Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Beats the hell out of their Hamm's Hippopotamus release.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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/
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 has held GNU/Linux back for nearly 10 years now.
Started 1997, first release 1999, more like 11 to 13 years rather than nearly 10 years.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
Which, really, has nothing to do with this. Anyone who doesn't know what Aero or Aqua are doesn't need to know whether they are using Unity or GNOME either, both will just work. For some of us, though, it's interesting news.
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.
"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 hope my neighbour's kid can make my damn Windows machine work again." -Joe Q Public, 2 weeks and 10 malware infections later
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.
Just wait for Orgasmic Octopus.. it's everywhere you want it to be..
which is totally what she said
For the love of $DEITY, stop recommending Kubuntu, it's an half-assed effort that keeps giving KDE a bad name. Yes, the 4.0 release was a PR disaster, whether it was the fault of the developers or distros is debatable but irrelevant now. If you want to run KDE, do yourself a favor and use a distro that puts some effort to it, like Mandriva, OpenSUSE or Chakra.
Nah. It'll suck.
Yeah, that's all well and good until you have a problem with running Random Program 10.4 on Mac OS 10.6 and all the search engines give you is advice on how to run Random Program 10.6 on Mac OS 10.4. That's when the names are useful.
And you can still use the version numbers if you prefer.
"Random Program 10.4" on "Mac OS 10.6"
The biggest problem I have is with Google thinking punctuation is white space.
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?
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."
Random? They're in alphabetical order and they alliterate.
There never was an 8.0 or 8.1. They're all x.4 and x.10, since they're released in April and October. Though they used to be x.6 and x.10 when they released in June and October. That bit seems to confuse the most people; the numbering scheme.
Also the Mac Gs refer to the hardware, not the OS.
I'm holding out for Xenophobic Xylophone.
...I just came for the free beer.
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.
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.
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...
Though they used to be x.6 and x.10 when they released in June and October.
The only June release was 6.06, and that was only because it wasn't ready for release in April. The goal has always been releases in April and October.
FWIW, I wish there was a window manager that set it's own paradigm.
There are several families of window managers that are pretty much unique to UNIX environments. Someone already mentioned Window Maker, there's also Afterstep if you like NextStep. There's also the Fluxbox/Openbox family. There's Enlightenment too.
Although if you want a wholly new paradigm that simply doesn't exist on other platforms, try a tiling window manager. Ratpoison/Awesome/evilwm/wmii/ion, there's actually a lot of these. Nobody who's used one of these window managers can accuse the Open Source community of not innovating.
it'd be nice if there was a window manager that set the standard for FOSS GUI desktops.
There will never be a wm that "sets the standard" because interface choice is too personal. Think of the actual physical desktops people use, and all the ways they choose to organize things. You can't expect computerized desktops to be any more consistent.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Gnome has held GNU/Linux back for nearly 10 years now.
What's wrong with it? How do you think we would have been better off without it?
Bow-ties are cool.
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
Maybe they just want to wait for it to exist and test it and shake the bugs out before they decide to use it ?
Why would they do that when Pulse Audio has worked out so well?
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
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.
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.
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
"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!
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.
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.
You are confused. Nowhere in the article it says that this is for netbooks (indeed, Ubuntu already ships with Unity for Netbook Remix, so this wouldn't be news). Heck, the second sentence of TFA is:
Moving to Unity as the default interface for Ubuntu Desktop with Natty Narwhal (11.04), rather than GNOME Shell.
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.
Use Rekonq instead of Konqueror. It's based on Chromium.
Beats the hell out of their Hamm's Hippopotamus release.
I was still holding out for Narcoleptic Nightingale.
"Just a fox, a whisper."
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.
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.
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.