OSCON Billionaire, cosmonaut and founder of the fast-growing Ubuntu Linux distro Mark Shuttleworth dreams impossible dreams.
No, not a return to the stars. He believes in something that’s far harder for mortal open source engineers to achieve.
That dream? To produce a desktop more beautiful to ordinary users than legions of Apple programmers supping on the milk of chief exec Steve Jobs’ alleged brilliance are capable of producing. That includes a desktop not funded by a clutter of annoying banner or Flash-based ads, but paid for by subscription-based services.
Now you’re done dreaming, go home and code for the victory.
In a Tuesday evening O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) keynote, Shuttleworth called on delegates to make a concerted effort not just to catch Apple but to overtake the company in the quality of the desktop experience they deliver users.
His company Canonical, Ubuntu’s commercial sponsor, is working to make the Ubuntu desktop “more beautiful” in the next two years, he told OSCON.
“I think the great task in front of us in the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something stable and usable and not pretty, to something that’s art,” Shuttleworth said.
“Think of the way the iPhone uses a pure software experience, it abstracts away all the hardware,” he said. “You can paint anything on the screen because it’s all software.”
Full Article: The Register
I applaud their efforts, but if they are going to take on Apple they need to work on their interface – alot. The current brown on brown theme in Intrepid Ibex is not pretty like Apple at all. Apple does a great job at making the interface what sells their products. Sleek and fashionable products sell and that’s exactly what Apple is doing. Ubuntu would need to go beyond the software too if they want to take on Apple and make their own products. Ubuntu has the capital in Shuttleworth, it’s just to what extent they are able to go.
