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Linux Mint 12 Released Today
An anonymous reader writes "Linux Mint 12 was released today. It includes the new 'MGSE' (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions), a desktop layer on top of Gnome 3 that makes it possible for you to use Gnome 3 in a traditional way. MGSE's Gnome-2-Like experience includes features such as the bottom panel, the application menu, the window list, a task-centric desktop and visible system tray icons. MGSE is a 180-degree turn from the desktop experience the Gnome Team is developing with Gnome-Shell. At the heart of the Gnome-Shell is a feature called 'the Overview': 'The Shell is designed in order to minimize distraction and interruption and to enable users to focus on the task at hand. A persistent window list or dock would interfere with this goal, serving as a constant temptation to switch focus. The separation of window switching functionality into the overview means that an effective solution to switching is provided when it is desired by the user, but that it is hidden from view when it is not necessary.' The popularity of Mint 12 with MGSE may be an excellent barometer as to whether users prefer a task-centric or application-centric desktop."
I am wondering whether desktop Linux matters in these times. For some it does I am sure, as evidenced on distrowatch . It is the most popular distro now, after pushing Ubuntu to second place.
In my little world though, Linux is inconsequential. I just do not care that much any more.
I [still] employ Windows XP at work, and use Windows 7 in addition to an Asus Eee Pad transformer at home, where I spend most of my time on the net.
I still have to ask the general public whether, desktop Linux still matters. Does it?
Security updates and support. I'm not the biggest fan of GNOME 3 or Unity but what Mint is doing isn't bad. Ubuntu had driven me away to OpenSUSE powered by KDE, but I found that I didn't like a lot of the KDE apps. Mint has made GNOME 3 more usable for me, and has really simplified some of the configuration and setup that was a pain in OpenSUSE. I run it on a MacBook Pro for compiling / cross-compiling programs and unlike OpenSUSE, everything just worked right out of the box. So far I am very pleased with it.
Why do people make a big deal about a distro's default desktop? You can install whatever you want.
Yeah, I could just 'apt-get install gnome-2' on the latest Ubuntu.
Oh, no. I can't, can I?
Most people just want a distro that doesn't suck out of the box.
'The Shell is designed in order to minimize distraction and interruption and to enable users to focus on the task at hand. A persistent window list or dock would interfere with this goal, serving as a constant temptation to switch focus.'
Jesus Christ, GNOME! You're not my boss and you're definitely not my wife. So, unless you're willing either to pay me or put out, kindly stop trying to tell me what to do.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Depends on the target audience. If your goal as a distro admin is to gain more users, then you want to think about what people see when they use your product. Look at what Ubuntu did with Unity; that's about all the proof needed. Sure, an end user can remove Unity and install GNOME 2 or XFCE or whatever, but the point is that a distro is simply a set of choices that some admin has made. They have to be good choices if the distro wants to survive.
Why is everyone re-inventing the boat, poorly?
Because its easy work and gives people lots of opportunities to argue about inconsequential stuff.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
And the 'performance' of having to move the mouse all over the screen, switch to a different overlay display, move the mouse all over the screen to click on an icon or take your hand off the mouse to type in the name of the application you start is not an improvement over Gnome 2.
Compiling a full Gnome 2 desktop from source is an exercise in masochism.
performance
Untrue. Most people know better. Try GNOME 3 on a netbook (for example) after using GNOME 2.
I'm not insinuating that the performance is unusable. But to say it performs faster is just sheer misinformation or inexperience. It's noticeably slower and clunky. You'd expect it to be though, because it's doing sophisticated animations, etc. If your video drivers aren't up to the task (which is probably likely, given the fragile state of Linux graphics), you're going to feel it.
The more important issue right now is that it's fairly unstable and buggy. Maybe the GNOME software itself is the cause, or maybe it's the video drivers. I can't really go 10 minutes without minor (yet persistent) rendering issues, and can't go an hour without the shell completely freezing and requiring a restart. (Get used to hitting Alt+F2, typing "r", and hitting Enter.) I'm using GNOME 3.2 by the way.
There's no real benefit to using GNOME 3 yet. The new paradigm they're going for isn't as bad as people say it is, but it isn't a clear-cut improvement over the ways of old either. Some things are better, some are worse. Combine that with the fairly disrespectful way that GNOME 3 was rolled out, and it isn't hard to see where all the disdain comes from. Linux Mint is the only distro I see respecting its users, particularly by creating a path for transitioning via extensions and offering MATE.
GNOME will be in a better position a year from now, I imagine. GNOME 3 will mature, they'll get to implement more of their ideas, and there will surely be a ton of extensions and themes. (This all assumes that video drivers will improve too. If they don't, GNOME 3 will simply never be pleasant to use.)
> There *IS* a loss associated with having too many choices, no matter what some people will tell you.
There is, balanced by benefits that outweigh the costs IMHO. Having multiple desktops and distributions means we can survive one going mad. Compare and contrast what is happening with GNOME3 and Unity with what is going on in the Windows and Mac worlds. When Win8 ships, those people have no choice, they get a tablet interface and it matters not if they like it or not. Eventually the Mac peeps know they get iOS and there ain't nothing they can do. On the other hand we told Fedora and Ubuntu to FOAD and picked something else. Most fedora users seem to be going with XFCE, Ubuntu users appear to be migrating in mass to Mint. Because we had a choice.
Imagine instead developers had listened to the siren song some people have been singing for a decade now, that GNOME and KDE had long since merged into one 'perfect' desktop, the small fry had folded up shop and got on board the One True Desktop. Then that One True Desktop caught tablet fever. Our options? All bad.
Right now we have multiple options in every major category of Free Software. Linus goes mad we adopt one of the BSD kernels. We have multiple web browsers, email clients, desktop environments, plumbing layers. About the only part that isn't redundant is X, no real options for that currently, but Wayland is under development.
Democrat delenda est
Nothing, except that the amount of energy and brainpower that is wasted on each of these hundreds of different desktops keeps the Linux community from producing a single, coherent solution that the wider world would find useful. Instead it is 100 smart guys wasting their lives in a mental circle jerk, accomplishing nothing that changes, or is even useful to, the wider world. Go Linux!
In all honesty, have you actually tried to use GNOME 3?
All the time.
So much so that I find myself tapping the Windows key in every other OS and wishing it would show me all open windows. Whoever thought that one out is brilliant: hit the key, boom, there's everything you're running, hit it again, boom, back to the original window, if you don't select one of the others. Hit it, boom, all windows again, pick one, boom, it's there. Hit it again, close a few, hit it, boom, back where we were.
Brilliant. Beats the snot out of alt-tabbing and the myriad of Expose ripoffs.
GNOME3 has some significant rough edges (some config options aren't exposed, the font size choices in the list of apps is troublesome, NetworkManager is messed up and notification is whack, hard dependencies on Evolution in Fedora bug the hell out of me) but there's some really, really good ideas there.
What I've found is that, well, people don't like change. I admit it made me uncomfortable, but I also found I didn't get fed up fighting little idiosyncracies like I do with KDE, or the sense that it's really, really under-developed (Unity). It was a few days of "huh" and then it worked.
--srj/mmv
Is this a misguided attempt to emulate the meteoric success of iOS and Android by just copying the Apple/Google/Microsoft corporate control over how users use the desktop?
Let me put it this way: when the Gnome team introduced marketing videos for the new Unity interface, the speakers wore black sweaters and talked with their hands while standing in front of stark white backgrounds. I am not making this up. They really and genuinely are trying to do everything like Apple.
Of course, I remember when early distros of Red Hat were pixel-for-pixel copies of the Win95 interface.
It's a damn shame. The "Blue Ocean Strategy" and the "Next Big Thing (Just Like Everyone Else)" has always been the staple of the tech industry. In manufacturing, you need to make your product stand out. With software, your product is just like familiar Windows/OSX... but better.
I'm not a hardcore geek, but I am a power user, and I can honestly say that Linux has been the biggest disappointment I've ever seen in the computer industry. Coming from an ex-Amiga user, that should mean a lot. It's either dumbed down or hardcore, with little in between. I try to like it and use it, but I just can't. Every distro I've tried over the last 10 years has let me down. The community just can't get its stuff together and venture into that large grey area.
Also from that link:
The omission of a window list or dock also reduces the amount of screen space occupied by the Shell, and therefore makes it better suited to devices with smaller screens.
This ranks right up there with, "We need to remove scroll bars!" and "Maximize must go, just because!" Yeah, I don't suppose they've ever heard of hidden panels, hotkeys, or just giving people an option to put it back.
Really. Of all the communities to buy into the idea of removing things for our own good, it just has to be the open source community?
The world really has gone mad.
I just don't get why they don't pick something like Enlightenment where they could have some actual say in the direction of the FDE and make a clean break. Its pretty clear that the GNOME guys are in a serious "itch scratching" mode and really don't give a crap what the people actually using the software think, so why not simply make a clean break and be "their own man" so to speak?
I know they are working on switching to Debian so they aren't tied to whatever crazy idea Canonical comes up with this week, so trying to hack GNOME to be what they want it to be when the developers are going in a different direction seems kinda nutty to me. If they are gonna do that why not just support the GNOME 2 fork guys, again where they can have some say?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Agreed, I tried to use the keyboard in Unity and was totally appalled. It is a total brain drain to use the mouse for everything. Hell, in Windows 7 I can burn through tasks with the keyboard--actually have to since everything is absolutely buried in the GUI anymore. We'll see how bad that is screed up with 8 though.
We'll see, but it's hard to imagine Microsoft letting their UI degenerate to Gnome-like levels of difficulty for general use. They have a huge business client base, and people still need to get work done, and they learned with the XP-Vista transition that if they don't do it right, people just happily chug along under the older version for years without upgrading, and no matter how much they threaten to not do so, they're forced to drag out supporting an ancient version until they finally introduce one people will upgrade to.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."