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Every six months without fail, a new release of Ubuntu arrives, carrying a number of new features. At the moment, this is great. Ubuntu improves at an extremely impressive speed and, each time, the release is a little better.
How long can this last, though? Certainly there are a lot of great features that could be implemented, but projects of Ubuntu’s size have to start worrying about feature creep, or the tendency to introduce too many features, making the product less useful and too complex.
While this may not be an issue that Ubuntu runs into for at least a few more years, it is something that almost every piece of software must eventually deal with. Hopefully Ubuntu will continue to introduce only useful, important featuers and not stray into bloat land.
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the ideas on ubuntu bainstorm just keep comming, so i dont see a end of the ideas/improvements for ubuntu
I’m scared that Ubuntu is becoming more and more hungry for computer resources! My PC is about 6 years old and Ubuntu 8.10 (or its Gnome) works noticeably slow. In few weeks there will be Ubuntu 9.04 and I’m considering jumping to something lighter such as Arch linux, since I’m scared my PC will work even slower than it is working with 8.10. Or maybe I try xubuntu or use ubuntu-server + fluxbox as a desktop
The key to Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution going completely mainstream, at this stage is OSS as a whole. Once Ubuntu is truly polished, they need to give the gimp, openoffice, ardour, and so on the full ‘Ubuntu’ treatment. Ubuntu is already as easy as anything else to use, but no one really cares. It’s all in the Apps from here on.
You say that Ubuntu improves “at an extremely impressive speed”, but each release is just “a little better”. Hmmm
You could replace the name Ubuntu in the story with the name of any popular distribution, since all are getting better all of the time.
I don’t think we need to worry about Ubuntu running out of features to implement. I can think of several features where the fact that they’re missing is mildly annoying. For instance:
1) GNOME does not support multiple desktop backgrounds. Okay, Compiz Fusion does, but GNOME will draw its own desktop over this, so it’s a choice between multiple desktop backgrounds and having any icons. Rather unhelpfully, the background color in GNOME is set as RRGGBB rather than RRGGBBAA, so there isn’t even that workaround available yet.
2) File Dialogs are spectacularly user-unfriendly in GNOME. They pull in whether your last instance of Nautilus was looking at hidden files or not (really helpful when the path is /~ (not)), but it only lets you sort by filename and date. Worst of all, the quick search box is hidden by default and only appears if you start typing.
3) An aspect of this was just manifested — Nautilus needs to be able to store viewing preferences on a per folder basis (and this includes setting a different icon size for the desktop!), and preferably as styles.
4) I wish Screenlets worked after a predictable fashion (the calendar has a particular predilection IME to revert to default colors and screen locations, and worse still create duplicates of itself). A usable version of Screenlets might be a bit too eye-candyish for some, but I like fun things on Linux.
5) Seeing as there seems to be a nanny features department at Ubuntu (bar stewards for making me hack my Xorg conf file on every single computer to allow me to give X the vulcan death grip), perhaps they’d like to write one to stop me creating a file owned by root in / called, say, “-rf *”. That should keep them out of harm’s way for a while.
Important: the GUI. Never mind functionality, productivity, security, policies or speed… The Vista / Windows 7 GUI is one of the reasons why people prefer Windows over (Ubuntu) Linux. I’m into Ubuntu since 6.10 Edgy Eft and I have never used Windows, since, but I have to admit that the latest Redmond OS looks just marvellous. My advice: hire some more or better graphical artists…
this is mostly an upstream issue
I don’t think theres a risk of Ubuntu becoming bloated since a lot of the new features are improvements on what already exists and is implemented. Also often new features cancel older features out, the desktop environment is limited in usefulness to the average user and its always those features that are focused on.
Further i don’t think theres a risk of the “M$” problem where the codebase becomes too large to maintain, most of the system is composed of upstream projects that (at least i think so) maintain efficiency of the code.
As for the rate of development, the only thing that could slow development is lack of money (which i think Mark Shuttleworth said something about), apparently in the current state theres only cash for a few more years ( http://www.techworld.com.au/article/265173/shuttleworth_canonical_may_need_3-5_more_years_funding?fp=4&fpid=161 ). Although with the growth rate of ubuntu i think there will be plenty of money for development.
In short, I dont see ubuntu turning to bloatware.
Acitta – That is true, but I try to be specific when I talk about LInux distributions. I think the whole concept of “distributions”: as being the same but different can be confusing to new Linux/Ubuntu/other distro users. (See, I just did it again.)
Ari T. – Perhaps releases at an extremely impressive speed would be a better wording.