It happens every so often around here that someone will claim X as the final hurdle to "finally realizing the year of the Linux desktop", and if you think that packaging Steam is that last cab off the rank, you are sorely mistaken. What about the ruination of a good desktop environment (GNOME), and the torture that getting a video card properly working can be? Or the cacophony of sound libraries that mean I can't get Skype to pick up my microphone? Or the many mail programs that *should* be able to import/export each other's databases yet, to this day, still manage to be a PITA (Kontact!).
I've been using Linux full time for 5 years (since the Windows Vista calamity) and it wasn't until Ubuntu ruined their distro with Unity that I had to hop to another one (Debian Squeeze and now openSUSE due to a new mobo install, and to get support for the LAN on same I wasn't prepared to upgrade to Sid). openSUSE 12.2 hasn't turned out to be as stable as I had hoped, so my Mac Mini should be delivered on Monday (TNT tracking currently has it in transit from Hong Kong:-) And installing and configuring Oracle Java is a nightmare. Just when you think you've found the right HOWTO to get it installed, you find that there's another way, and the way you were using was perhaps ill-advised. Yes, this isn't Linux's fault but Java is a necessity for some people, and the free Java doesn't quite cut it for some apps (CrashPlan, for example). It used to be that there were non-free repos in Ubuntu that added all these things nicely, but these seem to be a thing of the past nowadays for most distros.
Until Linux learns to cope with the installation/addition of other software that doesn't live up to its high and mighty standards, and stops fragmenting its core GUIs and programs, the much prophesied "year of Linux on the desktop" is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN! And if you think that people are going to accept a totally stripped-bare 100% pure distro the likes of which Richard Stallman would use, then it's game over (though it's probably been game over for years, now).
Some of us come late to this realisation, but when it does come, it's like an Enlightenment. I could have kept distro-hopping between the various major flavours of Linux like I have been for the past five years, or I could get a Mac (delivery due Monday:-) and simplify my end-using and development life greatly. Windows Sh8te is going to be like a cat among the pigeons when Microsoft start deprecating 7 in a big way, and the only safe harbour in that storm is Apple. I've been seeing predictions of "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" come and go for 15 years, and it's still as unfathomable now as it has been all this time.
I bought an ASUS eee-pad Transformer TF101 when they came out and it was quite a let-down (Android experience wise), especially the Marketplace, and the Google Play store is about as disappointing as the Marketplace, probably because it just looks like they changed the name and thought we'd be fooled.
Developing for iOS and/or Mac and just ignoring the rest of the world and their petty problems sounds like a recipe for success to me:-)
My problems with Linux are not entirely the fault of the GNOME developers' downward spiral into insanity. See my earlier comment: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3243483&cid=41946241 (just posted). I agree with your last sentence about not having to use extensions to make it usable.
I haven't tinkered much at all. In fact, among Linux users, I'm probably among the more lazy because I prefer things to "just work" here, too. My latest problem was having to switch from Debian Squeeze to another distro because I upgraded my mobo and didn't want to use Sid to get my ethernet working. I found that openSUSE's KDE Live CD seemed quite smooth but it's not particularly stable. Now this could be the mobo's fault and/or the ATI 4670HD using the FGLRX-LEGACY driver from geeko.ioda.net (you talk to some Linux users and they shit all over ATI: "ATIs are shit, get a NVidia", yet others are quite the opposite). I have a Dell U2711 LCD screen, and thought perhaps it's too big, so I changed a couple of settings in Catalyst (enabled Tear Free and reduced DVI frequency) and it seems a little more stable, with less complete X lockups, but they still occur several times a week.
But I'm just sick of the problems and the tinkering required to get it stable. KDE sometimes takes 2 minutes to let me start an application after login, too. That's another thing I don't care to get to the bottom of, and Nepomuk is just irritating shite. Playing a video sometimes results in complete video corruption such that I have to log off and on again. And Dolphin hangs if I forget to unmount a samba share before switching off the computer on which it resides.
My brother/mother recently got onto Skype to do video calls with my nephew and so I found a HOWTO and installed it. Seemed to go well, except it won't listen to my microphone or pick up my webcam. I've never seen a distro yet that wouldn't detect a webcam, so this is a first. Yet another issue that could take hours of fiddling. Linux's many sound systems are a joke. More Balkanisation to keep the control freaks happy (see: http://xkcd.com/927/). Skanlite is complete crap, too. I eventually installed Simple Scan (remembering it as a nice, no fuss, scanning program from my good old Ubuntu 10.04 days). Why have a scanning program on offer if it's complete garbage? It doesn't make sense.
Many of my MP3s show up as being 27:03:11 in length in Audacious. That's quite bizarre, since I ripped them from my very own CDs in Linux.
I hope this conveys some of the reasons why I'm done with Linux. I know I'm done enumerating my problems with it.
True, most desktops require some fiddling, and I'm sure I'll customise OSX in some way. An example of the "polish, smoothness and complete lack of fuss" would be the Magic Mouse and web browsing. Swipe left or right and it's the back/forward buttons, but not only that but as you swipe your finger, the current tab/page slides in sync with the motion and eventually disappears left/right off the window as appropriate.
Another example would be downloading files: the Finder window's Size column for downloads becomes a tiny progress bar in the adjacent cell for that file. Very nice indeed.
The menu bar at the top I'm beginning to appreciate, too. So many programs on Linux/Windows have weird and wonderful variations on the menu bar theme (especially considering the different libraries used to create each one), and some (especially on Windows) require considerable research to figure out how to use (I'm looking at you, WLM/Office Communicator!). On the Mac, the menu bar is at the top of the screen, and after all these years I think I finally appreciate the simplicity and uniformity of this approach. Sometimes, the "there's more than one way to do it" approach is just stupid and simply creates confusion.
That's an interesting way of summarising the situation. GNOME have effectively ruined what most of us knew well and were more than happy with, and foisted some half-baked straight jacket worse than the alleged strait jacket that is OSX (claimed by a commenter above). GNOME 3 is a serious regression from its predecessor. No wonder people a looking at the greener grass elsewhere and giving up on desktop Linux.
For the first few days, I was willing to learn, but found all the "different just to be different" keyboard accel choices to suck.
To be fair, the Mac OS and its "other world" keyboard shortcuts have been around for a very, very, long time. They're not "different just to be different", they're what they have been since day one (mostly), so I'm going to have to cut OSX some slack as I try to adapt, because it's me that needs changing here, not the Mac (though I used to bitch and moan about Apple needing to add a preference pane to enable what I consider to be "normal" shortcuts, like Home/End key going to the beginning/end of a line). This is one trade-off I'm prepared to make, I suppose, though switching from Windows 7 at work and OSX at home may prove challenging.
I realise you're just being informative to those that might find such a thing interesting, so I won't bite your head off, but I have no idea why anyone would want to further complicate matters by running a Linux window manager on a Mac. That just defeats the whole purpose, IMHO. At the age of 38 I now want simplicity and a hassle-free computer. The last thing I should be doing is bringing all my control-freakery from Linux to my new computer:-)
It all boils down to this fact: not everyone has time (or need) to write their own compiz plugins. Saying something is eminently more configurable than anything else is a fool's errand. So what if it is? Does its extra configurability result in a unified whole? Probably not.
I've been using KDE for about six months now since the Unity fiasco drove me away from Ubuntu (with a year's Debian use on the way, with GNOME 2.3x before the more-recent KDE/openSUSE install).
However, I've reached that point in my life where I just want things to work, and since the Mac OS is not hostile to most of the open-source tools I use every day (and will continue using), switching to a desktop that "just works" means I should get the best of both worlds. I won't have to hunt down special repositories to get essential things installed any more, and I won't have to read lengthy HOWTOs to get some basic things working. I've been using my brother's Late 2011 Mac Mini for a day now and I'm very happy with the polish, the smoothness, the speed, and the complete lack of fuss. I doubt I'll ever really love the Finder, and the Dock has never impressed me much, but everything else will be a joy to use.
Sorry, Linux, but after more than a decade of "Is this the year of Linux on the desktop?" predictions, the old adage about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results applies. Linux is still Balkanised and I still have to fight to get simple things to work. I'll still keep Linux for a LAMP server (bare metal or VM, haven't decided) and you'll have to pry Mythbuntu from my cold, dead, hands in the lounge room, but sadly there is no longer a place for Linux as my main desktop operating system. And now that Microsoft are doing their best to drive away their loyal user base, I see an even brighter future ahead for the Mac ecosystem. I may as well stop fighting it.
Re:But have they unwound the craziness?
on
GNOME 3.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
All of those extensions may give back some kind of "normal" desktop environment but having to fix myself what should not have been broken in the first place is something I take great issue with. It's almost as if the GNOME devs are so lazy about coding they want to have no more than 50 features across the entire codebase; any more than that and they'd have to work. Stuff that! A lazy D.E. is not something that is going to attract or keep users. If 90% of people want something and you won't play ball, then you can tinker with your precious little codebase to your heart's content: it's never going to see the light of day.
And as for Nautilus I never used that double-pane thing, but I'm not surprised to hear it's now history. I think it was the ability to add a button to the left/right of the location bar to change between clickable/editable location bar that started to piss me off in a major way. There are other things but Nautilus is also on the mad rush to cut down on the number of features for no apparent reason. Anyway, Dolphin in KDE is now so good I would never consider going back to GNOME again.... not unless it's forked and the features come back and the old GNOME goes the same way xfree86 did:-) Yes, I know there's MATE but it's not widely supported across the various Linux distributions.
Re:But have they unwound the craziness?
on
GNOME 3.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
Amen to this one, brotha! You've hit the nail on the head about why GNOME 3.x will *never* make it as a standard install in any of the few Enterprise-class installs it may or could ever have. Its defaults are just so crappy and missing!
Re:But have they unwound the craziness?
on
GNOME 3.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
I'm no troll... just a GNOME 2.3x refugee that has found asylum in KDE. It's been a while since I looked, but my problems included things such as:
not being able to add icons to the top bar for all my favourite apps and documents not having a normal task bar down the bottom not having a normal menu at the top not having a decent range of applets to add to the top bar (which I can't put things on anyway, so I guess there's no point having applets if you've got nowhere to put them) Nautilus having found new ways to strip out features where previously I thought they had hit rock bottom
All of these things are eminently and very simply achievable in KDE nowadays, and Dolphin is perfect. I shouldn't have to trawl though third party extensions to get back standard functionality, too.
I don't see anything in this announcement that tells me they have wound back some of the bats**t crazy design retrogressions in the 3.x release. Clocks? Wow... let me just pick myself up off the floor while I recover from the excitement at this prospect. How about making it a usable D.E. like GNOME 2.3x was? I'm now happily using KDE again and will continue to do so for some time for as long as the bats**t effect doesn't infiltrate KDE or until GNOME 3.x is actually usable. And if Apple can find their way to releasing a Mac that doesn't have a built-in screen, miniscule form factor, or is overkill like the Mac Pro that costs an arm and a leg, I might even consider switching to that. But as for GNOME 3.x, it's dead to me:-)
Apple prided themselves on making computing easy, but to release a file manager and then never improve upon it, and to expect users to write Apple Scripts (what a stupid language *that* is!) or to fire up a Terminal (Oh no, the most unholy of unholies on a Mac OS, using a command-line!), is something I will never understand. Apple seem to be hell-bent on NEVER improving the Finder. Path Finder isn't much chop, either. It still offers the "Replace" button instead of merging folders like normal operating systems do. The writing is on the wall for the Mac OS, anyway. Just like Ubuntu has done with Unity, GNOME have done with GNOME 3, and Windows will soon do with 8, these morons seem to think that tactile input devices are going to wiped from the face of the earth and made a crime to possess, because they're all making it progressively more difficult to use computers. Thank god for the likes of KDE (which I have recently re-adopted).
"Just do such and such" is the retort of many an Apple zealot, but the whole point is that Apple stubbornly refuses to even add a preference icon to allow such things to be modified to ease the transition of those who have learned - and cannot unlearn - a lifetime's habit. You might consider it to be very smart business indeed: add something that won't annoy existing users but which might help the hordes of Windows users looking for a refuge (and they will grow exponentially when 8 comes out). But no, The Most Holy Steve Jobs has declared that a feature, once implemented, may be improved only after his ego has been stroked most rigorously! Now that The Great One has ascended, it will probably take a Black Mass to get permission to fix something:-(
With Apple's huge pile of cash they could shell out a few bucks to improve their file manager. It's a child's toy compared to what it should have evolved into by now. The path bar is something so sad that even I could have designed it. The dock is nasty, too. And they could add some preference options for people who come from normal computing backgrounds -i.e., ones where the Home and End keys actually move to the beginning and end of the current line. Gee, that'd be awesome, wouldn't it? It won't even cost much, either. But will Apple lift so much as a finger to even consider improving what they already have in lieu of dreaming up more shiny to distract users from the fact that some aspects of their OS have been crappy from day one??? Nope. Because they're utterly hopeless. I'll stick to my Linux, thanks.
It just works. No fuss. No insanity. Just panels and file managers and not a lot else that I don't care for. These monolithic desktop environments developed by mental patients are a bad thing!
I'm not clicking through 8 pages, each of which seems to load a popup, just to read a list of 30 items. And judging from the first couple of pages I could stand to look at, the article is hyping up some very un-newsworthy information indeed! There's nothing worse than a site with tid bits of "information" surrounded by an orgy of advertising. Get lost!
Sea level rises 50ft more than the current dodgy "science" predicts? The prophesying of these alarmists is completely self-serving, not to mention so "far out" that we'll all be dead by the time they're supposed to come to pass, and would be used for toilet paper if I wasn't reading this off my LCD monitor.
Maybe this new GNOME is their version of Microsoft's "Windows Starter Edition" where you're only allowed to have a few things open at once, and they'll be coming out with a "GNOME 3.0 Home Premium Edition" in the near future that will allow us to actually use the D.E. like it was meant to be used?
Since the Ubuntu desktop wreckage of late I've switched to Debian. couldn't be happer. cut out Shuttleworth's meddling and go straight to the source:-)
which is why I don't run mixed repos, at least not for the past few years. Stable suits me just fine now that the fascination of testing the latest and greatest crap has worn off.
Slashdot Mirror
It happens every so often around here that someone will claim X as the final hurdle to "finally realizing the year of the Linux desktop", and if you think that packaging Steam is that last cab off the rank, you are sorely mistaken. What about the ruination of a good desktop environment (GNOME), and the torture that getting a video card properly working can be? Or the cacophony of sound libraries that mean I can't get Skype to pick up my microphone? Or the many mail programs that *should* be able to import/export each other's databases yet, to this day, still manage to be a PITA (Kontact!).
I've been using Linux full time for 5 years (since the Windows Vista calamity) and it wasn't until Ubuntu ruined their distro with Unity that I had to hop to another one (Debian Squeeze and now openSUSE due to a new mobo install, and to get support for the LAN on same I wasn't prepared to upgrade to Sid). openSUSE 12.2 hasn't turned out to be as stable as I had hoped, so my Mac Mini should be delivered on Monday (TNT tracking currently has it in transit from Hong Kong :-) And installing and configuring Oracle Java is a nightmare. Just when you think you've found the right HOWTO to get it installed, you find that there's another way, and the way you were using was perhaps ill-advised. Yes, this isn't Linux's fault but Java is a necessity for some people, and the free Java doesn't quite cut it for some apps (CrashPlan, for example). It used to be that there were non-free repos in Ubuntu that added all these things nicely, but these seem to be a thing of the past nowadays for most distros.
Until Linux learns to cope with the installation/addition of other software that doesn't live up to its high and mighty standards, and stops fragmenting its core GUIs and programs, the much prophesied "year of Linux on the desktop" is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN! And if you think that people are going to accept a totally stripped-bare 100% pure distro the likes of which Richard Stallman would use, then it's game over (though it's probably been game over for years, now).
Some of us come late to this realisation, but when it does come, it's like an Enlightenment. I could have kept distro-hopping between the various major flavours of Linux like I have been for the past five years, or I could get a Mac (delivery due Monday :-) and simplify my end-using and development life greatly. Windows Sh8te is going to be like a cat among the pigeons when Microsoft start deprecating 7 in a big way, and the only safe harbour in that storm is Apple. I've been seeing predictions of "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" come and go for 15 years, and it's still as unfathomable now as it has been all this time.
I bought an ASUS eee-pad Transformer TF101 when they came out and it was quite a let-down (Android experience wise), especially the Marketplace, and the Google Play store is about as disappointing as the Marketplace, probably because it just looks like they changed the name and thought we'd be fooled.
Developing for iOS and/or Mac and just ignoring the rest of the world and their petty problems sounds like a recipe for success to me :-)
My problems with Linux are not entirely the fault of the GNOME developers' downward spiral into insanity. See my earlier comment: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3243483&cid=41946241 (just posted). I agree with your last sentence about not having to use extensions to make it usable.
I haven't tinkered much at all. In fact, among Linux users, I'm probably among the more lazy because I prefer things to "just work" here, too. My latest problem was having to switch from Debian Squeeze to another distro because I upgraded my mobo and didn't want to use Sid to get my ethernet working. I found that openSUSE's KDE Live CD seemed quite smooth but it's not particularly stable. Now this could be the mobo's fault and/or the ATI 4670HD using the FGLRX-LEGACY driver from geeko.ioda.net (you talk to some Linux users and they shit all over ATI: "ATIs are shit, get a NVidia", yet others are quite the opposite). I have a Dell U2711 LCD screen, and thought perhaps it's too big, so I changed a couple of settings in Catalyst (enabled Tear Free and reduced DVI frequency) and it seems a little more stable, with less complete X lockups, but they still occur several times a week.
But I'm just sick of the problems and the tinkering required to get it stable. KDE sometimes takes 2 minutes to let me start an application after login, too. That's another thing I don't care to get to the bottom of, and Nepomuk is just irritating shite. Playing a video sometimes results in complete video corruption such that I have to log off and on again. And Dolphin hangs if I forget to unmount a samba share before switching off the computer on which it resides.
My brother/mother recently got onto Skype to do video calls with my nephew and so I found a HOWTO and installed it. Seemed to go well, except it won't listen to my microphone or pick up my webcam. I've never seen a distro yet that wouldn't detect a webcam, so this is a first. Yet another issue that could take hours of fiddling. Linux's many sound systems are a joke. More Balkanisation to keep the control freaks happy (see: http://xkcd.com/927/). Skanlite is complete crap, too. I eventually installed Simple Scan (remembering it as a nice, no fuss, scanning program from my good old Ubuntu 10.04 days). Why have a scanning program on offer if it's complete garbage? It doesn't make sense.
Many of my MP3s show up as being 27:03:11 in length in Audacious. That's quite bizarre, since I ripped them from my very own CDs in Linux.
I hope this conveys some of the reasons why I'm done with Linux. I know I'm done enumerating my problems with it.
True, most desktops require some fiddling, and I'm sure I'll customise OSX in some way. An example of the "polish, smoothness and complete lack of fuss" would be the Magic Mouse and web browsing. Swipe left or right and it's the back/forward buttons, but not only that but as you swipe your finger, the current tab/page slides in sync with the motion and eventually disappears left/right off the window as appropriate.
Another example would be downloading files: the Finder window's Size column for downloads becomes a tiny progress bar in the adjacent cell for that file. Very nice indeed.
The menu bar at the top I'm beginning to appreciate, too. So many programs on Linux/Windows have weird and wonderful variations on the menu bar theme (especially considering the different libraries used to create each one), and some (especially on Windows) require considerable research to figure out how to use (I'm looking at you, WLM/Office Communicator!). On the Mac, the menu bar is at the top of the screen, and after all these years I think I finally appreciate the simplicity and uniformity of this approach. Sometimes, the "there's more than one way to do it" approach is just stupid and simply creates confusion.
That's an interesting way of summarising the situation. GNOME have effectively ruined what most of us knew well and were more than happy with, and foisted some half-baked straight jacket worse than the alleged strait jacket that is OSX (claimed by a commenter above). GNOME 3 is a serious regression from its predecessor. No wonder people a looking at the greener grass elsewhere and giving up on desktop Linux.
For the first few days, I was willing to learn, but found all the "different just to be different" keyboard accel choices to suck.
To be fair, the Mac OS and its "other world" keyboard shortcuts have been around for a very, very, long time. They're not "different just to be different", they're what they have been since day one (mostly), so I'm going to have to cut OSX some slack as I try to adapt, because it's me that needs changing here, not the Mac (though I used to bitch and moan about Apple needing to add a preference pane to enable what I consider to be "normal" shortcuts, like Home/End key going to the beginning/end of a line). This is one trade-off I'm prepared to make, I suppose, though switching from Windows 7 at work and OSX at home may prove challenging.
I realise you're just being informative to those that might find such a thing interesting, so I won't bite your head off, but I have no idea why anyone would want to further complicate matters by running a Linux window manager on a Mac. That just defeats the whole purpose, IMHO. At the age of 38 I now want simplicity and a hassle-free computer. The last thing I should be doing is bringing all my control-freakery from Linux to my new computer :-)
My time is too valuable now to play whack-a-mole with my OS.
You've hit the nail on the head right there.
It all boils down to this fact: not everyone has time (or need) to write their own compiz plugins. Saying something is eminently more configurable than anything else is a fool's errand. So what if it is? Does its extra configurability result in a unified whole? Probably not.
I've been using KDE for about six months now since the Unity fiasco drove me away from Ubuntu (with a year's Debian use on the way, with GNOME 2.3x before the more-recent KDE/openSUSE install).
However, I've reached that point in my life where I just want things to work, and since the Mac OS is not hostile to most of the open-source tools I use every day (and will continue using), switching to a desktop that "just works" means I should get the best of both worlds. I won't have to hunt down special repositories to get essential things installed any more, and I won't have to read lengthy HOWTOs to get some basic things working. I've been using my brother's Late 2011 Mac Mini for a day now and I'm very happy with the polish, the smoothness, the speed, and the complete lack of fuss. I doubt I'll ever really love the Finder, and the Dock has never impressed me much, but everything else will be a joy to use.
Sorry, Linux, but after more than a decade of "Is this the year of Linux on the desktop?" predictions, the old adage about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results applies. Linux is still Balkanised and I still have to fight to get simple things to work. I'll still keep Linux for a LAMP server (bare metal or VM, haven't decided) and you'll have to pry Mythbuntu from my cold, dead, hands in the lounge room, but sadly there is no longer a place for Linux as my main desktop operating system. And now that Microsoft are doing their best to drive away their loyal user base, I see an even brighter future ahead for the Mac ecosystem. I may as well stop fighting it.
All of those extensions may give back some kind of "normal" desktop environment but having to fix myself what should not have been broken in the first place is something I take great issue with. It's almost as if the GNOME devs are so lazy about coding they want to have no more than 50 features across the entire codebase; any more than that and they'd have to work. Stuff that! A lazy D.E. is not something that is going to attract or keep users. If 90% of people want something and you won't play ball, then you can tinker with your precious little codebase to your heart's content: it's never going to see the light of day.
And as for Nautilus I never used that double-pane thing, but I'm not surprised to hear it's now history. I think it was the ability to add a button to the left/right of the location bar to change between clickable/editable location bar that started to piss me off in a major way. There are other things but Nautilus is also on the mad rush to cut down on the number of features for no apparent reason. Anyway, Dolphin in KDE is now so good I would never consider going back to GNOME again.... not unless it's forked and the features come back and the old GNOME goes the same way xfree86 did :-) Yes, I know there's MATE but it's not widely supported across the various Linux distributions.
Amen to this one, brotha! You've hit the nail on the head about why GNOME 3.x will *never* make it as a standard install in any of the few Enterprise-class installs it may or could ever have. Its defaults are just so crappy and missing!
I'm no troll... just a GNOME 2.3x refugee that has found asylum in KDE. It's been a while since I looked, but my problems included things such as:
not being able to add icons to the top bar for all my favourite apps and documents
not having a normal task bar down the bottom
not having a normal menu at the top
not having a decent range of applets to add to the top bar (which I can't put things on anyway, so I guess there's no point having applets if you've got nowhere to put them)
Nautilus having found new ways to strip out features where previously I thought they had hit rock bottom
All of these things are eminently and very simply achievable in KDE nowadays, and Dolphin is perfect. I shouldn't have to trawl though third party extensions to get back standard functionality, too.
I don't see anything in this announcement that tells me they have wound back some of the bats**t crazy design retrogressions in the 3.x release. Clocks? Wow... let me just pick myself up off the floor while I recover from the excitement at this prospect. How about making it a usable D.E. like GNOME 2.3x was? I'm now happily using KDE again and will continue to do so for some time for as long as the bats**t effect doesn't infiltrate KDE or until GNOME 3.x is actually usable. And if Apple can find their way to releasing a Mac that doesn't have a built-in screen, miniscule form factor, or is overkill like the Mac Pro that costs an arm and a leg, I might even consider switching to that. But as for GNOME 3.x, it's dead to me :-)
Behold, the MacBook Wheel, which will making typing a thing of the past: http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-laptop-with-no,14299/
Apple prided themselves on making computing easy, but to release a file manager and then never improve upon it, and to expect users to write Apple Scripts (what a stupid language *that* is!) or to fire up a Terminal (Oh no, the most unholy of unholies on a Mac OS, using a command-line!), is something I will never understand. Apple seem to be hell-bent on NEVER improving the Finder. Path Finder isn't much chop, either. It still offers the "Replace" button instead of merging folders like normal operating systems do. The writing is on the wall for the Mac OS, anyway. Just like Ubuntu has done with Unity, GNOME have done with GNOME 3, and Windows will soon do with 8, these morons seem to think that tactile input devices are going to wiped from the face of the earth and made a crime to possess, because they're all making it progressively more difficult to use computers. Thank god for the likes of KDE (which I have recently re-adopted).
"Just do such and such" is the retort of many an Apple zealot, but the whole point is that Apple stubbornly refuses to even add a preference icon to allow such things to be modified to ease the transition of those who have learned - and cannot unlearn - a lifetime's habit. You might consider it to be very smart business indeed: add something that won't annoy existing users but which might help the hordes of Windows users looking for a refuge (and they will grow exponentially when 8 comes out). But no, The Most Holy Steve Jobs has declared that a feature, once implemented, may be improved only after his ego has been stroked most rigorously! Now that The Great One has ascended, it will probably take a Black Mass to get permission to fix something :-(
With Apple's huge pile of cash they could shell out a few bucks to improve their file manager. It's a child's toy compared to what it should have evolved into by now. The path bar is something so sad that even I could have designed it. The dock is nasty, too. And they could add some preference options for people who come from normal computing backgrounds -i.e., ones where the Home and End keys actually move to the beginning and end of the current line. Gee, that'd be awesome, wouldn't it? It won't even cost much, either. But will Apple lift so much as a finger to even consider improving what they already have in lieu of dreaming up more shiny to distract users from the fact that some aspects of their OS have been crappy from day one??? Nope. Because they're utterly hopeless. I'll stick to my Linux, thanks.
It just works. No fuss. No insanity. Just panels and file managers and not a lot else that I don't care for. These monolithic desktop environments developed by mental patients are a bad thing!
I'm not clicking through 8 pages, each of which seems to load a popup, just to read a list of 30 items. And judging from the first couple of pages I could stand to look at, the article is hyping up some very un-newsworthy information indeed! There's nothing worse than a site with tid bits of "information" surrounded by an orgy of advertising. Get lost!
Sea level rises 50ft more than the current dodgy "science" predicts? The prophesying of these alarmists is completely self-serving, not to mention so "far out" that we'll all be dead by the time they're supposed to come to pass, and would be used for toilet paper if I wasn't reading this off my LCD monitor.
Maybe this new GNOME is their version of Microsoft's "Windows Starter Edition" where you're only allowed to have a few things open at once, and they'll be coming out with a "GNOME 3.0 Home Premium Edition" in the near future that will allow us to actually use the D.E. like it was meant to be used?
Since the Ubuntu desktop wreckage of late I've switched to Debian. couldn't be happer. cut out Shuttleworth's meddling and go straight to the source :-)
which is why I don't run mixed repos, at least not for the past few years. Stable suits me just fine now that the fascination of testing the latest and greatest crap has worn off.