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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.
It seems 2018 will be the year of GNOME on the Linux Desktop.
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?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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...
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.
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?
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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
KDE is measurably superior to both Unity and Gnome3 - features & functionality, stability, customizability, usability ...
Why dump Unity for something only marginally better?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
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.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Debian + XFCE4 is what I've always used.
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...
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.
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>