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 not a democracy"

[jmcvetta]

Unity is great. I love it, and I will miss it.

In fact, Unity is the main reason I use Ubuntu on the desktop. And using it on the desktop is the main reason all my servers run Ubuntu. Get rid of Unity and I'll be a whole lot more motivated to try different distros.

Canonical seems to have stunningly bad leadership in recent years. You get the feeling they spend all day thinking of ways they could fuck over their users and squander their good reputation.

Re:"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

To be honest, why not KDE? Kubuntu ist das good shit imo. Nothing or more like not much to fix.

This is cheaper than paying your own way to London

[El Cubano]

https://www.debian.org/distrib...

Great Process

[bankman]

"Ideally we're looking for people who are experienced in identifying (and fixing) theme issues, CSS experts and GNOME Shell / GTK themers."

So they're not specifically looking for input from actual users, the people who have to change all the idiotic defaults designers and themers chose in their endless wisdom? And all this is going to happen over the course of two days? I expect great things and will stick with Xubuntu. :-)

Re:Great Process

[bill_mcgonigle]

They ought to be looking for some UI people who can run a lab and translate user-identified issues into specific problem reports that the people they are asking for can do something with.

They probably don't want random poor-reporting users to slow down their sprint, but as so often happens, it sounds like they forget that UI design is an entire branch of Computer Science.

Infrastructure would be required to push each build iteration out to the lab, but that's quite do-able.

Re:Great Process

[unixisc]

"Ideally we're looking for people who are experienced in identifying (and fixing) theme issues, CSS experts and GNOME Shell / GTK themers."

So they're not specifically looking for input from actual users, the people who have to change all the idiotic defaults designers and themers chose in their endless wisdom? And all this is going to happen over the course of two days? I expect great things and will stick with Xubuntu. :-)

Which begs the question: why are they doing this? If Unity has failed, why not fall back to the existing and established sub-distros, like Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu (yeah, I know another organization now owns it), or just let users pick from miscellaneous distros, such as Trinity, Mate, Razor/qt, LX/QT, et al?

Re:Great Process

[unixisc]

With KDE, I can see the value: aside from Plasma, there is a whole family of applications that is available for KDE - from myriad small applications like kmail to Calligra (formerly KOffice).

With GNOME, I just can't see it. Yeah, there are some fringe 'made for GNOME' appslications, like GNOME Web (Epiphany), but they're just unwieldy. GNOME 2.x - now MATE - was okay, but not great. GNOME 3.x is bizarre, at best.

If big desktops have such value, why doesn't Canonical wanna drive it any more? It's having their cake & eating it too. They should do what PC-BSD does on the FreeBSD side of things, provide all the environments, and just work on tools that make their environment useful. Maybe focus on Steam integration more, since that's potentially a big driver of their platform

Ubuntu 17.10

[hcs_$reboot]

Glad I'm using only LTS releases, because the new coming 17.10 seems likely to get a messy GUI.

Clean up your own mess, douchebags

[drinkypoo]

Unity was always a farce, many of us warned you. Now you want our help cleaning up the mess you've made? Next you'll want us to help you remove systemd.

Re:Clean up your own mess, douchebags

[Kjella]

Unity was always a farce, many of us warned you. Now you want our help cleaning up the mess you've made?

To be fair, Canonical went where a lot of the market - Microsoft, in particular but a lot of other tech pundits too - thought the world was heading. Convergence, touch, one OS from smartphones to desktops. In retrospect, it's easy to see they were wrong. Microsoft had to backpedal on the Windows 8.x UI and Windows Phone is dead. Android and Chromebooks haven't merged, neither has iOS and macOS. You might say the Surface line has proven that cross-over devices aren't totally dead, but it's more of a border skirmish than all-out war. I don't know, it might have flopped because the implementation was bad too. But it mainly flopped because the market wasn't there.

Re:Clean up your own mess, douchebags

[Frank Burly]

What fraction of the people saying "Nice try, too late" donated money or contributed code, or art, or translations, etc?
If all they did was say "I don't like the way the project is going" that is fine and somewhat useful input as well, but there is an attitude of entitlement and distain that is unjustified and kind of funny.

FOSS programmer Bob Dylan: "Just because you don't like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything."

I get the dislike of Gnome, and Unity, and Metro but at least the FOSS options are easily substituted for one another and free.

Re:Clean up your own mess, douchebags

[iampiti]

Well, correct me if I'm mistaken, but the only part of the UI where Microsoft has backpedaled is on the start screen where they went back to a more classic start menu. In Win 10, they've changed some parts of the UI and the default apps to ones being designed for touch.

Re:Clean up your own mess, douchebags

[Chris Mattern]

In retrospect, it's easy to see they were wrong.

Retrospect? I said right from the start that thinking smartphones and full blown computers had the same UI needs was batshit insane.

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.

Re:Clean up your own mess, douchebags

[iampiti]

It was obvious to everyone. I've read in several places there was resistence even at Microsoft but I guess, as you say, that the higher ups wanted to capture the tablet market at all costs.
I still think that the ideal solution is 2 totally different interfaces and that huge targets and lots of whitespace are a waste of real estate on mouse devices. But I guess the young people are used to touch UI and that we the old farts don't matter much

Re:Clean up your own mess, douchebags

[drinkypoo]

What fraction of the people saying "Nice try, too late" donated money or contributed code, or art, or translations, etc?
If all they did was say "I don't like the way the project is going" that is fine and somewhat useful input as well, but there is an attitude of entitlement and distain that is unjustified and kind of funny.

What's hilariously unjustified is thinking that I'd donate to Ubuntu when they are explicitly going in the wrong direction. The stuff that's valuable in Ubuntu is in the core, and the community, including the PPA system. It's not in the goddamned themes.

Tests don't fix the problems of identity politics

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion, it is identity politics that has resulted in GNOME being in such poor shape today.

Using past Slashdot submissions, let's track what happened to the GNOME desktop environment project after it started engaging in identity politics, instead of just focusing on software development.

On June 15, 2006, Slashdot featured the story "GNOME Reaches Out to Women".

As we progress from 2007 through to just last week, we can see the decline:

• Godwin's Law Invoked in Linus/Gnome Spat
• GNOME 3 Delayed Until September 2010
• GNOME Developer Suggests Split From GNU Project
• GNOME 2.30, End of the (2.x) Line
• GNOME 3.0 Delayed Until March 2011
• Ubuntu Moves Away From GNOME
• Canonical To Divert Money From GNOME
• GNOME To Lose Minimize, Maximize Buttons
• Proposal For Gnome To Become Linux-Only
• GNOME Shell Hurts Gaming Performance
• Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME 3 For Xfce
• Debian Changes Default Desktop From GNOME To XFCE
• Gnome Goes JavaScript
• Gnome Founder Miguel de Icaza Moves To Mac
• Giving GNOME 3 a GNOME 2 Look
• The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money
• Dozens Of Canonical Employees Resign As Ubuntu Switches To GNOME, Shuttleworth Returns As CEO
• Debian, Gnome Patched 'Bad Taste' VBScript-Injection Vulnerabilities
• GNOME's Text Editor gedit 'No Longer Maintained', Needs New Developers

The GNOME project went from creating GNOME 2, which was perhaps the most widely used and most liked open source desktop environment ever created, to the GNOME 3 disaster (which was quite delayed), and eventually to the project having trouble finding a maintainer for its text editor!

Some people will misinterpret what happened, and blame women for it. Of course, that's a load of bollocks. As we can

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.

Isn't Canonical a business?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Isn't Canonical a business? With money? That they could use to hire people?

If anything this looks more like an "open hiring" date at McDonalds than anything else. (If the suckers who show up have any skills, they may toss them a low-ball offer to do task X on a timeline that will definitely cut into their day job.).

Re:Isn't Canonical a business?

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

They reorged a few years ago and decided appealing to the community was more important than paying experienced employees.

Re:Isn't Canonical a business?

[Anonymous Coward]

On April 12, 2017 there was a story here at Slashdot titled "Dozens Of Canonical Employees Resign As Ubuntu Switches To GNOME, Shuttleworth Returns As CEO".

I don't know if it's correct, but the summary for that submission stated:

The Reg has learned 31 or more staffers have already left the Ubuntu Linux maker ahead of Shuttleworth's rise, with at least 26 others now on formal notice and uncertainty surrounding the remainder.

Maybe they wouldn't have to be begging for community help if those employees were still around.

Re:Isn't Canonical a business?

[Tranzistors]

Isn't Canonical a business? With money? That they could use to hire people?

Just because Canonical doesn't pay doesn't mean that those people who show up won't get paid. If a company is selling PCs with Ubuntu, or are using it inhouse, might care enough about future Ubuntu desktop experience and lend their staff for couple of days to serve their business interests.

Re: This is funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should we 'forgive and forget' when we, as users, have been repeatedly fucked over?

We, the Ubuntu community, didn't want Unity. Yet it was forced on is.

We, the Ubuntu community, really don't want Gnome 3. Yet it's being forced on us.

It doesn't matter that Ubuntu Linux might be free. That's totally irrelevant.

If they wanted to 'make a good, more Open release' like you're claiming, then they'd be switching to Xfce or Kde instead of Gnome 3.

We shouldn't waste our time helping them when they're not doing what we want.

This is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

They should transition from Ubuntu (of any kind) to Slackware, the one true Linux, the most UNIXy of all of them. It will put and end to this silly systemd nonsense too. If that shit spreads much further, BSD (even more UNIXy) is going to "suffer" a great increase in popularity. I hope they have a suitable Solitaire game in there.

Hey, what's up with SCO these days? I hear they're still alive

Re:This is wrong

[fustakrakich]

*cough* pkgtool

Any problems with GNOME in Debian?

[tepples]

Try Debian

To people who have used GNOME 3.14 in Debian 8 "Jessie" or 3.22 in Debian 9 "Stretch": What serious problems have you run into?

Re:Any problems with GNOME in Debian?

[Eunuchswear]

There is a bug refreshing your Kerberos ticket when unlocking the screen in Gnome 3.22.

Obviously only affects people using Kerberos.

That's the problem I've run into with Stretch so far.

If you want Xubuntu, you know where to find it.

[tepples]

If they wanted to 'make a good, more Open release' like you're claiming, then they'd be switching to Xfce or Kde instead of Gnome 3.

Which is why Kubuntu and Xubuntu exist. I personally run Xubuntu on my PC at work. If you want Xubuntu or Kubuntu to gain momentum, then go ahead and contribute to that project. This project is for people who prefer GNOME.

I hope they go for modern ICU 59.1

[Heraklit]

I hope Ubuntu will go for a modern ICU 59.1 as unicode library! That would bring both Gnome and Ubuntu ahead.

Re: This is funny

[twistedcubic]

I'll never use Ubuntu, but I use Gnome. This sounds like a great way to get all the irritating bugs in Gnome fixed, indirectly.

Here's what my mom would've said to them

[Opportunist]

"Did you need my help to make this mess? No? Then I guess you won't need it to clean it up, will you?"

Re: This is cheaper than paying your own way to Lo

[slashdot_commentator]

Interesting. Can an argument be made that Gnome 3 is desirable enough to keep using Gnome 3 & systemd?

The kernel developers are still going to support systemd (until the customer base rejects it enmasse). But if people actually hate Gnome 3 so much that no one chooses to use it, how can it keep perpetuating itself?

Re:What Conanical (and others too) need to realize

[HiThere]

Sorry, but while I generally like KDE, the current version runs my disk drive constantly...so I switched to xfce. Gnome3 I consider a useless piece of garbage, but Gnome2 was better than KDE4.

Still, I guess if you're running on a tablet than there might be *some* value to Gnome3...but I'm still uncertain about that, as I don't have a tablet.

The last time I tried Mate I was unsatisfied with it, but that was over a year ago, so it might be a good choice. Cinnamon seems to be "better than Gnome3", but that's not saying much. I can't remember why I don't have LXDE installed. I think that why I tried it a year ago it was missing some features I needed...at least by default, and with the other choices I didn't see the need to coerce it.

Re:Tests don't fix the problems of identity politi

[SumDog]

I don't understand why this is modded down. It's a pretty good comprehensive summary of the gnome project. I remember back in 2012 when I was using Linux at work (used a hackintosh/Mac for years) and installed openSUSE with gnome3. Dear god .. took me a few hours to get everything semi-working to the way it was in gnome2. That's when I took the plunge and switched to i3.

Tiling window managers are the way to go. I've tried xnomad, i3 and a few others. I've settled on i3 for years, but whichever one you use, once you go tiling you won't go back.

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:Mate desktop - yes, Gnome 3 - no

[Tranzistors]

unusable; way too dumbed down, essential (to me) features removed

In the good old days people at least were a bit more specific with their off-topic whining.

Re:Tests don't fix the problems of identity politi

[xvan]

Had the same experience, I upgraded my ubuntu box and only had both broken gnome3 and unity as options. There was no easy way to install gnome 2. I went to awesome WM, it was a steep learning curve but my desktop experience has been consistent and out of my way for a long time. Yet I remember being quite happy with gnome 2 at the time.

Nothing technical ?

[redelm]

Do they think they have the technical side covered and just need lipstick? Not IMHO -- big efforts are necessary to improve recognition of displays larger than FHD (1920x1080) such as 2K (2560x1440) and 4K (3840x2160). They're now much more common and if the [built-in] graphics are limiting, then this too should at least be user-visible.

Dear Ubuntu,

[OneHundredAndTen]

If you want to transition from Unity to anything other than Gnome or KDE, count me in. If you want to transition to non-systemd, count me in twice. Otherwise, get stuffed.

I LIKE Unity

[Neuronwelder]

Keep your @!!!kin hands off of it! I also like the Unity episode on "Rick and Morty".

Re:I LIKE Unity

[Neuronwelder]

Um. I made a mistake. Disregard the previous statement.

No it's fine, we'll just watch

[arkane1234]

It's fine, we'll just watch. It's cute watching people squirm in their own feces.
I've hated that broken idea of a linux distribution since day one. I'll stick with Window Maker.

Re:This is funny

[MichaelSmith]

Unity made sense when Gnome was so unstable. Now that Gnome is usable, Ubuntu is dropping the cost of maintaining unity by using Gnome. It makes sense to me.

Re: This is funny

[MichaelSmith]

Sorry I have bad news for you. There have been unfixed irritating bugs in Unity for years. Gnome is meant to be the fix for those bugs.

Don't be stupid

[Tough Love]

Don't be stupid. Just finally admit that KDE is a far superior desktop to Gnome, and go with it. Or become irrelevant. (Switched most of my machines to Debian testing already, I've had enough of Ubuntu quirks and wildly inappropriate side excursions.)

Re:This is funny

[drinkypoo]

Can you believe that Unity might have not done EVERYTHING wrong and that GNOME doesn't do EVERYTHING right?

What I believe is that Unity took the air out of the room and asphyxiated things I was using like AWN, Compiz, and emerald. What Ubuntu would have to do to win back my loyalty at this point is fix that stuff. I had a great desktop with all the best aspects of all the most popular GUIs in one place with good performance, total configurability, high ease of use and even massive eye candy factor and... now I don't. Of that software, only Compiz still works correctly.

Install Ubuntu Server then whatever DE

[tepples]

Ubuntu handles that one of two ways:

Choice of install media The user chooses a desktop environment during the "download install media" step of installation. Install base system then desktop environment The user downloads and installs Ubuntu Server, a base system that doesn't include a desktop environment. After booting the freshly installed base system and logging in at the terminal, the user runs sudo apt install xubuntu-desktop to download the packages for an Xfce desktop environment. See the answer by Gilles.

Re:What Conanical (and others too) need to realize

[OneAhead]

The last time I tried Mate I was unsatisfied with it

I'm almost afraid to suggest it, but maybe you were just stuck with one of those ill-conceived themes a lot of distros currently ship as default with MATE?I'm saying this because I'm using Mate right now and my experience is almost identical to the old Gnome 2. That said, one of the first things I do after every installation is customize the desktop theme to be a bit more in line with the Gnome 2 of yore (old-fashioned looks be damned).

Blah, blah, blah Gnome 3 sucks

[brickhouse98]

Same old story. Use it or don't. It's a great DE for some, not for others. No other DE gets nearly as much hate for actually just advancing their platform instead of pushing out the same old thing year after year after year.

Re:Tests don't fix the problems of identity politi

[erapert]

So... Canonical should be switching Ubuntu to Cinnamon not GNOME 3?

Re: This is cheaper than paying your own way to Lo

[slashdot_commentator]

Nope. The kernels have "hooks" specifically to support systemd. Without them, systemd could not work as fascistly as it does. One does not avoid systemd merely by uninstalling the package, and running xfce. Not that systemd support can't be configured out of the kernel.