wyz9 | 12 years ago | on: All those people with cheap Android smartphones have finally started buying apps
wyz9's comments
wyz9 | 12 years ago | on: Bottle light inventor proud to be poor
wyz9 | 12 years ago | on: Bottle light inventor proud to be poor
wyz9 | 12 years ago | on: Why Mark Shuttleworth is important to desktop Linux
wyz9 | 12 years ago | on: Why Mark Shuttleworth is important to desktop Linux
wyz9 | 12 years ago | on: Why Mark Shuttleworth is important to desktop Linux
It seems the current strategy of Canonical is to change enough of the system so that developing cross-distribution will become more and more of a hassle, and trust software developers to just target Ubuntu due to its market share in Linux-land.
Unity was a step in the direction. It’s not critical to other programs, but Unity itself appears to be very hard to port to other distributions (and to be honest it was the first thing that actually made Ubuntu distinct from other Debian derived distributions).
Mir takes it a step further, now wm and toolkit developers will have to target either just Wayland, and lose out on the vast Ubuntu userbase, or target just Mir.
Canonical does its best to bring closed-source commercial desktop applications to the operating system through the Ubuntu app store. With good reason: they know the developers of these commercial applications will only target Ubuntu, since unlike open source programs where the distribution’s packagers do the work of bringing your application to their OS for you, that can’t be done very well with just binary packages compiled against x version of y library. Thus forcing users who want to use one of these applications to switch to Ubuntu.
EDIT: and let’s not forget that Canonical ships what is basically spyware with Ubuntu. Local searches on your desktop should not be used to help Amazon advertise. Shuttleworth’s reaction to the complaints were extremely cynical as well.