Preview of Ubuntu's Unity Interface 382
itwbennett writes "In late October we learned that starting with the next release (11.04), Ubuntu would use Unity instead of GNOME as its default desktop interface. Now we know a bit more about what that will (and won't) mean for users. The move to Unity doesn't mean that Ubuntu is abandoning GNOME. It also doesn't mean that users will be forced to use Unity; they'll still be able to revert to the old GNOME interface. What it does mean, mainly, is that users will be presented with a simple interface — probably too simple for nuts and bolts types. The more 'radical shift' will be switching Ubuntu's base graphics system from the X Window System to Wayland. There users can expect that it will take some time before things are in working order. 'In other words,' says Steven Vaughan-Nichols who reviewed Unity for ITworld, 'Wayland will be an option, and one that only people who don't mind having their desktops blow up on a regular basis should fool with, in Ubuntu 11.04. By Ubuntu 11.10, it will be workable, and come the spring release two years from now, Ubuntu 12.04, we should, if all goes well, see a stable Wayland-based Unity desktop.'"
No screenshots? (Score:5, Insightful)
Text is useless. I want screenshots!
Re: (Score:2)
Ordinarily a post like this would be a troll... but in this case... Yeah we're looking a a graphical desktop environment here. Can we maybe, I dunno, see it?
Re:No screenshots? (Score:4, Interesting)
Search Google Images for Ubuntu Unity. Behold - screenshots.
That said, for shits n giggles I grabbed Unity on my 10.10 desktop to play around with it. I wasn't impressed. Maybe it'll get better by the time they make it standard, but for me, Docky was FAR more stable and polished. I'll probably just continue to use it.
Re:No screenshots? (Score:4, Informative)
The image gallery [itworld.com] is linked right after the first paragraph of the article.
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The screenshots are there, and all I can say is "ugh!". I suppose it might be ok for a netbook, or a phone, but for a notebook, laptop, or desktop (or server) that's a truly hideous interface.
"Preview" but no screenshots? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, how is this possibly a "preview" when there is not one screen shot? One link goes to an older /. article, the other goes to an all text article.
Can you please stop naming things that don't have photos like they do have photos?
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http://ubuntudevelopers.blip.tv/file/4245457/
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> I'm sorry, how is this possibly a "preview"
> when there is not one screen shot?
I'm still fuzzy on how you can call it a preview when it's been in a standard distro for a good month or so. I've been using it daily for a while, and aside from the lack of auto-hide I'm not seeing much to complain about...
Re:"Preview" but no screenshots? (Score:4, Funny)
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This is why Ubuntu has stability problems (Score:2)
They make big sweeping changes to a new technology that is not well tested or even finished, ala PulseAudio. It's for this reason it's always felt buggy to me. I honestly don't get the global appeal, Fedora is cutting edge and stable and just as easy to use, while something like Madrive is stable and easy to use. I guess the free CD promo really paid off.
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The problem with PulseAudio is not that it wasn't finished or well tested, the problem is the implementation sucks (ie. bad programmers wrote it).
I have never understood why they didn't just go back to OSS. OSS has made extensive improvements in the latest versions and can do everything ALSA/PulseAudio/whatever can do plus a lot more. On top of that everything works with OSS because it's the original Linux sound API.
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The problem with PulseAudio is not that it wasn't finished or well tested, the problem is the implementation sucks (ie. bad programmers wrote it).
I can see why you didn't log in to post that.
Pulseaudio works fine in Ubuntu if you follow the Pulseaudio PerfectSetup guide. What I find particularly confusing is why the Ubuntu maintainers didn't seem to be capable of doing this. It's gotten closer to PerfectSetup since they started using Pulseaudio but it's still not there.
On top of that everything works with OSS because it's the original Linux sound API.
Unless, of course, it's been developed since ALSA gained dominance, in which case the OSS support might be poor or nonexistent.
Please log in so modding you down can become meaningful.
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Pulseaudio has a piss-poor implementation. To this date I've not found one (not a single one!) hardware setup where it worked as well as Alsa or OSS.
Worked better than ALSA, at least, on my Compaq nw9440 laptop with snd-hda-intel, for which neither ALSA dmix nor the built-in mixing would properly function.
Sound quality is crap. Hardware capable of more than two channels (for instance subwoofers, also in laptops) gets more or less permanently ruined,
Not for me, but whatever.
Man, the hours upon hours I've lost on Pulseaudio. Insanity. You defending it would be hilarious if it wasn't so utter tragic.
I'm not really defending pulseaudio so much (I'd prefer we could all go back to OSS which would solve all of these problems to everyone's satisfaction) as indicting Ubuntu over pulseaudio. If you look at PerfectSetup and compare it to various Ubuntu releases you can see that they didn't even fucking read it before configuring s
Re:Wake up (Score:4, Insightful)
Every new Ubuntu release I try to fight with PA for a couple of days. When it's clear it's not going to work, I purge it, and all is well. (Outside of a few flash issues, of course.)
I understand what PulseAudio is supposed to do - I've had it semi-working at times. It's a great, great idea. It's badly needed for Linux. I just wish it goddamned worked for me! Best I've done so far is have everything work, except sounds queued up in the pipeline, and trickled out tens of seconds to minutes after they were called. Before PA crashed and died. I have to agree with the AC you replied to: "Man, the hours upon hours I've lost on Pulseaudio. Insanity."
You what? (Score:3)
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Been using Ubuntu for about 4 years now and I'm wondering if you are referring to the development branch or the LTS releases... because I have not had problems with memory leaks or video card drivers getting "clobbered."
Screen FX (Score:3)
I've had problems with ubuntu a couple years now. This has been common over a few different machines even using differnt graphic cards. The machine seemed prone to desktop lockups that require a hard reset, which I despise. I had pretty much given up trying to fix the problem when I discovered they install those fancy-schmancy desktop FX on machines even if you don't enable them. So after removing ALL TRACES of compiz, beryl and the ilk and installing the OPEN graphics driver for my ATi card I finally got a
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I expect this sort of thing out of developer previews or on an unstable release, but for that to behave in that manner on a full release is asking a bit much. Likewise I think that it's foolhardy to decide to switch to Waypoint when it isn't completed yet. A better idea
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Ubuntu is for those who want everything to work, even if not perfectly. They include proprietary drivers strait off their install discs for the purpose of making all hardware within your computer work on first boot. Ubuntu and Debian take a lot of pride in Apt as well, as a way to reduce the pain of dependency tracking for your normal users who just want to get Cinelerra or other useful linux apps that are rarely ever included running.
Fedora
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They make big sweeping changes to a new technology that is not well tested or even finished, ala PulseAudio.
To be fair, new technology rarely gets well tested or even finished if no-one is using it.
Pulseaudio has been a disaster though. Every new Ubuntu release seems to fix some sound problems and introduce others (e.g. going from 9.10 to 10.04 stopped the button sounds working in xbmc on my HTPC).
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Too simple? (Score:2)
probably too simple for nuts and bolts types.
If it has text-based configuration files and access to a command line, that's good enough for tinkering.
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Yeah I don't like the idea of oversimplification, but so far I haven't seen a GUI so simple that it really gets in my way (not counting the anachronistic single-tasking behavior in iOS...a single-tasking GUI didn't bother me in PalmOS, but I expect proper multitasking in any modern OS...the hardware is MUCH more powerful now).
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Yeah, but the alternative to that was KDE... you could spend days in the configuration screens trying to figure out what color you wanted the right border of a single button. (I exaggerate, but that's how it felt to me.)
Let me get this straight... (Score:2)
...shifting to brand new, undeveloped technology will produce a product that isn't entirely stable on the first release, but it should get more stable with time?
What would I do without such genius insight? Instead of generalizations, how about you dig into the meat of how it will affect users day to day in the normal workflow of them using their computers?
In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
They are duplicating the KDE 4.0 roll out plan?? *ducks*
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Everywhere else in the world I'm aware of calls something alpha if it's feature-complete but still really buggy
Actually that's a beta version that is unacceptably buggy but feature complete.
alpha versions are not feature complete
beta versions are.
Anyway, define "feature-complete". There are new features coming in KDE 4.6, and there will be more in 4.7. Is KDE4 "feature-complete" yet? Maybe they should still not have released 4.0.
Feature complete is the set of features you are going to have in your releas
Great, so what does it look like? (Score:2)
Ubuntu, where's my 10 second boot? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ubuntu, where's my 10 second boot? (Score:4, Informative)
My laptop (Asus P50IJ-X2 w/ WD Scorpio 7200RPM HDD running Lucid 64bit) goes from POST completion to login screen in about 11 seconds, and then once I log in it takes about 4 seconds for a fully loaded desktop.
When it was running Karmic it took close to 30 seconds to get to the login window.
To compare to Win7's boot time: My gaming desktop (custom PC...12GB RAM @1Ghz, i7 940 @ 2.9Ghz, 2x 10krpm WD Velociraptors in RAID0 running Win7 Ultimate 64bit) goes from POST completion to login in about 10 seconds, and then takes about 3 seconds to get to a fully loaded desktop.
So Lucid is not only fast, but if you consider the difference in specs, it looks like it boots faster than Win7.
Re:Ubuntu, where's my 10 second boot? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well that is rather hardware specific. On a laptop with an SSD harddrive and core i7 quad PLUS 8gig RAM (A very expensive sony 13" one we bought for the boss) we came close.
On my house PC with a 7200RPM disk I get 15seconds for 10.04 up to the login screen, on my laptop with a 5400RPM hdd I get about 25secs for 10.10
What I do notice with every Ubuntu install where Win7 is Dual booted is that there is often not much to choose between the two in the beginning, but that during their lifetimes Win7 tends to take longer and Ubuntu tends to stay close to fresh install speeds.
I'm not even going to bother reading the article (Score:2)
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By focusing on Unity (on Wayland or X) for Ubuntu, Canonical has essentially forked its own Linux distribution.
you arent missing much (what does that even mean???? They cant "fork" their own distro...).
Re:I'm not even going to bother reading the articl (Score:5, Funny)
With such gems in TFA as
By focusing on Unity (on Wayland or X) for Ubuntu, Canonical has essentially forked its own Linux distribution.
you arent missing much (what does that even mean???? They cant "fork" their own distro...).
Perhaps the author typed "borked" and the editor "corrected" it.
Goodbye Ubuntu (Score:3)
Best of luck. Promoting Linux on the desktop is good, but I'm tired of broken packages pushed out as stable (latest kate in Ubuntu locks up on file open) and I highly value graphical network transparency. It's back to Debian for me.
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I hate having to wait 6+ months (or 2 years if you stick with LTS) to get app upgrades, so I switched to OS X for my laptop years ago. Still use Linux on servers though.
As for network transparency, Wayland is supposed to have that... it just won't be the antiquated kind of of networking that X11 does: Slow on the Internet without a clumsy add-on like NX, and no ability for more than one user to view a window at the same time without using VNC which is also antiquated and often too slow.
Re:Goodbye Ubuntu (Score:5, Insightful)
You seriously changed from free software to payware, from the open space of Ubuntu to the walled garden of Apple, from getting updates every 6 months to having to buy updates every so many years, from having full control over your machine and software to being beholden to Apple's CEO's every whim?
Amazing... just... amazing.
May I suggest renting a computer after that Apple machine has bitten the dust? That way you have even less control over your machine while you pay even more. It must sound like data heaven to you.
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Have fun. We'll see you again pretty soon when Debian (and virtually all the other distros) switch to Wayland a year or two after Ubuntu rolls it out.
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Have fun. We'll see you again pretty soon when Debian (and virtually all the other distros) switch to Wayland a year or two after Ubuntu rolls it out.
Debian will switch when Wayland is stable and has network transparency that is more than hand waving.
Unity Namespace Collision! (Score:5, Interesting)
The Unity namespace is already occupied by http://www.unity3d.com/ [unity3d.com] a great game engine for iOS and android and support multitouch and so on. Canonical is just going to make it a PITA for one or both sets of developers searching for "unity opengl" "unity GUI" "unity multitouch" "unity android."
Unity on Unity with Unity (Score:3, Funny)
It's the Apps stupid. (Score:4, Interesting)
Are there any Wayland native apps yet? Without those, all you have is a pretty interface and nothing to do with it. Sure, you can provide backwards compatibility by running an X server on top of Wayland, but then what was the point of dumping X.org?
The X11R6 protocol has been around for a long time, because it's good at what it does. By dumping the X protocol along with the X.org server they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Re:It's the Apps stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
Apps usually don't talk directly to X11. The GUI toolkit does. If Ubuntu can get QT and GTK+ ported to Wayland (which has already been underway for a while) then most apps are merely a recompile (plus some minor tweaking) away from being native Wayland apps. Kinda like how many GTK+ or QT apps have fully functional windows versions because those toolkits were ported to Windows.
Re:It's the Apps stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
Apps usually don't talk directly to X11. The GUI toolkit does. If Ubuntu can get QT and GTK+ ported to Wayland (which has already been underway for a while) then most apps are merely a recompile (plus some minor tweaking) away from being native Wayland apps.
You don't even need to recompile. Those apps are dynamically linked to their respective toolkit libraries. So long as the libraries maintain ABI compatibility, they can implement a new rendering subsystem, and the apps would never know.
Re:It's the Apps stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)
Until you try to run them with the -display flag.
Re:It's the Apps stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
Are there any Wayland native apps yet?
There doesn't need to be. Just provide an X server on top of the Wayland graphics engine, and continue to use your old X apps. This allows for an easy transition to Wayland for those apps that would benefit from it.
Furthermore, if you implement said support down at the toolkit level (ie, Gtk and Qt), the apps needn't even realize they're running over Wayland.
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By dumping the X protocol along with the X.org server they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Since this baby is still a baby after more than 20 years and somehow won't grow up this might be a good idea after all.
See, I have nothing against X Window. But Ubuntu just *has* to target some market and this is either a market in which the ability to have an application display a window on a remote display is somehow important or another market with different priorities. And I assume the former market is so small compared to the latter that throwing that grey-haired baby out finally might be a good move.
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What about window managers? Is my X11 based window manager going to manage window decorations for my Wayland applications? Does Wayland even have window managers?
Apparently, Wayland clients will all render their own window decorations. Which sounds utterly retarded to me: I really like having all of my windows having matching and predictable window decorations, with such nice WM-enabled features as a close button which falls back to killing the application if it doesn't respond to the request to close.
From what I can tell, Wayland is going to be a massive regression in actual usability and power of the open source GUI stack in favour of something that's shiny but se
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I've long wanted to write a brand new X server from scratch. Xorg is based on the old XFree86 codebase, based on X11 from X.org....
I think Keith Packard reimplemented on from scratch and that eventually turned into KDrive which now comes with the standard xorg distribution. Also, xorg development has come a long way since they split from xfree86. There's still quite a lot of old code around (e.g. XAA), but a lot of good rewriting has happened.
Hey, but don't let me stop you :)
Also, Wayland isn't an X11 imple
Wayland and nVidia? (Score:3)
How will Wayland ever be able to run decently on nVidia cards? Nouveau is not a real option yet (it's not yet decent enough for anything beyond accelerating desktop compositing) and nVidia doesn't plan to support EGL on Linux. So how will Ubuntu fix that? I'm really curious about that.
And how does Wayland plan to implement Clipboard and Drag and Drop functionality? Haven't seen that anywhere in the tiny amount of code that Wayland currently is.
Replacing X is not a bad goal, but getting there is hard. Just writing some code that defers the hard part about graphics to a driver and omits all the rest doesn't cut it. Let's just wait and see where this thing goes.
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You seem to have the wrong idea about Wayland. It's not meant to do any of that, but to provide a slim connector between the hardware and the applications.
Putting all that stuff in one giant library is what led to X and it's persistence in the first place, nobody wants to repeat those mistakes.
Drag and Drop / Clipboard are more sent to helper programs, UI toolkits, D-Bus, etc. That way it's much easier to maintain and improve.
That's what the UNIX philosophy was all about form the beginning, one tool should
Re:I'm glad I went back to Fedora earlier this yea (Score:4, Informative)
If "weird" includes Ubuntu's adoption of Wayland, I have bad news: Fedora is also dumping X for Wayland (eventually).
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From what I've heard at least they'll wait until it's ready before they decide if they should make the switch or not.
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Re:I'm glad I went back to Fedora earlier this yea (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubuntu lets you choose too. If you want off the roller coaster and just want a stable system based on proven technology, install an LTS and wait for the next LTS. Easy.
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If "weird" includes Ubuntu's adoption of Wayland, I have bad news: Fedora is also dumping X for Wayland (eventually)
Fedora? The base OS for RHEL server systems? Is going to dump X so server admins will no longer be able to run graphical admin programs remotely from their servers to their desktop without using some horrific kludge like VNC? Apps which will apparently require OpenGL to render, on servers which don't even have OpenGL drivers?
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Is it completely impossible to get something similar into Wayland? It doesn't do it right now, but if it get enough momentum I can't think that someone isn't going to add it.
Re:I'm glad I went back to Fedora earlier this yea (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it completely impossible to get something similar into Wayland?
Every time I've seen someone ask the Wayland devs how they plan to support remote rendering, their response seems to be 'we don't. go away'.
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Wait, seriously? They're replacing X Windows with something which doesn't support remote displays?
WTF??? Is that true? That makes no sense whatsoever ... one of the best things about X is being able to have display from multiple sources.
Re:I'm glad I went back to Fedora earlier this yea (Score:4, Informative)
Wayland developers include several lead X.org developers,[9] who feel that a cleaner new design and protocol is more maintainable for the future.[14] One of them has envisaged providing remote access to a Wayland application by either 'pixel-scraping' (as in VNC and SPICE) or getting it to send a "rendering command stream" across the network (like RDP).[15] It is anticipated that X11 applications will be supported by an X server running as an application on Wayland.
Hopefully they go the RDP-like route, which im my opinion is vastly superior over the way X11 does it.
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Here's something else: you only need to run Wayland if you want to. If you still want to use X, then just run that. Choice, remember?
And how long will it be an option and not default? We all know the direction this is going. Eventually everyone will switch and wayland will eat up all the resources leaving the Xorg project, like Xfree before it, to die a slow death whether its still needed by people or not. Even if resources are provided to Xorg the interest will be with wayland and Xorg will still die a bit rot death being dropped by most oses/distros again like xfree86. Bling will win out and needed features X had for twenty years will
Huh? (Score:2)
What are you talking about? Do YOU even know what it is?
Remote rendering in X is here NOW and has been for 20+ years!!!
Hello! Just set the DISPLAY environment variable.
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The question though ultimately is whether or not it's better than some of the other techniques that people
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Confusing? X is the server, and handles connections to it telling it what to display. Like httpd (apache) is a server and handles a Web client telling it what Web page to send down the pipe. People weren't confused running the Tetrinet server, seeing the clients connect to them and output images to the screen; but they're confused running the X server, seeing the clients connect?
It is confusing because while it makes sense from point of view of the X protocol, from the point of view of the user, the "server" appears to be the client and the "client" appears to be the server. If I connect to server and request an image - in the http protocol, I connect to a server(apache), and it shows content on the client(browser). However if I am doing the same thing using X, it appears as if I connect to server(remote system), and request to show an image, and it shows content on client(my display or X-Server). What is actually happening is that the remote server's program is the client that requests to display things on the server - but that is not what the user sees. Thus the confusion of so many people, which is understandable as it is not the most logical thing unless you understand the X protocol.
-Em
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But what average Joes WILL notice is the way X can shit itself and die hard if you have a half dozen apps on and then launch something heavy like a video.
My main linux machine gets rebooted every few months and I on average have *counts* 18 types of gui apps running at once, with 3-6 instances of certain ones without issue. Have run this way for years because I'm lazy and love to just leave everything open (run a heap of daemons too).
Now if they will only fork the kernel away from Linus who STILL refuses to have a stable hardware ABI even though OSX, Windows, BSD, Solaris, etc has had one for fricking ages which makes them a hell of a lot nicer, then we may actually have that third way.
Not this again. The reason we have no stable ABI, is because it is a FUCKING BAD idea. Besides, if you want a stable abi pick a kernel release and stick with it. There, stable ABI.
You know you are talking about the linux kernel
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X will still run fine, even under Wayland, so relax.
Re:I'm glad I went back to Fedora earlier this yea (Score:5, Insightful)
X will still run fine, even under Wayland, so relax.
Sigh, we're not talking about running X and rendering on a Wayland desktop, we're talking about running Wayland apps and rendering on a remote desktop, the way you currently can with X. The biggest single advantage of X over Windows, which the Wayland developers seem quite happy to throw away in the quest for 'The Shiny'.
Given a choice between fancier compositing effects and being able to run any program on any machine while rendering on any other machine, I'll take the latter any day.
Re:I'm glad I went back to Fedora earlier this yea (Score:5, Informative)
From the Wayland FAQ
https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/frequently-askeds-questions [google.com]
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Nvidia has no plans to support it because as of now, NO ONE USES IT. If by way of Ubuntu support it gains traction, Nvidia likely would indeed support it.
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Open source drivers are not useful for serious 3D work on Linux.
I'm currently doing serious 3D work with the Xorg Radeon driver with 4350 and 4850 cards (the former slow but fanless and quiet). The driver has been rock solid including suspend/resume. The only noticable regressions so far are lines not antialiased and bilinear filtering not working for mipmapping. These are in no way an obstacle to development work and I have every confidence these issues will be addressed in due course, and probably have already been addressed in upstream. Unlike the closed NVidia d
Re:I'm glad I went back to Fedora earlier this yea (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that Windows doesn't support X11 (at least it's apps won't act as clients - there are servers) and many, many, MANY admins get by just fine with RDP right?
X11 isn't the absolutely only way to do remote access.
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Isn't a Wayland a funded Red Hat project? It would look bad if Ubuntu got all the fame and glory for it while Fedora wasn't even using it.
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Its not a Red Hat project, the guy works for red hat but hes doing it on his own time. So say the faq at least.
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Its not a Red Hat project, the guy works for red hat but hes doing it on his own time. So say the faq at least.
Smells like a management issue at Red Hat.
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If "weird" includes Ubuntu's adoption of Wayland, I have bad news: Fedora is also dumping X for Wayland (eventually).
If only because Fedora and now Ubuntu are producing desktops for the corporate world instead of the traditional geek users.
Lightweight.
Limited.
Locked-dowm.
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If a corporate admin (as the GP suggested) gave you a regular user account with no su permissions, then of course you couldn't use apt-get.
If you want Ubuntu without unity...Linux Mint (Score:3)
Linux Mint has all the good plug ins and none of the weird stuff thats been happening ubuntu while
still being compatible with ubuntu. The window buttons are still on the right, the start button is
still on the bottom.
Linux Mint will still use GNOME for the forseeable future.
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You know, you can change the appearance in Ubuntu if you want to.
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The old "But you can tweak it just how you like it"
No thanks Linux Mint works...right from the start.
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There's not a whole lot of "tweaking" involved in right clicking a bar, unlocking it, and dragging it to the bottom of the screen. You also don't have to do it every time you reboot, so it's a one time "fix."
Heck, I drag my Windows taskbar at work up to the top... (that's less mousing around from file menus to window titles. I never understood having the task bar on the bottom of the screen in Windows or Linux. I usually remove the bar at the bottom of Ubuntu and put the Window manager in the top bar.)
Re:If you want Ubuntu without unity...Linux Mint (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe the point is, Ubuntu has abandoned "works out of the box" -- not that that ever happened. Most of us who want to use Ubuntu really want to use Windows 7, when it works, or Mac OS, when it works. It's a pity to trade on the reputation of Torvald's kernel, when we'll have to skip 11.04 and 11.10 on the recommendation of Canonical, and 12.04 on the principle that it's probably just another beta. Is that two years before Ubuntu is Ubuntu Again? I pity the support community, who is growing up and has to get on with its careers.
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Linux Mint will still use GNOME for the forseeable future.
By "still use" do you mean stick with GNOME 2 indefinitely or switch to GNOME 3? I haven't tried either Unity or GNOME Shell yet, but it seems pretty clear that they're both very different from a typical GNOME 2 desktop. I don't think it's fair to characterize Uubntu's switch to Unity as a major change for users in contrast with distributions that switch to GNOME 3.
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I'm unimpressed even as a long time Linux and Ubuntu user. In fact, I'd say it sucks.
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That's changing now. Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux, is joining Ubuntu in switching its graphics stack. Others may soon follow.
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I'm looking at switching to Debian once it requires more work to make Ubuntu power-user-friendly than to modify Debian to match Ubuntu's functionality.
The other day I upgraded my laptop because K3b doesn't work on Karmic. On Lucid, K3b worked and the wireless worked without the backported kernel modules, but now the backlight control was broken |:-|
I had to change the default GRUB2 boot parameters to include "acpi_backlight=vendor"
Now if only my laptop's webcam could be right-side-up it would be flawless...
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Yeah what's the conventional slashdot tag for this?
"uselesswithoutpics"?
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I have both.
Shameless blog punt here but look at the links below:
http://g33q.co.za/2010/10/26/using-unity-another-7-day-challenge/ [g33q.co.za] (An introduction to me using unity for seven days as my only work environment.)
I also show you how to create a custom skin for Unity.
And here is an older article where I take a preview look at Unity back in May already: http://g33q.co.za/2010/05/12/preview-ubuntu-unity/ [g33q.co.za]
Have fun!
Re:Its a different OS at that point (Score:4, Informative)
The desktop sits atop the OS. It's not a different OS, but a different GUI.
Unlike Windows or Mac, you can actually have several different GUIs installed, and even switch between them at will.
Re: (Score:3)
Bzzt! Wrong... The GUI is a significant part of what defines any consumer oriented OS. Your attitude promotes feature-instability on the desktop.
Its one of the reasons the Linux-based systems have such a hard time getting traction: The GUI stuff is treated as separate and second-class and can change from month to month. It prevents distros from being recognizable by end-users, and prevents robust vertical integration where its needed to make things convenient and understandable for the user.
Re:Its a different OS at that point (Score:5, Insightful)
That's an interesting opinion.
Perhaps it's rooted in a confusion in the use of "Operating System," or perhaps from your misunderstanding of what an OS is in general, or how the OS and UI interact. Surely, one can roll the UI into the "OS," but particularly in this case, the underlying mechanics aren't changing (there's still a GNU kernel in there), but the discussed changes are in layers between, which can be replaced if you don't like the changes.
The flexibility you chide is a strength not a weakness. When users are faced with Linux distros, they aren't experiencing the Linux OS, but the desktop interface atop the OS. When approaching a PC running Linux, they're faced often with Gnome or KDE or one of the others, probably tweaked with their distro's defaults or the previous user's preferences or tinkerings.
Further, except for us nuts-and-bolts users, few users even get into the UI they're presented with (beyond changing the background or adding widgets) after they've figured out how the launching mechanism works. Most of them are familiar and concerned with the applications they run (word processor, web browser, e-mail client). Those, for the most part, don't change when the underlying desktop changes (that is, switching from Gnome to KDE) any more than they do when applying different themes (colors, borders, fonts).
If you've ever written GUI software, you'd know that your fear-based misrepresentation (or perhaps another misunderstanding) of this is also unwarranted. Few people write application software directly to the UI (Gnome/KDE/etc), or even to the graphics layer beneath that (X/Wayland/whatever), but instead use an abstraction layer (QT, for example), for exactly the reason of removing the concern of which desktop UI it sits atop.
Underneath all of that, the OS, in this case GNU Linux, is the same.
Re: (Score:3)
Surely, one can roll the UI into the "OS," but particularly in this case, the underlying mechanics aren't changing (there's still a GNU kernel in there), but the discussed changes are in layers between, which can be replaced if you don't like the changes.
No, see, that's precisely the problem: because everything at the "GUI" or desktop frramework level is unspecified by Unix, features get provided there in an incompatible, framework-specific, way. So you *can't* replace layers if you don't like the changes - you can maybe pull, eg, parts of X, which at least has some kind of specification, or you can rip out the entire framework, and replace GNOME and all its app ecosystem with KDE and its ecosystem - but nothing in between. Modern desktop frameworks are now
Re: (Score:3)
Fair enough; the layers may be rather integrated. But I wasn't suggesting (quite) that you could take apart the UIs and piecemeal them together into some other option. There are dependencies that need to be respected, absolutely.
I think your example may be a bit more detailed than the typical user, or even just the Gnome vs KDE argument. Yes, when you switch from Gnome to KDE many of the applets, plug-ins, and supplementary do-dads go with. But the functionality, while perhaps different, is still probably t
Re: (Score:3)
End users don't care about any of that stuff. They want something with a single identity that is recognizable to THEM. What you defined is only recognizable to people like you and I. (And based on that, I would suggest Slashdotters stop referring to "Linux" as if could be a consumer desktop OS... it cannot be that any more than a transmission can be a car).
GNU/Linux is an OS with a CLI user interface. Android is an OS with a graphical user interface. They both have a Linux kernel. But just because some tech