Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

extremetech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 194 posts

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#91

Post by TylerE »

mindslight wrote: post #66
gerggerg wrote: post #26

Canonical is genuinely trying to make linux the most user friendly it's ever been and make it ready for real mass adoption. It's not going to be easy and not everyone is going to like every change but you can't get so down on them for trying so hard. Saying the solution is to go backwards is the same as telling canonical to just stop trying all together. There's no point in stagnating and sticking with gnome. New use…

The problem, like everything Ubuntu, is that it may be 'user friendly' when everything works perfectly, but when you want to do something different or something fails, it's anything but. You're left fighting multiple levels of indirection, trying to figure out what the system is actually doing so you can fix it . Much of the indirection comes from Debian, but it seems Ubuntu finds a single use-case, and then builds m…

I've been running Arch on a vps for a few months and I really like it. It feels like a more modern slackware + good package management. Very solid, and it doesn't pointlessly deviate from the standard way of doing things.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#92

Post by Legion »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #86
cletus wrote: post #81

It honestly boggles my mind that people can't read things like these and see that it's "choice" here that's why Linux on the desktop is doomed to be nothing more than a niche product for us geeks. Desktops succeed because they're consistent. Possibly the most important thing is to have a consistent API. X at this point is venerable. Nascent Linux desktops come complete with cruft. Lots of cruft. Honestly I can unders…

I don't ever want Linux on the desktop to succeed then if I have to sacrifice choice. I'm thrilled with Ubuntu every day, and if I had to sacrifice any of the flexibiltiy and customization I enjoy... well, I'd just use OS X. Also, I have no freaking idea how your Ubuntu feels sluggish. Being in Ubuntu on my Quad/8GB is vastly faster than being in Windows.

It seems to me, though, that there's room for all the people interested in developing a "for everyone" UI to rally around a single project.

The people interested in making Unity/Gnome 3/etc aren't the people interested in making ratpoison.

I wish desktop Linux would look a lot more like Rails 3: a "sensible defaults" stack that is ready-made for picking up and using, but with the ability to easily swap out SuperFriendlyDesktop for MyBadassTilingWM, the same way I might swap out ActiveRecord for DataMapper.

Of course, every distro thinks they're that, or are trying to be that. The problem is that there's no agreement on those defaults, partly because none of them are good enough (partly because they're no agreement, and around and around we go...)

The problem we're seeing with fragmentation isn't choice per se, but rather what we're seeing proven over and over again is that everyone trying to create their own "friendly" desktops results in none of the projects getting enough traction to get over the hump.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#93

Post by bascule »

Desktop Linux users are flocking to a distro that looks like an uglier version of Windows 2000?

"Tonight we're gonna GUI like it's 1999!"

I guess if they had any aesthetic sense, they'd probably be switching to OS X...

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#94

Post by DanBC »

old-gregg wrote: post #83
ChuckMcM wrote: post #56

Personally I found it a bit snarky. By the same token I find that UI wars are the most vitriolic, after all they are the way you talk to the machine day in and day out. Screwing with that, screws with everything. I have found Ubuntu's strategy interesting because it seemed clear that while KDE was following general guidelines around Microsoft OSes to be more accessible, and Gnome was following general guidelines arou…

Great comment. But allow me to disagree on comparing Gnome 2 to OSX. In my opinion old Gnome was exactly what you're talking about: "driving off the road". It wasn't like Windows or OSX, it was its own thing, the best desktop environment, in my opinion. The only element reminiscent of OSX (only visually, not functionally) perhaps was the menu at the top. Unity, on the other hand, is the exact replica of Gnome 3, just…

> Frankly, I'm not even sure it's possible to "drive off teh road to a new place" when it comes to desktop UX

Sure it is.

3d file managers[1] never took off. With todays hardware they'd be a lot nicer to use.

Users have been limited to quite small (sorry about my incorrect terminology here, I'm going to go read some man pages) total virtual screen size within which their windows were located. Now graphics cards, and system memory, are huge; this leads to possible radical new interfaces.

Imagine a "Zoomable UI" - documents open in their own full size window; any document opens in its own window tiled next to it; the user can zoom in as far as they like to do detail work, or out as far as they like to organise all these documents. Programs would open toolbars in their own windows. Any toolbar would be able to work on any document (because it's Unix, so all input and output is text, right?) - but the result wouldn't necessarily make any sense.

That's not particularly radical; tiling WMs exist already.

[1] (http://nooface.net/3dui.shtml) {my favourite is FSV.}

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#95

Post by [deleted] »

old-gregg wrote: post #83
ChuckMcM wrote: post #56

Personally I found it a bit snarky. By the same token I find that UI wars are the most vitriolic, after all they are the way you talk to the machine day in and day out. Screwing with that, screws with everything. I have found Ubuntu's strategy interesting because it seemed clear that while KDE was following general guidelines around Microsoft OSes to be more accessible, and Gnome was following general guidelines arou…

Great comment. But allow me to disagree on comparing Gnome 2 to OSX. In my opinion old Gnome was exactly what you're talking about: "driving off the road". It wasn't like Windows or OSX, it was its own thing, the best desktop environment, in my opinion. The only element reminiscent of OSX (only visually, not functionally) perhaps was the menu at the top. Unity, on the other hand, is the exact replica of Gnome 3, just…

[deleted]

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#96

Post by keithpeter »

jcastro wrote: post #87
gcp wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close. I forgot which one gnome-shell is exactly, but the GNOME 3 fallback is broken with VirtualBox seamless mode, and the GNOME 2 (or was it GNOME3-pretending-to-be-GNOME2?) fallback has by default an entirely messed up panel. It's easy to waste a day trying all these alternatives to get something that works. I don't call that an easy-to-use distro. Particularly as it's a regression .

That's the fallback from GNOME. The old "classic" panel look has been deprecated upstream, it doesn't really exist any more so I don't know what you're expecting Ubuntu to do in this case.

I'd suggest 'panel people' have a look at Xubuntu.

I don't expect Canonical to do anything, but I'd like them to include the Xubuntu desktop packages in the long term release support cycle as an option for users.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#97

Post by TylerE »

pekk wrote: post #55
gks wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extremely doubtful that we'll see Ubuntu as a contender to iOS and Android. If you're going to run linux on a tablet-sized device, why not just use Android? It has an existing application store(s), and more importantly an existing userbase. Look at WebOS, if there's any competition out there to compete with Android or iOS WebOS would be the best option. From everything I've seen and heard it is quite fantastic. If no…

Android is 'built on' Linux but it doesn't expose Linux to users in any remotely meaningful way (contrast, for example, with Maemo). I agree with you that it's doubtful, but if Ubuntu doesn't do it then I just don't think it can be done - Fedora and Debian aren't even going to try and most other distros don't even have the resources to start.

Depends on what you mean by expose. Root it, install terminal app, and go nuts.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#98

Post by DanBC »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #64

I still can't understand why Canonical doesn't just put out a Gubuntu similar to Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc. That way, they can keep pushing Unity forward while making it reasonably easy for uses who prefer Gnome to choose that option. I know it's possible to get gnome running (I did it on my netbook, which is running 11.10 - my desktop is still on 10.10), but the method feels unnecessarily hacky.

Because Gnome is breaking traditional Gnome workflows; Gnome 2.xx is only going to work for so long before dependency hell sets in; and Gnome 3 has some of the same problems for users as Unity.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#99

Post by keithpeter »

hackoder wrote: post #44

I use awesome wm on my debian laptop, but I prefer Unity and Gnome Shell to the old gnome 2 or kde or xfce. They are really starting to come together as coherent interfaces instead of having mismatched UIs. Some tweaking tools are around anyway and more will come with time. Gnome shell extensions are pretty good and they'll mature with time.

I suspect that users of tiling window managers are already quite a long way along the axis that Gnome appears to be moving along.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#100

Post by keithpeter »

unalone wrote: post #74
windsurfer wrote: post #61

I think people are looking at these operating systems the wrong way. In the past, Ubuntu was the easy to set up but hacker-friendly linux. Nowadays, they are transitioning to being more for OEMs and other devices. Linux Mint is simply coming in to fill the gap that Ubuntu is leaving as it transitions to other markets.

Well-said! The great thing about Linux – its killer feature compared to Windows or Mac – is that it's open-source, meaning each user is free to tweak it however they see fit. Ubuntu has been an interesting experiment in whether such an open-source system can also be designed to be competitive with a casual market; they're finding that the casual market's extremely difficult to penetrate, and so they're trying to inno…

"I think it's beautiful how Linux is capable of branching and splitting so painlessly."

You've nailed it for me with that quote. Thanks. Points up the difference between commercially packaged OS and a free (ish given Ubuntu's binary blobs) one.

Post reply on HN