So in other words, it has higher system requirements for baseline performance than Gnome 2?
No. Those are not other words for what I wrote. Those words have a completely different meaning. So either you twist my words on purpose (which is evil) or you don't understand me (which is retarded). Either way: You don't look good.
See, where Im from, thats generally called performing worse.
I start to believe that you actually come from a retarded background. See, where I come from people actually have a clue or if they don't, they are at least man enough to acknowledge that and ask frank questions to gain knowledge.
Again: Even on low end hardware compositing OpenGL WMs perform better than non-compositing WMs. Or in other words: GNOME 3 using Mutter performs about the same as GNOME 2 with Mutter or Compiz.
Performance *is* decreased for many people, due to the dodgy state of Linux gfx drivers.
Not all GPU drivers for Linux are bad.
GNOME 3 is also bloody slow for those without top-notch graphics cards.
You should learn to read. My GPU is totally low end but the NVidia drivers are quite good these days.
Mine is an onboard Radeon 4200 and it crawls running GNOME3. GNOME2 was faster.
So install decent drivers. For many Radeon GPUs there are at least three completely different GPU drivers: Mesa-classig, Gallium3D-based, and Catalyst. No idea which works best but if you experience bad performance with a Radeon HD 4200 which is many times more powerful than my old junk GPU then the only one to blame is yourself and your poor choice of driver.
Untrue. Most people know better. Try GNOME 3 on a netbook (for example) after using GNOME 2.
I'm not insinuating that the performance is unusable. But to say it performs faster is just sheer misinformation or inexperience. It's noticeably slower and clunky. You'd expect it to be though, because it's doing sophisticated animations, etc. If your video drivers aren't up to the task (which is probably likely, given the fragile state of Linux graphics), you're going to feel it.
As you indicated yourself, GPU drivers are a major factor. GNOME Shell relies on Mutter as WM which is composite-only. Composite OpenGL WMs (Mutter but also Compiz or KWin) can perform dramatically better than traditional WMs if the drivers are up to the task (and if the GPU was made in the last 5 or so years). So your quoted statement above is actually misinformation or inexperience. Broken drivers are not the fault of the WM or its authors. My main setup is KDE Plasma Desktop / KWin on a low-end laptop with NVidia 9200M GPU (proprietary drivers) and I swear that regarding pure rendering speed of windows composite KWin beats friggin' IceWM on my system!
So the actually informed statement about performance is "It depends."
I use Mint myself for my desktops, it works well and their kde version was always better than kubuntu.
Could you please explain to me how that would even be possible, considering that Mint never had its own KDE packages? Back in the day when Kubuntu's language files were completely broken, the Mint KDE people didn't even bother to simply add Debian's KDE localization files (that wren't broken) to a Mint repo. They kept using the Kubuntu versions.
I hope that the KDE folks don't get infected with the tablet flu for at least 10 years on.
Then you didn't get the memo about KDE's Plasma Active 1.0 release. That said, unlike others KDE simply ships additional shells for new form factors and doesn't follow the "one size fits all" approach.
Canonical never ever programmed their own printer manager. Most likely the Ubuntu version you tried first just happened to feature more current packages than the competition.
If you use Ubuntu, hate Unity, but would be happy with gnome-shell, why would you switch to Fedora instead of a simple "apt-get install gnome-shell"?
People who used Kubuntu know exactly why. Kubuntu with its KDE stack is the unloved stepchild of Ubuntu and once you've experienced how bad a desktop environment can become once it's not really supported by the distributor. Fedora is the best distribution for GNOME Shell such as openSUSE is the best distribution for Plasma Desktop.
Ubuntu wasn't always annoying. I think until recently it was one of the most polished user friendly experiences there was
Don't act as live dist upgrades never left the system completely broken. I especially remember one upgrade which left CUPS non-functional. I had to manually restart CUPS at least once per session. That was the reason I converted my last remaining Ubuntu PC to openSUSE which -- despite not officially supporting live upgrades to this day -- managed to keep the system working.
Again: The question was if those extensions are available for Ubuntu. Answer: They are. How you feel about collaboration between Mint and Canonical has nothing to do with it.
Stability? (Gave up on Kubuntu long ago, never tried Mint/KDE)
Mint KDE never had any special KDE packages. Mint's base system is exactly the same as Ubuntu's -- it just ships roughly a month after Ubuntu which means a month of bugfix patches. Mint KDE makes absolutely no sense. The only Mint KDE project that makes sense is the planned Mint Debian Edition because Debian never has current SC packages.
So? The question was whether the GS modifications from Mint will be available for Ubuntu. The answer was "Just add the Mint repos manually and you'll have it." So why do you mention LMDE at all?
And if you thing the GUI sucks: Modify the JS files and get a completely different work flow with minimal work.
Yeah, because every user wants to have to learn Javascript in order to fix a broken GUI.
Idiot. RTFA! JS makes it easy for distributors to modify the user experience. Users can just switch distributors (or wait for the official GNOME Shell Extensions website to go up). Mint 12 will provide a very different GNOME 3 user experience in Mint 12 (that's what TFA is about!!) with minimal work required.
The interface sucks and it is a resource hog. Who had the bright idea to write a DE in Javascript?
GNOME Shell is not a resource hog at all. Even my low-end laptop can run it without any trouble. And if you thing the GUI sucks: Modify the JS files and get a completely different work flow with minimal work. That's why writing a DE in JavaScript is a great idea and shipping modified JS files for GNOME Shell is exactly whet Mint 12 will do.
Qt/KDE go a similar route with QML (a JavaScript dialect). Plasma Active is already written completely in QML and with Plasma Desktop 4.8 some desktop components will be ported as well. QML/JS makes development easier and it makes customization by users and distributors easier.
Why don't they just fork the GNOME project into small and large form factors?
"Just fork"? If you think it's so easy to do to maintain a whole desktop environment, why don't you do it yourself? How do you think that would be easier than Mint's route to write a handful of GS extension files and let upstream GNOME take care of the rest?
Mint is just Ubuntu + additional repositories. Just add the Mint repos manually and you'll have it. Once extensions.gnome.org is up and running, I guess the Mint Extensions will be hosted there for everybody.
Is it? Do you know how most normal users do copy/paste? A hint: it's not with ctrl-C, ctrl-V.
How does that relate to entering search terms into Google? Keyboard shortcuts are a completely different use case from launching applications via a search term. Entering search terms is common because of Google. Ctrl-C is not because nothing in Google (or Facebook or whatever other popular website) does not require it.
That said, Mac users are way more used to keyboard shortcuts but unlike Windows Mac OS X not go through lengths to hide shortcuts.
Ok... Simple task: run a calculator. Ah, and we're talking mouse-bound users.. No usage of keyboard allowed.
That use case is totally retarded. Why should people with a mouse not use the keyboard? In which world do people not use their keyboard when googling something? With the WWW so deeply rooted in our lifes, 'type to get results' is more natural than ever. Many Mac users I know do not even start their applications via Dock or Finder. They simply enter the term in Spolight.
I'm a user of Plasma Desktop and despite a handful of apps (Firefox, Kontact, Juk,...) which I launch via QuickLaunch, I don't use the mouse at all any more to launch apps. Alt-F2 all the way for me. As for your calculator example: Why launch one at all? In KRunner I can simply type "2+2=" and the result comes right up. I think GNOME Shell as well as Unity are on the right track -- especially if they feature similar gizmos as KRunner (like the built-in calculator).
This bullshit with GPU acceleration being required in the first place, and then this additional bullshit involving LLVM, is yet another in a long list of flaws and horrible decisions.
WTF? LLVMpipe is not developed by GNOME. It's a Mesa project. LLVMpipe implementing compatibility with OpenGL API calls has nothing to do with GNOME's decision to rely on OpenGL for GNOME Shell. The decision to use LLVMpipe instead of Fallback Mode isn't even a GNOME decision. It's a Fedora / Red Hat decision: LLVMpipe happens to be good enough now and that's why Fedora will ship it by default and Xorg will be configured to use LLVMpipe as fallback driver instead of the Vesa driver or so.
LLVMpipe is a very good software renderer. Nokia conducted benchmarks and in turned out that LLVMpipe performs many times better at rendering than Qt's own software renderer. That's why Nokia decided that future Qt versions will use LLVMpipe instead of a home-grown solution that performs worse.
It is said that Apple worked on Siri for two years. So unless something very similar is in development for Android for almost two years, it'll take a while to do it again. Personally I don't care for Siri but considering that Iris for Android development was just started, another almost two years sound about right.
OK, you have barely a clue about openSUSE and OBS repos. That's fine. I have barely a clue about Arch Linux. But don't spread false infos about some made-up superiority of.deb vs RPM, please. Almost any tool can be found in some OBS repo (equivalent to PPAs) and zypper defaults to repo refresh (which can take a while depending on the speed of the chosen mirror) but zypper's '--no-refresh' option can override that as well.
OBS is the best packaging tool in existence (can also generate Debian and Ubuntu packages), delta updates are common since years (whereas in Debian/Ubuntu land I never encountered debdelta in the wild), and zypper has features, apt can only dream of (like metalink support by default, actually handling packages with multiple versions, Xz compression, etc.)
The package format has nothing to do with how the package manager behaves. Ever since SuSE became openSUSE it comes with zypper as package manager which along with OBS on the server side is just awesome.
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So in other words, it has higher system requirements for baseline performance than Gnome 2?
No. Those are not other words for what I wrote. Those words have a completely different meaning. So either you twist my words on purpose (which is evil) or you don't understand me (which is retarded). Either way: You don't look good.
See, where Im from, thats generally called performing worse.
I start to believe that you actually come from a retarded background. See, where I come from people actually have a clue or if they don't, they are at least man enough to acknowledge that and ask frank questions to gain knowledge.
Again: Even on low end hardware compositing OpenGL WMs perform better than non-compositing WMs.
Or in other words: GNOME 3 using Mutter performs about the same as GNOME 2 with Mutter or Compiz.
You missed the point completely.
Seriously: You did.
Performance *is* decreased for many people, due to the dodgy state of Linux gfx drivers.
Not all GPU drivers for Linux are bad.
GNOME 3 is also bloody slow for those without top-notch graphics cards.
You should learn to read. My GPU is totally low end but the NVidia drivers are quite good these days.
Mine is an onboard Radeon 4200 and it crawls running GNOME3. GNOME2 was faster.
So install decent drivers. For many Radeon GPUs there are at least three completely different GPU drivers: Mesa-classig, Gallium3D-based, and Catalyst.
No idea which works best but if you experience bad performance with a Radeon HD 4200 which is many times more powerful than my old junk GPU then the only one to blame is yourself and your poor choice of driver.
KDE 4 is slower than anything else.
Again: Install a decent driver.
performance
Untrue. Most people know better. Try GNOME 3 on a netbook (for example) after using GNOME 2.
I'm not insinuating that the performance is unusable. But to say it performs faster is just sheer misinformation or inexperience. It's noticeably slower and clunky. You'd expect it to be though, because it's doing sophisticated animations, etc. If your video drivers aren't up to the task (which is probably likely, given the fragile state of Linux graphics), you're going to feel it.
As you indicated yourself, GPU drivers are a major factor.
GNOME Shell relies on Mutter as WM which is composite-only. Composite OpenGL WMs (Mutter but also Compiz or KWin) can perform dramatically better than traditional WMs if the drivers are up to the task (and if the GPU was made in the last 5 or so years). So your quoted statement above is actually misinformation or inexperience.
Broken drivers are not the fault of the WM or its authors.
My main setup is KDE Plasma Desktop / KWin on a low-end laptop with NVidia 9200M GPU (proprietary drivers) and I swear that regarding pure rendering speed of windows composite KWin beats friggin' IceWM on my system!
So the actually informed statement about performance is "It depends."
I use Mint myself for my desktops, it works well and their kde version was always better than kubuntu.
Could you please explain to me how that would even be possible, considering that Mint never had its own KDE packages?
Back in the day when Kubuntu's language files were completely broken, the Mint KDE people didn't even bother to simply add Debian's KDE localization files (that wren't broken) to a Mint repo. They kept using the Kubuntu versions.
One reason: Mint's heavy handed tendency to replace the default Google search with a 'Mint-ized' version of Google search to draw revenue.
And Canonical hijacked Banshee's MP3 stores for Ubuntu. Other distributors (openSUSE comes to mind) never did that.
I hope that the KDE folks don't get infected with the tablet flu for at least 10 years on.
Then you didn't get the memo about KDE's Plasma Active 1.0 release. That said, unlike others KDE simply ships additional shells for new form factors and doesn't follow the "one size fits all" approach.
Canonical never ever programmed their own printer manager. Most likely the Ubuntu version you tried first just happened to feature more current packages than the competition.
Ubuntu choose to build off Debian testing
So far only a single release was based on Testing (10.04 LTS). The others are based on Unstable.
If you use Ubuntu, hate Unity, but would be happy with gnome-shell, why would you switch to Fedora instead of a simple "apt-get install gnome-shell"?
People who used Kubuntu know exactly why. Kubuntu with its KDE stack is the unloved stepchild of Ubuntu and once you've experienced how bad a desktop environment can become once it's not really supported by the distributor.
Fedora is the best distribution for GNOME Shell such as openSUSE is the best distribution for Plasma Desktop.
Ubuntu wasn't always annoying. I think until recently it was one of the most polished user friendly experiences there was
Don't act as live dist upgrades never left the system completely broken. I especially remember one upgrade which left CUPS non-functional. I had to manually restart CUPS at least once per session. That was the reason I converted my last remaining Ubuntu PC to openSUSE which -- despite not officially supporting live upgrades to this day -- managed to keep the system working.
Again: The question was if those extensions are available for Ubuntu. Answer: They are.
How you feel about collaboration between Mint and Canonical has nothing to do with it.
Mint uses Ubuntu repos directly. It basically is Ubuntu with another additional repo and different defaults.
Stability? (Gave up on Kubuntu long ago, never tried Mint/KDE)
Mint KDE never had any special KDE packages. Mint's base system is exactly the same as Ubuntu's -- it just ships roughly a month after Ubuntu which means a month of bugfix patches. Mint KDE makes absolutely no sense. The only Mint KDE project that makes sense is the planned Mint Debian Edition because Debian never has current SC packages.
Mint is, however LMDE isn't.
So? The question was whether the GS modifications from Mint will be available for Ubuntu. The answer was "Just add the Mint repos manually and you'll have it."
So why do you mention LMDE at all?
And if you thing the GUI sucks: Modify the JS files and get a completely different work flow with minimal work.
Yeah, because every user wants to have to learn Javascript in order to fix a broken GUI.
Idiot. RTFA!
JS makes it easy for distributors to modify the user experience. Users can just switch distributors (or wait for the official GNOME Shell Extensions website to go up).
Mint 12 will provide a very different GNOME 3 user experience in Mint 12 (that's what TFA is about!!) with minimal work required.
The interface sucks and it is a resource hog. Who had the bright idea to write a DE in Javascript?
GNOME Shell is not a resource hog at all. Even my low-end laptop can run it without any trouble.
And if you thing the GUI sucks: Modify the JS files and get a completely different work flow with minimal work. That's why writing a DE in JavaScript is a great idea and shipping modified JS files for GNOME Shell is exactly whet Mint 12 will do.
Qt/KDE go a similar route with QML (a JavaScript dialect). Plasma Active is already written completely in QML and with Plasma Desktop 4.8 some desktop components will be ported as well. QML/JS makes development easier and it makes customization by users and distributors easier.
Why don't they just fork the GNOME project into small and large form factors?
"Just fork"? If you think it's so easy to do to maintain a whole desktop environment, why don't you do it yourself?
How do you think that would be easier than Mint's route to write a handful of GS extension files and let upstream GNOME take care of the rest?
Mint is just Ubuntu + additional repositories. Just add the Mint repos manually and you'll have it.
Once extensions.gnome.org is up and running, I guess the Mint Extensions will be hosted there for everybody.
Both will be available but default will be GNOME Shell with Mint Extensions.
Is it? Do you know how most normal users do copy/paste? A hint: it's not with ctrl-C, ctrl-V.
How does that relate to entering search terms into Google? Keyboard shortcuts are a completely different use case from launching applications via a search term. Entering search terms is common because of Google. Ctrl-C is not because nothing in Google (or Facebook or whatever other popular website) does not require it.
That said, Mac users are way more used to keyboard shortcuts but unlike Windows Mac OS X not go through lengths to hide shortcuts.
Ok... Simple task: run a calculator. Ah, and we're talking mouse-bound users.. No usage of keyboard allowed.
That use case is totally retarded.
Why should people with a mouse not use the keyboard? In which world do people not use their keyboard when googling something? With the WWW so deeply rooted in our lifes, 'type to get results' is more natural than ever.
Many Mac users I know do not even start their applications via Dock or Finder. They simply enter the term in Spolight.
I'm a user of Plasma Desktop and despite a handful of apps (Firefox, Kontact, Juk,...) which I launch via QuickLaunch, I don't use the mouse at all any more to launch apps. Alt-F2 all the way for me.
As for your calculator example: Why launch one at all? In KRunner I can simply type "2+2=" and the result comes right up.
I think GNOME Shell as well as Unity are on the right track -- especially if they feature similar gizmos as KRunner (like the built-in calculator).
This bullshit with GPU acceleration being required in the first place, and then this additional bullshit involving LLVM, is yet another in a long list of flaws and horrible decisions.
WTF? LLVMpipe is not developed by GNOME. It's a Mesa project. LLVMpipe implementing compatibility with OpenGL API calls has nothing to do with GNOME's decision to rely on OpenGL for GNOME Shell.
The decision to use LLVMpipe instead of Fallback Mode isn't even a GNOME decision. It's a Fedora / Red Hat decision: LLVMpipe happens to be good enough now and that's why Fedora will ship it by default and Xorg will be configured to use LLVMpipe as fallback driver instead of the Vesa driver or so.
LLVMpipe is a very good software renderer. Nokia conducted benchmarks and in turned out that LLVMpipe performs many times better at rendering than Qt's own software renderer. That's why Nokia decided that future Qt versions will use LLVMpipe instead of a home-grown solution that performs worse.
It is said that Apple worked on Siri for two years. So unless something very similar is in development for Android for almost two years, it'll take a while to do it again.
Personally I don't care for Siri but considering that Iris for Android development was just started, another almost two years sound about right.
OK, you have barely a clue about openSUSE and OBS repos. That's fine. I have barely a clue about Arch Linux. But don't spread false infos about some made-up superiority of .deb vs RPM, please.
Almost any tool can be found in some OBS repo (equivalent to PPAs) and zypper defaults to repo refresh (which can take a while depending on the speed of the chosen mirror) but zypper's '--no-refresh' option can override that as well.
OBS is the best packaging tool in existence (can also generate Debian and Ubuntu packages), delta updates are common since years (whereas in Debian/Ubuntu land I never encountered debdelta in the wild), and zypper has features, apt can only dream of (like metalink support by default, actually handling packages with multiple versions, Xz compression, etc.)
The package format has nothing to do with how the package manager behaves.
Ever since SuSE became openSUSE it comes with zypper as package manager which along with OBS on the server side is just awesome.