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Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 Arrives For Testing
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."
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?
If you want Gnome 3 technologies on Ubuntu, without the awkward UI, Linux Mint has a default UI called Cinnamon which moulds Gnome Shell into something usable by humans. Give it a spin.
They turned it from "Linux for Humans" to "Linux for morons". Trust broken. The damage is done. The certainty's gone. The spirit altered.
Yeah, I'd really like to synergize with the upcoming Gnome shell paradigm shift to leverage the richness of the polished experienceness-ness. Thanks, Slashdot, for letting me experience the bullshitness of experienced PR bullshitters with experience.
But I really don't see the Unity disaster being fixed with the GNOME 3 debacle.
I tried Unity when it first got started in 10.10 and I hated it. It was buggy, it was unintuitive, on and on. Then I tried it again in 11.04 and while it was better it still pretty much sucked. On to 11.10 which while not being as good as Gnome 2, was usable. But now that I have been using it for a few months on 12.04, I love it. It's definitely a more productive environment for me than default Gnome 2 was especially with the integrated search. I prefer the approach to multiple monitors, the notification area is vastly improved and very uniform, the dock is solid and does exactly what it needs to do and even sports the per icon right click menu configurability. I'm a big fan of the HUD. Press the alt key and you can just start typing any functionality in your applications menus and the HUD will look until it finds a match. Makes Gimp very easy to use. About the only thing I don't like about Unity is the dash menu. It opens only after a noticable delay, does a very poor job of facilitating application discoverability and the icons are comically large. If it had some kind of list mode and a bit more functionality it might be better. But even that can be easily mitigated with the classic menu panel plugin or the cardapio launcher.
Basically, I thought I'd never like Unity but in 12.04 at least for me it seems solid and deserves a place at the table.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
You could quickly and easily already apt-get install a nice gnome setup pretty easily in Ubuntu so I think its a little silly they keep making new spinoff distros for different choices on what packages you want to install. I'd think it would be better for everyone if they kept it all as 1 distro with a few more options during the install process to choose what type of desktop you want, or if you want a serve,MythTV interface (mythbuntu) , or educational setup (edubuntu) . The torrent image is almost done downloading, I'm anxious to try it out and see how it is in a VPS.
http://interserver.net/
Whenever these kinds of articles are brought up, there is NO insightful discussion whatsoever. It's sickening, really. Instead of actually contributing to a logical discussion, every single comment on these kinds of articles says, more or less, "lol GNOME 3 sucks and only morons would like it because it's obviously trash; use a DE that actually makes sense". The problem with this kind of comment should be painfully obvious, but apparently it's not so simple with most of you. People say this in EVERY FREAKING COMMENT ON THESE ARTICLES! There is no originality whatsoever! Look, WE GET IT! You guys don't like GNOME 3! Just shut up then and leave the people who do like it alone! So what if some people enjoy GNOME 3? That's not your freaking problem! If they want to make an Ubuntu flavor that uses GNOME 3 by default then LET THEM FREAKING DO SO WITHOUT HAVING THEIR PERSONAL PREFERENCES QUESTIONED. Is this REALLY that hard? Is it really so bad to say something like "Oh well I hope this works out for them" or "I hope that GNOME 3 fans enjoy it"?
Seriously, you have a freaking right to dislike any DE you freaking want. I'm not contesting that. Just because I don't like some DEs doesn't mean that I should just go and yell at people who do like them all the time. That's not only rude but it's a waste of my breath. People like different things and you all should freaking realize that some people have different preferences than you do. I love GNOME 3 and I wish this project the best, and even if I didn't like GNOME 3 I'd still support its freaking existence because everybody has a right to support the software that they use. That's THE WHOLE FREAKING POINT OF HAVING MULTIPLE DEs AND DISTRIBUTIONS IN THE FIRST PLACE!
Good gravy... Just shut up and leave us all alone. We don't need your flamebait and trollish comments.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
I mean, this is just another flavor of 'buntu. Slashdot doesn't cover them all, and this one is simply Gnome 3; it's not a reversion to the 2.x world. So, what's the hook? Why is this project particularly newsworthy?
Without the stupid rounded corners, oversized borders, transparency crap, fancy gpu and cpu hogging bullshit of Gnome and KDE. No stupid compositors that require ridiculous effects that are recipe for X crashes and stalls... Run it with a straight Nvidia OpenGL driver and Google Earth will actually run smokin' 3D flight sim even on my old P4 with a really old Gforce 256 meg AGP card. Dump pulse audio and just use good old alsamixer, and every bit of software that I want to run like VLC, Audacity, Handbrake...and the likes runs just fine without relying on stupid video compositors that hog cpu and gpu cycles. X has come a long way and to clobber it with the same crap that one would expect from a Windows PC is just plain stupid. On good hardware the speed of running a slimmed down DE is really worth it and I feel is the real future of Linux.
I try the same thing with Gnome or KDE on the same hardware and poof nothing but dog squats and rapid crash restore action on the screen.
I am thinking of doing a series of setup vids and instructional vids on how to make a killer cheap Linux box that will do Citrix, GoogleEarth, Flash, all office document formats, play bluerays and all other media and do it faster than any other system in existance.
Linux can be the fastest OS ...period.... if you do your setup right and leave the fancy effects to the programs not the FRIGGING DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT!
Don't get me wrong Gnome and KDE have their good points but good video performance and speed is not one of them they have become far to complex and fail at the basic task of doing what the user requests in an unobtrusive manner.
Nice, a cheery article worded like an advertisement, for all the GNOME 3 haters on Slashdot to get on their favorite horse and start spewing rage.
Yes, I'm OK with GNOME 3. No, I don't care what's going on with Ubuntu these days. Canonical's increasing preference for NIH-motivated development means there are less people funded by them to fix real problems.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
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.
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.
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.
I ran that command in Ubuntu Precise a while ago, and, since then, I'm a happy camper.
I don't have much beef against Unity, it's just that on low-spec machines or in a VM, Unity 2D is not snappy enough compared to the "no effects" version of Gnome, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a 2D version.
I am still impressed at how easy it was to switch to Gnome, with no side-effect or additional tweaking required.
Having enjoyed Ubuntu as a novel change from Slack and Debian, I was pretty unconvinced by Gnome Shell or Unity when they appeared, switched to Mint and, as Gnome 3 started to improve, switched to Fedora. Eventually, I released I missed the Ubuntu repos and familiarity of the Debian derivative structure, and returned to experimental Ubuntu Quantal.
The first thing I did was install Gnome Shell, as I still haven't warmed to Unity, and this has brought some interesting regressions. But I live with them (and have great, well-meaning intentions of delving into the code) because I now, for whatever reasons, really like Gnome Shell. In fact, having been introduced to Mac for the first time in the last few weeks, albeit a version a year or two out of date, I found the interface a wee bit clunky, not particularly intuitive and distinctly unslick for a moderately heavy terminal user. Nice enough, but knowing the alternatives, I wouldn't pay good money for it. That's fine, I'm not in the target demographic. Garage Band, however, I'm sold - those kind of experience applications I think Mac does fantastically, and I believe there are fantastic IDE/code versioning/project management GUIs, but that not the point here.
So I guess this article refers to me. I certainly don't remember jumping on any band wagons, in fact I'm pretty sure I ended up here by repeatedly jumping off them, and despite being decidedly unhardcore, I claim to be "excitingly different" on blind date forms, as the interwebs tell me preferring Gnome Shell to XFCE, Fluxbox or TTY makes me rarer than a unicorn in hen tooth pyjamas.
I completely agree. The HUD is pretty awesome. The only thing I don't like really is the dock. However, you can just auto-hide the dock and use something like Avant or Cairo which is much better. Well I think the whole purple color scheme of Ubuntu sucks as well. You can change the purple color scheme but with LightDM even if you change the background and startup splash there is still a brief period of time when the screen is purple before the background loads. I think there is a patch for LightDM that fixes it if you want to recompile and install it but that is a lot of work just to change something that only lasts for a couple of seconds on boot.
Wayland is in the plans of KDE, Unity and GNOME. Not that that'll stop them from running on X, for those that refuse to adapt Wayland. But if one wishes to go w/ X, one could always go w/ either the other DEs or WMs, or one could go w/ the BSDs, which currently have no Wayland plans (That may make sense for them, but I do wish PC-BSD adapted Wayland)
GNOME 3 is eminently usable. Whether it is configurable enough for power users is another matter entirely.
There are very very many distros out there that exist as "respins" or "custom editions" which are basically debian + package-selection. For example, dyne:bolic, musix, ubuntu studio, kubuntu, ubuntu-gnome-remix. Why aren't they just published as: base-distro + package-repository + taskel (list of packages to apt-get) +
settings to change + (optionally) list of packages to remove?
I've never understood this - it hugely increases the maintainer workload, makes it harder to migrate (need to reinstall), makes it harder to try out, makes it harder to have a mixed system, and make it a real problem if the distro maintainer quits.
Perhaps someone can explain this to me, because I am truly puzzled.
Aside: yes, I recognise the advantage of, say, xubuntu (as a more minimal base-system), and I know that Kubuntu can be installed with "apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" - but why do most systems insist on clean-install from ISO as the primary (sometimes only) way to install them?
I haven't used Unity but, to be honest, the one thing I can't get over is the lack of symmetry. I know, it's petty, but it just hits me as wrong, like fingernails on a chalkboard wrong, to have something on the top and left side of the screen. Is that changeable?
Depends on what you are talking about. You can hide the dock completely and use your own. I use Avant Window Manager and it provides a MacOS X style dock at the bottom of the screen. If you are talking about the HUD, then i'm not sure if you can change it but it never bothered me being in the upper left hand corner. You can change the Windows themselves. You can detach the menus from the top bar if you want. You can also change where you want the close, maximize and minimize buttons if you want as well.
glad you have nothing better to do with your time than to unfuck something as simple as a desktop
GIMP depends on GTK, not GNOME.
First, I admit that I am not fond of KDE4 or Gnome3. I am looking at my next primary desktop using either LXDE or Mate if it is stable. I care much more for usability and stability than I do for gee-whiz features.
While I agree that they will not have the full community behind them, I wonder more about what effect this will have specifically on the developers. I believe that developers are the most limiting factor and I wonder if developers are split between all the different window managers, which project, if any, will actually have the necessary resources for continued development.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
In spite of its name, Unity divided the Linux landscape.
Gnome foundation leaders, here is your chance to strut your stuff by making a better desktop, also usable as a desktop, or face impeachment.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Among my friends, they generally like or at least tolerate Unity. In the Ubuntu Software Center, the most recent (later than March 2012) reviews average 4 star.
I, personally, like it very much. It saves screen real-state and:
1) Provides direct buttons for all the programs I commonly use
2) For other programs, I just hit Super and type the first letters of the program name
It is perfectly convenient.
I think the Slashdot anti-Unity hate is a remnant of the early days of Unity, when it was allegedly not baked enough.