As others have said, Fedora and Ubuntu Gnome Remix are good options. Just keep in mind however that both Fedora and Ubuntu time their releases so that they come in about 1 month after Gnome releases. In turn, Gnome releases are timed to be about 1 month after X.org releases. This is intentional, and is supposed to ensure that new versions of Gnome make it into the releases quickly.
The current versions are Fedora 17 and Ubuntu 12.04, which both ship with Gnome 3.4. The next versions are Fedora 18 and Ubuntu 12.10, which will both ship next month and both have Gnome 3.6.
If you want to try out 3.6, you should probably grab an Alpha of either Fedora or Ubuntu GR.
Maybe. A lot of desktop users always run all of their apps maximized anyway. I've been doing this most of the time ever since I was a Windows 3.1 user (Mac natives are probably different).
Improving the "running maximized" workflow is great for people who run maximized, and doesn't make things any worse for people who don't. So I don't see any problem with it.
I tried it for a while but then I found it made me slower. These days if my mouse accidentally strays into the hot corner, I just quickly flick the mouse back there again and it goes back to normal (the hot corner can be used to get out of the overview as well as to get into it).
I'm pretty sure that Gnome Shell isn't designed to work on a touchscreen. Hot corners are useless on a touchscreen, but Gnome Shell makes use of hot corners, so it's pretty obvious that it was designed first and foremost as a mouse-based UI.
They have done a few things to ensure that touchscreens aren't broken (e.g. the big icons), but the keyboard and mouse are obviously the primary input devices.
The whole "Gnome sucks because it is a desktop environment but was designed for a touchscreen" thing is a complete strawman argument.
Sorry, but in my opinion we must stop this development here and keep our native open and closed source apps. You can't even disassemble browser apps, all you have is the front-end. At least with Windows and MS apps I know they are going to stay around and work when I need them.
From a technical point of view, there's nothing stopping open source apps from staying open after they've moved onto "the cloud".
Imagine you bought server time, let's say an EC2 instance from AWS. Then you load it up with a webmail server, a storage server, and an open-source Google Docs-style word processor. You could use this EC2 instance to serve you mail, music and documents from anywhere using any device. And you could do it using 100% open source software.
This is what open source software could look like in the post PC era, but it's a shame that most open source advocates are so vehemently anti-cloud that they will not help make this possible.
Canonical have provided the community with a polished and free OS, and they've just made a small change to include search results from Amazon when you search for things that are available from Amazon. It sounds extremely unobtrusive and might even be useful sometimes. And you can disable it easily.
It takes a lot of work to build something as polished as Ubuntu, and Canonical are the only ones who have ever achieved this. If this doesn't work and they can't find enough money to be self sustaining, it'd be a huge loss for everyone. Canonical really pushed desktop Linux forward, but it's too bad that the community is holding it back.
I suppose that code could be somewhere in the Hotmail source code, but is it likely that they would put a completely arbitrary condition like that in there?
Maybe Benioff is right - a feed is a lot like a version control log. I can't imagine developing software without git or something similar. And I'd love it if word processors and spreadsheets made it easier to track version history.
"A version of Facebook for a technical topic" would probably look like my git log - internal to my company, closed off to non-developers and full of useful information.
Skeuomorphism is a good way to communicate what an application does at a high level (e.g. "this application is an ebook reader"), but it fails to communicate the details of how to use the application (e.g. "how to turn a page" or "how to close the book").
Take iBooks for example. How do I turn a page? Do I swipe the paper or do I use the little scroll thing on the bottom? How do I close the book? With a real book, I'd grab the back cover and physically close it, but that doesn't translate to a tablet interface. The correct way to "close" the book is to tap the "Library" button on the top-left of the page. How does that make sense??
A good user interface would make it clear which physical metaphors translate to the user interface, and which ones don't. But skeuomorphic interfaces send mixed signals about the affordance of an interface. That's why Windows 8's flat UI has (some) benefits - you can't manipulate a flat surface and it is obvious that any ornamentation is there to either 1) provide information or 2) provide a way to manipulate the UI in some way. If a UI element is not doing one of these two things, then it's an unnecessary distraction.
Also IMO it just looks tacky. It reminds me of Microsoft Bob or Creative Writer. Yuck.
Why are you bringing GNOME into this? The "number of user interface designers" in the article is largely made up of ex-Apple designers. These are the ones who made Mac OS X look like it does today.
I think it's disingenuous to talk about "personal computing devices" rather than "Personal Computers" and "mobile devices". There is a useful distinction - PCs run PC operating systems, and mobile devices run mobile operating systems. The two might converge in the future, but at the moment they're two totally separate platforms.
Unfortunately Microsoft still has monopoly on the PC operating system market. It doesn't matter how big iOS's market share is; no one is ever going to try to edit a Word document on their iPhone.
My old company used to have Office 2003 installed site-wide (until as recently as the start of this year). Occasionally we'd get documents from people who used Office 2007, which uses the new XML-based file formats and ironically, only those of us who used Ubuntu/LibreOffice could open these documents.
The article is saying that super cheap tablets can be found in Shenzen. The author then goes on to imagine what this might lead to in the future, such as free giveaway promotional tablets. He mentions that this might make things tough for hardware-only sellers, who have nothing to differentiate their products from the cheap Chinese tablets. But companies that integrate their hardware with custom software (like Apple) will be OK.
You didn't read the article, did you? The author's argument was that businesses that sell pure hardware will struggle. He specifically singled out Apple as an example of a company that also sells integrated software, and therefore does not have this problem.
The flaw in your argument is that you assume that people have to choose between a pc and a mobile device. I'm perfectly satisfied with my phone and tablet, yet I still have a "proper computer". In fact I have many proper computers.
No one ever said that the post pc world would contain no pcs. The point was that a greater share of users would be doing a greater share of their computing from non pc devices.
This is exactly what happened, and the people who were insightful enough to see it coming were able to make a lot of money from their prediction.
OK, updating it for free is something that people want to do but can't do with Windows/Apple.
XP is only going to be supported until 2014, and Snow Leopard is already out of support. The kind of people who need a free (as in beer) OS are likely to be running older hardware and will only have access to an older version of Windows/Mac OS.
The video game industry takes in far more revenue than the operating system industry. It takes in more revenue than Hollywood. In fact, it takes in more revenue than OSes and Hollywood combined!
Having all of the (currently Windows-based) gamers move over to Linux would certainly break the Windows monopoly.
There's not much I enjoy more than watching their expressions as they go through the various stages of emotion while playing with the devices 1. It starts with mild confusion — a sort of 'Why have you just given me an Android device?' look 2. Following confusion is sudden realisation that this isn't Android, it's built using JavaScript 3. After a short while the excitement starts in a sort of "Holy shit!" mind-blowing moment
So people get a "'Holy shit!' mind blowing moment" because they realise it was programmed in JavaScript instead of Java? That's only because they're programmers, and they know that HTML/JavaScript has historically had shit performance and a crappy UX. Try this with non-programmers, and they will have no reason to be impressed.
Users don't give a fuck whether apps are written in JavaScript or Objective C or Java or C#.
Let's do a car analogy here. Suppose you're at a dealer's lot, checking out a car. You're looking at a car that is totally average. Nothing special, and it even felt a bit sluggish during the test drive. So you're wondering why all your automotive engineer friends are so impressed with it. Then you ask them, and their response is "Did you check out the wiring harness? It's routed really cleanly! And all the drivetrain components are totally modular and extensible!"
This is what it feels like talking to programmers sometimes. It's astonishing how so many programmers just don't get it.
Apple got it. When the iPhone was first announced, Steve Jobs didn't get up on stage and talk for two hours about what language they developed the apps in. The iPhone wasn't awesome because it used Objective C. It was awesome because you could hold a web page in your hand and directly manipulate it with your fingers! It was awesome because pinch and swipe gestures made an app like Google Maps possible on a phone.
What does Firefox OS give users that Android doesn't? All these guys have done is recreate the Android experience using JavaScript. If the users don't know what JavaScript is, why should they care?
1. people who have basic morals, and wouldn't steal a car (nearly everyone) 2. determined thieves, who are basically unstoppable (a small fraction of thieves) 3. opportunitistic thieves (most thieves)
dywolf seemed to be saying that most people wouldn't steal a car, and determined thieves would always find a way anyway, so there was no point in locking his car. He may be right if his car is a shitbox and it doesn't matter if he loses it (although I think no matter how crappy your car is, it is still inconvenient to be stranded).
However, most thieves are opportunistic ones, and the effect of engine immobilizers on theft statistics proves that. Just because you're not woried about moral people and determine thieves, doesn't mean you can ignore opportunistic thieves.
When the car makers all started to introduce engine immobilizers, the rate of car thefts plunged. (An immobilizer is a device that prevents hot wiring)
If your reasoning was true then immobolizers would not have had any effect.
Yes a determined and well equipped theif will always find a way in. Unfortunately, most vehicle thefts are opportunistic crimes, and it is definitely worth trying to prevent that by locking your car.
Not too long ago, iPhone developers used to complain about how fragmented the Android market was. One iOS developer told me that it was much easier to develop for the Apple ecosystem because there was a standard resolution on all screens, but you never knew what an Android phone's screen would look like. Android developers had to worry about difficult concepts like density- and scale-indepdendent pixels, whereas Apple "made it easy for developers".
Now, there are a multitude of iOS screen sizes: the original iPhone (and 3G/3GS), the retina iPhones, now the tall-screen iPhone 5, the iPad 1 and 2, the retina iPad and maybe soon the iPad mini. And because so many iOS developers have assumed the "standard" screen size, they have to resort to hacks like letterboxing old apps.
I wonder if this factored in to the decision to maintain the horizontal screen width. If all iOS apps sported true resolution independence, would they have kept the same aspect ratio rather than going to 16:9?
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As others have said, Fedora and Ubuntu Gnome Remix are good options. Just keep in mind however that both Fedora and Ubuntu time their releases so that they come in about 1 month after Gnome releases. In turn, Gnome releases are timed to be about 1 month after X.org releases. This is intentional, and is supposed to ensure that new versions of Gnome make it into the releases quickly.
The current versions are Fedora 17 and Ubuntu 12.04, which both ship with Gnome 3.4.
The next versions are Fedora 18 and Ubuntu 12.10, which will both ship next month and both have Gnome 3.6.
If you want to try out 3.6, you should probably grab an Alpha of either Fedora or Ubuntu GR.
Maybe. A lot of desktop users always run all of their apps maximized anyway. I've been doing this most of the time ever since I was a Windows 3.1 user (Mac natives are probably different).
Improving the "running maximized" workflow is great for people who run maximized, and doesn't make things any worse for people who don't. So I don't see any problem with it.
There's an extension that lets you disable the top-left hot corner (actually there are a few).
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-corner/
I tried it for a while but then I found it made me slower. These days if my mouse accidentally strays into the hot corner, I just quickly flick the mouse back there again and it goes back to normal (the hot corner can be used to get out of the overview as well as to get into it).
I'm pretty sure that Gnome Shell isn't designed to work on a touchscreen. Hot corners are useless on a touchscreen, but Gnome Shell makes use of hot corners, so it's pretty obvious that it was designed first and foremost as a mouse-based UI.
They have done a few things to ensure that touchscreens aren't broken (e.g. the big icons), but the keyboard and mouse are obviously the primary input devices.
The whole "Gnome sucks because it is a desktop environment but was designed for a touchscreen" thing is a complete strawman argument.
Well, Google doesn't give 15% of referral to Canonical, but they do pay Mozilla $300 million per year to put a Google search bar in Firefox.
Imagine if Amazon and Canonical came to a similar arrangement, and Ubuntu gained a similar usage share as Firefox.
And there was also this, spotted in the London Underground:
http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/A3QARhSCIAA2R9U,0101-353576-0-2-3-1-jpg-.html
Admittedly I've never used Ubuntu on a server. Every time I've had to set up a server, I needed to go with Red Hat.
I was only talking about desktop Linux. Ubuntu server won't be affected by this, because it doesn't have unity or any gui installed anyway.
Sorry, but in my opinion we must stop this development here and keep our native open and closed source apps. You can't even disassemble browser apps, all you have is the front-end. At least with Windows and MS apps I know they are going to stay around and work when I need them.
From a technical point of view, there's nothing stopping open source apps from staying open after they've moved onto "the cloud".
Imagine you bought server time, let's say an EC2 instance from AWS. Then you load it up with a webmail server, a storage server, and an open-source Google Docs-style word processor. You could use this EC2 instance to serve you mail, music and documents from anywhere using any device. And you could do it using 100% open source software.
This is what open source software could look like in the post PC era, but it's a shame that most open source advocates are so vehemently anti-cloud that they will not help make this possible.
Canonical have provided the community with a polished and free OS, and they've just made a small change to include search results from Amazon when you search for things that are available from Amazon. It sounds extremely unobtrusive and might even be useful sometimes. And you can disable it easily.
It takes a lot of work to build something as polished as Ubuntu, and Canonical are the only ones who have ever achieved this. If this doesn't work and they can't find enough money to be self sustaining, it'd be a huge loss for everyone. Canonical really pushed desktop Linux forward, but it's too bad that the community is holding it back.
I suppose that code could be somewhere in the Hotmail source code, but is it likely that they would put a completely arbitrary condition like that in there?
Maybe Benioff is right - a feed is a lot like a version control log. I can't imagine developing software without git or something similar. And I'd love it if word processors and spreadsheets made it easier to track version history.
"A version of Facebook for a technical topic" would probably look like my git log - internal to my company, closed off to non-developers and full of useful information.
Skeuomorphism is a good way to communicate what an application does at a high level (e.g. "this application is an ebook reader"), but it fails to communicate the details of how to use the application (e.g. "how to turn a page" or "how to close the book").
Take iBooks for example. How do I turn a page? Do I swipe the paper or do I use the little scroll thing on the bottom? How do I close the book? With a real book, I'd grab the back cover and physically close it, but that doesn't translate to a tablet interface. The correct way to "close" the book is to tap the "Library" button on the top-left of the page. How does that make sense??
A good user interface would make it clear which physical metaphors translate to the user interface, and which ones don't. But skeuomorphic interfaces send mixed signals about the affordance of an interface. That's why Windows 8's flat UI has (some) benefits - you can't manipulate a flat surface and it is obvious that any ornamentation is there to either 1) provide information or 2) provide a way to manipulate the UI in some way. If a UI element is not doing one of these two things, then it's an unnecessary distraction.
Also IMO it just looks tacky. It reminds me of Microsoft Bob or Creative Writer. Yuck.
Why are you bringing GNOME into this? The "number of user interface designers" in the article is largely made up of ex-Apple designers. These are the ones who made Mac OS X look like it does today.
I think it's disingenuous to talk about "personal computing devices" rather than "Personal Computers" and "mobile devices". There is a useful distinction - PCs run PC operating systems, and mobile devices run mobile operating systems. The two might converge in the future, but at the moment they're two totally separate platforms.
Unfortunately Microsoft still has monopoly on the PC operating system market. It doesn't matter how big iOS's market share is; no one is ever going to try to edit a Word document on their iPhone.
My old company used to have Office 2003 installed site-wide (until as recently as the start of this year). Occasionally we'd get documents from people who used Office 2007, which uses the new XML-based file formats and ironically, only those of us who used Ubuntu/LibreOffice could open these documents.
I see you didn't read the article either.
The article is saying that super cheap tablets can be found in Shenzen. The author then goes on to imagine what this might lead to in the future, such as free giveaway promotional tablets. He mentions that this might make things tough for hardware-only sellers, who have nothing to differentiate their products from the cheap Chinese tablets. But companies that integrate their hardware with custom software (like Apple) will be OK.
You didn't read the article, did you? The author's argument was that businesses that sell pure hardware will struggle. He specifically singled out Apple as an example of a company that also sells integrated software, and therefore does not have this problem.
The flaw in your argument is that you assume that people have to choose between a pc and a mobile device. I'm perfectly satisfied with my phone and tablet, yet I still have a "proper computer". In fact I have many proper computers.
No one ever said that the post pc world would contain no pcs. The point was that a greater share of users would be doing a greater share of their computing from non pc devices.
This is exactly what happened, and the people who were insightful enough to see it coming were able to make a lot of money from their prediction.
OK, updating it for free is something that people want to do but can't do with Windows/Apple.
XP is only going to be supported until 2014, and Snow Leopard is already out of support. The kind of people who need a free (as in beer) OS are likely to be running older hardware and will only have access to an older version of Windows/Mac OS.
The video game industry takes in far more revenue than the operating system industry. It takes in more revenue than Hollywood. In fact, it takes in more revenue than OSes and Hollywood combined!
Having all of the (currently Windows-based) gamers move over to Linux would certainly break the Windows monopoly.
Have you done the arithmetic?
Installing it for free is something that people want to do but can't do with Windows/Apple.
There's not much I enjoy more than watching their expressions as they go through the various stages of emotion while playing with the devices
1. It starts with mild confusion — a sort of 'Why have you just given me an Android device?' look
2. Following confusion is sudden realisation that this isn't Android, it's built using JavaScript
3. After a short while the excitement starts in a sort of "Holy shit!" mind-blowing moment
So people get a "'Holy shit!' mind blowing moment" because they realise it was programmed in JavaScript instead of Java? That's only because they're programmers, and they know that HTML/JavaScript has historically had shit performance and a crappy UX. Try this with non-programmers, and they will have no reason to be impressed.
Users don't give a fuck whether apps are written in JavaScript or Objective C or Java or C#.
Let's do a car analogy here. Suppose you're at a dealer's lot, checking out a car. You're looking at a car that is totally average. Nothing special, and it even felt a bit sluggish during the test drive. So you're wondering why all your automotive engineer friends are so impressed with it. Then you ask them, and their response is "Did you check out the wiring harness? It's routed really cleanly! And all the drivetrain components are totally modular and extensible!"
This is what it feels like talking to programmers sometimes. It's astonishing how so many programmers just don't get it.
Apple got it. When the iPhone was first announced, Steve Jobs didn't get up on stage and talk for two hours about what language they developed the apps in. The iPhone wasn't awesome because it used Objective C. It was awesome because you could hold a web page in your hand and directly manipulate it with your fingers! It was awesome because pinch and swipe gestures made an app like Google Maps possible on a phone.
What does Firefox OS give users that Android doesn't? All these guys have done is recreate the Android experience using JavaScript. If the users don't know what JavaScript is, why should they care?
Yeah exactly. So there are three kinds of people:
1. people who have basic morals, and wouldn't steal a car (nearly everyone)
2. determined thieves, who are basically unstoppable (a small fraction of thieves)
3. opportunitistic thieves (most thieves)
dywolf seemed to be saying that most people wouldn't steal a car, and determined thieves would always find a way anyway, so there was no point in locking his car. He may be right if his car is a shitbox and it doesn't matter if he loses it (although I think no matter how crappy your car is, it is still inconvenient to be stranded).
However, most thieves are opportunistic ones, and the effect of engine immobilizers on theft statistics proves that. Just because you're not woried about moral people and determine thieves, doesn't mean you can ignore opportunistic thieves.
When the car makers all started to introduce engine immobilizers, the rate of car thefts plunged. (An immobilizer is a device that prevents hot wiring)
If your reasoning was true then immobolizers would not have had any effect.
Yes a determined and well equipped theif will always find a way in. Unfortunately, most vehicle thefts are opportunistic crimes, and it is definitely worth trying to prevent that by locking your car.
Not too long ago, iPhone developers used to complain about how fragmented the Android market was. One iOS developer told me that it was much easier to develop for the Apple ecosystem because there was a standard resolution on all screens, but you never knew what an Android phone's screen would look like. Android developers had to worry about difficult concepts like density- and scale-indepdendent pixels, whereas Apple "made it easy for developers".
Now, there are a multitude of iOS screen sizes: the original iPhone (and 3G/3GS), the retina iPhones, now the tall-screen iPhone 5, the iPad 1 and 2, the retina iPad and maybe soon the iPad mini. And because so many iOS developers have assumed the "standard" screen size, they have to resort to hacks like letterboxing old apps.
I wonder if this factored in to the decision to maintain the horizontal screen width. If all iOS apps sported true resolution independence, would they have kept the same aspect ratio rather than going to 16:9?