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Ubuntu Moves Away From GNOME
An anonymous reader writes "It's official: Ubuntu has, with its ironically named 'Unity' interface, chosen to move away from GNOME for Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. Or at least move away from GNOME Shell. Mark Shuttleworth says that Ubuntu will still be 'GNOME,' even if it's not using GNOME Shell. Do you agree?"
From TFA:
"GNOME Shell is the interface being developed for GNOME 3.0, which was delayed to spring 2011."
What the hell does a sea unicorn have to do with $5.00/case frat boy beer?
I know some people say you can't configure Unity (running it on a netbook) the one thing it really needs is the ability to auto-hide as I've now got this big column of desktop real estate on the left of the screen I can't do anything with anymore.
NB: To those complaining about lack of configurability - try dragging icons around or right clicking them - you can modify it...
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
...that the summary is +1 flamebait, apparently just a thinly-veiled attack on their decision. How about a summary that describes what they're doing (without using the word ironic), and why?
Mark Shuttleworth says that Ubuntu will still be "GNOME," even if it's not using GNOME Shell.
I've got a mole in the Ubuntu organisation. The word is that mr. Shuttleworth has been in secret talks with Darth^WSteve Ballmer to negotiate the rights for Vista's Aero interface. It was available for pennies due to the number of unsold Vista licenses. The next version of Ubuntu will sport the familiar Aero interface, with features such as the nifty and user-friendly Deny/Allow-widget, grafted straight onto the Linux Kernel.
Open source community, what more do you want?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Thanks to desktop standards, people have been doing this for years... makes sense that a major distro is following suit.
My desktop pretty much only uses gdm and gnome-terminal from GNOME, and occasionally nautilus (though I turn off the desktop handling).
Using Enlightenment DR16 or occasionally compiz as the window manager, and awn ("Avant Window Navigator") as the panel, with compatible taskbar and notification area.
Bye bye Ubuntu. You made me switch with Maverick Meerkat, but seeing as that's not an LTS as of Natty Narwhal I'll be going back to good ol' Debian.
The times when i used not-the-standard-configuration-of-whatever distribution i installed to save memory are gone with my last laptop below 512MB of Ram. If Canonical thinks its easier to maintain it in a different way, fine with me. If it does'nt work i can tune, switch, get into the details and fix it. Until that point i would be happy not to figure out about changes......
If they do weird things, i am happy to use debian again.
Gnome Shell - YES, I have tried this in Beta - is a real drag.
KDE4 was a cock-up. It's taken, what? 2 years to get back to everyday, usable? Gnome is great. The Gnome Shell will only take 1 year to do the same.
I don't know about Unity. But Gnome shell is a productivity / usability killer.
Example: Gnome Application Menu in the current Panel. Sure, it doesn't scale when you have 30 audio applications and as many "Internet" apps. But Gnome Shell? Only a handful available - in a non scrolling, apparently unconfigurable "top-ten" or so. None of which I chose to be displayed. Hey? Where'd WebHTTRack go?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Semantic questions, and questions of categorization, can be interesting and(when all goes well) can even clarify your thinking about a topic; but are otherwise rather pointless.
On the one hand, it is trivially obvious that if you aren't running the GNOME desktop environment, you aren't runnning GNOME. On the other hand, if you are running a set of programs, and depending on a set of libraries, essentially identical to that of a GNOME desktop, just window managed by something else, it is much more meaningful to say that you are "running GNOME" or "running a GNOME derivative" than it is to say much else.
Unless you want to actually come up with some set-based definition of what "Running GNOME" means, you won't really be able to conclusively answer the question one way or the other.
So the news is that they're moving away from something that doesn't exist yet?
Maybe they just want to wait for it to exist and test it and shake the bugs out before they decide to use it ?
I can't freakin' STAND KDE. I never really understood the appeal of it...just seemed like a convuluted mess to me.
Living With a Nerd
Consistency.
When you product changes all the time, people are going to have to deal with these changes. When I "upgraded" versions of Ubuntu, I had to deal with a completely different looking interface. WHY? Change for the sake of change seems to be a big driving force in this project. Honestly, the UI that I am using now is no different than it was in 2004. I could have made something in 2004 look exactly like what Ubuntu looks like today. So there really isn't even an excuse that things are being changed to add features. We get a "new look" every rev because some dev thinks that it looks cool. It gets really old when your task bar is moved to the other side of the screen, your menus are all reorganized, and the terminal session shortcut that used to be on a particular convenient context menu is now gone.
Up until recently (Vista/Ribbon interface) and arguably even now, Microsoft has been able to provide more consistency than a lot of these Linux distros.
Are we going to see a Gubuntu now?
There is going to be some questions about this decision in relation to GNOME. I want to make something crystal clear: Ubuntu is GNOME distribution, we ship the GNOME stack, we will continue to ship GNOME apps, and we optimize Ubuntu for GNOME. The only difference is that Unity is a different shell for GNOME, but we continue to support the latest GNOME Shell development work in the Ubuntu archives.
Jono Bacon from http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/10/25/ubuntu-11-04-to-ship-unity/
FTA: "Earlier this year, Canonical representatives had to deny that they were forking GNOME..."
This apparently is a common refrain when asked, no one will EVER admit to it.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
When they came to take away the Gnome Shell, I said nothing, for I do everything from the command line anyway (higher bandwidth than clicky-clicky)
When they came to take away the Gnome, I said nothing, for I run KDE, really just kdm/konsole.
When they came to take away emacs, I said nothing, for I am a VIM user.
When they came to take me away, there was no one left to defend me, because everyone else had upgraded to the latest Debian stable, now releasing 3 times as fast as recent Winders releases.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Great comment
"Not a clue what any of this means. I'll just stick with Windows or Mac. You buy it, turn it on, and it works." - Joe Q Public
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Gnome has held GNU/Linux back for nearly 10 years now.
I like the idea of Unity somewhat, but it really isn't much more than an omni-present dock, some shiny effects, and icons. GNOME Shell uses less horizontal space and equal vertical space, scales well for netbooks as well as desktops, has much better notification organization than Unity, is supported upstream much more, it has extensions which allow great control over the system (including this very nice and extremely lightweight dock extension), an Application Menu which lets you quit all windows of an application (and in the future, let you access options that apply to the application as a whole), and so much more! Unity, on the other hand, confuses me. The user interface prefers icons instead of words for telling us what things do, it wastes horizontal space by having that dock, it doesn't have nearly as good workspace management as GNOME Shell, it's slow-ish at the moment, and so on.
GNOME Shell has been steadily improving. You can check the git server right here, which I do every day. And just so you know, the overlay re-design is being worked on and is in a separate branch, which you can find here: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/log/?h=overview-relayout.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Ubuntu had a great deal of promise. But they have failed to deliver. It's been years, and they still cause hard drives to crash, they still fail to support hardware, and they still have shitty updates that break things. I'm done with Ubuntu and it makes me sad, because I can't go back to Windows now. My next computer is going to be an Apple and I don't give a damn about the apple tax, because apparently it is the only way to get a real unix desktop with well-supported software and hardware, that works. Shame on you Ubuntu.
Gnome Shell is going to be the killer feature of Gnome 3 and probably makes it DOA.
FWIW, I wish there was a window manager that set it's own paradigm. GNOME to me seemed to mimic early versions of Mac OS and OS X. KDE seemed to mimic Microsoft Windows. Granted most of the concepts are ripped straight from Xerox, it'd be nice if there was a window manager that set the standard for FOSS GUI desktops.
As it is now, I tend to use XFCE the most... blazing fast and rock solid stable on both slackware and freebsd... But I keep checking on KDE...
from TFA:
"Unity is 'a shell for GNOME, even if it isn't GNOME shell'"
Riiiiiiiiighhhhttttt... Why do people say things like that? It may be true, but it's like people in the community purposely try to make desktop Linux as confusing and unapproachable as possible.
I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank.
So Unity is a shell developed by Gnome, but it is not the true Gnome shell? What is the point of this? Why not just stick with what has made Ubuntu the most popular distribution of Linux. This to me is one of the flaws of Linux, nobody can make up their mind. Once a distro decides to use a certain shell stick with it. New users don't want to have to learn multiple shells. This way when a user picks a certain distro they know what they are getting in the form of a shell. How many Ubuntu users who are not computer geeks, but enjoy open source are going to pissed off once Unity is rolled out and their desktop looks completely different one day?
From TFA:
"GNOME Shell is the interface being developed for GNOME 3.0, which was delayed to spring 2011."
On the plus side: there are now also ordinary people using Ubuntu - people that don't know anything.
On the down side: they still don't understand what a shell is, even after that explanation (see quoted text).
To me, it's not really clear where GNOME starts or stops... So there's at least one Ubuntu user who is quite clueless what this is all about.
The value of this post? I show you all that there are people able to use Ubuntu without even the basic knowledge of the processes or even the names of them running on the computer. I always think of myself as the target group for Ubuntu. The wizkids can use the other Linux systems.
I can't blame distributions for not following the GNOME project in all their technical decisions - some parts of GNOME are (and continue to be) neat, but several, particularly those bits tied with Mono and other attempts to wear Microsoft's leash, are lousy (plus some bits duplicate functionality better done elsewhere, e.g. Empathy over Pidgin).
GNOME is still a pretty decent development environment, and there are a lot of nice applications that use the GNOME libraries. Still, there's no reason distros need the detault GNOME desktop to run them, and people/distros can be perfectly happy taking GNOME components and standards piecemail.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
"I want something that looks like Windows (start button, trashbin, tabs on bottom or top, etc)." - by commodore64_love (1445365) on Monday October 25, @11:22AM (#34012718)
See subject-line above, because afaik? That's as CLOSE as you'll get to the "Windows look & feel", w/out going to some sort of "Lindows" build (there used to be such a build, and probably there still may be if you check distrowatch.com )...
I felt much the same as you, which is WHY I chose KUbuntu 10.10 & 10.04 before that this year.
Anyhow/anyways:
Personally, I think Linux has FINALLY come to the point where it's a decent Operating System for most end-user oriented tasks @ home daily (e.g. - websurfing, home office tasks via OpenOffice, multimedia tasks etc./et al)... &, that's "ME", the "original posterboy for 'Windows fanboy @ /.'" pretty much, saying it.
What does Linux lack? Ok, from my perspective @ least:
HOMEFRONT:
More games, & of the calibre Windows enjoys... folks game @ home, face it, & most folks tend to use their PC's as a "Wintendo", or information gathering system/shopping system online.
INDUSTRIAL:
Better "esoteric peripheral equipment" support in drivers, and a VOLUME MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (a good one of the likes of the one Windows has with NTFS & Active Directory, OR, a ZFS filesystem)
Other than that though? Linux is pretty damned good, I have to admit it. Good enough for me to use daily in fact, and for around 1/2 yr. now consistently here @ home so far... I told Foredecker (a senior MS manager who posts here, via email, that EVENTUALLY? Linux WOULD "catch up" & it appears to be nearing that point finally, after oh, 15++ yrs. or thereabouts, imo @ least). Cover those bases above I noted?? It'll be there...
APK
P.S.=> Again though, is there a "closer build" to the look/feel of Windows? Well, check on "Lindows" online on GOOGLE to see what the case is there for that, because iirc, the 'tell' online was that it was almost EXACTLY a Windows 9.x shell look/feel (don't quote me on that though, I only heard the online "rumor mill"), which is what it sounds you are looking for... apk
I can't freakin' STAND Gnome. I never really understood the appeal of it...just seemed like a convuluted mess to me.
Good one. Either you are very young or sarcastic.
Windows 1-3. Complete changes. 3.1 to 95. Complete change. 95-98 the look didn't change, just where everything was. 98 to 2000... don't get me started. 2K to XP, lots of changes again. Vista so many changes many did not bother. W7, must have been a big change because people don't hate it as much as Vista.
Every single version of Windows has changed the layout and organization of basic configurations until the point where messing with your disks is so many layers deep I need a mining canary to find it.
Compared with that both OSX and Ubuntu have been solid rock.
Which probably is what sits in your head... MS and consistent interface...
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I can't freakin' STAND KDE. I never really understood the appeal of it...just seemed like a convuluted mess to me.
It was good and I liked it until KDE 4 came out. After trying to use it for 4 hours I switched to XFCE and have never looked back.
Ubuntu was great few years ago, equally supporting KDE and GNOME. Since then they failed to keep up with KDE version and trashed the user experience. I went to OpenSUSE and it's superior compared to latest Ubuntu or Kubuntu. It's fast, has latest KDE4 (that WORKS) and it has GUI tools (for system configuration, like adding printer from network) that are reliable. Even plugging secondary monitor to my laptop, finally started to work like it should.
Kubuntu had OpenOffice save dialog broken for two latest releases. If you tried to save anything, dialog would go stuck for 30 seconds and everytime you click anything (browse folders) it goes stuck again. Actually, i'm not sure if that is still broken?
Now it's Ubuntu this and Ubuntu that. Ubuntu doing something CraZy and n3w that just confuses users that just want to get job done.
Every now and then, everyone should try other Linux distributions too.
I can't freakin' STAND Gnome. I never really understood the appeal of it...just seemed like a convuluted mess to me.
Gnome is basically Windows XP/MacOS/Solaris/every other GUI for the last twenty years. KDE is... actually I don't really know what it is, it just seems like a mess every time I try to use it.
I would have thought they could use as much or as little of Gnome as they please. This is hardly anything new: for instance, back in the late '90s, RedHat shipped with Gnome by default, using Enlightenment as its window manager. (IIRC in at least versions 5.2 to 6.2 of the distro.)
On my present (Arch Linux) desktop boxes, it's no longer immediately obvious how much of Gnome I'm using any more. At the UI level, I've done a bit of cherry-picking, using things like compiz-fusion for managing windows and Avant Window Navigator instead of gnome-panel. I spent some time playing with other file managers, but in the end decided Nautilus was actually pretty OK. I haven't had any good reason, however, to replace much of the stuff under the hood that gets fired up by gdm, since I'm fairly happy with how everything works.
So you are upset that KDE is not a copy of basically Windows XP/MacOS/Solaris/every other GUI?
How far we have come. When I started using linux, the complaint was that KDE was "just" a badly implemented copy of windows.
If I could get last pass to work with Konqueror, I would drop Chromium. That - and handbrake - are the only non-kde program that I daily use.
KDE's my favorite desktop, but then, I was using it back when I ran Mandrake; tried KDE and Gnome and preferred KDE. I'm running kubuntu at home, I guess I should try Gnome again.
Free Martian Whores!
? There's little difference between KDE and Windows, except asthetics and a few added touches that make KDE nicer.
Free Martian Whores!
Ah, but searching doesn't *end* with typing words into a box. It ends when you've actually *found* what you were looking for. And seriously, while googling "ubuntu 10.10" does get you relevant results, it gets you all kinds of numbers with 10.10 in them (like 10.10.255.255). "ubuntu maverick" gets (IMHO) more relevant results.
One of my arguments to move to linux on desktop is that I will have to switch between environments and I'll be more flexible. Why some of linux users are so conservative to change?
I'm having trouble understanding your point of view. Kubuntu functions almost identically to Windows XP/7.
Someone with a three digit /. ID should know that Gnome took several years from the release of 2.0 (2002) until it was back to the usability level of 1.4. Gnome 2.6 (2004) was even forked by a couple of rather incompetent optimists. Of course, Gnome had usability experts from SUN who would claim that inability is two letters better than ability, since the ability to do things only would confuse those who don't understand why and how.
When did the 2.x series start coming good again? 2005? 2006? Or 2010, when they finally ditched Nautilus' obnoxious spatial mode? Or when GTK finally got an acceptable (it's still only half-decent) file selector?
No, he's upset that "it just seems like a mess" every time he tries to use it.
When Microsoft or Apple put something in their product that people don't like, FOSS proponents respond, "The beauty of FOSS is you if you don't like what someone is doing, you can just go off and do your own thing." When someone actually does this the FOSS proponents seem to respond with, "We can't afford to splinter into tiny interest groups or we won't be able to compete with Microsoft and Apple."
I guess I am somewhere between parent and GP, then. I'm a software engineering student who has some basic linux knowledge: I've used several distributions a bit, had one basic course about it and such... But I still get boggled when WLAN drivers aren't working or X doesn't start up or there is other such an odd problem. I have some large Linux related books in the bookself but have never had time to delve into them. Anyways: I, too, consider myself to be the target audience. It is nice to get the stability, security, etc. of Linux... With a distro that just works (tm). Perhaps one day, when I've gotten myself to study the OS more, I'll try out ArchLinux or something and see where that takes me.
I never liked KDE either, but there was a time (~1997?) when KDE apps would "just work" and were a lot more stable than their Gnome equivalents. However, that was never quite enough for me. I found myself getting irritable or angry whenever I used KDE (also my reaction to using Windows), so I decided not to torture myself any more.
Having said that, I do still make occasional forays into KDE just for perspective. But KDE4 was a non-starter until I found the setting to make the desktop usable as a desktop again; but let it not be said that Gnome developers have been innocent of imposing craniorectal notions on the hapless user.
Try LXDE. It reminds me of KDE3 a lot. I added it back onto my laptop and it's amazing.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
To me, Gnome's stock look is visually similar to the interface of MacOS while KDE's stock look is similar to Windows, but even there the resemblance is pretty superficial for both.
I think I like Gnome better, but I'm not sure how much of that is "KDE isn't as good" vs. "Canonical doesn't put together Kubuntu releases as well as core Ubuntu", since most of my recent KDE/Gnome comparison have been Kubuntu v. Ubuntu.
KDE apps would "just work"? I don't even understand what you're trying to do with this rather poor troll, apart from spewing regurgitated nonsense.
Someone with a three digit /. ID should know that Gnome took several years from the release of 2.0 (2002) until it was back to the usability level of 1.4.
Hm, I wasn't aware having a low user ID carried such burdens...
Perhaps we should institute a system of tests, in which low-UID users are periodically challenged on their knowledge, and demoted if they fail - and other users are given an opportunity to filter up the ranks via the same system?
Bow-ties are cool.
"Unity requires compositing to work properly, which means users need functioning 3D support to use the interface."
What if you have an app that doesn't work correctly with compiz enabled?
Not 2005 or 2006. That's about when I ditched GNOME due to being sick of Havoc Pennington's reign of "usability" terror. There was a constant crusade to make sure that no user could have edge flipping of multiple desktops, even as a buried option or as an "addon". (I basically stuck with GNOME until they broke Brightside so many times that the Brightside author gave up - Brightside somehow managed to add edge flipping to most GNOME WMs.)
Pretty much everything he did in the name of "usability" was to remove functionality. People bitch about KDE4, but KDE4 is far more feature-complete than GNOME was when I ditched it, and GNOME was actually trending downwards. (Admittedly, I didn't do the KDE 3.x to 4.x transition until around KDE 4.2 or 4.3.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Jeez. Ubuntu is becoming the jack of many trades and master of none.
Let the dedicated desktop guys at Gnome work on the UI. Last thing Linux needs is yet another implementation of a desktop.
I think we are about to witness the "Jumping the shark".. (Happy Days reference)
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
I would have thought they could use as much or as little of Gnome as they please. This is hardly anything new: for instance, back in the late '90s, RedHat shipped with Gnome by default, using Enlightenment as its window manager. (IIRC in at least versions 5.2 to 6.2 of the distro.)
On my present (Arch Linux) desktop boxes, it's no longer immediately obvious how much of Gnome I'm using any more. At the UI level, I've done a bit of cherry-picking, using things like compiz-fusion for managing windows and Avant Window Navigator instead of gnome-panel. I spent some time playing with other file managers, but in the end decided Nautilus was actually pretty OK. I haven't had any good reason, however, to replace much of the stuff under the hood that gets fired up by gdm, since I'm fairly happy with how everything works.
Yes there are all kinds of optional configurations and choices when it comes to components and programs and things, but when presented with a pretty usable and nice looking system, one might be less inclined to 'mess with it'. I think that there are also a lot of new users who weren't around for the crusty old days and simply don't know that you can cherry pick and build up your own desktop environment. Believe it or not.
The great thing about modern distributions like Ubuntu is that just anyone can install it and it works. All those battles of yore have been won. However, I think that it also suppresses the notion that it's still made of individual parts.
do() || do_not();
but the shit remains
It seems as though the GNOME devs are the only ones who give a crap about accessibility in the FOSS world. How will this affect blind users? Far as I know, there is no screen reader for KDE, and Orca only works with GNOME.
while i can see maintaining a gui that for all intents mimics the ease of use of mac, the state of the linux GUI is nothing short of hellishly bloated. GNOME makes its best effort to keep the bloat to a minimum, but in the end fluxbox, blackbox, and a host of others make it look downright obese. Kudos to the guys at Ubuntu. if you can bring something better to the table, bring it!
Good people go to bed earlier.
Can we get serious about the Linux desktop already? Gnome's gone off the deep end with gnome shell, and this looks to be no better. Turn GNUStep into a functional Mac OS clone. Take NetworkManager and DBusKit. Implement a systempreferences pane for networking, do the same with pulseaudio for sound, one for video etc. Finish simplewebkit/vespucci so there's a web browser, write a linux port of AdiumX using pidgin's libpurple and gnustep so there's chat. IRC/Mail already exists. Knock up a quick rhythmbox clone so there's itunes-alike functionality, and port over the mplayerOSX gui so there's a good video player with a nice frontend. Suddenly there's a lot less FAIL and a lot more consistency in the Linux Desktop experience. Start porting over the huge pile of open source mac apps that have decent consistent user interfaces. Write a finder knockoff, use gworkspace, or knockoff any number of other file managers. Oh and throw in a dock option for people who want it. Who knows? Adobe might even bother porting CS5 to the new platform if it retains compatibility with macOS libraries/Frameworks. They already have CoreImage/CoreFoundation implemented. None of the existing Linux desktops hold a candle to Mac OSX's gui. As a bonus gnustep already lets you set the menubar up in either macintosh style (top of screen), windows style (per window), or nextstep style (floating menu). Everyone goes home happy and we can all get on with our lives.
Isn't that sort of the point? Disrupt the user experience minimally when shifting from one OS to another?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I suppose ANY KDE 4.5x desktop based Linux distro will/can do here... because it's a LOT closer looking to the Windows desktop than GNOME (or others like xfce etc.).
However, I don't think KUbuntu is what you called it ("it's an half-assed effort that keeps giving KDE a bad name"). I like it personally.
See, I tried Linux "MINT" & it's basically the SAME THING as KUbuntu, but it packs in a lot of tools I could care less about (as well as CODECS I can load myself into KUbuntu on my own anyhow). That's all.
I tried Slackware 1.02 back in 1994, & later Redhat 5.2 + 6.0 even later, in 32-bit distros... too much was still "tty term" based work back then, even in those later Redhat distros. Nowadays though, since I moved to 64-bit wares as well, & with distros like KUbuntu around??
I again will state that Linux is "pretty much there" except for lacking ActiveDirectory, a solid VOLUME MANAGEMENT SYSTEM, & games like Windows has... all else is pretty much covered!
NOW - IF Linux covers those last 3 areas? It will be what I told MS' own senior mgr. of their "Windows Client Performance Division" in FOREDECKER via email (he posts here): Linux is bound to eventually "catch up" to Windows...
APK
P.S.=> However, all these "distros" like you see at distrowatch.com? Personally, this HARMS Linux imo & there IS a sort of "historical precedent" backing me!
E.G.-> Just like it did @ the kernel level in UNIX (BSD vs. AT&T/Bell Labs UNIX binary incompatibilities). Linus T.'s efforts @ "kernel control" are working though, which IS good...
I.E.-> All these diff. shells & Windows managers etc. plus software distributions? It "FRAGMENTS" Linux as a unified effort I feel, almost as badly as what happened to UNIX but not quite... IF ONLY there was maybe 1-3 diff. distros? Linux would be farther ahead, imo @ least, because of "consolidated efforts" concentrated on few, rather than many... apk
I remember the Window-manager-of-the-month club. Beginning with Enlightenment and finally sticking with Metacity, except when its Compiz that used to be Emerald.
I remember Big, default "CDE" panel, and the new, slim defaults. I remember difficulty in transition - but...
It was not so dramatic. Nautilus was always, pretty much a centrepiece - accessible as the Desktop - since the Andy Hertzfeld/Easel involvement 9-10 years ago.
This is crap navigation for phones/limited memory devices, shoveled up onto the full desktop. Unity looks to be... Much the same.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The thing is that people still bitch about KDE4 as if it still was stuck on 4.0. Mac OS X 10.0 was a pile of shit. Gnome 2.0 was shit. Windows Vista -- somehow, people stopped bitching about Vista when service pack 1, AKA Windows 7, came out. Some people have forgotten even how bad Gnome 2.0 was.
KDE? Oh, it's become pretty damn good in a very short time, works fine out of the box and you can configure it to hell and back if you don't like it. But people simply can't forgive the project for doing the same thing that Steve "can do no wrong" Jobs did with OS X 10.0: released too early. Hypocrites.
Nothing to get your panties in a twist over. I'm sure Gnome/KDE/XFWM will still be available from the repos no matter what canonical does. Besides, it's not like you can't still download Xubuntu, or Kubuntu and install Gnome there.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I knew that.
a few years ago i moved to xfce. I keep trying out other things E17, lxde, kde4, but i keep using xfce. Mostly due to the right click menu.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
""Lindows" was a some crap put together to try and not scare off Walmart customers from buying a $200 PC without Windows. It probably did more harm than good, as it was not free, which to home users is really one of the biggest advantages for linux. Microsoft complained about the name, and it was briefly renamed "Linspire" until Xandros bought them and dropped the product entirely. The only interesting thing it had going for it was the "Click'N'Run" app store, which was supposed to combine a good package management system (I think they used apt) with a front-end for searching and buying applications. However, IIRC it cost a subscription fee just to use the store." - by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @11:55AM (#34013260) Homepage
Per my subject-line above, I thank you for the info. (I was "hazy" on that & admitted it earlier, so it was a "live-N-learn" thing here & I thank you for that information).
Just "getting back into" Linux here, because last time I used it was around RedHat 5.2-6.0 builds really, and before that, way, Way, WAY EARLY ON in 1994 Slackware 1.02 (which means I probably tried it around the time the first folks here did really & I did not like it (lacked vidcard drivers, meant no "X" even for me, for an ISA based Diamond Stealth 24 "Windows Accelerator" vidcard).
I was also waiting for it to be multithreaded @ the kernel level (fully re-entrant core code that could "pre-empt" itself, and for there to be more than use "round-robin" to a single kernel mode thread for usermode multithreading)!
That all pretty much happened around kernel 2.2-2.4 iirc, around 2002-2003, iirc? Well, so that passed!
Then it was just really a matter of "end-user 'useability'" to happen, & it has imo @ least, with KDE 4.2-4.5x so far.
APK
P.S.=> So, again/lastly: IF the Linux folks who work on it @ the core (Linus T., A. Morton & crew) can get a GOOD VOLUME MGT. SYSTEM, &/or something like ZFS working in Linux, it'll take off even moreso than it has as a server in "industrial usage" I feel, and the gaming end? Get Linux THAT, & Windows/MS will be in serious trouble imo, because zero cost is HARD to beat when all else is pretty much equal... apk
*buntu land needs to RUN, not crawl, not walk, but RUN FAR AWAY from the disease that is gnome and monoboi's other crap...
But alas they still don't get it..."Unitiy....will require composting...."
Would you please QUIT with the stupid wobly windows, spinny cubes and other crap!
For a normal desktop KDE needs to be the choice, and yes I will be the first to get the tar, feather, and pitchforks out over the debacle that is and remains KDE4, unfortunately its still the better of the regular X WM's... For lighter weight LXDE, XFCE, etc. are great... just not for me..
If you want to see what a PROPER *buntu WITH KDE can look like then report to KMint and enjoy...
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1495
1311393600 - Back to Black
Isn't that sort of the point? Disrupt the user experience minimally when shifting from one OS to another?
Not for Ubuntu, it's not. They made that abundantly clear when they moved to the Mac-like "Min/Max/Close" setup out of nowhere in Lucid.
I just hope Gnome Shell isn't the disaster that KDE4 has been.
I really *want* to like KDE, but every time I try it, it is always broken. Take 4.5 for example. They finally have the desktop to a pretty stable level, and then for some reason decided to rewrite Kwin from the ground up, and caused a severe performance regression. It's not as noticeable on new hardware, but on an older machine it means not being able to play 720p HD movies without major performance issues. The same machine runs 720p just fine under Gnome.
After using KDE4.5 for a week, I uninstalled it and went back to Gnome. It might be plain looking, but it works. I really hope that Gnome Shell doesn't carry a lot of this sort of baggage.
I don't even understand what you're trying to do with this rather poor troll, apart from spewing regurgitated nonsense.
Nothing regurgitated about it. First-hand experience only. Fact is, at that time, KDE was a little more mature, and its apps were a bit more developed and didn't break as often. That doesn't mean I liked KDE (quite the opposite), but I try to be fair. Did you bother to read the rest of my post?
This is one of my favorites. You start off saying something very sane, so then when you pull the switcharoo to Plaid-speed Insanity, it packs the maximum impact.
The set up:
This is something many of us can relate to. (For me, it was Ubuntu 10.04 Server + hostapd + ath9k. Fail!) The above AC touches on something that doesn't make him seem like a wackjob at all. That's why when he pulls the switch
it leaves you reeling, because you don't expect it. When someone's criticism about an OS is lack of hardware support, you don't expect them to praise an OS that supports maybe 1% as much hardware as the one they just complained about. It's brilliant.
I am sick of my PT Cruiser's gas milage. That's why my next vehicle will be an M1A1 tank.
I have had it up to here with Democrats! That's why I'm voting Republican.
Zombie movies have been done to death. That's why I only watch vampire movies now.
Ubuntu doesn't have enough drivers. I'm switching to Mac OS!
Bud Light has no taste. That's why I drink Coors.
The Pentium II is obsolete. I'm getting an 80386SX.
Maybe because it doesn't work well for him?
I played with KDE 4 and felt that it was too buggy and slow. What should a Desktop do for me? Launch applications and maybe manage files.
That is really about it. I may pick a wall paper but that is it. Even widgets don't really thrill me.
I think that KDE has a lot of detractors because they don't find any benefit to it for them. Gnome actually works as a good compromise for IMHO between a bare bones and and overly complex desktop environment.
But then I may be just too hard to impress. I move between Windows, OS/X, and Gnome all the time and find them all about the same as far as the desktop goes.
Not wonderful but not great.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I use Gnome, because most of the programs I use tend to work better in it. I'm a bit compulsive with making things look the way they should.
KDE is, IMO, a knockoff of Windows (though I haven't used it much since 4.0 came out).
Gnome is also like Windows, but with a few things that make it more Mac-like. I can figure out both of them, but for me, Gnome "just works" and has fewer bugs.
IMHO GNOME and KDE happen to be a nice GUIs when combined with a great theme and icons. Sometimes people claim for innovation at the expense of consistency, and that's the price we pay. I'd stay with XFCE.
It's interesting how closely this anonymous summary echoes the sentiments of Jeff Waugh, who's never seen a good project that he wasn't able to slow down to a crawl, on Twitter: "... so now "Unity" becomes the most tragically ironic product name in #floss history. #ubuntu #gnome #fail #uds"
http://twitter.com/#!/jdub/status/28693612058
Wait a minute, have you ever tried to configure gnome-screensaver? They basically removed ~all configuration besides "which screen saver do you want and when do you want it?" It does have better encapsulation than xscreensaver, but ironically enough, all the settings that they nicely encapsulated are now hidden behind various semi-standard text files.
</rant>
Gnome != Windows
$ make available
I remember using gnome when it didn't have a built-in menu editor. I think that was as recent as 2005 or so.
If only the "community" had accepted KDE/QT instead of stomping their feet in righteous indignation, the Year of the Linux Desktop might have occurred a while back. But it seems that the community thrives on KDE v. GNOME, emacs v. vi and PeeCee v. Mac debates, so let's post a misleading anti-GNOME-ish article to Slashdot and generate some controversy whydoncha?
Who really cares what Ubuntu does or threatens to do. I've moved my lot to Linux Mint and am delighted that they are getting off the Ubuntu bandwagon and going with Debian. Life could not be simpler and more easily lived than on Linux Mint LMDE 10.
what it is with the various LInux distros. Why can't they simply establish a mechanism for systematically removing the various inconsistencies in the ways that they call the Linux kernel and in the way they are presented to the user? It that was available, then both groups build to the same standards specification to their hearts content. That way both groups have precisely what they want and users can chose which is best for them. Is it really all that hard to establish some rational measure of consistency from builds with alternate dependencies?
In principle there is nothing to stop anyone from creating a Gnome/KDE desktop that optimizes the desktop in a variety of ways of value to the user, with different optimizations for different users, who may have different needs or requirements.
They are not replacing Gnome. Unity is a shell that runs on top of Gnome. I tried Gnome Shell, which is also a shell that runs on top of Gnome. I didn't like it. I welcome an alternative to it. So these shells are just something that makes your desktop look nice and more organized supposedly. Gnome is still there. Quit with the ZOMG im swtching abck t ofedora!!! You don't have to use Unity or Gnome Shell. Am I wrong here?
Yes. In fact it is standard FOSS procedure. You don't like how one application suite works use what you like change what you don't and release back to the community. If the main distribution takes the changes into itself then don't fork. If they don't and the changes build up to a critical mass you have your own fork or shell add-on.
I use, and like Ubuntu. But I've never used Gnome.
I might use a few Gnome applications, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. I use Window Maker as my window manager, I use aterm for terminals, I use alpine for email, I use emacs/xemacs for editing.
Due to a bug in xorg in Ubuntu 10.10 which caused many applications to crash when using xinerama, including Window Maker, I was forced to use Gnome for a few days. It was pretty horrible.
I don't really care what Ubuntu's standard desktop is, I can still use whichever one I want.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
"People"? So you think that people.jobs-apologists = people.kde4-haters? Got news - they are two different sets.
Further, I DID pan 4.0 - it deserved it. (and that was BESIDES the fact that kubuntu made it impossible to have both on the machine if you wanted to use the repository - I'm STILL irritated at that)
The reason it took me so long to 'forgive' though, were the blatant LIES stated regarding what the 4.0 release was. The kde enthusiasts kept repeating them, and would attempt to shout down and denigrate anyone that didn't like 4.0 when it came out. (The 4.0 release page did NOT include any kind of note saying it was a testing or developer's release that wasn't ready for prime time. The actual release page said it was. The only reference re: development or testing referred quite clearly to packages that might not be ready in distro repositories yet). That left a bad taste in my mouth for a long time.
It was not ready, even though it is now. The only voice of reason at the time (that I can remember) was Aaron Seigo - and he was the ONLY reason I kept coming back to KDE to try it out with each release. Good guy.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
Ubuntu is not moving away from GNOME, so why doesn't the editor update the story?
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Yes, I read it, and deduced that you've tried neither KDE nor Gnome. 1997. Seriously. "The setting to make the desktop usable as a desktop again." It's as if your only goal is to make the comment plausibly on-topic.
Clippy would have said: It looks like you're trying to have a conversation.
Read the article, this is for netbooks, not desktops or laptops!!!
Mark politely refuses to sip the Kool-Aid!
Seriously, though, it'd be good to have Gnome Shell as an option for those who want it. It's possible Mark has backed down from his previous position of making change just for the sake of change.
On the other hand, Gnome Shell is truly innovative, and I commend the devs for that, and it's a good answer to MS fans who talk about the FOSS community not innovating. It'll be good to have a choice, though.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Weird how you can claim that GNOME has fewer bugs even though you haven't "used (KDE Plasma) much since 4.0 came out".
I am also tired of all the inconsistencies between the 6-month releases of Ubuntu. I think now that ubuntu is running on a lot of hardware, focusing on consistency and reliability would be much more important. Many changes are only done for the sake of changing! And unfortunately, this usually means that a lot of stuff breaks and that I have to figure out things again. Yes, you could say, then you should be going with the LTS releases. The idea is good, but in reality, my impression is that the LTS releases are not better-cooked than any of the standard 6-month releases; they have about the same amount of bugs. Moreover, with LTS releases, you are stuck with old software in many cases. I think it would make more sense to move to 1-year, or even 2-year release cycles for the core OS, with apps updated and maintained in between.
Plasma Desktop (the KDE project underwent a rebranding a year ago -- that's now the name of the DE) looks in its default layout somewhat like Windows but behaves actually very differently. The differences begin with the use of a single click to open files and end with Activities, newspaper views, etc.
The gnome shell, nautilus? misses basic features like transparent icons to signify selected (for copy/cut) items.
Windows 95 does it.
Yet, this bug has been open for years.
They refuse to fix it.
Other stuff is more important.
So the shell gets dropped...
Many people proclaim that OS X is an example of how great Unix front end could be, and that went mainstream. In order for Ubuntu to reach similar orbit, it's possible that it can't wait for Gnome proper to get it right, and they need to start making their own stuff.
Every time I try a new major KDE 4.x release, I still see regular crashes of various apps.
Gnome used to be a retreat from that - for all its flaws, at least it's rather stable - but they are fucking up the UI big time in 3.0 with this Shell thing. And Unity is even worse.
Well, I guess it's going to be XFCE for me from there. Hopefully someone will write a decent, stable DE in Qt4 in the meantime.
Ubuntu will be using Compiz for Unity, not Mutter. (The current netbook version is built upon Mutter, but it is being re-written for compiz.)
http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/a-bright-new-future-for-compiz/
The shell is my last refuge from GUIs and the damned mouse. I'd rather it be kept simple thank you very much.
Frankly, I can't stand all the GUI shell replacements for xterm for one simple reason: they integrate with the GUI. The GUI portion of these shells respond to key sequences that I prefer to go directly to the shell. If I use bash as my shell, I want alt-f to do what I've programmed it to do with readline key bindings, not invoke some annoying menu item. That way, when I remotely log into other machines, I don't have my local machine interfering. Logging and command history are more appropriately handled with built-in shell commands and tools such as "script" and "screen".
But I've been called a dinosaur before and undoubtably will be again...
There seem to be a lot of people complaining about it, but I *like* the current Gnome interface. It's simple, straightforward, has plenty of information available in minimal space and is pretty enough. OSX drives me nuts and I don't like the idea of GnomeShell or Unity. I like having a taskbar. I don't like having to click buttons or move my cursor to see which windows I have open. Evolution rather than revolution please.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1810977/ubuntu-unity-offer-2d-3d-graphics-1104
BTW: Compositing != Compiz. Newer window managers provide their own compositing without using Compiz.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Ever seen this? https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD
There is no need to spend time with packages you won't use.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
I'm preferring Gnome over KDE for one sole reason - 99% of applications I use everyday are Gtk based (e.g. audacious, xchat, gimp, empathy, gwibber, firefox, chrome, evolution, glade etc). The only Qt application I'm using is VirtualBox.
Ur. KDE? Their own wm? WAT
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
Please, give us a break here boys: marsu_k was first modded down for flamebait, and now is up modded? Who do you folks think you're fooling??
Let's let Mr. Bruce Perens, a pretty big name in the *NIX world no less, speak for me on this account, as to how "upmods and downmods" work here on /. (and everyone knows it):
"It just takes one Ubuntu sympathizer or PR flack to minus-moderate any comment. Unfortunately, once PR agencies and so on started paying people to moderate online communities, and to have hundreds of accounts each, things changed." - by Bruce Perens (3872) on Friday July 30, @04:55PM (#33089192) Homepage Journal
Straight from -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1738364&cid=33089192
APK
P.S.=> It's rather painfully obvious that marsu k is just another "multiple registered account utilizing troll" that mods himself up, even after others mod, or meta moderate him down.
That's lame tactics, guys, but easy to see through...
So, I have to ask, whoever modded him up: Is your fav. color "transparent" or what?? LOL... apk
For years now I run two partitions, presently one with a stable version of Kubuntu 8.04 and one with the latest Kubuntu 10.10 including KDE4.5.x . /home.
8.04 is installed on ext3, 10.10 on ext4 and via links they share parts of the
I learned long ago that cutting edge can be fun but you better have something secure to go back to when in need.
And I can say since about KDE4.2 I hardly ever come back to 8.04.
Once spoiled by the configurability of KDE you can only smile about Gnome users that class themselves as Hackers, Gnome seems locked up like OS X minus the 'it just works'.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Clippy would say it looks like your trying to start a fight.
I think this is why someone should either take Gnome and add in the "advanced" buttons that let nice tweaks, like screensaver settings in your example, be easily accessible, or take KDE and organize it properly so it's not a cluttered mess.
:D
Seriously, I believe there is a happy medium that you could make combining the two themes of Gnome and KDE, simplicity and power respectively, by burying the advanced features and tweaks and keeping the simple and common features up-front. I love each DE for each reason, but have ended up with Gnome as I dislike the clutter more than the removal of some features that I don't need all that much, or that installing some additional apps will give me.
Fork, anyone?
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
You could have upgraded from LTS to LTS (each 2 years instead of 6 months, possible since 8.04).
I grew tired of Debian for the Desktop even before Ubuntu existed, and when it came, it more or less addressed my issues.
1. I don't have time to configure/fix forever the same damn stupid things again. I like the install and it already works approach. We have lives to live...
2. I don't like Debian Stable, too old, and Debian Unstable too fragile/broken. While Canonical do pull from Sid twice a year, they test/fix stuff on their own.
3. PPAs, because sometimes a 6 month release is not enough, you can have a couple of crucial apps always updated thanks to this. Backports never got all you needed.
4. Innovation. Stability is nice for a base, but stagnation makes life boring. You might not agree with the changes, but at least they are trying new things.
5. Community support, aside from banning the unfriendly "RTFM" attitude, numbers here do matter. Ubuntuforums had become my most used source even for Debian issues.
I often use Debian at work, and my mind has not changed in the last 4 years. Even Ubuntu Server is becoming appealing now, although i still prefer the BSDs there. Ubuntu or a derivate (Such as Mint) is the best for the Desktop, and even "normal people". I don't do windows anymore, i just put Ubuntu using the "oem" install in their machines, it's my favorite/only solution to the tired "my windows has broken again" problem.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
"It was not ready, even though it is now."
Wrong. Its getting close...but has a long way to go.. but also has made choices that have altered the direction of the project from the KDE3 roots to a point that a KDE3 person, ME, has problems.
Examples:
media://
Alleged "fake transparency" when an user even offered up a fix! At least make it a choice to use this.. Nope! Composting or no transparency for you! PUHLEASE. That crap should not be intergrated into the WM.. It you want to add it fine, but not intergated.
"The only voice of reason at the time (that I can remember) was Aaron Seigo - and he was the ONLY reason I kept coming back to KDE to try it out with each release. Good guy."
Your wrong on this in so many ways, so wrong. That ONE PERSON is the BIGGEST PROBLEM in KDE Land from start to finish. Its the functions not the cute, pretty wobly windows, and stupid spiny cubes!
Art over function is not the solution!
1311393600 - Back to Black
Use Rekonq instead of Konqueror. It's based on Chromium.
That seems rather odd, considering they're mostly targeting Windows users. Bug #1 is about Microsoft.
"I want something that looks like Windows (start button, trashbin, tabs on bottom or top, etc). I tried to find Unity screenshots but found nothing. Does it look/feel like a Windows PC?" - by commodore64_love (1445365)
on Monday October 25, @11:22AM (#34012718)
LINUX XP:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=linuxxp
See that URL & this screenshot of it for your reference here -> http://distrowatch.com/images/cgfjoewdlbc/linuxxp-jvbxckujv.png
From the sounds of your requests?
Well - It MAY be what you're looking for, exactly (or, as "exactly" as is possible currently).
APK
P.S.=> Onwards & upwards, "getting back to you" is all, from my other reply to you here today in regards to KDE distro usage (I like KUbuntu personally, so I suggested it here -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1837998&cid=34012912 ... apk
No, I think people = people. Some people can't let KDE 4.0 go, even though they're perfectly capable of shutting up about practically all competing desktops. And on the contrary to what you claim, its unfinished status was in fact known, and the lack of features wasn't celebrated as a breakthrough in usability, which it was in Gnome 2.0.
It was made clear, and it was well known to everyone who considered installing it, that KDE4 wasn't ready for prime time at release. Yet you think it's in any way credible that you just happened to stumble over kde.org and saw the release announcement even though you were living in a bubble at the time and hadn't heard the rumours that it might not be quite the finished article just yet.
Oh, and hey:
"Cutting edge." "Marks the beginning." "Packages to test and contribute." Not: what you said.
I can understand that you're angry if you installed it and noticed an immediate drop in productivity, since what it actually did, then, was to expose you as an imbecile.
LINUX XP:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=linuxxp
That about "cuts the mustard" imo @ least, per the original poster's requests he find a Windows-Like Desktop for Linux... well, "there tis"!
---
"My apologies if I sounded hostile in that post, my intentions were to give some info on what "Lindows" is if anyone is looking for a Windows-like experience on Linux."
- by wastedlife (1319259)
on Monday October 25, @02:31PM (#34015668) Homepage
No, per my subject-line above? I think you were quite cool and NOT "aggressive" (a-holish, lol) to me at all, & I appreciated the historical backdrop actually... like I said earlier? I took a HUGE break from Linux, waiting for it to be what it is now, and hopefully, moreso in the future, per VOLUME MGT. SYSTEMS, &/or games on it.
---
"I agree that KDE is the way to go for something like that.""
- by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @02:31PM (#34015668) Homepage
Yes, I agree as you know, & for the same reasons the init. poster I replied to said he wanted: A desktop close enough to Windows to be VERY easy to adapt to.
---
"I hear Kubuntu gets far less development attention than the main Gnome-based Ubuntu, and see many people recommend SUSE for a KDE desktop."
- by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @02:31PM (#34015668) Homepage
Could be, I am not YET that "in touch" with the Linux crowd's "inner workings" (yet), but I intend to learn more as I go is all... you may be right, but, so far? Well, KUbuntu's been great to me, and it does get daily updates (via the software packages tool &/or drivers update tool (these are great)).
---
"I have not personally used KDE in a long time, but I think I might give it another shot now that 4.x seems to have ironed out most of the kinks."
- by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @02:31PM (#34015668) Homepage
Do, as it's "GOOD STUFF" now, @ least I think so (& I was a HUGELY "stiff critic" of Linux here for MANY years in fact, but, not anymore).
---
"I do recall a friend once customizing a KDE desktop for his parents to the point that they had no idea they were using Linux instead of Windows."
- by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @02:31PM (#34015668) Homepage
Heh, yea... well, see the 1st thing I posted above, lol... that oughtta "blow anyone's mind", especially on this account!
---
"Also, I agree that gaming is a big thing holding linux back from mass desktop usage, but I do not see how this can be fixed."
- by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @02:31PM (#34015668) Homepage
Time really... IDSoftware makes builds of DOOM/QUAKE/WOLFENSTEIN, so I figure it's only a matter of time before other major gaming houses do the same - it's only a matter of "love" on the devs parts though, because the "bean counters" are ALL about "sell, sell, sell" & Linux-wares are NOT generally sold for cash (freeware for the MOST part, right?)
---
"WINE and similar will always be at least one step behind in supporting DirectX/3D APIs, which are pretty much de facto. I've heard even John Carmack will be using DirectX/3D for an upcoming game."
- by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @02:31PM (#34015668) Homepage
Right, & JC was a HUGE fan of OpenGL on both Linux &/or Windows (& other systems/OS' too)... even he has to "go with the flow" @ times.
---
"I'm not sure what you mean by a "good volume management system like NTFS/Active Directory"
- by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @02:31PM (#34015668) Homepage
It's a feature for managing syste
Look, I'm all for smooth upgrades, consistency, and I understand why needless change is bad, but I think some people are equating change form something they are familiar with to needless change. Consistency is only a good thing when you either already possess a far superior UI to begin with (Apple in most people's opinions), or are mainly concerned with carrying over an old user base rather than expanding (Microsoft). As much as I love my gnome set up (elegant gnome + my own wallpaper + gnome do), I have to say the default gnome set up doesn't really blow anyone away, and it's hot keys, tricks, and menus aren't necessarily intuitive to a first time user. Basically, it doesn't really give anyone a reason to switch to Ubuntu on first glance. But you know what? The first time I showed my friends (mac and pc users) Unity and Gnome-Do, their first reactions were "wow, that's really cool" and "interesting (in a positive/excited way)" And when it comes down to it, Ubuntu is as much about attracting more users to Linux as it is about giving current Linux users a smoother experience. If Ubuntu doesn't have its own space carved out, what's to interest people, much less convince them to switch over? Plus, I would consider Gnome Shell a much bigger departure from the current gnome interface than Unity in terms of how you use it. Not saying Gnome Shell is worse or better than Unity, but I personally find I work faster on Unity and that Unity is a little more responsive to me.
sudo apt-get remove crap.
sudo apt-get install more_crap.
Once you click on your user name in the GDM login, you can change the default desktop to Gnome's original shell in the bottom panel.
So you are upset that KDE is not a copy of basically Windows XP/MacOS/Solaris/every other GUI?
How far we have come. When I started using linux, the complaint was that KDE was "just" a badly implemented copy of windows.
Is there something wrong with the Common User Access interaction design lineage? The very reason the document was put forth was to reduce user ramp-up time learning a new product.
WordPerfect 5, on the other hand, was a shining example of how to confuse the hell out of a new user by not working remotely like anything else out there. I used it for quite some time, even wrote applications with its macro language, and still couldn't get by without a key binding cheat sheet.
On the other hand, you could actually see begin and end tags in its Reveal Codes mode, and if you were willing to sink enough time and brain cells into it, it was wickedly powerful, so in some sense they were optimizing for the dedicated power user at the expense of the casual user.
On the gripping hand, for ~500 USD in the early nineties, perhaps they were right to expect a highly dedicated power user.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
KDE 4.5 is to KDE 4.0 as a Maglev is to a trainwreck.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I'm with you.
I just picked up docky, a month ago. I still have the regular "task" panel at the bottom, on "auto hide". It's my insurance policy - I can fall back to using the desktop that behaves as I expect it to.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Gnome Shell has been a goofy looking solution in search of a problem ever sense it's been announced. I'm actually thankful that Ubuntu is moving in a different direction. I still want my Gnome/GTK based apps, but I don't need their interface.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You didn't indicate that you thought I was being a jerk, I had just reread my post and thought it read a bit stand-offish. Glad you didn't feel that way.
Thanks for the tips, I'll have to check out KDE in my Ubuntu desktop again and maybe try the linux-xp in a VM.
For visual management of drive volumes, gparted is pretty strong on this front. The KDE equivalent is QTParted, although I do not know if they have feature parity.
For Active Directory, I misunderstood and thought you were talking about managing volumes with AD, hence the confusion. I agree that this is a must have for enterprise management of both servers and desktops. Anything I've seen from Red Hat or Novell just does not come close. I too am shocked that Novell did not do this considering AD started off as a poor copy of Novell's directory services.
But yeah, linux just never stops chugging along. It is a dominating player in the server arena and hopefully netbooks and tablets running linux will get more users to use it on a regular basis. In fact, tons of people already do and just don't know it (NAS devices, routers, phones and set-top boxes are already running linux in a lot of households).
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
I'm still using the same GUI in Windows that I started using in 1996 with Windows 95. There is no "try" about it... a few button clicks and about 30 seconds and I'm done. I don't have to download or install a single freaking thing, nor do I have to have any clue as to what is going on under the covers. I truly do not give a $hit that Windows "isn't modular." The GUI works the same way it has for the last decade and a half. That's what I need it to do, and the fact that Linux can do it in a more elegant way is not a feature I need.
It's interesting the differing philosophies. Gnome/Apple take the fewer features less configuration approach. Everyone else lets you do a ridiculous amount of crap to your UI. I personally prefer the KDE/mass configuration model, but the Gnome/Apple philosophy seems to be winning the hearts and minds of the masses. I regularly hear techy iPhone users actually brag about how few features their phone has. It's not cluttered with all the "useless crap" the other options have. *shrug*
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
He says that GNOME's rejection of global menus, for example, is one of the key philosophical differences that would be difficult to reconcile.
I haven't kept abreast of GNOME developments -- any clue what this part means? Just at first glance, it doesn't make a lot of sense...
Cheers,
Does a 4 digit id work?
I've been on the GNOME team for quite a while. First GNOME 2 builds were done on my laptop before the rest of the team got onboard with GNOME 2 work (and then it still took quite a bit of time for GNOME 2 to come out). I think that some mistakes were made, but I think GNOME 2.0 was more usable than 1.4. It didn't have the amount of customizability as 1.4, but it was way more consistent and worked far more reliably and was just damn prettier. I actually still like the spatial mode idea.
That said I'm not sure I was really crazy about gnome-shell nor unity when I tried whatever version I tried. One of the things I hate is that neither uses standard widgets. The netbook interface of ubuntu is very broken because it forced me to use a mouse because keyboard navigation was off (because of nonstandard widgets I assume) and using the mouse on the tiny netbook is a PAIN. Gnome shell has similar problems.
I would actually like the idea of GNOME getting simpler again. Get rid of the 2.x cruft and basically make the thing less complex. That is NOT the case with either unity or gnome-shell imo.
Jiri
What you mean to say is that *gnome* is a productivity/usability killer.
Drop-downs and preference pages that only give you one or two options, neither of which being the one you want/need? No thanks.
Begun, the flame wars have.
This. Just....THIS. Patrick decided to foist KDE 4 on me in Slackware 13.0 and I hated it. I spent days trying to tweak and configure it to get back to what I had with KDE3 but couldn't. So much effort goes into trying to match Windows Vista/7 with fancy desktop widgets and yet it seems that there are a great number of disaffected KDE3-lovers who just want to be able to work the way they used to. I actually looked at a ticket on their bug tracking system for an issue that I was trying to solve. Other users obviously cared about it enough, but the opinion of the developers seemed to be: "It works like that now, get used to it. Submit a patch or STFU. If you post more comments, we'll ignore this bug completely." Nice attitude. I don't expect KDE devs to be at my beck-and-call, but one comment single-handedly destroyed any inclination I had to try and get KDE4 working for me. I thought about going back to KDE3, but there seemed to be too many hoops to jump through, so:
$ xwmconfig # Select xinitrc.xfce, OK
Oh come now, fellow old timer, you can do better than that. Surely you remember MWM (Motif Window Manager) and twm (Tom's Window Manager)? All this fancy GNOME stuff; kids today don't know how good they've got it. Heck, I remember when, to get to the internet, we had to use special routers that used DECnet to encapsulate TCP/IP packets, because the latter was so new. The www hadn't been invented yet and spam only existed in tins.
Well. OLWM was there in the day - I just didn't know about /usr/openlook/bin back then.
Of course, FVWM in Magenta and Electric Blue. That's a classic look.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"You didn't indicate that you thought I was being a jerk, I had just reread my post and thought it read a bit stand-offish. Glad you didn't feel that way." - by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @04:21PM (#34017034) Homepage
Nope, like I said per my "subject-line" above?? You were QUITE cool compared to some of the very serious TROLLS I have had to deal with here over the years since 2001-2002 or so.
Your reply was actually WELCOME, as is this one (what w/ the info. on QTParted, & I hope KUbuntu has this, as I can use it! How?
Well, by doing as I have done in Windows since, oh, 1992 or so!
E.G. #1 -> I tend to move stuff like pagefile.sys on Windows to another disk, so, the same can be done in Linux for the swap partition for better overall performance by NOT "taxing" your main programs &/or OS disk in paging tasks (done here already & onto a TRUE SSD (non-Flash RAM based, faster on writes being DDR2 memory on it))
Only problem? I was only able to do it @ install time... I could not find the partitioning tool in KUbuntu! Especially a GUI one... so, thanks for your info. again!
E.G. #2 -> Webbrowser caches (I do this for Opera & I showed how to here -> http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1836434&cid=34004902 and also here http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1836336&cid=34001036 this week (the fastest browser only gets FASTER here, lol, via this "puny trick"), not sure yet on how to on Konqueror/ReKonq (the default webbrowser KDE has))
E.G. #3 -> %temp%/%tmp% ops movement to another diskdrive
E.G. #4 -> Apps or OS logging too to another diskdrive
See I think of it this way, & it's worked for me @ Microsoft's own "Tech Ed" 2000 -2002 where ideas of mine for SSD &/or Ramdisk usage took the company I did work for to a finalist position @ MS-TechEd 2 yrs. in a row in their hardest category: "SQLServer Performance Enhancement".
I figure the less your main disk does of that type of work from examples #1-4 above? The faster it will perform OS &/or Program executable loads I figure, & fragment your disks less as well, dual bonus (makes sense))
---
"Thanks for the tips, I'll have to check out KDE in my Ubuntu desktop again and maybe try the linux-xp in a VM." - by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @04:21PM (#34017034) Homepage
You're welcome, and you're welcome for the next "tidbit" from you to me, in return next below:
---
"For visual management of drive volumes, gparted is pretty strong on this front. The KDE equivalent is QTParted, although I do not know if they have feature parity." - by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @04:21PM (#34017034) Homepage
Not worried about striping or spanning: I just want to be able to graphically resize partitions, MOSTLY (for reasons #1-4 above mostly).
---
"For Active Directory, I misunderstood and thought you were talking about managing volumes with AD, hence the confusion." - by wastedlife (1319259) on Monday October 25, @04:21PM (#34017034) Homepage
Well, I am & I am not... AD is like Novell's own NDS (which was before AD really) & it allowed you to move ANYTHING around your entire enterprise in the tree you used (which beat the hell out of the old domains model, because once you "committed" to that? I, for one @ least, never EVER saw any solutions for changing a server role work generally... you were STUCK!)
Between AD &/or Group Policies? This is the 1 major area Linux needs to "Catch Up" in industrial environs imo @ least, to Windows... funniest part is?? NDS is a NOVELL product, & from what I recall of using it fairly heavily back in 199
His comments seem reasonable enought to me.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
"Actually, it is. Kubuntu gets sidelined by the development of the Gnome/Unity Ubuntu, where most tools are developed, and ends up looking, feeling, and working like a mess." - by Steve Max (1235710) on Monday October 25, @05:18PM (#34017850)
First, see my subject-line above. Secondly, your opinion? Who cares, as I disagree strongly about KUbuntu, because I use it everyday and it's pretty damned good. I don't see the hassles you speak of (though you speak SO "ambiguously" as to defend a the line of pure bullshit you're spewing here & you try to make the entire distro sound like it's broken and it's not... That's obvious enough (note your lack of specifics? You're not fooling anyone, troll!))
---
"Yeah, what about that? A distro that is just (K?)Ubuntu with a couple of extra repositories and different default settings is basically the same thing as (K?)Ubuntu, but with different default settings and applications? Who would have imagined?" - by Steve Max (1235710) on Monday October 25, @05:18PM (#34017850)
LMAO, doubtless coming from another 'wannabe' who *thinks* he knows computers... Steve Max: Do you even have a degree in the computer sciences, Steve Max? Do you have at least 17 yrs. of hands-on provable experience in computers professionally?? I do on both accounts & I have proof of it...
By the by: Who the hell are you to tell me "what's-what" on what I already KNOW here???
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"Sorry, but any experience with RH5/Slack 1.x is meaningless in deciding about distros today." - by Steve Max (1235710) on Monday October 25, @05:18PM (#34017850)
What, are you stupid? At the commandline/tty term ALONE you could still have gained by its usage as far back as today's distros, especially in shell scripting!
(Yup, as I strongly suspected: Another stupid little noob troll trying to "tell me how it is", lol, & I've been using *NIX variants since, oh, 1984 in academia... have you?)
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"You can't decide against Windows 7 because Windows 3.1 sucked, or against OS X because System 7 had no real multitasking." - by Steve Max (1235710) on Monday October 25, @05:18PM (#34017850)
Did I even mention those here? No. Who said I was 'against' other distros, especially when they're the SAME BASIC THING (Linux MINT & KUbuntu are SO CLOSE, it's not even funny... heck, MOST KDE based distros seem to be!)
---
"And I've fed the troll too much already to keep going, but your post is pretty funny." - by Steve Max (1235710) on Monday October 25, @05:18PM (#34017850)
Troll? Speak for yourself, noob... lol! See below especially in regard to this you dimwitted reprehensible little nobody of a troll...
APK
P.S.=> Lastly - I also posted about Linux XP too, which satisfies the orig. poster's (commodore64_love (1445365)) request mind you:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1837998&cid=34016492
Have you been as helpful to the poster I replied to, dipshit? No. You just act the troll... & you got burnt for it too.
In my opinion a desktop that adds takes a noticeable amount of time to load is just not worth it. I don't use Gnome on Ubuntu now and I suspect I won't in the future, The fact that the Unity Shell requires 3d hardware acceleration to be usable does not fill me with an optimism in this regard.
read my mind at http://the-willows.blogspot.com/
I also hated KDE 4, but found it getting progressively better with every 4.x release.
I prefer XFCE and I have been using it for many years (and I'm old school at that... configuring it the way XFCE used to be, rather than all Gnome-like and stupid) but I do use some of the KDE apps so I always have to keep a KDE build around.
I've recently just started using Slack again and the KDE that shipped with Slackware64 13.1 still left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, so I grabbed the sources and build scripts for KDE 4.5.1 from slackware-current and rolled that up to my liking.
I think it's almost there, it's got much better configuration dialogs now and stuff. It performs well and seems to be decently reliable. Still not for me, but I could use it.
At least they've made improvements to the Mr. Potato Head game (ktuberling)
Sorry, I'm on KDE 4.4.5 and still see random DE crashes and options that don't make sense. Widgets on the Dashboard lookalike randomly disappear altogether, that is if I can get them to launch properly at all. Compositing works fine, but I have to leave it turned off since other OpenGL programs don't work with it enabled so it may as well not work at all. Occasionally clicking on the "desktop" background is interpreted as a drag, and the entire "desktop" moves partway off the screen, requiring me to put it back with pixel-precision tracking - no snapping to edges or anything. Why the hell would I want that?
I know there was a lot of negativity about the KDE 4.0 release but I've moved on and judge the current release on its own merits. I just want a DE that works as well as KDE 3.3 did, dammit, and we still haven't seen anything from the KDE 4 line coming close to that.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I have Ubuntu running on three systems at home and as my primary platform at work. I am generally happy with it... except when it comes to upgrading. It seems incapable of managing even simple customizations. The lowest hanging fruit that needs to be plucked is network configuration. At both work and home I am using static IPs. The network management wizard (or whatever it's called) keeps trying to overwrite the interfaces file; I eventually remember how to suppress this via google but it's usually an hour wasted. Worse, during transition to a new version, Ubuntu thoughtfully notes that a variety of configuration files have changed (eg gtetris or some such) proffers a diff, and asks if I want to keep the old one or use a new one. Then it merrily runs off and overwrites all the network configuration information without so much as a how-do-you-do. I was upgrading from 9.04 to 10.04* this morning, and had to recover nameserver and gateway info from a colleague - all I had was loopback setup.
Video and audio always seems to be an issue, too. I had to do a fresh install at home because the system couldn't cope with a change from Nvidia to ATI video chipset, and stopped running anything with OpenGL. Tomorrow I'm wiping the work system with a fresh 10.10 because the Nvidia drivers (pick one of several) are now not being recognized, and even if I get X up with generic drivers the mouse and keyboard are no longer functional in an X session (such that I can't even get out to a shell with Ctrl-Alt-F1), even though the KB is fine prior to X. The last time I ran through an upgrade I had been able to get twinview working after spending a profanity filled day, but audio was somehow collateral damage, even though I didn't muck with anything obviously related to it. I could spend another day pasting bits of my logs into google but would rather spend half a day installing cleanly and restoring my home directory. Ironically I was feeling smug about my Linux platforms having just done this a month ago as a matter of routine Windows maintenance.
* My plan was to stick with 9.04 but I really need Thunderbird 3 to use a javascript filter plugin to compensate for the horror that is our corporate spam "filter", and the non-standard TB3 install suddenly got upset over an updated flash pluggin "shared" (??) with Firefox. I naively thought it would be easier to just bite the bullet and upgrade to a version where TB3 was part of the default install.
I think I will stick with Gnome! I woks! I hope Mint stays with it in its distro!!
Seriously. "The setting to make the desktop usable as a desktop again."
I refer to when KDE4 was first released. It came with a default setting that let you do all sorts of arcane things with your desktop, but not use it as a place to drop files and whatnot. I later discovered there was a switch I could change to revert to more intuitive (for me, that is) behaviour.
Anyone who has used Linux since '95 or so will have a list of "features" implemented in ANY of the desktop environments that seemed idiotic at the time. Sometimes they really were, and we had to find ways around them; otherwise we just learned to live with them and move on.
I think I might have been mistaken when I wrote "~1997". It might have been a year or two later, but I remember occasionally being frustrated with my preferred Gnome suite, and finding that the KDE equivalents tended to run more smoothly. Apart from that, it comes down to how comfortable one feels with the interface, and there lies a pointless flamewar with which I can't be bothered.
Did there used to be configuration other than which screensaver you want and how many minutes of idle after which to activate it?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
You're telling me.
I don't know about the others, but I'm savvy enough to use linux on the desktop for 90% of the time (I likes my Guild Wars). If I wanted to use a Mac, I'd use a Mac, dammit.
After so many years of using KDE with KDE apps I have come to expect my desktop manager to do a lot more then your assertion above. I want it to handle boring things like making external folders (sftp) feel native, that copy to clipboard and paste anywhere should just work, that drag and drop is anything and everything. I want filetypes to magically just know what I want from them, and right clicking to be very context sensitive. I want windows to give me info but not be in my way. KDE gives me that, like no other desktop environment ever has (group workload into 1 window: firefox, folder, music app: YES!). Unfortunately it always takes a while to learn the little tricks and default configuration of most distros is less then desirable.
Thanks for mentioning single click. Love it. Drives me crazy that other desktop environments are a mix of single and double click. Setting windows to single click is not the same as KDE's version.
You mean that KDE 4.5 will at some stage become KDE 4.0?
Seriously, loosen the tinfoil, I think it's affecting the circulation to your brain. Could it be that the slashdot hive mind can have dissenting opinions? No surely there must be a global conspiracy. FWIW, yes, I am a "multiple registered account utilizing troll" - I registered around 2000 when I was living in .de, but forgot what my password was (and after I stopped working there, lost saved credentials on my work computer/the work e-mail address I used for registering), didn't bother to re-register for a while.
Well, only if we can still get Kubuntu & Gnubuntu.
Have you tried ReKonq?
It is pretty good, at least better than Konqueror is (I am assuming you are talking about the browser side of Konqueror)
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I regularly use both when doing reviews for my blog and the newest KDE4 (4.5) is really good.
While not bug free yet, it has come a long way.
Gnome 2 has some basic niggles that are really getting to me, case in point the applets in the panels moving around between reboots. Or applets crashing.
And don't get me started on Evolution.
Back to the point though - up till the previous KDE4 release Gnome 2 has definitely been more stable - plasma crashes in KDE4 accounted for a lot of my KDE4 issues - but had about the same number of basic little niggles.
4.5 levels the playing field.
At least one can see the work going into KDE4 release on release, less so with Gnome. Guess they are focussing on Gnome3 now.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I used Gnome Shell for seven days trying to figure out if it was any good.
Sadly it tends to get in the way...
Here (shameless blog punt, I apologise) is Day 1, read from there.
http://g33q.co.za/2010/06/14/using-gnome-shell-day-1/
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I think that your second observation is spot on. Kubuntu is much more vanilla KDE than Ubuntu is vanilla Gnome.
If you want a really good KDE distro to try, go for Linux Mint 9 KDE, the 10KDE is not out yet.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Ugh. You just _had_ to drag clippy into this...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Have you tried right clicking on a panel widget and picking 'Lock to Panel'?
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
moderated already, so ac.
i've never used macosx (well, once, for 10 minutes, and i couldn't find the terminal).
i've been a longtime kde user. i currently have kde3 on my desktop and kde4 on laptop.
i skipped first kde4 versions because they did not feel usable to me at all - i tried livecd every now and then. note that i jumped to kde3 with the first betas, it really was a nice improvement.
so, kde4... ;)
1. even in latest versions, there are lots of graphical glitches, especially when switching another display on/off;
2. 'knetstats' in kde 3 was more usable despite it's drawbacks
3. i like amarok... i'm even wearing its t-shirt right now ! but i tried to like amarok2, and just didn't get to that. several months of attempted usage just drive me back to amarok1.
don't get me wrong, kde4 is nice - i like improvements to konsole (even though context menu for right clicking a tab was not available for a loooong time, i like new ksnapshot (even though it has graphical problems way too often).
it's just that there are too many problems even after what - two or so years ? so i'm still keeping kde3 on my workstation. maybe with kde 4.6...
compiz works just fine under KDE4.
IME compiz is more stable, more configurable and has a smaller memory footprint than kwin plus I get to use my favorite emerald theme.
I was a diehard GNOME user for years and KDE hasn't got it completely right yet - for instance I think kate is just awful and prefer gedit for a gooey text editor. I've tried learning to like kate but so far haven't been successful.
But - I do like that KDE seems to have the integration that GNOME lacks for the most part.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
"While not bug free..." You realize you are talking about software, right?
Use Rekonq instead of Konqueror. It's based on Chromium.
It is based on webkit, not chromium.
rekonq is a KDE browser based on Webkit. Its code is based on Nokia QtDemoBrowser, just like Arora. Anyway its implementation is going to embrace KDE technologies to have a full-featured KDE web browser.
I hope they eventually reach their goal of suppporting chrome extensions.
Drives me crazy that other desktop environments are a mix of single and double click.
Mixing clicks means never having to hover and wait for selection, then hold down shift and move the pointer and wait again. I can click and shift click before you're done hovering.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I remember the Window-manager-of-the-month club. Beginning with Enlightenment and finally sticking with Metacity, except when its Compiz that used to be Emerald.
You don't remember that well. With Compiz it used to be Beryl, now you can use gtk-window-decorator or you can use Emerald. I'm using it right now because the window decorators beat the living shit out of the GTK one (I use TruGlass.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You like docky better than avant-window-navigator? The recent releases (e.g. from the testing team PPA) will even fall back to ugly but working non-composited mode so if Compiz dies the dock remains.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
hah. Yeah.
You're perfectly right.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Rekonq is based on Chromium, which is based on webkit.
Thanks. I wish I'd had the patience you'd shown with it. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Thanks. I haven't had compositing fail in over a year. I guess nVidia has been stable. :-)
I too, use the Emerald decorator. Per your other comment, yes I glossed the Beryl/Emerald pairing vs. Compiz. I also didn't go into the detor that was Sawfish - before Metacity... I believe we have significantly illustrated the bumpy road which was travelled by the Gnome user.
Ugh! I just recalled doing Helix installs on top of a base RedHat WS. It had been blotted from memory!
All said, the new, Gnome Shell makes me resort to using a terminal as my principal program launcher. I don't believe that this is a design goal of the project.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Thanks, its nice to have a conversation about both the goods and bads of *NIX that doesn't devolve into an argument. I think it is easier to have an open mind if you use software pragmatically as opposed to zealously following one sect or the other. I see this time and time again with BSD vs. GPL licensing debates. GPL advocates often see BSD-licensed code as too easily stolen and BSD advocates see GPL-licensed code as "infectious" and too restrictive. The reality is that a developer needs to weigh the different licenses and decide if they want the code free for anyone to take or if they want others to be required to share changes back with them.
By the way, I took a look at the feature sets for qtparted and gparted. There are some screenshots on the respective web pages. I know (k)ubuntu keeps low-level system tools to a minimum, but I would be shocked if neither of these were in the default repositories. Gparted definitely is more feature-rich, but if you don't need any of the extra features I would try QTparted first. Gparted would likely require extra gnome libraries if you are in KDE.
Also, if you want or need to do offline partition management, I would recommend using the Parted Magic live CD.
Lastly, it looks like NDS is still alive and running in SUSE Enterprise Server, but under the name eDirectory. I am not familiar with it, so I do not know if it does as good a job as Group Policy in Active Directory at managing settings for tons of machines remotely. There is also no price listed, and I believe it is sold separately from SUSE Enterprise, so it may also lose out on a cost standpoint.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
It has as start-button analog, a clock, you can move windows around with it, and the file manager type windows show you previews of your media files. Who cares what its called? Who cares which desktop you have as long as it does these things?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I quoted from their web site. It is based on QtDemoBrowser
I remember when Gnome didn't have a built-in menu editor. I think that was around 2005 or so--it was before Sarge was released, so not too long ago. I don't recall being turned-off by the limited configuration options, but it was frustrating, back then, how Gnome could make the simplest operations inordinately difficult.
Since there exists:
Kubuntu (KDE)
Xubuntu (XFCE)
Lubuntu (LXDE)
and probably soon Gubuntu (GNOME),
it is good to see that Uubuntu will finally use a desktop environment starting with 'U'.
First Sunday of each month, eh?
So you don't apply kernel patches *right* away AND you seem to have a functioning social life?!
I am going after you just on principle! ;))
Why Do Gnome Needs to Bring this Gnome Shell Thingy?Ok..What I want to ask is, Give Us the Old Gnome Interface Lovers an Option.It Won't Harm.Pray tell Me!
"Thanks, its nice to have a conversation about both the goods and bads of *NIX that doesn't devolve into an argument." - by wastedlife (1319259) on Tuesday October 26, @12:57PM (#34026602) Homepage
Agreed, 110%, & you're welcome...
There is a LOT of that here (bad debates that degrade into total all-out flamewars &/or adhominem attacks instead of discussing facts), more than I have seen anyplace else online in fact.
I'm NOT above it, though I should NOT get "dragged into it". I just don't like being called names, or, seeing others try to distort facts or LIE...
See - The ONLY times I get "into it" with someone is if they take a "potshot" @ me first, as it was how I was raised (it stops "bullies", even if you get your face busted up a bit).
Online though? Well, then, I annihilate with facts once the ad-hominem attacks start (& occasionally, "righteous indignation").
BOTTOM-LINE TO ME:
I like both OS' families "in conflict" now (might as well be "general" about it, *NIX vs. Windows), & more than ever, because they're all pretty damned good now (*NIX variants, & Windows variants).
Personally speaking though, & this is just "theoretical speculation" here?
Well, what I brought up earlier on *NIX fragmentation @ binary compatibilities levels in the earliest branches (AT&T/Bell Labs UNIX vs. BSD mainly)?? Well, I figure if THAT didn't "go down"?? We'd ALL be running somekind of *NIX today in fact, & Microsoft/IBM (the main builders of the Win16/32/64 API really 'way back when') wouldn't have stood a chance.
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"I think it is easier to have an open mind if you use software pragmatically as opposed to zealously following one sect or the other." - by wastedlife (1319259) on Tuesday October 26, @12:57PM (#34026602) Homepage
It is, and I think one would be sort of "foolish" to put all of ones "eggs into 1 basket" really (I go strictly into why after the "BOLD" part below, but I have a few things to say on the way as to why)...
I have seen where companies rise to a HUGE "high" and then sort of "plateau there" for decades - IBM being the main case/example I have to offer I suppose.
LOL, for them all, in these companies? I suppose it's like achieving "escape velocity" from the earth I suppose - you only have to get "so fast" to get there/achieve your goal (in business, the analog would be "get so big" I guess) before you achieve that goal.
(After all - If you're publicly held as a corporate body, and always yield the stockholders a decent dividend every payout period then, you've done your job... you can go on "glide" until the competition starts "catching up"... problem is? They usually do, given time).
E.G.-> MS & others took a BIG bite outta IBM, not so much @ the "big iron" level, but vs. their midrange systems like the AS/400 (OS400) zOS stuff (used to be System34/36/38 stuff)... this is an "example thereof" & I do really *think* this is going to start happening to Microsoft.
I sort of even hinted it to one of their senior mgt. (he posts here as Foredecker), because I've seen it before over time... but, it's not like IBM "disintegrated"... they are STILL a huge force! They're just not as "overall domineering" as they used to be, & @ ALL levels... same is happening to MS I feel, slowly, but it is.
Linux tore its "traditional UNIX" bretheren a new one (yes, MS did the same too to the IBM's, DEC, & Sun type *NIX companies), & is continuing to do so, but it is also slowly eroding MS's hold on "server-dom" @ the departmental & enterprise class server level also I think, & I finally again DO think that Linux @ home is VERY doable (I like KUbuntu 10.10 VERY much in fact).
WHERE WAS I GOING WITH ALL THAT?
Well, to keep safe & have MY "personal bases" covered? It's best to try to be fairly proficient with ALL the major Operating Systems & wares out there... for employment's sake
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1837998&cid=34018050 by angloquebecer (1821728)
on Monday October 25, @05:35PM (#34018050)
Take a read, marsu k, & I suggest you quit operating on stale information & the past... things DO change you know, & my testimonial along with the fellow's there in the URL I just posted tends to "2nd my motion"...
Additionally, I didn't STOP there, I also posted about Linux XP, which DEFINITELY satisfied "Commodore64Love" the OP here's request (finding a Linux distro with an XP style interface & Linux XP over @ distrowatch DEFINITELY "fits that bill").
Have YOU been as helpful, or "on topic" regarding his requests? No - you've merely been a f'ing troll!
APK
I agree. Mostly. I like the idea of gnome-panel and the now conventional GNOME desktop. However, gnome-panel is horribly broken and nobody seems interested in fixing it. If you change resolutions frequently, for instance, then the applets get thrown around.
There is a solution, though. xfce4-panel works much better. Using xfApplet-plugin, you can also run many gnome-panel applets, though there are compatibility issues. I hope that this change from Canonical will fuel the interest in writing new plugins for xfce4-panel. If we can recreate the basic functionality of gnome-panel, then the problem is solved and we have made a good step forward in the direction we like. Using xfce4-panel with metacity or compiz, works very well, so it isn't necessary to switch to xfce.
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1837998&cid=34018050 by angloquebecer (1821728)
on Monday October 25, @05:35PM (#34018050)
Take a read, marsu k, & I suggest you quit operating on stale information & the past... things DO change you know, & my testimonial along with the fellow's there in the URL I just posted tends to "2nd my motion"... apparently, you don't know as much as YOU like to *think* you do on computing.
Additionally?
Well, I didn't STOP there, I also posted about Linux XP here, and also for the OP too in another post directly to HE (commodore64 love) instead:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1837998&cid=34016492
Which DEFINITELY satisfied "Commodore64Love" the OP here's request (finding a Linux distro with an XP style interface & Linux XP over @ distrowatch DEFINITELY "fits that bill") & kept ME "on topic"...
Funny how you get modded up for your bullshit though, off topic crap that it is, and you also admit to having multiple registered accounts here as well below... figures (another 'thinks he is clever' little online weasel, in yourself - you're not fooling anyone with the b.s.!)
So, in the end?
Well - Have YOU been as helpful, or "on topic" regarding his requests? No - you've merely been a f'ing troll, marsu k... and others are noticing it, OR, agreeing w/ my statements also!
APK
P.S.=>
"Seriously, loosen the tinfoil, I think it's affecting the circulation to your brain. Could it be that the slashdot hive mind can have dissenting opinions?" - by marsu_k (701360) on Tuesday October 26, @02:33AM (#34021782)
Sure, but you don't have to be such a facetious little punk about it, as you have been. Little wise ass weasels like you wouldn't last 2 minutes where I am from, but then, that's the REAL world, not online where a little "wannabe" like you can "act the loud mouth" & get away with it... especially behind your b.s. handle/nick here.
The little "global conspiracy" crap you spouted above? If you tried to insinuate that to my face, or anyone else's around here? I guarantee you'd end up flat on your back, knocked out. Nobody around here, including the courts, tends to give a shit about weasels like you is why. Obviously, you've never had anyone fix your wagon for your antics (or you have in the real world AND now online? You can be your "real self": which is, obviously, a sarcastic little worm). You're the kind of little weasel whose women I bop and make you watch, lol, and while you do my yardwork for me.
This figures too, & I knew it:
"FWIW, yes, I am a "multiple registered account utilizing troll" - I registered around 2000 when I was living in .de, but forgot what my password was (and after I stopped working there, lost saved credentials on my work computer/the work e-mail address I used for registering), didn't bother to re-register for a while." - by marsu_k (701360) on Tuesday October 26, @02:33AM (#34021782)
Figures, & I was right on that too: Most guys who are worth their salt KNOW little trolls & weasels like you, & honestly? It's WHY we pity little fucks like you.
Ever wonder WHY women do NOT like you? This is why, look how you act!
(Additionally? Well, that fellow angloquebecer from the 1st URL I posted above's NOT the only one who agreed with myself here: wastedlife, another replier here, also agrees that the closest he knows to get to what commodore64 wanted is a Linux based on KDE also, see his posts here - see that 2nd url above in fact, to that effect & please, for your sake & the rest of us? GROW UP TROLL! You're little multiple account tricks don't fool us here!)... apk
I have both KDE and GNOME installed because I find programs from each that are superior to the other (for instance, I <3 K3B, and Amarok is good (1.x is better than 2.0 though), but I also <3 Chromium and Pidgin.)
As for which DE I use, I prefer KDE, though I like GNOME a lot. Simply a personal preference.
A wise man once said, "Where is my other quotation mark?
It's got an overload of features (especially built into its graphical interface), which is simply what some people prefer.
I am not devoid of humor.
First of all, your admission of you using multiple accounts says it all - your kind here or on any other forums? Lowest of the low.
Secondly, the facts with backing opinions from others in that discussion showed that your "opinion" was not just that - your "opinion" was a screwup on your part also, which indicates your bullshit is used to troll others here, but unfortunately, it also shows you know jack shit as well, and that your "information" is stale!
E.G.-> 3 others in that discussion there (see URL below) and myself know that KUbuntu is VERY NICE nowadays, especially since 10.04.1 (currently it's @ 10.10)... and, http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1837998&cid=34045504 also shows more folks at that discussion told you you were wrong about KUbuntu having hassles like you described as well.
In the end?? Quit trolling others, & don't shoot your mouth off where you clearly do NOT know what you're talking about!
See subject-line (& don't worry about brief replies, you did the MAIN thing needed here: You got me the information I needed, mostly (I just don't know SPECIFICALLY yet how libraries (dll analog in Windows) are handled vs. how they are in Win32/64, where you have a "std. oldschool DLL type" & the newer COM/OLE type DLL, which needs something called a GUID to register itself and to be "marshalled" (fancy term for loaded & used))).
I would write longer too today, but, I am in a "time pinch" myself (moving into a new home I purchased & that meant "downtime" online & in other things in life too)...
APK
P.S.=> Again though - bottom-line here? Thanks... apk