Ask Mark Shuttleworth Anything

In addition to founding Canonical Ltd., the Ubuntu Foundation, and funding the Freedom Toaster, Mark Shuttleworth is a space enthusiast. In April 2002 Mark became the second self-funded space tourist and the first African in space. He spent eight days participating in experiments on the International Space Station as part of his $20 million trip. Now he's ready to answer your questions. Ask him anything you like, but please limit yourself to one question per post.

Unity

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. Really. WTF?

Unity?

[davydagger]

who do we blame for the Unity UI?

South Africa

[smi.james.th]

There's a lot of rhetoric bandied about by political figures here at the moment. What do you think would contribute best to the development of South Africa?

Losing its Lustre

[SkunkPussy]

Do you feel that Ubuntu might be losing its way amongst the more technical users with some of the decisions that are being made? For example, forcing a beta-level UI onto users for 3 versions of Ubuntu from 11.04-12.04, integrating paid search results from Amazon etc. Linux Mint, which is rapidly growing in popularity, would seem to be a backlash against Unity and is a splintering of Ubuntu (in fact the vast majority of packages are identical to Ubuntu). Do you therefore feel that Ubuntu's popularity has reached its peak and is at risk of stagnating or declining?

Why not systemd?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of distributions are moving to systemd. Why not try to merge some of the upstart functionality into systemd, as it looks like a superior design, and use it rather than developing a parallel but incompatible alternative?

Why still on debian?

[aglider]

I understand than relying on someone else hard work saves your company a lot of resources. But it also brings bugs, disputable choices and uncomfortable legacy into Ubuntu. Why not cutting that umbilical cord once and forever and start walking on your own legs?

Re:Prior Comments on Unity Criticism

[rubycodez]

Nonsense. Mac OSX UI is ok, one can tell where the windows went.

Windows 8 UI is dumbed down garbage just like Unity though.

How about we don't let YOU near any UI design group, you've no discernment nor wisdom

Re:Prior Comments on Unity Criticism

[rubycodez]

They've lowered the amount of usable screen space though. also the number of tasks that can be dealt with in an efficient manner as opposed to a mature windowing environment. Raising the level of uselessness, as it were.

Re:Unity

[rubycodez]

or into Ubuntu derivatives such as Linux Mint where they actually have standard good UIs installed like Mate and Cinnamon

Balance between software freedom and usability?

[Bradmont]

Ubuntu has made decisions that have been less than popular with the Free-software only crowd. Personally, I benefit from these decisions, for example, via easy access to Nvidia and Broadcom drivers on my laptop, but I also see the importance of the other side of the argument. What is your short- and long-term perspective on including restricted drivers and non-free software in Ubuntu? Is your approach simply pragmatic, do you hope to bring long-term change in industry practises by making free software a viable and important desktop platform, or something else entirely? Thanks!

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[account_deleted]

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