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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?"
...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?
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/
well ... considering that Miguel de Icaza has been in secret talks with Palpat^WSteve Jobs to make Gnome so hard to customize that people won't see why they should use it instead of just buying a mac, it's just being fair to both sides.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
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.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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.
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.
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.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
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?
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.
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.
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