DoctorMo's Blog

It’s Thanks Giving day here in the USA and what better day than to ask a question about consumerism: Is the direction of Ubuntu gearing it’s self for simple consumer grade computing?

Disclosure: I’ve always held out hope of getting inkscape included by default in Ubuntu.

A clue is in the recent planned removal of Gimp from the Lucid CD, if you look at the size of gimp and all it’s dependencies on the CD, you find lots of fat, so it’s not a surprise that it’s under pressure to be removed. Although devels explaining the removal with hand waving that F-Spot is to be the replacement was surely a bad political misstep, even if it’s probably a reasonable technical move.

The problem for me is a lack of regard for what I like to call: “The involved user”, people who are not just consuming data from their computers but are involved and get the feeling that their involvement is welcomed by default. This has always been something that distinguished FreeDesktops like Ubuntu, they contained not just programs for viewing interesting things, but all the tools required to also make a great deal of them.

This is what Walter Bender of Sugar labs would call “Making the mountains of learning available and visible to clime for everyone, even if only a few end up doing so”. That’s why we bother to make careful selections on what goes on the CD, those applications are the chosen few that will shape and mould the users understanding of the capabilities and user expectations of the system.

The mountain that is the drawing arts was just painted pink and a Someone Else’s Problem field was set up, rendering the entire artistic field invisible to new users. How do new users discover that they can make artworks with their computers? No solutions have yet been devised to solve this discovery problem. I’d like to point out that even windows has MS Paint, people who want to paint have a clear simple method for doing so on their computers and then they figure out that there must be better tools and are motivated to find them.

I think this simplified direction stems from a perception that Ubuntu should not be “for human beings”, but for the lowest common human possible (“Linux for Neanderthals” anyone?). This is at best a caricature that the devels have set up in their minds, imaginary people that we convince ourselves must be served in order to fix bug #1. These are the common people who only ever retouch the red eye in their photographs and never do anything creative like stick the head of their aunt onto the body of an donkey as an April Fools joke. These are the people who are not and will never be interested in a computer more functional than a television, and more fool those that present these users with any sort of creative outlet.

What makes this journey down to common denominator interesting is that this simple user case is and will be solved by other products. ChromeOS, Android and iPhone and is already looking to take the market of all those people who just want to go online and never want to do anything useful, and they’ll probably be doing it better than Ubuntu. Does Ubuntu really want to strip anything interesting and unique away from it’s default selection, so the only thing we’re left with is a rather bland bare bones base that we will always have to install extra programs on top of?

Surely the art of the computer is not just to provide a google-box for the sofa generation, but to furnish people with the tools and just as importantly the visibility that these tools exist and are available to everyone. Perhaps the problem I have with the direction being taken is not anything technical, but is a lot more to do with the myopia that surrounds a certain expectation about what the council estate users will want from their computers.

Perhaps in the end, if we can’t have tools like Inkscape, Audacity, Gimp and OpenOffice installed by default, then perhaps we should have a good mechanism that clearly shows their availability and install them through it, it was talked about at the session that we should have the software center provide this featured app list, perhaps that will work. And for poorly connected nations such as those in Africa, perhaps we should master a second CD to send to them. One that contains all the debs that complete their systems and give them creative tools as well, instead of struggling to decide what to include on a single CD and causing headaches for anyone not on the list of designated target consumers.