Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 Arrives For Testing 175
sfcrazy writes "The first ISO (alpha) images of Gnome Shell edition of Ubuntu is now available for download and testing. The Gnome edition of Ubuntu will bring back a lot of hard-core Gnome Shell fans who were looking elsewhere to get the pure Gnome Shell experience. Both Fedora and openSUSE are doing a great job at offering Gnome 3 Shell experience and the arrival of Ubuntu GNOME Remix will give the project the audience it needed."
I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been a Linux user for a few years now and while I've seen great strides made in desktop aesthetics and usability, I still can't with a pure conscious say that any of the DEs are as good as or better than what comes on Windows or OSX. Windows is without a doubt snappier and the taskbar has a lot of nifty and intuitive features. I can get past the artwork, fonts, and icons on Gnome/KDE/Xfce/etc. as I get that good artists cost money and that's not something these groups have in spades but basic usability is not something that needs to look good, it just needs to work. So, what's the deal?
Too little too late (Score:2, Insightful)
They turned it from "Linux for Humans" to "Linux for morons". Trust broken. The damage is done. The certainty's gone. The spirit altered.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
...continued
Take the window previews in Windows. I used to have those with Compiz and you can enable them in Unity but the implementation is buggy. When you mouse off of them, a lot of the time they won't go away so you have to mouse back over again. Also on Windows, you can grab the bottom of a window and pull it down to the taskbar to get a maximize vertical state. Why can't I do that in Linux? Another thing that rocks with Windows is if say you download something and you right click and select "see file in folder", when the file manager opens, the file is already selected so you don't have to hunt around for it. This is a small thing but it makes a huge difference by eliminating extra work. Also, if I select "Single Click" in the Nautilus settings, why doesn't the file picker respect that? And why is the file picker stuck on "details" mode? I'm pretty sure that KDE doesn't have these problems by the way but it has other ones. The main one being how much slower than GTK based DEs it is. I haven't tried it since probably 4.6 though so this could be fixed by now.
Anyway, there are many things I like about Linux on the desktop that Windows doesn't have like focus follows mouse (a must for multiple monitors), being able to mouse scroll a non focused window when I don't have ffm turned on. I love the way the notification tray in Unity looks and works. It's super consistent and writing plugins for it is a breeze. I also like the dock in Unity with how easy it is to add functionality to a launchers right click menu something that Windows and OSX people can only dream about. I just wish Linux didn't fall down on the simple things. I really want that auto file select thing.
Re:Linux Mint (Score:1, Insightful)
I actually used gnome shell for more than five minutes and don't really want to go back to windows 95.
"Blah blah blah proven interface blah blah blah fuck change"
It's still better.
Re:Linux Mint (Score:3, Insightful)
Also I think switching distro JUST for a different DE is retarded.
Especially when you are switching to a bug-infested ubuntu clone
Re:Too little too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately "Linux for Morons" is the only thing likely to grow market share as most humans are morons.
I dont blame them really - for most people, it's just another appliance.
Re:I don't get it (Score:0, Insightful)
So where in Burson Marsteller do YOU work?
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly, however, my question I pose to all of "/." is this. Why does someone not simply take whatever was (by general consensus) the best version of Gnome before they started ripping features out of it, and then figure out which one to fork Gnome in to. Since it's FLOSS, (UIAVMM...) anything you really wanted could be build on top of an older version. Why are we still letting people so obviously out of touch with what users want or need, it's just ask for, or even demand
Here [wikipedia.org] you go! The issue with Mate being a first class citizen is multi-fold though. First of all, despite many people not liking Gnome 3, they don't want to use something they perceive as "old" so going with a Gnome 2 fork just doesn't sit well. Another issue is there were many architectural problems and inherent bugs in Gnome 2 that were solved in the new version. Do the people maintaining Mate have the chops and resources to address these issues? I think ultimately projects like Mate and Trinity (KDE 3.5) serve a great purpose to maintain a legacy environment for people that just won't have it any other way but it is very doubtful that the full force of the community will ever get behind something like this mainly for the reasons I outlined above.
Ubuntu is loosing the contact with user base (Score:5, Insightful)
This is, in my opinion, the reason why Ubuntu will die.
They did the same when they dropped a working KDE 3.5 in favour of an unusable KDE 4.
KDE chose to move to v4, but this doesn't mean that Ubuntu needed to follow.
The same applies to GNOME with the Unity twist.
The biggest value for Ubuntu/Canonical is the user base. Make them angry to loose both them and your value.
Say after me: I'll listen to the user base!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too little too late (Score:5, Insightful)
They turned it from "Linux for Humans" to "Linux for morons".
I love them for that. No, I am not kidding.
But no jokes aside, Linux is not a single system. Ubuntu is for the complete n00bs (like myself), but there are still plenty of other Linux versions for the better-informed people like yourself. Stop complaining and shop around a bit. Most are easy to download.
Why I switched to XFCE (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm using Ubuntu as a desktop environment for daily work for years now and switched to XFCE recently. The reasons are quite simple, people know them already, but allow me to reiterate them infinitely:
10 PRINT "I want a traditional, unobtrousive desktop environment ('desktop metaphor') with hidable and freely configurable panels and some way to define command shortcuts."
20 PRINT "I also strongly prefer normal windows with minimal, user-definable decoration, ordinary menus (on the top of windows), and a fast file browser."
30 GOTO 10
All of this has existed for a long time and there was no reason to change it. I use whatever session/window manager gives the above features to me. There are plenty of choices besides Unity and Gnome 3, e.g. XFCE works fine for me. Sorry if that offends Gnome 3 or Unity developers for some odd reason.