Cadence?

Meta cadence? Significant amount of evolution? Meta cycles? This guy sounds like the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. What the hell happened to "just shut up and code"?

Make things work stable first, then dream on

Mr. Astronaut, please, could you pay more attention to small issues, like, say, regressions in key components of the OS as a wholepackage? Because as part of some kernel upgrade, they borked the Atheros wireless driver. Google for "unsupported jumbo" and see what I mean.

I'm about to go back to XP on my Acer A150 netbook because of this. I cannot believe that they have allowed this to happen on what is, apparently, one of the key markets of the emerging Linux distros. And I'm not a novice, I have three more boxes with Ubuntu installed on them and have been using one or another flavor of Linux for eight years.

And yes, I know that I can try enabling or disabling the proprietary driver. Yes, I know that I can download the latest madwifi snapshot, compile it from source and install it. Yes, I know that I can try ndiswrapper. And yes, I know all those things are free and I should not complain but instead provide a fix. I could do all those things and probably some of them will work.

But folks, this is my "browse the net from the dining room" machine, I'm not going to spend a couple of hours to do any of those hoops, specially when I have preinstalled a copy of XP in another partition. Yes, it will be a lot less safe. Yes, it will need constant updates, antivirus, periodic scans and who knows what else. Yes, I'll need to install by hand all the missing bits and pieces that come with Ubuntu (Office suite, mail client, usable internet browser and not that IE joke, etc) Yes, it will have 12 icons in the tray and pester me with all kind of commercials, update notifications, etc. But the "boot XP" fix takes 2 minutes vs. at least two hours of fiddling with Linux, plus the enormous pleasure of seeing whatever fix finally works being broken again by the next kernel/distro upgrade.

But hey, I'll be able to use my browser!!!! A message to the Ubuntu devs: if you want Linux to reach consumer level, this is not the way of doing it. Now, keep dreaming on your astronaut clouds.

Moment of bafflement

For some reason I saw the surname and my brain filled in "John Shuttleworth" rather than Mark, which made the rest of the article very confusing. However, I think that maybe John Shuttleworth should be making some of these presentations as I'm sure they would make more sense to the man in the street.

OMG

"trying to establish commonalty that will lead to better collaboration and co-ordination and strengthen the overall meta cadence."

If it sounds like Microsoft, it probably is Microsoft. He's been in too many conversations with Barmy Ballmer and the bullshit has leaked in and infected his brain.

I used to think Shuttleworth had something, but anybody who talks like that is a twat.

Do you hear that?

*RIPPPPPPPPP*!!!!

That's the sound of a fork happening!

I use Ubuntu all day for my day-to-day work, it's great but this Linux distro in-fighting it getting up my nose now! Debian is a solid distro but they are such a bunch of pompous tw*ts!

It was funny when there was only 5 distros about. but now it's just pathetic and another reason Linux will won't make the splash on the desktop it so richly deserves, tw*ts like the Debian mob making Linux people look exactly like everyone perceives Linux people to be like, pompous, arrogant and ultimately retarded!

I'm glad I jacked in my Linux box at home and signed up with the Revered Mooni....sorry Lord Jobs of Apple, best move I ever made and if I could convince the company to spring for an overpriced fanboi box, I would do it at work too!

Turn the other cheek

On the other hand, maybe Shuttleworth deserves some credit for not lowering himself to the level of the retarded whinging coming from the Debian community and for trying to act like an adult. I hope this little flame war does end in better communication between the camps, because both distros are great in their own way and can only grow stronger by working together.

Oh, and on the subject of PHB-speak, if you want Linux to succeed on the desktop, then someone has to go and talk the talk to the Dells and HPs of this world and, to coin a truly fucking horrid term, do some 'product evangelism' . It's the only way the Win monopoly will *ever* be broken, because regular users will never install a new OS on that old machine - they just go and buy a new box.

Re: Turn the other cheek et al.

"if you want Linux to succeed on the desktop"

Is that an assumption I see before me? My own OS of choice, which is not Linux, will never gain significant share on the desktop and you know what? I'm completely unconcerned about that. In fact, I'm quite contented, as evidenced by the icon. I use it (you'll note: No evangelism) on the desktop, but then I'm one of these stark-staring bat-shit crazy maniacs that actually matches the software to the tasks I wish to accomplish while leaving out all of the nasties I can really do without. Besides, Netcraft confirms *everyone* is doing quite nicely thank-you-very-much where it counts:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/performance/Hosters?tn=september_2009

"someone has to go and talk the talk to the Dells and HPs of this world"

For those of you obsessed with "beating Windows on the desktop" and "getting the OEMs to pre-install," worrying about "market share" and "desktop penetration, " I just have one simple question, as concise as it can be, asked from a position of seeing bugger all actual real advantage to the users of or the programmers that created this seething, chaotic mass of software that is GNU/Linux:

Why?

It's a genuine question that I haven't seen answered to my satisfaction yet (arrogant bastard, aren't I?). It usually comes down to fanboyism, an unhealthy obsession with and hatred of The Beast of Redmond and nothing of any real substance. Personally, I think the current development model works rather well. Security holes are getting patched as they filter down to the various repos, users aren't left searching for updates and the only people inconvenienced by it are those who want to treat it *like* Windows with a single dominant project directing all the others. Because no one GNU/Linux distribution "owns" all of its parts, this is never going to be feasible, even with all the "synergy," "leveraging" and "meta-cadence" in the world.

(PS: Sorry to pick on your post, goggyturk, but you were the one with the cojones to come straight out with it in plain English, so please take it as a mark of respect, just as "seething, chaotic mass" is intended as respect for the Linux development model for those that understand the strengths it brings.)

@Chronos

Normally I don't comment or respond to comments on here (fanning the flames is too risky) but Chronos has asked a reasonable question and I thought I would put forward my thoughts on the answer.

"Why"

I use both Windows and Linux at home, but try to convince many of my family and friends to use linux, specifically Ubuntu. I do this not from any interest in market shares and what-not but because of that simplest of Human motives, laziness.

Generally when something goes wrong I get called and bugged to fix it, and from my experience if I have convinced them to use linux I sacrifice a short time setting it up and showing them around and then get bugged a lot less than if they are using windows.

I happily agree that linux isn't for everyone, but getting it onto mass produced machines from Dell et al would make my life easier because then my older relatives would have heard about it and be less scared of the geekery.

These are just my thoughts but maybe you will find them at least a partial answer to your question.

Why?

Well, I don't know if that's the opinion of the majority of linux users, but I would like to see Linux get more market share and become widespread just because then we would get some love from software makers.

I mean, surely, there is GIMP, but many, many people would like to use Photoshop. If Photoshop where available for Linux, maybe they would use it instead of buying overpriced Macs.

My girlfriend needs to use CAD applications for work, and so she's stuck with windows.

Maybe if Linux got some more market share, these softhouses would start making apps for it. And maybe, if these softhouses started making apps for Linux, Linux would get more marketshare.

And I'm not talking about "freetard". I mean, if we got to spend money on an windows copy, and more money on an AutoCAD copy, we would gladly spend money in an AutoCAD copy to run on Linux.