Canonical Needs Your Help Transitioning Ubuntu Linux From Unity To GNOME (ubuntu.com)

BrianFagioli quotes BetaNews: On August 24 and 25, the Ubuntu Desktop team will be holding a "Fit and Finish Sprint," where they will aggressively test GNOME. Canonical is also asking the Ubuntu community to help with this process. In other words, you might be able to assist with making Artful Aardvark even better.

What makes this particularly cool, however, is that Canonical will be selecting some community members to visit its London office on August 24 between 4 pm and 9 pm. "Over the two days we'll be scrutinizing the new GNOME Shell desktop experience, looking for anything jarring/glitchy or out of place," says Alan Pope, Community Manager. "We'll be working on the GTK, GDM and desktop theme alike, to fix inconsistencies, performance, behavioral or visual issues. We'll also be looking at the default key bindings, panel color schemes and anything else we discover along the way."
A few caveats: Canonical won't pay anyone's travel expenses to London, and "Ideally we're looking for people who are experienced in identifying (and fixing) theme issues, CSS experts and GNOME Shell / GTK themers."

Comments

"This is not a democracy"

[Anonymous Coward]

Bite me. You broke it, you fix it.

http://www.webupd8.org/2010/03/ubuntu-is-not-democratic.html

Re:"This is not a democracy"

[Anonymous Coward]

Unity may be broken, gnome3 isn't a fix.

Re:"This is not a democracy"

[ckatko]

I keep saying this: Unity isn't half bad.

It makes excellent use of screen space on netbooks, and overloads almost every combination of arrow keys and meta keys to do something nifty like merge window into half the screen, or move it to another workspace, or switch viewing workspaces. It uses fairly low RAM, and CPU resources. I use a 2 GB RAM (1 GB is ZRAM'd) laptop with a CELERON processor and until I fill up the RAM, it's snappy. I run apache. I do development work in C/C++/D/Python and more. I take business notes and do recordings. I play old windows games like Fallout 1 and 2 with Wine. All from my crappy little laptop.

I FINALLY get used to this damn thing after Canonical is like "fuck what you want, you'll use Unity, you bitch, because IT'S BETTER." and now we find out that "better" means "whatever I like today (and maybe not tomorrow)." By switching back to GNOME they've basically lost any good faith that they knew what they were doing when they selected Unity.

Whoever is making decisions at Canonical, they're complete morons. They have no real plans. And they don't understand their users at all. (Like their insane Ubuntu-integrated Amazon adsense debacle.)

Re:This is funny

[bill_mcgonigle]

They paid to screw it up, now want help to fix it and won't pay for that.

No, that's not what's happening.

Yeah, Unity was a stupid idea. I've complained here about not even considering Ubuntu because of Unity before (though I've since run XUbuntu for some compatibility-driven tasks).

But what they're saying here is, "Guys, we were wrong, we're going with GNOME, but there are some things GNOME doesn't do right that Unity did". Can you believe that Unity might have not done EVERYTHING wrong and that GNOME doesn't do EVERYTHING right?

They want to make a good, more Open release and are asking for help from the community to do that.

Don't shit on people who are trying to mend their ways; the best thing about Open Source is the community and the "never forgive, never forget" attitude only serves to damage it.

Mate desktop - yes, Gnome 3 - no

[Alain Williams]

I have tried Gnome 3 several times, I also run it on a virtual machine .... but I just find it unusable; way too dumbed down, essential (to me) features removed; Mate (Aka Gnome 2) has them - so I stay there.

Re:Clean up your own mess, douchebags

[Dutch Gun]

That's one part. The second critical part is that "modern" apps (formerly "metro") used to be full screen only, which was ridiculous on PCs. The third was the elimination of the on-by-default screen hotspots, which were a disaster for normal mouse users. I generally don't mind using Windows 10 with those major issues fixed. I still think Metro apps look ridiculous on PCs, but at least they're reasonably functional now.

It's so strange to me how this looked so completely obvious to many of us looking from the outside in: that desktop PCs and touch devices have radically different interface needs, and any attempt to merge them is going to end up being a serious compromise for the PC users, making them unhappy.

I suspect this was largely a fearful reaction by those entrenched in PC tech as they saw mobile OSes eating PC's lunch in terms of general market share. So instead of focusing on making their core users happy, they tried to desperately grab at the emerging mobile market, only to lose their core constituency even faster.