Ubuntu in Competition with Apple

Mark Shuttleworth

Mark Shuttleworth said in a recent news release that he wants to make Ubuntu on par with Mac OS “within two years.” Hes decided to hire developers to “work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE”. This means that instead of having a split vision on what should be done where, and having a very mixed experience with the GUI in Ubuntu, one can enjoy a single , clean OS. This doesn’t mean however that his team will take monopoly of the OS. Rather, his team wants to fix problems quickly, and improve the OS while keeping the distinct open source view on the whole project. He says that his company, Canonical, has always released code under GPLv3 and one could only assume that would be the case with the new UIs especially since the projects they are working with are, themselves, open source. Ubuntu is, and will remain free of charge.

What does this mean for us? It means that the two supposed giants of the personal computer market, Apple, and Microsoft, will be forced to get off their complacency (especially Microsoft) and bring about some kind of change in response to this upstart called Ubuntu coming in and making a very compelling user experience free of charge and open for development by anyone. Think of an Apple-like company without DRM on its major products, think of an ad on TV about an operating system that dosen’t have 50,000 versions all of which cost over $100. Canonical will create more competition in the marketplace and thus, benefit the consumer greatly. Just as the iPhone created a paradigm shift in cell phones because it forced cell phone manufacturers to get off their butts and make something that we actually want to buy.

This also means that the potential is here for some major improvements in Linux gaming. If the claims from Shuttleworth are accurate, the team will be working to improve OpenGL support which, to date, has not been the best on certain hardware platforms like Intel. This could open the door for more laptops that couldn’t take full advantage of Ubuntu. One hopes this is the case as these are all issues that have plagued the open source community for years without any real solution.