enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

so Canonical have done some work in this general area before, and came 
up with this:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/desktop/remix

I think we could usefully discuss if this is going in a direction that 
we want to push, or if we want to go another way.

The selling points of this remix are:
Java
Adobe Flash plugin
VMware view
Landscape
Removing social networking features (gwibber)
removing file sharing apps (transmission)
removing games
removing sysadmin/development tools
adding LibreOffice Draw
adding RDP (Remmina?)

I don't know if they installed likewise-open/wine/mono and other 
microsoft compatibility things, but they could have done.

Personally I think this is possibly interesting to some corporates, 
possibly interesting to Canonical professional services. Not very 
interesting as a vision of the future business desktop in an environment 
where we are competing against desktop Android, iOS, MacOS X and Windows 
8. I think that ripping out the social networking features is rather 
backwards. We should be looking at adding stuff like Linked-in and 
Ecademy to gwibber and selling the social networking integration as a 
feature, not hiding it.

Most of the rest of the feature list is adding closed source things 
(vmware, flash) or ticking boxes to say "yes, we can do that too"

Now this is all a perfectly valid approach, and some people will see a 
lot of value in it (I was perhaps a bit flippant to call it boring) 
however it is the Canonical approach at the moment, I am not sure that a 
community effort in the same direction is going to achieve anything more 
than the professional services crew can sort out for themselves.

If we are going to target a dependency on a Windows heavy environment 
then lets do stuff that makes Ubuntu more awesome than Windows, maybe a 
lens that searches Active Directory for stuff would be interesting. A 
SAP/Peoplesoft Lens would also be cool along those lines.

Alan.

--
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