Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Jono is repeatedly smug about Facebook VR, nobody urinates on a laptop, we devote almost the whole show to one topic, and:
[00:21:15] Canonical have said that Ubuntu will dropping the Unity desktop and a bunch of associated technologies. The conversation around this has got a bit heated at times. What does it mean for Ubuntu and for the free desktop more generally? Is this the right thing to do? And what's next?
As a millennial, thank you Stuart. I am sick and tired of people blaming other generations because they simply do not understand one another. The fact that you stood up against this prejudice made my day a bit better.
@sil have you tried rawtherapee for photos? I have it, but it didn’t come with time to figure it out! I think it might be more of an open source alternative to Lightroom, but I’m not sure about that since I’ve never use Lightroom either. My main obstacle, other than time, is color blindness, so I can’t tell if the color is right or not. But I think it does have some black and white tools.
Do we know yet Cannonical’s plans regarding the phone? Clearly they are not going to develop any new models or majorly revamp the OS but is the project going to be quietly allowed to die or are there plans to continue to support existing users?
One of the subjects raised in the news section of today’s show was the use of smart phones in cars. The use of any phone in a car is problematic because even if it is only used for voice calls with a hands free kit this significantly affects driving ability any thing else should be unthinkable. We have had a discussion on texting here before
@sil is correct in saying that the solution has to be social, we agree not to use our phones when driving, and not technological. My daughter’s phone will work as a satnav but remains an active phone when you do so can still make and receive calls. I’ve only tried to use it once but got lost when a call came in just as I was approaching an unfamiliar junction. I won’t be using it again.
As far as I’m aware, and with no evidence, it’s been dropped; Canonical weren’t themselves supporting the phone anyway, that was the people you bought it off (Bq or Meizu). But I don’t think there’ll be new versions of the core OS or further development on the SDK etc.
OK, we have a great run, I guess I will not be back here anymore. it seems there is some thing going on here because he got the laptop without entry. Bye everyone.
After listening to the whole thing I have to still argue that Canonical really could have done better on multiple fronts. So first of all the focus point is dead on. From using Ubuntu for 10 years now the main issue I had with Canonical is they were like a dog chasing a toy and then a new toy comes along and they ignore the old one. There are so many great ideas that have never been expanded on. I think U1 for instance was a fuck up with focusing on the file sharing aspects of the use case and not focusing on the app aspect and making a very connected desktop.
Mostly I think Canonical should have from the very beginning offered a full consultancy service similar to Collabora, Codethink…etc. They had the people to do custom deployments and development of applications so they should have had an offering for that. There are a load of different profitable Linux companies out there offering that kind of service.
Rather than completely differentiating itself when Gnome Shell happened why didn’t they double down for instance on app development, the Ubuntu store and making like U1 above having a very connected experience. That means things like Android and iOS integration for instance. There are loads of ways to set themselves apart other than the default Gnome experience through apps which could be both paid and free, both proprietary and open source. Things like the deals with that music provider (can’t remember the name for the life of me), maybe partnering with Spotify instead and having connected features like remote controls on your phone for your computer. Really simple but they are polish and I’m sure there are quite a few ideas there which could be monitized or at the very least integrated from or into consultancy projects. There are loads of examples of places they could partner with or get some revenue from not just music but that is a small example of an area they could have I guess done a bit better. Focusing on things like the SDK earlier would have done quite a bit more than the convergence effort. It is super boring a concept in a way but having well designed apps that integrate into the overall vision of the Ubuntu desktop as a separate thing to Gnome/Fedora…etc is what should have been important.
The refocusing of Canonical is great and I think IoT and Cloud are places where they can probably work into a good strategy but they definitely had opportunities.
I thought, it was weird, how Jono defended Google.
People are lazy. If they are not offered choices, they don’t choose. Even, if they are given choices, but one is preselected, they refuse to think and change.
Jono said, that people can install alternative apps, if they want. Well, elitist Jono has his $1k Pixel, but most people have some $200–$300 Samsung/HTC/Huawei/Whatever Android-phones and the big problem is that they always run out of storage space. And Google does not help this problem by bloating their own software. One can hardly install any 3rd party software, when all the space is consumed by Google Play, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Movies, Google Books, (Google) Youtube, Google this-and-that. And every now and then they get updates and grow bigger and bigger. Even if they fitted just fine, when the phone was brand new, quite soon they hog up all the space. And what even worse, you can not uninstall them. You can only downgrade them to the “original” version by removing all patches. (And then they keep reminding you that you should upgrade.)
My wifes Sony just asked her to get updates for Youtube app. No can do. Not enough space available. And she doesn’t even have that much apps installed. (And where the *** does Youtube need access to contacts and SMS-messages?)
The actual winner is very happy… and you now know there are at least two of you!