Ramble On

May 14, 2011

Today we attended to the May Bring a Box meeting of the Surrey Linux User Group, and it was great!

We got a lot of interesting chit-chat and a couple of talks/demos at Nokia Southwood (nice venue, thanks Nokia guys!).

One of the talks was about VoIP alternatives to Skype, I guess because of the recent news of Microsoft acquiring Skype.

I was kind of disappointed by the approach to this topic, because instead of focusing on open protocols and applications using those protocols, the guy pointed to other “free as free beer” closed systems (or open, but they don’t tell you what are they using). Sincerely, I can’t see the benefits of switching from a closed system that actually works to another closed system that does a worse job.

He did a good work looking for SIP providers, but I think the open source clients were poorly represented (he failed to make Ekiga work, and he didn’t mention that Empathy, the Gnome default IM application, has actually a quite decent support thanks to telepathy components).

Then we had a demo of Gnome 3, going through its main features, and I offered myself to do a demo of Unity (I’m using it at work, and Alex has it installed in her netbook).

Hidden feature

The first thing I’ve noted is that most of the users don’t really know how to use the new desktop environments. I mean that there is stuff that you can’t know without actually reading some documentation (I showed how to make the Power off menu appear in Gnome 3, and it was a big surprise to everybody!).

I took my time to learn how to use Unity, because Alex and I wanted to seriously test it before discarding it completely. Alex was happily using Ubuntu before Unity and I got my laptop at work with Ubuntu installed, so both want to stick with Ubuntu in those machines as long as possible.

The second thing is that I would say that nobody likes Gnome 3 or Unity, although sometimes is a tittle bit unfair because users aren’t dealing with the change in the right way. Most of the attendees were happy Gnome 2 users, with Ubuntu mostly (I saw only one guy running Fedora, and there were some Red Hat guys).

Anyway, again that’s a problem of the desktops… if the functionality it’s not evident, they should find a way to show (or teach!) the users how it works, otherwise you’re very likely to refuse to use something that you don’t understand.

It was a nice day, with nice people. Thanks everybody!

by jjm on 8:32pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPorZy579vjU
(View comments)

(Notes: 3)

April 16, 2011

"5/11 participants (P2, P3, P5, P9, P10, P11) crashed Unity during their hour of testing. And towards the end of her test, P11 opened a zombie quicklist that stayed on top of everything and didn’t respond to clicks."

—

From Charline Poirier user test of Unity results.

I guess that was latest beta. All software has bugs, and Unity is a complex project, but the bit that caught my eye is: the participants crashed Unity.

Not bad if that’s what they intended to do ;).

by jjm on 10:54am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPorZy4LWX2E
(View comments)

(Notes: 2)

Filed under: Ubuntu Unity user test crash

February 24, 2011

"Apple at least only takes 30%. Canonical? 75% and they did not even write a line of code, they are just swapping the affiliate code."

—

From @migueldeicaza.

I don’t share the view of Miguel in a lot of topics, and this is obviously a humorous comment, but reading Banshee In Natty To Ship Multiple Stores And Contribute To GNOME Foundation and Canonical’s New Plan for Banshee, I must admit he nailed it.

by jjm on 8:24pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPorZy3FvHHb
(View comments)

(Notes: 12)

Filed under: Ubuntu Canonical Banshee Amazon Ubuntu One Open Source Humor

February 15, 2011

"After choosing Banshee as the next default player in Ubuntu, Canonical approached us, concerned with how our Amazon store would affect their Ubuntu One store."

—

From Banshee Supporting GNOME on Ubuntu (please, read the post… the revenue of Banshee’s Amazon store currently goes 100% to Gnome project).

Basically it’s news because the Banshee team declined a 25% revenue share offering from Canonical for not disabling the Amazon store in Banshee.

The distributor is very important, we all agree with that, but they’re distributing free software developed by others, under the Ubuntu brand; so I’m not sure where are the limits for the strategies that Canonical can use to make Ubuntu profitable (for them).

One could argue that this is not that important, because the store is supposed to be easily enabled back, but if it’s not important, why are they going to disable it in the first place?

Today, any user can install Banshee in Ubuntu (can someone confirm that the store is enabled?); so we’re talking about the importance of the applications installed by default.

by jjm on 5:32pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPorZy35MyHi
(View comments)

(Notes: 7)

Filed under: Banshee Canonical Ubuntu Gnome Amazon store

February 13, 2011

Updating non-Distro Packages

Today I’ve released Nautilus Flickr Uploader 0.10, and after 10 releases (since August 2009), I’ve been looking at the package downloads statistics for the last 8 months (I moved hosting in June 2010, and I lost the stats in the process).

Graph

Although log parsing is not the most scientific way of tracking this things, I can get some points from this graph:

I have more Ubuntu/Debian downloads than Fedora downloads. Far more, although Fedora is my development platform and deb packages sometims lag behind the source/rpm release.
Version 0.03 is not 0.03, but a symlink to the latest version available. A guy wrote a blog post saying how awesome was Nautilus Flickr Uploader, but he linked directly to the 0.03 deb file. To make things worse, that post was copied and pasted several times, so despite being released on September 2009, there’s people still downloading 0.03 (sic).
Fedora people tend to download the newest version, which is good. About half of the downloads are using the repositories, which is better than good.

I’m not tracking source code downloads, because it’s not the kind of user I want to focus today. Some other guy wrote a blog post pointing to the deb package and saying at the same time that the application was easy to install if you knew Perl (?). I guess that everybody using Firefox has a pretty decent level of C++ programming.

I think that packages are the way to go, and although having your software included in the different distributions is very good for the spreading of your application, it’s not perfect if you’re releasing early and releasing often (I’ve released 0.10 after 7 days of 0.09 release, and I think the changes are worth updating).

Updating software using repositories

The problem installing third party packages in your distribution is that you don’t get updates, because… who bothers to check if there’s a new version available? If the stuff you installed works OK, you probably won’t, and if it’s not working, you’ll move into a different application.

That’s when repositories are the key: if you use a third party repository, you’ll get updates like with the packages supported by your distribution and, at the same time, you’ll get the benefits from the release early, release often.

That’s why the main way to get rpm packages for Nautilus Flickr Uploader is using a repository (I provide F13 and F14 packages, thanks to Koji).

Right now I have both strategies: deb packages without repository, and rpm packages with repository; although I’d like to have more Fedora users to make the comparison more effective ;).

What do you think? Are you using third party packages or repositories? Which strategy do you prefer?

by jjm on 5:37pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPorZy33CI9p
(View comments)

(Notes: 6)

Filed under: Fedora nautilus-flickr-uploader release 0.10 repositories RPM DEB Ubuntu Debian

January 10, 2011

Spot the Difference

This particular thing freaks me out every day: left is $HOME, and right is $WORK.

Left is Fedora 14, and right is Ubuntu 10.10, both using Gnome and the same locale: en_GB.UTF-8.

For some reason the translation is different. I’m not sure, but I think I prefer Wastebasket over Rubbish Bin (although the second one sounds more British), but I’m not a native English speaker.

Which one do you prefer?

by jjm on 7:30pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPorZy2W9Ye8
(View comments)

Filed under: Fedora Gnome Ubuntu translation en_GB Wastebasket Rubbish Bin

October 26, 2010

"In his keynote address at the Ubuntu Developer Summit Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu 11.04 will use a new desktop version of Unity for the default desktop environment."

—

From OMG! Ubuntu!

The stress is in by default, and I think it will be easy to go back to classic Gnome or Gnome Shell anytime.

It’s a bold move anyway, but I don’t agree with Mark Shuttleworth when he says it doesn’t have to be seen as Ubuntu moving away from Gnome. Don’t subestimate the defaults!

The whole plan is interesting, because we’re going to see the reaction of a large community to the changes dictated by Canonical (a company) in Ubuntu, a distribution that used to focus on community, and now it looks more like a product focused on differentiation.

Update:

Unfortunately, this choice of Unity as the desktop user interface, instead of supporting the steadily progressing GNOME Shell project and trying to influence the direction of that project, is another step on the path to the siege mentality.

From Ubuntu to move to Unity as default desktop for 11.04 by Dave Neary. Interesting reading.

by jjm on 9:31am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPorZy1Jmv4T
(View comments)

Filed under: Ubuntu 11.04 Gnome Gnome Shell Unity upstream Canonical

October 17, 2010

"Ubuntu Tweak is an application to config Ubuntu easier for everyone. It provides many useful desktop and system options that the default desktop environment doesn’t provide. With its help, you will enjoy with the experience of Ubuntu!"

—

From Ubuntu Tweak website.

It makes me wonder why such application it’s needed, when Canonical claims constantly that they are building an user-centric and user-experience focused desktop.

There are things that aren’t easy to tweak by a newbie in a stock Gnome system, but I believe Ubuntu has been adding lately more of those default features you can’t change (I have a Ubuntu user at home, and she eventually stopped using Ubuntu Netbook Edition because of this).

In my humble opinion, both things are wrong. One of the most important features of open source it’s the possibility of adapting it to your needs, and traditionally it’s been easy to do so. I feel comfortable at Gnome, and KDE it’s kind of too much configurable for me, but I’m convinced that the abuse of defaults turning them into we think for you, and we know what is better for you isn’t right and will annoy the users.

I’m not saying than UX and UI design teams aren’t needed, but theirs it’s a tough job and prone to criticism, because open source software user profile is far away of being uniform, thus that kind of defaults can’t work for everybody.

by jjm on 11:16am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPorZy1FaFhE
(View comments)

(Notes: 1)

Filed under: Gnome Ubuntu Ubuntu tweak configure open source defaults user experience

October 6, 2010

"We are also extending our platform support to include a Windows client, which will be available in Beta very soon."

—

From Ubuntu One Blog: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.

I guess they will update the setup tutorial, that currently reads Because we want to give everyone using Ubuntu One the very best experience, we require that you run Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) or higher.

The basic plan lists in the tech specs: Sync for Ubuntu computers (Windows currently in beta), so supporting windows it’s actually a feature.

Is there any other distribution supporting Ubuntu One but Ubuntu?

by jjm on 5:29pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZPorZy1AucsC
(View comments)

(Notes: 2)

Filed under: Ubuntu Ubuntu One Windows support priorities money Canonical

August 8, 2010

Nautilus Flickr Uploader 0.06 Released

This is mainly a bug fix release, with a new translation added (Arabic, that’s nine translations already in Transifex!), and I moved from the deprecated Gtk2::SimpleList to Gtk2::Ex::Simple::List.

About 6 months ago I was celebrating 100 authenticated users according to Flickr, and today I just realized that right now there are 504 authenticated users. How amazing is when someone is using something you did and shared, isn’t it?

I’ve updated the Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu packages, and you can get them all from Nautilus Flickr Uploader website (as usual).

I’ve updated the the package review request, and someone heard my call for a DEB maintainer, so the application may be submitted to Debian too. Great!