20 YEARS OF LINUX ON THE DESKTOP (PART 2)
by Ploum on 2024-12-16
https://ploum.net/2024-12-16-linux_desktop2.html
> Previously in "20 years of Linux on the Deskop" : Looking to make the
perfect desktop with GNOME and Debian, a young Ploum finds himself
joining a stealth project called "no-name-yet". The project is later
published under the name "Ubuntu".
20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1)
https://ploum.net/2024-10-20-20years-linux-desktop-part1.html
Flooded with Ubuntu CD-ROMs
===========================
The first official Ubuntu release was 4.10. At that time, I happened to
be the president of my University LUG: LouvainLiNux. LouvainLiNux was
founded a few years before by Fabien Pinckaers, Anthony Lesuisse and
Benjamin Henrion as an informal group of friends. After they graduated
and left university, Fabien handled me all the archives, all the
information and told me do continue the work while he was running his
company that would, much later, becomes Odoo. With my friend Bertrand
Rousseau, we decided to make Louvain-Li-Nux a formal and enduring
organisation known as "KAP" (Kot-à-Projet). Frédéric Minne designed the
logo by putting the student hat ("calotte") of Fabien on a penguin
clipart.
Louvain-Li-Nux
https://www.louvainlinux.org/
In 2005 and 2006, we worked really hard to organise multiple install
parties and conferences. We were also offering resources and support. At
a time where broadband Internet was not really common, the best resource
to install GNU/Linux was an installation CD-ROM.
Thanks to Mark Shuttleworth’s money, Ubuntu was doing something
unprecedented: sending free CD-ROMs of Ubuntu to anyone requesting them.
Best of all: the box contained two CD-ROMs. A live image and an
installation CD. Exactly how I dreamed it (I’m not sure if the free CD-
ROMs started with 4.10, 5.04 or even 5.10).
I managed to get Louvain-Li-Nux recognised as an official Ubuntu
distributor and we started to receive boxes full of hundreds of CD-ROMs
with small cardboard dispensers. We had entire crates of Ubuntu CD-ROMs.
It was the easiest to install. It was the one I knew the best and I had
converted Bertrand (before Fabien taught me about Debian, Bertrand tried
to convert me to Mandrake, which he was using himself. He nevertheless
spent the whole night with me when I installed Debian for the first
time, not managing to configure the network because the chipset of my
ethernet card was not the same as the one listed on the box of said
card. At the time, you had to manually choose which module to load. It
was another era, kids these days don’t know what they are missing).
With Louvain-Li-Nux, we literally distributed hundreds of CD-ROMs. I’ve
myself installed Ubuntu on tenths of computers. It was not always easy
as the market was pivoting from desktop computers to laptops. Laptops
were starting to be affordable and powerful enough. But laptops came
with exotic hardware, wifi, Bluetooth, power management, sleep,
hibernate, strange keyboard keys and lots of very complex stuff that you
don’t need to handle on a desktop computer with a RJ-45 hole.
Sound was a hard problem. I remember spending hours on a laptop before
realising there was a hardware switch. To play multiple sounds at the
same time, you needed to launch a daemon called ESD. Our frustration
with ESD would lead Bertrand and I to trap Lennart Poetering in a cave
in Brussels to spend the whole night drinking beers with him while
swearing we would wear a "we love Lennart" t-shirt during FOSDEM in
order to support is new Polypaudio project that was heavily criticised
at the time. Spoiler: we never did the t-shirt thing but Polypaudio was
renamed Pulseaudio and succeeded without our support.
Besides offering beers to developers, I reported all the bugs I
experienced and worked hard with Ubuntu developers. If I remember
correctly, I would, at some point, even become the head of the "bug
triaging team" (if such a position ever existed. It might be that
someone called me like that to flatter my ego). Selected as a student
for the Google Summer of Code, I created a python client for Launchpad
called "Conseil". Launchpad had just replaced Bugzilla but, as I found
out after starting Conseil, was not open source and had no API. I
learned web scrapping and was forced to update Conseil each time
something changed on Launchpad side.
The most important point about Bugzilla and Launchpad was the famous bug
#1. Bug #1, reported by sabdfl himself, was about breaking Microsoft
monopoly. It could be closed once it would be considered that any
computer user could freely choose which operating system to use on a
newly bought computer.
The very first book about Ubuntu
================================
Meanwhile, I was contacted by a French publisher who stumbled upon my
newly created blog that I mainly used to profess my love of Ubuntu and
Free Software. Yes, the very blog you are currently reading.
That French publisher had contracted two authors to write a book about
Ubuntu and wanted my feedback about the manuscript. I didn’t really like
what I read and said it bluntly. Agreeing with me, the editor asked me
to write a new book, using the existing material if I wanted. But the
two other authors would remain credited and the title could not be
changed. I naively agreed and did the work, immersing myself even more
in Ubuntu.
The result was « Ubuntu, une distribution facile à installer », the very
first book about Ubuntu. I hated the title. But, as I have always
dreamed of becoming a published author, I was proud of my first book.
And it had a foreword by Mark Shuttleworth himself.
I updated and rewrote a lot of it in 2006, changing its name to "Ubuntu
Efficace". A later version was published in 2009 as "Ubuntu Efficace,
3ème édition". During those years, I was wearing Ubuntu t-shirts. In my
room, I had a collection of CD-ROMs with each Ubuntu version (I would
later throw them, something I still regret). I bootstrapped "Ubuntu-
belgium" at FOSDEM. I had ploum@ubuntu.com as my primary email on my
business card and used it to look for jobs, hoping to set the tone. You
could say that I was an Ubuntu fanatic.
The very first Ubuntu-be meeting. I took the picture and gimped a quick
logo.
https://ploum.net/files/old/ubuntube_fosdem.jpg
Ironically, I was never paid by Canonical and never landed a job there.
The only money I received for that work was from my books or from Google
through the Summer of Code (remember: Google was still seen as a good
guy). I would later work for Lanedo and be paid to contribute to GNOME
and LibreOffice. But never to contribute to Ubuntu nor Debian.
In the Ubuntu and GNOME community with Jeff Waugh
=================================================
Something which was quite new to me was that Ubuntu had a "community
manager". At the time, it was not the title of someone posting on
Twitter (which didn’t exist). It was someone tasked with putting the
community together, with being the public face of the project.
Jeff Waugh is the first Ubuntu community manager I remember and I was
blown away by his charism. Jeff came from the GNOME project and one of
his pet issues was to make computers easier. He started a trend that
would, way later, gives birth to the infamous GNOME 3 design.
You have to remember that the very first fully integrated desktop on
Linux was KDE. And KDE had a very important problem: it was relying on
the Qt toolkit which, at the time, was under a non-free license. You
could not use Qt in a commercial product without paying Trolltech, the
author of Qt.
GNOME was born as an attempt by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena to
create a KDE-like desktop using the free toolkit created for the Gimp
image editor: Gtk.
This is why I liked to make the joke that the G in GNOME stands for Gtk,
that the G in Gtk stands for Gimp, that the G in Gimp stands for GNU and
that the G in GNU stands for GNU. This is not accurate as the G in GNOME
stands for GNU but this makes the joke funnier. We, free software geeks,
like to have fun.
Like its KDE counterpart, GNOME 1 was full of knobs and whistles.
Everything could be customised to the pixel and to the milliseconds.
Jeff Waugh often made fun of it by showing the preferences boxes and
asking the audience who wanted to customise a menu animation to the
millisecond. GNOME 1 was less polished than KDE and heavier than very
simple window managers like Fvwm95 or Fvwm2 (my WM of choice before I
started my quest for the perfect desktop).
Screenshot from my FVWM2 config which is still featured on fvwm.org, 21
years later
https://ploum.net/files/fvwm.jpg
With GNOME 2, GNOME introduced its own paradigm and philosophy: GNOME
would be different from KDE by being less customisable but more
intuitive. GNOME 2 opened a new niche in the Linux world: a fully
integrated desktop for those who don’t want to tweak it.
KDE was for those wanting to customise everything. The most popular
distributions featured KDE: Mandrake, Red Hat, Suse. The RPM world.
There was no real GNOME centric distribution. And there was no desktop
distribution based on Debian. As Debian was focused on freedom, there
was no KDE in Debian.
Which explains why GNOME + Debian made a lot of sense in my mind.
As Jeff Waugh had been the GNOME release manager for GNOME 2 and was
director of the GNOME board, having him as the first Ubuntu community
manager set the tone: Ubuntu would be very close to GNOME. And it is
exactly what happened. There was a huge overlap between GNOME and Ubuntu
enthusiasts. As GNOME 2 would thrive and get better with each release,
Ubuntu would follow.
But some people were not happy. While some Debian developers had been
hired by Canonical to make Ubuntu, some others feared that Ubuntu was a
kind of Debian fork that would weaken Debian. Similarly, Red Hat had
been investing lot of time and money in GNOME. I’ve never understood
why, as Qt was released under the GPL in 2000, making KDE free, but Red
Hat wanted to offer both KDE and GNOME. It went as far as tweaking both
of them so they would look perfectly identical when used on Red Hat
Linux. Red Hat employees were the biggest pool of contributors to GNOME.
There was a strong feeling in the atmosphere that Ubuntu was
piggybacking on the work of Debian and Red Hat.
I didn’t really agree as I thought that Ubuntu was doing a lot of
thankless polishing and marketing work. I liked the Ubuntu community and
was really impressed by Jeff Waugh. Thanks to him, I entered the GNOME
community and started to pay attention to user experience. He was
inspiring and full of energy.
Drinking a beer with Jeff Waugh and lots of hackers at FOSDEM. I’m the
one with the red sweater.
https://ploum.net/files/old/fosdem_jdub.jpg
Benjamin Mako Hill
==================
What I didn’t realise at the time was that Jeff Waugh’s energy was not
in infinite supply. Mostly burned out by his dedication, he had to step
down and was replaced by Benjamin Mako Hill. That’s, at least, how I
remember it. A quick look at Wikipedia told me that Jeff Waugh and
Benjamin Mako Hill were, in fact, working in parallel and that Jeff
Waugh was not the community manager but an evangelist. It looks like
I’ve been wrong all those years. But I choose to stay true to my own
experience as I don’t want to write a definitive and exhaustive history.
Benjamin Mako Hill was not a GNOME guy. He was a Debian and FSF guy. He
was focused on the philosophical aspects of free software. His
intellectual influence would prove to have a long-lasting effect on my
own work. I remember fondly that he introduced the concept of "anti-
features" to describe the fact that developers are sometimes working to
do something against their own users. They spend energy to make the
product worse. Examples include advertisement in apps or limited-version
software. But it is not limited to software: Benjamin Mako Hill took the
example of benches designed so you can’t sleep on them, to prevent
homeless person to take a nap. It is obviously more work to design a
bench that prevents napping. The whole anti-feature concept would be
extended and popularised twenty years later by Cory Doctorow under the
term "enshitification".
Benjamin Mako Hill introduced a code of conduct in the Ubuntu community
and made the community very aware of the freedom and philosophical
aspects. While I never met him, I admired and still admire Benjamin. I
felt that, with him at the helm, the community would always stay true to
its ethical value. Bug #1 was the leading beacon: offering choice to
users, breaking monopolies.
Jono Bacon
==========
But the one that would have the greatest influence on the Ubuntu
community is probably Jono Bacon who replaced Benjamin Mako Hill. Unlike
Jeff Waugh and Benjamin Mako Hill, Jono Bacon had no Debian nor GNOME
background. As far as I remember, he was mostly unknown in those
communities. But he was committed to communities in general and had very
great taste in music. I’m forever grateful for introducing me to
Airbourne.
With what feels like an immediate effect but probably lasted months or
years, the community mood switched from engineering/geek discussions to
a cheerful, all-inclusive community.
It may look great on the surface but I hated it. The GNOME, Debian and
early Ubuntu communities were shared-interest communities. You joined
the community because you liked the project. The communities were
focused on making the project better.
With Jono Bacon, the opposite became true. The community was great and
people joined the project because they liked the community, the sense of
belonging. Ubuntu felt each day more like a church. The project was seen
as less important than the people. Some aspects would not be discussed
openly not to hurt the community.
I felt every day less and less at home in the Ubuntu community.
Decisions about the project were taken behind closed doors by Canonical
employees and the community transformed from contributors to unpaid
cheerleaders. The project to which I contributed so much was every day
further away from Debian, from freedom, from openness and from its
technical roots.
But people were happy because Jono Bacon was such a good entertainer.
Something was about to break…
(to be continued)
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> I’m currently turning this story into a book. I’m looking for an agent
or a publisher interested to work with me on this book and on an English
translation of "Bikepunk", my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist typewritten
novel which sold out in three weeks in France and Belgium.
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