GNOMEbuntu Set To Arrive In October 157
First time accepted submitter Rzarector writes "Good News Everyone! Thanks to the Ubuntu Gnome Community and Jeremy Bicha, it seems that the popular distribution will ship a flavor with a relatively pure GNOME experience in the next release cycle, on October 18. At this point the effort is community based, but hopefully GNOMEbuntu will make it as an official Canonical spin, similar to Kubuntu, Xubuntu, et cetera, in the 13.04 release. This is the story: At the Ubuntu Developer Summit in May, some discussions took place on the need for a Gnome spin. On August 13, Jeremy Bicha posted on Gnome mailing lists about looking a name for the new Ubuntu derivative. After that, I had no news till Stinger gave us a thread in Ubuntu Forums. On there, Jeremy talks about working on an Alpha version! So I contacted him and he verified that GNOMEbuntu will be released together with Ubuntu 12.10."
Which Gnome? (Score:2, Interesting)
If it's Gnome 3, then screw it. It goes into the "ignored trash" category, along with the Unity flavor of Ubuntu.
If it's a Gnome 2 fork (like Mate) or other Gnome 2 flavor, then I might be interested.
We converted all our home PCs from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Xubuntu 10.04 LTS more than a year ago,. This was after testing a couple of versions of Ubuntu with Unity in a VM and seeing the train-wreck that it was. Now we're on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS.
Whis is this not a meta-package? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is is this not a meta-package? Why is it necessary to have a completely different Ubuntu for Gnome?
Re:Which Gnome? (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks like Gnome 3.6 Desktop Environment:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/GNOMEbuntu-Will-Be-Released-on-October-18th-289041.shtml [softpedia.com]
Re:Why the Slashdot anti-Unity hate? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81hhVZULnhL._AA1500_.jpg
Nice development (Score:3, Interesting)
I like Debian and Ubuntu, because of systematical structure, good packaging system and overall atitude to open system development. However, I strongy dislike Unity (nothing objective, just subjective feeling), and I love GNOME Shell. So this is good news, because I would like to work on Ubuntu and Debian, while still using GNOME stack.
It's nice to see that while with lack of resources (this and KDE version of Ubuntu are realeased without support from Canonical), Ubuntu has all popular enviroments to install. While someone like GNOME founder/now troll Miguel like to blame fragmentation why Linux isn't bringing him millions, I think having it is not bad - altough I vote for lot of integration which already have took place.
So thanks goes to devs who undertook this rather daring quest.
Re:Why the Slashdot anti-Unity hate? (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to hate Unity with a passion. But after giving it a shot, I find that its not as terrible as I originally thought.
The main reason I hated it was that you pretty much HAVE to use the keyboard to use it. Not so bad for most people, but my monitor is a 42" tv sitting across the room with my pc. I have a wireless mouse and keyboard, but I usually left the keyboard turned off and sitting on a table out of the way. Until Unity, I could access all of my applications with no more than 3 mouse clicks, and I only had to use the keyboard to enter passwords or for the occasional terminal session. Now, I leave the keyboard turned on and always accessible because I have to use it much more often to actually accomplish anything. Though I have learned that as long as I use the keyboard a lot, Unity is actually pretty decent. I still have some major gripes though.
1- Yes I can just type a few letters and the program will show up, but if I cant remember the name of the program because I only use it once in a blue moon, I need to spend 5+ minutes searching for it. I also cant get programs installed through wine to show up with a few keypresses. (Probably a PEBKAC error, but still annoying)
2- I have to jump through a few hoops to get all my app notifications to show up correctly.
3- I have 5 third party apps installed to tweak various settings in Unity that should be built in
4- I think the universal menu system is retarded. I have it turned off, but it really should be a simple checkbox in the system settings.
5- It needs a better workspace indicator. The one that is stuck on the launch bar should at least tell me what workspace I have active since I cant remove it. (I have an extra mouse button set to open workspace switching, and I have the cube set up where if I scroll on the left or right of the screen, it changes workspaces)
6- I would like the option to only show open application on the active workspace instead of always seeing all open apps on all workspaces. If its already pinned to the launchbar, the little arrows are cool, but I dont really need to see a transmission icon taking up space on my main workspace when I only have it open on workspace 4
Wow, that was more than I thought there would be. After all of that, I still use it because I feel that it has promise, it just needs more polish. I believe that by 13.10 it should be fully featured enough to be a worthy successor to Gnome 2.
Re:Which Gnome? (Score:4, Interesting)
I know plenty of people who like Gnome 3 but hate Unity
Me! Hi! I'm here!
No, really guys. OK, I get that things can get rough when major changes are undertaken in your infrastructure. Whether that is Country, State or Desktop. But really all this hating on the gnome desktop has to subside at some point in time. I mean, come on! Ok, the guys made a total mess out of usability testing (not that large scale usability testing is good in any way but still some controlled environment tests are helpful) but in general they pulled it through. Gnome shell, in the past year, has been doing leaps!