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Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

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Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#251

Post by Spivak »

DCKing wrote: post #174
frik wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome 2 and KDE 3 were pretty good. Then both shells lost their way. Why do they try to be a bad clone of macOS rather than keep being a Win98 on steriods (KDE 3) or a more simple shell for normal users (Gnome 2).

I dislike that people speak in such absolutes on this. You're expressing a personal opinion. In my opinion, Gnome 3 is amongst the best desktop shells I've ever used. It's focus on simplicity in the base, while including extensibility using, well, extensions is unparalleled. I like that I can choose my own complexity and features without resorting to editing config files or hacky black magic. It's only marred by a su…

You don't think the dconf database is more or less the same amount of black magic as editing config files?

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#252

Post by xtracto »

unethical_ban wrote: post #231
Touche wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I live in an alternate universe? Do people really think this looks good? http://toastytech.com/guis/ubuntu114defaultunity.jpg

That's a 6 year old screenshot. They've made incremental improvements since... but yes, I've grown to appreciate it. The most annoying part of unity7's interface is its alt-tab function: It toggles between apps, not windows, and that's annoying.

That's the same behaviour as OSX. At first I also hated this behaviour, coming form the Linux/Window environment. But after using it in conjunction with ALT+` (to cycle through app's Windows) I actually find it better than the standard Windows behaviour.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#253

Post by slitaz »

nthcolumn wrote: post #240
rlpb wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you. I'd like a fully free software stack across my personal devices, and I also thought that Ubuntu had the best chance of achieving this. I think the issue is in a business model that would work for Canonical. OTOH, most of the hard work is done. My Ubuntu Phone mostly works. The stack is complete. I'd love to see interested people taking that code and keeping it going. I'd spend spare time on contributing…

A number of canonical employees here I note - OP included. So what's the mood like 'a zillion lines of code and four years later' internally? Does juju look like any better bet? Go on - we won't tell... ;)

It looks like you also have a charisma at telling dad jokes.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#254

Post by Longhanks »

xorblurb wrote: post #216
bsharitt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully this means that Wayland is now the unified future for the Linux desktop. I don't think it would be too hard for Canonical to create some installed by default extensions and themes to make Unity users feel more at home in Gnome. The global menu is the only thing I can think of that would maybe be a little too tricky to be worth the effort.

Wayland is the future is now the equivalent of the year of the Linux Desktop. In a way, maybe the year of the Linux Desktop was more convincing. At least people knew why they wanted that.

Wayland is already the default in Fedora 25 and with Gnome on Ubuntu 18.04, it will most certainly be, too.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#255

Post by geodel »

jononor wrote: post #139
geodel wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in case of Snap, it is part of money making server business. So it is less likely Canonical is going to give up on that.

But then you're competing with Docker images. Not that Docker is that amazing, but I just don't see why anyone would want to use Snap instead of Docker?

I am not sure e.g. how docker image is better for openoffice or eclipse/intellij idea and so on for desktop. I think Snap fits usecase much better. May be multiple snaps combined to create a service/image for a server.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#256

Post by DCKing »

Spivak wrote: post #251
DCKing wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike that people speak in such absolutes on this. You're expressing a personal opinion. In my opinion, Gnome 3 is amongst the best desktop shells I've ever used. It's focus on simplicity in the base, while including extensibility using, well, extensions is unparalleled. I like that I can choose my own complexity and features without resorting to editing config files or hacky black magic. It's only marred by a su…

You don't think the dconf database is more or less the same amount of black magic as editing config files?

I get that this is meant as some sort of snarky reply, but you honestly made have to look up what dconf is. Vaguely recall using it a few years ago. No, I don't consider it more or less the same as editing config files as I don't need it to configure things.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#257

Post by Kostic »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #140
shanemhansen wrote: post #6

I can't tell you how happy I am to see convergence dying. My desktop is not just a big phone and people put out some atrocious user interfaces in the name of "convergence". WRT to unity, at least it's improved. Ubuntu w/ unity currently has the best multi-monitor multi-dpi user experience I've seen on linux. I have a retina laptop with 2 external displays and ubuntu unity is the only thing that just works out of the…

> My desktop is not just a big phone and people put out some atrocious user interfaces in the name of "convergence". I agree. Sadly, GNOME's huge controls also seem to be optimised for touch screens. There are several semi-maintained hacks to reduce the padding throughout the DE: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_1QSDkzYY2vc/TbVt04mk52I/A... It's a mess. I wish GNOME just automatically looked like the bottom screens…

That's a realy old screenshot. GNOME 3 doesn't look like that anymore[1].

[1]https://people.gnome.org/~engagement/screenshots/gnome-3-24-...

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#258

Post by shanemhansen »

Kostic wrote: post #257
gurkendoktor wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My desktop is not just a big phone and people put out some atrocious user interfaces in the name of "convergence". I agree. Sadly, GNOME's huge controls also seem to be optimised for touch screens. There are several semi-maintained hacks to reduce the padding throughout the DE: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_1QSDkzYY2vc/TbVt04mk52I/A... It's a mess. I wish GNOME just automatically looked like the bottom screens…

That's a realy old screenshot. GNOME 3 doesn't look like that anymore[1]. [1] https://people.gnome.org/~engagement/screenshots/gnome-3-24-...

Random nit: is it just me or is the font rendering pretty terrible in the "web" screenshot?

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#259

Post by WorldMaker »

javajosh wrote: post #212
AtticusTheGreat wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who applauds this pivot, I never saw much value in the whole convergence idea. Why would I want my laptop and phone to be the same device? This seems to follow the misguided idea in software that if two ideas are similar, just make a single generic idea that solves both problems. But then you get into leaky abstractions and have to make lots of sacrifices to get it working well for both use cases.

Application convergence already happens via the browser; this takes much wind out of the sails of OS convergence. However, it also means that browser focused OSes, ChromeBook and FireFoxOS, will probably be the ones to win, in the end.

Or WebView-based cross-platform toolkits will win, in the end. (Electron, Cordova, React Native)

Given FirefoxOS is also retired and ChromeOS seems to be in the process of being replaced by or merged with Android, I figure the cross-platform toolkits are more likely to win than the browser OSes.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#260

Post by ex3ndr »

m45t3r wrote: post #191
severino wrote: post #187

Unfortunately, I guess Ubuntu Desktop won't last much, too. Can Canonical make money from that? Nope. They even made their product less appealing when they helped Microsoft run it inside their OS. I always thought Canonical wouldn't be around much longer, and these news seems to confirm that. I'd, as a long time Ubuntu user, miss them.

The great advantage that Ubuntu have by being the most popular Desktop distro is not making money from desktop users. The advantage is that some of those desktop users are also developers, so when they need to deploy their system in Server/Cloud/IoT/whatever, they choose Ubuntu because this is the distro that they developed their application to begin with. So yeah, desktop is a afterthought for Canonical, however it…

There no need to use Ubuntu if you can use debian. Debian is almost same and very light. Ubuntu doesn't feels like this.
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