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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.
Unity is ok, I'm not a big fan. Can't say I'm a big fan of modern gnome either. The whole full screen slide-out thing seems bloated, but I haven't had much chance to try to modify the functionality.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
GNOME is a lateral one.
Compared to... what? Even from Metro the direction is slightly slanted down.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
KDE missed its chance, and it's never felt to me like the designers really had much of a vision which means it's always been more of a kludge than GNOME - albeit right now, that makes it better than GNOME 3. Meanwhile whether you're using Unity, GNOME 3, or Cinnamon, the same underlying libraries are powering everything, which makes sense.
What I hope is that Canonical has noted that most of its users have been fleeing to Mint, and that if it adopts GNOME 3, it doesn't just adopt GNOME Shell and call it a day - we want desktops. Canonical might be able to make GNOME Classic/Flashback/whatever it's called today work - right now it's pretty horrible, at least in its default configuration, but Canonical could be the company to fix that, just as Ubuntu's flavor of GNOME 2 was always just a little nicer than the default configuration you'd get in, say, Fedora or Debian.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Another great blog post on the subject: https://slashdot.org/submissio...
LOL. Trust Schaller to be an asshole. Symptomatic he couldn't stop himself from lying about suse - which pretty much is a bastion of KDE, just to stroke his own ego.
sysyemd is bett....
Hahahaha, no can't do it.
Uhh Unity? Pay attention to the topic at hand.
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.
Dang it, I always do something like that. How could I have left that one out! *mumbles something about a decimal point*
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
In my estimation Gnome has adopted a lot of poor UX design and has a generally dumbed things down. KDE has made more appropriate choices but lacks polish whichhttps://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/04/07/1918225/gnome-dev-schaller-assures-ubuntu-users-the-move-to-step-away-from-unity-will-bring-consistency-across-linux-distros# could be solved by a large distro choosing it as their primary desktop.
KDE never had a chance, it's been consistently sabotaged and undermined by various fanatics within Debian and Redhat since all the way back from the start. GNOME is all about ideology, and not being KDE. That's why it sucks, and that's why it's attracted the current breed of "my way or the highway" developers, which makes it suck even more.
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.
KDE seemed to me to be the industrial choice and Gnome was the usability choice. While Gnome got some better more industrial features over time, KDE just stayed industrial.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I feel your pain. If there is something that I dislike more than a bad user interface, it is when it is changed to a different bad user interface.
entropy happens
Gnome still sufferers from the same stupidity that Unity did, that people don't need to do useful things with their computers.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
The only thing consistent about the Linux desktop is that it will remain a roundoff error for the foreseeable future, thanks to those who insist in pushing Gnome. Not such a bad thing though - people will remain on Windows, and crooks will carry on attacking Windows mostly. In the meantime, my Linux desktop (sans Gnome) does all that I need and want. So, thank you very much, Canonical, Red Hat and others. Keep up you good work to make sure that Linux on the desktop will never take off.
Systemd. GNOME. Absolutely no originality besides mid-tier under the hood differences. I remember when distributions had personality and originality. Now it's just the same junk with a different default wallpaper.
Size. Pretty much every mainstream distro is a respin of RH simply because they've got the most folks working on it and it would be an absolute buggerbastard of a job to untangle all Lennart's shit from it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Xemacs? You know Xemacs is pretty close to dead don't you?
Also zsh descends from sh, not csh.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
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.
I know this will go over badly, but I really wish WindowMaker had compositing support, for window scaling to help me find the windows I need. If it had that, it would be my window manager again in a heartbeat (full 'desktop environments' have been overrated).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You said it right, people who know me know I hate GNOME for that very reason "my way or the highway". Fedora only adopted GNOME because of the historical reasons mainly the core GNOME developers were from Red Hat. That said, there are some Red Hat KDE people, while KDE can block a Fedora release it's still a second class citizen within the bigger scale of things sadly.
Everyone wants a Tux in their life.
Cinnamon is so much a better desktop experience than Gnome 3.
I have called for the removal of the Gnome leaders, for abandoning people who need to get work done.
Activities menu? You have to be kidding me!
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
sudo apt-get install kde cinnamon xfce i3 awesome fluxbox mate
Try them all out then
sudo apt-get remove $THE_ONES_YOU_DONT_WANT
Nobody's forcing anything on you.
Is that both of these projects goals seem to be to REDUCE choice and diversity in the open source ecosystem...
There's no "seem to be" about it - it was pretty much explicitly stated by Schaller: "...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 ... This change should also make life easier for ISV...". I would translate that as "All your desktop environments are belong to us, and WE will decide what DE's you are allowed to choose from, (if indeed we even allow you a choice), because we want to make life easier for independent software vendors, because business".
Also, take note of those flavour-of-the-month management phrases: "sharing a bigger set of technologies", "convergence of efforts", "share one desktop technology stack", "all pulling in the same direction", and "more clear target". With all that PHB-speak, Christian Schaller is starting to sound like Satya Nadella.
Now I feel all warm 'n' fuzzy inside, because the operating system I adopted when I got sick of Windows, seems poised to become the next Windows. Yay.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
There was a Common Desktop Environment for *nix years ago (CDE) but mostly just the company pushing it (Sun Microsytems) liked it and nearly everyone else used something else. Even Sun gave up on it.
I can't see the current version of Gnome as being a better choice than Unity or even the previous (deliberately incompatible to the point of breakage if it's on the same system) version of Gnome.
Trying to converge everyone to that is IMHO doomed to failure even if RedHat push it as hard as they have pushed trying to get everyone onto SystemD.
I know this will go over badly, but I really wish WindowMaker had compositing support, for window scaling to help me find the windows I need. If it had that, it would be my window manager again in a heartbeat (full 'desktop environments' have been overrated).
Coincidental that you say this - I've just cloned the compiz repo (and emerald decorator repo) because I want to use my build of WindowMaker with compiz.
Nothing may come off it, but I already run a pretty customised WindowMaker (customised in the sources, that is), so perhaps I'll get WindowMaker built as a compiz-compatible decorator.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Pretty much every mainstream distro is a respin of RH
Wow you got a +4 informative for that? Tell me, how is Debian which came out a year before RedHat a respin of RedHat? And while you're answering, Google the desktop market share of distros just for shits and giggles to see how few mainstream distributions, especially popular ones actually are based on RedHat.
I remember when distributions had personality and originality.
Major distributions never had personality and originality beyond their package manager. They all converged on the same default formula very early on. Funny enough they were based around the largest and most feature rich packages available for the platform. About the only differences that survived were two package management schemes.
Same here. At the moment I remember the change from gnome2 to unity after upgrading. It was horrible so I tried gnome3, it was worse and there was no easy way to go back to gnome2 (no mate at the moment). So I went to awesome WM. I've some complains but the WM just stays out of your way, it's awesome.
You don't remembers shit. Honestly right now there is a lot of diversity in Linux distros. Take the classical ones like Debian and Red Hat - completely the same right? I bet you haven't even touched RHEL since you need to pay for it.... OK take Debian and CentOS. Quite similar - OK. Then take Gentoo and Arch Linux. Same yep? OK. Maybe try CoreOS? Alpine Linux maybe? Same shit eh?
Also zsh descends from sh, not csh.
Are you sure you don't mean ksh?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You are correct, but so is the GGP's point ... it's RH's influence that's concerning. It's not that RH is "evil," it's that it's just so big. Being big in itself is no crime, but if major applications start relying on stuff that's standard on RHEL and its derivatives but might not be standard on other distros (let's say systemd, just for argument's sake), then those other distros are pretty much forced to follow RH's lead or start slipping into irrelevancy. Their only other choice would be to pony up the resources to maintain forks of those projects for their own distros, but that's asking a lot.
The people that bitch about systemd wouldn't care so much if they weren't worried that Linux is becoming a monoculture where there's no real choice but to run things you don't want to run because other things won't run without them. It doesn't matter if competing distros aren't direct forks of the RHEL codebase if the components in those distros are the same as RHEL's because they have to be.
Breakfast served all day!
The people that bitch about systemd are often oblivious to the fact that it wasn't adopted in the Debian stream because of ties with RH but rather due to technical merits which were discussed by their core team publicly and in great detail.
The people that bitch about monoculture are free to do something else. It's open source. Put your money where your mouth is, or put the mouth away. Based on what was happening on forums I was able to conclude that in 2016: The world would implode. RH and Debian would cease being major distributions. Minor distributions would rise. System admins world wide would switch to BSD.
Precisely none of that has happened which is precisely why most of the concerns about systemd now get flat out ignored, for example the notion that any non-systemd component is dependent on it.
WOLF WOLF WOLF.
The scary part is the boy got eaten by the wolf in the end.