Ubuntu Unity Ported To Fedora Using OpenSUSE

sfcrazy writes "The general tendency within the open source community is to a whole new wheel to push your own cart. A majority of open source projects are suffering from duplication. Luckily, we just noticed a great example of such collaboration (or using resources by different competing projects) within the distro community. Ubuntu's popular Unity shell is being ported to Fedora (the distro which leads the development of Gnome shell and its also the breeding ground of many latest technologies which are used by the rest of the GNU/Linux world). Interestingly developers users openSUSE's build service to create this port. openSUSE leads the development of Gnome and KDE along with LibreOffice." Calling Unity "popular" seems like a stretch, but it's certainly where a lot of Ubuntu work has been lavished; the cooperation that open source code fosters at least lets whoever wants to use or develop it do so.

Comments

Great, sort of

[arth1]

So now that that's done, perhaps they can "port" Mate to Fedora too?

Gnome 3 and Unity isn't the answer. It's the question, and judging on user reaction, the answer is "no".

Re:Great, sort of

[erroneus]

Wait, what?! No, this is just crap.

GNOME 3 and Unity are not the answer PRIMARILY because no one was asking the damned question!!

People Don't Want GNOME Shell and Don't Want Unity.

"New Coke" sucks. We want Coca-Cola Classic now. Can we have it back?

Re:Great, sort of

[Skarecrow77]

I want unity. I like it. I've used a half a dozen different linux guis and unity is the one that lives on my desktop every day. Sure it's got issues, but they all do in one way or another.

Also, new coke was preferred in taste tests prior to release over "classic" coke and pepsi -combined-.

The reason it failed was because the coca-cola corporation had underestimated the extent to which they themselves had integrated coke into american lifestyles and memories, and any perceived change to that would be viewed by the american public as dicking around with their childhood.

http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp

honestly, new coke was pretty good. I miss it.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

Unity has never, and will never be the answer.

Honestly who thought porting Unity to SUSE was a good thing? Ubuntu users hated it, and because of that, many Gnome users have abandoned Ubuntu in favor of Mint. You can see a direct correlation on distrowatch between Mints sudden surge in ranking, and Ubuntu's sudden drop. It's really no surprise.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as they are porting it, I am sure we want it. Also, the "new coke" sucks thing is kinda stupid, seeing as when they tested for the new coke, most people agreed it tasted a lot better, but people didn't want a new taste, so basically you are saying that for the sake of not having to adapt, we should throw away an improvement. That said, I don't know if unity is an improvement. It has a few not so bad features, but I do miss a lot of things as well.

Re:Great, sort of

[mwolfe38]

I also like unity quite a bit. I would like it more if it were stable. Coincidentally, just yesterday I worked on an old man's windows computer and he had his taskbar on the left side of the screen the way unity has it. He said he does it since all the screens are widescreen it makes better use of his screen.

Re:Great, sort of

[cpu6502]

First Apple, then Microsoft, and now Canonical seem obsessed with making their desktops "pretty" rather than functional.

Mozilla also seems to have the same obsession..... just installed Firefox 13 on my brother's laptop, and I swear it looked like Chromium. He asked me to "make it look like it used to look" so I backed it off to Firefox 10 LTS which has the full dropdown menu. Change for the sake of change is usually bad, especially when the users just want it to work.

Take a look at cars: They've kept the same standard interface for as long as I can remember (back to the 60s at least). The shifter moved from the steering wheel to the floor, but otherwise I could drive an old 60s car or a modern 2013 car without difficulty.

Re:Great, sort of

[Lunix Nutcase]

In taste tests, people also routinely say they like Pepsi more than Coke. But this is purely becuase the taste tests are just small samples while many people can't stand drinking a full can of Pepsi because it's too sweet. This was the same with New Coke. The taste tests of old vs new Coke gave them an erroneous result because it used the same flawed testing as the Pepsi Challenge.

Re:Great, sort of

[Lunix Nutcase]

Yes, in sip tests people liked New Coke more, but ths was a flawed testing method consistent with the erroneous results of the 'Pepsi Challenge'.

Re:Great, sort of

[Merk42]

First Apple, then Microsoft, and now Canonical seem obsessed with making their desktops "pretty" rather than functional.

False Dichotomy

Take a look at cars: They've kept the same standard interface for as long as I can remember (back to the 60s at least). The shifter moved from the steering wheel to the floor, but otherwise I could drive an old 60s car or a modern 2013 car without difficulty.

And as far as Unity, the launcher moved from the bottom to the left. Yes you could list other changes, but I could list other changes to cars in the past 50 year as well.

Re:Great, sort of

[Skarecrow77]

I dunno, I think pepsi does pretty well for themselves.

especially considering that at the time of the whole coke classic / new coke debacle, pepsi was handily outselling coke.

Re:Great, sort of

[Skarecrow77]

you can get the "old" firefox interface with any of the newer versions. I've got 14.0.1 installed right now with the old look.

just go into "view" -> "toolbars" and change the "menu bar" setting.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

False Dichotomy

True. Unity is neither functional nor pretty.

Re:Great, sort of

[kahless62003]

No need to downgrade. In the title bar at the top, right-click on the space to the right of the "Open a new tab" button [+]. Click on "Menu Bar" in the context menu.

Re:Great, sort of

[Lunix Nutcase]

The point wasn't how well Pepsi sells or sold, the point is those new Coke taste tests gave erroneous results such as the Pepsi Challenge did. And Pepsi wasn't outselling Coke as your own link says:

and it was only Coke's greater availability in restricted markets (such as soda vending machines and fast food outlets) that was keeping its numbers ahead of Pepsi's.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

None of this matters because RC Cola is better than Coke -or- Pepsi

Re:Great, sort of

[Microlith]

People hating on Firefox tend to ignore that, unlike Chrome, the UI is customizable. I'm running nightly and it doesn't look all that different from Firefox 3.6, and aside from them playing with the locations of some buttons (always reversible) it hasn't changed much, and rarely in ways that weren't reversible.

Re:Great, sort of

[Lunix Nutcase]

And you ignore the fact that most users don't want to dick around with shit just to get back to what should be the sensible default.

Re:Great, sort of

[DeathToBill]

I seem to be the lone voice here, and I don't understand. I *love* Unity. it is far and away the best, most usable UI I have worked with. Ever.

I say that as a dedicated Emacs user. Unity follows the Emacs philosophy into the graphical desktop - the fewer times I need to reach for that damned mouse, the better. Any app I want to launch is four key strokes away. Any menu item is three or four keystrokes away, and I don't have to remember the arcane sequence of accelerators, I just start typing what I want to do.

Why do people hate it so much? Performance gets trotted out a lot, but even the 2D version running in a VMWare box is usable.

Re:Great, sort of

[kahless62003]

I'm not seeing a "view" menu because the menu bar is disabled. I found the option somewhere else too - the "Menu Bar" option is also available in the "options" submenu of the Firefox menu button.

Re:Great, sort of

[damien_kane]

Not only that, but the tests themselves were biased.

Case in point, a "blind" taste-test offered at a local waterpark that I was at as a teenager, with signs all around it clearly defining it as the "Pepsi Challenge"
This particular taste test was giving out prizes/awards. I had noticed that some people walked away with a bottle of pepsi, and some walked away with a chocolate bar, but nobody got to choose (they were simply being handed the prize).

I (correctly) assumed that those who chose Pepsi as the favorite received the beverage, and those who chose coke got the snack.
I prefer Coke, but I was thirsty and I knew which tasted like which. I chose Pepsi, and got a free beverage.
I told my friends, they attempted, and all got the same result.

At that point it wasn't a contest of coke vs pepsi, it was a contest of free beverage vs free snack on a hot, sunny day in a waterpark.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

Unity isn't the worst thing.
Having to use it for a week led me to find xmonad.

Re:Great, sort of

[Skarecrow77]

keep reading.
[quote] market surveys at the end of 1985 showed Pepsi ahead of New Coke and Classic Coke combined. [/quote]

also, since you said that "many people can't stand to drink a full can of pepsi" I was showing that however many your "many people" are, they aren't enough to stop pepsi from selling a metric shitload of product.

Re:Great, sort of

[Reasonable Facsimile]

None of this matters because RC Cola is better than Coke -or- Pepsi

Shasta, bitches!

Re:Great, sort of

[RabidReindeer]

Meh. I liked Crystal Pepsi. The caramel coloring in colas is purely for looks, and it curdles in you mouth.

But unless Unity supports desktop applets and user program launchers, I'm not going near it. Of all the insanely stupid things Gnome3 did...

Re:Great, sort of

[Skarecrow77]

huh? I thought one of the main knocks on unity was that linux users weren't allowed to dick around with the UI as much as they've classically been allowed to?

man, damned if you do, damned if you don't...

Re:Great, sort of

[Skarecrow77]

all true hackers drink jolt!

Re:Great, sort of

[Skarecrow77]

I liked crystal pepsi too. it was a little different, but in a good way.
pepsi crystal, which came out a few years later, was not the same thing at all!

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's only recently reached what could be called beta quality, it still sucks at multiple monitors, global menus are fucking lame, scroll bars that by default disappear are stupid and unintuitive, the dash is laggy, it's terrible at touch even when your monitor has touch capability, not allowing people to move the launch bar without needless dicking around, the fact that you need a third party program just to adjust fonts and other basic configuration, etc, etc.

Re:Great, sort of

[iamgnat]

And you ignore the fact that most users don't want to dick around with shit just to get back to what should be the sensible default.

This!

I've been an OS X user for almost 12 years now and am firmly expecting to drop it and switch to Linux next month when 10.8 doesn't fix the shit they messed up with 10.7. Apple's been messing with their UI for years now, but it's finally gotten to the level that it pisses me off daily that almost all my "muscle memory" is now broken because they've changed things too much. Sure some things can be reverted back to how they were (or some semblance there of), but little of it is documented and I shouldn't have to waste my time doing it.

I can understand enabling the new interface features for fresh installs, but when you are doing an upgrade is it really so hard to leave shit alone and provide the user information about why these new features are so "cool" and how to enable them if they want them?

On the topic of switching to Linux, does anyone know of good resource that details various window manager features and how to configure them? I've been out of the Unix/Linux desktop scene for a long time (late 90s) and so far I am no fan of Unity.

Re:Great, sort of

[Lunix Nutcase]

Huh? He was talking about the Firefox UI. Even still, if people have to needlessly dick around to get your DE or prgram usable you have failed big time. No one said take away cuatomizability, but you need sensible defaults or you just drive people away.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

huh? I thought one of the main knocks on unity was that linux users weren't allowed to dick around with the UI as much as they've classically been allowed to?

And the reason people want to 'dick around with it' is because by default it sucks. It's OK on a tiny netbook screen, but it's horrible when you're trying to do real work on a real screen.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

For the love of god - NOOOO!

Re:Great, sort of

[genus_001]

or Club Mate.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the difference between 19 and 21 tsp of sugar in a 355ml container, really? I find it hard to believe that those hardened sugar-crazed cretins (ie, anybody who volunteers for the "taste test") would be able to notice if you added a few dung beetles to the mix. Either Pepsi or Coke could be used to strip paint.

Re:Great, sort of

[genus_001]

You could have just went to preferences and clicked the Menu Bar box.

Re:Great, sort of

[sensei moreh]

I'm using FF-14.0.1 on Fedora Rawhide, and, after a bit of (annoying but necessary) tweaking, it looks pretty much like FF has looked for quite a while.

Re:Great, sort of

[chilvence]

What I don't get is why people moan so much about unity, when if they dont like it, there are 18 gazillion other linuxes out there to use. Or even just switch to classic mode! Unity is different on purpose, shitting all over it for its minor faults is akin to kicking a baby in the shins because they haven't properly preserved the grammar of their mother language.

Of course it isn't perfect, but the whole point is: at least its something different! Stagnant pools breed vermin...

Re:Great, sort of

[MrEricSir]

Gnome 3 and Unity isn't the answer. It's the question, and judging on user reaction, the answer is "no".

To be fair, the main reasons for the backlash are the same:

• Released too early with major bugs
• Linux users are notoriously change-averse
• No marketing effort aimed at showing how the new is better than the old

In fact, the response to KDE 4 was quite similar. The Linux desktop folks need to learn how to test properly and to take some marketing lessons from Apple. It's the least they could do.

Re:Great, sort of

[Robert Zenz]

Gnome 3 and Unity isn't the answer. It's the question, and judging on user reaction, the answer is "no".

Well, somehow I have to thank Gnome 3/Unity. Without it I'd never have tried Sawfish, XFCE, finally moved my POP account into a private IMAP server, learned Mutt, found DeadBeef, expanded my Conky-Configuration to include even more awesome stuff...I'd never have looked beyond Gnome if it wouldn't have been for those two.

So, this might sound crazy, but thank you Gnome and Canonical! Thank you for pushing a technology which made me look beyond what I already had, and let me find even better things! Thank you! ... ... ... Okay, you can now end the joke, we get it...can we now get the real Gnome 3?!

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

This what? Finish your sentences.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

What I don't get is why people moan so much about unity, when if they dont like it, there are 18 gazillion other linuxes out there to use

Because Unity isn't a Linux distribution?

Re:Great, sort of

[trimpnick]

I liked Vanilla Coke myself, alas I didn't know many others who did

Re:Great, sort of

[karolbe]

And you are a troll.

Re:Great, sort of

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Gnome 3 and Unity isn't the answer. It's the question, and judging on user reaction, the answer is "no".

Maybe the question is "How do we make KDE 4.x look better?"

Re:Great, sort of

[hairyfeet]

Bah, its all about what goes with it. RC Cola and Moonpies, Pepsi and peanuts, Coke and cashews. Of course with the Pepsi and Coke you'll need a bottle to pour in the peanuts and cashews respectively but it all comes down to having the right one with the right side.

Re:Great, sort of

[Compaqt]

I encourage you to have a look at the latest Unity in Precise Pangolin (Ubuntu 12.04).

They've fixed the worst problems and it actually works quite well for a developer workstation now.

-AltTab only cycles through the windows on the current virtual desktop, not all desktops.
-It's actually nice having icons in fixed locations. Good for muscle memory.
-Global menu is nice on a laptop. On a huge monitor it may not be. But you can turn it off with one of the tweak programs.
-"You have to know the name of the app" is a concern. But not most of the time.
-If you want a hierarchical menu of the installed apps, you can install Cardapio, which I did.
-Showing your most recently used files, apps, etc. is useful, because 90% of the time you're working with what you worked with yesterday.
-The multimonitor spec is pretty good

There are some annoyances with the indicators (they don't have tooltips anymore). Settings are also sort of dumbed down. But it's generally great for developers.

Re:Great, sort of

[hairyfeet]

May I make a suggestion? Look at Pale Moon for your brother as the LTS won't give you as long as you think, not with the way they've been spinning version numbers like a top, whereas Pale Moon has stopped any UI "enhancements" and version 12 because they too don't care for the direction Mozilla is taking. as a bonus its compiled for newer CPUs with the SSE flags so it actually gives it a nice kick in the pants.

As for what has been going on with OSes lately...sigh. if I wanted a God damned cell phone for a desktop i would have a damned desktop, just a cell phone! Why the fuck do they think everyone wants to have a cell phone UI everywhere? The only thing I have EVER agreed with SJVN on is that the new UIs all suck and nooo, not because we are 'scared of change" or any other bullshit, I've been through plenty of desktop UIs, from Win 3.x and 9x through BBox through KDE and Flux, no its because its all about the bling and aping fricking smartphones instead of actually designing for the fricking form factor. Its just the opposite of the retarded 'Hey lets make phones into teeny tiny desktops!" that MSFT did with WinCE for a damned decade, only now its "Hey lets make desktops into supergigantic smartphones".

Its all just a big giant clusterfuck and I'll be glad when these things bomb big time so they can actually focus on making desktops that work again, instead of feeling like my monitor should be touch and have a slide out keyboard just to deal with the mess.

Re:Great, sort of

[HarrySquatter]

Being buggy is a 'mnor fault', now?

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

The caramel coloring in colas is purely for looks

Not true. It actually has a distinct, slightly burnt flavour.

Re:Great, sort of

[arth1]

People hating on Firefox tend to ignore that, unlike Chrome, the UI is customizable. I'm running nightly and it doesn't look all that different from Firefox 3.6, and aside from them playing with the locations of some buttons (always reversible) it hasn't changed much, and rarely in ways that weren't reversible.

I can't minimize the bookmark and tab bars anymore. I really miss that. Now you have to go through the View menu where you can remove the bookmark bar from view, but not toggle it like the minimize button did. And the tab bar seems stuck no matter what.
Some might be comfortable with those changes, but they're still irreversible changes.

Re:Great, sort of

[utoddl]

I say that as a dedicated Emacs user.

There is no other kind of successful Emacs user.

Unity follows the Emacs philosophy into the graphical desktop - the fewer times I need to reach for that damned mouse, the better.

Exactly the point. You don't need a graphical interface. You already know the names of all the apps you want to run. But my mother and father do need a graphical interface, and they don't know the names of all the apps -- however few they are. They can't touch type and look at the screen at the same time. They need to nudge the computer with the mouse toward useful operations. They could do that before, and they can't with Unity, or with the GNOME Shell.

So, no you aren't a lone voice, but you are in the extreme minority. If I want to run my computer from the keyboard, I'll open a terminal. I like the terminal. And I like a real GUI. I don't much care for screens that are too short and too wide playing animations in response to undiscoverable key strokes, which as far as I can tell is the point of both Unity and the GNOME Shell. (I know you were just talking about Unity, but personally I'd toss them both in the same bin.)

Re:Great, sort of

[arth1]

I say that as a dedicated Emacs user. Unity follows the Emacs philosophy

Use self-modifying code and eat CPU through busy-polling?
Jokes aside, I am sure that there are people who like Unity (and some who even like Gnome 3). But I think the great majority don't; especially those who are used to working with lots of different apps, or use xdm or VMs.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason for the backlash is that I and many others don't want a braindead cell phone UI for our desktops. It is a fundamentally flawed DE. For a smart phone, it may be usable (I wouldn't use it, it performs as well as a gutted walrus), but on a desktop it only gets in the way.

Re:Great, sort of

[dhaen]

Hmm, I am not fond of Unity, Metro or the "iPadded" Lion interfaces, but if I'd seen those first perhaps I would have preferred them. It could be said they are each "dumbed down" but it could equally be argued that they "remove unnecessary complexity". Ubuntu is the trendsetter of the Linux community. Trendsetters are listened to, and it seems that Suse have followed their lead. I have a choice of interfaces, so am an impartial observer. I'll be interested to see how things develop over the next year or two.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

"I want unity. I like it. I've used a half a dozen different linux guis and unity is the one that lives on my desktop every day. Sure it's got issues, but they all do in one way or another."

Thats you. As for me fighting against Unity (as with all things Ubuntu decides to do) takes it too much effort each new release more and more your away from the core. So plenty of users have dropped Ubuntu and found something else. Unity sucks its Ubuntu's vista (some people liked it as well).

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

First Apple, then Microsoft, and now Canonical seem obsessed with making their desktops "pretty" rather than functional.

False Dichotomy

Ideally we'd have desktops that are both pretty and functional. Developers, however, only have so much time to use. Pick two: pretty, functional, on-time.

Re:Great, sort of

[Reasonable Facsimile]

all true hackers drink jolt!

I tried Jolt when it first came out, and it felt like someone had attached a car battery to my teeth.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

"New Coke" sucks. We want Coca-Cola Classic now. Can we have it back?

Yeah, Coca-Cola hasn't been the same since they removed the cocaine.

Re:Great, sort of

[Andrewkov]

Cherry Coke was pretty good, although Dr. Pepper is better.

Re:Great, sort of

[MrEricSir]

Blah, blah, blah. Throwing a bunch of buzzwords together doesn't make a coherent sentence, let alone anything resembling an argument.

If you're going to take the time to say something, at least take the extra second or two to add actual content.

Re:Great, sort of

[Zontar The Mindless]

"Troll" != "I disagree".

Even ACs are allowed to express their opinions.

Re:Great, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

go/went/have gone

See where you messed up?

Re:Great, sort of

[tehcyder]

In my unscientific taste tests (sample size - me and my kids) the cheapest cola you get in a supermarket tastes almost exactly the same as coke or pepsi once it's chilled/served with ice.

And if they're not chilled or served with ice, coke and pepsi also taste like shit.

I know this will seem like heresy to Americans, soz.

Re:Great, sort of

[tehcyder]

Cherry Coke was pretty good, although Dr. Pepper is better.

Drinking Dr Pepper is better than dying of thirst when you're too dehydrated to produce your own piss to drink, but that's about it.

Re:Great, sort of

[tehcyder]

I also like unity quite a bit. I would like it more if it were stable. Coincidentally, just yesterday I worked on an old man's windows computer and he had his taskbar on the left side of the screen the way unity has it. He said he does it since all the screens are widescreen it makes better use of his screen.

Proof yet again of the superior customising facilities available on Windows compared to the one-size-fits-all approach of Linux. Hold on a sec...

Re:Great, sort of

[tehcyder]

This what? Finish your sentences.

It's the new "me too!" and just as irritating.

There is an additional implication of elitism about it, as though the writer is saying "I do not have the time to write in English due to the fantastically important work I am doing, but I thought I would just let you mere mortal know that I find your ideas acceptable."

Re:Great, sort of

[tehcyder]

Blah, blah, blah. Throwing a bunch of buzzwords together doesn't make a coherent sentence, let alone anything resembling an argument.

IIf you count "cell phone" and "desktop" as buzzwords, I can only assume you have just been released from a very long spell in solitary confinement. You are aware that the US landed a man on the moon, right?

Re:Great, sort of

[cpu6502]

>>>In the title bar at the top, right-click on the space to the right of the "Open a new tab" button [+]. Click on "Menu Bar" in the context menu.

Yeah I did but still doesn't look the same as the older interface my brother had on Firefox 4. So I went to the LTS version (10) with 2 years of support & the same look he wanted.

Re:Great, sort of

[mfg]

In fact, the response to KDE 4 was quite similar.

The problem with KDE 4.0 was that it was simply nowhere near release quality; huge chunks of it were either massively buggy or simply not implemented, and it took them until 4.3 to get it to a state that I was prepared to use it as my desktop. At that point it worked pretty much identically to KDE 3.x, even though the underlying code had been completely rewritten, and I could just ignore the new stuff I had no use for such as activities without it affecting my desktop experience at all.

Unity, while it's less ugly than GNOME 3 and not quite as awful, still shares many of the same fundamental design flaws. No amount of bug fixing and tweaks can make a desktop usable when the basic ideas behind it are so wrong.

One summary, so many errors

[Anonymous Coward]

>> "Interestingly developers users openSUSE's build service"
Developers users? Developers used? Developers are using?

>> "A majority of open source projects are suffering from duplication. Luckily, we just noticed a great example of such collaboration"
I think there is a sentence missing in there. Or maybe the author doesn't know what duplication and collaboration mean?

>> "Calling Unity "popular" seems like a stretch"
Really? It's only the default desktop of the most widely used Linux distribution in the world. Popularity doesn't mean you like it, it's a measure of how many people use/like it. More people use Unity than just about any other open source desktop available, that makes it pretty popular.

Re:One summary, so many errors

[Nerdfest]

All of the Ubuntu Users I know switch to Gnome 3 or Xfce as their first step after install. This is obviously a small-ish sample size (15 or so, and mostly IT people), I'm currently tolerating Gnome 3. I find that Unity, in addition to some of it's design faults is too slow.

Re:One summary, so many errors

[Nerdfest]

... of course, my opinion shouldn't be trusted because I don't know the peoper "its" to use.

Re:One summary, so many errors

[Noughmad]

You missed some:

The general tendency within the open source community is to a whole new wheel to push your own cart

Yes, open source developers tend to accidentally a whole wheel.

openSUSE leads the development of Gnome and KDE along with LibreOffice

What? openSUSE doesn't lead anything, they use the software, and usually assist in its development.

Re:One summary, so many errors

[DdJ]

Interesting. None of the Ubuntu users I know are using anything other than Unity.

But then, none of them were Linux desktop users until Ubuntu 12.04 either.

(Well, I was, back in the 1990s. But not for like 12 years or so. The main thing I've found annoying about Unity is how hard it is to turn off virtual desktops/workspaces. Was tempted to switch back to TWM until I figured it out.)

Re:One summary, so many errors

[RDW]

Really? It's only the default desktop of the most widely used Linux distribution in the world. Popularity doesn't mean you like it, it's a measure of how many people use/like it. More people use Unity than just about any other open source desktop available, that makes it pretty popular.

Unity's 'popularity' is almost entirely dependent on the strong Ubuntu brand (built with Gnome 2). How popular would Unity be if it were presented as an equal choice at installation with Gnome 2 (or MATE)? The spinoff distributions offer alternative defaults, of course, but Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Kubuntu have much lower profiles than the flagship Ubuntu brand. I'd be very surprised to see Unity enthusiastically adopted by the broader Linux community (packaging it is one thing; getting more than a handful of users to install it is quite another). Meanwhile, Ubuntu's 'new desktop paradigm' has probably done more than anything else to boost the popularity of Mint (v13 with MATE is much closer to 'classic Ubuntu' than any of Canonical's recent offerings).

Re:One summary, so many errors

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's it. That's the reason your opinion shouldn't be trusted. I mean, you typing while drunk wouldn't figure into it at all.

Re:One summary, so many errors

[DdJ]

I'd be very surprised to see Unity enthusiastically adopted by the broader Linux community (packaging it is one thing; getting more than a handful of users to install it is quite another).

If you mean current Linux users, that's one issue. But another issue is: to what extent will Unity entice non-Linux users to become Linux users?

(I'm talking about on the desktop.)

I personally know very few people who use Ubuntu on the desktop. Of those people, none used it at all before 12.04, and none have switched away from Unity.

(I happen to be in this set myself. I've been a Linux user on servers since well before the switch from a.out to ELF. I used it on the desktop in the mid to late 90s, but not since -- every time I gave it a try, I quickly went back to other desktop operating systems. But now I'm using Ubuntu, and so are non-techie relatives, and a couple of other people around me.)

Re:One summary, so many errors

[moderatorrater]

I don't know the peoper "its" to use.

Today's not treating you too well, is it?

Re:One summary, so many errors

[garett_spencley]

I'm sure I could answer my own question with 2 seconds of googling, but for the sake of discussion: What are the differences between Unity and Gnome 3 besides performance ?

I've been using Ubuntu for quite a few years now and have never considered switching desktops, particularly to Gnome (and isn't Unity just Gnome with some changes or am I *way* behind the times ?) xfce is just too ugly for me. I'm one of those rare tech people who actually doesn't mind sparing a few CPU cycles to have something nice to look at, as long as it doesn't cause performance problems (I would even argue that for a lot of people a nice aesthetic UI can boost productivity as long as it's done properly - i.e: to create a more pleasant and intuitive user experience).

So, would I have any reason to want to switch from Unity to Gnome 3 ?

Re:One summary, so many errors

[Anonymous Coward]

They're talking about the openSUSE Build service (OBS), which allows a developer to build packages for multiple distros, and multiple architectures, using OBS. It's actually a very cool service and nothing else like it that I've ever seen. You might want to check it out before criticizing, as it is unique and openSUSE/SUSE lead the effort and it's availability to the public. http://build.opensuse.org.

Re:One summary, so many errors

[RanCossack]

So, would I have any reason to want to switch from Unity to Gnome 3 ?

I don't use gnome3 myself, but I did try it out for a while, and it did a few things that might meet your needs better.

Gnome3 can look pretty good, with themes. To my personal taste, the default looks terrible, though. It's also a lot easier to customize than Unity is now, though this wasn't the case earlier.

I tried it out for a while, and I actually really like how it handles notifications, though your taste may go the opposite way. And Compiz still has issues with snapping on resize, so getting away from that is nice.

Gnome3 also will dynamically manage your desktops/workspaces, adding or deleting them as you move windows to them. I personally couldn't stand that, but from what I hear it matches some people's needs perfectly.

Re:One summary, so many errors

[Anonymous Coward]

When I installed ubuntu the other day (having been using scientific linux for several months) I was so pissed off by the interface that I immediately installed Fedora instead. Seriously, why is there a GIANT sidebar on my desktop with GIANT buttons and I can't even move or hide it! And when I go to drag windows around, they lag behind my mouse. And no window list? That is one thing I could never stand when I had to use an apple computer. It should at least be an option.

I'm not sure Gnome3 is any better, but it only works in fallback mode on this computer, so I'm not complaining yet.

Re:One summary, so many errors

[Noughmad]

I know the OBS, I have used it for a couple of years, and although it was for only one project, I know how cool, useful and unique it is. I would never dispute its value to both distributions and developers. However, it is not what the summary says.

Re:One summary, so many errors

[techno-vampire]

I personally know very few people who use Ubuntu on the desktop. Of those people, none used it at all before 12.04, and none have switched away from Unity.

My sister started using Ubuntu (with Gnome 2) when it was 8.x. When Ubuntu switched everybody to Unity she deicded to give it a try before considering migrating to a different DE. She's not particularly fond of it, but she's put enough time into learning how to use it that she's not interested in switching. After all, the only thing she really wants is to be able to get work done, so as long as the DE doesn't actively get in her way it's OK with her. (I've used it a few times on her box while giving her tech support. Personally, I hate it.)

BTW, both of us are senior citizens; she uses Ubuntu, while I prefer Fedora with Xfce. Neither of us is your steriotypical twenty-something Linux geek. I mention this only because we're probably not in Unity's target demographic, and some of you might find that significant.

Re:One summary, so many errors

[tehcyder]

He's just carrying on the slashdot tradition of making at least one spelling/grammar mistake in any post pointing out someone's spelling/grammar mistake.

What's unusual is that he was being a grammar Nazi towards himself which is strangely impressive.

Yay we have (dis)Unity!

[cpu6502]

I'm not sure but I suspect this is the main reason I couldn't get Ubuntu to run on my 386 MB laptop. Unity was using too much memory and ran like a snail (similar to Vista). I switched to LXDE (lubuntu).

Re:Yay we have (dis)Unity!

[Anonymous Coward]

386MB is a strange amount of RAM to have. Does that include a 2MB video card?

Re:Yay we have (dis)Unity!

[perryizgr8]

Linux Mint's MATE interface is the way to go. lightweight, fast, familiar ui, and reasonably customizable.

Are you not entertained?

[DeTech]

From my real world experience most people don't mind Unity. I even use it at home. Just stick a terminal somewhere and it's just as good as any other "dock"

Why would you need to "port" it?

[sl4shd0rk]

Does it not use the standard gnome/gtk/... libraries? I've heard Unity sucks pretty bad, but if it requires special "ubuntu" extensions, that's just sick.

Re:Why would you need to "port" it?

[robmv]

I am sure it does not need to be ported, only packaged for any distribution, the problem with Unity is that Ubuntu had to patch many applications to use the new features that it provides, like the notifications API for example. That they are building it on OpenSUSE service and not directly on Fedora repositories is probably (I am guessing) because Fedora has an strict policy of not patching upstream projects, if you need new features, add those to the original project (if you convince the project managers that what you have done is good and needed)

Re:Why would you need to "port" it?

[geek]

Port is possibly the wrong term but to answer your questions, no, it doesn't use the standard upstream libraries. Canonical heavily patches and tweaks things to make them work. It's hack upon hack, the vast majority of which are rejected by upstream so Canonical just releases their own packages for it. This is why Unity will never be in the main Arch repos because their packages aren't compatible with upstream in most cases.

Oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's spreading!

Title made my brain hurt...

[ndtechnologies]

seriously, it did.

Re:Title made my brain hurt...

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Duplication

[Anonymous Coward]

> A majority of open source projects are suffering from duplication.
Sometimes software is so bad that doing your own thing is the only alternative. Yes, I’m looking at you, Unity.

Why? How?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't the Geneva Convention prevent development and use of torture devices on non-combatants?

Unity better than Gnome Shell

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

Come on Unity is much better than Gnome Shell (of course, classic Gnome 2 is better than both). Just one reason why Gnome Shell is bad: you got clickable elements on all four sides of the default (Home) screen. In Unity, only the right side and the top are significant, similar to the Mac and Gnome 2, where the bottom (the dock in the case of the Mac) and top are significant.

Re:Unity better than Gnome Shell

[Nerdfest]

That bottom area on Gnome 3 is one of its big flaws, I think. They display notifications there, but only when you hover your mouse over them. *Mail notifications*, stuff like that. Notifications are meant to be seen. I want toknow at a glance that I have an email to read. The only way I've found to fix this is with a third party mail notification program. Neither Thunderbird or Evolution will do it properly, even with some of the Gnome extensions.

Re:Unity better than Gnome Shell

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

That bottom area on Gnome 3 is one of its big flaws, I think. They display notifications there, but only when you hover your mouse over them.

I don't have a Gnome Shell instance at moment, so I'm not sure if that's the case. I do remember seeing notifications on the bottom area and on the top panel. Now, I'm not sure if the messages that appeared on the top panel were notifications or merely tooltips. Maybe that's what the Fedora folks were thinking, to separate the tooltips from the notifications. I prefer the notifications to pop up (automatically when important) not in a blank area, but near a recognizable screen element, say, a special icon or panel area.

Re:Unity better than Gnome Shell

[Anonymous Coward]

The launcher and task switcher are much better in Gnome Shell though (ok, the alt-tab, alt-`, alt-standon-your-head-and-pray situation is a joke, but at least you can install an extension to fix it).

The entire concept of the expanding/collapsing/scrolling launcher thing in Unity is fundamentally flawed. It's bad on a big screen and it's completely unusable on a netbook. Gnome 3 is excellent on a netbook. (Though the best Netbook interface by far was the original Ubuntu Netbook launcher).

For God's Sake...

[briancox2]

Why?

My thoughts

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

I don't mind using Unity on Ubuntu and it has gotten better since it was first introduced but I fail to understand why anyone would want to port this to other distros. I seem to recall many users giving negative feedback about Unity when it was first introduced and migrating to Mint as a result.

My Response to This:

[interval1066]

"NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!"

Is Fedora doing this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't tell from the article, but is Fedora actually doing this or is it a Fedora user? If you wonder why it makes a difference, well, a Fedora sponsored port implies support, while as a user port does not.

Re:Is Fedora doing this?

[eric_herm]

Fedora user.

And ported is a little misleading, just someone did quick package, but since they need non upstream patch to gnome, they will likely not be accepted by Fedora under this form.

Porting Unity to other distros...

[opus_magnum]

...sounds like spreading the pox to another town and calling it a success!

Re:Porting Unity to other distros...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if _I_ have to put up with it, I applaud the effort to force it on others :-)

UI Curmudgeons

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people who "HATE" Unity gave it a single chance when it was first released, and have never tried it again. The 12.04 release is as good or better than any other window manager out there. If you have the hardware it has some "pretty" 3D effects if not you can go 2D and it still works and is snappy even on a low end system.
People resist change. Change is hard. When Apple changed the UI people ranted now the same people will defend it to the end. KDE 3 vs 4 it took how many releases before people accepted it. It still makes me laugh/cry when I sit down on a windows machine and someone has changed the start memu to "classic" AKA make my desktop look like Windows 2000.

UI Curmudgeons give Unity a chance. Especially if you are running 12.04. YES it is different, YES some things don't work the way you want. But in some cases if you learn the new way you will find out it does work better, cleaner, smarter.

PS: if you real quiet you can hear the gnashing of teeth with the newest change Ubuntu is putting out. bye bye X Hello Wayland. +1 to Ubuntu for looking forward rather than backwards.

Re:UI Curmudgeons

[Anonymous Coward]

How many trolls would a troll troll troll if a troll troll could troll trolls?

Re:UI Curmudgeons

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm I would argue that all the people simple bashing Unity without saying "why" other than it is different are the trolls.

Re:UI Curmudgeons

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for everyone does say why. There end up being huge lists of reasons Unity sucks.

And make no mistake, suck it does.

1. Performance
2. Global Menu
3. Not well integrated with programs that canonical hasn't shimmed their own code into
4. Not compatible with multiple monitors
5. Pain in the ass to get the behavior I want from it wrt full screen and autohiding
6. alt+f2/dash lags and is so slow I often finish typing my commands and hit enter before it displays, resulting in the last command in history being launched instead of what I typed
7. Crashes a lot

So yeah. There are a shit ton of issues. I tried to use unity for 5 months. I FINALLY got IT's permission to remove that piece of shit and install MATE. Unity is the Windows ME of desktop managers.

Re:UI Curmudgeons

[Anonymous Coward]

July - 5 months = Februarywhich was exactly my point. People are judging Unity on it's first two releases 11.04 and 11.10. I'll be the first to admit 11.04 was garbage and I ended up moving back to gnome. 11.10 got better but it still had some flaws and 2D mode on older hardware was terrible. 12.04 has been night and day.

11.04 = Alpha
11.10 = Beta
12.04 = Release

if you have not tried 12.04 all I'm saying is give it a shot but you have to check the "I do it this way and only this way" stuff at the door and be open to a little change.
That being said I spend most of my day in a shell so as long as it is easy to launch one I'm happy.

Re:UI Curmudgeons

[arth1]

Also, largely incompatible with remote X (xdm) and Virtual Machines, meaning the users will have to deal with two different desktop environments for the same OS.

And old school users who use focus-folllows-mouse without click-to-raise (because it allows for dozens of overlapping windows with sane copy/paste) have a hard time with both Unity and Gnome 3.
Both seem to be designed for users who use one instance of one program at a time, on a single monitor. That may be what many users do, but really hinders power users.

Citation needed...

[osu-neko]

A majority of open source projects are suffering from duplication.

Is there any evidence at all that any open source project is suffering from duplication? What are the supposed harms? Does software that does the same thing as another piece of software somehow split the psychic essence of the concept so that each is only half as effective?

I really wish we'd just kill this myth. There's little reason to suppose it's true, and not a single shred of evidence for it.

The reason often cited is that if the developers weren't re-inventing the wheel, they would be producing something better. But what reason do we have to suppose this? In an open source project, people work on what they want to. They're doing it for the fun of it. There's no more reason to assert that them working on this code is hurting progress on other code than there is to assert that it's hurting their progress to max level in Diablo III. Somewhat less, I would say.

This complaint, often heard, is every bit as stupid as complaining than a man is spending days in his garage with his woodworking tools making a chair when he could just buy one at the store in a matter of minutes. Sure, it's not the most efficient use of his time, but that's not the point. He's doing it because he likes woodworking as much as because he wants a chair, perhaps moreso.

tl;dr: No open source project suffers from duplication. Stop repeating this idiotic myth.

English...

[Schlaegel]

• "The general tendency within the open source community is to a whole new wheel to push your own cart."
• "(the distro which leads the development of Gnome shell and its also the breeding ground of many latest technologies which are used by the rest of the GNU/Linux world)."
• "Interestingly developers users openSUSE's build service to create this port."

Would someone translate that to English please?

Re:English...

[wonkey_monkey]

"The general tendency within the open source community is to a whole new wheel to push your own cart."

I think they a verb.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why port Unity? It's garbage. Try using two command prompts at once with unity. Just try it. By God its hard work. Now try it with a sensible window manager such as the one that preceded the unity inflicted Ubuntu versions. Trivial.

So Why the F would you port something as crap as unity?

Doe not make sense. It's a step backwards.

Shows that something works

[Anonymous Coward]

That the opensuse build service (OBS) works, is a good idea and should be expanded.

Re: Crystal Pepsi!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! The neatest thing about Crystal Pepsi is that it reacted violently with snow, causing small hissing explosions.

And for the record, Vanilla Coke was the best cola ever, and I truly miss it since it is no longer available here in Canada.

Good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

One desktop environment to rule them all. Makes sense.
Now all they need to do is to start from scratch and get it right :)