Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 Arrives For Testing 175
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the mixing-it-up dept.
from the mixing-it-up dept.
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."
Linux Mint (Score:2, Interesting)
If you want Gnome 3 technologies on Ubuntu, without the awkward UI, Linux Mint has a default UI called Cinnamon which moulds Gnome Shell into something usable by humans. Give it a spin.
Re:Linux Mint (Score:2, Interesting)
Also I think switching distro JUST for a different DE is retarded.
Re:I don't get it (Score:0, Interesting)
Obviously, this is completely subjective. So far I've found XFCE, Gnome 2, and KDE all much more enjoyable to use than any Windows interface.
I can get past the artwork, fonts, and icons on Gnome/KDE/Xfce/etc.
It couldn't be more simple to switch themes, icons, etc.
Windows is without a doubt snappier and the taskbar has a lot of nifty and intuitive features. [...]but basic usability is not something that needs to look good, it just needs to work.
Usability and "snappiness" are not things any of them are behind in, so no idea what you're going on about there. I can't think of anything off the top if my head that the Windows taskbar can do that you can't do in other DEs. If there is any, it's not anything I used.
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.
Compiz bugs most likely trace back to your graphics drivers, which is unfortunate, but doesn't at all speak to the state of DEs.
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?
That's what tiling WMs do, and much more. I've also used an XFCE fork that does this, but I didn't use it frequently.
Time to upgrade to this (Score:5, Interesting)
Without [6809.org.uk] the stupid rounded corners, oversized borders, transparency crap, fancy gpu and cpu hogging bullshit of Gnome and KDE. No stupid compositors that require ridiculous effects that are recipe for X crashes and stalls... Run it with a straight Nvidia OpenGL driver and Google Earth will actually run smokin' 3D flight sim even on my old P4 with a really old Gforce 256 meg AGP card. Dump pulse audio and just use good old alsamixer, and every bit of software that I want to run like VLC, Audacity, Handbrake...and the likes runs just fine without relying on stupid video compositors that hog cpu and gpu cycles. X has come a long way and to clobber it with the same crap that one would expect from a Windows PC is just plain stupid. On good hardware the speed of running a slimmed down DE is really worth it and I feel is the real future of Linux.
I try the same thing with Gnome or KDE on the same hardware and poof nothing but dog squats and rapid crash restore action on the screen.
I am thinking of doing a series of setup vids and instructional vids on how to make a killer cheap Linux box that will do Citrix, GoogleEarth, Flash, all office document formats, play bluerays and all other media and do it faster than any other system in existance.
Linux can be the fastest OS ...period.... if you do your setup right and leave the fancy effects to the programs not the FRIGGING DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT!
Don't get me wrong Gnome and KDE have their good points but good video performance and speed is not one of them they have become far to complex and fail at the basic task of doing what the user requests in an unobtrusive manner.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
...and the taskbar has a lot of nifty and intuitive features.
Like what?
Re:I hate articles like this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Whenever these kinds of articles are brought up, there is NO insightful discussion whatsoever. It's sickening, really. Instead of actually contributing to a logical discussion, every single comment on these kinds of articles says, more or less, "lol GNOME 3 sucks and only morons would like it because it's obviously trash; use a DE that actually makes sense". The problem with this kind of comment should be painfully obvious, but apparently it's not so simple with most of you. People say this in EVERY FREAKING COMMENT ON THESE ARTICLES! There is no originality whatsoever! Look, WE GET IT! You guys don't like GNOME 3! Just shut up then and leave the people who do like it alone!
It's not about you, it's about Gnome. I'm glad you like Gnome 3. I don't. It removed too many capabilities that I depended on all day every day, and not all of them have well-known ways to get them back. Or, from what I can tell in some cases, any way to get them back.
If Gnome 3 had been an alternative Gnome, or an option to something that preserved the capabilities of Gnome 2, I wouldn't care, but it was made the default desktop for Fedora 17. It took me from a cluttered but functional desktop to a clean desktop that did virtually nothing except show me what my social networking friends were up to (I don't HAVE friends!) and demolish my working space every time I overshot the mouse into a corner.
The developers of Gnome over the years have shown a consistent contempt for a large part - if not the actual majority of their users. And, since they refuse to listen on their own channels, the howling mobs have to make their voices heard where they can. Here, for instance. Besides, if all this forum offered was fulsome praise for Gnome 3, that would be too much like validation of something a lot of us don't consider valid.
If you enjoy Gnome 3, I'm happy for you, and your voice in the matter is just as valid as anyone else's. But we want the conversation to be democratic, and that means dissent as well. Be glad that there is dissent. Too much of today's discussion is conducted in echo chambers.
Why always the ISOs? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are very very many distros out there that exist as "respins" or "custom editions" which are basically debian + package-selection. For example, dyne:bolic, musix, ubuntu studio, kubuntu, ubuntu-gnome-remix. Why aren't they just published as: base-distro + package-repository + taskel (list of packages to apt-get) +
settings to change + (optionally) list of packages to remove?
I've never understood this - it hugely increases the maintainer workload, makes it harder to migrate (need to reinstall), makes it harder to try out, makes it harder to have a mixed system, and make it a real problem if the distro maintainer quits.
Perhaps someone can explain this to me, because I am truly puzzled.
Aside: yes, I recognise the advantage of, say, xubuntu (as a more minimal base-system), and I know that Kubuntu can be installed with "apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" - but why do most systems insist on clean-install from ISO as the primary (sometimes only) way to install them?
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
You're an older guy aren't you? Not trying to insult, I'm an old greybeard system builder and repair guy myself but you see we older guys have this thing called 'pride in our work" that frankly is being wiped out in the young. Maybe its because they can turn in great work and be outsourced tomorrow, maybe its the schools being run like sausage factories, hell maybe video games give them a short attention span...who knows.
What I DO know is that for every one of you and me that consider a solid job to be a point of pride there are 10,000 that will walk away the second they become bored or find the work getting hard which is why I say FOSS will never ever go anywhere on the desktop. Look at how many posted here after the first poster with obvious bugs, the compiz bugs, Ubuntu icons disappearing and Unity freezing, hell Thom at OSNews wrote an epic rant on how he was watching a video and went to switch to a message app and the whole desktop crashed.
If you are gonna get the masses to use your OS that kind of amateur hour shit just won't fly, no googling for fixes, no using CLI piles of gobbledygook as a crutch, obvious bugs like those need to be so damned rare people automatically start asking if you are having hardware problems if you find one. Whether the guys here accept it or not OSX and Windows have been that way for awhile now, sure you may get a bad driver but the OSes are pretty solid and more importantly consistent.
To get that level of rock solid consistency you are gonna have to get all those young devs to do QA, regression testing, and bug fixes, as well as get them to take real pride in their work so that when they hear about a bug like GP was having they drop working on Foo+4 and start immediately working to fix it. So far the ONLY way I've seen to get the new devs that act as you describe to do what needs to be done is cold hard cash, otherwise they start working on their "next new thing" and they frankly won't give a rat's ass about how well their last thing runs or does not run in this case.