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Ubuntu 11.10 To Switch From GDM To LightDM
dkd903 writes "Earlier, during the Natty development cycle we reported that LightDM is being considered as a replacement for GDM. That did not happen for Ubuntu 11.04, but today it has been confirmed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Budapest that LightDM is finally replacing GDM in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric."
Unity Vista(tm) is Canonical’s response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.
“This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical’s vision of the desktop,” said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. “So we added a ‘minimise’ button too.”
Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth’s roadmap for Unity Vista. “I woke up one day and thought, ‘Gosh, I’d really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I’m using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can’t think of a better user experience.’ We’re not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way.”
Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. “It’ll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called ‘phones’ and run Android.”
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Really... they are joking, right? LightDM isn't light at all
I understand "big changes" in Linux distributions that have a day to day impact on all users like switching to X.org or Unity are important events. But most people spend about 10 seconds tops interacting with Gdm every day. It's just not that important for most users.
Considering the number of things that get broken in GDM in every new Ubuntu release, this may not be a bad thing. For example, going from 10.04 to 11.04 gdm started displaying every single user in the /etc/passwd file, except when it randomly only displays the last one who logged in.
orifice ostrich will be the best ubuntu ever!! year of the desktop linux? MORE LIKE DECADE OF THE DESKTOP LINUX!!!
and does this change actually fix anything? or does it just break stuff as usual?
The real question is whether they will switch from Unity as the default to something else. Anything else.
Natty goes from Gnome to Unity
Oneiric goes from GDM to LightDM, Firefox to Chromium and X to Wayland.
While it's not quite on the level of OS9 to OSX and definitely not without losses, 2011's Ubuntu releases will change the landscape of Linux for the better.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
This decision seems logical, especially for interfaces that might be used on netbooks. No need for fancy stuff before you even login to your desktop
Some of us learn from other people's mistakes and the rest of us have to be other people. -- Zig Ziglar
Need I say more?
> But does not actually provide a shut down option, because that might confuse users too much.
Ah, but if you are one of the advanced users (who GNOME wishes would just take the hint and switch to another desktop) who insist on a shutdown option, you can go read the arcane lore on a blog that describes in perfect detail how to download a non-supported third party plugin that will add a shutdown option. Of course the blog post isn't easy to find on Google and documents a procedure that doesn't quite work right with the current release and the link to the actual download is now a 404 error with herbal viagra adverts on it.
Democrat delenda est
> Need I say more?
In a sane world I'd disagree. But I know we live in an insane one and it won't take long for the idiots who thought using an HTML rendering library to render the login screen will start adding net based content as plugins to the login screen. Why not put a weatherbug up? Or a news ticker. Or the phase of the moon, and getting it locally is just too much trouble. Stock tickers? Why not. Until an exploit.
Bet WebKit's squalid bulk didn't go into the 5KLoC vs 50KLoC size difference.
Democrat delenda est
It's a normal X login manager without all the extra crap from gdm and kdm, and since it's in the Ubuntu repos already, all it needs is a good theme.
If you like GDM, you can use it. This is free software (in both senses), and just because Ubuntu's main branch is going a particular direction doesn't mean you have to. If you want to be based off of Ubuntu, you could do a kubuntu-like fork. If you want to do something completely different, you can switch distros (e.g. I switched to ArchLinux because I didn't want all the eye candy and complexity of what Ubuntu was doing).
And if you're really not seeing the choices you like out there, you can always roll your own. I've done that too, it's time-consuming but not particularly difficult. And if you really like doing that, you can fairly easily set up your installs with a package manager, set up a repository, and all of a sudden you're well on your way to having your own distro.
As it stands, I'm interested to see what Ubuntu comes up with, but I don't equate them to desktop Linux. There are just too many good options out there for that.
I am officially gone from
http://www.advogato.org/person/mjg59/diary.html?start=296
To summarise, their argument is that LightDM is light on code because it can't do as much as GDM and the others, and if you removed those features from the others they would be light as well.
If that's true and that is the main difference, maybe it'd be easier to strip out, or turn off, parts of GDM if Canonical wants to dispose of certain features to achieve a faster boot time.
11.04 is SO SLOW to boot in comparison to 10.10.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
Many a time I searched for a replacement for GDM, but none of the alternatives provide the switch-user feature that I need (that is, the ability to have multiple users logged in at once, with an option to switch from one to another; useful for when there are more users than machines at home).
factor 966971: 966971
I really like Unity, too. It got me to finally try Xfce, and I'm very happy with the change. (I've been meaning to try it out for ages, but never got around to it.)
After switching back to 'classic' I just fired up synaptic, installed Xfce and whatever recommended additions I thought looked good, logged out and back in using Xfce, and I haven't had an urge to go back yet. Granted, it's only been a few days, but the things I do every day work as well or better.
I liked it so much that I installed Xubuntu on another system, and really like the defaults they put in place there.
I think the next time I reinstall the OS on my 'regular' computer (as opposed to just upgrading Ubuntu) I'll be grabbing Xubuntu.
WALSTIB!
Why in the world are you allowing unprivileged users to set the theme for something that runs as root?
It's not like you're on the internet browsing random sites, it's pulling a few things from disk you have to be a privileged user to set.
If the user has the privileges to change the theme, they had the privileges to corrupt/delete important files.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I have been planning to make XFCE my default session in 11.10 since Gnome 2.32 will no longer be an option. Combine that with the news that GDM will be replaced with LightDM, my system will be relatively Gnome-free. I can't find too much information on LightDM, but I hope it is easily customizable and that it isn't ugly-as-sin or too-basic out of the box. I have been disappointed in 11.04 on the lack of easy customization/configuration of GDM. I know I can always edit the raw conf files, but I'd like a nice GUI to manage it like I would other aspects of the theme.
Haven't made up my mind yet, but I often find Matthew Garrett's blog posts insightful, and he doesn't like it: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/136274.html
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Bet WebKit's squalid bulk didn't go into the 5KLoC vs 50KLoC size difference.
From the docs it looks like WebKit might be optional in LightDM. But if WebKit is used on Ubuntu, then I don't see why loading a 25MB HTML engine (+ it's dependencies!) is a good thing. WebKit is pretty bulky. And this is a login manager we're talking about!
And it's not like WebKit will be loaded later anyhow. Even if you do use a WebKit based browser, that is most likely Chrome, which bundles it's own copy of WebKit - so no sharing with apps that use the system WebKit like LightDM.
You could let root install the themes, and just let an unprivileged user choose between them.
You could also run the GUI as an unprivileged user and the core as root, similar to xscreensaver.
Dilbert RSS feed
You know... I've finally adopted the 'use linux as much
as possible' mindset... settled on a distro and now they
are trying to fuck it up as much as they can.
Bravo.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
You are missing the point. While I do not care for the Unity interface, you are missing the point. Unity was rushed, because gnome3 and gnome-shell were so, so late. Then, because of the delay, Ubuntu, look at what they found problematic with gnome-shell (both functional and political) and made their own shell. Again, while I don't care for Unity, it is pretty usable and was made so in a relatively short period of time. From that perspective, the developers should get recognition. Again, if gnome3 had shipped on time, there probably wouldn't be unity.
As for Unity not being ready. I think most people, including Ubuntu would admit that, or at least that it isn't completed yet. For new users, they usually direct them to their LTS releases which Unity is not even an issue. For advanced users, they can easily switch to the old gnome interface. I do think, the old interface should have been the default with Unity being optional, but they didn't ask me. What having Unity in 11.04 provides Ubuntu a very large usability and testing population to perfect it for 11.10.
As for moving to lightdm, they aren't the only ones. While KDE has KDM, all the other environments have to use XDM or GDM. XDM works, but it isn't very pretty. GDM makes a lot of gnome load and run in the background, even though you aren't running gnome for a desktop. Switching to lightdm will mean that if you want to run XFCE or openbox or E17 or whatever, you don't have to have a gnome session running just to provide login/logout capabilities.
Webkit is most definitely not required for lightdm. It is just one of several presentation layers. However, if used on something like a netbook or tablet, it would make a lot of sense, since the browser would be one of the first things opened on the device. As for exploits, again, if the user is going to be doing pretty much everything in the cloud, which seems to be Ubuntu's opinion (and many others), then a webkit exploit is just as exploitive at the login screen vs the actual desktop. However, since access can be restricted at the login screen, the danger should be minimized.
Almost gnome free. Xubuntu has a number of apps that still have gnome-dependencies, like the administrative tools, the package manager (both their own and synaptic), evince (although a gnome free version is in the repository), etc. That said, these would only run a gnome session when actually used, whereas gdm runs all the time. LightDM doesn't have a configuration tool, but it is easy to configure. I would expect themes to become available without much delay. The lack of GDM customization is not Ubuntu's fault. The Gnome developers took that ability away and nobody has taken it upon themself to write a new app to do it.
I still prefer text mode and typing startx command to start my X. Am I the only who still does this in Linux? :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I run quite a few Ubuntu servers and workstations. My use of gdm seems to leave me feeling rather annoyed. It seems to have a number of painful memory leaks or something as it gets heavier and heavier over weeks of continued use - restarting it seems to resolve the issue, until a few more weeks pass.
I don't really care if LightDM is really lighter than GDM in general, I care far more about how usable it is over weeks of constant use.. Hopefully we'll see a massive improvement here. I'm glad Ubuntu continues to work on bringing in some innovation. Nice to see, even though it can be a bit disrupting. Rad.
So I have this theory that Mark Shuttleworth is actually an undercover Micro$oft operative that is being funded to create a huge community around Ubuntu and it's "sponsor", Canonical. Over time, when so many people are using it, loving it, promoting it....things start to break. Things break in Ubuntu that don't break in other distributions.
But it's not only the things that break, but Ubuntu starts changing things - not too much change all at once, but little things here and there. Not too much to move distros (at first), but things to slowly start to eat at your sanity.
More and more, Ubuntu breaks things, changes things...just enough for people to get very annoyed at "Linux". After all, Ubuntu is Linux for human beings (AKA n00bs?). People slowly start to complain to anyone who will listen that "Linux sucks".
And Ballmer does the penguin dance yet again.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
i'm not a fan of the pim/osx interface gnome has become any more then most people i've talked to. now that enlightenment has reached its goal e17 i thought i'd give it a shot. it is really nice. i like ubuntu. they are doing good things for people that are not just fed up with microsoft. that being said, i think making the desktop more like os/x is worse. but hey. it isn't my project and it is a free distro so it isn't my place to bitch.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Around 06 or so Ubuntu was pretty cool. I had high hopes for it, and expected it to become the "linux on the desktop" that we've been ranting about for years.
But slowly, yet methodically it just got more sluggish, buggier, dumbed down and overcomplicated. It seemed like every release had a different set of apps for everything, and things like network configuration kept jumping between the "preferences" menu and the "system administration" menu. Not a huge deal, but having to relearn the layouts ever time wasn't enjoyable. Finally, it got where the standard gnome interface of ubuntu was nearly unuseable on my hardware (too slow). I switched to Xubuntu, and found NO change in performance. It felt like it was just an XFCE theme on top of gnome.
I tried gold old Debian for a bit (it was my main squeeze for years and years) but finally just went back to Slackware (what I started with back in the 90s)
Linux is linux again :-)
do() || do_not();
I still prefer text mode and typing startx command to start my X. Am I the only who still does this in Linux? :P
Last time I had Slackware installed (13.0 I think) it booted to a cli login. I'd be using it now if I'd figured out how to make BOINC work.
I am about to abandon Chromium and switch back to Firefox.
I am sort of a power user of web browsers. I like to open lots of windows. When I read my web comics, I just open every link in a subfolder, then close each page as I read each comic. I expect my web browser to be able to have dozens of windows open at once.
Using Chromium under Ubuntu 11.04 (with the "Ubuntu Classic" desktop if it matters), my computer is slow and unusable. The problem is that Chromium just sucks up all my RAM and the system starts swapping. That computer has 4GB of RAM... 4GB, and it's not enough for Chromium.
I now have to shut down Chromium twice a day, and reopen it, to free up leaked memory. I'm not happy about this.
I think the internals of Chromium can get into some sort of bad state, and if I close all my current open windows and start opening new ones, it might mitigate the situation somewhat (by getting rid of all state and starting over fresh). I'm very annoyed that the browser doesn't Just Work and I even have to think about this stuff.
And the surprising thing: there isn't any setting, anywhere, to tell Chromium to limit how much history it collects. I want history on the open pages, and that's pretty much it. If the history expires after two days, that's pretty ideal. There is no way to make the history expire. From time to time I manually nuke the history, and whenever I do so, the disk grinds away for a long time, I'm sure at least ten seconds.
So, in theory, Chromium is nice and fast because it caches the heck out of everything. In practice, it consumes gigabytes of RAM and starts my whole system swapping, which makes the whole system slower than a 486 running Windows 98.
I am willing to entertain the theory that Flash is partly to blame for the leaks. But somehow Firefox has never been as bad as Chromium, and it's the same Flash on both.
I am not a fan of Unity, and I am not a fan of the UI regressions that go along with it. And I have several computers upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04, and my desktop just freezes up sometimes, forcing a reboot. (Probably I could get by with just stopping and restarting GDM, thus slaughtering the X server and everything running under it. But at that point I might as well just reboot.) And on the laptop I upgraded to 11.04, the WiFi stopped working at all. (The good news: that laptop now wakes from sleep mode, which it never did before. Closing the lid used to force a cold boot. There is some actual progress in 11.04.)
I am cautiously optimistic about Wayland. We'll see.
But I am seriously considering moving to Xubuntu, because I really don't want to run Unity. And I am not happy that I need to reboot 11.04 more often than I need to reboot Windows on my work computer.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
However, if used on something like a netbook or tablet, it would make a lot of sense, since the browser would be one of the first things opened on the device.
I don't get it, why does loading a copy of WebKit in the login manager make sense? That you open a browser soon later doesn't matter, since the by far most common browsers, Firefox and Chrome, would not benefit from that in any way: Firefox since it doesn't use WebKit, Chrome since it has its own copy - you will have 2 copies of WebKit in memory at that point, each taking >25MB!
However, if used on something like a netbook or tablet, it would make a lot of sense, since the browser would be one of the first things opened on the device.
I don't get it, why does loading a copy of WebKit in the login manager make sense? That you open a browser soon later doesn't matter, since the by far most common browsers, Firefox and Chrome, would not benefit from that in any way: Firefox since it doesn't use WebKit, Chrome since it has its own copy - you will have 2 copies of WebKit in memory at that point, each taking >25MB!
The distro would be bundling LightDM and the browser. Why would they build them against two different copies of WebKit?
It is very awkward for a distro that bundles Chrome to use the system WebKit, since Chrome's entire approach is opposed to that. Chrome updates silently and often and if it used the system WebKit, Chrome could not update itself at all. You would be frozen with an older version of Chrome, and Google stops supporting them very quickly - Google's goal is update every one to the new versions.
pros:
-great for cheap-skates who wont upgrade their hardware
-super for surfing the net
-excellent for typing your term papers
-wow I can spin my desktop
cons:
-Don't go beyond the pre-installed apps, do not try to add more stuff its masochism without the sex.
-old MS-DOSesque prompt commands, feels like 1985 in terminal, makes one say aloud, "oh goodie!"
-geek oriented
-a labyrinth of out-of date and incompetent forums for help - oh that is the "community" sounds important but it sucks
-obscure repositories, with crappy descriptions of what will and wont work and what they are supposed to do
-forget about installing shit from terminal unless you have had linux/unix in college or waste a year with Linux For Dummies
-don't go shopping for games at Walmart or other interesting apps online, they wont work
-don't go down to Walmart and buy a printer, it wont work
-no real "plug and play", its more like "plug and play simple things" or "plug and hope" or "plug and search for drivers" "plug and omg i have to use terminal"
It was the end of the world as we knew it. The devs messed up our beloved KDE!! Game over, switch to Gnome. But then came several subsequent point releases and a year later KDE rocks and most everyone is very happy. Lesson? Sometimes you have to go backwards a little to go forwards. Hang in there, it'll get better...
While its nice to know about the changes: after booting a new kernel I have to install new (Nvidia) graphics drivers, and at the end, instead of typing service gdm start, now it will be service lightdm start. My real peeve about the article is the illiterate being who wrote the article. Code is a non-count noun. That is to say, that you never get a 'hairs cut' because hair is the plural of hair. Likewise, you don't go on a 'roads trip', you go on a road trip. Source code is 'code'. To describe one line, you say one line of code. To describe the whole body, you also say code. Much like you don't go on a 'roads trip', even though there was more than one road, when talking about the collection, you say 'code'. I don't care if some marketing bunny or illiterate is trying to get you to say codes. When talking about codes, they are describing a very specific set of numbers needed to disarm the bomb, or decrypt the enigma cypher. When talking about computer software, its a non-countable noun. The correct use is 'code'. I hate beating people over the head with this, all they have to do is become literate. When I was in university, I had to study natural language processing for an artificial intelligence course, and had to get very intimate with parts of speech (dammit!). Please don't make me beat you with a dictionary!
Your post is theoretically "right on the ball", but as Yogi Berra is attributed to say "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is".
The amount of people who use your particular setup is going to be much smaller if it is very customized. This means two things: the amount of bugs in your setup which others are going to report will be smaller, and secondly, the projects bug-fixing efforts will discriminate against fixing those bugs compared to bugs in the default setup.
Without facts that I don't have, however, I cannot compare any particular customized setup under Ubuntu with a particular (almost certainly less popular) different distribution. And people who stick with Ubuntu will still gain benefit from the popularity of Ubuntu for fixing "core" bugs.
After reading this discussion, I also will probably end up sticking with Ubuntu, but customizing the UI (so in some ways, I suppose my gut feeling agrees with you). However, I certainly will look to download live versions of Mint and other distros to check out whether I think it might be worth my while to switch.
Chrome's port of WebKit can only work inside chrome; it's designed to be connected up to a shim which talks using IPC to a browser process, which handles a lot of the work. Chrome and its browser process are not designed to be embedded, so using that in LightDM won't work. LightDM would probably have to use the Gtk+ port, which shares a lot of code, but has to be built separately due to all the ifdefs.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Why all the butthurt? There's always been alternatives; if you do more with your login screen than "name/password", you can always replace what they gave you out of the box with something else.
moses@deunan:~$ apt-cache search x-display-manager
lightdm - Display Manager
lxdm - GUI login manager for LXDE
slim - desktop-independent graphical login manager for X11
wdm - WINGs Display Manager - an xdm replacement with a WindowMaker look
xdm - X display manager
gdm - GNOME Display Manager
kdm - KDE Display Manager for X11
.... https://bugs.launchpad.net/lightdm/+bugs?orderby=-heat&field.status%3Alist=NEW&field.status%3Alist=INCOMPLETE_WITH_RESPONSE&field.status%3Alist=INCOMPLETE_WITHOUT_RESPONSE&field.status%3Alist=CONFIRMED&field.status%3Alist=TRIAGED&field.status%3Alist=INPROGRESS&field.status%3Alist=FIXCOMMITTED&field.omit_dupes=on
The Ubuntu Team must be braindead to even consider this move.