Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 Arrives For Testing

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 Arrives For Testing

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday September 2, 2012 @06:06PM from the mixing-it-up dept.

sfcrazy writes "The first ISO (alpha) images of Gnome Shell edition of Ubuntu is now available for download and testing. The Gnome edition of Ubuntu will bring back a lot of hard-core Gnome Shell fans who were looking elsewhere to get the pure Gnome Shell experience. Both Fedora and openSUSE are doing a great job at offering Gnome 3 Shell experience and the arrival of Ubuntu GNOME Remix will give the project the audience it needed."

12 of 175 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-02 18:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

I've been a Linux user for a few years now and while I've seen great strides made in desktop aesthetics and usability, I still can't with a pure conscious say that any of the DEs are as good as or better than what comes on Windows or OSX. Windows is without a doubt snappier and the taskbar has a lot of nifty and intuitive features. I can get past the artwork, fonts, and icons on Gnome/KDE/Xfce/etc. as I get that good artists cost money and that's not something these groups have in spades but basic usability is not something that needs to look good, it just needs to work. So, what's the deal?
1. Re:I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-02 18:29 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  ...continued
  Take the window previews in Windows. I used to have those with Compiz and you can enable them in Unity but the implementation is buggy. When you mouse off of them, a lot of the time they won't go away so you have to mouse back over again. Also on Windows, you can grab the bottom of a window and pull it down to the taskbar to get a maximize vertical state. Why can't I do that in Linux? Another thing that rocks with Windows is if say you download something and you right click and select "see file in folder", when the file manager opens, the file is already selected so you don't have to hunt around for it. This is a small thing but it makes a huge difference by eliminating extra work. Also, if I select "Single Click" in the Nautilus settings, why doesn't the file picker respect that? And why is the file picker stuck on "details" mode? I'm pretty sure that KDE doesn't have these problems by the way but it has other ones. The main one being how much slower than GTK based DEs it is. I haven't tried it since probably 4.6 though so this could be fixed by now.
  Anyway, there are many things I like about Linux on the desktop that Windows doesn't have like focus follows mouse (a must for multiple monitors), being able to mouse scroll a non focused window when I don't have ffm turned on. I love the way the notification tray in Unity looks and works. It's super consistent and writing plugins for it is a breeze. I also like the dock in Unity with how easy it is to add functionality to a launchers right click menu something that Windows and OSX people can only dream about. I just wish Linux didn't fall down on the simple things. I really want that auto file select thing.
2. Re:I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-02 19:44 · Score: 0, Insightful
  
  So where in Burson Marsteller do YOU work?
3. Re:I don't get it by hairyfeet · 2012-09-02 21:26 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  You DO realize that every time someone like you screams "Shill!" when someone points out a legitimate beef you make the community look like this guy right?
  As for why basic usability features don't get done, its simply human nature or as i like to call it "the busted shitter problem". It has been said time and time again its the last 20% that takes 80% of the work but with FOSS you have the busted shitter problem in that releasing NEW software is FUN, while spending years doing bug fixes, regression testing, and QC? Is about as fun as getting a root canal at the DMV. To hunt down that bug and fix it will probably take a good year of hard work that is gonna suck balls, so why in the hell should somebody do a lousy job like that for free?
  And THAT is the problem in a nutshell. Apple and MSFT pay millions of dollars to developers to do all those truly shit jobs so those bugs don't end up affecting the end user, whereas the devs for a lot of the stuff in Linux are doing the work gratis so the truly shit jobs aren't done.
  Maybe a combination carrot and stick approach is required? Have a bounty for the worst bugs, were people donate to get them fixed, and at the same time have a set schedule, say 5 years, per software release when it comes to things that the system counts on. That way the devs can't just keep putting out new versions willy nilly because the distros won't add them to the repo and would have an incentive to actually work on what they have instead of through the baby out with the bathwater like they did with the DEs and sound subsystem.
  Because there are plenty of guys like me that would be happy to put your product on new systems and give you a support network like Apple has with the Apple stores but obvious major bugs like that being released in supposed "ready for the user" software just makes the whole system look second rate and it makes after market support a nightmare and too costly for the little guys.
  
  --
  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Too little too late by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-02 18:28 · Score: 2, Insightful

They turned it from "Linux for Humans" to "Linux for morons". Trust broken. The damage is done. The certainty's gone. The spirit altered.
1. Re:Too little too late by pointyhat · 2012-09-02 18:51 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Unfortunately "Linux for Morons" is the only thing likely to grow market share as most humans are morons.
  I dont blame them really - for most people, it's just another appliance.
2. Re:Too little too late by captainpanic · 2012-09-02 21:49 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  They turned it from "Linux for Humans" to "Linux for morons".
  I love them for that. No, I am not kidding.
  But no jokes aside, Linux is not a single system. Ubuntu is for the complete n00bs (like myself), but there are still plenty of other Linux versions for the better-informed people like yourself. Stop complaining and shop around a bit. Most are easy to download.
Re:Linux Mint by collet · 2012-09-02 18:34 · Score: 1, Insightful

I actually used gnome shell for more than five minutes and don't really want to go back to windows 95.
"Blah blah blah proven interface blah blah blah fuck change"
It's still better.
Re:Linux Mint by paulatz · 2012-09-02 18:41 · Score: 2, Insightful

Also I think switching distro JUST for a different DE is retarded.
Especially when you are switching to a bug-infested ubuntu clone

--
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
Re:I don't get it. by oakgrove · 2012-09-02 20:12 · Score: 4, Insightful

More importantly, however, my question I pose to all of "/." is this. Why does someone not simply take whatever was (by general consensus) the best version of Gnome before they started ripping features out of it, and then figure out which one to fork Gnome in to. Since it's FLOSS, (UIAVMM...) anything you really wanted could be build on top of an older version. Why are we still letting people so obviously out of touch with what users want or need, it's just ask for, or even demand
Here you go! The issue with Mate being a first class citizen is multi-fold though. First of all, despite many people not liking Gnome 3, they don't want to use something they perceive as "old" so going with a Gnome 2 fork just doesn't sit well. Another issue is there were many architectural problems and inherent bugs in Gnome 2 that were solved in the new version. Do the people maintaining Mate have the chops and resources to address these issues? I think ultimately projects like Mate and Trinity (KDE 3.5) serve a great purpose to maintain a legacy environment for people that just won't have it any other way but it is very doubtful that the full force of the community will ever get behind something like this mainly for the reasons I outlined above.

--
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Ubuntu is loosing the contact with user base by aglider · 2012-09-02 20:58 · Score: 4, Insightful

This is, in my opinion, the reason why Ubuntu will die.
They did the same when they dropped a working KDE 3.5 in favour of an unusable KDE 4.
KDE chose to move to v4, but this doesn't mean that Ubuntu needed to follow.
The same applies to GNOME with the Unity twist.
The biggest value for Ubuntu/Canonical is the user base. Make them angry to loose both them and your value.
Say after me: I'll listen to the user base!

--
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Why I switched to XFCE by aaaaaaargh! · 2012-09-02 22:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

I'm using Ubuntu as a desktop environment for daily work for years now and switched to XFCE recently. The reasons are quite simple, people know them already, but allow me to reiterate them infinitely:
10 PRINT "I want a traditional, unobtrousive desktop environment ('desktop metaphor') with hidable and freely configurable panels and some way to define command shortcuts." 20 PRINT "I also strongly prefer normal windows with minimal, user-definable decoration, ordinary menus (on the top of windows), and a fast file browser." 30 GOTO 10
All of this has existed for a long time and there was no reason to change it. I use whatever session/window manager gives the above features to me. There are plenty of choices besides Unity and Gnome 3, e.g. XFCE works fine for me. Sorry if that offends Gnome 3 or Unity developers for some odd reason.