Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
2011's Ubuntu releases will change the landscape of Linux for the better.
I'm not sure everybody would consider those changes better.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
We are not all teenagers. Our family computer has logins for more than 20 family members. How does Auntie Gladys remember whether her login is "Gladys", "gladyce", "glad", or "auntieg"? (She only uses it alternate Christmasses)
I do not want family members to login as "guest" because that would (a) leave them insecure, and (b) set a bad example.
Incidentally, most have been able to use Ubuntu/OpenOffice with no instructions at all, some without even being told its not Windows. (Quite a few of my family use OpenOffice on Windows, following problems opening old Word files with new versions of Word). Most seem to prefer it, and ask "why is your computer better than mine?" - the computer in question is a P4 with 512M!
Now get off my lawn.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
why did i have to get this far down to find this question, and why is there no answer yet. is it that hard to spend 3 words in the summary telling me me what a DM is in this case, and whether G or light will matter to me?
Correct. Using a widescreen monitor you have more room to store a bar horizontally. Placing a menu bar on the side of the screen like that necessitates scrolling through the bar to get to many icons, whereas they'd all be immediately accessible if laid out on the bottom (or even top, though that's not what I'm used to) of the screen.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
it forces everyone to re-evaluate and that is the best thing that can happen.
Disputable.
What, precisely, are we re-evaluating? Novelty for novelty's sake is a disease. Stability can be important, even overridingly so.
Please provide a concrete example of an actual problem that these "innovations" purport to solve.
Ubuntu is in danger of rendering itself irrelevant to any but the "Oooh, shiny" crowd, and Apple already has a lock on that.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Wayland is a massive step backwards too. Everyone's just going to run an X server on top of Wayland, so it will do nothing but add another layer to slow things down and break.
If people start writing native Wayland apps, that's another massive step back since Wayland doesn't have network transparency, forces clients to provide their own window decorations, etc.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Any display manager can do this on Linux. Using good ol' xdm on Debian, just edit /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers and have xdm start an X server on multiple virtual terminals. Typically :1 will be ctrl-alt-F8; :2 will be F9, etc. If you start an xdm on multiple terminals and just switch to a new one when someone new needs to log in, you'll be covered. (What I don't know offhand is if there is a way to arbitrarily start a new X server by hitting a key, rather than having to configure a set number of servers ahead of time.)
In your home, if you have, say, 4 users, you can agree that each user has a particular vt.
On my desktop I have ctrl-alt-F12 load up a "guest" account with xfce. Once the guest logs out, root removes the home directory and drops in a clean new one. The guest automatically loads up firefox. It's great for visitors who get rather confused when they saw my old xmonad desktop. (my current awesome is a bit less confusing, at least.)
Often it seems that newer programs implement newer functionality, when really the old Unix programs were doing the same thing twenty years ago.
Penny - plain text accounting