In 2009, a small team lead by Mark Shuttleworth, conducted a review of our key brand values and identity. Based on that work, a set of visual treatments were produced, and shared with key members of the Ubuntu Art community, spanning the core distributions, derivatives, and aligned efforts like the Forums. Representatives from Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Mythbuntu, SpreadUbuntu and more came to London and worked with the Canonical design team to refine the designs and work together. The results of that work are presented here.

Ubuntu rose to be the number one consumer Linux distribution pretty much since the day it was released, and it's no wonder why—it's the only distribution that even bothers thinking about design. It's nice to see how far come, but I feel like a lot of the roadblocks that will continue to prevent mainstream adoption are a result of focusing on the design elements that have to do with how the operating system looks and feels, and ignoring the design elements that have to do with how the operating system itself functions.

That being said, look and feel is a big part of getting people in the door, and stepping away from the brown humanistic theme is a giant leap forward. That theme was simple atrocious. Who thought that was a good idea in the first place?

"Truly open-development, open-source phones like the Nokia N900 will never hit the mainstream in the US because wireless carriers in the country hate the unexpected, writes PCMag's Sascha Segan. The open-source philosophy is all about unexpected, disruptive ideas bubbling upwards, and that drives network planners nuts. So, you get unsatisfactory hybrids like Google Android, which uses some open-source components but locks third-party developers into a crippled Java sandbox. The bottom line is that while Linux the OS, the kernel, and the memory manager are attractive to phone manufacturers, Linux the philosophy — and users banding together ad hoc to create new things — is anathema to wireless carriers."

It’s sad but true.

But even if the carriers were on-board with and open source operating system it still might not work. In fact, it may make things worse. Why? Versioning. Just look at Android. It’s only gone mainstream in the last few months and there are already three different versions of the operating system, all with proprietary UI elements, running on an array of different hardware. There is no uniformity, and application development is pretty lackluster. There are only three versions out in the wild (1.5, 1.6 and 2.0), and it’s already problematic.

RIM has run into problem similar to that of Android, being that there are quite a few versions of the the Blackberry OS, and not every application will run on every version. Some phones can be upgrade, and some can’t. Its up to the carrier to decide what happens, and often they do nothing.

Despite the draconian policies Apple has put in place with respect to application development (and application approval) for the iPhone, it just works. At any given time there is only one version that developers have to worry about: the latest version. It runs on every iPhone, and every iPhone user can upgrade to the latest version of the OS. Applications lack the ability to access certain system functions, and so you never have to worry about them turning your iPhone into a brick.

I have a feeling that even if we had a real open source operating system for mobile, we’d still have problems and the user experience might be even worse than it is today with Android handsets. You might have hundreds of different versions of an OS, with the carrier only supporting one or two. Whether or not an application would run on your phone would be determined by what spin you have and what your hardware specs are. No one wants to sit there hacking away at a command line just to get the GPS to work in some new application you downloaded.

It sucks, but as bad as the Apple/iPhone model is, it’s the best we’ve got.

To begin with, one of the more surprising reveals that came out of yesterday's news is that the OS cannot be installed on your own computer. Oh sure, there are downloads available that use Google's open-sourced code to create bootable builds tech-savvy users and developers can play with, but the official word from the search giant is that anyone wanting to use the "real" Google Chrome OS will have to purchase a new netbook to do so. You cannot simply download it from the web and install it on any machine.

Yesterday, Google released the source for their new Chrome OS – a super-lightweight Linux distribution that only runs their Chrome browser and Google Gears. It's basically a new window manager running on top of the Linux kernel. Most of the big tech blogs slammed it for not being a "real" operating system and calling it a huge disappointment. What the hell are they talking about?

I read the snippet above and started wondering what's wrong with some of these tech blogs. Why has the editorial level of the content fallen to the level of the comments on Digg or YouTube? The articles on TechCrunch and Mashable were no better. Why are people who know nothing about Linux writing about a new Linux distribution? They all rush to get articles out the door as fast as possible and then they end up writing ignorant nonsense. The big three web technology blogs (TechCrunch, Mashable, and ReadWriteWeb) now routinely write articles about things they know nothing about, or products and services they've never used. What is this?

... anyone wanting to use the "real" Google Chrome OS will have to purchase a new netbook to do so.

The source is available in full. Anyone who wants to use the "real" Google Chrome OS can compile it from source – just like every other linux distribution. Since when is compiling from source not real? Google has simply chosen not to use a standard library of drivers in the OS they seed to OEMs. In fact, they may leave it up to OEM manufacturers to develop driver packages themselves. In any event, the OSS community will likely develop a set of drivers for the Chrome OS in no time. It all ready works in a virtual machine. That's a good start.

I thought that the Chrome OS was a brilliant idea. One of the biggest problems I have with modern notebooks, netbooks and smart-phones is that the battery life is abysmal. An operating system that's designed to only run web applications could run with a very low CPU footprint. I, for one, welcome an era of netbooks that last all day on a single charge.