Day 4 at Canonical

08Sep09

Day 4 dawns at my new place of work! I’m now an employee of Canonical, the people who make Ubuntu Linux. I’m working with the design team and am really excited to get cracking on what I believe is a really important product and set of open source projects.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog posted a story yesterday about installing Ubuntu on your Mac. Clearly a slow news day over Labour day weekend

But it got me and some of the design team here thinking. Ivanka, head of the design team, also posted a response to a friend’s tweet on the subject.

I think Ivanka makes good points and they’re the same reasons that I got interested in using Ubuntu even though I was already using a Mac every day. I don’t dislike Windows or Mac OS and I’ve tried a bunch of different flavours of Linux. For my part I like that it’s reasonably light weight, works well and I can do my job on it which I think is always the biggest test. Could it be prettier? Yes it could. Could some applications be a little more refined? Yes, certainly. But as I said in my presentation back at the beginning of the year it’s there and working and YOU can help make it better!

You can’t contribute to OSX unless you work at Apple. You can’t make Windows better unless you work at Microsoft. You CAN make Ubuntu better from your bedroom or customise it to make it do what you want. That’s a powerful idea. Equally, if Windows or OSX do what you want in the way you want them to then that’s fine to. Variety is good. It challenges and inspires and it will make everyone have to work harder to make their products stand out.

Vive la difference!

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