6 ms·

Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

36 points by mrsebastian 14y ago

stephengillie 14y ago
Is developing from within a "glass house" a stressful downside to FOSS?
- mrsebastian 14y ago
  I know that Mozilla struggles with this -- that it's a whole different PR ball game, when tech writers have access to the nightly FTP server.
Karunamon 14y ago
Shuttleworth is sick of Ubuntu features being torn apart by critics before they’re ready. <snark> Well maybe if Shuttleworth didn't require a crap interface and built in ads on the desktop and making smartass comments when challenged about it, they wouldn't be torn apart by critics. </snark>
- kkowalczyk 14y ago
  <nosnark> Maybe if we didn't have "critics" like you that are quick to rant and diss other people work while not doing anything themselves, highly-visible projects wouldn't have this problem and wouldn't require such steps. I lead a fairly successful open-source project and I'm on the receiving end of this attitude of entitlement as well. People don't realize how much work goes into developing of software and when you give it away for free, with source-code, it's very demoralizing to have non-constructive, abusive comments like the above ("crap interface" ?). I'm sure Ubuntu, being vastly more popular and visible, receives vastly more "constructive criticism". </nosnark>
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    >it's very demoralizing to have non-constructive, abusive comments like the above ("crap interface" )? I'm sorry, compared to standard GNOME (v2, v3 can join Unity on the junkpile IMAO) or KDE, Unity is crap, and I am hardly alone in that opinion. Perhaps certain open source developers just suck at taking any kind of criticism? That's sure what these moves feel like. I would bet large sums of money we're going to see something distasteful come of this, along the lines of further intrusive desktop advertising ala Amazon Lens. Maybe if you would start listening to the community more when there's a large outcry (amazon lens, unity, gnome 3, etc etc etc) there would be fewer people who feel they are "entitled" to a desktop experience that doesn't suck!
    - donniezazen 14y ago
      Can you explain in great details questioning the design choices made by Unity and how it is crap. I like both Unity and Gnome 3.
      - Karunamon 14y ago
        http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/unity.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/unity.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3.html Same guy, takes the words out of my mouth in both cases. Worth mentioning is that they have, admittedly, made a great deal of progress. Unity isn't the buggy mess that it was back a couple of major releases ago, which renders moot a good deal of the author's complaints. I could still do without the mandatory 3d acceleration (which wouldn't be so bad if they would leave Unity 2D alone but nope, they're killing that off.....) and the full screen , space wasting interface. I am on a desktop, not a netbook. Optimize accordingly, please. Unity is a fine interface for smaller screens and mobile devices. Not so much for the desktop.
        donniezazen 14y ago
        Thanks, one of the biggest problems with Gnome 3 is that there is not even one distribution that actively promotes Gnome 3, get rid of kinks, themes it, and make it look like modern DE/OS. Fedora is a lot of work, Arch Linux believes in KISS. On the other hand Ubuntu does everything for you.
dude_abides 14y ago
I can see how Shuttleworth is drawing inspiration from Apple and MS Surface, but normally, you don't announce that X will be developed in secret, you develop X in secret, and then announce it!!
- stephengillie 14y ago
  That works well with unannounced features or unexpected patches. What do you say when you just developed version 12 in the full public eye, and mysteriously all public activity on version 13 stops?
benologist 14y ago
Rewrite of http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1200 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1200 written and submitted by one of five Ziff Davis (ExtremeTech.com, Geek.com and PCMag.com) employees that spam HN. Their other employees/accounts include: - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82 http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82 (their social media manager) - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly Then there's also maxko87 and evo_9 but I haven't figured out what their connection is yet, maxko87 autosubmits extremetech articles and evo_9's usage mirrors ukdm's who submits ~50% geek.com + ~50% a small group of other sites, but for extremetech.
- icelancer 14y ago
  Yeah, wow. Just checked his submission history. Gotta love these blogspambots.
abc_lisper 14y ago
Canonical has gone mad. More and more it seems like this company is the worst thing that could happen to linux. Seems like embrace and extinguish to me. Make a distro the best among others, so novices can tentatively take their first steps in it. Now botch it, kill it and burn them so badly they would never come back to linux again.Sigh!
- munchhausen 14y ago
  Are you nuts? Ubuntu 12.04 is the best distribution of a Linux-based OS by such a huge margin that it's, as they say, not even funny. Even if I take into account the fact that many users seem to nurse a rather passionate dislike of Unity, I don't see how anyone can claim that Canonical is "botching, killing and burning" anything. Ubuntu is in the long term most definitely on a steady path of continuous improvement, and is currently at a level where the "it just works" factor is present in surprisingly huge amounts. (I am saying this from the perspective of both the desktop and the server versions - the server version is ridiculously hassle-free to run compared to what I am used to with supposedly superior "enterprise" distros the likes of RHEL and SLES.) To be honest, your comment is so bizarre that I now wonder if it was supposed to be a wind-up.
  - macavity23 14y ago
    Agreed 100%. I recently picked up a little thinkpad laptop as a take-everywhere-don't-mind-too-much-if-it-dies machine. Ubuntu 12.04 supported absolutely every bit of hardware on it out of the box, with the exception of the fingerprint reader, which needed a single package install, and nary a cfg file edit in sight (fingerprint auth for login and sudo is awesome!). This includes: * Hardware accelerated graphics * Suspend and resume when closing/opening lid * All the non-standard thinkpad buttons - external monitor, volume etc * USB bluetooth adaptor * External bluetooth trackpad (Apple) * 3G dongle - this was not only autodetected, but popped up a wizard that asked me to identify my carrier, and then proceeded to configure everything and just magically brought up the internets Anyone who doesn't think this is a big deal has not been running linux for very long :-P Personally, I still replace Unity with Gnome3, but that's a single add-repo and package install, taking about 2 minutes. Unity is significantly better with each release, if that continues I'll probably go back to it in a few versions. I don't get the vitriol either. Slackware and Debian are still around if Ubuntu is too n00bish for you; personally I'm old and I want shit to just work. Haters gonna hate I suppose.
imchillyb 14y ago
IMO, Mr. Shuttleworth is a douche. This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want. The decisions made by Shuttleworth have nothing to do with FOSS or the users. His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind. Mr. Shuttleworth desired a single code base for Ubuntu. That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not function well on portable devices so...enter Unity. All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a wonderful experience. Now, not so much. I will now be replacing all of my machines', and our corporate machines' Ubuntu installs with an alternate flavor of Linux. I was willing to live with the Unity change, I was willing to live with the Grub change. I am not willing to live with this. FOSS is not built upon secret sauce Mr. Shuttleworth. For shame!
- 1SaltwaterC 14y ago
  You still have Gnome, KDE, Xfce, etc. So, why the fuss?
- freehunter 14y ago
  Hyperbole and drama. Ubuntu was the same as all other versions of Linux. All other versions of Linux are still the same as Ubuntu has been changing. The answer to your problem? Just use some other flavor of Linux. They're exactly the same as they've always been. This is the entitlement that Shuttleworth hates. It's his project. People contribute because they want to contribute, but it's still his project. He owes you nothing, and you owe him nothing. You're mad because... you don't have any other choice? I know that's not true. How about, you're mad because you want to be mad about something and this is what you've picked? That's about the only reason to be this emotionally involved in your operating system of choice.
- mbell 14y ago
  > This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want. Who do you think the Ubuntu user base is? I'm willing to bet the vast majority are not developers locked into the gnome 2 style desktop environment as you appear to be claiming. > His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind. How dare he make choices he believes will benefit the company he has personally dumped massive piles of cash into. Really, what an asshole. </sarcasm> > That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not function well on portable devices so...enter Unity. The gnome dev process was a train wreck, KDE is a bloated mess, and xfce is devoted to being minimalist. His only choices were forking gnome 2 or building their own DE. I really can't blame him for not wanting to take over a massive existing code base. Particularly one that is locked into a desktop metaphor that doesn't have a long term future for the masses. > All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a wonderful experience. Now, not so much. What makes you think people like you (developers, presumably) are the target market for Ubuntu? They aren't, they never were, ubuntu has always had the goal of being a distro for non linux geeks. Its pretty clear looking at the mass market that the standard desktop metaphor is on its way out for general purpose computing needs.
zzleeper 14y ago
(Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu? I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.
- montecarl 14y ago
  I haven't liked Ubuntu very much in the past couple of years. I just don't care for the UI at all. I have really liked Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com http://linuxmint.com) so far. They still maintain a Gnome 2 desktop that is very stable.
- columbo 14y ago
  It really depends on what you consider user friendly. If you want fast access to the top ten applications you will normally use and an OS that is almost entirely hidden go for crunchbang (http://crunchbang.org/ http://crunchbang.org/) (video demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBuqWPcsTig&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBuqWPcsTig&feature=relat...) . CB has been my distro of choice for several years now.
  - zupreme 14y ago
    CrunchBang looks very interesting. I'm surprised that I've never heard of it. I'm downloading a copy now. Thanks for mentioning this.
  - shardling 14y ago
    Crunchbang is pretty awesome on low-end systems, too. I recently tried about 10 different "lightweight" distros on an old P3 with ~128 MB of RAM, and Crunchbang was the only one that ran ok and felt polished. (IIRC puppy linux was the only other one that ran fine, and it's just hideously ugly.) My favorite distro was one that prominently mentioned that it could run on low end systems like mine. It turned out that the installer needed more RAM than the distro... I suggested to the developer that this be mentioned on the download page, and he seemed confused/offended! :(
- 14y ago
Zigurd 14y ago
That seems awfully thin-skinned. Having written a couple books for programmers, hate mail is just part of the landscape, and the more your own tastes and opinions come into play, the more there is for people to disagree about. Sticks and stones, etc. Ultimately it's not crucially important. But it's also unnecessary. And if you don't have Google's resources behind your behind-closed-doors development, you could be missing out on community contributions.
donniezazen 14y ago
Blame Ubuntu or Shuttleworth but Ubuntu is the only Linux distro with any direction and actively expressing itself. You can never satisfy 100% of your customers.
viraptor 14y ago
I'm not exactly sure how can you develop a popular and polished interface without a lot of user testing. From the bugs I reported it seems like they don't have enough testers in Canonical itself, or maybe their qa its just not going deep enough. Either way... I don't think that cutting off early beta testers will be good for the project.
BruceIV 14y ago
I predict the secret whiz-bang features will be even more half-baked than normal for new Ubuntu features - on their six-month release schedule, new stuff generally isn't stable and full-featured for about three releases (which is a bit of a pain).
acabal 14y ago
I don't think they should develop in secret, but they most definitely shouldn't release until things are polished. Much of the criticism Unity and various other features received was well-deserved, because Canonical released essentially alpha software. Then when the criticism comes in, the defense is, "hey take it easy guys, we weren't done yet!" Well if you're not done--don't release! There's a middle ground here: develop and design in public, but don't release until you're truly ready. Everyone says that sticking to LTS is the only way to guarantee a stable system, but that's just not practical in the milestone-distro world, where an important update to one piece of software you find critical requires an update to the entire system.
nnq 14y ago
"[...] and you get your name in lights." ...and the prize for the greatest attention whore of the OS BDFLs club goes to...
mistercow 14y ago
Marketing-wise this would absolutely be an effective strategy, but you have to take a page from Apple's book and spin your motivation to be positive. You can't say "I'm sick of critics dissing features before they're ready" because that sounds whiny. Instead, you have to express that you are working on some really kick-ass features and you want them to really "pop" when they debut. You have to focus on the positives and pretend that the critics don't exist. (Publicly, that is; internally, you had better listen to the critics).
theevocater 14y ago
If they code some "secret" features and then release the code... why does it matter it was coded in secret? This seems to be such a non-issue. In fact, Shuttleworth's mistake here was talking about it at all. He is paying to have code developed to help improve Ubuntu and he happens to want to get somewhat polished versions of it before they release to public. Why is this bad? Sometimes people release early/often and that works for them. In this case Shuttleworth and by extension Canonical believe that releasing at the polished stage is beneficial. Plus its not like there is some uber-secret group in a dark chamber coding this stuff up -- you just have to be an ubuntu developer with a little bit of traction to be part of it.

36 points by mrsebastian 14y ago

stephengillie 14y ago

Is developing from within a "glass house" a stressful downside to FOSS?

mrsebastian 14y ago
I know that Mozilla struggles with this -- that it's a whole different PR ball game, when tech writers have access to the nightly FTP server.

Karunamon 14y ago

Shuttleworth is sick of Ubuntu features being torn apart by critics before they’re ready. <snark> Well maybe if Shuttleworth didn't require a crap interface and built in ads on the desktop and making smartass comments when challenged about it, they wouldn't be torn apart by critics. </snark>

kkowalczyk 14y ago
<nosnark> Maybe if we didn't have "critics" like you that are quick to rant and diss other people work while not doing anything themselves, highly-visible projects wouldn't have this problem and wouldn't require such steps. I lead a fairly successful open-source project and I'm on the receiving end of this attitude of entitlement as well. People don't realize how much work goes into developing of software and when you give it away for free, with source-code, it's very demoralizing to have non-constructive, abusive comments like the above ("crap interface" ?). I'm sure Ubuntu, being vastly more popular and visible, receives vastly more "constructive criticism". </nosnark>
- Karunamon 14y ago
  >it's very demoralizing to have non-constructive, abusive comments like the above ("crap interface" )? I'm sorry, compared to standard GNOME (v2, v3 can join Unity on the junkpile IMAO) or KDE, Unity is crap, and I am hardly alone in that opinion. Perhaps certain open source developers just suck at taking any kind of criticism? That's sure what these moves feel like. I would bet large sums of money we're going to see something distasteful come of this, along the lines of further intrusive desktop advertising ala Amazon Lens. Maybe if you would start listening to the community more when there's a large outcry (amazon lens, unity, gnome 3, etc etc etc) there would be fewer people who feel they are "entitled" to a desktop experience that doesn't suck!
  - donniezazen 14y ago
    Can you explain in great details questioning the design choices made by Unity and how it is crap. I like both Unity and Gnome 3.
    - Karunamon 14y ago
      http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/unity.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/unity.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3.html http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3.html Same guy, takes the words out of my mouth in both cases. Worth mentioning is that they have, admittedly, made a great deal of progress. Unity isn't the buggy mess that it was back a couple of major releases ago, which renders moot a good deal of the author's complaints. I could still do without the mandatory 3d acceleration (which wouldn't be so bad if they would leave Unity 2D alone but nope, they're killing that off.....) and the full screen , space wasting interface. I am on a desktop, not a netbook. Optimize accordingly, please. Unity is a fine interface for smaller screens and mobile devices. Not so much for the desktop.
      - donniezazen 14y ago
        Thanks, one of the biggest problems with Gnome 3 is that there is not even one distribution that actively promotes Gnome 3, get rid of kinks, themes it, and make it look like modern DE/OS. Fedora is a lot of work, Arch Linux believes in KISS. On the other hand Ubuntu does everything for you.

dude_abides 14y ago

I can see how Shuttleworth is drawing inspiration from Apple and MS Surface, but normally, you don't announce that X will be developed in secret, you develop X in secret, and then announce it!!

stephengillie 14y ago
That works well with unannounced features or unexpected patches. What do you say when you just developed version 12 in the full public eye, and mysteriously all public activity on version 13 stops?

benologist 14y ago

Rewrite of http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1200 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1200 written and submitted by one of five Ziff Davis (ExtremeTech.com, Geek.com and PCMag.com) employees that spam HN. Their other employees/accounts include: - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82 http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82 (their social media manager) - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly Then there's also maxko87 and evo_9 but I haven't figured out what their connection is yet, maxko87 autosubmits extremetech articles and evo_9's usage mirrors ukdm's who submits ~50% geek.com + ~50% a small group of other sites, but for extremetech.

icelancer 14y ago
Yeah, wow. Just checked his submission history. Gotta love these blogspambots.

abc_lisper 14y ago

Canonical has gone mad. More and more it seems like this company is the worst thing that could happen to linux. Seems like embrace and extinguish to me. Make a distro the best among others, so novices can tentatively take their first steps in it. Now botch it, kill it and burn them so badly they would never come back to linux again.Sigh!

munchhausen 14y ago
Are you nuts? Ubuntu 12.04 is the best distribution of a Linux-based OS by such a huge margin that it's, as they say, not even funny. Even if I take into account the fact that many users seem to nurse a rather passionate dislike of Unity, I don't see how anyone can claim that Canonical is "botching, killing and burning" anything. Ubuntu is in the long term most definitely on a steady path of continuous improvement, and is currently at a level where the "it just works" factor is present in surprisingly huge amounts. (I am saying this from the perspective of both the desktop and the server versions - the server version is ridiculously hassle-free to run compared to what I am used to with supposedly superior "enterprise" distros the likes of RHEL and SLES.) To be honest, your comment is so bizarre that I now wonder if it was supposed to be a wind-up.
- macavity23 14y ago
  Agreed 100%. I recently picked up a little thinkpad laptop as a take-everywhere-don't-mind-too-much-if-it-dies machine. Ubuntu 12.04 supported absolutely every bit of hardware on it out of the box, with the exception of the fingerprint reader, which needed a single package install, and nary a cfg file edit in sight (fingerprint auth for login and sudo is awesome!). This includes: * Hardware accelerated graphics * Suspend and resume when closing/opening lid * All the non-standard thinkpad buttons - external monitor, volume etc * USB bluetooth adaptor * External bluetooth trackpad (Apple) * 3G dongle - this was not only autodetected, but popped up a wizard that asked me to identify my carrier, and then proceeded to configure everything and just magically brought up the internets Anyone who doesn't think this is a big deal has not been running linux for very long :-P Personally, I still replace Unity with Gnome3, but that's a single add-repo and package install, taking about 2 minutes. Unity is significantly better with each release, if that continues I'll probably go back to it in a few versions. I don't get the vitriol either. Slackware and Debian are still around if Ubuntu is too n00bish for you; personally I'm old and I want shit to just work. Haters gonna hate I suppose.

imchillyb 14y ago

IMO, Mr. Shuttleworth is a douche. This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want. The decisions made by Shuttleworth have nothing to do with FOSS or the users. His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind. Mr. Shuttleworth desired a single code base for Ubuntu. That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not function well on portable devices so...enter Unity. All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a wonderful experience. Now, not so much. I will now be replacing all of my machines', and our corporate machines' Ubuntu installs with an alternate flavor of Linux. I was willing to live with the Unity change, I was willing to live with the Grub change. I am not willing to live with this. FOSS is not built upon secret sauce Mr. Shuttleworth. For shame!

1SaltwaterC 14y ago
You still have Gnome, KDE, Xfce, etc. So, why the fuss?
freehunter 14y ago
Hyperbole and drama. Ubuntu was the same as all other versions of Linux. All other versions of Linux are still the same as Ubuntu has been changing. The answer to your problem? Just use some other flavor of Linux. They're exactly the same as they've always been. This is the entitlement that Shuttleworth hates. It's his project. People contribute because they want to contribute, but it's still his project. He owes you nothing, and you owe him nothing. You're mad because... you don't have any other choice? I know that's not true. How about, you're mad because you want to be mad about something and this is what you've picked? That's about the only reason to be this emotionally involved in your operating system of choice.
mbell 14y ago
> This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want. Who do you think the Ubuntu user base is? I'm willing to bet the vast majority are not developers locked into the gnome 2 style desktop environment as you appear to be claiming. > His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind. How dare he make choices he believes will benefit the company he has personally dumped massive piles of cash into. Really, what an asshole. </sarcasm> > That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not function well on portable devices so...enter Unity. The gnome dev process was a train wreck, KDE is a bloated mess, and xfce is devoted to being minimalist. His only choices were forking gnome 2 or building their own DE. I really can't blame him for not wanting to take over a massive existing code base. Particularly one that is locked into a desktop metaphor that doesn't have a long term future for the masses. > All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a wonderful experience. Now, not so much. What makes you think people like you (developers, presumably) are the target market for Ubuntu? They aren't, they never were, ubuntu has always had the goal of being a distro for non linux geeks. Its pretty clear looking at the mass market that the standard desktop metaphor is on its way out for general purpose computing needs.

zzleeper 14y ago

(Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu? I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.

montecarl 14y ago
I haven't liked Ubuntu very much in the past couple of years. I just don't care for the UI at all. I have really liked Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com http://linuxmint.com) so far. They still maintain a Gnome 2 desktop that is very stable.
columbo 14y ago
It really depends on what you consider user friendly. If you want fast access to the top ten applications you will normally use and an OS that is almost entirely hidden go for crunchbang (http://crunchbang.org/ http://crunchbang.org/) (video demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBuqWPcsTig&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBuqWPcsTig&feature=relat...) . CB has been my distro of choice for several years now.
- zupreme 14y ago
  CrunchBang looks very interesting. I'm surprised that I've never heard of it. I'm downloading a copy now. Thanks for mentioning this.
- shardling 14y ago
  Crunchbang is pretty awesome on low-end systems, too. I recently tried about 10 different "lightweight" distros on an old P3 with ~128 MB of RAM, and Crunchbang was the only one that ran ok and felt polished. (IIRC puppy linux was the only other one that ran fine, and it's just hideously ugly.) My favorite distro was one that prominently mentioned that it could run on low end systems like mine. It turned out that the installer needed more RAM than the distro... I suggested to the developer that this be mentioned on the download page, and he seemed confused/offended! :(
14y ago

Zigurd 14y ago

That seems awfully thin-skinned. Having written a couple books for programmers, hate mail is just part of the landscape, and the more your own tastes and opinions come into play, the more there is for people to disagree about. Sticks and stones, etc. Ultimately it's not crucially important. But it's also unnecessary. And if you don't have Google's resources behind your behind-closed-doors development, you could be missing out on community contributions.

donniezazen 14y ago

Blame Ubuntu or Shuttleworth but Ubuntu is the only Linux distro with any direction and actively expressing itself. You can never satisfy 100% of your customers.

viraptor 14y ago

I'm not exactly sure how can you develop a popular and polished interface without a lot of user testing. From the bugs I reported it seems like they don't have enough testers in Canonical itself, or maybe their qa its just not going deep enough. Either way... I don't think that cutting off early beta testers will be good for the project.

BruceIV 14y ago

I predict the secret whiz-bang features will be even more half-baked than normal for new Ubuntu features - on their six-month release schedule, new stuff generally isn't stable and full-featured for about three releases (which is a bit of a pain).

acabal 14y ago

I don't think they should develop in secret, but they most definitely shouldn't release until things are polished. Much of the criticism Unity and various other features received was well-deserved, because Canonical released essentially alpha software. Then when the criticism comes in, the defense is, "hey take it easy guys, we weren't done yet!" Well if you're not done--don't release! There's a middle ground here: develop and design in public, but don't release until you're truly ready. Everyone says that sticking to LTS is the only way to guarantee a stable system, but that's just not practical in the milestone-distro world, where an important update to one piece of software you find critical requires an update to the entire system.

nnq 14y ago

"[...] and you get your name in lights." ...and the prize for the greatest attention whore of the OS BDFLs club goes to...

mistercow 14y ago

Marketing-wise this would absolutely be an effective strategy, but you have to take a page from Apple's book and spin your motivation to be positive. You can't say "I'm sick of critics dissing features before they're ready" because that sounds whiny. Instead, you have to express that you are working on some really kick-ass features and you want them to really "pop" when they debut. You have to focus on the positives and pretend that the critics don't exist. (Publicly, that is; internally, you had better listen to the critics).

theevocater 14y ago

If they code some "secret" features and then release the code... why does it matter it was coded in secret? This seems to be such a non-issue. In fact, Shuttleworth's mistake here was talking about it at all. He is paying to have code developed to help improve Ubuntu and he happens to want to get somewhat polished versions of it before they release to public. Why is this bad? Sometimes people release early/often and that works for them. In this case Shuttleworth and by extension Canonical believe that releasing at the polished stage is beneficial. Plus its not like there is some uber-secret group in a dark chamber coding this stuff up -- you just have to be an ubuntu developer with a little bit of traction to be part of it.