Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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...
Budgie: https://solus-project.com/budgie/
Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it.
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.
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.
Debian + XFCE4 is what I've always used.
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard