Holy freakin' hell that is an awful headline. This is a DONATION, nothing more. Canonical is not asking people to pay, it is asking people to donate if they are so inclined. The press releases states that Ubuntu is and always will be free.
Use Ubuntu and want to give some money for it? Great. Donate. Now there is a way where previously there was none.
Use Ubuntu and don't want to give money? Great. Don't donate.
A) makes it a pain to drag everything to $0 (8 sliders to drag)
B) makes it seem like you're getting a t-shirt too
C) makes me feel bad for downloading it for free.
D) is any of that money going to the Linux Foundation? It's not clear - if not, shame on them.
The linux foundation is responsible for a very small portion of Ubuntu, and is probably one of the most funded parts. When I donate to Canocial to support ubuntu, I expect that money to go to where it will be most useful to making a good product.
It's not a stretch at all, considering it's a partial quote. Read the article before getting into a knot.
If you scroll down you will see a screenshot from Ubuntu which says, "Pay what you think it's worth" which is followed with subtitle text of, "Millions agree that Ubuntu is a great piece of software. But how much do you really think it's worth?"
Nowhere does the article or title imply that you cannot download Ubuntu regardless of your donation. However, Ubuntu themselves has chosen wording which alludes to asking people to pay.
I wish Ubuntu/Canonical would give you the option to donate somewhere else on their site besides via the download page. I set aside ~50$ per month to donate to open source projects. Until now I have not donated to ubuntu since they dont sport a regular donations page
Apart from the fact that they did have a regular donation page, what on earth is stopping you from donating "via" the download page? For all intents and purposes this is the donation page.
Canonical is commercial, the Ubuntu Foundation is not: http://www.ubuntu.com/news/UbuntuFoundation. Ubuntu's been accepting donations for quite a while, long before they added this.
Also, it's not a traditional donation in the Mozilla Firefox sense because you cannot deduct it from your taxes because Canonical is a for-profit commercial organization.
In this form, Canonical overstates an appropriate objective in the tips: support more hardware? How about supporting any, thoroughly?
I have done my best to buy hardware that I thought was to be well supported (on the desktop! because I thought power management would be "too hard", so I've given up on laptops), but as far as I can tell, nobody is home doing the QA and holding back releases (or, by any other means, making sure they work) because of regressions, specifically in the area of hardware/driver issues.
I don't need more half-broken crap. I need at least one thing that does work, all the time, across several releases, for three years at a stretch. I will pay for it. This is not represented among any of their available choices: even the one saying "support more hardware" suggests there is any level of support that is adequate. There is no such thing in end-user Linux-land (and I mean the kernel quite specifically) right now. That's not to fault Linux (although it may deserve it): nobody is withholding releases on the basis of quality on any one integration of hardware.
As much as I despise their corporate philosophical direction, Apple does this very well.
I say these things as a long time Ubuntu user (and still using it) who was pleased with the strides they were making in the mid-2000s, and still thinks they are the only Operating System seriously doing something about about omnibus Free-software usability today. I still have two Ubuntu workstations that are my primary sites of use, but now use it in begrudging concession to my professional needs and personal philosophy: not out of preference in any other dimension, least of which would be "quality."
This makes me sad, but I'm getting too old and impatient to put up with this.
I know how you feel. I'm afraid rock solid QA regarding hardware support seems almost impossible unless you get the manufacturers on board. Apple obviously has it easy in this regard.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the support for laptops is more dependable than the support for desktops, especially if you go for an unexciting configuration with Intel graphics etc.
Microsoft has it the easiest, and the result has been mediocrity in reliability (largely on account of bottom-dollar driver authorship), even given its monopoly power in the OEM market. Clearly, "just" locking up the entire OEM market is not enough to Achieve Results. Hence, the signed-driver certification programs we're seeing in recent years, although I have no idea how effective they are.
Apple does a crapload of work to make sure that the one, tiny blessed subset of integrated hardware they select every so often works well during the span of its useful life. Sure, they lean on driver authors of suppliers pretty hard, something which few can do, but they are not nearly as hands-off as Microsoft: the buck stops with them, and a bad integration is Their Fault. And, on the flip side, if you are not an Apple supplier you don't give even two bits about supporting their operating system, for obvious reasons.
If there was a Dell distro and it Did Not Suck, I'd seriously consider it. I consider Ubuntu good-enough, so it could be Ubuntu but carefully tested and with divergent kernel and driver releases when appropriate.
> For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the support for laptops is more dependable than the support for desktops, especially if you go for an unexciting configuration with Intel graphics etc.
Doubtful, having not long ago possessing such a laptop and sitting next to a colleague in the current-day who has kept with the faith, although with increased grousing. He was, of course, careful with his hardware purchase, buying an ostensibly well-supported Thinkpad. The monitor on his desk still sits unused.
There is so much more to go wrong in common use cases that are eliminated on a desktop (because you can't even do some of them, or wouldn't want to). Wireless chipsets, power management, suspension and hibernation, fiddly bits like special softkeys, hot plugging displays, you name it. The weakest link on the desktop side is the video card, and this has proven to be bad enough for me -- crashes have come and gone for me with each Ubuntu release on a pretty plain-jane NVIDIA card.
They don't have the power to block a release if a three year old laptop is broken. Hence, not nearly good enough. If there was a System76 distro and it wasn't terrible in other dimensions then we'd be talking about something interesting.
Well, I agree that they don't have such power right now, but I don't think it's currently biggest bottleneck (linux doesn't break that often, + LTS releases get more and more usable, for example 12.04 is already good).
The bigger thing currently is to simply buy something and know it will 100% work with at least current Ubuntu. That's unfortune, but it's true.
Use Ubuntu and want to give some money for it? Great. Donate. Now there is a way where previously there was none.
Use Ubuntu and don't want to give money? Great. Don't donate.
Don't use Ubuntu? Carry on.