Proprietary Panda: Don't Be Misled by the Innocent Looks of Ubuntu (and Microsoft Canonical)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 24, 2023,
updated Sep 24, 2023

THE previous article mentioned Mark Shuttleworth. Mr. Shuttleworth is not an evil person and he is certainly not stupid. He also left some comments in Techrights (in the distant past) and we'll write about him in the future, seeing that he put pressure on mere volunteers (some committed suicide later).

As part of the relaunch (after upgrade) of Techrights we try to reduce repetition, replication and duplication across Techrights and its sister site, Tux Machines. For GNU/Linux updates we suggest that Techrights readers also subscribe to Tux Machines. Both sites have RSS feeds.

There are a few worthy highlights about Ubuntu and Canonical though; Stéphane Graber, who left Canonical two months ago (he said he was no longer happy there), is "[b]ringing back the Incus demo server" [1], Alan Pope, who also left Canonical (he had worked with the team developing Snaps), says he "built a snap of bandwhich," [2] and Ubuntu 23.10 beta has been released [3-6]. It's pushing Wayland [7] and users' preferences/interest don't seem to matter. Canonical has been busy pushing RTOS [8], "cloud", and Web bloat [9] because that's where it believes there's more money. The Weekly News [10-11] (it's Issue 805 already) will not say much anymore and Alan Pope plays "hero" by upgrading to some edgy beta with a very short support cycle [12]nical tough.

Given the number of disgruntled employees who leave Canonical and given Ubuntu's trend of just copying whatever IBM does in Fedora, is there still a good reason to choose Ubuntu? There's no actual community and a lot of the development efforts have been minimised for financial reasons or offloaded to others through Snaps. IBM did the same with Flatpak. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Stéphane Graber: Bringing back the Incus demo server

   History

   One very neat feature we had back when LXD was hosted on the Linux Containers infrastructure was the ability to try it online. For that, we were dynamically allocating a LXD container with nested support, allowing the user to quickly get a shell and try LXD for a bit.

   This was the first LXD experience for tens of thousands of people and made it painless to discover LXD and see if it’s a good fit for you.

   With the move of LXD to Canonical, this was lost and my understanding is that for LXD, there’s currently no plan to bring it back.

   Enter Incus

   Now that Incus is part of the Linux Containers project, it gets to use some of the infrastructure which was once provided to LXD, including the ability to provide a live demo server!

2. Alan Pope: Monitor bandwidth usage with bandwhich

   Back in 2020 I stumbled on Bandwhich, a “Terminal bandwidth utilization tool”, written in Rust.

   More recently, I was looking for a tool to identify which processes on a box were using bandwidth, and how much. I remembered Bandwhich and took another look. I wanted an easy way to install Bandwhich on a variety of machines, running a variety of Linux distributions across different architectures.

   So I built a snap of bandwhich.

3. Ubuntu 23.10 Promises to Be an Exciting Release, Here’s Why

   A new installer, GNOME 45, minimal preinstalled software, and TPM-backed FDE are among the upcoming Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur" novelties.

4. Ubuntu 23.10 Beta Released with GNOME 45 and Linux Kernel 6.5

   Ubuntu 23.10 beta is now available for public testing with the latest GNOME 45 desktop environment and powered by Linux kernel 6.5. Here's what's else is new!

5. Ubuntu's 'Mantic Minotaur' peeks out of the labyrinth

   The next release of Ubuntu will appear in mid-October, and the latest daily builds reveal some of the features of the forthcoming interim release.

   Ubuntu 23.10 is codenamed Mantic Minotaur; the adjective means relating to prophecy or divination of the future, and we're sure you know what minotaurs are meant to be. The wallpapers have a suitably labyrinthine theme. Mantic hasn't gone into beta yet – that's scheduled for next week. However, some of what will be in the new release is becoming clear.

   The original Ubuntu release schedule, back in 2004, was intended to synchronize with the GNOME project's semiannual releases, so we knew that the default desktop would be the imminent GNOME 45, whose beta we examined in August as well as the changes to its extensions system earlier this month.

   One change that should have little to no visible impact is switching the default Firefox browser snap to use Wayland by default. In the event of problems, the above post details how to revert to the X11 version of Firefox, but it looks tricky for non-technical users.

6. Ubuntu 23.10 Adds a New Package to Restore Old Classic Font

   For those who prefer the old system font, now it’s easy to get it in Ubuntu 23.10 via a new package! Since Ubuntu 23.04, Ubuntu takes use a new slim font for the text in system menus, documents, and app windows.

7. Ubuntu 23.10 Runs Firefox in Wayland Mode by Default

   Most of us using Ubuntu use the Mozilla Firefox Snap preinstalled by default — and in Ubuntu 23.10 that package comes with a big below-the-surface change. Ubuntu defaults to Wayland but the Firefox Snap currently runs in XWayland mode Canonical has announced that it has configured the Firefox Snap in Ubuntu 23.10 to run in Wayland mode by default.

8. Fast SDV prototyping in automotive with real-time kernel

   How you can use real-time computing to prototype software defined vehicles in the cloud

9. Display graphs for WebRTC Statistics API data using ChartJS and React

   WebRTC is an open-source technology that enables Real-Time Communications (RTC) in a web browser.

10. Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 805

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 805 for the week of September 10 – 16, 2023. The full version of this issue is available here.

11. The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 805

12. Alan Pope: Go manic for mantic

    So let’s upgrade now!

    Also, nobody seemed to spot that I got the releases round the wrong way. 23.04 is Lunar, and 23.10 is Mantic. I edited the post, but kept the above screenshot in

    Upgrades work

    So I’m upgrading one of the machines now. I will only upgrade my personal desktop Intel NUC, not the work laptop. For now, at least.

    I’ve long had the opinion that Ubuntu upgrades are generally reliable. On the whole, for most people, most of the time, the upgrade tool from one release to the next, will result in a working system.