This seems like such a small change, but it's the most important single contribution to adoption and usability that Ubuntu have made to date. Design matters.
"the most important single contribution to adoption and usability that Ubuntu have made to date."
To be fair, Ubuntu isn't really in the business of making changes, just packaging up software other people write in an accessible way. Most of the projects and changes that people praise Ubuntu for hit Fedora first because they're developed by Red Hat engineers, or because they're developed by 3rd parties and Fedora picks them up first because of their whole "bleeding edge" thing.
Canonical isn't about making changes, they're about driving adoption. Launchpad Bug #1 is "Microsoft has majority marketshare." Canonical might not write a ton of software themselves, but they get tons of feedback from their sizable and engaged userbase, and they work hard with upstream devs to get usability problems addressed. They've also been active in pushing new developments (like Wayland replacing X) into the mainstream really, really fast. Ubuntu 10.10 boots to a usable desktop in under 15 seconds. And I don't know how much money they paid Dalton Maag upfront to get a royalty-free license on that font, but it was definitely a lot, and I'm grateful.
To be fair, Ubuntu isn't really in the business of making changes
Tell that to the Unity team. Or look at the app indicators. Or notify-osd. Or wait until Wayland hits. This last one isn't Ubuntu code, but it's still a change they're pushing for.
Really, Ubuntu writes a decent amount of code and I think it's doing the distribution a disservice not to mention this.
"You do realize that the Wayland came from devs working for Red Hat right?"
I did mention that Ubuntu didn't write that code, so yes, I'm aware of that. Kristian Høgsberg, the original author, was working for Red Hat at the time he started the project. I don't know how much dev time Red Hat currently contributes in the current state of Wayland, if any.
In any case, the only ones actively pushing for Wayland use are the Ubuntu devs. Fedora has half-heartedly implied that it will use it at some point in the future. Maybe.
Dave Airlie, a Red Hat engineer, is basically the guy when it comes to pushing progress in Linux's graphics stack. Shuttleworth declaring which way Linux development should go doesn't do shit for the community if he doesn't hire developers to see it through.
> Tell that to the Unity team. Or look at the app indicators. Or notify-osd.
Unity is (a) not fully-baked yet and (b) a big change from what Ubuntu has historically focused on in the past. App indicators an notify-osd are pretty tiny from a code perspective, though not from a design perspective.
I'm not trying to trivialize the effort of polish and design, because it's a large part of what the free software community has traditionally been fairly bad at. But it's very different from nuts-and-bolts engineering.
Holy moly, I literally saw this appear last night. It was looking for good fonts to use in a project of mine, clicked one, clicked back, and there it was.
Did they find a good font license yet, or are they still using the temporary Ubuntu Font License? There's nothing wrong with that license per se, but I know they were trying to make a better license for fonts in general to reduce license proliferation.
http://font.ubuntu.com (linked in the article) still says "Ubuntu Font Licence 1.0", and the "Licensing FAQ" says "For the short-term only, the initial licence is the Ubuntu Font License (UFL)."
Web fonts seem like such a boondoggle to me. "Solutions" like SIFR are just not an area I've had the time to explore.
How complicated is this new Ubuntu thing? I went to the webpage, and the font examples are AN IMAGE, I can't even select them! How are they "brought to the web?"
This is pretty close to a real solution, much better than SIFR. This lets you specify a remote font file, which the browser will download and apply to the text. This means the text shows up as text and not as a picture or Flash embed. It also means that if the font file is not available for some reason, the browser will fall back to something reasonable.
The Google Font Directory is a library of freely-licensed fonts that you can link from your own web pages. When you click a font name here, it will take you to a demo page so you can see how well it works. http://code.google.com/webfonts
Or, more accurately, this is the solution, very different from sIFR or image replacement. It’s how every sane person would expect webfonts to work (plus a few weird quirks you have to know about).
It’s relatively simple to do on your own and solutions like Google’s Font Directory or Typekit make it even easier.
