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Canonical Founder Talks About Ubuntu Desktop Switching From Unity To GNOME, And Focus On Cloud (google.com)
Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth on Friday talked about the move to switch Ubuntu's desktop user interface from Unity to GNOME, and putting a stop to development of Ubuntu software for phones and tablet: I would like to thank all of you for your spirit and intellect and energy in the Unity8 adventure. [...] Many elements of the code in the Ubuntu Phone project continue -- snaps grew out of our desire to ship apps reliably and efficiently and securely, the unity8 code itself will continue to be useful for UBports and other projects. And the ideas that we have pushed for are now spreading too. Finally, I should celebrate that Ubuntu consists of so many overlapping visions of personal computing, that we have the ability to move quickly to support the Ubuntu GNOME community with all the resources of Canonical to focus on stability, upgrades, integration and experience. That's only possible because of the diversity of shells in the Ubuntu family, and I am proud of all of our work across that full range.
Is like washing shit off with piss.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I am definitely not a novice Linux user. But I'm just that a user not a Linux developer. I develop applications that happen to run on Linux and other machines.
I've never formally understood what the difference between Unity and Gnome and KDE really is. decades ago I used KDE and loved it's crisp germanic feel. I installed Unity a couple of times by mistake and always found myself puzzled how to get a terminal up or lauch applications or really do anything. Randomly clicking stuff sometimes produced results but it was forever a mystery. I've run Damnsmall linux (XCFE) and liked that. I've used redhat on servers but never really liked RPM. As well as rasberry pi noobs. And these days I just awlays head straight for mint.
Mint makes everything easy.
But really what's the difference??? the only think I see as an end user is .Debian: you get apt-get
1) Unity . baffling desktop
2)
3) . Redhat: RPM
Kde used to be good but lost out.
But I don't really understand what it means to use gnome. What changes? where files go? what sort of API apls can call? I really don't know
enlighten me.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Initially, Ubuntu was really what opened the way for Linux on desktops for more or less average users. Yes, then convulsive attempts to somehow get back the invested money accompanied by bouts of NIH syndrome, the apogee of which was the notorious Mir, but Mark raised the bar of friendliness. Now, yes, *ubuntu (including the letters k and x), has many alternatives, but when instead of gratitude to the person who spent a lot of money and time on Linux, you see this, it becomes insulting for humanity. Canonical's innovations, of course, for the most part are questionable. Yes, when the project stubbornly continued to be unprofitable, and the attempt to repulse costs due to a fairly easily disconnected adware was met with wild opposition (which, however, it is easy enough to understand) NIH began to pull the blanket on itself to the edge of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. All this, of course, is sad, but the classic OpenSource model of monetization "money for support" works better for difficult to master and configure products, and not for what "launched - and works." Mark began with the fact that he began to bring the desktop Linux to this state, and this in the financial plan - the occupation is quite hopeless...
The "focus (is) on stability, upgrades, integration and experience."
I say, good for you Mark. It takes a big person to admit defeat and move on!
Linux users want a new distro every time the wallpaper changes. Meanwhile the handful of grown-ups who remember what Unix is don't spend their time focused on the desktop widgets, they focus on the CLI and on C programming - where the action is at for geeks of merit. So, anyhow, sorry grandma, you'll have to change your desktop again.
I'm surprised they got around to it. Don't they still have some more broken python scripts to write and isn't there a text-based log for them to convert to binary somewhere?
Save your "but everyone is using Linux & Ubuntu these days, nobody cares about you BSD greybeards" comment. I'd point out that it's both Argumentum ad numerum and Argumentum ad populum, but then I'd have to explain logic and translate the Latin.
I have had the opportunity to use Gnome on an x86 tablet, and it is already there. It's funny, typically I do not like Gnome. But put it on a tablet and it is awesome. Granted, I am speaking as a nerd not a general consumer. Still, if you get the chance you will see what I mean.
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In fact for a distribution aimed at people PC's, focusing on the "Cloud," or as we used to call them "other peoples servers" would be really strange indeed
I can't stand hamburger UI, giant title bars and that annoying menu/title bar at the top so I never "upgraded" to GNOME. It seems to me that GNOME team took a bunch of macOS features and stitched together a DE. However, while macOS is quite logical and there's a reason why things are on that OS, much of how GNOME works makes little sense from usability point of view.
This is why I stuck with Xfce, Unity and Cinnamon. I run all three of these DEs on my various computers and laptops.
But now that Ubuntu is moving to GNOME, what's the point of using Ubuntu over Fedora? RedHat has all the GNOME devs and they have the best GNOME + Wayland implementation. And that implementation actually works without Xorg. Other distros that run GNOME still can't get Wayland working right. Can Canonical/Ubuntu team make a better version of GNOME than RedHat? Given the history, I'm willing to bet money against that.
I'm also quite sick of apt-get and inflexible PPAs and managing them has been an absolute hell. Things just break, packages end up conflicting and untangling the mess can take you hours. I find Fedora's DNF and Copr a lot more sane (almost as sane as pacman and AUR on Arch but probably not as good).
So in conclusion, I really don't see a point in using Ubuntu anymore. If you want APT, just use Debian instead. If you care about GNOME, use Fedora. I'll be replacing Ubuntu with Fedora on one of my laptops later this year... and not with next version of Ubuntu+GNOME.
complaining about how radically different Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 are it was a Python-level community split and I say that as someone who basically doesn't care. So the people who hate Gnome 3 are mostly KDE people or Gnome 2 people.
I personally hated Unity mostly because of it's corporate bullshit which Canonical I'm sure is still pursuing (ads on your desktop anyone? Sound familiar?) in some form.
The first Linux desktop I saw which actually impressed me was a customized one in the 90's that a friend made from Gnome and Enlightenment.
I'm not a programmer either, I started with Slackware in 1995, I have Linux machines but not as my primary desktop and I am not exactly a zealot.
For the end user, the difference is mostly in the UI/UX and what applications will play nice with what (as far as integrated look and feel you can mostly run whatever); I usually end up installing the dependencies for several to get shit to work or to use some part of something I like over the other. I'm not really talking about package management which you listed (just about everything is a front end for a front end for a front end at this point. I like yum and apt more or less equally (and yes I said apt not apt-get, search is good)).
I have Mint on my laptop and Cinnamon (based on Gnome 3) is decent but not without problems. So yea... some rambling .. maybe some of it is useful.
Oh and yea API/where files go/*everything*, they have their own window managers there are lots of choices and differences between them; you can install them and then use the login manager (for the name) in Mint to try different window managers and find one you like but warning YMMV and some are broken by default.
Cinnamon is what Gnome 3 should have been.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
...that liked Unity. And I'm NO casual. But it made excellent use of space on a Netbook. I dislike how they basically use every possible meta key combination, but in exchange for that, I get super fast virtual-desktop commands, moving windows inside a desktop, and moving windows across desktops. My little 2 GB RAM Chromebook with ~10 inch screen converted to Ubuntu is the workhorse of my day. I use it for clients, for RDP, I use it at home for fun and programming hobby games.
I honestly don't know what I'm going to switch to now. I hate that you can't customize everything in Unity, but what you could customize with a few tools, worked well for me.
I combine Unity with Guake. Guake is a top-down multi-tab terminal like the Quake drop-down console. So I've got virtual desktops for each task, one for personal internet, one for business internet, one for taking notes, and one for running Audacity while recording conferences. Meanwhile, I use Guake and quake pops down with F5, and goes back up with F5. And, Guake doesn't change when you change virtual desktops. So I can have four tasks running, and tasks inbetween them can be in Guake. (Of course, Guake also has multi-tabs.)
So between the two, I'm very fast and efficient with my keypresses. People will watch me work and be amazed. And I go, "This is Linux, and it's awesome."
But Unity is a big chunk of that efficiency for me. People say it's slow and fat, but my 2 GB RAM laptop seems to be just fine with it. It almost never crashes. I've got some plugins for it that work well for monitoring stats. Meanwhile, I open a single Google Doc in Chrome on my system and it takes almost half of my entire machine's memory and CPU usage. And even sites that aren't as notoriously fat as Google Docs, still fill up my RAM fast. So my entire supposedly "fat slow" system is dwarfed by most websites.
So, yeah, this kind of sucks. Just when these dumb twats at Canonical get people to change (while telling us the whole time "this is the BEST way to do Linux!") they change their minds and go back. So whatever high ground they had before, they just lost by going right back to GNOME3. Who the hell is running that company? A couple of monkey's humping a random number generator? I can't wait to find the next "modern feature" they shoved down our throats, only to change their minds on.
MATE is what Gnome 3 should have been.
FTFY.
I all but gave up on Linux being a viable operating system when Ubuntu switched from Gnome to Unity. So happy that I can start running it again and that I'll finally see the year of the Linux desktop.
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Man let phones & tablets be phones & tablets. They aren't desktops; they aren't laptops. We don't want them to try to act to be. This is not a "failure", its a wakeup call, one I bet Microsoft would have LOVED to get prior to the release of 8. Ubuntu is very lucky to have a real life example of exactly what we (consumers) DON'T want, and where paths lead... I'm happy and excited for Ubuntu; gotta be in it for the long game =)
I was recently trying to settle down with Unity on Ubuntu 16.04, and it is generally ok. But then I run into a problem when I wanted to do the simple task of reducing the scrolling sensitivity. I searched, and asked on forums, and it seems impossible to do. Why would such basic controls, that once existed, be removed from Mouse & Touchpad system settings?
I never used GNOME. In a way, I can't forgive them for fragmenting the desktop Linux back in the 1990s (yes, it was because of the license, but that was fixed soon after in KDE, and became a non-issue, yet, GNOME marched on). If we had one good desktop, it would have been more conducive to adoption. And no, this is not an area where 'users can pick from alternatives'. So called choice in the desktop environment was bad fragmentation that Linux desktop never recovered from. That was compounded by GNOME 3, and Unity came in to try to fill the void. Others resisted the over bloated desktops, and therefore we see the minimalists like XFCE, LXDE, ..etc.
I have been using KDE Ubuntu (kubuntu) for over 15 years as my only desktop. With the 14.04 to 16.04 upgrade, KDE started down the path of 'protecting the user from themselves' by dumbing down things. Some things were missing (a weather widget), and other thing could not be customized (e.g. notifications stay in a place where you can check them later).
So, I did something I was contemplating for a long time, for minimalism and other reasons: switch to XFCE (Xubuntu 16.04). I am happy with it.
I disagree that Ubuntu has bad package management. All these years, I rarely had any repository conflict. One or two times in the over 15 years I have been using Ubuntu. If you add a lot of PPA's then yes, you may get conflicts. I don't have many PPAs. I only use the odd one for a specific software that is not up to date (e.g. GIMP 2.9.x, which has 16-bit image support), and that is it.
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