Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.