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Red Hat Confirms GNOME Classic Mode For RHEL 7
An anonymous reader writes "The H-Online is reporting that the upcoming RHEL 7 will use GNOME Classic Mode over Gnome Shell as its Default Desktop GUI. Speaking to TechTarget ahead of the 2013 Red Hat Summit, Red Hat engineering director Denise Dumas said this regarding the decision: "I think it's been hard for the Gnome guys, because they really, really love modern mode, because that's where their hearts are." She added that the same team had "done a great job putting together classic mode" and that it was eventually decided to use it in favour of the more radical modern interface to spare customers the effort of relearning their way around the desktop again."
I have been using the GNOME shell in Fedora 15 -> 17. Once they added the "extensions" interface it made it palatable as I have a number of extensions that give me back some of the old features. I do like the http://extensions.gnome.org/ interface though...makes it easy to find and add the needed extensions. But I can't honestly say that the changes GNOME3 introduced were worth the trouble. The workflow isn't greatly enhanced and the learning curve was bad enough to make me curse more than once.
I haven't seen a single interface enhancement that I can say was worth the headache: Windows XP -> Windows 7 ( I finally turned off Aero). I won't try Windows 8 unless I have to. Firefox upcoming v25 changes have me scared. MS-office ribbons suck.
In most cases I see these as a solution looking for a problem...
Our Corporate customers have Demanded that we don't make the interface change for only trendiness, so we are sticking with what works best for fur paying customers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When Red Hat 6 or 7 are mentioned in close proximity I automatically think of the CDs I was installing on my PIII 450 MHz many years ago. Before I visited Fedora, *buntu and Debian.
I still have that PIII... maybe I should boot it up and frustrate myself trying to get LILO to install and then unfrustrate myself looking at pixelated pr0n at 28.8 kbps :-)
GNOME definitely has a long way to go with the new UI theme. I found it fitting for Ubuntu (obviously), but as for Debian 7's default theme... I found myself caught off guard. As "conservative" as the Debian development team is, I'm surprised they defaulted to that.
As for Red Hat, I'm glad they chose classic mode. Maybe it will make the GNOME team step back and fix the annoyances associated with their modern mode.
You are much more diplomatic than I am. I did a Debian install yesterday, first non-headless one in a while, and narrowly avoided spraying acidic bile all over the keyboard when I saw what GNOME has become...
You're assuming that the machine RHEL is installed on is a server. If you have mission critical desktop machines, wouldn't you pick RHEL for that?
It's not pandering, it's doing what is required to stay relevant. The new gnome just isn't quite at the point where it works as well as the older gnome interface, so the old one stays if RHEL want people to keep on using their distro.
I don't think that's it at all. I think Gnome3 has been weighed pretty well on it's merits. Many people consider it unusable. It made me jump ship for Mint (and I've been primarily running RH/Fedora since the mid nineties). I've tried alot of different desktops (Enlightenment, Gnome 1-3, TWM, KDE 1-4, and then some) . I'm not unwilling to change, and I think that's generally true of linux desktop users. We will try new things, and embrace the good ones. We will also harshly reject the bad ones. That's our culture.
And BTW, linux admins all have the same desktop. It's usually black w/ green monospace characters. ;)
Cost of unnecessary retraining = Bad.
Loss of productivity due to needless changes = Bad.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
The straight lines are straight, and lines on different letters have different apparent thickness.The kerning's a little distinctive as well, making the letters each look a little different. All together, this means that after a few minutes of reading text, your eyes will still be able to read the text! This encourages a computer user to actually use their computer, resulting in a higher risk for repetitive-strain injuries like Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
In contrast, consider the Segoe font Microsoft has chosen for Windows 8 and Office 2013. Its lines are curved, its corners indistinct, and every letter looks identical apart from its shape. The pristine perfection of each glyph allows the brain to properly tangle the shapes together, interrupting the reading process. In my own experience, I've found that after only a few minutes of reading labels in the course of my work, the discomfort in reading is a subtle reminder to get up and look away from the computer for a few more minutes.
From the many interruptions, I'm sure my health has improved, and the total effect on my productivity has been quite noticeable.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
An easy fix: apt-get install xfce4. For more thorough fix:
echo "deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/debian wheezy main" >>/etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get install mate-desktop-environment
And for the love of Yog-Sothoth, remember to clean up the crap Gnome3 pulled in if you inadvertently installed it. Some stuff just wastes disk, some wastes memory, some (like avahi) is a security hole, some (network-manager) is just a wholesale sabotage machine.
Gnome3 Classic Mode is a bad joke: it superficially matches the appearance of Gnome2, while retaining but a small fraction of its functionality.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
New != Good
Sticking with the old version != unwillingness to learn
If the old version works better, why should they change? That's looking at it's own merits. Changing just because it's newer isn't.
Change for the sake of change == bad
I don't even have X installed on my CentOS and RHEL servers. It's so much easier to manage from the command line... especially remotely.
But then I'm the kinda guy MS had to come out with "Server Core" for, I suppose.
-=JML=-
He's probably complaining about the greyscale subpixel antialiasing. "Most" people are used to the RGB/BGA/whatever methods instead. In my case I can't stand those, and find the settings in that screenshot to be quite agreeable. ... that said one of the first things that would happen is my setting the fonts to the DejaVu fonts, instead of whatever they are using.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
ed Hat doesn't include anything that could potentially infringe upon patents. The reason why fonts in Windows and OS X look good is because a lot of man-hours went into developing them, so companies like Microsoft got a patent for things like ClearType. That said, if you need better Linux fonts, look into Infinality.
All font rendering on Linux sucks. This includes Infinality. You don't notice it much on phones or tablets, because of the high DPI, but with a standard low-DPI monitor or TV set, it's painful.
The only completely open-source solution I've seen that provides acceptable results on a low-DPI screen is Anti-Grain Geometry. But as far as I can tell, this was never incorporated into any actual distribution, and has remained just a tech demo.
Arial? Man - that's bad for a UI. Even Microsoft doesn't use Arial for their UI. They used Tahoma up through XP and then Segoe starting in Vista.
Truthfully, I don't find Ubuntu's interface font that bad, but I usually switch my interface to use Google'd freely available "Droid" font which is pretty decent.
Also, after much experimenting with the awful looking out of the box Linux GUI's, I actually found that the #1 actual problem with the font setup is mostly just that by default they're too damned big. 10, 11, or even 12px for the normal interface font. I found that if I dropped the standard font size down to 8 or 9px - even with an ugly font - things looked a LOT better.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The server system doesn't have to be running an X-Server to present X-client applications on remote desktops. With X and network transparency, you have a choice.
If it is possible for a new desktop to be better than its predecessor, then it is possible for it to be worse.
The users largely hate GNOME 3. Therefore, it has failed user acceptance testing. It is worse than its predecessor.
In this case, it's Red Hat - who pay many of the remaining GNOME devs - saying "dunno what you're here for, but we're here to serve our users." It's nice someone is.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
If you're performing a new install of Debian and want it to use xfce as your desktop right from the start, edit the install cd boot command and add the following:
desktop=xfce
Or you can go to Avanced Options and choose xfce.
Then your system will be configured for xfce from the get-go.
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. --Hofstadter's Law
you don't need local desktop manager running for that, you can do remotely with ssh -X
This shows a lot of maturity on the part of the GNOME devs (for creating a usable classic mode), and on the part of RedHat for defaulting on it.
Radical change may be exciting for developers and vendors, who are too aware of the usability issues with the "old" desktop paradigm, but it's not trivial to change a culture overnight. We're not all Steve Jobs clones who understand what people want better than they seem to know. iPhones were greeted with love, but the new experimental desktops coming out of the free software world seem to cause more angst than adoration. It takes maturity to recognize that maybe you are going too far all at once.
Slow but steady is the smart way to go: allow for radical experimentations while not breaking usability patterns built over years of using computers.
Good show, everyone involved.
Not really. What this is is political bullshit: Backlash at new UIs means don't release with a new UI, and claim that people won't have to relearn. Then when they're forced to otherwise relearn anyway, they won't be as bothered down the line. On top of that, in 25 years when RHEL8 comes out there won't be any more bickering about Gnome-Shell and they'll be able to release without political pressure.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Change for the sake of change is usually not a good thing when it comes to enterprise systems.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
"How does that not hurt anyone's eyes?"
We read it instead of staring at it indefinitely waiting for the meaning to somehow invade our pores without any effort on our part. You should try it sometime.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Ever since KDE stopped sucking around 4.2.6, I've gone back to KDE after hiding out in Gnome 2.x
It has the least amount of derp out of all the desktop environments. The KDE devs flirted with the "hey, let's remove features" fad, but actually came to their senses a lot quicker than the Gnome guys when they started having to don Nomex underwear.
KDE 4.10.x is spectacular. It's chock full of features, and not that much bigger in footprint than XFCE.
As for server stuff, who the heck puts a desktop on a server?
--
BMO
>They'll all just end up copying Windows eventually anyway.
You mean like how Microsoft lifted features/concepts from KDE and put them in Vista/7?
>Windows 8 vs KDE and Gnome
I'm not sure about gnome these days, but the KDE guys have a fully fleshed out touch centered interface (KDE Plasma Active), but they keep it entirely separated from the base KDE install, because unlike Microsoft, they reacognize that desktops and tablets are used differently.
This meme that Linux desktop devs blindly follow Microsoft and Apple needs to die. Because while it has a grain of truth that came from last century, it's completely outdated.
--
BMO
RHEL is also used for desktops - the "workstation" segment where servers run the software and the users have an X windows capable desktop machine to display it. So much for your two cents, that's where Redhat is getting their $ - desktops for engineering and scientific users in areas such as design and resource exploration. If a bit of software from Halliburton (yes they have software too) that hasn't changed since 2003 doesn't display properly in a new window manager then RHEL will lost sales if they use the new WM.
So, let me rephrase, for mission critical stuff, you install stuff marked as "technology preview" ?
( cf https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.1_Technical_Notes/ar01s03.html ).
You know, the whole TP that is explicitely written as "not to be used in production" from the same documentation :
https://access.redhat.com/support/offerings/techpreview/
So in the end, the vendor say in the release note "do not do this, this may break", and when it break, you just rant because you forgot that part ?
Complete bullshit. You're massively misrepresenting the story.
The survey was only web servers, and those certainly aren't the majority of all servers. The numbers say nothing about the server space at large.
And RedHat was never #1... Instead, #1 in their ranking was previously CentOS.
Even then, RedHat distros are only behind because they've split their numbers between CentOS, RHEL, and Fedora. Combine those three (or even just 2), and they're still easily #1.
No, that's what Debian does, but it's absolutely NOT what RedHat does. RedHat pays numerous open source developers. They're major contributors to many popular open source projects, like the Linux kernel, GNOME, and many others.
No. "Most vendor-supported" means exactly that. You might find some areas where it's not as pervasive, but that won't change the facts.
I want to run servers.
Which Linux distros are supported on Dell PowerEdge servers?
RHEL and SuSE.
Which Linux distros are supported on HP Proliant servers?
RHEL/CentOS/OEL and SuSE.
Which distros are supported for Oracle 11i?
Oracle Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
What versions of Linux are supported by EnterpriseDB (commercial version of PostgreSQL)?
RHEL/CentOS and SLES across the board. *some* small number of versions are supported on Ubuntu. (No Debian support).
It's utterly insane to claim RHEL isn't the most well supported distro out there. It overwhelmingly is.
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