Yet Another Linux Blog

Open Letter to Ubuntu’s Benevolent Dictator made the news at LXer today. I read it. I was not impressed.

What was this “open letter” about? The author rambles on for many paragraphs, but seems to make just two points:

1. PC hardware is very diverse and it’s difficult to support all of it,
2. the Linux desktop experience has a lot of bugs.

The author suggests that Ubuntu should align every 2nd or 3rd release with a Debian release so that much of the work could be shared. Brilliant! Or not, since Ubuntu packages are already made from Debian packages and bugfixes are contributed back upstream.

I think the author’s article is a perfect example of the sort of post that I’m always tempted to write, but I hold myself back and don’t decrease the SNR of the Web.

Off the top of my head, my suggestion would be to somehow improve the hardware-related bug reporting process. Perhaps you could hire a person to get together a large number of machines and test the software on all of them. Perhaps you could split this up among several people, each with access to different hardware configurations. And then perhaps you could have some sort of central database where they could all report bugs and everyone could see and confirm and track the status of the bug reports. Wouldn’t that be great? Oh, wait, that’s what the Ubuntu guys are working on: Malone, on Launchpad.

So maybe the author should contribute to the process instead of writing a pointless “open letter”. In fact, that’s what I should be doing instead of writing this, too. You can see my contributions to Malone here: Alex Chekholko in Launchpad.

I’ve been reading the UbuntuForums Dapper development forum, and I have a couple of points to make.

First of all, the general attitude seems to be “whine, whine, whine”. Most of the topics started in the forum are something like “featureX sucks, why can’t it work in this other way?” Every once in a while, a knowledgeable person will reply and say “it’s because of A,B,C that featureX works that way and it doesn’t make sense any other way”, but mostly it’s people replying with “yeah, I agree, featureX sucks, this Linux thing is overhyped”. Most annoying are the posts which demand that certain default behaviors be drastically changed, for whatever reason (usually not a good one).

Second of all, there are a lot of complaints about the developers not “listening” to the users (of the forum). People who make this complaint usually don’t realize that they’re not in the correct channel to complain to developers. UbuntuForums is a forum for users, not for developers. The developers use the Launchpad and Malone and developer mailing lists. And maybe this is a good thing, since most of the complaints are just noise, and aren’t properly researched or worded.

One problem is that by making it as easy as possible to participate in the Ubuntu community, you make it as easy as possible to ask lots of stupid questions. Is there any way to make it a requirement to at least search the forum and the wiki and Google before asking a question?