A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use, but takes time to set up and learn to use. So it's not for everyone.
Interestingly, I've experienced the same issue Apple is suffering with Ubuntu. Edgy Eft (6.10) was incredibly simple and nice. Like OS X Tiger. Now there are dozens of services running and something always gives trouble. I guess the old adage applies, make things as simple as possible but no simpler...
There's something to be said about reinventing the wheel just for the sake of reinventing it, change for the sake of change. Constantly redesigning UIs that were working perfectly well, chasing after fads. In implementing a new UI, Ubuntu acquired a lot of new bugs, broken features and reliability issues. That's normal. Newer code is buggier code. You might think this "old" code is crufty, it might not be designed in the ideal way you like, but by throwing it away, you throw away years of testing and fixes too. That's an argument in favor of incremental evolution and refactorings IMO.
Maybe I'm biased. When I was 16, I used to find colorful desktop backgrounds and fancy UIs cool. Now I'm 30, and I just want the damn thing to f'ing work reliably. I don't need rounded corners, or transparency, or animations or even a desktop background. I'd be OK with a bland UI that looks like Windows 98, so long as the machine can do all I need it to reliably and fast.
Distrowatch is a shitty indicator of anything other than Distrowatch hits. Plenty of people like myself have been using Ubuntu for years and not gone to Distrowatch for years.
Out 'in the wild', I've never seen a distro that's not Ubuntu or openSUSE (desktop anyway). Most statistics on sites such as Wikipedia or Steam also point to Ubuntu's dominance (according to Steam's hardware/software survey, Ubuntu is about 7x more popular than Mint Rosa, which of course is also Ubuntu-based).
> In implementing a new UI, Ubuntu acquired a lot of new bugs, broken features and reliability issues.
To be honest, most of the issues I've ever had with Ubuntu are upstream issues. The 'Unity' interface these days pretty much IS the equivalent of 'legacy'. It's certainly not as radical as Gnome Shell or even some of the happenings in KDE Plasma-land. No one uses Compiz any more, except apparently Ubuntu (yes, I realize eventually we'll have a non-Compiz Unity interface).
Really? In such a short time it's considered 'legacy' now? The Gnome 2.x interface is legacy, but I wouldn't consider Unity to be so.
xfce - that's what I use. And I'm an even grumpier old man at 40 :-)
Convertible tablets like Microsoft Surface don't count -- those are laptops with detachable keyboards.
I have been running Arch for 7 years before switching to NixOS. I found using no desktop environment, just a tiling window manager and only text-mode software (except firefox and a document viewer) incredibly robust. So few moving parts I never had a major hiccup.
Exactly. Sounds like you agree with nextos:
> A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use
The Linux distro's actually serve multiple 'customer' segments. On the client side there are at least two customers (at a minimum), one is end-users, the other is the OEM's who pay for Linux to be preloaded. The traditional OEM's need a solution to the PC market shrinking while the devices market has eaten their lunch.
It's true you have to determine the difference between a short-term 'trend' and a long-term shift. I'm sure you don't think that the mobile market is a short-term 'trend'.
Ubuntu is both a commercial AND a community project. The goal has always been to take the power of Linux, make it usable for 'general users' and take it to the market winning new users.
The PC market is shrinking, so much so that all the major manufacturers are struggling (e.g Dell going private, HP splitting itself etc). Meanwhile the growth in the next billion units is a) in China b) on 'mobile' devices.
IF you were in charge of strategy what would you do?
> They gave their main demographic a slap in the face ... > Now, according to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is below Mint and > Debian in terms of popularity.
The demographic for 'traditional' Linux is something like 2-4% of the PC market: the biggest thing that's happened since the 2000's is OSX has stolen developer user-base from Linux. These users are well -served (arguably habituated) by the older interfaces, but more general users are not well-served. Even if you put aside the goal of winning new users, you simply cannot build a successful business on 2% of the market (particularly when that 2% of desktop users is not orientated towards buying anything and hates advertising).
It's tough to serve more than one users-base, but Linux (Ubuntu in this case) can as it's very flexible. There's still a massive pot-pourri of software and options in the repositories! I find self-described 'geeks' complaining about Unity really bizarre - if you're a power user it's literally 3 commands (touch .xinitrc; vim .xinitrc; exec <wm-of-your-choice) to change the interface.
> That's an argument in favor of incremental evolution and refactorings IMO
That works if the old thing can be incrementally improved. The issue for Linux is that it's simply fallen behind the significant changes in the client market. At an infrastructure and applications level the FOSS/Linux environments aren't competitive to the other mobile offerings. And, it's basically impossible to maintain one complete stack for the desktop and a different one for the mobile space at the sizes the Linux companies are.
> Now I'm 30, and I just want the damn thing to f'ing work reliably. > I don't need rounded corners, or transparency, or animations or even a desktop background.
The thing is that puts you in the 2%, the things you care about are quite different. General users do care about animations, basically the whole UI "experience": to get them to change you really have to show them something different. Of course, you have to have some level of stability, but you don't win new users by telling them you are so much more stable - users just restart the app or device, they carry a battery charger everywhere and just shrug and plug-in. You only really have to read some of the comments in this thread to see what I mean ;-)
It's the last OS X release that felt like an improvement to me, and one of the last OS X releases that I trusted. Every one since has actually had feature regressions (let's make a formerly visible folder invisible!) or stability issues.
I still have a 2008 Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard and it's more stable than a 2012 MBP running Mavericks and performs about as well.
Early iOS had wonky reset issues too.
Instead, they're just offering us their own versions of things just because they can, not because their's is any better. Maps being exhibit A, and Apple's mail client not changing in 10 years (aside from some minor adds and removes) are examples of this.
Apple used to mean software for people who were not technology savvy. Now it means phone software for people who are not technologically savvy, and computer software that's just like everyone else's. Frankly, I can never figure things out on an iPhone. They're too confusing in their interface. Especially compared to my beloved Newton 2000.
I remember that in (I think 10.3) they "fixed" the issue by having a timeout dialog popup and ask if you wanted to disconnect... only it was too sensitive and would popup (and then go away before you could react) if there was any jitter in the network connection.
Starting with 10.7 and seeing the decline coming, I was happy that Ubuntu ran very well on that laptop and that held me over until I left Apple hardware entirely.
Mac OS now is in a weird limbo between the Unix heritage, the Mac heritage, and the iOS heritage. I think unifying these strands is an enormous challenge, but also really cool and inspiring. Maybe Apple are going to focus on making cars or whatever, and some weird little upstart is going to come along and make something totally new. You can see people starting to talk about Slack as an operating system, but that's still very primitive.
Chat and command lines are interesting because they represent a huge paradigm that's been overshadowed by the "GUI" paradigm, namely the paradigm of queries and responses: you ask the computer something and get something back, perhaps asynchronously. It's such a useful, coherent model. Easy to program with. Portable across interfaces. Good for exploration. Cognitively appropriate. Etc etc.
I think the complexity and bug-riddenness of most "modern" desktop operating systems come from an over-complicated and incoherent model of operation. Mobile represents a new start. It currently lacks in flexibility, but it's probably a good thing to start with rigid simplicity than to try for flexible complexity, and unless you can perfect a genius UI right away I do think those are the options, if you're aiming for the general public who don't want to learn vim.
I also think the divide between application programmers and computer users is politically a Bad Thing and also a result of exaggerated complexity. Unix was always about user scripting, and it managed that because of textual data, worse-is-better, and RTFM. Apple might not be the company to get back to this, because they're making tons of money from making shiny coherent appliances for people who pay to think as little as possible.
So just generally I'm not holding my breath for Apple to come up with a wildly new and interesting paradigm here. They're a dinosaur. A very pretty dinosaur. I'm more interested in startups with weird ideas, like maybe let's use e-ink displays, cheap ultralight computers, cloud servers, natural language processing, and the interactive fiction adventure exploration paradigm to provide a new style of terminal gadget that's even cooler than Linux. (If you steal this idea, please don't fuck it up.)
