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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."
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.
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/
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.
"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 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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Nah. It'll suck.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
You are assuming that these two groups of FOSS proponents are the same folks. This is not necessarily the case. Just as the community is large enough to favor different preferences for the software itself, the community is large enough to foster different ideas about how the software development should proceed.
Bow-ties are cool.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
KDE 4.5 is to KDE 4.0 as a Maglev is to a trainwreck.
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