Ubuntu 11.10 To Switch From GDM To LightDM 236
dkd903 writes "Earlier, during the Natty development cycle we reported that LightDM is being considered as a replacement for GDM. That did not happen for Ubuntu 11.04, but today it has been confirmed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Budapest that LightDM is finally replacing GDM in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric."
GDM (Score:4, Interesting)
Considering the number of things that get broken in GDM in every new Ubuntu release, this may not be a bad thing. For example, going from 10.04 to 11.04 gdm started displaying every single user in the /etc/passwd file, except when it randomly only displays the last one who logged in.
Extinction-level event (Score:3, Interesting)
Oneiric goes from GDM to LightDM, Firefox to Chromium and X to Wayland.
While it's not quite on the level of OS9 to OSX and definitely not without losses, 2011's Ubuntu releases will change the landscape of Linux for the better.
Re:FUCK YES! BROWSER EXPLOITS AT LOGIN! (Score:4, Interesting)
> Need I say more?
In a sane world I'd disagree. But I know we live in an insane one and it won't take long for the idiots who thought using an HTML rendering library to render the login screen will start adding net based content as plugins to the login screen. Why not put a weatherbug up? Or a news ticker. Or the phase of the moon, and getting it locally is just too much trouble. Stock tickers? Why not. Until an exploit.
Bet WebKit's squalid bulk didn't go into the 5KLoC vs 50KLoC size difference.
Re:Extinction-level event (Score:5, Interesting)
Dunno about LightDM or wayland, but Unity and Chromium are a massive step backwards rather than an improvement. Unity is buggy and a pain to use, and Chromium has shit for extensions and still won't work right with adblock. No thanks. You want a better experience, install XFCE and XDM with Compiz Fusion for the eye-candy. You want bloated garbage that makes your computer completely unsable, install the new default Ubuntu or Kubuntu distros.
Why not SLiM? (Score:4, Interesting)
The good news (Score:4, Interesting)
If you like GDM, you can use it. This is free software (in both senses), and just because Ubuntu's main branch is going a particular direction doesn't mean you have to. If you want to be based off of Ubuntu, you could do a kubuntu-like fork. If you want to do something completely different, you can switch distros (e.g. I switched to ArchLinux because I didn't want all the eye candy and complexity of what Ubuntu was doing).
And if you're really not seeing the choices you like out there, you can always roll your own [linuxfromscratch.org]. I've done that too, it's time-consuming but not particularly difficult. And if you really like doing that, you can fairly easily set up your installs with a package manager, set up a repository, and all of a sudden you're well on your way to having your own distro.
As it stands, I'm interested to see what Ubuntu comes up with, but I don't equate them to desktop Linux. There are just too many good options out there for that.
Does it have user switching? (Score:4, Interesting)
Many a time I searched for a replacement for GDM, but none of the alternatives provide the switch-user feature that I need (that is, the ability to have multiple users logged in at once, with an option to switch from one to another; useful for when there are more users than machines at home).
The best part of Unity (Score:5, Interesting)
I really like Unity, too. It got me to finally try Xfce, and I'm very happy with the change. (I've been meaning to try it out for ages, but never got around to it.)
After switching back to 'classic' I just fired up synaptic, installed Xfce and whatever recommended additions I thought looked good, logged out and back in using Xfce, and I haven't had an urge to go back yet. Granted, it's only been a few days, but the things I do every day work as well or better.
I liked it so much that I installed Xubuntu on another system, and really like the defaults they put in place there.
I think the next time I reinstall the OS on my 'regular' computer (as opposed to just upgrading Ubuntu) I'll be grabbing Xubuntu.
Re:Why not SLiM? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Extinction-level event (Score:2, Interesting)
Chromium works fine with adblock and has for the last year or so. It is also significantly faster than Firefox.
Re:Extinction-level event (Score:5, Interesting)
While I like the idea behind LightDM & prefer Chromium over Firefox, that wasn't why I said it would change Linux for the better.
I think there is a lot of dogma within the Linux universe which needs to be shaken up once in a while. Survival of the fittest and all of that. We've seen recently where LibreOffice forked away from OpenOffice in a move that was almost universally welcomed and which has breathed an incredablt amount of new life into the project. Ubuntu's move to Unity, while much less warmly received, caused a large amount of navel gazing within the Gnome ranks and I believe it will pay a lot of dividends in the near future especially with interoperability.
Is Wayland ready for primetime? Nobody thinks so yet. Is Chromium better than Firefox? Depends on your opinion. But with the major trend setting distro making these changes, it forces everyone to re-evaluate and that is the best thing that can happen.
Re:Why not SLiM? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, the username field is also the only field in which you can type clear text, thus the only field where you can actually see when you have capslock on or loaded a wrong keymap. It always drives me nuts when I have to enter my password and can't even verify that the keys I am hitting are really the keys I think they are.
Re:Why not SLiM? (Score:4, Interesting)
One reason: Why broadcast your login ID's to someone ? Make them work for it.
IT'S A CONSPIRACY!! (Score:4, Interesting)
So I have this theory that Mark Shuttleworth is actually an undercover Micro$oft operative that is being funded to create a huge community around Ubuntu and it's "sponsor", Canonical. Over time, when so many people are using it, loving it, promoting it....things start to break. Things break in Ubuntu that don't break in other distributions.
But it's not only the things that break, but Ubuntu starts changing things - not too much change all at once, but little things here and there. Not too much to move distros (at first), but things to slowly start to eat at your sanity.
More and more, Ubuntu breaks things, changes things...just enough for people to get very annoyed at "Linux". After all, Ubuntu is Linux for human beings (AKA n00bs?). People slowly start to complain to anyone who will listen that "Linux sucks".
And Ballmer does the penguin dance yet again.