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Ubuntu Unity Ported To Fedora Using OpenSUSE

Posted by timothy on from the say-that-three-times-fast dept.

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.

11 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Great, sort of by arth1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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".

    1. Re:Great, sort of by erroneus · · Score: 5, Funny

      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?

    2. Re:Great, sort of by Skarecrow77 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Great, sort of by cpu6502 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
    4. Re:Great, sort of by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:Great, sort of by damien_kane · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:Great, sort of by RabidReindeer · · Score: 4, Informative

      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...

    7. Re:Great, sort of by Skarecrow77 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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...

  2. Re:One summary, so many errors by RDW · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

  3. Why? How? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  4. Unity better than Gnome Shell by k(wi)r(kipedia) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.