Even a cou­ple years ago, video edit­ing wasn’t con­sid­ered an essen­tial part of a desk­top, for most users. It was the realm of pro­fes­sion­als and hob­by­ists who could afford the nec­es­sary hard­ware to transcode video in less than an hour.

But after the advent of YouTube, ade­quate proces­sors, and ubiq­ui­tous cam­eras — in phones, mon­i­tors, and now on the iPod nano — every­body feels that it’s their right to add scrolling text and wipes to their lit­tle movies. And rightly so; video edit­ing soft­ware has long been expen­sive and dif­fi­cult for a rea­son. But it’s almost 2010, and that shouldn’t be the case any­more. It’s no longer too much to expect to be able to put a title and a fade-out on a video where you com­plain about your hair, even if it is a triv­ial indul­gence. You don’t need to know HTML to run a blog; why should you need to learn script­ing lan­guages and FFm­peg switches to run a vlog?

Steve Jobs was famously mis­taken in think­ing that the next step for per­sonal com­put­ing at the turn of the cen­tury was video edit­ing, until it took a back­seat while Nap­ster made dig­i­tal music and the iPod the most promi­nent tech­nolo­gies of this decade. And as all that went on, proces­sors got out­ra­geously fast, and hard dri­ves got out­ra­geously large, even in “low-end” sys­tems. iMovie existed, but has only recently become famil­iar and com­fort­able to large num­bers of peo­ple. Microsoft’s answer to iMovie, “Microsoft Win­dows Video Edi­tor 1.3″ or what­ever it must have been called, was fee­ble, buggy, and went unused as most PC own­ers had to work hard to derive any­thing of value from it; iMovie, mean­while, prac­ti­cally asked Mac own­ers to use it. It’s my under­stand­ing that Microsoft’s video edi­tor has improved lately, but I don’t know for sure.

Any­way, so here we are, with video edit­ing taken for granted by some, and indig­nantly demanded by oth­ers. And, while we’re at it, a rel­a­tively large migra­tion toward Ubuntu. 8.10 Intre­pid was a land­mark release, 9.04 fol­lowed suit, and 9.10 is becom­ing unequiv­o­cally the most antic­i­pated Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion by the gen­eral pop­u­lace ever. Even in its beta form it’s being called “almost per­fect,” and gen­er­ally her­alded every­where not only as a tri­umph of open-source, but as a tri­umph of oper­at­ing sys­tems period.

There’s more to life than hard, ster­ile prag­ma­tism, and if you think oth­er­wise, you are cold and dead and nobody will ever love you.

So!, with all these peo­ple work­ing to make Linux acces­si­ble, surely they’ve got some decent video edi­tor up their sleeves? Well — as is a typ­i­cal answer from most Linux users — yes and no. There is Cinel­erra, which is very pow­er­ful and enjoys a wide user base, but even its man­ual admits to its Linux her­itage, that “Cinel­erra is not intended for con­sumers.” I can attest to this. In addi­tion to Cinel­erra I’ve down­loaded just about every video edi­tor there is for Linux, from Avide­mux to Kden­live to Kino to PiTiVi. All of them either crash in Ubuntu, are ter­rif­i­cally com­pli­cated, or lam­en­ta­bly sim­ple. Sim­ply put, there is no “iMovie for Linux.”

But this is pre­cisely what Mark Shut­tle­worth is shoot­ing for with Ubuntu. Or, rather, it’s a good metaphor for what he’s shoot­ing for — to make Linux not merely eas­ier to use than other dis­tros, but to be invit­ing to peo­ple who don’t even know what Linux is. This is why Ubuntu’s slo­gan — “Linux for human beings” — has become so obso­lete. Of the things that Linux pro­vided when the Ubuntu project began in 2004, Ubuntu now pro­vides them in a more acces­si­ble way than they’ve ever been pro­vided, and if a per­son has heard of only one Linux dis­tro, it is likely to be Ubuntu.

Now, how­ever, with Shut­tle­worth explic­itly tak­ing aim at Apple, Ubuntu’s slo­gan — not merely for mar­ket­ing pur­poses, but for the under­ly­ing vision of the project as a whole — needs to evolve. “Linux for human beings” begins with the premise of Linux, and qual­i­fies it with the promise of ease-of-use. In order to gain the sig­nif­i­cant mar­ket share that Shut­tle­worth wants to see, and to prop­erly ori­ent Ubuntu’s devel­op­ers toward that end, the “Linux” part of Ubuntu needs to be sec­ondary. What must instead be empha­sized is that it is a pow­er­ful, easy, fun, and free oper­at­ing sys­tem that hap­pens to use a Linux kernel.

These things are becom­ing increas­ingly true, but, as much as I am impressed by it, I can’t in good con­science say that Karmic ful­fills the ulti­mately desired promise of Ubuntu. Karmic is still just “Linux for human beings.”

At the same time, never before has this promise been more clearly within view. Sev­eral huge — huge — things have hap­pened recently, or are hap­pen­ing, to take Ubuntu beyond its cur­rent sta­tus as merely the best Linux dis­tro, from an eccen­tric “third-party can­di­date” to a gen­uine com­peti­tor. Aside from its hugely increased hard­ware sup­port out-of-the-box (which, bravo), I’m tempted to argue that the improved font ren­der­ing in Jaunty is the sin­gle most impor­tant step in increas­ing Ubuntu’s appeal — and fur­ther that any­body who dis­agrees with me is hope­lessly out of touch with the real world.

Linux users pride them­selves on with­stand­ing the most bru­tal of com­put­ing envi­ron­ments, but it’s that kind of ego­tism that, if unchecked, will pre­vent Linux from ever gain­ing on the desk­top. If you think pretty wall­pa­pers are a friv­o­lous waste of your disk space, that’s your pre­rog­a­tive — but if you think that it was a bad deci­sion for Canon­i­cal to include them in Karmic, given all that they’re try­ing to accom­plish, then you’re not pay­ing atten­tion. There’s more to life than hard, ster­ile prag­ma­tism, and if you think oth­er­wise, you are cold and dead and nobody will ever love you.