Moving Toward a Single Linux UI?

Anonymous writes "With the releases of Fedora 9, Hardy Heron and OpenSuSE 11 so close together, it's looking more than ever like an evolution to a common interface for major Linux distributions. Here's a compilation of screen shots and descriptions that make it appear to be the case. Would this be a good thing or a bad thing?" There are plenty of other options out there, of course, even considering only Linux distros that are based on Gnome and KDE, and plenty of wilder (or at least less common) desktops to choose from besides.

Comments

Slackware?

[MikeDawg]

Ouch, Slackware, never gettin' no respect. Slackware 12.1 was recently released as well.

Re:They already have a common UI.

[BrookHarty]

I love command line, but why use default 80x25?!

Add this to your boot prompt in grub on the
vga=775 and get some good 160x60 loving 1280x1024.

Re:Winners and losers

[proxima]

Anyone looked at KDE 4.0?
  I cranked it up in a VM and had to look twice to be sure it wasn't GNOME. Most of KDE's signature customizability is gone, and (like GNOME) it's not just a matter of missing GUIs for tweaking settings; the settings themselves are gone into hard code.

This is temporary, and is a common complaint about KDE 4.0. The idea with KDE 4.0 was to ship what they had to encourage further application development. There are lots of changes to KDE, including using a new version of QT (the underlying toolkit).

The basics are there, but customizeability, as you noted, is lacking. From what I understand, that flexibility (especially in terms of the main panel) will return with KDE 4.1, to be released this July.

KDE 4.0 isn't for everybody. After reading about some of these limitations, I decided to wait until KDE 4.1 before upgrading my Kubuntu laptop's KDE version. As I understand it, KDE 4.1 will bring applications like the PIM framework up to speed, and I should be able to make my desktop look and work like I'm used to with KDE 3.5 (a substantial alteration from the default).

KDE hasn't abandoned the philosophy of a very flexible user interface, it's just taking time to re-implement the features in the serious overhaul that is KDE 4. I can wait.

Re:From TFA ... page/slide 8 ...

[markdavis]

Oh please, give us a break.

Rather than potentially BREAKING the GUI on a significant number of machines, the last SEVERAL releases of Mandriva have it ready to use and integrated with one click on "3-D desktop". Having it as the "default" isn't necessarily a good thing, nor does it make it the sole domain of Ubuntu.

Mandriva has been around before there was an Ubuntu. It is just as or more pretty, powerful, flexible, stable, easy to use, and polished. It was distributed on HP's and several other hardware vendors long before Ubuntu was offered on Dell. Unlike Ubuntu, a single Mandriva DVD can install a default KDE or Gnome or combined (or other) system... they don't seem to have the need to have separate Gnomedriva and KDEdriva distro versions. Of the people I know that use both (*untu and Mandriva) regularly, they all tend to like Mandriva better. That doesn't mean that Ubuntu isn't wildly popular nor deserving of praise. But people should not feed it credit and sole spotlight for things common to other if not many distros.

Every time I see ANY article/posting refering to something that applies to all Linux distros under a single distro name, it is almost always Ubuntu users who do it. It is tiring, arrogant, and insulting to users and developers of other distros.

Keep in mind that you are the one trying to turn this thread into an Ubuntu vs. Mandriva thread. My point was that you should not use the term "Ubuntu" instead of "Linux distros" when it is something that really refers to many, most, or all distros.

Re:It is a necessity to have a common GUI

[Coryoth]

Think about what it would be like if the command "ls" was named something different in every linux distribution. Part of Microsoft's success is that there are GUI contracts that are very rarely broken so you almost always know how to do basic tasks with a new program. Sigh. Time to trot out the screenshot yet again. All those Microsoft applications in that screenshot all work the same right? The menu in notepad is just like the complete lack of a menu in Word and Media Player? And while IE and Windows Explorer look the same at first glance, having the spacing and arrangement ever so slightly different is all part of some master plan? The (complete lack of) consistency in how toolbars are presented in Word, Outlook, IE and Blend is carefully arranged?

In the meantime GNOME and KDE both have Human Interface Guideline documents that spell out how applications should work to be consistent, and, oddly enough, most applications for the respective desktops hew to them rather well. You can certainly expect a more consistent environment than Windows apparently is these days (even if you stick to MS software)!

Re:The UIs are not the problem

[beav007]

But, some of the things make Ubuntu Ubuntu and Fedora Fedora. For example, having no root account by default makes Ubuntu different... Last time I checked, Ubuntu did have a root account, but the password hash is set to a single bang (!), which is impossible to match. Enabling the root account is as easy as changing the root password.

Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux

[Weedlekin]

"The problem is, of course, that Windows and OS X both threw away decades of work and started from scratch"

MS released the first version of Windows in 1986, and previews of NexStep (which is the foundation for OS X) began in 1986 too, so development work on both was pretty much concurrent with the original MIT version of X (1984, with X11 appearing in 1987). It's not therefore correct to say that either threw away decades of work.