Once and for all I’m saying it now: So long, Ubu and thanks for all the former great ideas.

Canonical – the enterprise behind Ubuntu – did miss the train. Many times. They were always too late, not really wanting to ride or just too plain stupid to book a ticket to ride. The best/wurst thing about Canonical’s failure is that we, the un-involved public, knew about your attempts to make it big in the enterprise world since years already. Everybody knew Mark Shuttleworth was preparing his company to be taken over by Microsoft or some other big player.

And why didn’t that happen?

Because you obvsly miss something, something other Linux distros had/have. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE, Oracle, all found new homes in the corporate world. They are swimming not only in money but are also developed and maintained by professionals and are huge successes in the corporate world.

Don’t ask me why, as I don’t have any interest in corporate solutions. They don’t have much in common with our various hobbyist distros, apart from the Linux kernel itself. But if I can hazard a guess I’d say Shuttleworth and his dev team have always been much too wibbly wobbly in their decision-making, jumping from desktop to desktop like over-excited kids, alienating the users, and don’t look like a reliable bizniz partner for potential buyers.

And not only did they switch their main desktop much too often and erratically, they were always much too late in the game. Other, much smaller distro projects are sticking to their guns, through good times and bad. All the distros on Gnome 3 for example. After quite an elongated period of fuckery and insecurity, their patience is slowly paying off by now, since Gnome 3 becomes a usable desktop environment.

Ubuntu just jumped onto the Gnome 3 train a couple of releases ago, again much too late to make any impact.

You know your editrix never, ever, not even once, installed Ubuntu on any of her computers, only for testing purposes she played with Ubuntu Mate for, like, 10 minutes or so, found it lacking, installed something better and never touched anything Ubu again.

I guess the enterprising investors see it in a similar way, and stay the fuk away from Canonical. And that’s why we’re witnessing this once groundbreaking Linux distro slowly withering away.

So long and …

… don’t say you haven’t been warned!