Tuesday, July 14, 2009
UbuntuOne
(There isn’t much information (currently) on the official site, other than installation instructions, mailing list and bugs database)
This is a potentially brilliant idea, because it gives people a convenient way to support financially their favorite distribution, and with solid financial support this could become a reliable backup solution. Correct, there may be cheaper options available on the market, but you never know how long they’ll last (Streamload being a good example of that)
On the other hand, as of right now the service is hardly usable.
- It is clearly inferior compared to the popular (among Linux crowd) DropBox service, which provided 5 times more of paid storage, supports versions, has be better UI (web-based and client-side) and is compatible with every modern Linux distributions, Windows and Mac;
- It is still very buggy and incomplete. For example, when I added a file through Web UI, it never showed up in my Ubuntu folder, though synchronization the other way around worked fine;
- There are also browser-compatibility issues, e.g. with Google Chrome;
- Is this service supposed to be open source? I could not find any reference to the server source code anywhere, nor to any plans for future client-side API.
Mailing list appears to be relatively low-volume, and I am not sure many people are actually using this – which, given the modest, at best, progress of development and plenty of competitors, does not promise a bright future for this project any time soon, in my opinion.
But, whatever this is going to turn out, the idea was really a good one.
Labels: internet, linux, Ubuntu, web-services
