Canonical Killing Unity For Ubuntu Linux, Will Switch To the Superior GNOME (betanews.com) 386
Reader BrianFagioli writes: Today, the company admits that it is throwing in the towel on Unity, as well as its vision for convergence with devices like phones and tablets. Starting with Ubuntu 18.04, the wonderful GNOME will once again become the default desktop environment! "We are wrapping up an excellent quarter and an excellent year for the company, with performance in many teams and products that we can be proud of. As we head into the new fiscal year, it's appropriate to reassess each of our initiatives. I'm writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS," says Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and Canonical.
2018 (Score:5, Funny)
It seems 2018 will be the year of GNOME on the Linux Desktop.
Re:2018 (Score:4, Funny)
Not on my PC i would rather install Windows 10 again!
Re: 2018 (Score:5, Funny)
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When you say "work", do you mean "Gather up my information and sell it to the highest bidder?"
May I remind you of Ubuntu's less than honourable past? https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk]
Re: (Score:3)
The data is NOT anonymized. Back when this all started I sent a request to Microsoft to know what kind of data was collected. They needed my Microsoft account name and the name of the computer. They then sent me a breakdown of the data collected. 1.2 million data points for a computer that had all the provided privacy options turned off (meaning disabled in settings). The laptop was simply loaded with windows 10, minimally configured to include things like the Japanese IME, and then left, logged on, un
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So am I the only one who actually liked Unity? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was kinda cumbersome to get used to Unity at first though.
I came from the absolute opposite (non-modal) school of using a desktop (for a long time I was an FVWM user w/ sloppy-focus, later I switched to Window Maker). So this extreme modal like click-to-focus desktop in Unity felt strange at first. But IMHO Unity is quite good at what it does. In like 2-3 days I got used to it and it doesn't bother me anymore. Unity was certainly a lot cleaner and less clunky than GNOME 3 was at the time.
Unity uses the opposite user design philosophy to what I prefer for a developer's desktop (i.e. sloppy-focus for work with multiple windows). But IMHO, given what Unity aims to do, it does things extremely well from a user interface perspective.
If there are things which need to be trashed in the Linux desktop, it would be the Xlib as the default API (something like Quartz would be a good replacement and is long overdue), ALSA, Pulseaudio, and systemd.
Xlib and ALSA are the biggest reasons for the Linux desktop lagging behind everything else. They're horrible APIs. ALSA in particular is overly complicated, device specific, and complete trash. Xlib was a good design when it came out, but now that we have true-color displays, and that remote graphics make less sense it doesn't work anymore. Because ALSA and Xlib are horrible APIs, we get tremendously bloated, buggy messes of intermediary APIs to hide their overall suckiness (e.g. Pulseaudio and Qt). Pulseaudio and Qt are probably good compromises but they're the wrong solution to the problem. The problem needs to be fixed at the core libraries, not by plastering wallpaper over the cracks. Then there's Qt and MOC. Fuck MOC.
Systemd is just absolutely horrible. A jack of all trades and master of none. A bloated pig, that even its own developers probably don't understand anymore, let alone the users. it goes against the UNIX philosophy of doing only one thing and getting it right. If we want the Linux desktop to win over its rivals Windows and MacOS X, we need to push our own vision of an OS for power users. That's after all what UNIX is all about. I don't necessarily mean programmers, it could also be artists and documentation specialists. i.e. if I was a translator wouldn't I want multiple windows open at the same time with dictionaries, the text I'm working on, a glossary, etc? If I was an artist, wouldn't I want to be able to launch renders and know their status in the background while I'm working on something? An OS that empowers people and makes them productive. A desktop for large screen displays where you can work with multiple documents visible at once. Not smartphones and the card deck metaphor. Not an OS that reduces everyone to the lowest common denominator. But an OS that allows everyone to work at their peak ability.
Another thing Linux could use would be its own runtime with architecture independent binaries and application packages. Even if it's a copy of Android's. I know it isn't good for high performance apps, but we need a runtime for shovelware that doesn't suck.
Gnome 2 or Gnome 3 ? (Score:3)
I hope they use Gnome 2. Gnome 3 is for tablets.
Re: The only thing about Ubuntu (Score:5, Interesting)
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He probably had, like me, a Nokia N900.
MOD Parent up! (Score:3)
Could not agree more. I stopped using Ubuntu when they went to Gnome3. Gnome3 is a complete POS.
Wonderful? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gnome3 is awful. I really do not like using it.
So isn't it great to have an OS that lets you change your window manager for something else (like my preferred KDE5?)!
Say, whatever happened to those explorer.exe replacements in the Windows scene? I think one of them was called BlackBox maybe?
Re: Wonderful? (Score:3, Insightful)
GNOME 3, while awful, has been the least of my problems with 'modern' Linux. Weird problems with systemd often prevent my Linux system from booting far enough to even get to a login prompt. I'd switch to a different distro, but all of the major ones now use systemd. I don't want to use an archaic distro like Slackware, or a niche distro like Devuan, or a weird one like Gentoo. So recently I've been using NetBSD and really liking it. I don't know if I even want to go back to Linux.
Re: Wonderful? (Score:5, Funny)
> I don't want to use an archaic distro like Slackware, or a niche distro like Devuan, or a weird one like Gentoo. So recently I've been using NetBSD
That gave me a chuckle.
You mean you didn't want to choose between archaic, niche or weird, so you found one that is all three at once? :)
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Never had any problem with systemd preventing bootup. Are you sure its systemd? I disabled graphical login on systemd systems on some computers and it tends to work fine, with one minor issue, some times you need to ctrl+alt+f1 to a command prompt. It looks just like a minor kernel isue or something. Ive added my own jobs to systemd with no problems. Overall systemd is an improvement, simpler declarative unit files, you can still use shell scripts if you want. A more modular architecture.
Re: Wonderful? (Score:4, Funny)
Never had any problem with systemd preventing bootup. Are you sure its systemd?
Of course he's sure. All linux problems are directly caused by systemd now.
Thanks, systemd!
Re: Wonderful? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Wonderful? (Score:5, Interesting)
Care to recommend a GOOD FM for systemd?
I mean, not list of all options and files in alphabetical orders with brief explanations what each does to another obscure file without giving any clue WHY and WHAT FOR, and why should I care. I want a guide, starting with overview of the logic, structure and purpose of main components, what are the purposes and tasks of systemd, how it achieves them, and how to control and modify them, in that order.
Currently, I found only two types of systemd docs: "inventory/catalogue of options", something an already proficient systemd developer could use as reference to recall finer details of given functions, and "voodoo programming" guides. Want A: Type X, press Y, enter Z. Something for a total newbie, to get given thing done and remain none the wiser. I'm yet to find something that allows one to "enter the world of systemd", and start understanding it.
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Honestly there isn't one. Poettering is too busy shitting out code to bother writing any documentation. Now your window manager has to have systemd hooks to work correctly. I get that commercial UNIX like AIX has binary logs, but the whole point of Linux is that it's not UNIX. That's why I love the *BSD way. Clean and uncluttered with top notch documentation.
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You can hate the project and find technical fault with design decisions. That's fine. But don't tell me the documentation is bad. I think one of the reasons it conquered the Linux landscape is specifically the document
Re: Wonderful? (Score:4, Insightful)
Manpages: alphabetical list of commands/files/parameters.
FAQs: How to get things done and remain none the wiser.
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Redhat: A short document with all the "what" and none of "why" or "why would I need this" followed by an unending list of "get a job done and remain none the wiser."
Archlinux: not even that, just head first into voodoo programming.
The Linux.com starts promising... and then ends. It's the right approach but waaay too short and shallow.
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In other words, classic developer-written documentation: tells you exactly what you want to know - but you need to already know the answer in order to look in the right place.
Re: Wonderful? (Score:5, Funny)
But by all means, blame the OS because you're lazy...there are two whole other OS's to choose from depending on whether you're lazy and rich or lazy and poor, knock yourself out.
Blaming systemd for everything is the "Thanks Obama" meme for Linux users.
Re:Fuck systemd and this hipster Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Systemd is terrible and what they've been doing to Linux is also terrible.
You're assigning guilt for too many things to systemd.
No more simple ifconfig to set an ip address.
On RHEL7 and similar, net-tools is no longer installed by default, you should use the 'ip' command from iproute2, see http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.i... [lartc.org] . ifconfig and 'route' for Linux have been on the deprecation path for years, before systemd existed.
I think since RHEL6 the Red Hat documentation and training material stopped referring to ifconfig.
You need to create a file in /etc/network/eth-whatever and add some options.
This has been the way to create persistent network configuration for years (since Red Hat 5.3).
(And it's /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-${INTF})
No more "route" either, so how do you set a route?
ip route add
'ip route' is significantly better than 'route', e.g. 'ip route get ip.add.re.ss' will change your life.
Oh and the best part is things like nslookup and traceroute are not included by default!
So, install them (e.g. 'yum install bind-utils traceroute') . You can resolve names (the way most normal processes would, e.g. looking in /etc/hosts or other sources of host information as configured in /etc/nsswitch.conf) using 'getent hosts', that should be sufficient on most general-purpose servers (if you don't need to look up SRV or MX or TXT records etc.).
Neither is "man" which I had to install manually.
What distro are you talking about? This *really* has nothing to do with systemd ...
Sure give me 10,000 obscure and buggy libraries but not include core utilities like nslookup? Oh and I almost forgot. On a completely idle system, systemd is using the most cpu time out of everything else. So nice of my startup manager is the top resource hog.
On an idle system that has been up for 10 minutes, systemd has consumed less than 1 second of CPU time. A *real* resource hog</sarcasm>
Re:Wonderful? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gnome3 is awful. I really do not like using it.
I agree that the default settings for GNOME 3 in most distributions is terrible. It's actually very much like Unity if you ask me. However, it doesn't have to be that way. I was testing different distributions one day and discovered that one had a very nice implementation of GNOME. (I think it was CentOS.) Upon investigating I realized there was a setting that could be changed to go back to a traditional layout.
So could you tell us what it is? (Score:2)
Upon investigating I realized there was a setting that could be changed to go back to a traditional layout.
It would be nice if you would tell us what this setting is. B-)
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He probably installed 6.x, they're still on Gnome 2 which is quite nice.
Re:So could you tell us what it is? (Score:5, Informative)
No, he's probably talking about 'Classic Mode', which is an alternative interface provided by gnome-shell that looks more like a Win98 / GNOME 2-style desktop. It exists more or less entirely because some Red Hat desktop customers (yes, we have some!) wanted to update to RHEL 7 but wanted a more 'classic' desktop UI.
https://access.redhat.com/docu... [redhat.com]
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It exists more or less entirely because some Red Hat desktop customers (yes, we have some!) wanted to update to RHEL 7 but wanted a more 'classic' desktop UI.
Proving once again that people are willing to shell out big bucks for a quality product ;)
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Adjectives like "SUPERIOR" in the title and "wonderful" in the description tell you a lot about the author's objectivity.
I'm no Unity fan, but it did handle 4K screens well at a time when nothing else would. I do wish KDE would get its 5 together (maybe it has, I honestly haven't cared enough to check in over a year). The worst thing about GNOME is reading how AWESOME it is, and then having to use its outdated, fragmented, counterintuitive crap because it got default-installed on you. Anybody who thinks
Re:Wonderful? (Score:5, Informative)
The summary takes on a more realistic meaning if you read it in a sarcastic tone.
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The lines in question are actually quoted from Betanews. I still can't decide how sincerely they're meant. :P
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I would tend to agree, but then "geek" with the 4 digit user ID above seems to be claiming, with a straight face, "SUPERIOR" as an objective measure.
I thought: "works on my new laptop as-default-installed" was an objective measure, one that Unity was winning a couple of years ago. Not that I'm lamenting Unity's departure, but to give credit where due, the Unity group were the first to make 4K screens work well, so at the time when they had it nailed and everybody else was fumbling around with configuration
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I'm less concerned with what's "underneath" a computer desktop and more concerned with how it looks and performs "on the glass."
I'm feeling a "polishing a turd" analogy coming on, something about rub too hard on the old desktop apps and they'll get messy - especially the integrated ones where changes will smear around on everything. Gnome 3 has been baking in the sun for 6 years now, KDE 4 for 9 years, they are what they are... which is pretty damn good for the most part, but they both have tremendous room
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Say, whatever happened to those explorer.exe replacements in the Windows scene?
Somewhere on floppies I have the source code for the Toolbox one from PC-Kwik (formerly Multisoft), where I worked in the mid-90's before the company went out of business. It was a nice one, very simple and quick to use.
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So isn't it great to have an OS that lets you change your window manager
I should be able to mod this up to +6. I don't favour KDE myself, but if you do, good luck to you. I think Cinnamon is a really good desktop environment, but over the years I have used most of them and Linux lets me do that which is the key thing.
Re:Wonderful? (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile, kubuntu will continue to exist, delivering a superior KDE-driven user experience! :D
Re:Wonderful? (Score:5, Informative)
I was on KDE for around 15 years. Never used GNOME.
But when I recently upgraded from Kubuntu 14.04 to Kubuntu 16.04, there were many annoyances here and there. For example, no weather widget. Also, the notification history was gone. Dumbing down the user interface is rampant and have reached KDE.
So, I bit the bullet and switched to XFCE (Xubuntu 16.04), and it is fast, nimble and just works.
It was as simple as:
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get purge plasma-desktop
Then learning the ropes of XFCE, and adjusting the settings.
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A little late? (Score:5, Interesting)
This sounds like April 1st news. But as real news, I'm guessing that when Gnome does return to Ubuntu as the default DE, it'll be a bit customized at least. It wouldn't be too had to create the addons to make Unity users feel a little more at home on Gnome 3.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The GNOMEs moaned the loudest when Unity was forced upon the world.
The whiny wheel often does get its way.
Re:A little late? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubuntu users who were Unity skeptics didn't flock to GUbuntu, they flocked to Mint.
THIS. Mint was already on the upswing before Ubuntu switched to Unity several years ago, probably because it already seemed more polished and "just worked" upon install, whereas Ubuntu at that time still tended to require post-install tweaking even to get basic stuff like basic multimedia codecs. And (according to Distrowatch) Mint surpassed Ubuntu in pagehits starting in 2011.
Around that time, Mint dumped GNOME and began focusing on Cinnamon and MATE, both of which seem to have gained widespread acceptance.
Ubuntu potentially has a real chance here to move back into the spotlight if it made the right decision for default desktop, but I'm not sure GNOME 3 is it either. Linux Mint suffered a bit of backlash last year when it announced it wouldn't ship with multimedia codecs packaged in the ISO by default (even though it's still just a matter of a checkbox during the installation dialogs, assuming one has internet access), removing one of the significant convenience reasons people flocked to Mint in the first place. Anyhow, it would be a perfect time for Ubuntu to assert it's "not so different from Mint" anymore and increase popularity again after the Unity backlash.
But GNOME 3 is probably not the best way to do that.
[Full disclosure: Mostly these days I tend to use XFCE in Linux, because I like something a bit lighter. So I have nothing personally invested in this debate.]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
GNOME 3 has a faster workflow than Cinnamon or Unity Desktop. You can tap the top-left corner or press the Meta key and get a view of all your windows on the current desktop; create a new desktop by dragging a window between any desktops; and pull up an application by bringing up the Activities view and just typing. It pretty much gets out of your way.
Unity is basically 4x4 with zoomed-out view of all desktops at once, cluttered together, with a dock and an extra click to pull out a search bar. Cinnam
Re:A little late? (Score:5, Insightful)
GNOME 3 has a faster workflow than Cinnamon or Unity Desktop. You can tap the top-left corner or press the Meta key and get a view of all your windows on the current desktop;
Having overlapping windows that don't take up the entire screen is far faster - then you don't have to hit anything to see your windows.
And "top left" and other edge/corner actions pretty much kill virtualization and multiple monitors, where screen edge != where the mouse stops.
Gnome 3 and Windows Metro are GUIs for people who work with applications blown up full screen, and never need productivity boosting functionality like copy/paste without flipping windows back and forth.
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Re:A little late? (Score:5, Informative)
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Ubuntu users who were Unity skeptics didn't flock to GUbuntu, they flocked to Mint.
Well, I tried Mint when the Unity thing happened, but the whole, "google needs to pay us or we'll remove it from the list of default search engines in our version of Firefox" thing bothered me on a philosophical level (I know I could and I did manually add it, but they were trying to charge money to stop them from removing a feature instead of charging money to add a feature, and that rubs me the wrong way) and I immediately returned to Ubuntu. Not GUbuntu, but not unity either. You can always just apt-get
Re:A little late? (Score:5, Informative)
"The Market" seemed to be adopting Cinnamon and MATE.
DistroWatch backs you up. Take a look at where the various Ubuntus rank in their most popular list:
Mint #1, Ubuntu #3, Ubuntu MATE #15, Lubuntu #20, Xubuntu #31, Kubuntu #41, Ubuntu GNOME #54.
Mint, which has the default Cinnamon desktop, is #1. If you want Gnome 3 you're down to #54. Given that list, why on earth would they pick Gnome?
Re:A little late? (Score:4, Informative)
Debian, which is number 2 on that list, has had GNOME as default for a very long time.
But yeah, DistroWatch is probably not representative.
For instance, GNOME is specifically intended to cater to non-tinkerers. People visiting DistroWatch are probably mostly tinkerers.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Why Gnome 3? The summary says it clearly: "to the superior GNOME". Ie, 2, that is, MATE.
Gnome 3 is maybe superior to, uhm, Commodore 64's user interface with it's LOAD "*",8,1 -- but perhaps even that is unfair to C64.
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But what about the GEOS windowing system on the C64. It was the bomb!
I'm comparing GNOME3 only with the default built-in UI, it obviously loses vs GEOS.
Even Metro is slightly better, and that's like comparing whether Temujin or Attila the Hun would be the better baby-sitter for your kid.
Sigh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Going from crappy to crappier.....
Dear god just use Cinnamon and call it done...
Re:Sigh.... (Score:5, Informative)
Going from crappy to crappier.....
The recent versions of GNOME have some settings that can be tweaked to get a more traditional layout with a proper application menu. As God intended.
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Re:Sigh.... (Score:5, Interesting)
gnome seems to have a lot of momentum these days.. and whilst I don't like all the decisions I can live with most of them, except the lack of type-ahead in nautilus...
About Time (Score:4, Interesting)
While neither Gnome nor KDE are perfect, they are still the best "general" desktops for most users. Most users doesn't mean most /. users are very technical people/ I'll still very fond of Window Maker and prefer it with KDE a close second.
If FOSS developers had spent all this time trying to not copy Windows and it's use case, Linux and FOSS in general would be ahead of Microsoft and Mac.
This is good news and may yet help get more people on the Linux desktop.
Re:About Time (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't so much an endorsement of Gnome as a rejection of Shuttleworth's pie in the sky "follow every trend" style of management and their extreme desire to reinvent the wheel at every turn. Rather than use Gnome they "developed" unity. Rather than use Wayland they "developed" Mir. Rather than pursue a desktop OS they pivoted towards the phone taking over everything.
So Unity is dead like most of their other NIH house custom plumbing projects so I suspect Mir will be next. Shuttleworth would get far more bang for his buck if he spent his money helping established projects rather than trying to reinvent the wheel at every turn.
Finally! (Score:2)
I'm still very much attracted to the idea of using my phone as my primary computing device, but not so much that I want to carry the weight of Unity around with me. ChromeOS is already showing us how to seamlessly inject Android apps into the desktop space.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That's, kinda, a shame (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sticking with Cinnamon, but I am glad that Unity is effectively dead -- and Mir along with it. Now Ubuntu will focus on Wayland and Gnome, and I won't get Unity pushed to my Ubuntu machine during an upgrade. Gnome is a great backup DE for Cinnamon should it break on an update.
I never cared for Unity or the convergence philosophy behind it. Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, KDE, and other DEs will have to do unless someone wants to fork Unity for those that liked it.
They are right about one thing, though -- Linux Mint is incredibly popular because so many people prefer Mate and Cinnamon (Gnome forks) over Unity. With Gnome as the default, if Gnome merges the changes from Mint, Ubuntu would be a decent user OS again... from my perspective at least. ymmv.
Is this a late April Fool's joke? (Score:4, Informative)
Outside of Redhat's bubble, GNOME hasn't been relevant in years. The developers of GNOME went full Apple in trying to control how users use their computer.
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damn, out of moderation points... +5 for you!
gnome is largely ignored today, not being totally ignored just because of gtk ... that in turns forces you to use several gnome tools
i only know one person that used gnome3 and mostly because he uses fedora, not because he likes it, he just didn't care enough to change it.
Re:Is this a late April Fool's joke? (Score:4, Interesting)
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KDE, Xfce, Mate, Cinnamon. Basically anything but GNOME.
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CentOS 6 is on Gnome 2, so I assume RH is the same. The 7 series are on Gnome 3 IIRC.
Less hope for Ubuntu sans systemd then.. (Score:2, Insightful)
MATE (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubuntu MATE is an amazing release. Fast, capable, easy on resources, and it gets out of the way.
Mark, if you really want to ruffle some feathers, go with the real successor to Gnome 2. You had it right the first time.
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I agree. That's why I moved to Linux Mint Mate for desktops. Ubuntu's version of Mate that I was using on 14.04 was old had still had lots of not-so minor bugs. I still use Ubuntu LTS for servers. There is don't have to deal with Ubuntu's GUI craziness.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Mate is unacceptably buggy. The volume control constantly crashing -poof-. The weather applet whose weather maps have been completely busted for a YEAR with no fix in sight. I consider it by far the best-designed DE, but I don't think it has the development resources to compete.
The latest KDE is what I am trying out now, after several years of frustration on Mate, utter disgust with GNOME 3 and Unity, and disappointment in Xfce.
About time (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft gave up on the desktop/mobile convergence nonsense after Windows 8. When a hybrid desktop/mobile device becomes practical, it'll just need two different desktop environments for the two different interface modes. Simple.
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Phablets, mini notebooks - there are converged devices, just not many users for these devices.
My Nexus 5x has higher screen resolution than the "desktop" monitor I'm typing this on, and can interface to bluetooth keyboard and mouse, if I cared to.
I do wish that Jolla would have gotten some traction with their Linux based tablet/phones...
I can't say I blame them (Score:2)
Mir (Score:3)
Re:Mir (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine (hope?) this means they'll be switching to Wayland. The only reason Mir existed was for their mobile convergence platform and Unity 8. Without them, there's no reason to use it.
YEAAAAAAAHHHH!!!! (Score:2)
Man, this is such good news I'm gonna bash all my coworkers who still use that INFERIOR UNITY CRAP. ...although, I understand their crappy decision, partially: most of them are lazy to change or simply found Unity good enough, and the fact it is the default choice on the login screen also helps.
April fools? (Score:2)
Wait, too late. I'm blown away by this announcement! Canonical has been *so* invested in Unity over the years, in spite of a ridiculous amount of resistance from the community. I don't think Unity 7 is awful, though I certainly welcome the move to pure GNOME. Unity 8 has indeed been a disaster, but I really wanted Ubuntu Phone to take off. Particularly once Android support is added. I really hope this effort will continue, as Google is closing Android more and more each release.
My biggest interest is
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One step ahead of Windows but sucking all the same (Score:5, Insightful)
Today, the company admits that it is throwing in the towel on Unity, as well as its vision for convergence with devices like phones and tablets
About frigging TIME. It sucked. Royally. Props to Canonical for beating Microsoft to the punch with this idea. Having a desktop that's identical to a phone has some good points. Sounds good on paper. It's not like it doesn't have any merit at all. But it's a bloody terrible idea. And trying to shoe-horn your users into a hideous mishmash of interfaces that randomly assume two wildly different I/Os is bound to piss off a lot of people that didn't really need to be pissed off. The gain you get from "oh hey, this looks just like my phone" isn't nearly offset by all the "OMG WTF would you do that?".
One of the big reasons I just don't like windows 10. They could have made it easy. But what's easy and helpful for the desktop is nigh impossible on a phone. And what's useful to a phone is a pain in the ass for a real mouse and keyboard.
And what's the fucking point? Who runs windows 10 on a phone? Who runs Ubuntu on their phone? They were trying to position themselves to tackle the phone market, but this position doesn't make sense until you're already there. And neither got there. EVEN THEN, until you can take your phone, dock it, and have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, when what's the fucking point of making this OS try to straddle the different hardware?
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until you can take your phone, dock it, and have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard,
Oh, hey, it's been while since I looked. This is totally possible.... if you go out of your way to get a phone that supports MHL (Mobile High-Definition Link), and get a dock that then supports that. The MHL people are fragmented as hell unfortunately.
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Unity was introduced as a lightweight out-of-the-way window manager for Ubuntu Netbook Remix version, and on a small screen netbook it was actually quite brilliant compared to the alternatives. The concept of maximizing the menu into the title bar and merging it with the status bar *really* saved a lot of space on a small screen, and auto-m
Wonderful GNOME? (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the GNOME that was so "wonderful" that it resulted in the rise of multiple [wikipedia.org] forks [slashdot.org] and a mass exodus of developers? [slashdot.org] The GNOME 3 series has had to undo every major UI design change they have made because people hated it so much.
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The GNOME 3 series has had to undo every major UI design change they have made because people hated it so much.
So have they done that? It seems technically competent, but with terrible UI. If they unbreak the UI, perhaps it will be worth using again.
Gnone 2 or Mate...yea! (Score:2)
A damned shame (Score:2)
I really enjoy Unity. Hopefully it will continue to be available as an alternative window manager.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I would agree with that. KDE has some problems, but it still is the best power user desktop going. It's highly customizable compared to most of them and still has a lot of advanced features tucked away in "advanced" menu options.
It even works well for more basic uses - sort of like the Win7 interface without the MS crap infesting it. It has a good "start menu" type thing which people used to desktops of yore take to quickly.
KDE5 is still not as good as KDE4 was, but it's better than most of the other opt
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
KDE has the enormous advantage that you can operate it with the compositor OFF. That gives it very low latency over VNC; less latency even than RDP.
I tried hard to make Gnome and Unity and Mate and Cinnamon run fast over VNC, but nothing matched the low latency of KDE with the compositor off and most effects, shadows, etc turned off. Ubuntu was working on a "low graphics" mode for Unity, but it still wasn't as good has KDE minus the compositor. Now I guess that will die with Unity...
Well, shit. (Score:4, Insightful)
I really like Unity!
I barely use Unity (Score:2)
One big mess (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about only Unity: Linux/GNU in general is one big mess [altervista.org] of an OS.
If you ask people who actually use their PCs for work, most of them will tell you that the best DEs are reminiscent of Windows 95 with various small productivity improvements like Search in the Start Menu, icons only in task panel, vs. icon + application name, virtual desktops, widgets and good keyboard shortcuts. Also people generally cannot tolerate simplicity and scarcity in regard to customizability and features first introduced by Apple, now reduced to nothingness by Gnome 3/Unity/Windows 10. I know quite a lot of people who were relieved after migrating from Unity/Gnome to "old fashioned" XFCE.
For some reasons various UX wannabes try to reinvent the desktop every few years and they fail, fail and fail. The prime examples are well known: KDE4/5, Gnome 3, Unity and Windows 8/10 interfaces (yes, Windows 10 Start Menu is as horrible as Windows 8 apps start screen). It seems like modern designers are hell bent on turning your beautiful PC UIs first designed for display/mouse/keyboard, into some grayish mess of huge buttons, tons of white space and nondescript controls meant for tablets and phones. I cannot imagine a common UI which will work equally well on such distinct platforms. I suspect it just doesn't exist.
one person's fault (Score:3, Interesting)
I really don't care if he admitted he was wrong, what I care is about years of engineering effort wasted and the Linux desktop platform reputation affected because of one person dumbness.
I would expect that the Ubuntu Foundation look into this shameful failure of common sense and do something to prevent it from repeating in the future.
But I'm not holding my breath as he pays their salaries.
Bah! (Score:3)
good for both ubuntu and gnome (Score:3)
Just remember how both gnome & ubuntu advanced when they worked together. I think both grew stronger during that time and had were at their best.
They splits ways, for no good reason, sure the first release of Gnome 3 was not really up to snuff, but Unity can almost be completely remade in Gnome 3 with extentions etc. Now combining forces again, both projects can grow faster and advance at a faster pace.
Also, there is no reason why Gnome 3 wouldn't be a good fit for a phone/tablet just as much as Unity was.
Good plan but... (Score:3)
GNOME Shell is my favourite Linux desktop. I am using it happily on my CentOS 7 development machine at work. It is great that Ubuntu are going to adopt GNOME as their default desktop but you just know it is going to be tainted by one of their ugly brown/orange themes...
Re: (Score:2)
Shit, wrong damn story
Re: (Score:2)
Why would they do that when Kubuntu is already excellent? Also I can see no compelling reason to compete with Mint.
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
All these years tossed in the bin just like that. What a colossal ...
So do you think they should throw MORE man-lifetimes down the rathole after those already wasted?
Rule 1 of business: Don't throw good money after bad. It applies to other endeavors and resource types as well.
Experiments are necessary to progress. You usually can't tell for sure if something will be a great improvement, or be crippled by "gotchas", until you try it. But once you find out, first that they're failing, second that they're not readily fixable, it's time to pull the plug, stop the waste, and move on.