As the results of Canonical’s survey of Ubuntu server users indicated last week, the cloud is an area where Ubuntu still has a lot of room to grow. And since that growth isn’t likely to happen all by itself, Canonical has been pushing the cloud hard to consumers. It has developed a cloud-computing portal for the Ubuntu community and is actively pursuing cloud-oriented technologies everywhere from the desktop (think Ubuntu One) to the server (home of the Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure).

The Cloud and the “Near Future”

Most recently, Canonical began distributing a short e-book titled Enterprise Cloud Strategy: Six Near-Future Scenarios last Monday. Available as a free download, the publication touts the benefits of using Ubuntu in a cloud environment, emphasizing above all the advantages derived from sticking to flexible, open-source technologies.

Some aspects of the booklet come off as a bit melodramatic, such as the section titled “(MORE) GLOBAL ECONOMIC TURMOIL.” But sensationalist tendencies aside, the publication also makes some good points about the way organizations should plan their cloud strategies.

For one, it points to Ubuntu as a potentially more environmentally friendly — and, by extension, cost-efficient — option on which to build cloud infrastructure, given Canonical’s efforts to optimize Ubuntu for energy-efficient processors like ARM. I’m not sure Ubuntu is so unique in this respect — Linux in general is quite ARM-friendly, arguably more so than proprietary platforms — but Ubuntu is as likely as any other major distribution to come out ahead of the pack if and when ARM servers take off.

The book also highlights the open-source tools built into Ubuntu’s cloud solutions, especially JuJu, as well as management tools like Landscape (which, alas, is still proprietary). This is a solid point: It’s hard to argue against the logic that anyone looking to invest in the cloud will likely benefit from sticking to mature open-source solutions as much as possible. In an ecosystem where standards are still evolving, becoming tied to proprietary technologies could turn out to be hugely problematic.

And last but not least, I was intrigued by Canonical’s emphasis on the dangers of “virtual image sprawl,” or the tendency of cloud environments to decrease efficiency by encouraging the creation of more virtual machines than necessary. I was surprised that the book raised this topic at all, since in one sense it discourages investment in the cloud in the first place — quite the opposite of Canonical’s goal.

It’s also not clear to me how Ubuntu is any better for preventing virtual-image sprawl than other operating systems, since the problem seems to have more to do with IT administrators’ behavior and planning than with the particular software they use. But I admire Canonical all the same for pointing out that cloud computing can have its downsides, a fact which many bright-eyed advocates of the cloud are reluctant to admit.

Cloud computing remains in a state of rapid evolution, as do Ubuntu’s solutions for the cloud. It’s hard to say how they’ll come together when the niche grows more mature. But what is clear is that Canonical hopes to tie Ubuntu’s future closely to the cloud, whatever that ends up meaning in real terms.

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It’s no secret Canonical has been pushing Ubuntu for corporate workstations strongly. As early as 2008, the company partnered with IBM on a virtualized desktop solution for businesses. More recently, it’s been pushing Ubuntu as a desktop operating system for enterprises in literature, and has also expanded the life cycle of LTS releases to help appeal to corporate customers.

The announcement last week of Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix is thus only Canonical’s latest move in a longer campaign. And for now, this special enterprise-oriented flavor of Ubuntu remains in the testing phase, currently available only in 32-bit form and intended for evaluation purposes.

Previewing the Ubuntu Business Desktop

So what exactly is there to evaluate? In Canonical’s words, “The remix retains all the goodness of Ubuntu and is compatible with all Ubuntu-certified hardware, apps and tools, adding business-focused tools from the standard Ubuntu and partner archives and removing home user-oriented apps.”

That’s a pretty good summary, at least depending on what one considers “home user-oriented apps.” For geekier readers interested in an exhaustive list of the software differences between the remix and generic Ubuntu, I did a diff of their filesystem manifests, which you can grab here. But to sum it up: the Business Remix lacks games, multimedia applications, some non-English language packs, the NotifyOSD daemon, social media apps (though Empathy instant messenger is included) and the Ubuntu One client.

Some other, smaller pieces of software are strangely absent in the Business Remix as well, including telnet and the bash-completion package. I was surprised to see these missing, because although they’re not vital to most business users, they’re such tiny utilities that I’d have expected them to be left in, if only to make life easier for system administrators.

On the other hand, the major offerings in Business Remix that normal Ubuntu lacks include packages for Adobe Flash, Java and the VMware View client. Right now, these hefty additions to the default software stack bring the size of the remix ISO image to about 712MB, just too large to fit on a CD, which is a bit inconvenient.

Aesthetics

In the looks department, there’s not much at all separating the remix from purply, generic Ubuntu. Besides a back-to-basics boot menu, the remix, which runs Unity by default, is pretty identical to stock Ubuntu 11.10:

The Last Word

As most geeks know, building custom remixes of Ubuntu is pretty easy, and any large business interested in running Ubuntu on its workstations almost certainly would have the technical expertise to put together a custom spin of the operating system on its own. Because of that, I wonder how many organizations will end up using the Business Remix in production environments.

Nonetheless, Canonical’s offering of an official Ubuntu flavor tailored specifically at the enterprise serves as a reminder of the company’s commitment to that market, a fact which may on its own help encourage confidence in Ubuntu as a corporate-desktop solution. Even if this spin doesn’t see much use, it might help inspire more businesses to give Ubuntu a try.

And last but not least, the package called “ubuntu-business-defaults,” which is present in the remix, appears poised to make installing an enterprise-oriented suite in Ubuntu as easy as one click — just like the other *ubuntu-* meta packages. That certainly won’t hurt when it comes to bringing Ubuntu to business desktops.

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The stakes surrounding the deployment of Ubuntu on servers are high. They’re a measure of Canonical’s success relative to other competitors in the open source channel such as Red Hat and Novell. They also say something about the health of Linux as a whole. And last but not least, they reveal a lot about technology trends in the open source ecosystem and beyond — where open source is being deployed, what kind of applications are popular and where the channel’s momentum might lead it in the future.

Ubuntu Server Edition Survey 2012

On Feb. 14, 2012, Gerry Carr, Canonical’s director of Communications, posted results of the latest survey of Ubuntu server users. This is the third time the survey, completed on a voluntary basis on Ubuntu’s website, was taken. The last one was in 2010.

The full report is available here, but some notable highlights that help reveal how Ubuntu is being used — and where it might be headed in the future — include:

• Traditional applications — web, database and mail servers — constitute the clear majority of current Ubuntu deployments. That suggests users trust Ubuntu for high-volume, mission-critical services, although it also means Ubuntu may still have room to grow when it comes to more novel server technologies, such as those related to the cloud.
• And on that note, when asked whether Ubuntu is a viable platform for cloud-based deployments, a whopping 70 percent of users declined to answer (of the remainder, 27 percent answered yes and 3 percent said no). Canonical interprets that trend as evidence that many users currently lack sufficient experience working with the cloud, which may be true, though that still seems like a huge number of abstentions. Whatever the explanation, it seems clear that Canonical needs to work harder to encourage Ubuntu use for the cloud — as indeed it has been — to avoid being left behind in this growing segment of the IT world.
• Interestingly, most Ubuntu servers are running on traditional desktop PCs. As the report pointed out, “the prevalence of the tower PC probably reflects the number of hobbyist and home users responding to the survey.” I also wonder, though, if this suggests that Ubuntu may still lack as strong a presence in the server rooms of large organizations as some of its competitors.
• More than half the respondents were located in Europe, and barely a quarter were in North America. According to the report, other data (which Canonical has not shared) suggests that in fact most Ubuntu server deployments are in the United States, with Europe overrepresented in the numbers released Tuesday because the survey was better publicized there. I’ll take the report’s word for that, but assuming it’s true, the higher response rate among Europeans nonetheless may be linked to the stronger presence of Ubuntu among governments and other large organizations in Europe.
• Although the data on users’ perceptions of the compatibility of Ubuntu with other platforms is a little hard to make out, since it’s presented only in a graph, it looks like most respondents believe Ubuntu works pretty well with other systems. In addition, there appears to be no major difference in its perceived ability to integrate with open source vs. proprietary platforms, suggesting that Ubuntu has done a good job of building bridges into the closed-source world — no mean feat given the many hurdles to integrating open source technologies with proprietary ones.
• Last but not least, KVM is now more popular than Xen as a virtualization hypervisor among survey respondents — but both still lag behind VMware. And surprisingly, VirtualBox ranked relatively high given that it’s mostly a desktop-oriented solution. (Perhaps this finding, however, also reflects the fact that many respondents are hobbyists who may be running server technologies alongside desktop ones).

All in all, the survey’s use is a bit limited by the nature of the respondents, who seem to represent certain segments of the Ubuntu server community disproportionately. But nonetheless it helps to illuminate some key facets of Ubuntu Server Edition’s future, with the takeaway points being the following: It has a lot of room to expand in the cloud; it’s doing an impressive job of integrating with other parties in both the open and closed-source channels; and its popularity in the server rooms of large organizations may still lag beyond the appeal it enjoys among hobbyists.

Now, if only Canonical would take a survey of desktop users, that would be truly fascinating …

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If Ubuntu is the world’s most popular Linux distribution — or at least was — Unity is undoubtedly the world’s most controversial open source user interface. Loved by some but passionately loathed by many users in its earlier iterations, the desktop environment is nonetheless here to stay, since Canonical shows no signs of shipping Ubuntu with anything else in the near future.

Fortunately, despite all that was wrong with Unity when it was first introduced, Ubuntu developers have been hard at work improving stability and usability. If everything goes as planned, the version of Unity that ships with Ubuntu 12.04 in April 2012 will be full of enhancements that will make the problems of its predecessors only bitter memories.

Unity Improvements

More specifically, here are some of the new features to look for in the latest and greatest iteration of Unity, as well as some other enhancements currently in development, based on developers’ blogs and mailing list messages:

• Better multi-monitor support: Arguably (and I did argue about this a couple months ago), it would have been nice if Unity would just have worked with multiple monitors from the get-go as well as other desktop environments did. But since it didn’t, it’s great that this should be less of an issue in Ubuntu 12.04.
• Enhanced VMware Unity integration: It’s not yet clear that this feature will be complete in time for the 12.04 release, but Unity developers have been talking about making VMware’s “Unity” mode — a feature that integrates the windows of a guest operating system into those of the host, like VirtualBox’s seamless mode — work better under the Unity desktop environment.
• Support for virtual drives in the Unity launcher: With developers working on this bug, there’s hope that the upcoming version of Unity will do a better job of handling launchers for virtual drives. This may not be a huge deal, but it would certainly be nice to get this stuff working — especially since it was so much of a non-issue in GNOME 2, for instance.
• Playing nicely with Compiz: Developers are working to smooth over some of the ugliness involving Unity and the Compiz compositing manager. This is mostly back-end stuff, but it should benefit users by making for a more bug-free experience.
• New screen edge detection: In an effort to make the Unity dock less intrusive, it will now require more than a quick mouse hover to unhide itself. Personally, I can’t say that this issue has bothered me too much, and I think I’d rather just see more options for customizing how the dock behaves.  But I’m encouraged all the same by the attention afforded to this usability concern.
• Last but not least, there’s HUD, Canonical’s latest user interface adventure, which most likely soon will be integrated into Unity. I’m curious to see how users react to this change, given that there was so much outrage when Canonical simply moved the window buttons from the right to the left a few releases ago. But maybe people will end up learning to like it.

This list certainly isn’t exhaustive, and the Ubuntu 12.04 release remains more than two months away. Plenty could change between now and then — and undoubtedly will, as Ubuntu developers respond to the user feedback on Unity they’ve been soliciting. But overall, by most appearances upcoming versions of Unity promise to be more user-friendly and robust than their predecessors. And that’s a great thing, because I don’t want to keep using MATE and Cinnamon forever.

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For starters, here’s the why: Although you might be expecting a diatribe here against Ubuntu and Canonical, and all of their collective flaws that drove me to try Mint, I can’t really pin any major blame on them. It’s true I’d become a little tired of trying to make Ubuntu 11.10′s version of Unity work in a way I liked. (I’m hopeful Ubuntu 12.04 will bring a more user-friendly iteration of the desktop environment.) And the hibernation problems I’d been having in Ubuntu 11.10 sometimes got my day off to a bad start when I turned on my computer and it rebooted instead of resuming.

But more than any major frustration with Ubuntu, I decided to give Mint a try — and to put in on my production machine, since that’s the only way I’ll really get to know its ins and outs — because of simple curiosity. I wanted to explore a different default. I was eager to see what Mint’s new homegrown interface, Cinnamon, was like. And I was intrigued by Mint’s endorsement of MATE, another desktop environment designed to revive GNOME 2.

Mint, Cinnamon and Me

By and large, I’ve been enjoying Mint so far. From a technical standpoint, it’s not actually very different from Ubuntu at all. Mint is based very closely on Ubuntu, uses Ubuntu’s repositories, practically is Ubuntu — in many respects there’s about as much difference between the two distributions as one finds between fraternal twins.

Yet Mint’s major distinction is its emphasis on user-friendliness, which it does well. Even more than Ubuntu, Mint offers a truly complete system out of the box, with proprietary codecs, the Adobe Flash plugin and everything else one needs to be productive preinstalled. These things are all easy enough to acquire in modern versions of Ubuntu as well, but having them already integrated into the software stack in Mint just made my life that much easier. (On the other hand, this software makes the Mint installation image several hundred megabytes larger than Ubuntu’s, although a condensed one is available.)

Upon booting Mint for the first time, I realized that a major component of its strategy for being user-friendly in the current state of the Linux ecosystem — where nearly half a dozen desktop environments are competing for users’ attention, all of them with their various pros and cons — is to offer lots of options. Out of the box, Mint 12 ships with GNOME Shell, Unity, Cinnamon, MATE and “GNOME Classic,” an attempt to make GNOME Shell look like GNOME 2. Users simply select which one they want to use when they log in.

This struck me as a brilliant idea: By dumping myriad choices on users, Mint can mitigate the wrath of those who inevitably will loathe one or another of its desktop interfaces. Hopefully these people will have enough different options to explore that they’ll exhaust themselves before they decide to hate on the distribution itself and blame it for the inadequacies of the desktop interface they’re using.

As for Cinnamon, the desktop environment that most intrigued me because it was released only in January and was created as Mint’s answer to the interfaces being developed elsewhere, it’s not bad. In the end, however, I concluded that — much like Unity and GNOME Shell, which both still have some growing to do — it’s a bit immature and currently lacks the customizability to be truly usable. Unlike Unity and GNOME Shell in some other distributions, however, Cinnamon has not been pressed on users as the only available choice, making its flaws eminently more forgivable. It has real promise, and I’m excited to see where it will go as it becomes more complete.

Sadly, while there are lot of things I like in Mint 12, it hasn’t proven to be the bug-free paradise I dream about. Like Ubuntu, and despite all its emphasis on usability and user-friendliness, Mint has issues. The Archive Mounter tool doesn’t totally work, for example, and Wine gives me problems. Hibernating is also still an issue, though that was predictable given that Mint is so similar to Ubuntu under the hood.

And the realization that Mint has issues is probably the most important point I’ll take away from this experience. Whenever I install a new operating system, there are a few moments — sometimes they even last for days — of hope, exhilaration and anticipation. Then the inevitable bugs and other flaws manifest themselves, and reality hits. The world is imperfect, even if you run Linux, and no matter how polished or user-friendly or technically sophisticated distributions such as Ubuntu and Mint become, there always will be room for improvement.

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First, let me clarify what I mean about the choice of desktop environments available until a few years ago. By no means were GNOME 2 and KDE the only options, or the only serious ones; there have long been a huge range of interfaces for Linux beyond GNOME and KDE, many of them very stable and usable.

But until recent years virtually all mainstream distributions shipped with GNOME or KDE by default. Unless you were a power user interested in trying out obscure alternatives, GNOME or KDE was what you got when you decided to install Linux.

Now, however, the field has undeniably changed. KDE has lost the prominence it once held, and GNOME 2 has been deprecated in favor of GNOME Shell. What’s more, a variety of new projects have sprung up, many of them endorsed by major Linux distributions, for creating entirely novel desktop environments. The most prominent examples include Ubuntu’s Unity, Linux Mint’s Cinnamon and MATE, an effort to revive GNOME 2.

Compartmentalizing Open Source?

The open source ecosystem has never been short on different choices, and in that sense the rapid expansion in the number of desktop environments offered to users is unsurprising. Just as there always will be lots of Linux distributions to choose from, so always will there be plenty of desktop environments.

But given the extreme diversity of competing Linux interfaces that have popped up in only a couple of years’ time, and the complete failure of the community so far to coalesce around one or two leading ones, this may represent something more significant than the natural tendency of open source developers to fork projects. It’s a bit early to say definitively, but I wonder if we’re trending toward the fracturing of the world of desktop Linux itself into different poles that will never be as compatible as they once were.

Traditionally, one could run whichever Linux distribution one wanted and still be able to use all of the open source software out there. Most programs were installable on any Linux distribution, and KDE applications could run in GNOME, and vice versa, easily enough.

But with different distributions now clinging to their own individual desktop environments, which in some cases are being developed in-house rather than upstream, cross-distribution compatibility no longer may be such a sure thing. With Unity, GNOME Shell, Cinnamon and MATE diverging in such different directions, there may come a day when an application designed to run in one of those environments won’t work in any of the others.

Such compartmentalization of desktop Linux seems yet more likely given Ubuntu’s plans to adopt the Wayland server and the HUD interface. Don’t expect other distributions or desktop environments to rush to ensure compatibility with those changes. Nor is Canonical likely to make it any easier to install Unity on other distributions, another restriction on cross-distribution compatibility.

Would the open source channel fall apart if desktop Linux distributions grow more distant from one another, in technical as well as political terms? Certainly not, since there’s a lot more to open source than the Linux desktop. But a shift like this could be somewhat of a shock for users accustomed to the interchangeability that traditionally has been almost a given in the open source world.

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We’ve covered Ubuntu branding — the artwork and names associated with the operating system — a number of times in the past. By and large, Canonical consistently has impressed me over the last few years for holding its own when it comes to developing a coherent and attractive Ubuntu brand.

This is particularly true when measured by the standards of the open source channel, where some projects lack any real branding at all (the MATE desktop is an example, although maybe not a fair one since it’s a new endeavor) and others are just, well, ugly (as much as I love Debian, it’s hard not to see a flushing toilet in its coarse, choppy logo). This poor branding isn’t too surprising, since open source developers tend to have much less time and money to pay professional designers than their equivalents in the proprietary world, but it’s still a reality.

A Look Back in Time

Canonical may have gotten good at Ubuntu branding in recent years, but that wasn’t always so. To get an idea of just how remarkably the face of Ubuntu has evolved over the years, it’s illuminating to take a look at snapshots of the Ubuntu homepage from different points in time, courtesy of archive.org.

Here’s what ubuntu.com looked like in October 2004, back when the operating system officially made its debut. That was a while ago, and the Web in general was less pretty back then. But besides the Ubuntu logo and the highly questionable screenshot, there’s no real content here at all that approaches branding:

Here’s the homepage again in February 2007, by which time it had greatly improved in the aesthetics department but still lacked an elegant logo or distinctive font or color scheme:

And here it is today, when the design is so consistent that even Chinese characters look right at home:

Ubuntu Brand Guidelines

Even good branding is only worth anything if the people representing the project — which in the open source world often means third-party users as much as those directly affiliated with development — deploy it. For that reason, Canonical has launched a new website, design.ubuntu.com, offering “Ubuntu Brand Guidelines” conceived “so we can all communicate Ubuntu with the same precision we use to make it.” It explains how different groups of people should use the Ubuntu name and artwork in various contexts to keep the Ubuntu message consistent.

On the surface, these “guidelines” may sound a bit Orwellian, and I’m sure some users out there will decry the site as the latest endeavor by dictator Shuttleworth to impose a unilateral vision on the rest of the community. But that’s a separate debate, and regardless of whether one agrees with the way Canonical has chosen to communicate its branding values to Ubuntu users and third-party developers, the company deserves credit for taking this issue seriously in an ecosystem where few other projects do.

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As Shuttleworth — who formerly served as Canonical CEO until resigning that role in late-2009 to focus on the design and development of Ubuntu — noted on his blog, menus have been a central feature of pretty much every graphical user interface that’s existed since the 1970s. Declaring, “We can do much better,” Shuttleworth has boldly proposed a new interface concept, the Head-Up Display (or HUD for short), which theoretically could make interacting with the computer faster and more intuitive.

Specifically, the idea is to replace menus with pop-ups where users invoke a particular action simply by entering a few keystrokes or speaking a few words. Here’s a video of the concept in action:

Novel Idea?

I wouldn’t call the idea behind HUD totally new. In a lot of ways it’s comparable to Zeitgeist, which does for file system hierarchies what Shuttleworth wants to do for menu interfaces: help users find information without having to remember exactly where it’s (often arbitrarily) located. And there are plenty of tools already in existence — such as Synapse, the Unity dash and the GNOME Shell overlay — that build on Zeitgeist or similar technologies to provide functionality pretty similar to what Shuttleworth envisions.

What’s novel about HUD, of course, is that it would replace window menus entirely. That’s a wildly radical step, and one that represents a huge ambition for Shuttleworth and Canonical.

The incorporation of support for voice commands, which Shuttleworth emphasized as an eventual goal, also sets HUD apart from most existing tools that fall into the same category. It’s a great “natural next step,” as Shuttleworth put it, although given the relative paucity of solid voice-recognition technologies in the open source world, I’m a bit skeptical that this part of the HUD roadmap will be implemented very soon.

Thinking of the Users

Canonical touched off plenty of nerves about two years ago when it moved the window buttons in Ubuntu to the left by default. And the introduction of Unity engendered long and ongoing controversy. I’m therefore left wondering how users will react to this latest idea for radically revamping a central part of the Ubuntu interface.

Since Canonical — regardless of whether it deserved it — has already earned ill will among some users for earlier UI changes, it probably faces an uphill battle with HUD. People will be suspicious of the new tool before they even try it.

On the other hand, the fact that Canonical is pushing forward with this idea is an indicator that it’s not worried what dissenters think. It has prioritized innovation over keeping happy as many users as possible, a stance that could be interpreted as arrogance, but also could mean enough people are continuing to download Ubuntu so it doesn’t matter.

After all, Canonical is the only party with reliable means of determining just how many people continue to use Ubuntu despite all the loud controversy over Unity. Maybe it will turn out that those upset over the interface changes are just a vocal minority, and Ubuntu’s innovative interface features will become the envy of the Linux world.

Or maybe HUD will prove an ill-conceived idea and drive yet more users to alternative Linux distributions. Time — a lot of it, because as Shuttleworth admits most of the code for HUD hasn’t even been written yet — will tell.

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To be clear, I don’t use Microsoft Office exclusively. I process my words in LibreOffice whenever possible, since it runs natively and has a lot of features that I miss in MS Office. I especially like the autocomplete functionality and built-in support for exporting to PDF.

Thanks to the wonders of the Wine emulator (actually, Wine is not an emulator, but we’ll call it one for simplicity’s sake), however, I can run Microsoft Office — in my case, Office 2003, since that was the last copy I bought — just as easily as LibreOffice on my Ubuntu system. As a result, I’ve had it installed for years and keep it updated regularly.

LibreOffice and Microsoft Office Compatibility

And that’s a good thing, because there have been many days when having Microsoft Office so readily accessible has been vitally important for doing my job — usually because I’ve found myself in situations where LibreOffice has been unable to handle Microsoft Office files correctly.

In general, as most of its followers know, LibreOffice can open Word, Excel and Powerpoint files pretty well. It also can save data in those formats without problems most of the time. But occasionally — especially when the documents involved have complicated content such as comments or embedded files — LibreOffice just doesn’t cut it. In other words, it’s good, but it’s not perfect.

In most cases, that would be fine. I’ve been using computers long enough at this point to know there’s no such thing as perfection in the world of software. All the same, the problems with LibreOffice become untenable when they involve sharing files with other people for whom I do need things to be perfect. In my professional life, I can’t send Word files to others and just keep my fingers crossed that they’re not going to see a mash-up of jumbled nonsense when they try to open the file. So instead, I have to use my own copy of Microsoft Office to make sure things look alright before passing the data on.

The root of the problem, of course, is not the fault of the LibreOffice developers or the open source community. It stems from Microsoft’s clinging to proprietary file formats, or obfuscating its implementation of those which ostensibly are open. It all boils down to Redmond being nasty and evil.

But while that may be an excuse, it’s not a solution. Nor is it realistic — at least outside of the universe of the Church of Emacs — to refuse to deal in file formats that LibreOffice cannot read and write natively. An unfortunate fact of life is that the vast, vast majority of humanity opens and saves its documents in Microsoft Office formats, and will probably continue to do so for a long time to come.

Because of these things, I wonder whether LibreOffice will ever be a truly complete replacement for Microsoft Office — and, by extension, if Linux will meet the needs of general computer users as well as proprietary platforms. It’s not that I don’t want it to — I certainly do — but even if it’s unfair, I can’t foresee the total disappearance of compatibility issues in LibreOffice to the point that people who need to do real work in a Microsoft-dominated world will be able to ditch Microsoft Office entirely.

Of course, cloud-based office productivity holds promise for resolving this dilemma by making Microsoft Office and LibreOffice alike obsolete. But the cloud revolution seems to be coming more slowly than promised. Until it achieves its full effect, I’ll have to keep a launcher for Word in my Wine menu, sad as that makes me.

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Admittedly, I have to give most of the credit for noticing the lack of Unity-based spinoffs of Ubuntu to an attentive reader of my earlier post named Jake, who pointed out in the comments that most Ubuntu remixes predate the adoption of Unity. Indeed: According to DistroWatch, there are exactly two Linux distributions that ship with Unity as their default interface: Ubuntu and Leenux, a relatively obscure spinoff that on its webpage actually appears to use the old Netbook Remix interface that Unity replaced. So that means that of the approximately 125 official and unofficial Ubuntu variants out there, Ubuntu itself is the only one based on Unity.

That’s kind of a big deal. I can’t think of any other Linux distribution that’s so unique with regard to its interface. Nor do any of the mainstream distros, with the exception of Ubuntu, use desktop environments developed in-house; instead, most of them are built around GNOME Shell or KDE, which are third-party projects.

All Part of the Plan?

Why might this be so? There are several potential explanations.

The first — which will appeal to those users who wish that Unity had never been created — is that the interface is simply unpopular. That might be part of the answer, but it’s not sufficient on its own. While there has been plenty of trepidation regarding Unity, there are also people who actually like it — and not all them, believe or not, work for Canonical. In addition, as Ubuntu developers continue to revamp the interface and fix the problems that marked earlier versions, it stands to gain a larger following. Attributing the lack of Unity-based Ubuntu spinoffs to user rejection alone is not a satisfying explanation.

Some might argue also that Unity is harder to work with from a technical standpoint. But I’d disagree. This might be a point best debated by serious developers, but based on my own limited experience remastering Linux distributions, it doesn’t seem to me that Unity should make things any more difficult. Like any other desktop environment, it’s just a set of packages that can be added or removed to a remixed software stack pretty easily.

The third explanation, and the one which makes the most sense to me, is that no one has spun off Unity because Canonical has kept the interface so close to home, so to speak. Precisely because Unity is different from GNOME Shell, KDE and the like in the sense that it’s developed by Canonical rather than partners elsewhere in the open source channel, Canonical has been able to exert much more rigid control over it.

Unity is open source, of course, and anyone is legally entitled to do with it what he or she wants as long as he or she respects the relevant licenses. But Unity is so tightly integrated with Ubuntu itself that it hasn’t made sense to build Ubuntu spinoffs based on Unity. For Unity to work well it needs the software stack that ships with Ubuntu proper.

It’s also telling that Unity has not been distributed outside of Ubuntu’s own channel. An effort to port it to Fedora fizzled out, and I couldn’t even find RPM packages of the software anywhere. Meanwhile, the only up-to-date Launchpad PPA for Unity currently supports Ubuntu 12.04 alone. In other words, even just installing Unity on a distribution that’s not Ubuntu remains a tall order, too difficult for most people to consider.

And my suspicion is that this is exactly the way Canonical wanted things. The company has been stingy with Unity most likely because it believes Ubuntu will be most successful if it has a unique desktop environment that allows it to stand out from the constellation of competing Linux distributions. Canonical wants Ubuntu to be something special, and Unity — as it exists today, and as it will evolve in the future as it expands to TVs and beyond — is a central part of that formula.

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For the sake of civility, I won’t get back into the debate on Unity’s merits relative to GNOME Shell, KDE or any other Linux desktop environment. Suffice it to say, though, that — as we’ve seen in abundant clarity here on this site — Canonical’s decision to replace GNOME with Unity was more than a little contentious for many users.

Suffice it to say, too, that I was a little confused why Canonical jumped off the GNOME ship in the first place. Sure, the retirement of GNOME 2 meant that a big change was in store for users either way. And building their own desktop environment gave Ubuntu developers more control over their operating system without having to rely on channel partners who sometimes had a different philosophy about things. But creating a whole new interface from scratch — particularly one that, at least at first, appeared to be largely a redundancy of GNOME Shell — seemed like a risky expenditure of resources for little concrete gain.

But with the news that the interface for Ubuntu TV will be based on Unity — or actually is Unity, as Michael Hall noted recently — things make a bit more sense. Or do they?

On one level, we might conclude that Canonical’s plan all along was to build a desktop environment that could work not only on desktop and laptop PCs, but also on TVs, among other things. And that may indeed have been the company’s strategy. But I’m not certain users will necessarily decide in the end that it was the right one.

I agree that it makes sense, as Hall also pointed out, to integrate one interface and unified set of APIs into Ubuntu that will work across all devices running the operating system, in order to encourage developers to target the platform. There’s no disputing that developers like consistency and standardization.

But will open source users, in the end, be persuaded to terminate the revolt against Unity that some have undertaken — I’m thinking of the MATE fork of GNOME 2, for instance, and Linux Mint’s new Cinnamon interface — simply because Unity will work on their TV as well as their PC? No matter how excited developers may be about Unity and the opportunities it makes possible across different kinds of devices, I’m not convinced users will be equally happy.

In other words, we need to distinguish developers from users. It’s important to cater to the former, but the latter need some love as well. And rightly or wrongly, Canonical’s image among users has become colder over the last year or so, I would argue, because of Unity.

This isn’t to say Unity is destined to fail. In fact, particularly now that Ubuntu developers are working on fixing its bugs and enhancing its usability, there’s a very good chance that the harsh feelings it engendered early on will be forgotten as users realize that it can work just as well as the desktop environments they’ve known and loved in the past.

But if everyone does end up loving Unity, the fact that it can run on their TVs probably won’t be the reason. It will be because it works, period. And by adding a new line of devices to the hardware on which Unity needs to work well, Ubuntu developers have only set a higher bar for themselves when it comes to ensuring a positive Unity experience.

Let’s hope that, as Canonical pursues the exciting future that Unity and Ubuntu TV make possible, it also keeps in mind that when all’s said and done, it’s about the users — not the developers or toolkits or cool hardware. If it doesn’t work for most of the users, at least most of the time, on whatever hardware they run, it doesn’t work.

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According to DistroWatch, there are 118 Linux distributions based on Ubuntu. These include both the official variants like Kubuntu and a wide range of lesser known spins created by community members. It’s this latter group, comprised mostly of operating systems that are not so well-known, that I’m interested in here.

Going through the DistroWatch list — which is not exhaustive — one finds an impressive variety of different custom versions of Ubuntu, many of which I didn’t even know existed. Most of them cater to specific tasks: there’s Ubuntu Studio for multimedia production, nUbuntu for security testing, Ubuntu Rescue Remix for (you guessed it) rescuing broken systems, and so on.

At the same time, there are also several spins dedicated to specific groups of users: gNewSense and Trisquel for those who want to run only 100 percent open source software, Vinux for the blind and visually impaired and even distributions dedicated to followers of particular religions, specifically Ubuntu Christian Edition and Sabily (for Muslims). (Not on the DistroWatch list is Ubuntu Satantic Edition, which I’ve yet to determine to be either a joke or a serious project.)

Community Spinoffs and the Open Source Ecosystem

Granted, it’s not too surprising that there are so many variants of Ubuntu. After all, if there’s one thing open source users are known for, it’s forking software into myriad different spins to align with everyone’s peculiar personal preferences. In addition, tweaking Ubuntu into a new distribution is very easy from a technical perspective, thanks to tools such as Remastersys, which makes it so easy to create custom live CDs even I can do it.

What’s more interesting to consider than the number of Ubuntu variants is the role they play in the broader channel. Viewed from one perspective, they’re an affirmation of the extensive choice and personalization that open source software makes possible. On the other hand, though, one might conclude that they detract from Ubuntu by drawing followers away from the mother distribution, by making it harder to support users who are basically running Ubuntu but whose versions have been tweaked in unpredictable ways and by spreading the Linux community’s finite resources too thinly.

Personally, I don’t think the collection of custom distributions is doing any harm. Most of them have small followings, and although they theoretically could fracture the broader Ubuntu and Linux communities in a negative way, they clearly haven’t done that so far.

One trend worth noting, however, is that many of these Ubuntu spins are no longer being developed. For example, gNewSense, Ubuntu Christian Edition, EasyPeasy, gOS, and Linspire — all of which were once notable distributions, some even of commercial importance — have gone dormant or been officially discontinued. In all, only 80 of the Ubuntu-based distributions on the DistroWatch list remain actively developed.

What does it mean that these spinoffs have reached their ends of life? Without a doubt, the specific story of each one is different. But more broadly speaking, it seems to me this relative decline in the diversity of Ubuntu’s sub-ecosystem could signal broader consensus around Ubuntu itself. People are no longer spinning it off because they’re happy enough with the base distribution. And that’s good for Canonical.

On the other hand, maybe this trend just means Ubuntu is no longer as popular as it once was, at least as a platform on which to build newer spins. That would align with other indicators suggesting that interest is growing in different distributions relative to Ubuntu.  But I doubt that’s the case, since the proportion of active remixes based on Ubuntu is significantly higher than that for other distributions including Fedora — meaning that Ubuntu remains more popular as a base distribution.

Either way, even if some Ubuntu variants are going dark, and whatever that might mean for the larger ecosystem, don’t expect users to stop remixing Linux distributions altogether. It’s a pretty safe bet that as long as open source software exists, there will be someone wanting to fork it.

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