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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/
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.
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.
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!
It's not about you, it's about Gnome. I'm glad you like Gnome 3. I don't. It removed too many capabilities that I depended on all day every day, and not all of them have well-known ways to get them back. Or, from what I can tell in some cases, any way to get them back.
If Gnome 3 had been an alternative Gnome, or an option to something that preserved the capabilities of Gnome 2, I wouldn't care, but it was made the default desktop for Fedora 17. It took me from a cluttered but functional desktop to a clean desktop that did virtually nothing except show me what my social networking friends were up to (I don't HAVE friends!) and demolish my working space every time I overshot the mouse into a corner.
The developers of Gnome over the years have shown a consistent contempt for a large part - if not the actual majority of their users. And, since they refuse to listen on their own channels, the howling mobs have to make their voices heard where they can. Here, for instance. Besides, if all this forum offered was fulsome praise for Gnome 3, that would be too much like validation of something a lot of us don't consider valid.
If you enjoy Gnome 3, I'm happy for you, and your voice in the matter is just as valid as anyone else's. But we want the conversation to be democratic, and that means dissent as well. Be glad that there is dissent. Too much of today's discussion is conducted in echo chambers.
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?
glad you have nothing better to do with your time than to unfuck something as simple as a desktop
Well yes, any gnome 3 messaging service, so that means empathy. Other things that used to work in the systray equivalent are relegated to a semi-transparent life elsewhere in the UI, for no good reason can tell. This is not useful, especially where there are protocols and services empathy does not support. I have yet to hear any good reason why other systray/notification area apps are not allowed, but it fits in with the whole "you can't customise anything" ethos, as well as the record of just throwing things out.
As for virtual desktops, it's to do with control, or rather the lack of it given to the user. Also the fact that the dynamic nature of them means that things are not always in the same place. I'm sure if you search for "Gnome 3 virtual desktop" on Google you'll find all sorts of things about it.