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?"

Comments

I agree...

[noidentity]

...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?

And this is why people stick with other OSes

[TrisexualPuppy]

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?

Re:And this is why people stick with other OSes

[jedidiah]

OTOH, I am free to use the same UI I was using in 1998. This won't quite fly with either MacOS or Windows.

Sure, you can try to enable "legacy interfaces" with other operating systems but their GUIs simply aren't built to be modular.

Linux is. That's why I can run whatever I want despite what the "guys in charge" think. Changing or keeping my own customizations is also pretty trivial.

If you think "everything has changed" from one version of Ubuntu to the next, I suspect that you are only looking at a clean install.

Re:And this is why people stick with other OSes

[timeOday]

I have just stuck with fvwm, from slackware, to debian, gentoo, now ubuntu. It's lighting-quick, doesn't waste screen real estate, and basically gives me nothing to complain about. I've had the same config file for at least 10 years, I just copy it over to each new machine and tweak it when I start using an app enough to want it on the launch menu.

Ubuntu makes it easy to do this; fvwm is available from the default package set, then select it as your "session" at the login screen.

My point being, I share your dislike of needless changes, but I don't feel I've been forced to change.

Re:And this is why people stick with other OSes

[Chris Burke]

Oh no. The window controls moved from the right top of the window to the left top of the window, some icons look slightly different, and the default theme is a slightly different shade of brown. My world, she is rent asunder.

The interface changes from the last few years of Ubuntu updates are in the same order of magnitude as XP to Vista, or Win98 to XP. The "consistency" of Windows is an artifact of them not releasing a new OS for over 5 years. When they do, they of course make different decisions than what they made years before in a previous release. They only maintain "consistency" in the broadest scope, like there's still a Start menu and window frames still have a Close, Minimize, and Maximize buttons. Ubuntu has this too.

I understand that consistency is something people desire in the abstract. I do not believe that lack of consistency is a reason anyone stayed away from Vista. They stayed away because it was crap. Now people are happily using Windows 7, and the fact that some icons look different. Similarly, the Ubuntu releases are not so dissimilar as to actually cause significant confusion. Maybe for 5 seconds -- "where did Minimize go? Oh, there it is."

And frankly, if those 5 seconds of confusion cause a panic, or a desire to avoid that OS from then on, then I believe that you need to be exposed to some inconsistency in the form of new GUI interfaces. Learning to use one and exactly one specific interface is a recipe for obsolescence. Exposure to multiple GUIs results in generalizing your understanding, so then when you sit down in front of a new and seemingly completely different GUI (like your friends Macbook), you aren't lost.

That said, consistency is good, and randomly changing the interface (considered in isolation from why) is undesirable. But that is not why people are avoiding Ubuntu and Linux in general. They're avoiding it for other OSes because those other OSes come pre-installed by OEMs, and support all the software they want to run.

Re:Ordinary people use Ubuntu

[corbettw]

That's funny, because I consider myself in another target group of Ubuntu users. I know all about the guts of Linux, but frankly, computers are not my life. I'm too busy with a wife, kids, social obligations, neighborhood functions, and just living life to bother with all the work that seems to go along with most other distributions. Using Ubuntu allows me to free my time to spend on those things I find important rather than downloading, compiling, and installing the latest kernel once a month. I can just put "aptitude safe-upgrade" in cron to run at 1am on the first Sunday of each month and I know I'm good.

Re:Ubuntu is dead to me.

[jedidiah]

I would use MacOS if not for that whole "failing to support hardware" thing that you like to give Ubuntu flack for.

Seriously. I run Linux on Apple gear because Linux hardware support is better.

If your thing is "everything is supported", then Apple really isn't the platform for you.

Re:Wow

[heathen_01]

I can't freakin' STAND Gnome. I never really understood the appeal of it...just seemed like a convuluted mess to me.

Re:Ordinary people use Ubuntu

[eddy the lip]

I'm with you. I've been using linux as my primary OS for work and play since you had to edit x.conf by hand. I had a lot of fun learning about the guts of the system, I just don't have time to do that much anymore. I'm grateful that there are distributions that let me just get work done, and still let me get dirty with it if I really want to.

And after all these years, I'm finally having friends ask me, unprompted, to install linux on their machines because they're tired of Windows. It's only been recently that I've been able to say "sure" and leave off the two page list of caveats.

Heck, I don't even have to install it for them anymore - I just give them an Ubuntu CD and tell them to call me if they have any problems. They're usually just fine on their own.

Re:Wow

[MrHanky]

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?

Re:Wow

[Andy Dodd]

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.)

Re:Mwahaahaaa!

[moonbender]

Most halfway computer literate persons will be able to use in some fashion all of the following: all Windows version from 95 to 7, all Mac OS versions from 7 up to 10, and all Ubuntu version starting from the very early ones (don't think I've personally witnessed the first release). They're all essentially the same in far more ways than they are different. It's all WIMP.

Whether or not any OS has been "consistent" over the years is really just semantics. You're cherry picking certain aspects (the mere existance of a start menu, for instance). I think claiming that the user interface of Windows and Mac OS haven't changed significantly in those years is ridiculous. I can tell you that despite being a excessive user of all Windows versions up to XP, I now have difficulties accomplishing simple tasks such as disabling a network connection in Win7; not because the user interface is worse (I assume it's better), but simple because it's really different, particularly if you've developed a kind of second sense for the previous versions. I'm sure the first Ubuntu version resembles the current Ubuntu release more closely than Windows 95 resembles Windows 7. But that is hardly fair, since Ubuntu isn't all that old.