Ubuntu to Take on Mac

Written by Alastair Otter of MyBroadband:

Canonical, the corporate backer of Ubuntu Linux, is hiring a team of designers and developers to make desktop open source software easier and more appealing to use.

Canonical head and Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, said in a blog post last week that the company plans to hire a team of designers and user interface experts to contribute to not only Ubuntu’s usability but also to other upstream open source applications.

Shuttleworth says that he plans to hire designers and interface experts that 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”.

It was in July that Shuttleworth first raised the challenge of improving the appearance and usability of Linux. At OScon in Oregon, he said that Linux developers needed to improve the interface so that it could “blow right past Apple”.

And earlier this week, announcing Jaunty Jackalope, Shuttleworth said that Ubuntu 9.04 should be comparable to those of the traditional big OSV’s – Microsoft and Apple.

Filed under: Mac Related, Apple, Mac, Ubuntu