Canonical, the leading backer of the Ubuntu version of Linux, is hiring a team to help make open-source software on the desktop more appealing and easier to use.
The company plans to sign up designers and specialists in user experience and interaction to lead Canonical’s work on usability and to contribute to other free and open-source desktop-environment projects, including Gnome and KDE, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical chief executive and founder of the Ubuntu project, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.He wrote: “We are hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, GTK, Qt, Gnome and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop-experience ideas into reality.”
Shuttleworth has said recently that usability is the top priority for open-source software. Free Linux desktops should have “a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years”, he said at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention last week.
[From Shuttleworth: Open-source desktops need a facelift | Tech News on ZDNet]
This isn’t solved by a team, though some developers will be needed: what makes this work is a design czar, someone who can tell people when to stop. Citing Apple makes sense if they are going to get deeper than the GUI (and since all the projects named are window managers/desktops, it doesn’t look like it). Will the next two years be different from the last 10 or so?