Giving Unity Another Go

Yesterday I installed Unity5.0 and I was pleasantly surprised by some of its new features:

• I can set the panel background colour. By default, the Unity panel adapts itself to match the wallpaper colour. This doesn’t always work out, and with certain background colours it looks really horrible with the icons on it. I set mine to a none-harsh, dark grey and can now see my icons without any desire to fork out my eyes.
• I can set the launcher panel to be ever present. I have plenty of horizontal screen space and I find it annoying not having a window list present on my display. When I have to hover my mouse to the left edge and wait a few hundred milliseconds before I even see the list of open apps and where they are positioned, it just annoys me. Having them always on-screen is just so much easier.
• It’s fast and more stable. Unity 5.0 is noticeably more snappy than it’s predecessors. It also feels less buggy. What drove me away from Unity on Oneiric was that the window placement snapping got horribly confused now and again and the only way out of it was to kill Compiz or otherwise restart Unity. My session is 24 hours old already and still going strong

Some Areas that could do with Improvement

Update: I thought it’s worth mentioning that removing the Gwibber lens removed close to *500MB* of that extra 1GB RAM that was used. There also seems to be an issue where gdbus and dconf worker are way more busy than they should be (at least on my machine). I’m figuring it out and will file bugs if I can confirm them. When they behave better then memory usage in Unity and Gnome Fallback shouldn’t be that far apart.

• Global menus still get confused about running apps. Sometimes I’d get a Thunderbird title in the menu space and Thunderbird has already been closed. This is kind of weird when you’re not aware of the bug.
• Memory usage is high. I’m currently using around 1GB more memory than I typically would when using the Gnome 3 Fallback session with the same software running. I’m hoping that it stays there and that it won’t continue to rise due to memory leaks and other memory issues. This is a deal breaker on application servers.
• The Dash isn’t very pretty or user friendly. I guess the dash didn’t get much work or research done due to the focus on getting bugs fixed, so it’s probably not all that bad. At least you can right-click on the Ubuntu icon now and get a list of installed Unity lenses. The Dash home should really be customisable, and I’m not sure how users are supposed to do some rudimentary tasks like connect to a network share.

Overall Thoughts

Unity has improved a lot recently. I feel that I can continue using it if it’s memory consumption stays under control. I’m testing it on Ubuntu 12.04 which is currently in an early pre-release state. Unity crashed twice while writing this blog entry so I hope it’s just some underlying bugs that will be solved by the time Ubuntu 12.04 hits release.

As for deploying it at client sites, I don’t think I could recommend that until it’s memory issues are resolved. Losing 1GB of RAM is a lot. Simple day to day tasks should be more intuitive (finding recent docs, accessing menus, accessing what used to be known as ‘Places’, etc), and it would help a lot if the Dash home were customisable (I couldn’t find a way to do it from within Unity or anything about it in the documentation). The Gnome 3 Fallback session is very solid and very familiar and I think I’ll continue to recommend it for the typical user desktop. At the rate that Unity is improving though, that might soon change.

This year I just want to get more stuff done.

Motto for 2012:

The Principles Meme

This morning I read the following in a blog entry: “I applaud him for sticking to his principles, and not compromising“. The person who wrote it didn’t even agree with the person he was referring too, and yet he was congratulating him for sticking to his principles. I’ve seen a bunch of similar statements recently. There’s also a similar, more self-congratulating meme where people are very proud that they are unwaveringly sticking to their principles no matter what.

I’m not sure where this comes from, perhaps it stems from religious roots? Perhaps from people who are afraid to admit that they are flawed in any way? Perhaps they have some agenda that they want to push?

What if no one ever compromised on their principles? What if, in South Africa during the Apartheid years no white person were willing to consider that anyone with a different skin colour could be considered an equal? What if people could never see women as equals and they could never get voting rights or other equal rights? There are many, many more concepts in the past that were rooted as moral principles and with the hindsight we have now, we can see that they were clearly wrong. Sticking to those principles would have been harmful. The sad thing is that today still, many concepts in society is flawed. So why do we choose to applaud people who are inflexible, unscientific and in my opinion, irrational?

The Scientists

I applaud the scientist types, the ones who are able to look at new information or evidence and are able to take a step back and say “Hey, maybe I should re-think this!”. I respect those who are willing to say “Perhaps I was wrong” and share they’re experiences with others to get wider feedback rather than the person who will relentlessly defend their position, typically using some absolutes to try to prove their point.

Last weekend I spent some time with the LTSP folks at the annual LTSP hackfest called “By The Sea” (or BTS for short). This was my second BTS. It was well attended and these were some of the items that were covered:

• Migration to new NBD
• Bootable chroots
• libpam-ssh
• Epoptis
• Local window manager
• Improvements to ltsp-build-client
• Migrate LDM to GTK+3
• LDM login speedup
• Try to do something about the default LDM theme

 

 

Other than that it was a great time for LTSP enthusiasts to get together and socialize a bit. For the next few months, the focus is on fixing bugs and getting LTSP in a good shape for when Ubuntu 12.04 LTS arrives, since everything that is done now should be supportable for 5 years. After that there will most likely be some push to move from LDM to LightDM, which will allow us to have much nicer (and more useful) login screens for all kinds of remote sessions. It was great seeing everyone there and I hope to be there again next year!

Great UDS

This week I attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.04 in Orlando, Florida in the USA. I have so much to say about it that I don’t know where to begi n.

This was only the 5th UDS I’ve attended so far, it’s also hands down the best. UDS has become a well-oiled machine. Things just worked and everything was in place to ensure highly productive sessions. Kudos to the organisers, you rock!

Thanks to the sponsors: Cloud Foundry,  Rackspace and Google. VMware sponsored the food for this UDS, it was awesome, I hope I haven’t gained too much weight. Also thanks to Canonical for providing me and a whole bunch of other community members full sponsorship.

Ubuntu 12.04 – A high precision release

This UDS I spent most of my time on technical sessions rather than on the community side. I find the community sessions emotionally draining, probably because I’m such a strong introvert. The technical sessions on the other hand I find engaging, exciting and inspiring. Most sessions I attended were calm, highly focussed and very productive.

Ubuntu 12.04 is going to be a very special release. So much effort has been put in from the very start to ensure an exceptional high quality release. Some have said that ‘precise’ sounds like a bit of a silly name to type in your sources.list file, but there’s never been an Ubuntu release where precision has been more relevant. There were plenty of sessions covering really important issues like LTS upgrades, the state of MOTU, keeping daily builds usable, the role of the ARB, the relationship with Debian and many more discussions that will lead to having higher quality packages in Ubuntu. I can’t even start to cover it in this blog entry but over the next release I’m going to write a *lot* about it. There’s such amazing focus going into quality and people should know about it!

Venue

The Caribe Royale is a great venue for UDS. I think if Nintendo would have ever released a game called “UDS Resort” it would look pretty much like this place. I hope it’s host to a UDS again in the future! It was great seeing so many Ubuntu contributors, especially all the people who attended UDS for the first time. I hope to do so again in 6 months!

Some updates form the world of Jonathan…

• LTSP BTS2011: Yesterday Marc, Stéphane and myself drove down to Southwest Harbour in Maine for the LTSP By The Sea 2011 hackfest. It wasn’t a long road trip, but it’s been fun, we picked up 4 other people at Bangor airport and the minivan we’re hiring was like a party bus from the airport to the harbour. The hackfest itself has also been really fun so far and productive, I’ll blog about that some time.
• UDS Precice: On Sunday I’m off to Orlando, Florida for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.04. It will be my first time in Orlando, and the first time I get to attend a UDS in the US. Previously my visa got approved too late so I couldn’t attend, this time I received a 10 year visa so I should be fine for a long time, I’m really happy and relieved about that.
• Holidays and stuff: The week after UDS I’m back in Canada for a week to organise some things and report back at the office about what happened at BTS/UDS and then I’m off to South Africa for 3 months. I’ll be working from there for the period and also taking most of my year’s holidays during the end of December and early January. I’m the best man for a wedding and will be organising a road trip for the bachelors party, my friend in South Africa also got my motorbike fixed so we might end up going there by bike, the weather should be really good around then.
• Back in Sherbs: On 15 February, just after my 30th birthday, I’ll be back in Sherbrooke. I’ll probably end up having some form of birthday party in both countries. After that… the adventure continues!

“Damage Control”

I just read an article on CNN about Americans complaining that their bank fees are too high. It’s not unique to them, the same thing is happening here in Canada. Last week I got notification from Bank of Montreal about their price increases. The ad on the Internet banking site made it sound very pleasant, so much so that I decided to take a peek at the PDF to see what’s actually changing. The details were shocking, they are implementing a heavy increase in banking fees in December. I don’t have many services at BMO so the debit card fees will affect me most. I decided to innocently tweet something about it…

I didn’t give it much thought again after that. Today I received this tweet reply from BMO:

“please feel free to DM me your questions and concerns”

Really? What kind of half-assed reply is that?  I’ve put my concern out clearly and concisely in my tweet. What exactly do you want me to direct message you? I doubt they really have any intention of addressing my concerns. I highly doubt they’ll actually reduce any fees just for me. It seems that all they want is for me to DM them anything I have to say about their pricing instead of publicly saying it. Perhaps they should’ve read today’s Seth Godin before composing their tweet.

Come on, you can afford it

For the kind of money the banks charge us, I’m kind of disappointed at how cheapskate their marketing is. I would at least expect some creativity or some form of trying to win people over, or maybe even some kind of decent justification (I guess they just don’t have any and they know it). Instead all we get is “We have a right to make profit too” (Bank of America). How lame is that?

A Gnome summit just 2 hours away from where I live? Awesome!

A few weeks ago I noticed that the Gnome summit that usually takes place in Boston is happening in Montréal this year!  Being a Gnome user for more than a decade and having provided support for it to many people since then, I thought it would be great to pop in for a few hours and see what it’s about. The first session is just about to start and I hope to be back tomorrow as well.

Gnome Stuff in Edubuntu

In Edubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) that’s being released next week, we’ve had to drop Nanny, Pessulus and Sabayon. That’s quite painful since they were great tools, but they didn’t work so well with all the Gnome 3 stuff and they don’t seem to be very actively maintained upstream at the moment. I would’ve gotten involved with those tools if I wasn’t already over-committed, I even considered doing something from scratch that integrates with the Gnome System Settings manager. My goal for now is just to get to know some people and learn more about the Gnome project and its goals. Maybe in a few months my situation will be different and I can commit some time to it. There’s really a need for administrating what desktop systems look like, how they work and how they are locked down in schools and other large deployments.

In Edubuntu, we’ve had to make some tough choices regarding the Gnome desktop since the 11.04 release. We want to keep Edubuntu a great system for schools, but also not stray too far from what a default Ubuntu system gives you. For 11.04 (natty) we decided not to use Unity by default, but provide it as an option in the installer so that early adopters could give it a try. For 11.10, we now install Unity by default and provide the Gnome fallback session as an optional installation. Our aim for Edubuntu is to support Gnome fallback mode as well as Unity. I’m really glad to see that Debian has decided to support Gnome fallback mode as an equal to Gnome shell in Wheezy without having to activate it in system settings first. It would be nice if Gnome upstream could stop calling it the ‘fallback’, but I guess they want to push Gnome Shell as the default as far as possible. Happy hacking everyone!

I’m spending my day at the Ubuntu Global Jam in Montréal. What surprised me most is that after all these years, it’s the first global jam I’ve actually attended. Canonical provided the venue and some yummy refreshments. I managed to be somewhat productive, but even better was being able to put some more names to faces with the local Ubuntu crowd.

Looking forward to the next one already!

 

 

Now and again, someone asks me “Why do you use Debian?” or “What’s so great about it? Why don’t you use (insert any other Linux distribution here)? I never quite know what to say. I’ve gotten so wrapped up in why Debian is great that it has become hard to imagine how someone else couldn’t see what I admire in it.

So.. what IS so great about it?

It’s great for similar reasons as Wikipedia. Wikipedia builds this huge collection of free articles, pictures and videos and assimilate it by making sure the content is free, that statements are properly backed, that there are proper links between articles and probably a few dozen really big things I haven’t even  ever thought about.

Great community. Debian has some parallels to Wikipedia. It’s almost like a Wikipedia but for software instead of articles. It assimilates free software and makes it easy to use on a very wide variety of systems. It does so better than any other system that exists (at least IMHO, I list just some of the reasons for saying that below). Packagers are like editors on Wikipedia. They integrate all kinds of free software into the system, making sure it meets the project’s quality standards and that the licensing is sound.

Operating system support. You can run Debian with a Linux, FreeBSD or GNU/Hurd kernel. FreeBSD and GNU/Hurd is admittedly not as rounded as Linux in all situations, but just the fact that you have a choice of operating system kernel and that the project supports 3 of the most well known ones is amazing. I can’t even think of one other system that actively works on supported different kernels.

Desktop support. Some systems focus on Gnome, KDE or in the case of Ubuntu, Unity. Debian supports a really wide variety of desktop environments. Gnome, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Fluxbox and more are all fully supported and in the main archive.

Architectures. It runs on a really amazingly wide range of hardware. It runs officially on i386, amd64, armel, sparc, powerpc, ia64, mips, mipsel, and IBM/s390, but you can also run it unsupported on alpha, armhf, avr32, hppa, m68k, powerpcspe, sh4 and sparc64 architectures. Debian scales from some of the tiniest computers that can run an operating system to the world’s most powerful super computers.

The Debian Social contract. Many distributions exist to make profit. There’s nothing wrong with that and I fully support that people use free software to make a living (I’d be a hypocrite if I said otherwise). Unfortunately, many distributions also base their choices on their profit motives. Decisions are often made based on “What’s going to make us profit right now” as apposed to “What will be best for our users now and in the long term?” (I’ll stay away from specific examples for now because this blog post is about Debian and not Oracle, Novell and similar companies). Debian exists for its users. It’s mission is defined in the Debian Social Contract. Decisions are made based on what’s best for the user and not to maximize benefits of the project sponsors.

If I don’t stop here I’ll go on all night. And I haven’t even started talking about how great APT is yet or that Debian has pretty much the largest collection of high quality packages available. Or how reliable upgrades are. But this blog entry isn’t about convincing people to use Debian, it’s about expressing why I like it so much and I’ve probably expressed that sufficiently already.

But.. But…

Oh yeah, I get some uphill from people for liking Debian, I can deal with it.

What about Ubuntu? There are some shortcomings in Debian that can’t really be fixed due to its public commitments, or at least, fixing them would break things in Debian. Apple has created a huge eco-system around the Apple App Store. It’s how people buy applications now on most Apple systems. It’s been so successful that Google has used the same concept on the Android Marketplace. Many other systems are doing it too, Ubuntu is promoting free software and non-free software alike in it’s Software Center. Ubuntu will be making it easier for people to buy and install non-free software. Some critics might say that Ubuntu is promoting non-free software that way, but it’s a good experiment and it’s great that it can happen without having to be part of the Debian project. There are more things that Ubuntu does that would be really difficult to get into Debian, but I don’t want to focus on that because Ubuntu is really a *great* Debian derivative. It has delivered Debian (in some form) to more users than Debian itself has by relentlessly working on making it as easy to install and maintain as possible. On top of that, Ubuntu does a great job of submitting their fixes and improvements back to upstreams and to Debian itself. I use Ubuntu on my home desktop and some servers and support it at clients on a daily basis. I think it’s a worthy project and it’s great that it exists. So why do I sometimes use Debian instead of Ubuntu? On servers, stable releases of Debian and Ubuntu LTS releases are quite close to each other. Debian provides more testing before releasing and only releases when the system is ready, where Ubuntu sticks to a committed release time. Ubuntu’s release cycle also has it’s own benefits, but recently I’ve come to prefer Debian Squeeze on my own machines (I don’t even have to use Plymouth!) and I know many people feel differently about it and that’s fine. On my laptop I’m a bit more risky.. I want new, cutting edge, I don’t mind if there’s some problems now and again and I’m happy to fix it when it does pop up. I run Debian Unstable on my laptop with packages from Experimental. It works great for me. I’ve been running it again (used to do it before Ubuntu started) since late last year and besides a transition to /run that caused dbus to break and gdm not to start for one evening, I haven’t any problems worth mentioning. On development versions of Ubuntu the ride is typically much more bumpy. That’s not a problem for most Ubuntu users since users usually stick with with stable releases, and Ubuntu releases often enough (way more than Debian) so that they could still have newest software on a regular basis. There are many views on Debian and Ubuntu, in my opinion Ubuntu is an important and relevant derivative and even though it’s goals are somewhat different, it compliments and promotes many of the Debian ideals.

It’s old!  Debian’s release cycle isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. I’ve mentioned some of the benefits of releasing when ready above. On top of that, Debian has also made its backports repository an official resource, which makes it easier to get newer software on stable releases. There are also micro-sites like mozilla.debian.net where users can get some specific backports for certain types of packages. I guess Debian could really benefit from  something similar to PPAs for this. Unfortunately Launchpad.net doesn’t support Debian builders (understandably so since waiting times on Ubuntu packages can already be quite high). The concept of another PPA implementation has been bought up on the Debian lists before and I have a lot to say about it, but that will be another blog entry. Also, Debian has something in between stable releases (which can get quite old on desktops) and unstable/experimental (where all the active development is taking place). When a package has been in unstable for a while and doesn’t do harm to your system, it’s promoted to an repository called ‘testing’. In testing you get a good combination of stability and new software. Admittedly you probably don’t want to deploy testing in large corporate environments since it’s officially unsupported, but for personal machines and for the typical hacker, it’s known to work great.

Choose 10 completely random numbers! 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. (I never claimed that Debian is perfect)

In Summary

Debian has a large and vibrant community with a big eco-system around it. It has many derivatives, some of them extremely high-profile and special in their own right. The whole effort is spectacular and awesome- and it’s all from a completely distributed world-wide self-governed community project. Sure, it’s not perfect, but I can’t help to look at it and admire it as one of the wonders of the age of information.

And now I have something to point to when people ask me, “Why do you like Debian?”