As far as when Ubuntu will be back at Best Buy here in the United States, or "When at Best Buy down the road?" Kenyon said, "We're working on it and I'm confident we're going to get there."
A better question is whether Best Buy will still be selling computers or anything at all down the road.
I'm happy Ubuntu is starting to gain this type of traction, but it needs two things to really make the leap:
1) Mass market game compatibility.
The mainstream computer user needs office tools, a browser, email, music, video, and games. Games are the only absentee from Ubuntu. Some major upgrades to Wine could solve this.
2) A mobile strategy
There's definitely been attempts to put Ubuntu on mobile devices, but nothing concrete from Canonical. If they had been more forward thinking, they could have been Android instead of Android being Android.
Finally, I'd personally like to see a lite version of the latest Ubuntu releases. The reason I got into Ubuntu in the first place was to bring new life to my old hardware. Unity doesnt work at all on old hardware, and the fallback is not as good as the old Gnome 2 experience. I'm still running 10.10 on a number of machines because it was my favorite release.
I don't think that Ubuntu needs a mobile strategy, and related to this, it probably does not need games either.
Input methods have a huge impact on application design. A app for touch devices is significantly different from a mouse and keyboard device.
Since touch devices are invading the living room and become premier gaming platforms (also in combination with gamepads and large TVs), the classic desktop does only need to focus on applications and use cases that are optimized for Mouse and Keyboard input.
That's why I think Ubuntu should stay with the classic desktop, and Android should keep its focus on devices with less precise/fast inputs like touch/trackball/remote controls
Xubuntu is your "lite" release for old hardware. It's shipped with XFCE instead of Unity so it doesn't require much to run. I believe Xubuntu 12.04 is released same-day as the 12.04 release.
A better question is whether Best Buy will still be selling computers or anything at all down the road.
I'm happy Ubuntu is starting to gain this type of traction, but it needs two things to really make the leap:
1) Mass market game compatibility. The mainstream computer user needs office tools, a browser, email, music, video, and games. Games are the only absentee from Ubuntu. Some major upgrades to Wine could solve this.
2) A mobile strategy There's definitely been attempts to put Ubuntu on mobile devices, but nothing concrete from Canonical. If they had been more forward thinking, they could have been Android instead of Android being Android.
Finally, I'd personally like to see a lite version of the latest Ubuntu releases. The reason I got into Ubuntu in the first place was to bring new life to my old hardware. Unity doesnt work at all on old hardware, and the fallback is not as good as the old Gnome 2 experience. I'm still running 10.10 on a number of machines because it was my favorite release.