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Linux Mint Will Adopt Gnome 3
sfcrazy points to news, posted in the current blog post about Linux mint statistics, that the Linux Mint team "has thus decided that in the next version of Linux Mint 12, they will continue to support Gnome 2, but will also introduce Gnome 3." Related news from an anonymous reader:"Contributors in the GNOME community have started a GNOME desktop user survey. The GNOME Foundation wouldn't endorse any survey, but the community has put together a 23-question desktop survey. Regardless if you use GNOME, they encourage all Linux users to participate."
They might want all users to take the survey, but there is really no reason to unless you use GNOME. A good portion of the questions are basically 'How does GNOME work for you.'
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
does that count?
I understand Mint has a rather loyal (and loud) user base. I gave it a try, but wasn't very impressed. My experience was pretty much a buggier, less supported version of ubuntu. Mint seems to be tailored for a very specific environment and group of users, and falls apart quickly if you go off the rails just a little.
I would not be surprised if it's popularity picks up, however, because there are lot of users that don't like unity. I don't like unity either, but I like a lot of the other subtle-yet-important tweaks and tools Ubuntu delivers that makes using linux a whole lot less painful. Ubuntu is the only distro I've ever used that makes setting up vpn and wireless internet connections remotely easy.
That said, I've been using ubuntu with xfce4 (nope, not xubuntu) instead of the unity wm. Crisp, clean, fast, simplicity with all the powerful apps a click away if I want them.
Next year will be the year of the Gnome 3 desktop?
I don't have anything worthwhile to say, I just thought GNOME should use codenames for each release and release 3 in partiluclar should be GNOME 3: Profit!
I spent my computer time on the weekend away from the current 'normal' Xfce desktop and tried out Gnome 3 and Unity in a more serious. way. I found I could actually live with either of them. I've said before that the big missing feature is configurability, but they're both much better than before, and have the majority of panel widgets that I like. It ended up that I prefer how Gnome 3 works, and it's responsiveness. The big thing missing from it is the integration with mail and chat that Unity has, specifically for Thunderbird and Pidgin. Gnome 3 has no mail notification on the panel that I could find, which is an important feature. It seems to be a little to tightly tied to Evolution. I discovered that I could live with Unity, although it's quite difficult to configure window themes, etc (as opposed to panel themes). I'll figure it out, it's just that that wasn't my primary goal. I do find its actual keyboard response quite slow, and I'll probably remove the integration with the global menu. I'll probably try sticking with it another month or so at least. I think both Unity and Gnome 3 are both quite usable, and deserve a more serious look ... and this coming from someone who switched to Xfce.
Is Arch Linux. After using Ubuntu for a long time they have really forced me to leave with their decision to force a Fisher Price desktop on me.
Why does every distro but Debian have this weird hangup where the GUI cannot be decoupled from the OS?
Or rephrased, why does Debian apparently find it easy to do, whereas the big corporate OSes just can't handle it?
(I use Debian w/ xfce and on a netbook with a dead mouse pad, ratpoison)
Does anyone expect this trend to accelerate, perhaps the next Ubuntu will only ship with emacs and if you want to edit with vi, well then you'll just have to install Arch which will only have vi and no emacs? Maybe this game will become popular with languages and if you want Python you'll only be able to select from certain distros?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Don't you mean the remaining 75 million? Linux growth continues. There's been no decline in users adopting it, only solid increases. 75-100 million users is a significant market. Stop being a troll and get back into your mom's basement (or rather back under your bridge).
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
1) Longtime users of Gnome2 and KDE3 who reject the respective current bloat versions should unite!
2) ???
3) Profit!!! (i.e. usable DE)
I just switched to Mint because Unity (while very good) is not for me and I don't like Gnome 3.
I guess I'm on to rolling my own with Xfce desktop...
I've been using Fuduntu for nearly a year now (Fedora based, roling release distro that has stuck with Gnome 2) and it has worked out well. I don't know how long they can keep away from Gnome 3, but for the time being I'm grateful that they aren't jumping on the unity/Gnome 3 bandwagon.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Linux and now ESR are both moving away from GNOME3 (and KDE) and go to XFCE. ESR says XFCE looks like where Iâ(TM)m landing.
Many people resent the way both KDE and GNOME are not about functionality anymore, but about "because I can".
The fact that the GNOME community need to do their own survey shows, to me at least, how high the Ivory Tower is that the developers live on.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I'm not happy with 3.x and I made sure to point out that I found the 2.x Gnome to be my favored environment.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Linux fanbois laughed at the FSF's GNU/Linux campaign, will they start insisting on Linux/Android?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I just switched to Mint from Ubuntu to get away from Unity. I had been a loyal Ubuntu user since 6.06. I hope Gnome 3 isn't forced on Mint users, or that it doesn't suck like Unity. If so, next is Xubuntu.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I was trying to decide what to replace my Ubuntu with (now that they have fully lost their MonoMac-lovin' mind). Now I know: Debian!
I've been using Xubuntu for several days now and I love it. Before installing Xubuntu I tried Ubuntu/Unity (again) and hated it (again) - although not as much as 11.04 Unity six months ago (after a few weeks I switched to the "classic" desktop). Xubuntu looks and acts just like Gnome 2.x as far as I can tell. There was just one thing I had to tweak: to get windows network browsing working, I had to replace the default Thunar file manager with Nautilus. It's important with this to put "nautilus --no-desktop" as the command in the launcher: the "--no-desktop" option prevents Nautilus from doing strange things to the desktop. As far as I can tell, everything is working exactly the same, or better, than it worked in Ubuntu 11.04 classic desktop.
I've got a Sandy Bridge chip, and I love the 64-bit Sandy Bridge support in 11.10 Xubuntu - it works great, not a single glitch in 3d games or any video glitches at all. Google Earth zips along using maybe 30% of CPU, and I can watch a 1080p video with only a few percent of CPU used. I'm definitely a convert to Xubuntu for the next six months.
Gnome 3 fallback mode is ridiculously incomplete !
A lot of users will switch when this mode is improved to the level of gnome 2
aaaaaaa
I don't understand people who bash Linux. I am not talking about trolls like OP, but there are people who are serious about hating Linux.
Why would one want to demotivate people who work on an "indie" OS? Would he/she also bash amateur music bands for making "indie" music and not working for a major record label? What kind of person are such people?
Coding etudes
+1
right click disappeared. But PCs are not macs, and HAVE a f*** second button !!!
no menu mean no way to find an application unless you remember the name !!
Gnome 3 is bullshit
Unity is worse
aaaaaaa
You'd think it'd be different around here, but it's not.
I can't speak to how well Gnome 3 works on typical large-screen multi-monitor setup, but my home laptop with a 14" screen, it works exactly the way I've always wished Gnome would. It's well put together, well designed and while there aren't a lot of native config tools for it yet (3.2 aside--haven't tried it), I'm sure that's all in the works (and if it's not, people/distros will create them).
the idea of Mint's polish on top of Gnome 3 sounds just about perfect to me--exactly the desktop I'd like to use.
I've already been this route. While I am still using Xubuntu, it is frustrating. There are a couple of extraordinarily irritating problems. The most significant is that the window manager sometimes either fails to start or crashes. You log in to an interface where windows have no borders, or have borders that cannot be used. The only solution is to Alt-F2 and restart the window manager. This bug has been documented since Xubuntu 6.x - and it is still around.
Less irritated are problems with the session manager. Sometimes it correctly remembers the windows you had open when you logged out. Sometimes it loses them. Sometimes it remembers windows that you didn't have open. Again, the solution is easy: delete the session cache, log out and log back in. However, none of this should be necessary - these are pretty basic usability problems. They are less irritating than Gnome 3 or (god forbid) Unity.
The best solution for the moment seems to be sticking with 10.04 LTS and Gnome 2 - and praying that Canonical comes to their senses...
Why would one want to demotivate people who work on an "indie" OS? Would he/she also bash amateur music bands for making "indie" music and not working for a major record label? What kind of person are such people?
You must be new on the Internet.
Same here. I recently switched over to Xubuntu and couldn't be happier. I'm curious to see their download statistics. From what I've read on other Linux forums, quite a few are defecting from Gnome and the God-forsaken Unity.
I told them honestly in the comment field that the fact that virtual desktops can no longer be fixed in number is what drove me from Gnome 3 to KDE. If this was an option, I'd be fine with it since I didn't have to use it. Even FireFox 7 can be put back the way it was. (Why do user interfaces move things like the reload button after a decade plus in the same place, for no reason? Might as well install light switches in new houses at different heights from the floor.) What I don't like is having a desktop environment suddenly work differently in a way that cripples how I always work, for no reason. Even Gnome 2 in compatibility mode doesn't have a fixed number of virtual desktops. I have 10 of these, each with a specific purpose, and I need them to always be in the same place every time.
I mean, a desktop environment that's based on an iPad is fine, but professional software developers are the ones using Linux. Probably the only ones. If you cripple Linux for them, who are these people who want their desktop to look like an iPad? Are they suddenly dumping Windows and the Mac and moving to Linux? Are people really porting X11 and Gnome to phones and tablets?
Since this isn't Gnome itself, but someone else doing the survey, it's probably wasting my time to fill it out.
Am I the only developer using a very large desktop area? I must be because both Mac, Windows, Unity and Gnome 3.0 SUCK DONKEYBALLS when all you need from your desktop is a very large space to put windows on. KDE is the worsed. MS tried the Active Desktop thing before and it only makes sense for people that see the desktop. I don't, there are windows in front of it on which I am doing my work. I HATE files on the desktop because I first need remove windows to access it. At most I use it because it is an easy place to find in most file managers.
As an experienced users, focus follows mouse is also a must. I very often switch input between windows/apps and that means every click to focus I don't have to do saves a lot of time and agro. It is so bad that on windows I routinely have input go to wrong window simply because I am so used to not having to click a window or WORSE part of a window to have THAT part of my screen receive input.Why should I ever want to move the mouse away from a window and still have the input go to that window?
The OSX unified menu is not just a killer of focus follows mouse (the menu would change as your mouse passes other windows on the way to menu) on a large desktop it means the menu can be a long way away from the window. This would matter less if you didn't need to first click the window to give it focus and then go back to the menu to use the menu... I do notice that most hardcore mac users are users of special packages that have an insane amount of short cuts on their input devices. But us mere mortals have to deal with apps that are far less optimized.
Unity loves to put the menu on the far left... so if your main monitor happens to be on the right... happy mouse travelling!
Gnome 3.0... actually, I am not sure what the hell it is trying to do. Crash a lot? Make years of development of utilities a waste as nothing works anymore? Create a desktop with absolutely ZERO options for configuration?
I know what the flaw is with the recent KDE, Gnome 3.0 and Unity developments. The linux year of the desktop never happened (despite the fact that it has been years my employers even had to consider whether to allow me to use Linux as my development desktop) and they saw how iOS and even Android suddenly got people to use non-MS Windows... and they think that this audience will make them the millions they been dreaming off in secret.
Hell, even MS is doing with Windows 8. Surely it is the standard desktop that is the block to selling more? It even makes some sense. The more supposedly "noob" friendly the app, the more it deviates from the old windows (and I mean here the style slowly evolved from the xerox design, not MS specific). Check your latest brand name computer and its crapware. Wanna bet the config utitlities and virus software looks "slick" with non-standard buttons and such?
Do "users" really like it? I don't. But I am a developer so I don't matter.
So, when asked once again to rescue a windows machine for people who are perfectly good friends but not the brightest people in the world, I installed Ubuntu instead once Flash updates had made certain that it was good enough for people who only use the web, play music, download and chat.
Surely these people, a few who have a below average IQ (this is not me being elitist, one of them has been tested as being around 85 ) would never be able to work with Linux?
Well, they did and not only did they manage but do you remember the nerd rage when Ubuntu switched the window buttons? None of them even cared, most hadn't even noticed. All I really had to do to instruct them was how to accept updates.
Yes, that was silly because when Unity hit, that was the end of the experiment. Unity was NOT understandable and Gnome 3.0 was no better. It was a disaster far worse then ANY MS update EVER. It broke about a dozen installs and I had no easy way to recover. And while these people had no problem switching from Windows to Ubuntu they NEED their Facebook and so i just reinstalled windows and r
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Compared to Ubuntu's Gnome3 unity, stock Gnome 3 is fantastic (default in Fedora 15 and Fedora 16). ...)
I can just complain that skype notifications are not pinned to the screen, but the rest is brilliant (efficient, snappy, perfect shortcuts, etc
It took me a few weeks to get used to, just like moving from xp to vista, but it's a big step forward.
For several years I've used the "install command line system" option from the Ubuntu alternate CD. With that, I'd have a nice base system up and running where I could do cool stuff like:
"apt-get install openbox tint2 xorg pcmanfm wicd" if I wanted a minimalist system or "apt-get install gdm xorg synaptic vlc network-manager" if I wanted a basic gnome desktop.
The point is, Ubuntu gave you the benefit of having an "up to date" "Debian-ish" distribution that you could customize relatively easily, while having access to the somewhat up-to-date Ubuntu repositories.
Ubuntu 11.04 was the first version where I said "uh oh", since the amount of crap installed in a commmand line only system really inflated, as well as the insane dependencies of various packages and messy configurations. Too much work to get rid of the countless Unity references and unnecessary dependencies.
I tried 11.10 and realized I simply cannot use Ubuntu anymore in a custom manner. It is too tightly packaged, and there is nothing wrong with that. I gave Unity a try, but found it insanely juvenile and obivously not geared for people who use their computers for genuine work or development. For some, it's perfect, for me, it just slows me down.
I've switched back to Debian 6 with Gnome 2, because it just works. A basic command line only Debian install is very clean and doesn't contain a hugh number of silly dependencies. Plus, with Debian's backports repositories you can get updated packages.
The two main reasons I use Linux as a desktop OS are the ability to setup encrypted raid and Compiz. The window management features I have configured for Compiz allow me to easily manage a vast number of running apps and terminals, all while having multiple desktops. It is superior for multitasking. Windows 7 can get about 50% of the way there with third party apps like "switcher" (Scale/Expose clone).
I tried making the switch to XFCE 4.8, and was REALLY impressed by the lightweight-but-fully-featured setup. However, XFCE and Compiz themes don't play nice, and I didn't really want to install the entire Gnome backend to get gconf functionality in place to change things like themes, etc.
Without Compiz, I would rather use Win 7 than stay on Linux. So for me, Debian 6 with Gnome 2 and Compiz, with updated packages from backports works wonderfully for me.
That said, I do believe the Linux community is ready to split. You have the old timers who know what they want, and are resistant to radical cosmetic change (Linus). You have the younger generation of kids who know Linux well enough to maneuver around, but want to be able to show off a flashy desktop (Unity / Gnome3 users). Lastly, you have your average Joe, who certainly wouldn't pick Gnome 2 or KDE 3.5 over Win 7 or OSX.
Canonical knows the only way to make Linux profitable is to make it appeal to the masses. Give the OS away for free, and make your money via app stores and support. Ubuntu is lightyears ahead of any other Linux distro in this department, but I seriously doubt they will win that battle with Apple. OSX is already dirt cheap.
If I had to, I'd probably pick Unity over Gnome 3, simply because of the community size behind it. It's sort of silly that people complain about lack of choice with Linux, since there has never been more support or more choice with Linux than today. If you don't like Unity, don't use Ubuntu. If you don't like having outdated packages, don't use Debian. If you need bleeding edge, use Arch. There is nothing but choice, and with Linux you are going to spend hours, if not days, getting your system tweaked the way you like it. For me, that's part of the fun of using Linux. You have total control. I know a lot of Linux users who have given up and gone to Win7, just because they grew weary of Linux's occasional "hiccups".
You must be very ill informed. There are between 75 and 100 million people using Linux world-wide. Go back to your bridge troll.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
No I'm not counting Android. Android has 550,000 activations a day. In one year that's roughly 200 million. Ubuntu alone has around 25 million users, not including servers. Redhat has nearly that amount if not more. Again, he's a troll. Kick him back to Mordor.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Yeah, I have the same problem w/ RPM based distros - i'm always on the edge when it comes to installing updates, or other software. I'm therefore interested in Kubuntu, but ideally, I'd like a distro that is Debian based, but gives me a choice of KDE 4.7 or 3.5, or GNUSTEP. Don't bother w/ Gnome, and XFCE - I don't care that much about the latter.
While I like Debian, the only thing about it is that some of the things change from RHEL that I am used to - such as system-config-network, and the equivalent of /etc/sysconfig/network - I'd like to know those things so that I can configure the laptop to be online. Also, it would be nice if I knew that the distro I was using has Wi-Fi support. Other things, such as Iceweasel for Firefox, I can live w/, although I do hope Konqueror has advanced some from when I last used it. And I'd really be interested if GNUSTEP's browser - Vespucci. They are billing it to be Safari-compatible, in which case I really wish they'd have considered Camino as a compatibility target, so that it'd be compatible w/ both Safari and some version of Firefox.
Bottom line - I wish GNUSTEP was available as an option for one of the standard Linuxes, or even BSDs on the market.
Wow, this is horrible news. I'm still working on the tail end of my conversion from Ubuntu to Mint. I would not have bothered to switch to Mint had I know this. I know about the promise to support G2, but the next step after Unity/Gnome3 is adopted is forcing its use. The developers behind this craziness know that their "improvements" are universally despised, and they realize the user, given choice in the matter, will reject them.
I do not understand this wave of UI insanity sweeping the entire desktop OS community. My desktop system with dual 28" monitors is not a 10" tablet. Why is that so hard to understand?
Most of it stems from people's prejudices. When they should be fighing against criminal activities by government and corporations they fall back into the weaker area of their lives and attack anything different. Some of it stems from their desire to not learn something new. They spent years learning simple things over and over, that to learn something that requires a modicum of thought horrifies them. Some make a living off what they learned, and they just don't want to go back and relearn, they are the sorts that have given up on all things exept what they know well and like, anything different is to be hated. They don't have to know anything about it, it is just that they get to voice it without restraint and that makes them feel good emotionally. They feel this is something they can make a difference in, be an activitist from their basement caves, so to speak. They can't see themselves doing much more than playing games where they get to abuse their cohorts and they try to extend that to a more real aspect of their lives, the web in general. Linux is just big enough to be a real target for them, the unwilling unthinkers.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Just switch to KDE4. I admit the first year and a half or so I wasn't happy with it and it was too buggy, but lately it has been great.
Unity is a pile of crap even more heinous than Gnome 3.
If you don't want to leave Ubuntu then just download Kubuntu.
I'd like a source for that, a little over 2 billion people have computers and Linux browser market share has been steadily under 1% so about 20 million. Unless you're counting all other uses of Linux on servers, routers, set top boxes and whatnot but I doubt those users would define themselves as Linux users.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I was really angry at Gnome3, I'm an Archlinux user so I was between the first people to use it when it become stable, for a couple of weeks I switched to XFCE and guess what? I'm back at Gnome3. In this second try however I did three small changes to gnome3 that improved my user experience: 1. Installed tint2 taskbar, 2. Activated the "minimize" option on windows using gnome-tweak-tool 3. And finally installed Alternative-status-menu-extension to get back my power off option. Now I'm a very happy gnome3 user, I love it
I'm a registered Ubuntu user. I've not used it for over 12 months....
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
...who the hell wants a smelly foot on their desktop?
*Meanwhile, on the Fluxbox desktop...*
What are you guys talking about? Have any of you actually used Unity/Gnome3?
First of all to answer the parent, if you know what you want, I think typing "Te" into the search box and selecting "Terminal" is much faster than navigating a menu structure. I don't see how that is retarded at all. In fact, it has been a feature of Spotlight on OS X for quite a while.
To get to the OPs question, which is what to do if you don't know what you want, the interface is still discoverable. You can do this in two ways. You can either type what you think you want, like "word" or "office" to get the Libreoffice writer. Or if you really don't know what you want, you can click applications, and expand the filter results menu to see the applications organized by categories.
So, in other words, this is about learning a new interface, which is relatively simple. Some people don't want to, obviously, but just because you have to learn something new doesn't mean it is retarded.
this is my new favorite comment on Slashdot. my previous one was this one http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194281&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=15927703
Can I ask you about a couple of things?
I installed Debian on a server (VPS) to kick it around. I was put off by little usability niggles, like less not being installed so you get Solaris type behavior of man pages "falling off the end" when you page to the bottom. Comments?
Re: Upstart- it seems to me the big selling point is that not only does it start a service when you go to a given runlevel, but also it keeps it started if for some reason it (webserver, db) falls down. To me that seems useful, and Debian not having it means another headache of cobbling together some kind of program or script (if not running blah, start blah), probably running as root.
Any downsides to Upstart?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Anything else is just for pansies.
/. after all. Or are we?
We are on
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
It's always had serious bugs. Mailboxes get corrupted. It crashes. The developers don't "get it" at all. They focus on adding lame features while serious data-eating bugs remain for over half a decade.
I suspect the developers are in over their heads regarding concurrency and atomic updates. Evolution has **lots** of threads.
So OK, bugs happen, but why keep pushing people to use it? That is offensive. There should be a "DO NOT USE" warning until it isn't horribly unstable.
Well maybe it's gdm. I have two user profiles that I sign on, GNOME and its Network manager on one, e17 on the other. I play music with xmms on the first, and I switch to the second and the CTL-ALT-Fn switch pauses the music. If I ran multisystem inside of a VM in the first, it actually pauses during the bootup while I'm on the second userprofile. Do I have to watch *everything* now?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
better to "bash" linux that to "dash" linux or "sh" linux, or worse: "ash" linux
blog.sam.liddicott.com
I think gnome3 is great. It does have a menu (despite most people saying it doesn't: hint - click on "applications" instead of "windows" when you press the menu button)
However.. I also have a three monitor desktop, using xinerama, one of them is a udlfb usb frame-buffer device. So I guess gnome3 will never work for me. This forces me to mint, which I've been considering after being ignored and/or insulted to death by launchpad.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
When it comes to desktop environments, everyone has an opinion! (So here's mine: nothing beats the OSX interface. Nothing. XFCE is a distant second.)
Calm the panic a little: from TFA:
The new edition will initially be developed alongside the GNOME 2.32-based release which will remain as the default desktop environment of Mint. The developers had decided to stick with GNOME 2.32 because there had been "radical changes" in GNOME 3.x's desktop which had split the communities of GNOME and Mint users.
They are in a group-think, target-fixated, death-spiral focused on mimicking the commercial UI experience. But the people who went to linux went there because they didn't like the UI decisions made by microsoft and apple. They went there because of the configurability of linux. And they went there because Linux Made Them More Productive.
Now, since the rate of climb for Linux adoption seems to be leveling off or dropping, they are coming up with crazy ideas to jump-start linux adoption again. And they are going to sell out the values that drew their early adopters to the program.
If the only choice is between: windows, mac, and a half-assed lookalike, they are going to abandon Linux.
Linux shouldn't try to mimic anything. It should be trying to define what the computer will look like 10 years from now. And that should not be a damn iphone.
Linux is not microkernel so GNU/Linux does not apply for operating system. Linux is monolithic kernel what is the first operating system architecture what is still used (other than just Linux as well).
The Operating System and The Kernel are synonyms. But people fell to marketing propaganda of companies like Microsoft to believe that operating system is something what you can see and "type", shell (CLI) or a GUI. And GNU people tried to use same propaganda two years after Linux got famous and they even edited standard Unix tools like uname to be incompatible with standard uname so they could support their GNU/Linux propaganda (check the changelog if you dont believe).
Android use Linux as its operating system, Google have not forked Linux. Even the Apple's own MkLinux version of it was never forked (MkLinux was Apples first Open Source project and idea was to check how Linux would work as Server-Client operating system instead as monolithic. And with the study they got with Linux, they made XNU, using Mach microkernel, Filesystems and network protocols from FreeBSD and own I/O Kit for drivers).
Even today, Google pulls stuff from kernel.org, they patch it with own version of power management and few other small tweaks. They have offered changes back to Linux community but they never were accepted for various reasons. But still, Linux in Android is compatible with Linus version of Linux. You can write drivers on either of them and then get it work on other version and vice versa and it is not just about drivers.
Android is distribution of the Linux to mobile devices with own user land. It does not make it different operating system. If someone believes so, or believes the marketing propaganda of GNU/Linux or Windows etc. Then GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others are different operating systems as well with same logic. And you can even install all those different "shells" to same computer, log in, bring non-IT person to room, show around and then re-login to different "shell" while person waiting in other room and then bring back to room and person would believe you are using two different operating systems. (More easily to do when having a multiple computers like in some computer lab and then booting same LiveCD with different "shell" on it and ask opinion about what operating system is best).
Android alone has hundreds of millions users out there. On desktop I would say 75 is minimum amount but closer 150-200 would be correct. And on servers, well, bigger part of the whole segment is ran by Linux.
Problem is that people dont know what Linux is or even the heck is "Operating System". They cant see "Linux", they can not recognize it and build emotional ties to that brand (other than technical) like they can do something what they can see and "use" like GNOME, KDE, Windows Shell or OS X. And big part of that is themes for GUI, wallpaper, icons and fancy bling bling graphics. Not the technology. So you can fool most computer users even by changing wallpaper, icons and theme to different. And even more tech persons by changing just the "shell". But real IT people, who know that Linux kernel is the operating system and nothing else ran by it is not. Those people you can not fool. Too bad there are maybe just few thousand of such people in the world anymore.