Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu pulls the 'official' plug on Kubuntu

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 10:00 AM, Jay Dobies <jason.dobies@redhat.com> wrote:
> I can see that they want to push Unity, but I haven't really met anyone who
> likes it (or Gnome 3). Maybe it's because I deal mostly with other
> developers and we're all pretty anal retentive about control, but it still
> feels pretty risky for Canonical to be putting so much behind Unity.
>

It seems to me that everybody is conceding the desktop war and placing
their hopes on desktops being replaced by touchscreen tablets.  I'm
not convinced that this will happen.  Tablets get people excited, and
people who do nothing but read email and websites love them.  That
tends to include lots of managers (who basically just go to meetings
and read email and documents), so it gains high-level support in the
enterprise as well.  However, I've yet to see tablets successfully
deployed to people who actually do work, except in certain niches
(where they often compete more with PDAs or whatever if the business
has already taken automation seriously).

When you view a website, or read an article, or look at a powerpoint
document on a tablet, and think how much easier that tablet has made
viewing the info, be sure to also ask yourself whether you could have
created the thing you're looking at using a tablet.

>From a practical standpoint I'd say ChromeOS is actually a better fit
than a tablet OS for what many people do.  However, it too is limited
to people who have more traditional office roles (creating documents
and working with text/numbers), and it isn't so useful for anything
graphical/etc unless people go really nuts with html5 and javascript.

But, people who buy stock and invest listen to the pundits, and right
now they're all crying tablets, so that's where companies spend their
money.

In any case, if you aren't actually paying Canonical for Ubuntu then
you're not really their customer anyway, although without its free
installed base I am not convinced Ubuntu would be able to compete with
the likes of Redhat/Suse/etc.

Rich
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