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."
...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?
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.
"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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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.
KDE 4.5 is to KDE 4.0 as a Maglev is to a trainwreck.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.