Isolationism

Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical Ltd. (the creators of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution) posted on his blog today that he feels that skin-deep beauty is what Ubuntu desperately needs right now (before rambling on about something a little less to-the-point—maybe it sounds better when you hear it in from him in person).

I cannot claim anything close to the involvement that Mr. Shuttleworth can with Linux, nor can I speak of successes of anything close to his. I am however a Linux user of several years (admittedly mostly from the server side of things and more recently on the desktop) and have been an Ubuntu user for perhaps half a year now after switching over from Gentoo on the desktop (I still use and love Gentoo on my two development/file servers).

I am of two minds regarding Mark’s statement.

On the one hand, he’s absolutely right: There’s enough about Linux that—despite all the excellent work his team has done on Ubuntu—has yet to be set right for the ‘casual user’. Take for example font rendering; to get Linux to render fonts that I felt were attractive enough to use and typographically correct (e.g. no bad kerning between characters, common fonts render legibly at frequently seen sizes in web pages, etc.) I had to play with all of the permutations of settings that affect font anti aliasing, sub-pixel smoothing and pixel order, hinting, enabling hidden “grey area” features due to patent restrictions, installing other fonts due to similar licencing restrictions, then installing even more patches to existing fonts to improve hinting for on-screen display, then got to go through it all again in slightly different terms in the KDE Control Panel so that KDE applications looked as good as those using GTK … It took hours.

On Windows XP, I enabled ClearType and I was done. (Most Windows users still don’t know about ClearType either, apparently, which is just mind-boggling—I’m sure that is why Internet Explorer 7 enables it by default for rendering web pages, because it’s ludicrous not to use it at this point.)

Another example: In Ubuntu, everything is in shades of brown by default; the boot screen, the login manager, the skin, the background images. Of course it all makes sense to do; it’s part of the Ubuntu brand. You can change just about everything to something else (with varying levels of effort required depending on what you want to alter); Personally, I have to as a matter of course—when you’re doing computer-based design for a living, you need neutral colour schemes or it affects your colour perception. This is incidentally something the Mac folks seem to have understood very well for years now, and the proof is in the pudding: They have maintained a colour-neutral skin throughout several major interface redesigns. Surprise surprise, most Mac users don’t seem to be in any hurry to change to something else; I doubt the same can be said for your average Ubuntu user … and unfortunately most of the alternative skin configurations that ship with Ubuntu are pretty ugly; more time wasted surfing trying to find alternatives that I could live with.

The hard fact is, though, pretty looks only get you in the door; you’re going to need more than that to keep users happy.

For example, Ubuntu isn’t known as one of the faster Linux distributions—Hardly surprising, as that’s not the point—but that doesn’t mean speed should have to suffer as much as it does. I’m gratified to see that more optimisations come out often enough, but I think Canonical (and the community) can do better; I as a user also have a good feel for what I do (and don’t) need, and having more options to get “under the hood” a bit to make some optimisations wouldn’t go amiss; Ubuntu’s shortcoming here is that it tries to be user-friendly like Mac and put the scary stuff out of sight instead of embracing it like Gentoo does (although truth be told, Gentoo suffers from rather the opposite problem, although thankfully they at least have a lot of documentation and equally friendly/useful discussion forums).

Another major drawback to Ubuntu is the “It Just Works” dilemma. I mentioned one issue already with the font rendering; this is a REALLY big deal. People who use computers do nothing but read for probably 90% or more of the time they spend online; if fonts aren’t a dream to read, people will consider going with a vendor where they are (and again, no surprises here: Windows and Mac have font rendering in the bag.)

There are more, though. Take music-playing software; I love Amarok for listening to my tunes; it’s like iTunes, but better and doesn’t suck. Not only is it not “officially supported” by Canonical (perhaps because it’s a KDE app, not Gnome) but the only thing it seems to play “out of the box” is mp3s, which is shocking considering that flac and ogg vorbis would seem the most likely support to be bundled with the player (as both are free and open source) and yet neither are supported—in the end I had to eventually download a user-based patch of Xine to get flac/vorbis support to work!

I had a similar experience in the past 24 hours with VMWare Player and Server, which I described in detail in an earlier post. Again, VMWare Server was clearly the better tool for the job, but only VMWare Player was in Synaptic at all; the instructions for installing VMWare Server and getting it up and running were posted by a user in the discussion forums.

Another gripe is 64-bit support; it just isn’t as good as 32-bit, and now I regret bothering at all with a 64-bit OS when, if anything, I seem to have less flexibility to figure out a workaround than I did in Gentoo.

I understand the technology is still new, but amd64’s been around years now, hasn’t it? Isn’t this the way of the future? I’m not asking for special treatment; it would just be nice to have things “just work”. I don’t really care if some video codecs are only available for the 32-bit player, I just want to watch my movie and I get frustrated when it takes me hours of hunting to find out why it won’t work then cobble together a solution based on other users’ forum posts (which is invariably the only place with useful instruction: I think Canonical could take a page from Gentoo on this one).

All told, don’t get me wrong. I think Mark Shuttleworth is a great guy and a saint to the cause of open source and humanity in general. I think his company, Canonical, and their flagship product, Ubuntu, are excellent.

I just hope they continue to grow and flourish into the marketplace, and want to contribute my two cents regarding my experiences (and encourage you to do the same). After all, I won’t be installing Vista; it would be nice to have an alternative that fits my ideals and my aesthetic—it would be even nicer if it didn’t put any more holes in my pocket than having a baby already has.