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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the delivering-a-desktop dept.

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."

6 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. "This is not a democracy" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Bite me. You broke it, you fix it.

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

    1. Re:"This is not a democracy" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    2. Re:"This is not a democracy" by ckatko · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.)

  2. Tests don't fix the problems of identity politics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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:

    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

  3. Re:This is funny by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  4. Re:Great Process by unixisc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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?