The week in your words: Ubuntu dons dirty Mac

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 12 Sep 2008 at 18:04

In a week that saw Mark Shuttleworth promise to beautify Ubuntu, Google promise to digitise every newspaper on the planet, and the Government promise not to finance fibre, we take a look back to see what our readers have made of it all.

Ubuntu recruiting for Mac OS X beaters

This week brought news that Canonical-founder Mark Shuttleworth had donned a beret and started flinging throw cushions around in his quest to pretty up Ubuntu. A splash of red here, a few flowers there, and Shuttleworth believes Mac OS X could be made to look like the six-fingered, basement-dwelling ugly cousin in no time. But, as it turns out, Tablot_Avenger isn't that shallow.

"If they can get InDesign to work reliably with Ubuntu, or get Adobe to produce a Linux version (unlikely) then I'd be interested. Scribus is OK but a long way away from what I need."

Bubbles15 also had one or two other minor concerns: "A waste of time. Why bother? Linux has no role on the desktop. It's a complete mess, user unfriendly, the file system is arcane, as soon as you have a problem your dumped back at the console, there's no easy way to manage disks - it's a disaster in usability terms. Making it 'pretty' is daft. Make it usable by normal people first."

We may have rather undersold "one or two". Thankfully though, hjlupton was already donning his poms poms and mighty Mark tee-shirt to support the move.

"Ubuntu is making a sound move here. Linux has the stability but things don't integrate that well together at present. it makes it harder to do certain tasks with the OS.

"If they manage to produce a new version of ubuntu that is really tidy on the front end, yet retains all the stability etc that it presently has, then I think it will be a result, and will finally make Linux a properly viable alternative for Joe Public."

Google to digitise "every newspaper ever written"

Is anybody else noticing that Google's recent actions bear more than a passing resemblance to James Bond super-baddie organisation SPECTRE? Take for example, its "lair" at NASA headquarters, its "world domination" of search, its "assassination" or rival browsers, its vast "surveillance" of the populace and general blasting of space rockets into outer space. And now it intends on digitising every newspaper ever written. Mere coincidence, we think not. Perhaps it's time we started calling them GOOGLE.

robgt1 was nonplussed: "They'd have to pay me to read the bilge that somehow manages to get printed every day in 'news' papers these days. I long since gave up reading them. Such pathetic, biased, nonsensical writing of morons deserves to stay forgotten, not archived for future generations to see just how bloody stupid we are/were."

Exactly, that's what Facebook's for, after all. But heatherkay was more receptive to the scheme.

"While it can be argued that current newspapers are filled with tripe and bilge, I like the idea that newspapers from the past could be digitised. It would revolutionise historical research, for a start. No need to traipse to the British Library, hunt for a microfilm, locate the paper in the hope it might be the right one... Just search in your browser. Assuming, of course, that content will be indexed and not just imaged."