Ubuntu and the Art of Deception

I am, and have been an Ubuntu user for almost six years; over the past four, I've given up Windows entirely (skipping over Vista and 7, save for rescuing family members' PCs occasionally). However, the more and more Ubuntu grows the more I notice discrepancies between the Linux that I loved originally, and the current incarnation.

The Deception

In the most recent release, the biggest change was the addition of a web API that interfaces with the desktop. Don't get me wrong, this is great, but a very underwhelming thing to take SIX MONTHS to develop. Had I wished to do so, I could have perfected the same thing (because the back-end is already totally there with DBus) in about forty hours of work. So, if Canonical had one developer working on it, for one week, it would have been done. What happened the rest of the time?

When Shuttleworth gets out and states all of the great things that came to us in 12.10 the major ones were these:

• Webapps - as discussed about 40 hours of time
• Online accounts - already integrated in Gnome, a simple port was all that was needed
• Dash Previews - essentially a few more plugins to the dash, which should be about a week of programming, especially if you use the utilities already available, like the "file" command
• Easy full disk encryption - Essentially a single change to the installer
• Ditching Unity 2D - this should have freed up a lot of developer time!
• And the hotly contested Amazon Search Results - advertisements for your PC that I'm sure Amazon would have implemented due to all the free advertising

The News

So, what did the news sites report on for six months? Theme changes, new button gradients, new backgrounds, etc. All the real work I could have done quicker, and not included the ads.

When all of this came out, webapps were touted as a great fusion of desktop and web, where in reality, they work on when the pages are already open, saving a few clicks at best, and opening your system to security flaws at worst. Why not support W3C apps? That would be a huge boon to the software overall, and a push to help Tizen. What about supporting Firefox apps? Quick to develop, quick and open to deploy.

The Amazon advertisements are a huge privacy concern, according to the EFF, rather than some magical new way to shop.

The Future

So, what does this all mean? Ubuntu has reached the feature creep stage, because it's founder won't take risks; maybe he's outpaced himself with a six month development cycle instead of continuous integration, but not enough is changing other than seeming regressions that users have to fight with each subsequent "release", but a great number of users refuse to admit this, probably because they don't know enough how quickly these changes could be made to a well designed system.

Perhaps Shuttleworth has spread himself too thin; rather than shoring up upstream apps and using them (i.e. docky could have easily been used instead of unity) he has created his own; rather than creating a unified configuration file set, we have a hack that works with each individual application.

It would be nice to see a desktop, particularly the most powerful one, contribute far more to the small projects that make it up, rather than fork them, until that happens, Ubuntu will become more and more of an impenetrable island that will eventually grind to a halt where a finite set of resources is used to do everything.