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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

#451

Post by kristianp »

frik wrote: post #136
hd4 wrote: post #125

I'm one of the people who asked for less NIH in Ubuntu in the recent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 but I didn't think they would take it this far. Jokes aside, it's sad that Unity won't be developed further. I'm one of the ones who loves Unity 7, it's always been faster and less memory hungry than GNOME or KDE for me. I will just have to cling onto the LTS for as long as possible. In the long-t…

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).

> 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 completely agree with this. Back in the Gnome 2 days I was very happy using Ubuntu. As someone who has used MS Windows for a couple of decades, the way the Gnome 3 desktop switched to Mac-style interface, without any option to change back really irritated me. I don't think I'm alone, I think there are a lot of people who have used Windows who were alienated by the gnome changes and gnome devs preference for creating shiny new things over having things that worked and had few bugs.

I have tried to customise gnome in the past and it didn't have sufficient customisibility to have a windows-style bar at the bottom with apps, start menu and clock and also menus on the apps instead of on a common bar. I did try Mate but the distro wasn't up to the quality of what it was trying to replace. This was probably 3 years ago now though.

Making the file manager like the Mac finder was pretty annoying too (I think that was KDE 4 though). So much functionality went away when they did that.

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

#452

Post by jeremyjh »

madprops wrote: post #420
jeremyjh wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think KDE Plasma 5 is really quite good. I switched to it from Unity when I switched to Arch last year. I don't ask for much from a desktop system, but I like how easy it is to customize KDE. I don't think it tries to be OS X at all - seems like a slightly more tasteful Win 7 to me; though I see that in Gnome.

Yeah, to be honest I think Ubuntu should've picked KDE. It's a more direct competitor to Windows 10 which is in my view the best desktop OS. Gnome 3 is nice, just had it installed a couple of days ago. But some things are unpolished, some don't make sense. GTK open dialogs don't even have proper image previews which has been a feature requests for a lot of years (something KDE does have).

Ubuntu has always been focused on the GNOME platform - they started with the GNOME environment and Unity itself is an alternate shell for GNOME desktop. GNOME is going to be much more familiar to their developers and users - users will use the exact same applications they'd use in Unity and they will look good and make sense. KDE is really an alternate universe, and one I enjoy and prefer for now but I don't thing this would make sense for Ubuntu. If you want a KDE-focused distribution based on Ubuntu, KDE Neon looks awesome.

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

#453

Post by brendaningram »

noobermin wrote: post #318
brendaningram wrote: post #314

Disclaimer: I don't use Gnome or Unity, I'm an i3 guy. I understand that choice in the Linux world is very important, but I also think that choice (taken to extremes) can be crippling. My opinion is that we have too many desktop environments, and too many distros. If we imagine a hypothetical scenario where in June 2010 Ubuntu committed to Gnome as the DE, imagine how much progress would have been made with Gnome in…

I'm not entirely convinced this is right. Many people worked on Gnome, I'd bet even more did so than did for Unity and Mir. It's not that having more than one project completely divided the FOSS community's resources up.

True, Gnome has had huge development carried out over the last few years. Red Hat / Fedora have been great in terms of contributing to the FOSS community.

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

#454

Post by brendaningram »

flukus wrote: post #339
brendaningram wrote: post #314

Disclaimer: I don't use Gnome or Unity, I'm an i3 guy. I understand that choice in the Linux world is very important, but I also think that choice (taken to extremes) can be crippling. My opinion is that we have too many desktop environments, and too many distros. If we imagine a hypothetical scenario where in June 2010 Ubuntu committed to Gnome as the DE, imagine how much progress would have been made with Gnome in…

I think it's more about the way effort is split. i3 would be an example of good competition, it does something the others don't. Unity on the other hand, does it do anything that couldn't have been done by changing the default gnome configuration? Competition is good but replication is a waste.

I like that quote: competition is good, but replication is a waste. One of the comments below says that Unity was a necessary experiment, and it could have resulted in something amazing. That's very true, and the world has some amazing inventions because somebody wasn't afraid to experiment.

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

#455

Post by brendaningram »

Nightshaxx wrote: post #326
brendaningram wrote: post #314

Disclaimer: I don't use Gnome or Unity, I'm an i3 guy. I understand that choice in the Linux world is very important, but I also think that choice (taken to extremes) can be crippling. My opinion is that we have too many desktop environments, and too many distros. If we imagine a hypothetical scenario where in June 2010 Ubuntu committed to Gnome as the DE, imagine how much progress would have been made with Gnome in…

I kind of agree, sorta. On one hand, freedom is freedom. You can't say "here have some freedom" then when people do what they want say, "oh I didn't mean that much freedom!" That said , I think Canonical has a responsibility to do things smarter since they (like it or not) are the face of Linux for a lot of people.

Well said, they need to do things smarter. But I guess that's what they are doing with this decision. They've determined that Unity has failed as a commercial endeavour, and now they're moving to something different. It just so happens (in my opinion) that moving to Gnome will not only be better for Canonical, but also for the broader community.

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

#456

Post by brendaningram »

reitanqild wrote: post #353
brendaningram wrote: post #314

Disclaimer: I don't use Gnome or Unity, I'm an i3 guy. I understand that choice in the Linux world is very important, but I also think that choice (taken to extremes) can be crippling. My opinion is that we have too many desktop environments, and too many distros. If we imagine a hypothetical scenario where in June 2010 Ubuntu committed to Gnome as the DE, imagine how much progress would have been made with Gnome in…

More important I guess than code contributions to gnome they stopped distributing gnome. If I am at all representative for early Ubuntu users they themselves might also have lost quite a few enthusiastic fans in the process. From what I read here they won quite a few enthusiastic users as well so it's not all black and white though.

I'm sure they lost a lot of fans with Unity. They lost even more with the Amazon search debacle. But it's almost certain that they won just as many with both of those changes. I don't really like or dislike Unity. I've used it in the past and been happy enough. Ubuntu did lose a lot of my trust with the Amazon search feature though. My grandmother used to say "trust is hard won, and easily lost".

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

#457

Post by brendaningram »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #356
brendaningram wrote: post #314

Disclaimer: I don't use Gnome or Unity, I'm an i3 guy. I understand that choice in the Linux world is very important, but I also think that choice (taken to extremes) can be crippling. My opinion is that we have too many desktop environments, and too many distros. If we imagine a hypothetical scenario where in June 2010 Ubuntu committed to Gnome as the DE, imagine how much progress would have been made with Gnome in…

While I agree that there are, in fact, way too many distros and desktops in the Linux space, I disagree with the sense that Ubuntu did damage towards a goal of fewer choices. Just because Gnome is there doesn't mean it's ultimately the best software for the job and sure they likely could have driven a lot of improvements to it but sometimes there needs to be experimentation. If Unity was more popular and found its wa…

I agree completely that experimentation needs to occur. I definitely don't begrudge them for making the decision to implement Unity.

My initial thoughts were more hypothetical - and I definitely wouldn't suggest that Gnome is the best software/DE around!

If we take Linux Mint for example - they've gone out on their own with custom/forked versions of simple things like XEd, XPlayer, XReader. That isn't experimentation, it's just a difference of product development philosophy. I'm not saying we should all be clones and all use the same software, but at what point do we say "ok, there are 57 text editors out there, let's work with one of them to improve that feature set rather than go out on our own with the 58th editor". Surely the hours of development going in to these "X" apps would be better spent contributing back to something that everybody can use and is already using.

I think for me it all comes back to a deeper philosophical and moral issue - why can't we all just get along and work together on shared solutions.

I feel like this is a relevant quote: "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

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

#458

Post by brendaningram »

pvdebbe wrote: post #375
brendaningram wrote: post #314

Disclaimer: I don't use Gnome or Unity, I'm an i3 guy. I understand that choice in the Linux world is very important, but I also think that choice (taken to extremes) can be crippling. My opinion is that we have too many desktop environments, and too many distros. If we imagine a hypothetical scenario where in June 2010 Ubuntu committed to Gnome as the DE, imagine how much progress would have been made with Gnome in…

As I see it, you are talking more about exposure than choice. I agree having GNOME on the spotlights will draw people to it and stuff will get fixed and possibly better. Never liked Unity but didn't use it ever either. And having defaults doesn't imply a lack of choice IMO. It is still easy to change DEs on a vanilla Ubuntu as it should be. I don't bother with the variants, I just install vanilla Ubuntu and install m…

All true. We're all free to install any DE environment we want. But defaults are definitely useful to the entry level Linux users. I would love to see the day when the first (and easiest) choice for Joe Dad and Mary Mum setting up a computer for themselves and their kids is Linux with an easy to use DE instead of Win10/MacOS, with defaults that include LibreOffice instead of Pages/Office365, Firefox instead of Safari/Edge, and more.

Yes, many distros offer this out of the box right now, but it's not at the forefront of Joe-average's mind, because it's still not easy enough.

I just think that if there was less fragmentation (see my Linux Mint XEd example above), we could make much faster progress toward a FOSS world for the average user. Note, I'm talking about less fragmentation - not zero fragmentation.

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

#459

Post by gurkendoktor »

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-...

I am on GNOME 3.22 and the title bars are still crazy - look at the Night Light screenshot for example.

Most GNOME apps look great because they titlebar is actually a toolbar, but I spend most of my time in portable third-party apps which have large, empty titlebars. This is the one thing I immediately envy when I see a Unity screenshot.

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