PanaceaSupplies

I have been using Ubuntu on the desktop for years, and have had patches applied to Ubuntu (as well as to Ubuntu upstream, thus they found their way into Ubuntu).

I think one of the main problems with Ubuntu is the one Greg Kroah-Hartman has been talking about for a while ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3385088017824733336 ). Canonical just seems to have trouble for some reason with working with the rest of the community. A recent example that has been discussed on the net has been a sentence on the Precise Pangolin technical overview ( https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PrecisePangolin/TechnicalOverview/Beta1 ). Previously the sentence said "Beta-1 includes the 3.2.0-17.27 Ubuntu kernel which is based on the v3.2.6 upstream stable kernel." Thankfully, Ubuntu has now put the word Linux between stable and kernel. But the first version fits in with how some people view Canonical's and Ubuntu's attitude. Ubuntu kernel? And of course, there's the Gnome/Unity fork. And other things I could go into but won't, Banshee revenue etc.

Different people have different views about this, and I suppose there are different levels to view this on. But even putting social aspects aside, I think there are striking technical aspects to the problem. And the technical problem is Canonical just does not have the staff to be able to handle doing forks as it has been doing.

Here's an example vis-a-vis the Gnome/Unity fork, with this Unity bug ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz-plugins-main/+bug/875557 ). A bug is discovered on October 16th. The bug was reported three days after Oneiric was released (October 13th). It was a hugely annoying bug, where a big semi-translucent orange overlay would appear on the screen after switching workplaces. It affected me. 124 other people marked that it affected them, and considering the limited number of people who do bug reports, that number can be certainly be multiplied by a variable. As well as the over 25 duplicate bug reports of it. The bug was not fixed until January, which meant people had over two months of this annoying desktop experience which had me to the point of wishing for Windows. On November 5th, someone posted a very rough work-around, which I managed to implement, but I have over 20 years of Unix experience, I have no idea how an amateur would have fared with that fix.

And the problem with the two and a half months to fix that widespread, very annoying bug, is really the only people who could fix it were Canonical engineers. I, and some others, if we have the time, might dive into the code and try to figure out all the Gnome/Unity library interactions that might cause this. One factor dampening this spirit is knowing that Gnome 3 users are not having the problem, so doing the work to fix it will only help the Unity fork, not the whole Gnome/Ubuntu universe. And in a way, one feels like one is helping problems which come out of that fork. So once a quick fix is posted, one stops caring about doing a fix-fix, a quick hack just fixes it for my desktop and I'm off.

Or another example - Gnome uses the Clutter toolkit library, Ubuntu dumped this and started using one called Nux. Well, anyone can browse through Launchpad's bug reporting database for nux ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nux ) to see how that has gone, what issues arise, how serious they are, how long they get fixed etc. Again, the problem is when you move from a toolkit like Clutter, supported by many distros, to "Nux", which AFAIK only Ubuntu and perhaps its spinoffs are using, a situation develops whereas Canonical will need to have the staffing to fix almost all of the problems which come up for it.

And someone such as myself, who if they have the time, and especially if they're affected by it, might feel the motivation to go into the code and see if they can come up with a patch for Nux. Not particularly because it's a fork. There's plenty of instances of a fork becoming the de facto standard over an original project. It's this insular kind of feeling around it. There's a feeling that something like Nux is for Canonical and Ubuntu, not that this is a "better Clutter" that all the other distros might turn around and start using.

Some annoyances have been fixed - like a full-screen Firefox having the close button on the top left by default, yet the sidebar popping out and covering it when I move the mouse there - the sidebar now does not cover the top menu - which is good. But a smaller insular team doing UI design is what missed this in the first place.

So aside from social aspects, I really question whether Canonical has the personnel to be able to handle forks like Nux, Unity etc...

All these things aside, I still use Ubuntu on my desktop - I'm typing from my Ubuntu desktop right now. A lot of the innovations to make Ubuntu user-friendly, easy to install etc. I'm happy about. I think Launchpad is a great resource for bug tracking and other things. Friends and family members whose Windows machine have crashed I have fixed by installing Ubuntu over it, showing them how to use Firefox and LibreOffice Writer etc., and it has worked for them beautifully. My concerns are mostly around Canonical trying to bite off more than it can chew with these forks, and the ill will the insularity of Canonical and Ubuntu has sometimes generated. Hopefully these things can be remedied. If you look at Wikipedia stats, Android aside, Ubuntu is clearly the most used Linux desktop, by a factor of multiples. I hope some of these things are straightened out as Canonical and Ubuntu learn and grow as projects.

Well a shorter version would be, why is Canonical forking all these projects that it does not have the staffing to maintain the forks of, and which outside developers don't, and probably won't, take up the maintenance of?

You can read my OP for some examples, I can give even more if you want, although apparently you don't want to hear any more any how.