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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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.

Title made my brain hurt...

[ndtechnologies]

seriously, it did.

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).

Why? How?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

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.

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.

Porting Unity to other distros...

[opus_magnum]

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

Re:Yay we have (dis)Unity!

[perryizgr8]

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