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GNOME Dev Schaller Assures Ubuntu Users the Move To Step Away From Unity Will Bring Consistency Across Linux Distros (gnome.org)
Earlier this week, Canonical announced that Ubuntu will be ditching Unity as the default user interface on desktops to go back to GNOME next year. The company also said that it will be ending development of Ubuntu software for phones and tablets, in what is a push to focus on cloud. In a blog post, Christian Schaller, a developer on Fedora and GNOME (and Senior Software Engineering Manager at Red Hat), offered some assurance to the community that this is the right move in the grand scheme of things. He writes on an official blog post: We look forward to keep working with great Canonical and Ubuntu people like Allison Lortie and Robert Ancell on projects of shared interest around GNOME, Wayland and hopefully Flatpak. It is worth mentioning that even as we [have] been competing with Unity and Ubuntu, we have also been collaborating with them, most recently on [the] integration of features they wanted from GNOME Software such as user reviews. Of course now sharing a bigger set of technologies collaboration will be even easier. I am personally happy to see this convergence of efforts happening because I have -- for a long time -- felt that the general level of investment in the Linux desktop has not been great enough to justify the plethora of Linux desktops out there. Now having reached a position where Canonical, Endless, Red Hat and Suse again share one desktop technology stack and along with consulting companies such as Centricular, CodeThink, Collabora and Igalia helping push parts of the stack forward, we are at least all pulling in the same direction. This change should also make life easier for ISV who now have a more clear target if they want to try to integrate their UI with the Linux desktop as 'the linux desktop' becomes a more meaningful term with this change.
Still not going back to Ubuntu after Unity. Gnome 3 isn't the right direction either for me. Maybe if they put their eggs in the Mate or Cinnamon basket I'd give them a whirl again but that isn't the case. Would have been really nice if they went with Mate instead, that'd draw me back.
A developer of GNOME thinks that one of the largest Linux distros giving up on their own DE and going back to GNOME is a great thing.
This is like that article a few days back where GE said that more robots in the factory was nothing to worry about.
Dear Slashdot: I'd be far more interested in commentary by people who don't have a conflict of interest with the topic.
Gnome 3 is just too different, no minimize/maximize buttons out of the box, I cant have a single taskbar with a list of open applications and the notification center. I dont understand how enterprise users would want such a jarring change, but I'm no UI developer.
Consistency should not be the one and only goal. If that's all we wanted, we could have just rolled with whatever Microsoft felt like handing down.
I'm unhappy that pretty much all the major linux distros are the same nowadays, with RedHat pretty much calling the shots for everyone. Particularly since I disagree with them on much of their recent vision. Nowadays whether I choose Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Fedora, or OpenSuSE, it's all substantially the same thing: whatever RedHat thinks it should be. Sure there's this big divide in deb versus rpm, but that's far less relevant day to day than the software stack that gets installed.
Of course, Mir and Unity weren't exactly the things I really would have favored.
Gnome is interesting, in that I think in terms of relaibilty/quality, it does quite well. However UI wise it's frustrating and a bit too high and mighty. Customize your desktop? Only if you are a programmer, otherwise you are stuck with what they give you. They think a tray is 'evil' and endeavor to punish apps trying to do tray things by making them massively annoying by default (requiring 'topicons plus' for remotely sane behavior). They finally have some semblance of window search, but the UI is atrocious, making their expose rip off of limited utility.
KDE tends to have a more compatibile UI vision with me, but too many glitchy behaviors crop up every time I go to use it, and not-quite fully executed concepts.
I'm encouraged by MATE's recent porting to GTK3, though the time it took was a worrying sign of how well they will do at keeping currency moving forward.
What really disappoints me is that GNUstep/Windowmaker has not gotten more care and feeding. I still enjoy the experience, but without compositing and particularly scaling windows with some sort of search, I just can't bring myself to use it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.