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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
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.
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'
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 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?
We need a new fork. Gubuntu, for everybody who was perfectly fine with GNOME. Then their flagship Ubuntu releases can sport whatever hot new thing they want to roll out every six months.
/* No Comment */
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_display_manager_(program_type)
Specifically it's the spot where you type your username and password before logging in. Since most Ubuntu users run their computers as single users on a desktop box, and only ever access one session profile (gnome) I doubt this will make any impact on anyone's life.
I run slim on my mediacenter because it was easy to configure kiosk mode (auto login), and also I could launch other programs in it without learning to write proper session files; but it has some problems and I may look into lightDM.
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.