[abc_lisper]

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]

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]

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.

[abc_lisper]

Yeah. How do i know. I upgraded my work machine to ubuntu 12, and here is what happened. Unity flat-out does not get rendered. Dual monitor setup wont work. So i had to switch to fluxbox and use xrndr to make the screen visible on both the desktops. I have been using linux for almost 12 years now, and somehow it does not seem like an improvement. So much for it just works.

[cabirum]

Canonical needs money. Ubuntu is the only linux mature enough to begin slowly commercializing and become a new major player on the OS market.

This can be a reason Shuttleworth is afraid of critics. Imagine a new feature will be "Ubuntu Premium": a package of brand new professionally developed productivity apps, ranging from webdev and graphics to security products. It's the next logical step after the introduction of ads.

If such an unpopular feature was announced today, Ubuntu will lose its users way before the release of v13.

[a-priori]

Nothing's stopping you, or anyone else, from forking it and making their own distro their own way.