Has Ubuntu bitten off more than it can chew?

Is Ubuntu the world’s most successful failure? By far the world’s best-known Linux distro (if you discount the disputable case of Android), it’s achieved what once looked impossible: an easy-to-install, easy-on-the-eye Linux distro that doesn’t immediately alienate anyone without a PhD in computer science.

It’s met a punishing biannual release schedule with almost metronomic precision for a decade, embedded an app store long before Apple popularised the concept, and resides on tens of millions of PCs and servers worldwide. And yet…

Despite arguably offering a better desktop interface than Windows 8, Ubuntu remains a resolutely niche OS. Its share of the worldwide PC operating system market has never exceeded 1 or 2%; most web analytics packages fail to even recognise it as an OS in its own right, instead lumping it into a generic “Linux” bucket.

Despite arguably offering a better desktop interface than Windows 8, Ubuntu remains a resolutely niche OS

That’s hardly surprising when you consider how difficult it is to buy an Ubuntu system on the high street – the Saturday boy at Dixons thinks Ubuntu is the new striker at Chelsea. Even ordering systems online from “close” partners such as Dell is challenging.

Yet, despite failing to make a significant breakthrough in the consumer PC market, Ubuntu is accused of selling out by members of the open-source community.

The attractive Unity interface has, ironically, split the userbase, with many accusing Ubuntu of dumbing down. Linux Mint is now the most sought-after distro, according to DistroWatch.com’s page-hit rankings. Meanwhile, free software zealot Richard Stallman is urging users to boycott Ubuntu, branding it “spyware” because of the way it sucks up user data to serve search results for Amazon. (Ubuntu developer, Canonical, denies the charge.)

Given that it seems to have plateaued in a declining PC market, perhaps it’s no surprise that Canonical is developing versions of Ubuntu for TVs, smartphones and tablets. This is an ambitious four-screen strategy that even Canonical CEO Jane Silber admits is risky, not least because users can’t easily install Ubuntu on the other three devices the way they can on a PC.

So what does the future hold for Ubuntu? Is the poster child of Linux distros overstretching itself? Or is it primed to become the next Android, an open-source alternative to the closed worlds of Apple and Microsoft?

Four-screen dream

The first glimpse of Ubuntu’s attempt to break free of the PC came more than a year ago, at CES 2012. At the far end of the hangar-sized South Hall, on a stand dwarfed by those of home-entertainment giants Sony, Samsung and Sharp, stood a single television running the Ubuntu TV interface.

With no stadium-sized screen, deafening loudspeakers or scantily clad models to attract attention, most of the 150,000 attendees in Las Vegas merely ambled past – if they even made it to the back of the hall in the first place.

More than a year later, that Las Vegas demonstration unit is probably still the only public sighting of Ubuntu TV. Canonical admits it’s been tough convincing manufacturers to take a gamble. “We’ve had, and continue to have, good conversations with TV manufacturers,” Canonical’s Silber told us. “Unfortunately, we’re not in a position to announce a product launch date; it’s down to the TV manufacturers.”

What’s the hold-up? Major manufacturers such as Sony, Samsung and Philips have their own firmware installed and commercial content deals to go with it. Those Netflix and YouTube icons aren’t placed on smart TVs out of charity, in much the same way bloatware vendors buy their way onto your PC desktop. Canonical doesn’t have the financial muscle to buy its way onto TV sets, and so must rely on consumer pull to convince manufacturers to take a chance.

The question is whether Ubuntu TV is compelling enough to have consumers begging for it. Although the interface on the demonstration units looked attractive, the feature list – terrestrial broadcast PVR, satellite integration, extra information alongside TV shows, the ability to resume from where you left off – barely distinguishes Ubuntu TV from products already on the market. The doors of Sony showrooms aren’t being hammered down by consumers demanding change.

The smartphone arrives

Almost a year to the day since Ubuntu TV was unveiled, Canonical was once again inviting journalists to witness another new branch of the OS. A teaser on the Ubuntu website suggested a touch interface, leading many – including PC Pro podcasters – to predict the arrival of the tablet version. After all, with Windows 8 tablets now arriving, it would be easier for consumers to install the OS on their own hardware than it would be on iPads, Android tablets or smartphones.

Yet, smartphones it was. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth introduced a somewhat contradictory strategy of targeting both low-end handsets and a new category of “super phones”, which would see an Ubuntu handset double as the user’s primary desktop computer. “This is Ubuntu – it’s the whole deal,” said Shuttleworth at the London event. “You can dock this [phone] and get the full desktop with [virtualised] Windows applications.”

Ubuntu for phones doesn’t lack ambition. While the interface has elements that are shared across the different flavours of Ubuntu – the tray of apps that slides in from the left-hand side of the screen, for example – it also has a few unique touches.

The equivalent of the lockscreen, for instance, is a swirling infographic displaying data such as the number of emails waiting in your inbox, or more quirky stats such as the distance travelled on your journey to work. And then there’s Ubuntu’s Head-Up Display – first introduced in Ubuntu 12.04 – which enables users to search for commands in apps, such as typing (or even saying) “sepia” to apply a tint to a photograph, rather than hunting out the correct button or dropdown command.

Most striking of all, however, is this vision of the desktop replacement “super phone” – a pocketable device that sits in a dock on your desk, powering an external display and all the applications you’re used to running in Ubuntu or even a virtualised Windows environment.

Canonical isn’t the first company to try to pull off this trick: Motorola’s short-lived Atrix smartphone attempted to power a laptop-like terminal, but a high price and stuttering performance proved a less than alluring combination.

Silber is confident Ubuntu will be different, with the company laying down strict hardware specifications for the top-end devices. “You can plug your phone into a keyboard and monitor and have a full desktop experience – that resonates well with handset manufacturers and operators, particularly in an enterprise environment, as you can easily see it becomes your thin client, your main computing device. That requires a certain computing ability – a quad-core phone. Our technology story is strong,” she adds.

Yet, Canonical has – at the time of writing – failed to find a hardware manufacturer willing to back its vision. As with the TV market, Ubuntu finds itself unable to buy influence. While Google can lavish billions on buying Motorola, and Microsoft can spend similar sums buying Nokia’s loyalty, Ubuntu is left to slug it out on technical merit alone.

“We can’t buy our way into the market, that is absolutely true,” admits Silber. “We’re up against the big guys – and that’s hard. We can’t do this alone; we have to partner wisely. We believe there are strategic pressures on industry players that make that possible.”

This possibility appears to be driving a wedge between Google and the other Android handset makers.

“There’s growing concern around the power in the Android ecosystem being centralised around Google,” says Silber. “It’s making its own hardware, it’s controlling post-sale services, and that’s a strategic concern to operators and hardware manufacturers. We believe there’s room in the industry for another player, and we’re positioned well to become that other player.”

Mobile market observers agree that cracks are appearing between Google and its partners.

“There seems to be a big push for alternative OSes to Android: Firefox, [Samsung’s] Tizen, Jolla [born out of the ashes of the MeeGo project] and Ubuntu,” says Carolina Milanesi, research vice-president at Gartner. “Some vendors are looking at alternatives to differentiate their offering, so they’re not so dependent on Google.”

With carriers already involved with Firefox and Tizen, it will be hard to get traction for Ubuntu

However, Milanesi isn’t sure Ubuntu will be the one to bridge the gap. “With carriers already involved with Firefox and Tizen, it will be hard to get traction for Ubuntu.”

App ecosystem

It isn’t only handset manufacturers Ubuntu must win over; app developers can also make or break a mobile OS. Silber claims Ubuntu has an inherent advantage over its up-and-coming rivals in the form of its thriving developer community.

“We’re confident in our ecosystem story in terms of apps and app stores – we have those things on the desktop, and have minimal work to make them appear on other form factors,” she claims, although whether a desktop app can be satisfactorily ported with “minimal work” is questionable.

However, Canonical isn’t naive enough to believe it can outgun its rivals, and is making concessions to developers in the Google camp already.

“We want app developers to care about Ubuntu as a platform,” says Silber, adding that the SDK for native Ubuntu app development has already generated a healthy interest. “Having said that, we’ve recognised that there’s a bunch of app developers out there on competing platforms. We intend to make it possible, and even easy, to make an existing Android app work on the Ubuntu platform.”

Ubuntu will also run apps developed in HTML5, another way to make it easier to port apps from rival OSes – although Silber insists Android apps and HTML5 support aren’t a safety net in case it can’t convince enough developers to write native Ubuntu code.

“Both [native apps and HTML5] are important; we don’t think of HTML5 as a fallback. The notion of having your favourite apps on the left-hand side [of the screen]: those could be HTML5 web apps or native apps there, and to the user they look the same.”

Losing the heartland?

If, even by its own admission, Ubuntu faces an uphill battle for acceptance on televisions, smartphones and tablets, it’s also facing challenges on more familiar territory: the PC.

Shuttleworth’s stated ambition to make Ubuntu a visually attractive alternative to Windows and OS X – he stood down as CEO of Canonical to focus on UI design – has alienated some of the Ubuntu fanbase.

Accusations of “dumbing down” or creating a “Fisher Price-style” UI have been thrown at Shuttleworth by users who are happy opening the terminal and installing application packages with a line of code.

Many have deserted to less flamboyant, more traditional-looking distros such as the top-ranking Linux Mint. Canonical can rightly claim that no other consumer distro has Ubuntu’s OEM support, but support from PC manufacturers in Western markets is hardly effusive.

Canonical regularly cites Dell as one of its closest partners – “a staggering 850 Dell retail outlets in India and 350 in China feature Ubuntu PCs,” it claims in marketing materials – but in the UK, even finding a Dell system with Ubuntu pre-loaded is a challenge.

They’re rarely advertised, if ever, and a search for Ubuntu on the Dell website returns results for PCs where various editions of Windows are listed above Ubuntu. “Windows 7 or Windows 8 – choose the operating system that suits you,” reads the banner at the top of the page for the Dell Latitude E6430 Premier, one of the few you can configure with Ubuntu. Not that the average consumer would even notice.

A lot of our customers who upgrade every six months would be pretty well served by a rolling release

Ubuntu also finds itself under attack from within the open-source community. The decision to integrate Amazon results into OS search results provoked accusations of selling out and compromising user data. The Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman – a man who could start a fight in a phone box if it accepted coins that were minted using proprietary machinery – labelled it the “Ubuntu spyware” in a typically scathing online polemic.

He urged users to boycott Ubuntu, claiming that it “behoves us to give Canonical whatever rebuff is needed to make it stop this. Any excuse Canonical offers is inadequate; even if it used all the money it gets from Amazon to develop free software, that can hardly overcome what free software will lose if it ceases to offer an effective way to avoid abuse of the users.”

Shuttleworth hit back at the “trolls” accusing Ubuntu of passing on their data to its shopping partner. “We’re not telling Amazon what you’re searching for,” he wrote on his blog. “Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already.”

New release schedule

With the PC market stalling and Ubuntu failing to record any significant growth in market share, you can see why Canonical might be tempted to divert its efforts to the sexier growth markets of televisions, tablets and smartphones.

Indeed, a recent Google Hangout discussion among Ubuntu developers prompted media reports that Canonical was doing just that, with plans to drop its six-monthly releases and rely on the biennial LTS releases instead.

That’s a case of putting two and two together and coming up with three and a half, according to Silber. Yes, the developers were debating dropping the six-monthly releases, but it was only a “very, very early-stage discussion” and no conclusion had been reached.

What’s more, the motivation for dropping the interim versions was to introduce new features more, not less, frequently. “When we started Canonical and Ubuntu in 2004, and we said we’re going to release Ubuntu every six months, the reaction was ‘you guys are crazy, nobody can put out a full OS every six months – that’s just madness’,” says Silber. “Now, everybody does it. Fedora does it every six months, SUSE does it every six months; we showed how it could be done. Now six months seems a really long time.”

The new schedule would allow developers to trickle out new features when they’re ready, rather than waiting for arbitrary six-month staging posts. “A lot of our customers who upgrade every six months would be pretty well served by a rolling release, because what they want is the latest and greatest all the time. Every time we do one of those releases, we stop doing other development work.”

Whether it’s on the PC, or on the three other form factors, Ubuntu’s developers are going to have plenty on their hands over the next couple of years. Whether their work ends up in the hands of millions of consumers is less certain.