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Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding

arstechnica.com

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Re: Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding

#91

Post by barrkel »

rbanffy wrote: post #62
barrkel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live with Windows 7 on two monitors, combined pixel area approximately 3600x1200, and it's still not enough even with Windows's more condensed by default tree views, list views, menu bars, toolbars etc. I have e.g. my desktop icons dialed down to 32x32px. I like my toolbar buttons 16x16px. I like my buttons approximately 75x25px. Information density. When running XP, as I still do on my non-Linux laptops, the total…

You have very unique needs. I am always with a lot of open windows, using small fonts and icons and usually have more than one screen at hand, but I am sure I would feel lost on a 3200x1200, at least for a while. A couple weeks ago, I discovered the big Integraph (I restore and collect interesting computers and this one was just gathering dust) screen my mother uses was capable of going up to 2048 by about 1500, I fe…

It's 3600. 1920x1200 on one screen, 1680x1050 on the other.

There's a trick to window management - I use cascading windows on the second monitor, as I detail here:

http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-win...

Re: Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding

#92

Post by AngryParsley »

ori_b wrote: post #81
AngryParsley wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Intel drivers being replaced with much more unstable replacements). Ugh, I had this same problem. Every time I upgraded Ubuntu, hardware rendering got another 10x performance decrease and more bugs. Eventually I couldn't even enable vsync, so I got horrible tearing while watching videos. I partially blame Ubuntu for this, since they could have held back Intel's driver updates. Ultimately though, it was Intel's fault…

The problem is that X had a massive amount of crap in it. Getting rid of the crap is hard, and things really had to get worse before they got better. Switching acceleration architectures to something that's not from the '80s, allowing modern hardware to effectively accelerate the UI, allowing video to interact with OpenGL and so on needed to be done, and there was really no good way to do it painlessly.

I can think of one way: don't put new drivers in your distro until they're at least as good as old drivers.

Re: Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding

#93

Post by nailer »

AngryParsley wrote: post #92
ori_b wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that X had a massive amount of crap in it. Getting rid of the crap is hard, and things really had to get worse before they got better. Switching acceleration architectures to something that's not from the '80s, allowing modern hardware to effectively accelerate the UI, allowing video to interact with OpenGL and so on needed to be done, and there was really no good way to do it painlessly.

I can think of one way: don't put new drivers in your distro until they're at least as good as old drivers.

Exactly. Have a variety of text hardware and a video test suite. Don't release the new drivers until they pass.

Re: Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding

#94

Post by senko »

randallsquared wrote: post #74
rbanffy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would be really nice if I only had one 'update' button to push. No. If you are asking for updates and fixes, you are doing it wrong. It should be automated, because you shouldn't have to bother to remember pressing a button. I set up my mother with a Linux box and sure as hell I don't count on her pressing buttons without some prompting. > As it is, 5 different things want to update practically every day. If you…

"Most likely, you will end up with five different bugs scattered throughout your system with many different libraries that really should be just one." Actually, I prefer the five. When you have a shared library, and bugs are fixed, applications that use the library might well break. Shared libraries mean that either applications are at risk of completely failing to work, or that the library developers have to flag th…

> It seems to me that the only good non-mirage reason for shared libraries was disk space usage.

Shared libraries are shared in memory too. If you have 5 separate copies of libfoo and you start up applications using them, you'll have 5 copies of libfoo in memory too. And memory is much scarcer resource than disk space.

Re: Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding

#95

Post by rsheridan6 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #57
rsheridan6 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dell did make a serious Ubuntu effort in 2007. They had a fair selection of Ubuntu machines, but they didn't make any money. Other OEMs dropped their plans to sell Ubuntu, and all you can get with Ubuntu from Dell now is a few netbooks. I bought one when they were brand new (in fact, I'm using it right now). It was not ready for prime time - there were suspend/hibernate problems, among other issues. I could not have…

Don't blame Ubuntu for the suspend/resume or other hardware compatibility problems. Dell sold you a system with hardware and software that conflict. Suspend, hibernate, et al work fine on almost all properly configured combinations of hardware under Linux. If Dell chose to sell you a system with an incomplete configuration or unsupported hardware, that's their fault, not Ubuntu's. I don't know that I'm entirely convi…

Dell shouldn't have sold the system like that, but it should work when you do a fresh install of Ubuntu. If it doesn't, then the system is only good until you reinstall the OS, even if Dell did some post-vanilla install configuration.

It didn't work after reinstalling the OS. It does with Karmic, which shows that it's not a hardware problem.

I stand by my statement. But Dell is also not blameless, and my next computer was not a Dell (and won't be).

Re: Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding

#96

Post by cma »

jsz0 wrote: post #43
nearestneighbor wrote: post #15

Am I the only one who thinks that at the GUI level Ubuntu is better than OS X? (I use Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 8.04 extensively)

GNOME itself has evolved nicely but the wheels fall off the Ubuntu UI when you start installing applications. If you're careful and only install GTK apps it's bearable but once you mix in QT apps and other non-GTK stuff you have a horrible mix of UIs that lack consistency.

You can just as easily substitute "Ubuntu" with "OS X" above since QT runs on OS X.

Re: Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding

#97

Post by sid0 »

carbon8 wrote: post #40
nearestneighbor wrote: post #15

Am I the only one who thinks that at the GUI level Ubuntu is better than OS X? (I use Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 8.04 extensively)

Gnome's biggest downside is the same core problem of the Windows interface: having a menu bolted on to each window is incredibly inelegant, redundant and wasteful of screen space.

OS X's biggest downside is that it doesn't allow an interface without menus. :)

Re: Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding

#98

Post by AlisdairO »

senko wrote: post #94
randallsquared wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most likely, you will end up with five different bugs scattered throughout your system with many different libraries that really should be just one." Actually, I prefer the five. When you have a shared library, and bugs are fixed, applications that use the library might well break. Shared libraries mean that either applications are at risk of completely failing to work, or that the library developers have to flag th…

> It seems to me that the only good non-mirage reason for shared libraries was disk space usage. Shared libraries are shared in memory too. If you have 5 separate copies of libfoo and you start up applications using them, you'll have 5 copies of libfoo in memory too. And memory is much scarcer resource than disk space.

True, although code memory space consumption is not the issue it once was. The consumption of most of the big hogs (web browsers, word processors, etc) is data-related.

Re: Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding

#99

Post by AlisdairO »

rbanffy wrote: post #35
dasil003 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think ambition is something you have to earn, more power to him. However considering the cat-herding involved in creating great user experiences from the top down, and considering how much Apple pays its engineers and designers, if he pulls this off he's 100 times the leader Steve Jobs is.

What they have earned is the right to brag. Apple has a Unix that's very polished and usable, but is not that much Unix-ish if what you need is a traditional X desktop. And OSX lacks package management.

This isn't package management for OSX per se, but if you haven't seen it already I highly recommend macports/porticus, which is pretty effective at managing package for the unix-y apps that OSX is missing.

Re: Ubuntu introduces new theme and branding

#100

Post by flubba »

cookiecaper wrote: post #60
flubba wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you captain obvious

Well, saying "I like Xubuntu better than Ubuntu" kind of makes it seem like he thinks they're different. Xubuntu is just the name of the spin that comes with XFCE by default. If you're using Ubuntu or Xubuntu, you're still using Ubuntu. The right comparison here would be, "I like Ubuntu's XFCE theme much better than their GNOME theme", or whatever the specific case is. Maybe he likes XFCE better altogether, and then…

Yep, my bad >.<
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