Canonical Killing Unity For Ubuntu Linux, Will Switch To the Superior GNOME (betanews.com)

Reader BrianFagioli writes: Today, the company admits that it is throwing in the towel on Unity, as well as its vision for convergence with devices like phones and tablets. Starting with Ubuntu 18.04, the wonderful GNOME will once again become the default desktop environment! "We are wrapping up an excellent quarter and an excellent year for the company, with performance in many teams and products that we can be proud of. As we head into the new fiscal year, it's appropriate to reassess each of our initiatives. I'm writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS," says Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and Canonical.

Comments

2018

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems 2018 will be the year of GNOME on the Linux Desktop.

Re:2018

[Anonymous Coward]

Not on my PC i would rather install Windows 10 again!

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

When you say "work", do you mean "Gather up my information and sell it to the highest bidder?"

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I mean usable to do work out of the box.

Re: 2018

[TheOuterLinux]

"Did someone say Linux Desktop?", as the Linux Foundation and Micro$oft's ears get a little pointier. I swear I hear about "cloud" way too much these days. Slashdot has gotten a lot better about that recently. Last year though...Jesus.

Re: 2018

[Computershack]

When you say "work", do you mean "Gather up my information and sell it to the highest bidder?"

May I remind you of Ubuntu's less than honourable past? https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

The hyperbole doesnt help, yes we all know they collect some telemetry data and ideally this should be something that can be completely turned off on all systems (not just enterprise) but deliberately mischaracterizing it as "Gather up my information and sell it to the highest bidder" is obviously harmful to that goal because we all know that isn't what is happening.

Yes they use that anonymized data for crash reporting, performance analysis and improvements to accuracy as well as (probably) targeted advertising in at least some form. Now from the perspective of privacy, no matter the anonymization strategy, this is something that should always be optional and the fact that it is not is a problem that should be remedied. You don't have to go and invent fantastical hyperbole like the idea that they are "selling your data to the highest bidder" because we know that isnt true.

Yes the truth doesnt have quite the dramatic effect that your invented scenario has but if you try to get people to focus on the made up stuff rather than reality then the reality doesn't seem so bad anymore and won't be remedied.

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

"You don't have to go and invent fantastical hyperbole like the idea that they are "selling your data to the highest bidder" because we know that isnt true."

This belief requires faith in MS, something I do not have any more. They have lost that with me after thirty years. I would also request a citation from a non Microsoft source, because I find your bare statement lacking.

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

>This belief requires faith in MS, something I do not have any more.

No it does not. If you believe the claim then you provide the evidence to support it, thus far every time I have asked for citation there is just silence.

>I would also request a citation from a non Microsoft source, because I find your bare statement lacking.

How am I going to provide you a citation that something is *not* happening? If you want to make claims that Microsoft is "selling your data to the highest bidder" then the burden of proof is on you but you cant provide such proof because it doesnt exist. I have asked the peddlers of this nonsense for proof of this many times and the claim is simply made up and significantly detracts from the real issue, but maybe that is the idea.

I see how an extreme (but untrue) claim works in favour of diminishing the impact of the genuine but less extreme reality.

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

2019, year of systemdOS on the desktop.

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah-ah, Jesus was big in the news like 2000 years ago. Oh wait, I just googled it and he didn't even rate a mention. Which is kind of inspiring, if you think about it.

Re: 2018

[Barsteward]

that only happens if you buy it ready installed. took me almost a day to upgrade my girlfriends laptop from win 7 to win 10 with all the stupid reboots and downloading of new drivers and more reboots - think i'll take it back to win 7 as it doesn't look so bad anymore compared to win 10

Re: 2018

[Pikoro]

The data is NOT anonymized. Back when this all started I sent a request to Microsoft to know what kind of data was collected. They needed my Microsoft account name and the name of the computer. They then sent me a breakdown of the data collected. 1.2 million data points for a computer that had all the provided privacy options turned off (meaning disabled in settings). The laptop was simply loaded with windows 10, minimally configured to include things like the Japanese IME, and then left, logged on, unused, for 1 week. It simply sat there. 1.2 million data points collected. Details of the breakdown and conversation with Microsoft on my blog: http://init.sh/

Re: 2018

[kurkosdr]

But after that, the gpu drivers were excellent, the battery life was as good as win 7 (compared to the worse battery life of desktop linux) and if the laptop had switchable graphics, they worked seamlessly. This is what I tell to people who say "you just need to get used to desktop linux". Desktop Linux has worse gpu drivers and worse battery life (because it can't trigger the low power modes of the gpu) and no amount of getting used to will fix that. Pah... I will take Win10 and its spying anytime. I am not hurt by Win10's spying. Having worse gpu drivers and battery life does hurt me, because it is giving me less value for the laptop I paid for.

Re: 2018

[ilsaloving]

You know very well that getting direct evidence that MS is "selling data off to the highest bidder" is virtually impossible unless you are very deep within Microsoft, so *of course* no one will be able to respond to that demand.

It's like having a creationist demand evidence that "If evolution was real, explain how a monkey turns into a man". It just doesn't work that way.

However, Microsoft has a VERY long, and VERY extensive history of fucking people over in order to get what it wants. (And no, I won't bother listing any, because this is a broken record that has revolved so many times that the grooves have practically worn through the vinyl.) . Just by looking at Microsoft's history, you would have to be shockingly naive to believe Microsoft *didn't* have an ulterior motive for all this data collection, because Microsoft doesn't do *anything* without an ulterior motive.

For a while, it seemed as if Microsoft was turning a new leaf, but now we see they were simply pivoting.

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 3 is Wayland and there's no proprietary drivers from nvidia and amd

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

9/10 people who say "ditto" use windows. stay there, dumbass.

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worse gpu drivers and battery life

Funny I've never had these problems.

Again another paid MS shill.
Please go away and get a real job.

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

Harsh... and yet... so fair

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

"We will disclose to third parties the content of files in your private folders."
- paraphrasing the actual EULA

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

MS says in the EULA that's exactly what they can & will do. That's evidence enough for me. Where are folks getting this misplaced faith that MS would never do it?

Re: 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be one of those people paid to accuse any person of saying they like Windows to be a shill.

Wonderful?

[i_ate_god]

Gnome3 is awful. I really do not like using it.

So isn't it great to have an OS that lets you change your window manager for something else (like my preferred KDE5?)!

Say, whatever happened to those explorer.exe replacements in the Windows scene? I think one of them was called BlackBox maybe?

Re: Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME 3, while awful, has been the least of my problems with 'modern' Linux. Weird problems with systemd often prevent my Linux system from booting far enough to even get to a login prompt. I'd switch to a different distro, but all of the major ones now use systemd. I don't want to use an archaic distro like Slackware, or a niche distro like Devuan, or a weird one like Gentoo. So recently I've been using NetBSD and really liking it. I don't know if I even want to go back to Linux.

Re:Wonderful?

[Thelasko]

Gnome3 is awful. I really do not like using it.

I agree that the default settings for GNOME 3 in most distributions is terrible. It's actually very much like Unity if you ask me. However, it doesn't have to be that way. I was testing different distributions one day and discovered that one had a very nice implementation of GNOME. (I think it was CentOS.) Upon investigating I realized there was a setting that could be changed to go back to a traditional layout.

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they picked Razor-qt/LXQT instead. Since they have distros based on different DEs e.g. Xubuntu, Lubuntu, et al. A GNOME version could have been called Gubuntu

Re:Wonderful?

[JoeMerchant]

Adjectives like "SUPERIOR" in the title and "wonderful" in the description tell you a lot about the author's objectivity.

I'm no Unity fan, but it did handle 4K screens well at a time when nothing else would. I do wish KDE would get its 5 together (maybe it has, I honestly haven't cared enough to check in over a year). The worst thing about GNOME is reading how AWESOME it is, and then having to use its outdated, fragmented, counterintuitive crap because it got default-installed on you. Anybody who thinks that the "resource hog" arguments of >10 years ago have any relevance to today's desktop machines (RPi excepted) kindly see yourself out.

I'll be dual-desktop installing all the apps I can't stand the GNOME variants of, and that's O.K. - what I lament is that nobody is taking the time to polish a distro where everything KDE and GNOME "just works" as installed from apt-get.

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't agree more. I'm using Ubuntu MATE right now, and they definitely should have picked it over GNOME. It may be possible to get GNOME into a usable state (although that thing that puts the window buttons at the bottom of the screen will probably always look like a carbuncle), but with so many decent desktops to choose from, why bother?

Re:Wonderful?

[khr]

Say, whatever happened to those explorer.exe replacements in the Windows scene?

Somewhere on floppies I have the source code for the Toolbox one from PC-Kwik (formerly Multisoft), where I worked in the mid-90's before the company went out of business. It was a nice one, very simple and quick to use.

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Traditional quite doesn't do it, missing panel applets, etc.. just do apt install mate-desktop for fork of Gnome2 which is being maintained

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

BlackBox was always one of my favourite window managers. It is made strictly for X11 (no Windows or even Wayland) but there were several external projects to make Blackbox-like shells for Windows to use in place of Explorer. I personally used bblean (and it's successor, bbclean) for years on Windows XP. I think the interest in alternative Windows shells dwindled once Windows 7 came out because that's when Windows's own shell was finally good enough that it wasn't worth the effort in replacing it.

Re:Wonderful?

[geek]

I think the word superior is fitting. Technically speaking GNOME is superior in every single way, which is why Unity ultimately used it under neath for most of its technology. Wonderful, I will grant that word is used here subjectively but I really don't think superior is another other than an objective statement of fact.

Re: Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFM, seriously. I have a dozen machines, some high and some low end...if I don't get a boot prompt it's either because my video drivers are wonky or because I'm passing the wrong kernel arguments.

But by all means, blame the OS because you're lazy...there are two whole other OS's to choose from depending on whether you're lazy and rich or lazy and poor, knock yourself out.

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

I though someone was being sarcastic, are you tell me it was meant with a straight face, I think not.

Re:Wonderful?

[Fly Swatter]

The summary takes on a more realistic meaning if you read it in a sarcastic tone.

Re: Wonderful?

[TheFakeTimCook]

GNOME 3, while awful, has been the least of my problems with 'modern' Linux. Weird problems with systemd often prevent my Linux system from booting far enough to even get to a login prompt. I'd switch to a different distro, but all of the major ones now use systemd. I don't want to use an archaic distro like Slackware, or a niche distro like Devuan, or a weird one like Gentoo. So recently I've been using NetBSD and really liking it. I don't know if I even want to go back to Linux.

Hmmm. Howabout macOS?

Re:Wonderful?

[harperska]

Or maybe Gnubuntu?

Re:Wonderful?

[AdamWill]

The lines in question are actually quoted from Betanews. I still can't decide how sincerely they're meant. :P

Re:Wonderful?

[JoeMerchant]

I would tend to agree, but then "geek" with the 4 digit user ID above seems to be claiming, with a straight face, "SUPERIOR" as an objective measure.

I thought: "works on my new laptop as-default-installed" was an objective measure, one that Unity was winning a couple of years ago. Not that I'm lamenting Unity's departure, but to give credit where due, the Unity group were the first to make 4K screens work well, so at the time when they had it nailed and everybody else was fumbling around with configuration customizations that didn't really solve even half the problems (I'm looking at you KDE, but GNOME was there too), I'd say Unity was objectively superior.

Today? Who knows, I've got a 15.10 install that works pretty well and haven't had time to play around with it much. I hear bad things about 16.04 - whatever - I'll deal with those warts when I have to, maybe they'll be improved by then.

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, *box-en!

I haven't used one since the XP days. BBlean, or BB4Win, I think.

Re:Wonderful?

[JoeMerchant]

I'm less concerned with what's "underneath" a computer desktop and more concerned with how it looks and performs "on the glass."

I'm feeling a "polishing a turd" analogy coming on, something about rub too hard on the old desktop apps and they'll get messy - especially the integrated ones where changes will smear around on everything. Gnome 3 has been baking in the sun for 6 years now, KDE 4 for 9 years, they are what they are... which is pretty damn good for the most part, but they both have tremendous room for improvement, and aren't keeping up with the shiny new hardware as well as Windows (because Redmond has conned the shiny new hardware vendors into writing drivers for them...)

Re:Wonderful?

[unixisc]

Except that Canonical has different distros for different DEs/WMs: Lubuntu, Xubuntu, and until they handed it off to someone else, Kubuntu. Their default options on the original Ubuntu were Unity and Gnome. Now that they've dropped Unity, Gnome is the one left. But really, they should have picked something else, like Razor-qt or LX/QT: Gnome 3 is, as you said, pretty ugly & unwieldy

Re: Wonderful?

[unixisc]

GNOME 3, while awful, has been the least of my problems with 'modern' Linux. Weird problems with systemd often prevent my Linux system from booting far enough to even get to a login prompt. I'd switch to a different distro, but all of the major ones now use systemd. I don't want to use an archaic distro like Slackware, or a niche distro like Devuan, or a weird one like Gentoo. So recently I've been using NetBSD and really liking it. I don't know if I even want to go back to Linux.

Which DEs do NetBSD come w/? I've been using PC-BSD and now TrueOS, and love Lumina, but have gotten stuck at a particular version and can't even use the App Cafe. I plan to upgrade at some point so that I can, but until then, wanted to know how good the alternatives are within BSDland?

Re: Wonderful?

[unixisc]

Only thing: so far I miss Steam, but the latest TrueOS allows one to play that under WINE. But that's why I need the latest update.

Re:Wonderful?

[youngone]

So isn't it great to have an OS that lets you change your window manager

I should be able to mod this up to +6. I don't favour KDE myself, but if you do, good luck to you. I think Cinnamon is a really good desktop environment, but over the years I have used most of them and Linux lets me do that which is the key thing.

Re:Wonderful?

[hey!]

If you want wonderful, try i3.

The whole rationale for the mission creep that has been bloating desktop environments for the past twenty years is that the desktop is supposed to be a kind of Grand Central Station for the information in your life. Well, we just passed the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, and that rationale is antiquated.

On the desktop just need something that will launch applications and allow them to share screen real estate. That's it. Everything else is bloat.

Re: Wonderful?

[SharpFang]

Care to recommend a GOOD FM for systemd?

I mean, not list of all options and files in alphabetical orders with brief explanations what each does to another obscure file without giving any clue WHY and WHAT FOR, and why should I care. I want a guide, starting with overview of the logic, structure and purpose of main components, what are the purposes and tasks of systemd, how it achieves them, and how to control and modify them, in that order.

Currently, I found only two types of systemd docs: "inventory/catalogue of options", something an already proficient systemd developer could use as reference to recall finer details of given functions, and "voodoo programming" guides. Want A: Type X, press Y, enter Z. Something for a total newbie, to get given thing done and remain none the wiser. I'm yet to find something that allows one to "enter the world of systemd", and start understanding it.

Re: Wonderful?

[SharpFang]

> I don't want to use an archaic distro like Slackware, or a niche distro like Devuan, or a weird one like Gentoo. So recently I've been using NetBSD

That gave me a chuckle.

You mean you didn't want to choose between archaic, niche or weird, so you found one that is all three at once? :)

Re: Wonderful?

[Eravnrekaree]

Never had any problem with systemd preventing bootup. Are you sure its systemd? I disabled graphical login on systemd systems on some computers and it tends to work fine, with one minor issue, some times you need to ctrl+alt+f1 to a command prompt. It looks just like a minor kernel isue or something. Ive added my own jobs to systemd with no problems. Overall systemd is an improvement, simpler declarative unit files, you can still use shell scripts if you want. A more modular architecture.

Re: Wonderful?

[Ol Olsoc]

GNOME 3, while awful, has been the least of my problems with 'modern' Linux. Weird problems with systemd often prevent my Linux system from booting far enough to even get to a login prompt.

So, what is the analysis and solution? I ask because whenever I have a problem, I go online and get an answer. And I haven't had any problems with systemd, and seen very few online, except for people blaming systemd for everything including the heartbreak of psoriasis.

It's one of those things, if I'm having a problem and others aren't, it is probably my problem, not that something something doesn't work.

Re:Wonderful?

[kimvette]

Meanwhile, kubuntu will continue to exist, delivering a superior KDE-driven user experience! :D

Re: Wonderful?

[Ol Olsoc]

But by all means, blame the OS because you're lazy...there are two whole other OS's to choose from depending on whether you're lazy and rich or lazy and poor, knock yourself out.

Blaming systemd for everything is the "Thanks Obama" meme for Linux users.

Re: Wonderful?

[Ol Olsoc]

Never had any problem with systemd preventing bootup. Are you sure its systemd?

Of course he's sure. All linux problems are directly caused by systemd now.

Thanks, systemd!

Re: Wonderful?

[ChrisMaple]

No, some problems are still caused by PulseAudio.

Re:Wonderful?

[Rakarra]

Adjectives like "SUPERIOR" in the title and "wonderful" in the description tell you a lot about the author's objectivity.

Regardless of whether a switchover is a good idea or not, when I saw the Slashdot title, I assumed that this was an April Fool's story that Slashdot was late in publishing. The adjectives are typical for April Fools Slashdot stories.

Re: Wonderful?

[ArchieBunker]

Honestly there isn't one. Poettering is too busy shitting out code to bother writing any documentation. Now your window manager has to have systemd hooks to work correctly. I get that commercial UNIX like AIX has binary logs, but the whole point of Linux is that it's not UNIX. That's why I love the *BSD way. Clean and uncluttered with top notch documentation.

Re: Wonderful?

[presidenteloco]

"..if I don't get a boot prompt it's either because my video drivers are wonky or because I'm passing the wrong kernel arguments."

Hahahaha. An attitude like this is precisely why Linux will never be a popular choice for the desktop/laptop.

What's wrong with an OS design philosophy that says:
By default this will work, and work reasonably well.
Only if you want to tweak it to optimize it in some way will it potentially not work.

Philosophy extension: Unless I the OS mastermind is completely braindead, this is the year 2017, so by default the OS and its default-installed applications will be configured secure. You have to do work to undo that secure default state.

Re: Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does your nose alternate days between Obama's and Lennart's ass?

Re: Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would read the manual
If i could find it. It was up to date. And it actually helped me. But most of the time the docs are out of date or does not help me with my specific problem.

People like you is the reason Linux is not more widely used.

I 've met many people like you, but the do not stick around at a company long - either they get fired or they leave on their own because they can not handle real work.

Re: Wonderful?

[GoingDown]

Have you tried googling?

There is quite a comprehensive documentation available from Redhat: https://access.redhat.com/docu...

Also, Archlinux has always good wiki articles, and systemd one is here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind...

One good introduction is on Linux.com: https://www.linux.com/learn/un...

 

Re: Wonderful?

[DuckDodgers]

Are you kidding? https://www.freedesktop.org/wi... is excellent. Man pages, FAQs, tips and tricks, debugging errors, Howtos for converting a SysV Init service to systemd, etc... The man pages are huge and highly detailed. If you mis-type a command, the error message is usually helpful.

You can hate the project and find technical fault with design decisions. That's fine. But don't tell me the documentation is bad. I think one of the reasons it conquered the Linux landscape is specifically the documentation.

Re:Wonderful?

[DuckDodgers]

If you didn't already know, "Ubuntu GNOME" was the name of the official Ubuntu flavor with the GNOME desktop. I guess that becomes the new vanilla Ubuntu.

Re:Wonderful?

[DuckDodgers]

The original GNOME 3 releases locked you into their new user interface layout, and I never could get used to it. I tried for weeks, too. But more recent point releases of GNOME 3 have a 'classic mode' which is basically "Revenge of GNOME 2".

I love how KDE5 / Plasma looks, but whenever I tried it the stability was awful. Admittedly, the most recent attempt was over a year ago.

In any event, I think the real news here is that Canonical couldn't get any more hardware partners to care about Ubuntu Touch. I don't care if they dropped Unity for XFCE, Ratpoison, IceWM, or LXQt (no offense to fans of those respective projects), I care that Android has well and truly conquered mobile and will probably be the ultimate future of consumer computing for most of humanity.

Re:Wonderful?

[kbahey]

I was on KDE for around 15 years. Never used GNOME.

But when I recently upgraded from Kubuntu 14.04 to Kubuntu 16.04, there were many annoyances here and there. For example, no weather widget. Also, the notification history was gone. Dumbing down the user interface is rampant and have reached KDE.

So, I bit the bullet and switched to XFCE (Xubuntu 16.04), and it is fast, nimble and just works.

It was as simple as:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get purge plasma-desktop

Then learning the ropes of XFCE, and adjusting the settings.

Re:Wonderful?

[Trogre]

Just to be pedantic, Unity was just a shell for GNOME 3. The horrible desktop environment you're referring to is most likely GNOME Shell, the default shell for GNOME 3 which, to be fair, even the GNOME developers released as a proof-of-concept hoping others would build a graphical shell that was actually usable..

Canonical are just moving Ubuntu from one GNOME 3 shell to another.

Re:Wonderful?

[Jetstream]

One of the big explorer replacements was Litestep. Another was Geoshell.

You'd think they'd still be going strong, with the big fiasco that is the Win 8 & 10 "menus".

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 2 ... naturally the best like DAVID or MONA LISA or LACOON, or LOST ON THE GRAND BANKS or ... who is that frontal of a frisky, 19-th century gal in LaMus ? ! Can't be improved. By anyone. Ever. So use MATE. Pay for your products every two years ... like I do.

Re: Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahahaha +100

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, gnome3 sucks. but ya know what? not near as much as unity.. and, with a few tweaks and addons, it's more than adequate.. even in its default state, is still 1000000% better than windows 10... so there is that: gnome3 > win10. that should be enough to attract just about everybody to the party.

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm no Unity fan, but it did handle 4K screens well at a time when nothing else would.

Except vtwm, whose last rock-stable release was in 2005. *Stop playing* with the spew of widgets and pictures and complex and therefore unstable nonsense scattered all over your screeen, and stop trying to make the window manager as greedy and aggressive in doing things it cannot do well as systemd aspires to be. Lennart Pottering *learned* the idea of "spew in unstable features" from working with Gnome developers.

Re:Wonderful?

[dublin]

because Redmond has conned the shiny new hardware vendors into writing drivers for them...

Not conned, they just recognize market share when they see it. Linux has conquered the server world when even Microsoft has a large portion of its Azure instances running Linux), but Linux on the desktop is walking dead. This loss of Unity is sad news because IMO, Unity had one of the few chances of reviving desktop Linux - for a number of reasons, including the really important one of being a native Linux for mobile. (No, Android really doesn't count as Linux just because there are a few Linux bits remaining if you dig deep enough.)

On the other hand, with the advent of Ubuntu for Windows (WSL), most Linux users and developers will find that Windows is now nearly as good a Linux as any other Debian/Ubuntu-based distro, and the combination of Windows and Linux without emulators, VMs, or the need to reboot really does offer the best of both OSes.

WSL is a work in progress, for sure, but it has awesome potential, and is already changing the way I work... (BTW, the Creators Update next week includes upgrades to both WSL and to the MS command shell to (finally) support proper color control, among other things.)

Re: Wonderful?

[basecastula]

Man, I have used Manjaro for years and never had these issues. Back in the early days using archangel and similar did these things happen.

Re: Wonderful?

[SharpFang]

Manpages: alphabetical list of commands/files/parameters.
FAQs: How to get things done and remain none the wiser.

Re: Wonderful?

[SharpFang]

Redhat: A short document with all the "what" and none of "why" or "why would I need this" followed by an unending list of "get a job done and remain none the wiser."

Archlinux: not even that, just head first into voodoo programming.

The Linux.com starts promising... and then ends. It's the right approach but waaay too short and shallow.

Re: Wonderful?

[Hognoxious]

A short document with all the "what" and none of "why" or "why would I need this"

In other words, classic developer-written documentation: tells you exactly what you want to know - but you need to already know the answer in order to look in the right place.

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody who thinks that the "resource hog" arguments of >10 years ago have any relevance to today's desktop machines (RPi excepted) kindly see yourself out.

Fast performance is still fast performance, even on today's machines. Yes, I do think it matters. I have 12 GB of RAM and run Openbox.

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fake news. It's just wonderful. Best ever.

Re: Wonderful?

[Barsteward]

I don't believe a word of that troll post or perhaps get someone who has a clue about installing/configuring software to do it for you

Re: Wonderful?

[Barsteward]

you could start here https://www.freedesktop.org/wi...

Re: Wonderful?

[Barsteward]

why did you believe that troll?

Re: Wonderful?

[Barsteward]

thats the same as saying its all systemd's fault. out of date and untrue

Re:Wonderful?

[luis_a_espinal]

I was on KDE for around 15 years. Never used GNOME.

But when I recently upgraded from Kubuntu 14.04 to Kubuntu 16.04, there were many annoyances here and there. For example, no weather widget. Also, the notification history was gone. Dumbing down the user interface is rampant and have reached KDE.

So, I bit the bullet and switched to XFCE (Xubuntu 16.04), and it is fast, nimble and just works.

It was as simple as:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop sudo apt-get purge plasma-desktop

Then learning the ropes of XFCE, and adjusting the settings.

Yep. Xubuntu FTW. I keep having to work with multiple distros out of necessity. Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Oracle Linux, CentOS. I keep falling back to Xubuntu to retain my sanity.

The thing I hate the most is not the desktop wars, but the fact that there's never a one single way to set up network interfaces or installing packages, or in some cases like RHEL, the inability to transparently migrate a system between major releases (you simply can't upgrade a system, but instead have to build a new one from scratch.)

The change to systemd has also been a pain. Many installation systems for turnkey-products simply stop working and you have to treat pre and post-systemd as truly different operating systems. Whatever the reasons they might be, these changes have been awfully disruptive.

I hope that, years from now, we get to see an ROI from it.

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Say, whatever happened to those explorer.exe replacements in the Windows scene? I think one of them was called BlackBox maybe?

hi, maintaner of bbLean/bbZero here

well the old generation of coders who made bb4win is gone for quite a long time so the development kinda halted. last of the bb-derivatives (bbZero) is kept alive and work well in win7 (x86, x64) with aero off, but changes in windows (8.0+) broke a lot of stuff and it's not working as nice as it should. hooks stopped working, skinning does not work with dwm (which cannot be switched off), new metro style apps and their pecularities (get icon from uwp app etc)

i am in phase of slowly replacing critical parts of old bb, but the development is heading in a bit different way, than simply 'make it work again'. old bb never had s7 scheme interpreter and possibility to control wm from command line for example, like good old sawfish had.

also i do not insist on replacing explorer.exe as this brings more problems than solves. explorer is integral part of windows and i have no intentions (nor resources) of replacing win subsystems apart from the window manager functionality (and possibly turning off ads on sight as i am quite alergic to them).

Re: Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be hard to tell when you are that far up that ass of Trump's...

Re: Wonderful?

[DuckDodgers]

The man pages for systemd are excellent. No fooling. Tell me what you want to do with the systemctl command to manage and query services that you can't figure out from https://www.freedesktop.org/so...

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.blackbox4windows.com is the only living shell replacement for windows from the blackbox line.

Re: Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

he's an idiot. let him bother the netbsd people now.

Re: Wonderful?

[SharpFang]

I'm an embedded systems developer. I need to trim systemd of every single functionality the target device is not going to need, removing them from the build of the customized systemd binary, to free up system resources for the actual device control application.

Any manpage to help me with that?

Re: Wonderful?

[fluffynuts]

Just putting this out there in case it helps.

I shifted from being a Debian (or Debian-based) distro user (as my primary desktop OS) for about 16 years to Gentoo. Best move I ever made. No systemd. No pulseaudio. Emerge just works and I can even get picky about what features are compiled into an application with a good ebuild.

I've only been on the Gentoo train for about 6 months now, but I'm not looking back. You're right though that the pickings are slim for a distro which still adheres to a unixey philosophy. If you like a BSD, you'll probably like Gentoo -- portage is heavily based-on/inspired-by BSD ports, for one. You just get an OS which is slightly less esoteric (read: you can get precompiled binaries for applications where the source isn't available and broader driver support; I'm not hating on BSD -- indeed, I also heavily considered a flavor (Net-, PC-, Open-) before Gentoo - this is just my experience).

Yes, I miss the Debian I cut my teeth on. I even miss Ubuntu 4.whatever through 10.whatever, which was just Debian with a nifty installer and easier access to some of the trickier parts as well as more up-to-date software than Debian stable without the periodic oddness of Debian unstable/testing.

But I really don't miss longer boot and shutdown times with systemd (vs openrc in parallel mode) or my audio daemon bombing out randomly (so often, in fact, that before I shifted, I had clean-reloaded twice (clean Ubuntu and then, out of desperation, back to a clean Debian vanilla), and finally, out of frustration, wrote a shell script to periodically poll if the pulseaudio process was running, and, if not, start it up, followed by restarting XFCE's sound manager, which would be totally lost by the whole process. A totally unecessary hack, since the whole of PA is totally unecessary (for regular users who don't need fancy baubles like network transparency of the sound daemon), as I can now attest.

Re:Wonderful?

[JoeMerchant]

I suppose I should check out WSL - but the last time I delved into the world of VMs, et. al. I came out screaming and went back to trusty GRUB dual boot.

Re:Wonderful?

[JoeMerchant]

That's some sad truth about Android... maybe it will mature into something as developer friendly as Linux someday, but for now I'd say it's a bigger PITA to develop for than Linux was even 20 years ago.

Re: Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd... Thanks Obama.

Re: Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

I could tell you, but...

Re: Wonderful?

[Ol Olsoc]

systemd... Thanks Obama.

That was how he bugged Trump Towers..... 8^)

Re: Wonderful?

[SharpFang]

The Lennart Blog linked in the introduction seems really promising.

Re:Wonderful?

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

I don't have a horse in this race, I understand systemd will ease one day the distribution makers tasks, but I see adapting to it has been like a difficult labor. Personally, I would have embarked on that train a little later, but to anyone his own.

With that out of the way, it's a terrible shame we in the free/open source area cannot agree on reasonable standards to ease the work of developers or users.

It's all that which you mentioned, Luis, and a lot more. For example, my printer has drivers which require LSB as a dependence. Most modern Debian- and Ubuntu-based distributions simply won't provide it. I had to resort to old things like Mint 17 or Zorin 9 and now chose Mageia as it still offers that. Then, using Mint 17.x also meant I could not have "yad", which Mint 18 has and my bank requires for some "security module".

I don't like Windows, I even find it detrimental to my performance in many tasks, particularly the troublesome need to copy/paste with Ctrl-C/V, the double clicking _and_ the click to focus idea.

But all desktops, Gnome, Mate, KDE, Xfce, LXDE... whatever, should have a generic, whitebox mode. A set of shortcuts and gestures so common that users could use it as reference and upon which books and tutorials could be written. This would not prevent at all any customization to fit personal tastes. Alas, we should have standards about it, too, in order to use a popular tweaking in various DEs.

But any one making DEs acts like it's a small miracle of technology, which people should adopt the way it is, because it is "the one true way". This is valid both for moron-like interfaces like Gnome (ONLY fit for newbies) and for atomic reactor-like KDE (TOTALLY unfit for newbies!).

Unity was no exception to that problem and it was known to be lacking in the customization department (why cannot English have words like "customizability"?). Besides it united different platforms (desktop, phone, tablet) but created less unity among desktop environments (the famous one more standard problem).

Maybe returning to Gnome makes Ubuntu more used and that would be good. I know I would change to another DE as my first task after buying an Ubuntu computer.

But we still need a Linux interface for phones, because Android (even being Linux itself) is getting so closed it is becoming harder to use and the alternatives (iOS, Windows) are even less interesting. I cannot purchase a tablet for that exact reason.

Re: Wonderful?

[Seven Spirals]

Perhaps he didn't want to fiddle with GNOME vs KDE (or maybe he did since NetBSD has both plus a few dozen others in pkgsrc), Systemd, clueless hipster beards and dumb tee shirts that show too much gut, DBUS, PulseAudio, broken worthless scripts written by annoying lightweights, NetworkManager, or any of the other lovely, ahem.., gems that come along with "newschool" hip Linux distros.

Isn't the Ubuntu and Fedora crowd supposed to be off writing some other bad idea in sophomoric scripting languages, not flip-flopping on DE's ? Did SystemD run out of solutions to create problems from? Perhaps they ran out of log files to convert to binary? Maybe they are still trying to get PulseAudio to unmute ? I know guys, it's rough. Maybe Canonical can convert all the config files in /etc to XML for the next trick the cool kids can rubberstamp. I wouldn't know. I'm wandering the wilderness with BSD, too. :-)

Let's see, Linux makes a new distro every time someone changes a desktop background or window manager. All the BSD's have "ports" trees of some type that gives you ALL the DE's simultaneously. Not that we care, since we are busy focusing on the CLI and C programming instead of a snazzy new nonsense name like "lightning lamb" or "Zambufra" for our latest distro.

A little late?

[bsharitt]

This sounds like April 1st news. But as real news, I'm guessing that when Gnome does return to Ubuntu as the default DE, it'll be a bit customized at least. It wouldn't be too had to create the addons to make Unity users feel a little more at home on Gnome 3.

Re:A little late?

[squiggleslash]

I'm guessing that when Gnome does return to Ubuntu as the default DE, it'll be a bit customized at least. It wouldn't be too had to create the addons to make Unity users feel a little more at home on Gnome 3.

I hope so, GNOME 3 really is awful, and I'm not seeing anything approaching mass adoption of it. Shuttleworth talks about the market picking it, but did it? Ubuntu users who were Unity skeptics didn't flock to GUbuntu, they flocked to Mint.

I wish Canonical had adopted Cinnamon instead. I think it's a desktop with a lot of potential, but it needs some good quality control (the fact the DM runs Webkit as root, including installed plugins, should tell you how much the Mint team cares about quality right now...) "The Market" seemed to be adopting Cinnamon and MATE. Where's this "adopting GNOME 3" thing coming from?

Re:A little late?

[KiloByte]

Why Gnome 3? The summary says it clearly: "to the superior GNOME". Ie, 2, that is, MATE.

Gnome 3 is maybe superior to, uhm, Commodore 64's user interface with it's LOAD "*",8,1 -- but perhaps even that is unfair to C64.

Re:A little late?

[JoeMerchant]

The GNOMEs moaned the loudest when Unity was forced upon the world.

The whiny wheel often does get its way.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a big fan of MATE, it's terrible for 4k displays, as it doesn't auto-scale things properly for you to see stuff (e.g. you *can* make all the fonts 24 point, etc., but that's just silly).

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

But what about the GEOS windowing system on the C64. It was the bomb!

Re:A little late?

[AthanasiusKircher]

Ubuntu users who were Unity skeptics didn't flock to GUbuntu, they flocked to Mint.

THIS. Mint was already on the upswing before Ubuntu switched to Unity several years ago, probably because it already seemed more polished and "just worked" upon install, whereas Ubuntu at that time still tended to require post-install tweaking even to get basic stuff like basic multimedia codecs. And (according to Distrowatch) Mint surpassed Ubuntu in pagehits starting in 2011.

Around that time, Mint dumped GNOME and began focusing on Cinnamon and MATE, both of which seem to have gained widespread acceptance.

Ubuntu potentially has a real chance here to move back into the spotlight if it made the right decision for default desktop, but I'm not sure GNOME 3 is it either. Linux Mint suffered a bit of backlash last year when it announced it wouldn't ship with multimedia codecs packaged in the ISO by default (even though it's still just a matter of a checkbox during the installation dialogs, assuming one has internet access), removing one of the significant convenience reasons people flocked to Mint in the first place. Anyhow, it would be a perfect time for Ubuntu to assert it's "not so different from Mint" anymore and increase popularity again after the Unity backlash.

But GNOME 3 is probably not the best way to do that.

[Full disclosure: Mostly these days I tend to use XFCE in Linux, because I like something a bit lighter. So I have nothing personally invested in this debate.]

Re:A little late?

[bluefoxlucid]

GNOME 3 has a faster workflow than Cinnamon or Unity Desktop. You can tap the top-left corner or press the Meta key and get a view of all your windows on the current desktop; create a new desktop by dragging a window between any desktops; and pull up an application by bringing up the Activities view and just typing. It pretty much gets out of your way.

Unity is basically 4x4 with zoomed-out view of all desktops at once, cluttered together, with a dock and an extra click to pull out a search bar. Cinnamon has a fixed virtual desktop arrangement and (last I checked) no Activities view, so you're back to spending 6 seconds navigating (well-arranged) menus instead of 1 second to open whatever application you were thinking.

The world is moving away from Windows 95 desktop interfaces. There's a loud minority installing "Classic Shell" on Windows, and they get way too much attention.

Re:A little late?

[TrekkieGod]

Ubuntu users who were Unity skeptics didn't flock to GUbuntu, they flocked to Mint.

Well, I tried Mint when the Unity thing happened, but the whole, "google needs to pay us or we'll remove it from the list of default search engines in our version of Firefox" thing bothered me on a philosophical level (I know I could and I did manually add it, but they were trying to charge money to stop them from removing a feature instead of charging money to add a feature, and that rubs me the wrong way) and I immediately returned to Ubuntu. Not GUbuntu, but not unity either. You can always just apt-get gnome, which I did, after trying KDE4 and thinking it was even worse.

At the time Gnome3 was much worse than it is now, but now it can be customizable to the point that I prefer it to Gnome2 and the alternatives that try to emulate Gnome2. And if you don't agree, you could always apt-get MATE.

People freak out over Unity and whatever else, but those are just default options. Install whatever window manager you want.

Re:A little late?

[myrdos2]

"The Market" seemed to be adopting Cinnamon and MATE.

DistroWatch backs you up. Take a look at where the various Ubuntus rank in their most popular list:

Mint #1, Ubuntu #3, Ubuntu MATE #15, Lubuntu #20, Xubuntu #31, Kubuntu #41, Ubuntu GNOME #54.

Mint, which has the default Cinnamon desktop, is #1. If you want Gnome 3 you're down to #54. Given that list, why on earth would they pick Gnome?

Re:A little late?

[AdamWill]

"Shuttleworth talks about the market picking it, but did it?"

That's not what he's talking about, there. He's talking about the *cellphone and tablet* market. No-one wanted to sell Ubuntu phones or tablets and no-one wanted to buy 'em. Canonical's entire strategy for the last several years has been this 'convergence' idea that people would want to run the same OS on their phone, tablet and computer. This does not appear to have panned out in the slightest. That's the market failure he's talking about.

There is virtually no desktop Linux "market", because almost no-one pays for it. Red Hat and SUSE are probably the only companies managing to sell enough "Linux desktops" to produce an amount of money worth talking about, and even there it's very much a niche business.

Re:A little late?

[arth1]

GNOME 3 has a faster workflow than Cinnamon or Unity Desktop. You can tap the top-left corner or press the Meta key and get a view of all your windows on the current desktop;

Having overlapping windows that don't take up the entire screen is far faster - then you don't have to hit anything to see your windows.

And "top left" and other edge/corner actions pretty much kill virtualization and multiple monitors, where screen edge != where the mouse stops.

Gnome 3 and Windows Metro are GUIs for people who work with applications blown up full screen, and never need productivity boosting functionality like copy/paste without flipping windows back and forth.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize the distrowatch page hits are absolutely meaningless and don't reflect usage in any way? I've had the exact opposite experience with Mint. It's always been buggy and required a ton of tweaking, whereas Ubuntu just works out of the box.

Re:A little late?

[KiloByte]

But what about the GEOS windowing system on the C64. It was the bomb!

I'm comparing GNOME3 only with the default built-in UI, it obviously loses vs GEOS.

Even Metro is slightly better, and that's like comparing whether Temujin or Attila the Hun would be the better baby-sitter for your kid.

Re:A little late?

[Merk42]

"The Market" seemed to be adopting Cinnamon and MATE. Where's this "adopting GNOME 3" thing coming from?

Maybe "The Market" means "Linux User" and not "Ex-Ubuntu User"?

Re:A little late?

[fahrbot-bot]

And if you don't agree, you could always apt-get MATE.

And now MATE is an official Ubuntu flavor and the desktop can be easily (re)configured for various layouts, one being like on Mint if you like.

Re:A little late?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

He's talking about the *cellphone and tablet* market. No-one wanted to sell Ubuntu phones or tablets and no-one wanted to buy 'em.

1) Make sure that your devices are not in stock anywhere.

2) People won't buy them because they can't.

3) ???

4) No profit!

I really, really wanted a Linux tablet capable of running software that I want to run. but I guess I'll have to keep using Debian Gnuroot...

Re:A little late?

[AdamWill]

I was simplifying. *I* would actually have bought an Ubuntu phone or tablet like a shot if one with decent enough specs, LTE, and some kind of working Whatsapp support showed up. But you, me, and the other F/OSS nuts are more or less a rounding error in the cellphone/tablet market. So read "no-one" as "almost no-one" if you like - the strategy depended on establishing themselves as at least a viable player in the mainstream cellphone/tablet market in at least *some* significant geo, and this was clearly just not happening. No major manufacturer wanted Ubuntu on its devices, and the sales for the minor devices they managed to ship through arcane channels were more or less the built-in F/OSS nerd market and nothing beyond it.

Re: A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

Temujin, hands down.

Re:A little late?

[chmod a x mojo]

Did you actually try their tablet / phone OS?

I installed it on a supported Nexus10 tablet.... it was a completely counter-intuitive shitshow. Waaaay too late to the market, everyone had used Android / iOS by the time they decided to bumble out the Ubuntu OS for phones and tablets - that didn't work in any way, shape, or form like a sane ( or even logical ) person would expect them to. Couple that with trying to sell shit tier phones that were 1-2+ years out of date, and were weak even when they were released....

That is even after looking past the fact that their market thingy had: 1: almost no applications ( the windows phone market looked like a wholesalers warehouse compared to the Ubuntu Market ) that anyone would need / want, and 2: the "scopes" that were the "desktop / icon view" replacements were also prety much non-existent.

It was completely DOA.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the majority of #3 uses it because it ships with Ubuntu rather than being a "conscious" choice.
Going back to Gnome will not make those people install Unity and the people at #54 will merge with the main group.
There might even be a bunch of people in the other groups that tolerated Gnome when it was the main environment in Ubuntu but switched to an alternative because they couldn't stand Unity.

My point being that the list doesn't really tell us anything about the reasons people pick one dist over another, only that they do.

Re:A little late?

[squiggleslash]

GNOME 3 has a faster workflow than Cinnamon or Unity Desktop.

...if you want it to do a fairly limited subset of things, mostly involving a full-screen only desktop.

. Cinnamon has a fixed virtual desktop arrangement and (last I checked) no Activities view, so you're back to spending 6 seconds navigating (well-arranged) menus instead of 1 second to open whatever application you were thinking.

Cinnamon is a traditional desktop. It can have as many virtual desktops as you want - it's pretty much GNOME 2 built with GNOME 3 technologies, cleaned up and looking much better. If by "Activities" you mean "Applications", they're either a single click or a categorized start menu away. They're not buried in massive full-screen giant icon panels.

The world is moving away from Windows 95 desktop interfaces. There's a loud minority installing "Classic Shell" on Windows, and they get way too much attention.

Windows 8.x was discontinued by Microsoft and replaced with Windows 10, which you should try out some time - it essentially reverts back to the traditional desktop, complete with start menu. That's why you're seeing a reduction in the number of people installing Classic Shell - for most people, it doesn't really change Windows 10 that dramatically.

Microsoft found that the vast majority of people do, actually, want the traditional desktop.

Re:A little late?

[AthanasiusKircher]

Well, the Distrowatch stats DO tend be indicative of which distros people are paying some attention to... You're right that they shouldn't be taken as user numbers (and I didn't say they were). My point was about what distros are getting attention, and Linux Mint gets a lot of attention. (BTW, do you have better stats? Individual Ubuntu derivatives don't generally identify themselves in browser agent data or whatever, so it's difficult to estimate userbase.) As for the rest of your comment, YMMV. But I think we can reasonabky say Mint didn't get so much attention because it was a harder to use and clunkier alternative to the already established Ubuntu for MOST Mint users.

Re:A little late?

[DuckDodgers]

GNOME 3.8 was released four years ago last week with Classic mode, which is a reimplementation of the GNOME 2 interface.

Re:A little late?

[DuckDodgers]

GNOME 3.8, released in spring 2013, has the "Classic Shell" option which restores the GNOME 2 interface anyway. I use Ubuntu a lot, that's the route I'll go.

Re:A little late?

[DuckDodgers]

I don't think Distrowatch is representative of the general Linux market. When I switched distributions once a month or more, I was there all of the time. I still have Linux on three of the five computers in my house, but I average less than one installation a year. I don't go to Distrowatch at all.

Re:A little late?

[roman_mir]

Ubuntu users who were Unity skeptics didn't flock to GUbuntu, they flocked to Mint.

- 100%

reminded me of some of the comments I made on the subject of Unity being DOA for me.

Re:A little late?

[DuckDodgers]

Canonical's entire strategy for the last several years has been this 'convergence' idea that people would want to run the same OS on their phone, tablet and computer. This does not appear to have panned out in the slightest.

Oh, I absolutely believe Canonical is right about this. I think convergence really is the future of computing. My wife works in the medical field and does her job all from an Android phone, and at home she does all of her computing on a tablet. My brother-in-law runs his contracting business off his phone, he rarely ever uses his desktop. My teenager plays more games on his phone than he does on the gaming console.

Now, whenever someone brings up this people, people shout it down with objections that you won't want to compile the Linux kernel or encode a Blu Ray on a OnePlus 3. And that's definitely true. But we the video geeks and the software developers represent a tiny niche of the market. 95% of the public doesn't use more computing power than a Google Pixel phone provides. Give my wife a way to use her Android phone as a desktop, and she'll ditch her desktop.

So convergence is the future. There just isn't enough interest in converged devices based on a non-Android version of Linux to make it worthwhile for Canonical. Android is going to eat the world.

Re:A little late?

[Jetstream]

Count me among that minority. One of the reasons (there are so many to choose from) I despise Win10 is the so-called start menu. Perhaps it's an improvement over 8, but still ugly as crap. But then, I'm someone who themes Linux Mint (Mate & Xfce) to look like Win98, so I'm obviously a sick f**k. ;) I don't see myself jumping to Ubuntu just because of this, but I see the potential of a classic gnome theme as promising. If I was just starting from scratch with Linux, it might pique my interest.

Re:A little late?

[Jetstream]

I think that every time someone installs Linux, there should be telemetry reporting the exact version, so we can have more accurate stats of what is really installed. Oh crap, now I'm starting to sound like a certain other o/s company. Never mind! Would be nice to know what the actual install stats are for the various Linux flavors.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having overlapping windows that don't take up the entire screen is far faster

No it isn't. Now I have to cycle through them instead of just clicking the one I want. If I want to cycle through them (say I only have two), Gnome has that ALSO.

And "top left" and other edge/corner actions pretty much kill virtualization and multiple monitors, where screen edge != where the mouse stops.

Also a bogus complaint. There a button there. You don't have to hot-corner it.

Gnome 3 and Windows Metro are GUIs for people who work with applications blown up full screen, and never need productivity boosting functionality like copy/paste without flipping windows back and forth.

And a third bogus complaint. There's no rule that says you have to run everything full screen.

Re:A little late?

[nasch]

That's not so much convergence as not using PCs any more.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but as a professional C++ developer, you are a tool.

People who get real work done still use "Windows 95 interfaces". I type this on XFCE4 right now using a 128 core development machine with over 2TB of ram.

Yet within that same interface I run Vim. I understand both sides of the equation. I *use* both sides of that equation. But only fool forces someone into the uncomfortable areas. Some run keyboard driven minimalist WMs but prefer massive IDEs. Others run "classic" window managers yet use something complex like Vim. The point is neither were wrong for wanting what they wanted....

It's more about liking a color than your color actually being superior. These are opinions.

The way you talk doesn't explain why it's better, you just are demanding we do it that way because it's somehow easier by your reasoning. By your reasoning.... by your reasoning. Keep saying that until it clicks. Notice how I didn't tell you how I prefer bootstrapping a Gentoo install without a manual and can setup the entire system from the command line including setting timezones, building the kernel, emerging the various dependencies for a gui, etc.... I don't assume other humans want to subject themselves to that and assume you'd respect that by not assuming I want to use flipping GNOME 3.

Now get off my lawn.

Re:A little late?

[AdamWill]

Exactly. I certainly buy that a lot of people don't really have a lot of need for a desktop/laptop PC any more. But those of us who do, probably don't really want the same interface on it as we want on our phones. We might want access to some of the same *stuff*, but that doesn't mean we want to use the exact same desktop/app stack.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you on the first editions of gnome3.
And i still dont like the default theme.

Gnome3 is can be configured to look and feel
However one please they should just get
A sane default theme. Dont think Ubuntu will use the default

Re:A little late?

[drinkypoo]

Way back in the way back I used to use gnome 2 with compiz and emerald, and avant-window-navigator. I still remember that as a golden age of desktop linux in which it was both beautiful and functional. Unfortunately, of those things, only compiz still works worth a damn.

Re:A little late?

[olau]

Debian, which is number 2 on that list, has had GNOME as default for a very long time.

But yeah, DistroWatch is probably not representative.

For instance, GNOME is specifically intended to cater to non-tinkerers. People visiting DistroWatch are probably mostly tinkerers.

Re:A little late?

[bluefoxlucid]

.if you want it to do a fairly limited subset of things, mostly involving a full-screen only desktop.

I want the DE out of my way. You talk like you want to waste your time playing with the DE instead of using it as a vehicle to get your hands on the applications you want to work with.

Cinnamon is a traditional desktop. It can have as many virtual desktops as you want

Yes, it can have as many of a fixed number of virtual desktops as you want. Oh, you have 3x3 but you need 10? Better re-configure your virtual desktop setup to be 3x4 so you have 12. In Gnome 3, you just start using a new virtual desktop.

If by "Activities" you mean "Applications", they're either a single click or a categorized start menu away. They're not buried in massive full-screen giant icon panels.

No, in Gnome 3, there's an "Activities" view. If you touch the top-left corner or press that Windows key Microsoft got stuck on all keyboards nowadays, it suddenly takes all your windows on the current desktop and shows them in what's essentially a MacOS Expose view. If you then start typing, it starts searching through the command names, icon labels, and keywords associated with your applications, showing you the matching applications; if you hit the Enter key, it executes the first one, which is often the most-recent one you've run that's in the results.

That means I can get Gnome Terminal up by tapping Meta with my pinky and typing "ter" and hitting enter. I can get Xchat-gnome running the same way. Applications aren't buried in menu trees or whatever you're babbling about with giant icon panels; they're at the beck and call of a fleeting thought and a brief twitch of my little finger. Gnome 3 quite nearly simply responds to my will and desire, and would do exactly that if I could eliminate the 3-4 keystrokes and 20-30 milliseconds required to actually express what I'm thinking.

You can switch between your open windows by clicking them in this view. You can drag them to another desktop--they're all shown on the right side of the Activities view. There's a new desktop at the bottom of all that; or you can stick a window between two existing desktops and it'll insert a new, empty desktop there. Ctrl+Alt+up/down moves you through desktops--Activities view or not.

Microsoft and replaced with Windows 10, which you should try out some time - it essentially reverts back to the traditional desktop, complete with start menu

Actually, we don't have Windows 8 here; we're running Windows 7, and upgrading to Windows 10 soon. Windows 7 users have been using an open-source software called Classic Shell to get a Windows-XP or Windows-2000/95 start menu in Windows 7.

Windows 10 has a nice feature where you press Win+Tab and it gives you an Expose view like Gnome Shell. You can add (horizontal) desktops, although you can't create a new desktop between two existing ones, and need to manually add a new desktop to the end. Ctrl+Win+Left/Right moves between desktops in either view.

The Windows 10 start menu is just an alphabetical list of applications in a rolling menu, too. There are some folders, some controls, and a Windows-8-style panel area on the right side. Microsoft has a Cortana search bar next to the start menu which functions like Gnome Shell or Unity Desktop search, kind of.

That means Windows 10 requires a lot of mouse work to use the virtual desktops and to start applications; Gnome 3 allows that, but will let you get things running with just the keyboard, up to and including the creation of new desktops. If you want to move windows between desktops or create desktops between other desktops, you need to pull out the mouse.

It sounds exactly like you've never seen Gnome 3 or Windows 10. Maybe you're just full of shit.

Re:A little late?

[DuckDodgers]

Sorry I didn't finish detailing my argument. I think Android gadgets of all kinds will start to offer more and more traditional desktop features when they get docked with an external display and physical keyboard. I compile big applications, my Android phone isn't good enough for me to work like that. But most people could, their Androids and iPhones already provide all of the computing power they use on a daily basis.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have tried the Gnome 3 classic shell. it is very minimal. Not much functionality. I tried it and thought it was lame.

I will stick with MATE.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME 3.8, released in spring 2013, has the "Classic Shell" option which restores the GNOME 2 interface anyway. I use Ubuntu a lot, that's the route I'll go.

Things may have changed since I last tried it, but the Classic Shell *looked* like Gnome 2 but there were problems involving mouse buttons not doing the same thing with the panel and a bunch of other minor but really annoying things that made it definitely *not* a Gnome 2 interface. Sadly I can't remember what they are anymore since I use Mate. Mate 1.18 is now 100% GTK3.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

and geezers using light weight desktops aren't the market either...

Re:A little late?

[bluefoxlucid]

Yeah I liked the springy, wobbly windows and all. It went away in favor of still using massive 3D resources, but not doing anything worth a damn except technically compositing on 3D flip buffers with 3D-generated shadows to present exactly the same visual effects as ever with inflated hardware requirements.

Re:A little late?

[nasch]

I think Android gadgets of all kinds will start to offer more and more traditional desktop features when they get docked with an external display and physical keyboard.

That's going to be awesome, and MS is already doing it (or maybe it hasn't been released yet). I'm in the same boat, I don't think my phone could handle a full featured IDE, but it would be really cool to just have one computing device. Maybe a dock with a GPU in it for gaming.

Re:A little late?

[squiggleslash]

You talk like you want to waste your time playing with the DE instead of using

No, actually, I don't. What I want is an interface that fits what I need to do when I need it to do something. An interface that's oriented towards one way of doing things, that makes it a pain to, say, see two things at once, is not optimal.

Yes, it can have as many of a fixed number of virtual desktops as you want. Oh, you have 3x3 but you need 10? Better re-configure your virtual desktop setup to be 3x4 so you have 12. In Gnome 3, you just start using a new virtual desktop

It sounds to me like you want to waste time playing with the DE instead of using your computer.

No, in Gnome 3, there's an "Activities" view. If you touch the top-left corner or press that Windows key Microsoft got stuck on all keyboards nowadays, it suddenly takes all your windows on the current desktop and shows them in what's essentially a MacOS Expose view. If you then start typing, it starts searching through the command names, icon labels, and keywords associated with your applications, showing you the matching applications; if you hit the Enter key, it executes the first one, which is often the most-recent one you've run that's in the results.

That sounds so much better than clicking on the task bar to select a running application, on the shortcuts to start a new instance of something I use regularly, or quickly finding it in the start menu if it's not something I... wait a moment, that doesn't sound better at all!

Actually, we don't have Windows 8 here

I wasn't asking you if you used Windows 8 there, I was pointing out that Windows 8 is no longer current, having been supplanted with a version of Windows, Windows 10, that uses a classic desktop, so making comments about Classic Desktop declining in popularity as evidence that non-desktop environments rule the roost is, well, not smart.

It sounds exactly like you've never seen Gnome 3 or Windows 10. Maybe you're just full of shit.

Or maybe you are. Because, leaving aside the fact I can't tell if you're impressed or hate Windows 10 based upon your last two paragraphs, the fact is you're completely wrong about what people prefer: people want desktops. Why? They work. Sure, you can tell me you don't want them, because you've found half a dozen keyboard shortcuts that work great in GNOME 3 and make it almost usable, if you want to learn keyboard shortcuts rather than, you know, get work done. But for the rest of us, the desktop metaphor is intuitive. Windows are friendly ways to organize information on screen and usually "just work", and the great thing is when they don't initially, they're easily fixed. We like being able to launch terminals and browsers with one click, rather than type in search commands, and we like being able to find applications we don't use as often by looking in nice categorized lists, rather than trying to remember that the thing we use to edit images is called The Gimp.

For all of its faults, Unity didn't stray too far from that familiar desktop metaphor, but it strayed enough that ordinary users fled to distributions like Mint. They didn't go with GNOME 3, because GNOME 3 isn't what anyone has ever asked for. Except you, apparently. Congratulations! Somebody wrote a desktop environment just for you. Everyone else is using something else.

Re:A little late?

[thejynxed]

In my household, it depends on what you count as being a Linux distro. If you throw in Android with that lot, then I have 3 phones, 3 tablets, a laptop, an HTPC, a cable modem and two routers all running some form of Linux. The modem runs a very customized version of RHEL, the routers custom Debian, the HTPC Linux Mint when I want to play around with using my 55" tv as a monitor, otherwise it is running PLEX. Laptop is Mint, phones and tablets are Android. Not sure exactly what OS powers a Roku, I'd imagine some sort of BSD or Linux kernel is involved, so might as well toss that into the mix.

The two desktops I have run Win10 (one Home, one Pro), and there is an iPad Mini 2 floating about that my wife uses for watching Netflix, playing around on Facebook, and playing Clash of Clans.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

> That's not so much convergence as not using PCs any more.

And that is a fine example of perfectly well defined convergence. Like in cars, which used steam, electricity etc. converged on the use of a single fuel: gasoline.

I don't think Canonical was wrong; it strikes as absurd the idea that people would not want a Linux-based phone, because Android is Linux-based and has been wiping the floor with the iPhone since some time now. For this situation, I blame the cellphone makers (which would rather make you purchase a new phone instead of updating or upgrading it). Also, perhaps a little paranoid of me, some folks in high places must be somewhat scared about really independent phone OSes.

Even without convergence, to me the whole thing boils down to: I'm waiting for a Linux (not just Android) tablet since some time. Not Crouton or other tomfoolery, but booting Linux and nothing else. No dual boot with Android or iOS or Windows, nothing, nichts, nada.

And it seems I'll need to wait a lot more.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Having overlapping windows that don't take up the entire screen is far faster

> No it isn't. Now I have to cycle through them instead of just clicking the one I want. If I want to cycle through them (say I only have two), Gnome has that ALSO.

You don't cycle thru them. That's why "focus-follow-mouse" exists. And you need to point at what you want (e.g. to select a field or click a radio button) anyway, so this is not an extra step. Besides, any sane DE allows you to turn off "raise on click", so that windows behave as papers on a desktop: you can write on them without disrupting your screen setup.

This whole cycling thru windows is why Windows is moronic. We don't need that.

>> And "top left" and other edge/corner actions pretty much kill virtualization and multiple monitors, where screen edge != where the mouse stops.

> Also a bogus complaint. There a button there. You don't have to hot-corner it.

Application specific functions should remain inside the application window. Traveling to top of screen to use "File" is dumb, even with that "border is infinite" trick, because we (well, at lest, I) need to separate that opening a Calc spreadsheet is a different action from opening a Writer document. Mixing things is simplifying further than what is advisable (like Einstein said).

>> Gnome 3 and Windows Metro are GUIs for people who work with applications blown up full screen, and never need productivity boosting functionality like copy/paste without flipping windows back and forth.

> And a third bogus complaint. There's no rule that says you have to run everything full screen.

If you unmaximize something and next time it comes up full screen again -- that's my definition of irritating. I'm under the impression Gnome does that. Maybe it's different now...

Re:A little late?

[bluefoxlucid]

That sounds so much better than clicking on the task bar to select a running application

One of those 1cm-wide blocks that expands into a menu of things? Oh, right, every desktop stopped having task bar buttons and moved to just showing an icon that may or may not expand a menu.

on the shortcuts to start a new instance of something I use regularly

I actually have Chrome, Xchat-gnome, and the terminal on the left side in the Activities view; the dock isn't on my screen normally, because it's a waste of space. Thing is, it's faster for me to just tap the Windows key, type, and hit enter than to reach over, grab the mouse, move to a dock pinned to the left of the screen (Unity), and click an icon. If I'm just logging in and want to start 6 applications across 4 desktops, I have to go into the Activities view anyway, and can click-click-click the shortcut icons if I want to bother.

or quickly finding it in the start menu if it's not something I

I didn't even know I had a DVD burner. I typed "DVD" and it showed me Thoggin.

I wasn't asking you if you used Windows 8 there, I was pointing out that Windows 8 is no longer current, having been supplanted with a version of Windows, Windows 10, that uses a classic desktop,

Windows 10 is less like the "classic" desktop than Windows 7. People here with Windows 10 are re-configuring it to try and look more like older Windows, and people with 7 have been downloading Classic Shell. Yes, people are running away from the Windows 7 and Windows 10 interfaces.

so making comments about Classic Desktop declining in popularity as evidence that non-desktop environments rule the roost is, well, not smart

I was pointing out they're a loud minority. They're a small sample who are malcontent and so noisy, while most people who are fat and happy don't care to bother arguing with idiots to explain that what they're getting without putting in any effort is great as far as they can tell. People who want to bitch are noisy.

When you have a million happy users and thirty who are pissed off, you have a forum flooded with whining and wargablers. It looks like the whole world is having a nuclear meltdown.

you've found half a dozen keyboard shortcuts that work great in GNOME 3 and make it almost usable

I've found "Windows Key", "Typing" (as in text, like "Firefox" or "Web browser"), and "Ctrl+Alt+arrow" (the same key combination that switches desktops in Gnome 2 back in 2001). I'm sure you'd be bewildered if I told you about this secret, magical spell called "Alt+Tab" too--another keyboard shortcut that nobody knows about, except us smart people who dig through the source code.

Re:A little late?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want Gnome 3 you're down to #54. Given that list, why on earth would they pick Gnome?

Incorrect, I'm using gnome on ubuntu which places me at #3.

You know it's possible to change the DE in Linux right?
Ubuntu is Ubuntu no matter what people install.

"the wonderful GNOME"?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I really hope this wording was chosen intentionally, with tongue planted firmly in cheek... but somehow I doubt it.

Sigh....

[Lumpy]

Going from crappy to crappier.....

Dear god just use Cinnamon and call it done...

Re:Sigh....

[Thelasko]

Going from crappy to crappier.....

The recent versions of GNOME have some settings that can be tweaked to get a more traditional layout with a proper application menu. As God intended.

Re:Sigh....

[jopsen]

IMO gnome-shell has long been better than unity... I keep experiencing a lot of papercuts in unity, windows jumping between desktops, weird interactions and just generally annoying papercuts...

gnome seems to have a lot of momentum these days.. and whilst I don't like all the decisions I can live with most of them, except the lack of type-ahead in nautilus...

Re:Sigh....

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh they should just stick to twm.

Re:Sigh....

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use Mate, it's traditional Gnome2

Re:Sigh....

[squiggleslash]

Yeah, and it all feels great until... until you want to add an applet to one of the bars. And then, amazingly, you have to load up Firefox, navigate to a website, and edit your bar from there. Note: I don't mean you download stuff from said website (though that happens too), I mean that's where you set up each applet.

The defaults on the distro I tried it with were pretty terrible too, so it wasn't as if changing the settings was some obscure thing only power users would want to do.

Cinnamon is what GNOME 3 should have been.

Re:Sigh....

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking hell. So after how many years it's back to what was the right idea all along ?

The Gnome developers are the most arrogant, clueless bunch of asshats ever.

Fuck Gnome.

Re:Sigh....

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's be honest. Cinnamon is the generally preferred direction, but painfully half-baked.

Re:Sigh....

[Anonymous Coward]

At the time Unity was released, it was superior to gnome3 in a multi-monitor setting. Gnome3 has come a long way, though.

I am sad to see their convergence project being scrapped, but I always had a hard time to see how they'd monetize on that. With convergence gone, it makes no sense to keep developping Unity and Mir.

About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

While neither Gnome nor KDE are perfect, they are still the best "general" desktops for most users. Most users doesn't mean most /. users are very technical people/ I'll still very fond of Window Maker and prefer it with KDE a close second.

If FOSS developers had spent all this time trying to not copy Windows and it's use case, Linux and FOSS in general would be ahead of Microsoft and Mac.

This is good news and may yet help get more people on the Linux desktop.

Re:About time

[JoeMerchant]

Phablets, mini notebooks - there are converged devices, just not many users for these devices.

My Nexus 5x has higher screen resolution than the "desktop" monitor I'm typing this on, and can interface to bluetooth keyboard and mouse, if I cared to.

I do wish that Jolla would have gotten some traction with their Linux based tablet/phones...

Re:About Time

[rahvin112]

This isn't so much an endorsement of Gnome as a rejection of Shuttleworth's pie in the sky "follow every trend" style of management and their extreme desire to reinvent the wheel at every turn. Rather than use Gnome they "developed" unity. Rather than use Wayland they "developed" Mir. Rather than pursue a desktop OS they pivoted towards the phone taking over everything.

So Unity is dead like most of their other NIH house custom plumbing projects so I suspect Mir will be next. Shuttleworth would get far more bang for his buck if he spent his money helping established projects rather than trying to reinvent the wheel at every turn.

Re:About Time

[Kjella]

This is good news and may yet help get more people on the Linux desktop.

I doubt it. If all my applications and games would run and hardware would work on Linux there's roughy three basic operations I'd need my WM to do. Start applications, switch applications, quit applications. Everything else is nice-to-have, it could look like RHL6 from last century and I'd manage. I was more excited last month with DaVinci Resolve created a free Linux version - they already had free Windows and Mac versions but only commercial Linux versions. A free professional NLE video editor, now that's useful. What the start menu looks like, WTF cares.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Who would have thought that a different form factor requires a different style of UI? Well, I could have told both Microsoft and Canonical this when they began their misguided adventures. Would they have listened? Not a chance. They were too determined to prove to the world just how stupid the concept of desktop/mobile convergence really is. /rant off

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft gave up on the desktop/mobile convergence nonsense after Windows 8. When a hybrid desktop/mobile device becomes practical, it'll just need two different desktop environments for the two different interface modes. Simple.

Exactly. The goal in reasonable code is to try to split things up between functional areas so you can hopefully avoid creating a mess where everything is hopelessly interdependent. Now some of that may be unavoidable, but you try not to tie anything permanent, or nearly so, without a really good reason. The desktop UI should have been designed as a replaceable and switchable element with the API hiding all the hard work. Now, tablets and desktops are quite different in how the UI typically works, so that may be easier said than done in some cases. Still it was Microsoft's job to design things so it worked. You see this on the web with angular 2 and such where web pages just work, and adjust for desktop and tablet.

If the design is solid, people could switch to what they wanted from the beginning as needed. Of course speaking of hideous windows UI design decisions that should just die has anyone ever seriously looked at theming? Every color associated with text should have a corresponding background color. Windows continues to fail at that, and then throws in some rather strange and wrong high contrast theme to somehow make things worse. I'd be amazed if there wasn't some way to fix that, while maintaining backwards compatibility.

On the bright side they do have a dark mode that works in some newer applications, but still they need it all cleanly integrated where you set it once and it just works.

Re:About Time

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE's not perfect? That's news to me. I've been using it for years as my primary desktop and I have no complaints at all. In fact, with some of the 'interesting' choices Firefox has made in the last few years, Konqueror has become my main browser. I don't know what I'd do without either of them.

I used to try a lot of different lightweight window managers like IceWM and xfce, but I kept hitting functionality walls like lack of a decent file manager. For anyone interested in trying linux I'd 100% recommend debian + KDE. If it's not perfect it's sure doing a good job of fooling me!

That said, I am a big fan of the GNU project, so I want to like gnome; I'm rooting for gnome... but it just doesn't have it's shit together like KDE.

Re:About time

[dublin]

I think it's a bit early to say they've given up on mobile convergence, given the persistent and reasonably well-backed reports that MS is working on a new kind of mobile device (usually tagged as the "Surface Phone" although that may not be an adequate or accurate description of it). In fact, it seems that they've doubled down on being able to go that direction, even though they have no really compelling Win10 Mobile devices right now (the HP Elite X3 being the most notable potential exception...)

"BetaNews" submissions almost EVERY SINGLE DAY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, here we have it. Yet another "BetaNews" submission on Slashdot's front page.

We're subjected to one of these submissions nearly every day now!

March 31 had two of them. March 25 had three submissions linking to this "BetaNews" site!

What's the deal here? Why is this "BetaNews" site getting linked to from Slashdot in so many submissions?

This "BetaNews" site and its articles are mediocre at best.

So why are they getting so much attention here?

This is getting nearly as bad as the Bennett Haselton "contributions" from the Dice era!

Seriously, if we wanted to read "BetaNews" articles every day we'd just go to the "BetaNews" site directly!

Slashdot editors, let's have some diversity here, ok? Let's maybe limit ourselves to one or two "BetaNews"-linking submissions a month.

Re:"BetaNews" submissions almost EVERY SINGLE DAY!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it is because Betanews and Slashdot are owned by BizX?

Finally!

[davide marney]

I'm still very much attracted to the idea of using my phone as my primary computing device, but not so much that I want to carry the weight of Unity around with me. ChromeOS is already showing us how to seamlessly inject Android apps into the desktop space.

wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. All these years tossed in the bin just like that. What a colossal waste (arguably by some, from the very beginning). I'll admit I'm very disappointed that they are abandoning convergence though. And what this means for SNAPS I'm really not sure.

Re:wow

[Ungrounded Lightning]

All these years tossed in the bin just like that. What a colossal ...

So do you think they should throw MORE man-lifetimes down the rathole after those already wasted?

Rule 1 of business: Don't throw good money after bad. It applies to other endeavors and resource types as well.

Experiments are necessary to progress. You usually can't tell for sure if something will be a great improvement, or be crippled by "gotchas", until you try it. But once you find out, first that they're failing, second that they're not readily fixable, it's time to pull the plug, stop the waste, and move on.

That's, kinda, a shame

[squiggleslash]

I'm not a huge fan of either desktop, but Unity seemed better thought out and closer to an ideal system than GNOME's "Re-invent everything but for no apparent reason" approach.

I guess I'll stick to Cinnamon for now. I just wish someone would put together a good GNU/Linux 2:1 desktop.

Re:That's, kinda, a shame

[Ramze]

I'm sticking with Cinnamon, but I am glad that Unity is effectively dead -- and Mir along with it. Now Ubuntu will focus on Wayland and Gnome, and I won't get Unity pushed to my Ubuntu machine during an upgrade. Gnome is a great backup DE for Cinnamon should it break on an update.

I never cared for Unity or the convergence philosophy behind it. Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, KDE, and other DEs will have to do unless someone wants to fork Unity for those that liked it.

They are right about one thing, though -- Linux Mint is incredibly popular because so many people prefer Mate and Cinnamon (Gnome forks) over Unity. With Gnome as the default, if Gnome merges the changes from Mint, Ubuntu would be a decent user OS again... from my perspective at least. ymmv.

Re:That's, kinda, a shame

[DuckDodgers]

GNOME 3.8 is four years old and restored a "GNOME Classic" option, which gives you the GNOME 2 user interface with the prettiness of GTK3.

They probably only added it because they were hemorrhaging users to Cinnamon and MATE. But it's there. So the choice of GNOME 3 as the replacement for Unity isn't as controversial as it would have been in the GNOME 3.0-3.6 time period.

Re:That's, kinda, a shame

[squiggleslash]

GNOME Classic was pretty awful the last time I checked (I was trying it under whatever the latest version of Fedora was in January of 2016.) Having to edit panels by using a web browser and browsing to an external website is patently ridiculous, for example. The applets are atrocious too - for example, why replace that simple visual workspace switcher from GNOME 2 with a menu?

My gut feeling is that Classic is an attempt to make people think "Oh, this isn't as good as I remember it, let me try GNOME Shell instead", but my view is it's awful and I'd rather try anything else.

Cinnamon is your best bet for a GTK3 desktop at this stage. I'm just unhappy with certain design decisions (the use of Webkit, running as root, with plugins enabled, for the DM being the most major.) But it generally works, is clean, pleasant to use, and is a real desktop. I just wish it had better 2 in 1 support.

Re:That's, kinda, a shame

[DuckDodgers]

I hadn't tried it in years, so I just set up Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 beta 2 on a VM. Classic mode seems to work pretty nicely - I don't know what you mean by having to browse to external websites.

I have nothing against Cinnamon, mind.

Re:That's, kinda, a shame

[squiggleslash]

I'll try it again at some point when I can be bothered, but the situation as of just over a year ago was that editing the panels required installing a Firefox plug-in (that might have already been installed) and browsing extensions.gnome.org. That site is still up and running and still describes the same functionality, so I assume that it's still necessary - hopefully, you just haven't had to use it because you were satisfied with the default panels, I wasn't however.

Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[damicatz]

Outside of Redhat's bubble, GNOME hasn't been relevant in years. The developers of GNOME went full Apple in trying to control how users use their computer.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[higuita]

damn, out of moderation points... +5 for you!

gnome is largely ignored today, not being totally ignored just because of gtk ... that in turns forces you to use several gnome tools
i only know one person that used gnome3 and mostly because he uses fedora, not because he likes it, he just didn't care enough to change it.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

What DE people are using now on Linux?

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[uncle slacky]

Budgie: https://solus-project.com/budgie/

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[damicatz]

KDE, Xfce, Mate, Cinnamon. Basically anything but GNOME.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm one of those people using (and liking) Gnome 3. I used to use fvwm2 up until a couple of years ago when I switched to Gnome. There are some things that I still miss from my old handcrafted .fvwm2rc but overall the experience is better for me, and I would argue that that's usually the case as long as you look outside the Slashdot crowd.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does RHEL only include GNOME 3? If so, that sucks. If not I'd question whether GNOME is relevant even *inside* the "Red Hat bubble". At least in Fedora you have a choice. (I'll grant you that Fedora GNOME has some nice wallpapers included by default, and all the other "Fedoras"... don't, but that's hardly a reason to use such an ucked fup desktop.)

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you mind sharing your .fvwm2rc? And, yes, I'm really asking.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://paste.fedoraproject.org/paste/fEhgIKPh4LgevqzbnSJwwl5M1UNdIGYhyRLivL9gydE=

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[Hognoxious]

CentOS 6 is on Gnome 2, so I assume RH is the same. The 7 series are on Gnome 3 IIRC.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

They moved to customization via addons instead of customization via menu options. Makes it virtually infinitely hackable, quite the opposite of Apple.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[Rakarra]

Well, Mate is basically "Gnome, but in the good ol' days."

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[Rakarra]

Does RHEL only include GNOME 3?

I use RHEL7 with Mate. Works ok, but is generally unsupported compared to Gnome.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Looks interesting but they seem to think Wayland is a non-starter. At this point if I'm switching DE's I'll get away from X11 insecurity too.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[DuckDodgers]

I've been posting the same thing up and down the discussion. GNOME 3.8 and newer has a "GNOME Classic" option, which restores the GNOME 2 features but with the same pretty GTK3 theming you see in GNOME 3 and Cinnamon desktops.

So no, you're not stuck with the original GNOME 3.0 way of interacting with the desktop. One click, and it's back to standard.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[Jetstream]

Back in the "good old days", I thought Ubuntu 10.1 was 'da bomb!'. But then came Ubuntu 11.x and it went downhill from there.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[dublin]

While there are some valid security issues with X (and audio is a bloody nightmare), the fundamental idea of network extensibility in desktop environments is needed more now than ever. It seems like a real shame that most all of the things angling to replace X can't do one of the most important things it's always given us...

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[olau]

You can say that, but the Red Hat "bubble" is really big - they're pouring tons of resources into upstream projects, so calling GNOME irrelevant is shortsighted.

Also some of the people of the full-Apple mindset has had less time/influence the last couple of years, and some of the warts have been removed.

Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke?

[corydoras]

Except that isn't true.
https://qa.debian.org/popcon-g...

Bias much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, no bias in that report.

Personally I still prefer KDE, although it is starting to get a bit crufty and sucky.

GNOME 3 Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, it's terrible. GNOME 2 wasn't especially pleasing aesthetically, but it was good for getting the job done. GNOME 3 is really annoying to use. Unity isn't that bad, and definitely better than GNOME 3.

Less hope for Ubuntu sans systemd then..

[popoutman]

Yes, it looks as though it'll be harder and harder to displace systemd from Linux distros with the defaulting to Gnome, with it's hardcoded dependencies. Long live Devuan Linux

Re:Less hope for Ubuntu sans systemd then..

[Anonymous Coward]

Devuan? The distribution run by "veterans" that are seriously challenged by renewing SSL certificates?

Re:Less hope for Ubuntu sans systemd then..

[Anonymous Coward]

Their not challenged, they just don't do it that often. But then who pays attention to bleating browsers anyway, who trusts centralized trust. Sandbox everything, Shirley.

Re:Less hope for Ubuntu sans systemd then..

[supertall]

MX Linux is what you are looking for.

Re:Less hope for Ubuntu sans systemd then..

[Anonymous Coward]

If they need weeks(!) to renew their expired certificates, they appear very much challenged. And they are aware of the expiration, so no excuse there.

I'll not mention the other glorious stories around the vets, but there are good reasons why Devuan has no stable release.

Re: Less hope for Ubuntu sans systemd then..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh, Devuan. I installed the latest beta and it worked OK but has a really outdated init system. I installed systemd and its running fine now.

Re:Less hope for Ubuntu sans systemd then..

[walterbyrd]

I think MX Linux uses systemd.

Re:Less hope for Ubuntu sans systemd then..

[uncle slacky]

It *can* use systemd, but it uses sysvinit by default.

Re:Less hope for Ubuntu sans systemd then..

[Anonymous Coward]

As if devuan was even alive.

They import Debian packages, which keeps the distribution twitching. But there is no work on any of the Devuan-specific packages for month at a time and those packages tend to break those taken from Debian, too.

GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

[Anonymous Coward]

in other words..

unity wouldn't be fixed and ready in time for 18.04 next april.

at least they just said 'fuck it' this time

Thank goodness!

[jediborg]

Another company realizing that the desktop/laptop requirements are fundamentally different from smartphone/tablet requirements. Trying to use one OS/GUI to serve both might sound like a great way to cut development costs for a company, but its also a great way to produce a poor user experience that doesn't deliver 100% on either platform.

Re:Thank goodness!

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, by moving to gnome3, I think maybe they aren't demonstrating what your suggesting by this move.

Oh boy

[lactose99]

Can't wait for all the "I don't see this at my company therefor it doesn't exist" bullshit anecdotes.

Re:Oh boy

[lactose99]

Shit, wrong damn story

MATE

[flatt]

Ubuntu MATE is an amazing release. Fast, capable, easy on resources, and it gets out of the way.

Mark, if you really want to ruffle some feathers, go with the real successor to Gnome 2. You had it right the first time.

Re:MATE

[Hydrian]

I agree. That's why I moved to Linux Mint Mate for desktops. Ubuntu's version of Mate that I was using on 14.04 was old had still had lots of not-so minor bugs. I still use Ubuntu LTS for servers. There is don't have to deal with Ubuntu's GUI craziness.

Re:MATE

[fnj]

Mate is unacceptably buggy. The volume control constantly crashing -poof-. The weather applet whose weather maps have been completely busted for a YEAR with no fix in sight. I consider it by far the best-designed DE, but I don't think it has the development resources to compete.

The latest KDE is what I am trying out now, after several years of frustration on Mate, utter disgust with GNOME 3 and Unity, and disappointment in Xfce.

Re:MATE

[Anonymous Coward]

no need to get separate release, just do # apt install mate-desktop

Re:MATE

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had some of those issues with XFCE, but for the few years I've been using MATE it's been rock solid, maybe it's just your distro.

Also it provides nice alternatives on other DEs, like Atril, a non-crippled Evince (gnome's PDF reader)

Re:MATE

[mz721]

I use MATE on Debian 8 on a six-year-old atom-powered netbook, and it's snappy and reliable. Unity was a case of 'we have to do something different. This is different, so we'll do it.' MATE continues the style of UI that many of us first encountered on the desktop, so it's more intuitive for us. You can't force intuition into a new shape, you can just wait for a new generation with a new set of muscle memories comes along.

Re:MATE

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny??? I don't see any of these problems on Mate 1.12.1.

Maybe you should try to debug the Mate code and fix the problem.

Or are you just another shrill Wiener?

Re:MATE

[fnj]

What a doofus nameless coward troll. I want something that will work for ME in my daily life with a minimum of fucking up, jackass. I don't want to waste my time designing desktop environments, or fixing busted DEs. I don't design my own cars either. I try to select cars that work reliably, and shun crappy brands.

And by the way, Mate is at 1.18. It doesn't matter to me what the quality of some ancient version is. What matters is how the CURRENTLY maintained version works. Actually, the problems I mentioned all cropped up since 1.12.

Re:MATE

[fnj]

Mate has gone downhill significantly over the years. For reliability, the current 1.18 is worse than 1.16, which was worse than 1.14. I think it's mostly teething problems due to changing from GTK2 to GTK3. The languishing of the weather applet can't be blamed on that, though. It's just laziness. They just haven't adapted to the new online weather API.

Re:MATE

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ubuntu MATE is an amazing release. Fast, capable, easy on resources, and it gets out of the way."

Windows 95, here we come.

Re:MATE

[bigmadwolf]

My daily driver OS is Mint 18.1 MATE on a Thinkpad X230 and its rock solid. Can't fault it really. Default desktop theme is already good, runs like a dream with Compton compositor with no screen tearing. It doesn't need much tweaking, just gets out of my way and works. Battery life is excellent. Weather applet works fine now though yes it was broken for a few months last year. I've been using Gnome 2 for a rather long time. Had used Ubuntu since it first came out in 2004 with 4.10 Warty Warthog. Once Unity came along around 2011 and annoyed me I went to Debian Squeeze with Gnome 2 desktop. After that grew too old I went to Mint MATE where I'll stay until something about it ends up pissing me off and I'll move on, it hasn't pissed me off yet though...

Re:MATE

[geekymachoman]

I used linux (on desktop) since 2001 - actively.
Debian, Redhat, Slackware, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Gentoo, I've had all of it... and fucked around with all of their individual quirks to get them to work, etc.

Now I use Mint. It just works (with some bugs here and there, but tolerable) and gets out of my way.. exactly what I want to get my work done.

It also has some quirks, with retarded update policies and couple of other things, but I get why... and It's fine. I can mitigate security concerns the other ways.

Re:MATE

[LienRag]

I'm getting used to MATE since I switched from Cinnamon (beautiful, but heavy on the system) some weeks ago, but the default settings are really ugly and I have trouble finding a good theme to replace it...
I use Black which has some good things in it, but on slashdot textboxes (like where I type this message) the text appears white on white, so it's really not practical.
What would be the best UI settings to use then?

About time

[GameboyRMH]

Microsoft gave up on the desktop/mobile convergence nonsense after Windows 8. When a hybrid desktop/mobile device becomes practical, it'll just need two different desktop environments for the two different interface modes. Simple.

I can't say I blame them

[DrXym]

They could probably produce something which looks and feels extremely close to the existing Unity using GNOME shell. They're not forced to take the default behaviour if they don't want it although that is not a bad decision either. Perhaps they'll also dump Mir while they're at it.

Re:I can't say I blame them

[AdamWill]

Of course they'll dump Mir. There's literally no reason to keep spending money on building it any more.

Impartiality

[Wootery]

"Superior". Nice and impartial.

Mir

[FithisUX]

Does it mean that they have ported Gnome on Mir?

Re:Mir

[hackel]

I imagine (hope?) this means they'll be switching to Wayland. The only reason Mir existed was for their mobile convergence platform and Unity 8. Without them, there's no reason to use it.

Silently clapping...

[dimko]

Finally. It was fashionable to hate it. And we did. Not in for Gnome, but as long as it's not Unity...

GNOME?

[quantic_oscillation7]

well, at least they could go with Cinnamon.....but i would prefer something like KDE or at least Qt based.

Re:GNOME?

[hackel]

Why would they do that when Kubuntu is already excellent? Also I can see no compelling reason to compete with Mint.

Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

This is sad news for me. I own an Ubuntu phone and one of my primary reasons for running Ubuntu was the Unity desktop. Canonical killing off both products means there really isn't anything keeping me in the Ubuntu ecosystem any longer.

YEAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!

[cloud.pt]

Man, this is such good news I'm gonna bash all my coworkers who still use that INFERIOR UNITY CRAP. ...although, I understand their crappy decision, partially: most of them are lazy to change or simply found Unity good enough, and the fact it is the default choice on the login screen also helps.

Gnome sucks

[nonicknameavailable]

Gnome sucks bye bye Ubuntu !

April fools?

[hackel]

Wait, too late. I'm blown away by this announcement! Canonical has been *so* invested in Unity over the years, in spite of a ridiculous amount of resistance from the community. I don't think Unity 7 is awful, though I certainly welcome the move to pure GNOME. Unity 8 has indeed been a disaster, but I really wanted Ubuntu Phone to take off. Particularly once Android support is added. I really hope this effort will continue, as Google is closing Android more and more each release.

My biggest interest is in retaining locally integrated menus. I find these incredibly useful. I can't stand a global menu bar, but reclaiming the screen real-estate menus take up is a huge advantage. I know many GNOME apps have Chrome-style master menus in their title bars, but I would much rather have a full menu available with shortcut keys and on hover.

Re:April fools?

[Anonymous Coward]

FVWM2 FTW! Something that isn't bloated, memory-wise with tons of extra executables, configuration files, and other wm specific nonsense.

Re:April fools?

[blackomegax]

Not all of us are completely fucking autistic.

Re:April fools?

[squiggleslash]

I actually have a plug-in for Cinnamon that does global menus, but it relies upon Unity being installed to work (presumably so that GNOME, QT, etc have the appropriate patches to redirect the menus.) So here's hoping future Ubuntus will come with Unity - even if we don't use it.

Finnaly !!!

[zakzor]

Unity sucks (my opinion and of many many others). I use Ubuntu Gnome and before it was official I had to install and remove all the packages by myself.

One step ahead of Windows but sucking all the same

[HeckRuler]

Today, the company admits that it is throwing in the towel on Unity, as well as its vision for convergence with devices like phones and tablets

About frigging TIME. It sucked. Royally. Props to Canonical for beating Microsoft to the punch with this idea. Having a desktop that's identical to a phone has some good points. Sounds good on paper. It's not like it doesn't have any merit at all. But it's a bloody terrible idea. And trying to shoe-horn your users into a hideous mishmash of interfaces that randomly assume two wildly different I/Os is bound to piss off a lot of people that didn't really need to be pissed off. The gain you get from "oh hey, this looks just like my phone" isn't nearly offset by all the "OMG WTF would you do that?".

One of the big reasons I just don't like windows 10. They could have made it easy. But what's easy and helpful for the desktop is nigh impossible on a phone. And what's useful to a phone is a pain in the ass for a real mouse and keyboard.

And what's the fucking point? Who runs windows 10 on a phone? Who runs Ubuntu on their phone? They were trying to position themselves to tackle the phone market, but this position doesn't make sense until you're already there. And neither got there. EVEN THEN, until you can take your phone, dock it, and have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, when what's the fucking point of making this OS try to straddle the different hardware?

Wonderful GNOME?

[Gravis Zero]

You mean the GNOME that was so "wonderful" that it resulted in the rise of multiple forks and a mass exodus of developers? The GNOME 3 series has had to undo every major UI design change they have made because people hated it so much.

Re:Wonderful GNOME?

[drinkypoo]

The GNOME 3 series has had to undo every major UI design change they have made because people hated it so much.

So have they done that? It seems technically competent, but with terrible UI. If they unbreak the UI, perhaps it will be worth using again.

Re:Wonderful GNOME?

[Billly Gates]

You mean the GNOME that was so "wonderful" that it resulted in the rise of multiple forks and a mass exodus of developers? The GNOME 3 series has had to undo every major UI design change they have made because people hated it so much.

They never did. I just fired up the newest build of Fedora in Hyper-V to see what has changed. WOW does it suck.

Still can not minimize Windows yet ... shook head and uninstalled VM and went back to Windows. Sorry the good old days of gnome 2 are done and for me it killed my idea and fantasy about Linux overtaking Windows. I lost faith in the idea that the community could make something as good as WIndows GUI for desktop users and quietly gave up.

Gnome 3 did damage. More than SystemD did for servers in the image for Linux and was one of the worst environments ever created.

Re:Wonderful GNOME?

[Anonymous Coward]

Still can not minimize Windows yet ...

By default. Just turn on the minimize buttons and stop complaining.

Re:Wonderful GNOME?

[GoingDown]

Or press Super+H.

Or click title bar with right mouse button and select minimize.

Re:Wonderful GNOME?

[olau]

Although some people were disgruntled and some with good reason, there never was a mass exodus of developers. The GNOME project has always been somewhat fragmented with people coming and leaving. In recent years, they've done a lot of stuff to attract more developers, with some success, I think, at least looking from the outside.

Gnone 2 or Mate...yea!

[evolutionary]

I was always fond of gnome 2 myself. I'm also really fond of Mate.

Re:One step ahead of Windows but sucking all the s

[HeckRuler]

until you can take your phone, dock it, and have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard,

Oh, hey, it's been while since I looked. This is totally possible.... if you go out of your way to get a phone that supports MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link), and get a dock that then supports that. The MHL people are fragmented as hell unfortunately.

how about throwing the towel on systemD

[Anonymous Coward]

and Amazon too.

A damned shame

[jmcvetta]

I really enjoy Unity. Hopefully it will continue to be available as an alternative window manager.

Jeebus!

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to know a sure fire way to fire up the neckbeards? Call one desktop environment "superior"...that will do the trick!

KDE?

[nightfire-unique]

KDE is measurably superior to both Unity and Gnome3 - features & functionality, stability, customizability, usability ...

Why dump Unity for something only marginally better?

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would agree with that. KDE has some problems, but it still is the best power user desktop going. It's highly customizable compared to most of them and still has a lot of advanced features tucked away in "advanced" menu options.

It even works well for more basic uses - sort of like the Win7 interface without the MS crap infesting it. It has a good "start menu" type thing which people used to desktops of yore take to quickly.

KDE5 is still not as good as KDE4 was, but it's better than most of the other options out there. Including newer versions of Windows past 7.

Re:KDE?

[dfsmith]

I only use DEs that have wobbly windows (e.g., KDE). Don't ask me why... maybe I feel subliminal guilt when I under-use my GPU?

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE has the enormous advantage that you can operate it with the compositor OFF. That gives it very low latency over VNC; less latency even than RDP.

I tried hard to make Gnome and Unity and Mate and Cinnamon run fast over VNC, but nothing matched the low latency of KDE with the compositor off and most effects, shadows, etc turned off. Ubuntu was working on a "low graphics" mode for Unity, but it still wasn't as good has KDE minus the compositor. Now I guess that will die with Unity...

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cannonical are a GTK shop. They'd have to rewrite EVERYTHING.

Re:One step ahead of Windows but sucking all the s

[c]

Having a desktop that's identical to a phone has some good points. Sounds good on paper. It's not like it doesn't have any merit at all. But it's a bloody terrible idea.

Unity was introduced as a lightweight out-of-the-way window manager for Ubuntu Netbook Remix version, and on a small screen netbook it was actually quite brilliant compared to the alternatives. The concept of maximizing the menu into the title bar and merging it with the status bar *really* saved a lot of space on a small screen, and auto-maximizing windows is somewhat necessary too.

The concept just doesn't scale so well to dual 24" monitors, although I think most people have kind of gotten used to it.

The main problem I find is that behind Unity, there's a lot of useless Gnome shit still burning cycles...

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

That's where I am, and staying. Mint with Cinnamon for newer computers, Mint with MATE for older computers or low end video, and Debian for server duties.

"Wonderful GNOME"

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. Hard to find a more irrelevant piece of software, developed by a bigger bunch of incompetent narcissist.

Thanks for the laugh though.

Re:convergence

[Anonymous Coward]

To me convergence was a dumb idea from the start, and I always thought Ubuntu and Microsoft working on that was a waste of time. Thinking that a 5" cell phone, 10" tablet, 15-17" laptop, 19-32" desktop and 55" TV should somehow all act and look the same is ridiculous. I'm a firm believer of use the right tool for the job.

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the driver support. Unity always sucked. But if you don't buy a crappy computer, driver's really aren't a problem. Ubuntu phone...seriously who was going to buy that garbage.

Give my good old Debian or CentOS and I'm good.

Well, shit.

[PvtVoid]

I really like Unity!

Re:Well, shit.

[azrael29a]

I really like Unity!

Yeah, me too. I got used to it, and it feels good to work with. Less screen estate wasted. Its only downside is a lack of an application menu for those users which don't know how their apps are named/don't know how to search for them. I hope they'll be able to customise Gnome3 so it retains at least some of Unity's look and feel. Also, it's possible for others to fork/continue the project, since its open source.

Re:Well, shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

And you are a fucking moron for it.

Re:Well, shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

after trump, the world collapse

Wonderful GNOME from the makers of Systemd!

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME is a giant turd and stinks more than ever. Remember these guys are directly responsible for or associated with:

* DBUS
* Avahi
* PulseAudio
      https://aliver.wordpress.com/2...
* Systemd - Need I say more?

If you liked this garbage, knock yourself out. It *is* Ubuntu, after all. I consider Ubuntu (and Fedora to a lesser degree) a powerful moron magnet, peeling away people I'd rather not see in IT anyway.

I love how the Linuxites say "But it's for the servers!" when they talk about things like Systemd which are really there to assist GNOME crap. Pottering loves to trot that out "Servers boot faster". As if an extra 10 seconds is going to make any difference on a server that takes many minutes just to get through post (ie.. an HP DL G9 server for instance).

Let's be real. It's not for servers. The nasty-fying of Linux is actually for GNOME and Android. Period.

The ugly little truth is that they are pending Linux to suite the less technical folks and phone distros. This is a side effect of the "taking over the world" mentality. It's just that saying it's for servers makes it seem more technically justifiable and cool.

Sorry, but my perception is that Linux isn't cool anymore and hasn't been for a long time. I feel it's more suited for newbies, technical rubes, and loud talking non-listening visionary assholes like Pottering.

Re:Wonderful GNOME from the makers of Systemd!

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel it's more suited for newbies, technical rubes

Is that why you try to use Linux?

I barely use Unity

[jetkust]

I thought it was fine, but there were a couple things I hated. The forced grouping of terminal windows in the task bar which basically breaks ALT-TAB, and breaking the ability to map ALT+F10 shortcut to maximize window. In the end, I doubt I'd enjoy using it for extended periods of time.

Re:I barely use Unity

[Ambient Sheep]

Alt-` (or whatever your particular keyboard's key next to "1" is...

So could you tell us what it is?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Upon investigating I realized there was a setting that could be changed to go back to a traditional layout.

It would be nice if you would tell us what this setting is. B-)

Re:So could you tell us what it is?

[Hognoxious]

He probably installed 6.x, they're still on Gnome 2 which is quite nice.

Re:So could you tell us what it is?

[AdamWill]

No, he's probably talking about 'Classic Mode', which is an alternative interface provided by gnome-shell that looks more like a Win98 / GNOME 2-style desktop. It exists more or less entirely because some Red Hat desktop customers (yes, we have some!) wanted to update to RHEL 7 but wanted a more 'classic' desktop UI.

https://access.redhat.com/docu...

Re:So could you tell us what it is?

[Thelasko]

No, he's probably talking about 'Classic Mode', which is an alternative interface provided by gnome-shell that looks more like a Win98 / GNOME 2-style desktop. It exists more or less entirely because some Red Hat desktop customers (yes, we have some!) wanted to update to RHEL 7 but wanted a more 'classic' desktop UI.

https://access.redhat.com/docu...

I believe that's it. I'm away from my Linux machine at the moment and can't look it up. More than one distribution supports it, but not all.

Re:So could you tell us what it is?

[Thelasko]

It exists more or less entirely because some Red Hat desktop customers (yes, we have some!) wanted to update to RHEL 7 but wanted a more 'classic' desktop UI.

Proving once again that people are willing to shell out big bucks for a quality product ;)

Re:So could you tell us what it is?

[Anonymous Coward]

The other way to get a "classic desktop" on RHEL 7 or Centos 7 is to use the MATE window manager. Since MATE is essentially a fork of good old Gnome 2, it'll provide the familiar look and feel that some folks want.

Re:So could you tell us what it is?

[AdamWill]

Well, sure, but GNOME is the only officially-supported desktop on RHEL (unless we're supporting KDE these days, I never can keep track - but at most it's those two). You can install whatever other desktop you like on it, but RH won't support it. So if you actually want commercial support for your desktop deployments from RH, MATE (and Cinnamon etc. etc. etc.) aren't in the running.

Re:So could you tell us what it is?

[Hognoxious]

You say it looks like it. Does it act like it? I'm over 20, so I tend to care more about the latter.

Re:So could you tell us what it is?

[CRC'99]

Well, sure, but GNOME is the only officially-supported desktop on RHEL (unless we're supporting KDE these days, I never can keep track

Oh god I wish RH would support a proper KDE5 environment. It would benefit greatly from some more resources to move things along quicker.

I'm active in testing the KDE5 stuff in Fedora (and in #fedora-kde most times) - but having some more hands on it would really make things nicer for all parties.

Comments replaced with this VASTLY SUPERIOR one

[theendlessnow]

Ta da!!

(hey you opened it)

One big mess

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

It's not about only Unity: Linux/GNU in general is one big mess of an OS.

If you ask people who actually use their PCs for work, most of them will tell you that the best DEs are reminiscent of Windows 95 with various small productivity improvements like Search in the Start Menu, icons only in task panel, vs. icon + application name, virtual desktops, widgets and good keyboard shortcuts. Also people generally cannot tolerate simplicity and scarcity in regard to customizability and features first introduced by Apple, now reduced to nothingness by Gnome 3/Unity/Windows 10. I know quite a lot of people who were relieved after migrating from Unity/Gnome to "old fashioned" XFCE.

For some reasons various UX wannabes try to reinvent the desktop every few years and they fail, fail and fail. The prime examples are well known: KDE4/5, Gnome 3, Unity and Windows 8/10 interfaces (yes, Windows 10 Start Menu is as horrible as Windows 8 apps start screen). It seems like modern designers are hell bent on turning your beautiful PC UIs first designed for display/mouse/keyboard, into some grayish mess of huge buttons, tons of white space and nondescript controls meant for tablets and phones. I cannot imagine a common UI which will work equally well on such distinct platforms. I suspect it just doesn't exist.

Re:One big mess

[Anonymous Coward]

You are describing XFCE. I've been running it for over a decade.

Re:One big mess

[upuv]

One of my biggest hates in modern trends in UX was to have hidden controls, magic corners and symbols with overloaded meanings.

You had to have magical knowledge to use these controls. Windows 8 being the biggest offender with magic corners with no visual indicator that lead to essential controls needed for normal operation. Windows 8 made my blood boil the instant I tried to use it. Unity was near useless unless you knew the name of the application you wanted, and for those of us with dyslexia it was a near impossible interface to use.

This none-sense of form over function resulting in hiding function in obscure locations was always a doomed model. There was also the none-sense drive to unify touch interfaces and keyboard mouse interfaces as one UX experience. The fundamental issue here is the UX form grew out of the input devices we had.
punch cards -> card loader and status lights.
keyboard -> terminal interfaces
keyboard + mouse -> graphical windowed UI's
touch -> tiled interfaces with gesture controls.

The UX world was in love with the touch interface and believed it would be the only interface. "There can only be one." Basically every UX went this path. Windows, IOS, Windows mobile, Win 8.x/10, Gnome, Unity. OSX almost fell into this trap as well but at least Apple product tested this option and realised it sucked for certain device types.

When Ubuntu/Canonical decided they were going after the mobile market, tablet and phone they decided to completely ditch the ageing X system and rebuild the whole UX technology stake and model it around touch. In the Linux world the reaction was swift. Gnome3 with similiar ideas at around the same time. Over night MATE and Cinnamon were born. Linux Mint distro shot up the popularity charts to become arguably the most popular desktop distro. Gnome felt the hit the hardest with a mass defection of developer talent into the MATE and Cinnamon camps. This ultimately hurt Canonical as well developers simply avoided Unity.

Hopefully people will come to realise that the UX is tied to the input methodology/technology. Having two UX shells on a system is not the end of the world as a matter of fact I would prefer this model. Where the shell is tied to input device and or user preference.

Re:One big mess

[OneoFamillion]

The thing that young innovators tend to ignore is that things are usually the way they are because of a reason, even if the reason is not readily apparent. Now that doesn't mean that there's never room for improvement, and sometimes it even happens that the original reason is no longer there, but usually things are a result of a long evolution where thousands of hours have been spent on every detail, and it is unlikely that a complete overhaul will result in a better user experience.

Re:One big mess

[Anonymous Coward]

It is scary to note how much of a homerun Microsoft hit with the Windows 95 UI, 22 years ago. It can't have been a big team, looking at how consistent the UI was, and how limited in scope, but that handful of people must have been responsible for more than a few billion dollars in sales since then.

Choices for the users

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome or Unity, eh. This week I would like to be bludgeoned on the head with a crowbar instead of a hammer.

GNOME is a bag of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

It needs serious reworking to be usable. Keep it clean. Stay minty.

one person's fault

[qQ7eBMsfM5gs]

What really sucks in this whole story with the Ubuntu Unity (besides the software itself) is the fact that the entire Ubuntu community was mislead by one individual.
I really don't care if he admitted he was wrong, what I care is about years of engineering effort wasted and the Linux desktop platform reputation affected because of one person dumbness.
I would expect that the Ubuntu Foundation look into this shameful failure of common sense and do something to prevent it from repeating in the future.
But I'm not holding my breath as he pays their salaries.

Re:one person's fault

[JustNiz]

>> what I care is about years of engineering effort wasted...because of one person dumbness.

This totally applies to systemd too.

Re:one person's fault

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you complaining about? Wasn't the Unity development paid from the pockets of Shuttleworth himself? They tried and failed, nothing wrong with that. I tried to use Unity for few days, hated it and replaced it with XFCE. They did not try to force their crap into every system as systemd cabal does so they did no harm to the Linux ecosystem.

Gnome superior HA

[Billly Gates]

Is it just me or was 2010 the good old days of Linux when the GUIs were good, effects were in via eye cand with openGL add ons, you could actually minimize WIndows too!

Gnome 3 got me to give up on Linux and switch to Windows 7 after 10 years waiting. Ubuntu was close with Gnome 2 and its anti aliagned LCD cleartype fonts. THen #### Unity and Gnome 3 had to come in.

At least Microsoft acknowledges when it went down that path with Windows 8 that not everyone wants a cell phone on there desktop and went with Windows 10. When will Gnome go back to 10 years ago for improved UI?

Re:Gnome superior HA

[DuckDodgers]

Four years ago GNOME 3.8 came out with a "Classic Shell" option that restores the GNOME 2 user interface. So I suspect that's what almost everyone that uses GNOME 3 these days uses - I wouldn't be surprised if it's the default setting on many distributions.

Re:Gnome superior HA

[iggymanz]

the are good GUI's, MATE or Cinnamon

forget GNOME3, the devs left what users wanted or needed or liked in the dust. does anyone even use that crap any more?

um? slackware? gentoo? ... etc etc

[Anonymous Coward]

devuan is basically a mess I think...
use old established *nix's like slack and gentoo...

or check out others on http://without-systemd.org/wik...

Re:um? slackware? gentoo? ... etc etc

[walterbyrd]

Manjaro OpenRC seems to be getting rave reviews.

It is based on Arch.

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[loufoque]

The best phone I ever had ran Debian.
Ubuntu is pretty much a variant of Debian Testin, so why not.

Gnome is still just a political statement

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome created as a hack by a bunch of evangelists who got their panties in a bunch because they didn't like that qt which KDE is based on, wasn't available under LGPL, only GPL. It was half a DE back in 1999, and it sill feels like half a DE written by UX wanks who want to make is as mac-like as possible.

But hey, if you like regedit, you'll love gconf!

Re:Gnome is still just a political statement

[unapersson]

But hey, if you like regedit, you'll love gconf!

What do XML files in directories on the filesystem have in common with a binary blob?

Re:Gnome is still just a political statement

[thejynxed]

You'll end up spending an eternity looking for the right settings in some obscure backwater part of them both, and hope you don't screw something up because TFM is more sparse than the Gobi Desert, is what.

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[dwarfking]

Debian + XFCE4 is what I've always used.

Bad news

[cyberthanasis12]

I am sorry to hear this. Unity is a desktop I like to play with, browse some sites, make a documents and so on. It is something different than KDE and Gnome and it adds to the plurality of Linux. The majority of /.ers didn't like it, but we will all be poorer without it.
And, no, I don't have the resources or the expertise to take it over. I will probably switch to KUbuntu.

Ding dong Unity's dead...

[TheOuterLinux]

Now if we can just get people to realize XFCE is the best. GNOME is nothing but eye candy and doesn't really do anything special that a whisker menu, catfish, synapse combo can't. And, that combo is much faster, especially on older computers. Also, a lot of the panel items people try to hunt down for GNOME and Mate are already available by default in XFCE.

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually due to ubuntu having predetermined release dates you might find more updated packages on Debian, ie GIMP 2.6 on Ubuntu 12.04 vs GIMP 2.8 on Debian 7

One down .. one to go ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unity down ... systemd to go ..

BB4 Windows is alive thanks to this guy

[Anonymous Coward]

He themes it, so check out his gallery for some skins; he also wrote a manual to set it up. This way http://pitkon.deviantart.com/gallery/

Re:BB4 Windows is alive thanks to this guy

[Hognoxious]

Very pretty, but not very good for getting actual work done.

So what do you wont from this hobbyist OS?

[SurenEnfiajyan]

It seems that Canonical hasn't enough resources to maintain Unity 7 and bring Unity 8 to a mature state. Nowadays Android and Chrome OS are better alternatives to this hobbyist mess.

Good you're halfway there!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get rid of that system-whats-it-called and I'll be back in the fold.

I moved to Ubuntu from all other distros in the 6.x days and deployed it in production through 10.x. Once Unity was the default Canonical started with other niggly BS that I wouldn't put up with and changed OS's entirely. I'll be happy to check them out again with an up to date kernel and no other binary BS...

April Fools

[watermark]

This story was first published on April 1st and is just now making it to the front page. The other story in the firehose is how they will be using Wayland instead of Mir. The next thing you know, Microsoft will join the Linux Foundation. (am i rite?)

Re:April Fools

[dublin]

With WSL (Ubuntu for Windows), there's a pretty decent chance that Windows will be the most widely used Linux *desktop* OS within two years.

This is Microsoft's deal to screw up - if they execute well, then Windows and Linux may become far stronger together than either could be separately. WSL is just the first step, bringing Unix/Posix text stream pipeline semantics to Windows in the most standard and useful way ever - way better than MKS/SFU/Interix/SFA. Imagine, now, that Canonical integrates all the 21st century structured object pipeline concepts from PowerShell and Mono/.NET into Linux - *that* is something that could benefit the entire Unix/Linux community, as well as the Windows community.

It still sucks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody wants Unity or the new Gnome except people who like Windows. Every Ubuntu install I do gets gnome-flashback instead of the fucktard Unity or Gnome session.

Finally!

[ReneR]

just when I mentioned the other week that "I totally can get used to this unity or what it is called": https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and I'm not even a Ubuntu user ;-)

Bah!

[dfn5]

Give me twm and a stippled root window any day.

Re:Bah!

[Anonymous Coward]

vtwm: rock stable, and very effectively multiplies your work space with "virtual" windows. Set up one window of one project's work, another window of another projects, and another window for porn and http://www.fuckedcompany.com for when the boss isn't around.

Re:Bah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stippled root window on an interlaced screen. Builds character.

Bring back KDE3

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE 3 is still the best DE ever made for Linux. I really wish someone with the know-how, time, and money had kept it going the way the MATE guys did with gnome2.

Re:Bring back KDE3

[buchanmilne]

KDE 3 is still the best DE ever made for Linux. I really wish someone with the know-how, time, and money had kept it going the way the MATE guys did with gnome2.

You mean like the Trinity team?

(But, if you haven't tried KDE5 recently, you should.).

Distro fragmentation kills Linux

[KayakFun]

I got fed up with the Linux fragmentation of all these distro's inventing the same wheels in parallel, wasting resources that could have been spent at really killing Windows. I went from SuSe to Ubuntu 10.04 as that was the biggest distro then. It had a nice unobtrusive UI that looked a lot like Windows 7 which I used at work.

The introduction and enforcement of Unity made my flee towards Linux Mint Cinnamon, then the biggest alternative distro. For me as a Drupal back-end developer, I don't care much about UIs. I need an out-of-the-way window manager, and as much as possible screen real estate. I use a terminal with a few tabs open, 2 browsers with a lot of tabs open, PhpStorm and FileZilla. That's it.

Why Mark S does not switch to Mint/Cinnamon must be the damned Linux mantra roll-your-own-distro and his own stubbornness. Productive people don't need Unity with its merging a phone UI with a PC UI, and we do not need Gnome3 either, we spend our time in applications ON TOP OF the OS and the Window system. So stop the fragmentation and join the Linux leader or at least something in the top 3, not #54 in popularity.

that's a low bar

[Anonymous Coward]

yes gnome may be better than unity; but gnome is far from wonderful

Wonderful

[Anonymous Coward]

It can't be good, it is only written in C.

Why not KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE is superior at a technological level. They can customize it to their liking and improve it in a shorter timeframe while also having more maintainable code (admittedly not a guarantee). More importantly, Qt is developed as an opensource project by a separate company whose sole goal is improving it. The resources poured into Qt and its industry support are orders of magnitude higher than GTK+.

If they're gonna do a course correction, I think switching to a Qt and C++ based desktop will be a good move to avoid a lot of future technical debt.

feeling grateful about focusing on mindfulness

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm excited! A very obese blogger posted a stock photo of a pretty young lady along with 20 sentences about a 21-sentence blog from Mark Shuttleworth. Like and Link in social media. By the way, thanks for the ads!

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[corychristison]

I use XFCE on my two laptops, and main workstation.

I can't stand thr bulkiness of KDE or Gnome.

I've experimented with other WMs but none of them provide the full desktop environment, and can be difficult to configure.

I use IceWM on my HTPC.

Yeah!

[Doloresanto]

Finally!!! Oh my God! At least Canonical is capable of admitting it's mistakes. Seriously, the whole Unity idea was just plain goofy from the start. It's strange that Canonical can't hire a good designer, it's a rich company.

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[spongman]

have you tried xubuntu?

Systemd

[DaMattster]

Now if only they would drop systemd

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to this. It's all I need, and all I ever shall need.

Fuck systemd and this hipster Linux

[ArchieBunker]

Systemd is terrible and what they've been doing to Linux is also terrible. No more simple ifconfig to set an ip address. You need to create a file in /etc/network/eth-whatever and add some options. No more "route" either, so how do you set a route? Oh and the best part is things like nslookup and traceroute are not included by default! Neither is "man" which I had to install manually. Sure give me 10,000 obscure and buggy libraries but not include core utilities like nslookup? Oh and I almost forgot. On a completely idle system, systemd is using the most cpu time out of everything else. So nice of my startup manager is the top resource hog.

Re:Fuck systemd and this hipster Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-1.html

Re:Fuck systemd and this hipster Linux

[buchanmilne]

Systemd is terrible and what they've been doing to Linux is also terrible.

You're assigning guilt for too many things to systemd.

No more simple ifconfig to set an ip address.

On RHEL7 and similar, net-tools is no longer installed by default, you should use the 'ip' command from iproute2, see http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.i... . ifconfig and 'route' for Linux have been on the deprecation path for years, before systemd existed.

I think since RHEL6 the Red Hat documentation and training material stopped referring to ifconfig.

You need to create a file in /etc/network/eth-whatever and add some options.

This has been the way to create persistent network configuration for years (since Red Hat 5.3).

(And it's /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-${INTF})

No more "route" either, so how do you set a route?

ip route add

'ip route' is significantly better than 'route', e.g. 'ip route get ip.add.re.ss' will change your life.

Oh and the best part is things like nslookup and traceroute are not included by default!

So, install them (e.g. 'yum install bind-utils traceroute') . You can resolve names (the way most normal processes would, e.g. looking in /etc/hosts or other sources of host information as configured in /etc/nsswitch.conf) using 'getent hosts', that should be sufficient on most general-purpose servers (if you don't need to look up SRV or MX or TXT records etc.).

Neither is "man" which I had to install manually.

What distro are you talking about? This *really* has nothing to do with systemd ...

Sure give me 10,000 obscure and buggy libraries but not include core utilities like nslookup? Oh and I almost forgot. On a completely idle system, systemd is using the most cpu time out of everything else. So nice of my startup manager is the top resource hog.

On an idle system that has been up for 10 minutes, systemd has consumed less than 1 second of CPU time. A *real* resource hog</sarcasm>

Re:Fuck systemd and this hipster Linux

[Barsteward]

whats nslookup, ifconfig and traceroute got to do with systemd installation? they exist on my opensuse machine by default. systemd gives you additional software, it doesn't take anything away. maybe you should do some research before spouting off other peoples troll posts and making yourself look ignorant

Re:Fuck systemd and this hipster Linux

[ArchieBunker]

The point of this is if your network config isn't working its pretty damn difficult to install "bind-utils" or even "man" because they can't be bothered to include it. Traceroute would be nice to have for troubleshooting routing problems, but again good luck installing that when something is broken. This was OpenSUSE by the way. Why should systemd even be consuming that much CPU while doing supposedly nothing?

Re:Fuck systemd and this hipster Linux

[CRC'99]

On RHEL7 and similar, net-tools is no longer installed by default, you should use the 'ip' command from iproute2, see http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.i... . ifconfig and 'route' for Linux have been on the deprecation path for years, before systemd existed.

I think since RHEL6 the Red Hat documentation and training material stopped referring to ifconfig.

But lets not pretend its perfect. NetworkManager used to constantly cause my Xen server to lose its networking. 'systemctl restart NetworkManager' caused it to come back - after hooking up a keyboard and mouse. Systemd's networkd can't bring up ppp connections - it doesn't know what they are - and last time I tried it choked on bridges.

So, you fall back to the good old 'chkconfig network on' and remove everything networkd and NetworkManager related. But now wait-online doesn't work for systemd - so anything that requires the network to be up will cause issues - requiring other hacks to bring back into line.

So yeah, its not perfect, and some stuff is still broken.

Re:Fuck systemd and this hipster Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

'ip route get ip.add.re.ss' will change your life.

THANKS, THANKS, THANKS!!!

Today more than ever I feel grateful for /.'s comments section!!!

Re:Fuck systemd and this hipster Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were a TLA and needed to neuter/bug the threat that is Linux, how would you go about it?

Are we surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

that Canonical can't even ship their April Fools Day prank on time?

MATE is better than Gnome 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 3 sucks like Unity.

Gnome developrs took a dump on its existing user base when the came out with Gnome 3.

MATE is so much better.

Re:MATE is better than Gnome 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

MATE is so much better.

Yep. I want a desktop that is reasonably lightweight, works in the 'traditional' desktop way and doesn't keep changing.

MATE is like going back to Ubuntu 10.4 with Gnome 2 (which I left very reluctantly when it went out of support)- which is exactly what I want. I tried Unity and Cinnamon in between, quite liked Cinnamon but it was rather slow on my old desktop PC. MATE is really snappy.

forked unity8

[Capt. Beyond]

Someone has the idea to fork unity8 and continue

http://unity8.org/

glib2 == incompentence

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome uses glib2. A poorly implemented threading library. Historically, it may have made sense, but is now complete/total bloat-ware.
That is: Any UI code using glib2 is poorly written "code". Destroy the dependancy upon glib2, and I might consider Gnome again.
Use Posix threads, and lots of users will be thrilled/delighted with the code size reduction, improved performance, and decreased bug levels.

(Yeah, I have nothing but contempt for Gnome due to usage of glib2)

Re:glib2 == incompentence

[Anonymous Coward]

glib really? Gthread is a wrapper for pthread i've never noticed that much difference to be honest tho i guess gthread has a couple less function calls to do. Also glib is much more than just a threading library.

Is it possible to download "Superior GNOME" today?

[tlambert]

Is it possible to download "Superior GNOME" today?

All I can find is regular GNOME...

Thanks in advance!

The Superior GNOME ???? In what planet?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME is:
- Ugly
- Unstable
- A resource hug
- A usability nightmare

So what part of that is "superior" ?? I understand that Unity is pure garbage. But even as pure garbage it is still slightly better (in a few places) when compared to GNOME .... which is less than garbage/

Unity gone at last!

[Clived]

Well its about time. I ran about four editions of Ubuntu, but Unity killed it for me, found it awful on 32 bit computers which is why I have been running Linuxmint since then, without any problems.

Nuff said

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know phones could do that...

MOD Parent up!

[walterbyrd]

Could not agree more. I stopped using Ubuntu when they went to Gnome3. Gnome3 is a complete POS.

Re:MOD Parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally its Ubuntu ive found to be complete POS. I run Gnome 3 on Debian

Next on the agenda...

[iCEBaLM]

... Drop Mir for Wayland, and quit fragmenting shit.

Remix looks promising

[walterbyrd]

Android for desktops. Have not tried it, but it looks promising.

Unity gone - who cares?

[russbutton]

I've never used Unity and why should anyone give a shit? One of the great things about Ubuntu is that there are many windowing interfaces to choose from.

I've been using Windowmaker as my primary desktop since 2001. When I worked at Sun (back when it was still Sun) Microsystems, I compiled Windowmaker and ran it on Solaris. It's fast, lightweight and pretty much does all the things you want a windowing system to do. I still use it.

Quit whining.

Re:Unity gone - who cares?

[dublin]

And the youngstas forget that probably the biggest thing that held Linux back in the early days was the lack of a decent window manager and desktop environment. (Back then, all the good ones were either strictly proprietary or required expensive corporate foundation licenses.)

Sun's open sourcing of OpenWin was definitely one of the things that really allowed Linux to take off. Sun started things rolling and soon, there were many good choices, and sadly, the contribution of OpenWin is mostly forgotten today. I've often really wondered if Linux would have ever had a prayer without OpenWin as its first, modern, great-looking GUI platform...

Re:Unity gone - who cares?

[russbutton]

I remember Open Windows. I worked at Sun doing desktop support. We were still using Sparc 1, 1+ and 2 machines then. Thick ether in the buildings with MUX boxes. That was just before the Sparc Center 1000 first came out.

So am I the only one who actually liked Unity?

[cheesybagel]

It was kinda cumbersome to get used to Unity at first though.

I came from the absolute opposite (non-modal) school of using a desktop (for a long time I was an FVWM user w/ sloppy-focus, later I switched to Window Maker). So this extreme modal like click-to-focus desktop in Unity felt strange at first. But IMHO Unity is quite good at what it does. In like 2-3 days I got used to it and it doesn't bother me anymore. Unity was certainly a lot cleaner and less clunky than GNOME 3 was at the time.

Unity uses the opposite user design philosophy to what I prefer for a developer's desktop (i.e. sloppy-focus for work with multiple windows). But IMHO, given what Unity aims to do, it does things extremely well from a user interface perspective.

If there are things which need to be trashed in the Linux desktop, it would be the Xlib as the default API (something like Quartz would be a good replacement and is long overdue), ALSA, Pulseaudio, and systemd.

Xlib and ALSA are the biggest reasons for the Linux desktop lagging behind everything else. They're horrible APIs. ALSA in particular is overly complicated, device specific, and complete trash. Xlib was a good design when it came out, but now that we have true-color displays, and that remote graphics make less sense it doesn't work anymore. Because ALSA and Xlib are horrible APIs, we get tremendously bloated, buggy messes of intermediary APIs to hide their overall suckiness (e.g. Pulseaudio and Qt). Pulseaudio and Qt are probably good compromises but they're the wrong solution to the problem. The problem needs to be fixed at the core libraries, not by plastering wallpaper over the cracks. Then there's Qt and MOC. Fuck MOC.

Systemd is just absolutely horrible. A jack of all trades and master of none. A bloated pig, that even its own developers probably don't understand anymore, let alone the users. it goes against the UNIX philosophy of doing only one thing and getting it right. If we want the Linux desktop to win over its rivals Windows and MacOS X, we need to push our own vision of an OS for power users. That's after all what UNIX is all about. I don't necessarily mean programmers, it could also be artists and documentation specialists. i.e. if I was a translator wouldn't I want multiple windows open at the same time with dictionaries, the text I'm working on, a glossary, etc? If I was an artist, wouldn't I want to be able to launch renders and know their status in the background while I'm working on something? An OS that empowers people and makes them productive. A desktop for large screen displays where you can work with multiple documents visible at once. Not smartphones and the card deck metaphor. Not an OS that reduces everyone to the lowest common denominator. But an OS that allows everyone to work at their peak ability.

Another thing Linux could use would be its own runtime with architecture independent binaries and application packages. Even if it's a copy of Android's. I know it isn't good for high performance apps, but we need a runtime for shovelware that doesn't suck.

Re:So am I the only one who actually liked Unity?

[serviscope_minor]

Xlib and ALSA are the biggest reasons for the Linux desktop lagging behind everything else. They're horrible APIs. ALSA in particular is overly complicated, device specific, and complete trash. Xlib was a good design when it came out, but now that we have true-color displays, and that remote graphics make less sense it doesn't work anymore.

I assume you men the X Protocol, not XLib, since there are now alternate bindings, such as XCB.

Pedantry aside, I've spent a fair mount of time writing XLib directly, I quite like it and I completely disagree. X certainly has some warts and oddities. However, it's not nearly so bad as you make out. The remote display stuff is pretty transparent and has very little effect. The main result is that a few calls are async which would be synchronus on a purely local system, but most of GUI programming is async anyway so it really doesn't matter all that much.

As for the true colour stuff, that's just... bizarre. X has always supported truecolour displays: I remember using them in 1994 on an SGI. I mean sure all of the sub true colour and palette stuff could be removed, but it doesn't really have much effect over all.

Your complaint also doesn't make a huge amount of sense. It's not like you're levelling the same complaint at Windows, which incidentally also has a whole slew of crap in it to deal with obsolete display tech that (like X) they keep around for compatibility with old programs that were written when palettes were a thing and beyond that, it's not exactly common to write a Windows program with direct GDI calls anyway. So if Linux is behind, what precisely IS it behind?

Alsa is ehhhh. It's OK? I mean it's a low-level API for driving a sound card, so it works fine if you want low level control, though it's way clunkier than the old OSS interface. I mean, I figure teh job of the kernel is to provide the low level interfaces and abstract the hardware into a common set of parameters. Then various sound daemons make it OK. I mean pulse now generally works for me, and I approve of the concept of userland sound (microkernels FTW!) but I don't find either especially thrilling. About the best I can say is that ALSA faithfully provides an interface to actual sound cards and Pulse Audio is currently not giving me ball-ache though being LennartCode, YMMV.

I'm also aware that ALSA can do a whole heap more, but WTF those configs... fuck that.

Systemd is just absolutely horrible.

Preach it!

I used to be way off the fence, then I climbed on the fence, then got shoved rudely off the fence when my laptop developed a systemd related problem which I and no one in online help forums has been able to offer any help on.

To the non haters: If you claim systemd is better than sysv init and can't fix or even provide a clue about) the unplanned clean shutdowns on my laptop (I'll post more details if you want), then you're full of shit.

it goes against the UNIX philosophy of doing only one thing and getting it right.

What if its job it to invade your system? It does that and does it exceptionally well.

Re:So am I the only one who actually liked Unity?

[cheesybagel]

Your complaint also doesn't make a huge amount of sense. It's not like you're levelling the same complaint at Windows, which incidentally also has a whole slew of crap in it to deal with obsolete display tech that (like X) they keep around for compatibility with old programs that were written when palettes were a thing and beyond that, it's not exactly common to write a Windows program with direct GDI calls anyway. So if Linux is behind, what precisely IS it behind?

Notice I did not mention Windows as an example for how to do things. :-) Sure a lot of people use it, I use it too, but I avoid programming for Windows like the plague. The only way to do it, without tremendous pain, is to use something like C# to hide the ugliness of it all. Both Linux and Windows are way behind MacOS X. But even MacOS X is getting kinda dated. Remember all the jokes about how user interfaces in Linux were a mess and each toolkit had its own look and feel making the desktop look like a patchwork of applications? I wonder what those people would say if they used a Windows 10 desktop. Hah.

With modern programmable graphics hardware you can write pretty much any graphics interface you think of. In that respect it's kinda like old times where X11 had support for all those stipples, and arcs, and weird things like that because much of it was software. Much of the early Windows GDI was about accelerating the S3 operations (rectangle draw, line draw, BitBLT). Later they had the idea to merge the printer and display. That resulted in a minor mess as most cards couldn't accelerate the more advanced ops. In addition GDI+ is not a 100% match to what the dominant print format (PDF) we have today requires. I've seen proposals to make the low level just a bunch of pixel buffers you can write to. I don't know if that's the right approach to doing things though. The vector approach that MacOS X uses seems, to me a lot better, especially as screens keep increasing in resolution.

A lot of things about X are kinda inane. The font system is shit and was basically sidestepped with Xft. While the 2D graphics system is palette based. I know it supports true color but the way you use things is quite suboptimal. OpenGL supposedly fixes that (another extension). But in practice, because not everyone has GL on their system, quite often rendering is still done over the old interface. It does not have support for running application graphics code on a GPU at a low level either. It was never conceived in that way. Once you realize that you are using a bunch of extensions and the pretty much all the standard API is legacy baggage, that is when you should think of redoing things over. But for that to be done we actually need a lot of infrastructure we don't have today in Linux at a robust enough level. Like Vulkan and SPIR-V. With OpenCL and GLSL running over it.

Re:So am I the only one who actually liked Unity?

[serviscope_minor]

Notice I did not mention Windows as an example for how to do things. :-)

I did notice, however, it still does the things you claim are holding Linux back (well some of them). But it's a success, so I would suggest that the mere existence of Windows is a counter argument, whether or not it's good in some abstract sense.

Both Linux and Windows are way behind MacOS X. But even MacOS X is getting kinda dated. Remember all the jokes about how user interfaces in Linux were a mess and each toolkit had its own look and feel making the desktop look like a patchwork of applications? I wonder what those people would say if they used a Windows 10 desktop. Hah.

Yes! I never really bought the argument. Even back in the day when Windows was a bunch more consistent, quite a few devs liked to get cute and di it themselves. then XP came along and made the default look of the desktop look different from the programs. Things have diverged faster and faster since then. Perhaps that debunks the old argument?

A lot of things about X are kinda inane.

I agree.

The font system is shit and was basically sidestepped with Xft.

Yes, that's true. It didn't work well for various reasons, though the new one isn't exactly a shining example of brilliance. Every time I do an apt-get update something changes such that I have to tweak the Fixed SC font I use in gvim.

The XComposite method works much better, and everything uses that now.

While the 2D graphics system is palette based. I know it supports true color but the way you use things is quite suboptimal.

Ish. I mean you can allocate colours and then draw with them. If you are i a truecolour mode, you can generate colours programatically directly without allocation. Once you get into the XRender extension, it can do full alpha blending and anti-aliasing which means it'll generate all the intermediate colours without allocation.

But in practice, because not everyone has GL on their system, quite often rendering is still done over the old interface.

Really? there's soft renderers and have been for years. Sure they're not super fast, but they work. There's also the old old interface (XDrawLine etc) and the newer one via XRender which can draw many of the primitives, but nice looking.

It does not have support for running application graphics code on a GPU at a low level either.

Not sure what you mean. For modern cards, the 2D drawing stuff can be accelerated with OpenGL: the glamour module does that for new cards which have 3D drivers but not 2D acceleration.

It was never conceived in that way. Once you realize that you are using a bunch of extensions and the pretty much all the standard API is legacy baggage, that is when you should think of redoing things over.

Now this I really don't get. Why do people punish X so badly for updating the API over the years? Sure they're extensions relative to the standard defined in 1987, but something like XRender has been part of the API now for nearly two decades.

Just because the old functions exist, doesn't mean you have to support them! Also, just because the protocol provided a way of introducing new API calls (called extensions) doesn't mean you have to support 30 year old X servers. It's entirely fine I think to not support ubuntu 10.04 in your program for example, and as far as I can see, it's entirely fine to not support an X server of that era too.

I would say that the old API is (apart from the drawing bits) fine, and actually in a misguided way of going cross platform, a number of toolkits no longer use it properly which can make programs perform poorly in certain cases.

But for that to be done we actually need a lot of infrastructure we don't have today in Linux at a robust enough level. Like Vulkan and SPIR-V.

I don't know what SPIR-V is, but Vulkan works on Linux.

Re:So am I the only one who actually liked Unity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up and have me, daddy!

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[Eunuchswear]

He probably had, like me, a Nokia N900.

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[Eunuchswear]

Actually it was to some extent based on Ubuntu, given that the init(1) replacement was upstart, but most of the non phone specific packages were from Debian.

My current phone uses Wayland and systemd, just to freak out any passing VUAs.

Refresher - Ask Mark Shuttleworth Anything 2012

[Browzer]

Questions: https://interviews.slashdot.or...

and

Answers: https://interviews.slashdot.or...

Gnome 2 or Gnome 3 ?

[stooo]

I hope they use Gnome 2. Gnome 3 is for tablets.

good for both ubuntu and gnome

[sad_]

Just remember how both gnome & ubuntu advanced when they worked together. I think both grew stronger during that time and had were at their best.
They splits ways, for no good reason, sure the first release of Gnome 3 was not really up to snuff, but Unity can almost be completely remade in Gnome 3 with extentions etc. Now combining forces again, both projects can grow faster and advance at a faster pace.
Also, there is no reason why Gnome 3 wouldn't be a good fit for a phone/tablet just as much as Unity was.

bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Good bye screen real estate, hello 2 inch title bars.

Good plan but...

[Stephen Chadfield]

GNOME Shell is my favourite Linux desktop. I am using it happily on my CentOS 7 development machine at work. It is great that Ubuntu are going to adopt GNOME as their default desktop but you just know it is going to be tainted by one of their ugly brown/orange themes...

Re:Good plan but...

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I'm concerned, it will finally become usable thanks to one of their nice brown/orange themes.

Its about freakin time

[Anonymous Coward]

Unity was a suck fest and a bad idea.

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I ditched Mint/Cinnamon (for Ubuntu/MATE) because of Mint's Kernel update policy. A serious kernel security error was identified (dirty COW I think). The fix was either to go back to an earlier Kernel without the vulnerability or forward to a newer kernel.

What did Mint do? *Nothing*. No change to the recommended - vulnerable - kernel. No notifications. Nothing. If I had not already been aware of the issue, and worked out myself which kernel to use, I'd probably still be running with this serious vulnerability (which if I remember correctly could be exploited via javascript in any web browser). This is *not* an acceptable policy. A 'user friendly' distro should take care of such things by one means or another.

Real source link faggots

[Anonymous Coward]

Another day, another beta news article by that faggot. Is it so hard to include a link to the real article /. editors?

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

On my home workstation, I have been experimenting with Linux running under VirtualBox. (M$, the evil bastards, have driven me to consider Linux for my prime OS. I need more experience without desktop Linux before I am confident about making that leap.)

I have found Xubuntu to be really good. It is shockingly simple and elegant; crude, yet effective. I highly recommend it for a newbie to Linux.

That said, I also nee to evaluate Mint at some point, as it too is a contender.

I like GNOME

[rgbe]

I've been running Linux almost exclusively for almost 20 years on my primary desktop. I've tried many many desktop environments, but I've come back to GNOME 3 and I actually really like it... once I got used to it. It's not cluttered, it's one of the most polished DE's available and relatively bug free. There are a few small issues, but not nearly as much as other DEs.

Re:I like GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

> I actually really like it... once I got used to it.

Maybe that would work for me, too. But I have this childish obsession about adapting the interface to my tastes. Silly me.

Not even Mate will do. Gnome 3 and similar which require a lot of processing power and offer little to no customization are of no interest to me. And that applies also to Ubuntu, by extension.

Fortunately, there's Xubuntu and Lubuntu.

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Mint is a good starting point that most people would probably recommend. The KDE version is the prettiest, and kind of Windows like. But their Cinnamon edition seems to be where their focus lies.

The typical childish behavior

[Anonymous Coward]

Like many before them in the linux world, this behavior sounds like
"I'm right, the world is wrong. You do not appreciate? Then i stop giving it to you".
This as opposed to receiving the zillions of critiques about the wrong design of Unity.

Well done. Now you wasted millions and years. Because of your ineptitude.

Re: The only thing about Ubuntu

[houghi]

I really liked Windowmaker much better as it was much easier to adapt. Then something sent wrong between X, NVidia and Windowmaker where each blamed the others as being the problem, so I went to XFCE4 as well,

Not as flexible as Windowmaker, but not bad.

And I HATE the KDE/GNOME/XFCE/Whatever devide. I run KDE/GNOME/Whatever programs as I please. A desktop should just show the programs on my screen.

Now I have a PC with a BIOS that tries to do everything with a bootloader that tries to do everything, running a Windowing program that tries to do everything, so I can connect a browser that tries to do everything to a website that tries to do everything.

The reason I went to Linux was because it was like Lego blocks. I could use whatever I waned and had options. Now I have issues if I don't want the printer drivers installed, because it wants to delete everything when I try to do that.

all work the same

[nten]

I use unity, gnome3, win7,8,10, and osx all the same way. I remove as many non-background things as I can. Then I hit some key or keys and begin to type what app I want to start, like brow... Or term... Then I pick one with the arrow keys and hit enter. Given that my use case doesn't really favor any particular choice I have trouble understanding the heat in these discussions. What does Cinnamon do (or not do) that gnom3 fails at?

Re:all work the same

[Xolotl]

Then I hit some key or keys and begin to type what app I want to start, like brow... Or term... Then I pick one with the arrow keys and hit enter.

I start a browser ... with one click. On an icon. How is key-type-type-type-type-arrow-enter more efficient??

Anyway, Cinammon and all other menu/toolbar/dock DEs leverage something the brain/hand is good at: remembering relative location and visual cues and pointing at or reaching for them in an instant. Millions of years of evolution. Gnome 3 throws that away (at least without severe tweaking).

Re:One step ahead of Windows but sucking all the s

[LienRag]

But what's going to happen to UbuntuTouch then?

Ubuntu will be a Linux desktop for Linux users

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to attract a wider category of users, use Plasma and become a modern desktop for everyone.

Moving along

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great news guys, lets get it back to PC development. The last thing we really need is any kind of unnatural, unpolished, mess of phone, tablet, and PC interface all locked up held hostage where it shouldn't be.
Use Windows for 20yrs, slowly in that time, ex. get accustomed to central prominent feature of OS, like (start menu); watch it be completely destroyed with 8, everytime you click it; everytime you get heartbroken & frustrated you just clicked wrong button for no reason, while trying to do something else...
Invaluable design fail to learn from.
Do something good with it!