Ubuntu 13.04 Is About 13% Complete

[Vadi]

I don't mean to say that when it's not done 100%, the release isn't done 100%. I mean to say that I don't think it's supposed or intended to reach 100% on release day - some items there are "wishlist" that should be done if there is extra time left over.

[uid313]

I used to be very excited about new Ubuntu releases, but the excitement is wearing off.
Ubuntu seem to be heading the wrong direction and lately, I've been a bit disappointed.

I consider Unity to be cumbersome and pain to use. Recently they made it worse and now
some consider it adware and spyware.

Ubuntu used be the sexy distribution but now it looks ugly. The theme is ugly.
It is not as sexy as for example Linux Mint or Elementary.

Ubuntu have lots of regressions and it seems they never really nail it and get everything right.

GNOME is going downhills too. Gnome Shell is almost as bad, maybe worse than Unity. At least it doesn't have adware/spyware.
Still a pain to use though. Now GNOME is removing the Fallback session which was the only sane and useable way to use GNOME.

[Veerappan]

It's just a typo.


I wouldn't mind getting involved, but cripes it seems like you need a lot of domain knowledge just to dive into an OSS project. Scanning through the bug reports and it's like, "yeah no clue... no clue... no clue...".

I'd say that the easiest way to get involved is testing and filing bug reports. If you want to play a game on ${DISTRO}, but it doesn't work (and crashes instead), try to figure out where the crash happened, and let the responsible people know. If there's rendering bugs, let the mesa-dev guys know through bugs.freedesktop.org. If it turns out that the graphics drivers were to blame, they'll probably eventually give you a patch to test (or just commit the fix and let you know which version to test).

Some domains require a ton of knowledge, but some ways of getting involved are easier than others. Some projects are looking for translators, and if you know a non-English language, you can use those skills to help out (while also learning more about the inner workings of the project). The aforementioned testing/reporting is also good.

Otherwise, I'd pick one feature that you wished you had that sounds simple. Then, if you have programming knowledge, start to dig into the part of the code that you think is responsible for where you want that feature added. If you don't have programming knowledge, it might still be useful for the people who maintain the project if you come up with some mock-ups/drawings of what you think should be added and what you think the UI could look like. I'm sure there's plenty of other ways to get involved, but those are some that popped into my head (which is a miracle considering I haven't had my coffee yet).