Ask Slashdot: Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu?

jammag writes "'When the history of free software is written, I am increasingly convinced that this last year will be noted as the start of the decline of Ubuntu,' opines Linux pundit Bruce Byfield. After great initial success, Ubuntu and Canonical began to isolate themselves from the mainstream of the free software community. Canonical, he says, has tried to control the open source community, and the company has floundered in many of its initiatives. Really, the mighty Ubuntu, in decline?"

Linux Mint anyone?

[captainpanic]

Ubuntu got popular because the ordinary people who cannot figure out how a command line works could use it. It looked quite a bit like Windows, which was a good thing. A task bar at the bottom, and a menu with a lot of functionality. Unity is too different, and made it slower too. So, many people seem to switch to Linux Mint.

I mean, even the close/minimize/maximize buttons had to be switched around to the top left... WHY?

If I want unnecessary bling-bling and a lack of functionality, I'll get a Windows computer. If I want to be a hipster, I'll get an Apple. I use Linux because I like simplicity and functionality. As soon as Ubuntu stopped delivering that, I switched to Mint.

Re:Yes.

[marcello_dl]

Ubuntu to arch seems a drastic step (still it is possible and productive). To those who don't like it I suggest to pick among the dozen ubuntu derivatives you find at distrowatch so you can keep using your ubuntu knowledge. Mint comes to mind. Or fall back to debian.

Re:Yes.

[Chrisq]

They're making incredibly unpopular design changes without giving people any real option to do things their own way and driving their own userbase away. Unity and other ass backwardsness pissed me off SO MUCH that I learned to use Arch Linux just to get away from it.

Its the "we're going our own way" decisions - like Mir instead of Wayland, etc. This leaves you thinking - If I keep with Ubuntu I will be out on a limb, forced to use Unity, etc.

Re:Never knew what was wrong...

[marcello_dl]

> I mean c'mon, just make it f-in work out of the box.

You are addressing the hardware manufacturers, right? because they have the power to do that, all the others have to hack support into their drivers.

Re:Yes.

[Christian Smith]

They're making incredibly unpopular design changes without giving people any real option to do things their own way and driving their own userbase away. Unity and other ass backwardsness pissed me off SO MUCH that I learned to use Arch Linux just to get away from it.

Its the "we're going our own way" decisions - like Mir instead of Wayland, etc. This leaves you thinking - If I keep with Ubuntu I will be out on a limb, forced to use Unity, etc.

How is anyone forced to use Unity in Ubuntu? There's still Kubuntu, lubuntu etc. And even with straight Ubuntu, you can still install whatever desktop you want, and select it at login.

I personally don't mind Unity, I can pretty much work with whatever desktop is installed by default, as I use the apps and not the shell. So long as I can switch easily between apps, who cares.

And I guess most none-technical people just don't care either way. If it works, it works.

Re:Yes.

[hawkinspeter]

I tried Unity and didn't get on with it, so I just carried on using XUbuntu instead. If you don't like the desktop environment, it's trivial to replace it with a different one.

Hate unity? There are other *buntus.

[Chewbacon]

I switched to Kubuntu simply because I hate Unity's minimalism and lack of customization and I hate Mint's sluggishness. I haven't looked back. I like *buntu distributions simply because they're the easiest to get up and running. Unless you need a highly customized Linux system, you can't argue with *buntu's simplicity when it comes to installation.

Quality assurance, I tells ya

[jones_supa]

The Unity desktop has for years suffered of terrible stability and performance issues. Part of the blame goes to Compiz, which makes for a quite heavyweight graphics stack for simple desktop effects. On certain computers Compiz also crashes every now and then. If you put the vanilla Ubuntu desktop to a small Atom / Bobcat laptop, you can easily see that even the basic functions are painfully slow and thus the desktop unusable. When we go up to relatively fast Core 2 Duo machines, even then opening the Dash is laggy and also dragging shortcut icons from Dash to taskbar is a jerky experience. Just try it.

Additionally there are some weird issues that seem to linger from release to another, some of which would be easy to fix:
* Brightness is changed in two steps at a time. Apparently the button press event gets handled by both OS and BIOS. Setting /sys/module/video/parameters/brightness_switch_enabled to 0 can be used as a workaround.
* Hibernation is disabled by default, while in practice it works just fine on most machines. (how to enable it manually [ubuntu.com])
* Bluetooth adapter on/off state is not remembered across reboots.
* I always get that "Your current network has a .local domain, which is incompatible with the Avahi network service and not recommended" popup. This just creates a bad out-of-box experience. What is Avahi? Why must I even care about it? Why did not the installer configure my hostname better then?

Re:Yes.

[dmbasso]

s/-do were/-do was/

And just for clarification, I've been using Unity for only around a year because I waited as long as I could before I had to upgrade libraries and stuff. The upgrade to Gnome/gtk 3 broke all my gedit plugins, and I didn't have time to adapt them. Recently I decided to try Pluma (MATE's version of gedit), and it was a piece of cake to make plugins work.

So I can't thank you enough, MATE crew, you guys are awesome!

Re:Yes.

[gagol]

Been running Xubuntu (XFCE4 desktop instead of Unity) even since Unity was shoved down my throat. Could not be happier.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 to this, Xubuntu is great, stable, fast, simple.

Re:Yes.

[Arancaytar]

(like when accidentally launching an application with meta+number)

HOLY SHIT.

Mystery solved. I've been dealing with that weird crap forever without realizing what keys I accidentally hit.

Re:Yes.

[Arker]

Sounds like you should try Slackware. In my experience it's always the one that 'just works.' No idiot package-manage to fight with, no ABI breakage caused by munchkin compiler options, no big fancy system management system that you cant get to even run when you actually need it - just a nice sane system that does what it's told to do.

Re:Yes.

[kthreadd]

3.2.0-4 is the name Debian uses for their branch of the kernel. It is not the kernel version. Type uname -v and it will give you the actual version that it is based on. My Debian machine runs 3.2.0-4 but the actual kernel version which it is based on is 3.2.46.

Re:Yes.

[postbigbang]

Straight-up Debian is nice, and it's stable, and it's sometimes painful to watch it evolve. Ubuntu's payload has all the stuff I need. I can strip it and make it light, then foist it up as a bunch of VMs and feed the instances through puppet or whatever, then tear them down easily.

With Deb or the RH/Fedora/CentOS/Oracle payloads, you have to take great pains to strip them down; Ubuntu is just easier. When I'm constructing payloads, it's easier to just strip junk out of Ubuntu, rather than build Deb up. I'm sooooo tired of either the kitchen sink of payloads, or the other side, which is the barest of bones, no upholstery at all, and maybe missing the steering wheel.

Re:My work pattern has been stomped on

[Blaskowicz]

Does mdm work? (It presume it stands for "mint display manager"). From the description, it says it support XDMCP. It's like everything went rogue or DE-specific, so Mint wrote a replacement that can do everything. The current version has crazy eye candy too :
http://segfault.linuxmint.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/mdm.png [linuxmint.com]
Using HTML, which sounds crazy at first but the thing just shows up and it must mean anyone can give it any look.

Re:Yes.

[clarkn0va]

Debian was my first and only distro until Ubuntu hit approximately 6.04. It was then that I felt Ubuntu offered a smooth enough experience to justify the "bloat" (funny how perspectives change) that came with the switch.

Having used mostly Ubuntu on my servers for the past seven years, there has been the odd time that I needed to squeeze Linux onto a small flash, and it was Debian to the rescue. Debian is great, but when you're used to Ubuntu it does feel unfamiliar in the way it handles some things.

A second thing that has me still preferring Ubuntu on servers is the quicker uptake of new features. SSD TRIM is a big one, as I started migrating all of my systems to SSD in 2008, and TRIM required the newest kernels. Yeah, I could have compiled my own kernels in Debian, but as any Debian user knows, updates are a different world when you step outside the Garden of Eden that is apt-get. Ubuntu made getting such new features a piece of cake and in a timely manner.

And lastly, there are advantages to being mainstream. There are tonnes of cool products being developed for Linux these days, and generally speaking, Ubuntu and RedHat/CentOS are the first distros to get support. Steam is one example. LTSP is another project that you're going to get way better developer support on if you're running Ubuntu. A counter example is VoIP software, including FreeSwitch and a bazillion Asterisk distros, which tend to be much better documented on CentOS.