Submitted by In a surprise move (at least, it was surprising to me), Ubuntu founder and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth has announced he’s stepping down as the CEO of Canonical, the commercial endeavour behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. He will continue, however, to play major role in the company and Ubuntu’s future.
Jane Silber, the Chief Operating Officer of Canonical, will take over Shuttleworth’s role as CEO. His stepping down as CEO does not mean, in any way, that Shuttleworth will disappear from the stage. In fact, his stepping down allows him to focus more on product design and development, his passions. He will also remain as the head of the Ubuntu Community Council and the Ubuntu Technical Board, and he wants to spend more time working with partners, especially in Asia.
“I will focus on my passions of product design and development. I want Ubuntu to succeed as the open platform of choice for almost all use types whether on netbook, notebook, desktop, server, embedded device or wherever people compute,” Shuttleworth said in an interview with ComputerWorld, “That is a large undertaking and being able to focus on that, thanks to Jane, is a great privilege. I will also spend more time talking to and visiting partners and customers about what they demand from an open platform and feeding that back into the product through the community and Canonical.”
Canonical will continue to do what it has been doing, and will not change direction because of this. The move also means that the leader of Canonical and the leader of Ubuntu are now two different people.
“This move will bring about is a clearer separation of the role of CEO of Canonical and the leader of the Ubuntu community,” Silber said, “It will be two different people now, which I think will be helpful in both achieving their joint and individual goals more quickly.”
Now that he have more time, he could start to study Interaction Design… I, and many people would appreciate very much
Not necessarily a bad thing as he wants more time to work on making Ubuntu the next big OS. I am sure he still has the final say on things around there.
Mark may fancy himself a product design type, but he’s got a way to go on that front.
The Nautilus “mixed spatial/browse” mode was awful, and was directly pushed by Mark before being forgotten about. Now we have big gaps above libnotify popups and horrible “message indicator” applets (hey look, it’s a whole new notification system and launch paradigm – just for messaging applications!)
Oh, and the fast-user-switch applet has every shutdown option right there in the menu, and insists on polluting my taskbar with a Unix username, all in lower case. How’s that for good design?
In general, Canonical applications and artwork nearly always fall short of a good user experience. Launchpad is only now starting to look decent and work well. Ubuntu One is still shaky-feeling. The default Karmic panel applet setup is boggling and clunky.
I’m glad Mark is refocusing on the areas he’s passionate about. I just hope he’s not intending to be the final arbiter of Ubuntu design decisions.
This one particularly bugs me. Panel space is limited. Do you know of any way at all to get rid of the username and still keep the applet?
I thought that applet had a settings dialog. Mine did in 9.04, where you could select what to display. I think the options were “username”, “icon”, and something similar. I know I changed mine to a user icon just because I didn’t want it to take up space.
It did have a settings dialog on 9.04, but it seems to have been removed on 9.10. I don’t know if this was a Ubuntu or GNOME decision. I really don’t see any logic behind it. 99.99% of the time, the user knows who is logged in and doesn’t need to see their name on the panel 100% of the time.
is it that 99.99% is you and 100% of users you don’t really know? show us studies that prove you being right… i’m one of 0.01% that don’t agree with you 😉
Edited 2009-12-17 23:15 UTC
…the user knows who is logged in…
I agree. Love it or hate it, but on the desktop and with Ubuntu, the majority of the systems are single user systems. Most ordinairy people don’t know about or don’t want to use the multi-user nature of Linux. (Heck I know of the advantages of multiple users and I don’t even use it. My BF and I use one account.)
For these systems to show who is logged all the time is superfluous. Make it an option to do so if it is desired, but the default should just show something space efficient. It doesn’t really bother me on our 24″ screen, but I don’t like it one bit on our 9″ netbook.
It was an Ubuntu decision. The settings dialog exists on my Mandriva and it has always been there on all the other distros I’ve tried.
Why don’t you just change the Real Name to something shorter? You could even change it to Menu or System or something if you wanted.
That’s a possible “hack”, but not really a solution. The GECOS (i.e. Full Name text) entries really shouldn’t be messed with to change a “niggle” with a DE applet. It breaks the original purpose of the entry to begin with and creates a possible fault for future updates/upgrades and other programs that may use this info (i.e. finger). But hey, you’re free to muck with your Ubunutu install as you wish.
It’s sad that you’re right and yet Ubuntu and Gnome go well beyond the current state of KDE’s user interaction. Gnome almost reaches Mac-like levels of fluidity, where keystrokes are consistent between applications and there’s a minimum of keys and clicks to do something. Dialogs take instant effect and allow you to revert instead of
I believe in the underlying power of the KDE framework, but they need to at least catch up to Gnome for elegance and cleanliness. As it is, when I configure a desktop or a panel under Plasma, I feel like I’m about to be asked to fill out a TPS report to get it done.
And that’s why I basically do it only once.
I would like to see KDE adopt Gnome’s instant-apply behavior, but that would be a major change of their HIG.
1) join B&M Gates Foundation or any other philanthtopy
2) act as acting chairman providing intellectual input on ubuntu forums?
3) join Indiana Soalris project
4) Collect unemployment benefits
5) Open a sales/mall kiosk for ubuntu
6) or better work as door-to-door salesman for ubuntu
7) persue “rocket science”? after you can’t figure out “rocket science behind windows popularity…
8) hide in basement and come up with another distro for yourself…
my first thought is that it doesn’t matter. I suspect that is his thinking as well.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu,+windows+7,+iphone
great minds don’t sit around on things that are going nowhere fast
Great minds don’t pretend to correlate google trends graphs with reality…
So a free OS put together by volunteers isn’t squashing Windows 7, oh noes! It is all over now! Close shop and don’t forget to turn off the lights the leas one out… right?
don’t think with such emotion, denizen of the internet. there is more to see than what you saw. read again and consider only your way to excellence
Yeah, right. And yet we (at least used to) hear how a free OS is easily overtaking them all. Already back in 1998 or so.
Not sure, I installed Windows 7 and Karmic on the same day – I like Windows 7 although on my hardware it was much harder to get working than Karmic due to driver support. I thought I might end up using it more than Karmic, but no, I prefer Karmic to Windows 7 it loads faster to a working desktop and well I prefer it, it was also a lot cheaper nothing as oppose R1300 and that for cut down “Home Premium†for “Professional†it’s R2025
I’d say Linux – Ubuntu is ready for Desktop prime time – the year of the Linux Desktop has already happed, it just most people haven’t noticed. Trying to be objective I don’t think there is much difference in obvious quality between Karmic and Windows 7, Windows main advantage being all those applications you can add to your system. If we compare Home Basic to Karmic I think Karmic is clearly better and as for Vista – well if you happy with Vista what can I say.
I think you would have to be very close minded, not to say that Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth hasn’t advanced the Linux desktop significantly. We are beginning to see competition in the OS market.
Edit
OK Windows 7 and Karmic get to a Working Desktop in about the same time 35 seconds-ish, it Karmic feels a bit faster as when the desktop loads it works in Windows I need to wait for the AV etc to load (my Windows is fairly clean not one that loads a 100 things into the taskbar)
Edited 2009-12-18 06:27 UTC
Try ubuntu, debian, fedora, suse, red hat; you’ll see more action.
The difference in your comparison is advertising.
Mark’s great contribution is that he woke up the Debian community, and I’m very grateful for that.
the Steve Jobs of the open source!!
Mark doesn’t threaten individuals and even customers with legal action. I’ve never seen him wear a turtleneck. And he’s never used his money and influence to steal a liver which rightfully should have gone to someone else. Someone, somewhere in this world, died of liver failure because of that. Think about it…
Edited 2009-12-18 02:38 UTC
Maybe not, but you do have to assign copyright to him if you want the right to contribute to one of their projects. That says something.
He wore one in space, underneath the space suit.
Somebody, somewhere in this world, dies of liver failure every time someone else receives a transplant. Many people, probably. Is there a credible citation to which Jobs received preferential treatment over others? I’m actually asking in all honesty, because I never saw anything about that in the news.
And far be it from me to be an Apple apologist, just playing the Devil’s advocate here…
Somebody, somewhere in this world, dies of liver failure every time someone else receives a transplant. Many people, probably. Is there a credible citation to which Jobs received preferential treatment over others? I’m actually asking in all honesty, because I never saw anything about that in the news.
I remember having read about it myself too, something that whereas John Doe usually has to wait around 2 years for a transplant Jobs received his in just a few months and there were several people before him in the line with a lot worse condition than he had.
Can’t give a link though, it’s been so long ago and I didn’t really think of saving the article anywhere at that time.
The US national average wait time for a liver is over a year. Steve Jobs announced that his health problems were “more complicated” than first thought on Jan 14, and had a handy-dandy refurb liver installed the following April.
The US health insurance system is also broken.
Strange that you know so much about liver donation wait time, but pretend not to know about live donor liver transplants.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/transplant/Programs/liver/living_don…
You are a well known troll here on OSNews, but trolling about such a serious matter is a new low for you. Shame on you.
You’re saying that you think that some Apple Fanboy somewhere donated half his liver to The Steve? Well, I guess that’s not so hard to believe. Probably had to talk the poor schmuck out of trying to give him the whole thing…
Edited 2009-12-19 17:02 UTC
Jobs has relatives. Maybe your family hates you so much that no relative of yours would give you half his/her liver, but usually family members love each other and would happily do a live donation.
You definitely need mental council for your trolling about such a topic. It’s sick.
Edited 2009-12-19 17:09 UTC
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Source?
Why would you need a source? To get a liver it has to be taken from a dead person. Many people are on a waiting list for years. Jobs wasn’t.
Edited 2009-12-18 13:00 UTC
You can buy a liver from the black market taken from a living person, I assure you.
You can do anything with enough money.
Toally wrong: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/transplant/Programs/liver/living_don…
Well, maybe those people don’t have healthy relatives that can provide a half liver.
Maybe Jobs waited for years.
While it might be true that you can take partial liver donations, in this case it isn’t because jobs had a complete liver transplant which is entirely different – which is why I phrased it in that context.
But……….he didn’t.
I guess Mark gets a little bit of extra free time now. I hope he spends it talking to the average user who doesn’t know much about computers.
With 9.04 I needed to go command line because of the horrible behavior of the update manager.
This time I couldn’t choose ‘do nothing’ in the power management and I can’t configure to remove my name on the applet. I haven’t even found to switch off the confirmation when I want to shutdown, restart…
For me, ubuntu is getting worse instead of better. The parts that get better are not ubuntu specific.
If I would have more time I would switch to another linux version with similar netbook launcher as 9.04
This guy is terrible at Interaction Design. I was hopeful the day he hired some experts. I’m disappointed some year later. These experts are either no experts at all or they are just constrained by the “benevolent dictator”, as he calls himself. I definitely hope he spends his time anywhere but designing interaction.
Oh, and he’s not much better at managing communities either, if the forums are any indicator. A bunch of whimsical policemen wannabes rule those forums and show off their power to the mere mortals on every occasion. The forums were nice at some point. They aren’t anymore.
Edited 2009-12-19 07:47 UTC