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Ubuntu Mate

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Re: Ubuntu Mate

#81

Post by danford »

detrino wrote: post #68
fingerprinter wrote: post #26

Gotta love how people just won't let go and move on. Imagine if all the diehard mac users ported OS9 to OSX because "OSX was forced on them". It's called progress. Gnome2 was a dying project when Unity was announced. Gnome3 was "coming soon", but flailing around. Unity is different, sure, but so was OSX to a degree when it came out. People need to move on. Unity is the present and future of Ubuntu. We've been talking…

People complain about Unity and Gnome3 because they don't offer workflows that work well for desktops. The Linux community is open to change and new ideas, but when the majority of users are unhappy with something for such a long time then something is clearly wrong.

Gnome 3 works pretty well on my desktop. But I use the keyboard for navigation a lot.

Re: Ubuntu Mate

#82

Post by danford »

keithpeter wrote: post #66
kudu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Mate instead of a modern, extendable DE such as GNOME 3?

Training cost. It is that simple. Same reason a lot (not all) companies are 'downgrading' PCs with Windows 8 back to Windows 7. Have you ever pushed a major application re-design out to 'normal' users? Disclaimer: personally, I quite like Gnome Shell running on top of the Gnome 3 libraries and gdm3.

How much training does it actually take to learn the GNOME 3 interface though? I use to train people at a call center how to use an old terminal based DOS application to fill out orders for sausage in 3 8-hour days. But gnome 3 is a lot more simple. Surely 8 hours is enough to teach about work spaces and how to press the windows key?

It's funny you almost never hear about companies having to train staff to use a company smartphone. I guess all smart phone interfaces are pretty similar though.

Re: Ubuntu Mate

#83

Post by tux1968 »

evilduck wrote: post #74
fingerprinter wrote: post #26

Gotta love how people just won't let go and move on. Imagine if all the diehard mac users ported OS9 to OSX because "OSX was forced on them". It's called progress. Gnome2 was a dying project when Unity was announced. Gnome3 was "coming soon", but flailing around. Unity is different, sure, but so was OSX to a degree when it came out. People need to move on. Unity is the present and future of Ubuntu. We've been talking…

There are tons of people who still bitch and moan about how OSX 10.6 was the pinnacle of OSX, and that's been going on nearly 5 years. I've seen plenty of people try to make Win8 look like XP too. There's a good percentage of people who simply do not like change.

Then why don't we start architecting computer systems that respect many peoples aversion to large abrupt change, and allow them to gradually adopt new features? Instead we do these sporadic and massive code-drops that are jarring to a large segment of our users. And then we blame our users for being disgruntled.

As developers we would never accept this from the kernel, and we would complain about how it was forcing us to do massive changes to our code. Yet, we think nothing of doing this to those who have come to rely on our code.

We need a better methodology and economic model. This may well be one of the hidden benefits of SAAS where slow incremental changes fit in more easily.

Re: Ubuntu Mate

#84

Post by gerbal »

27182818284 wrote: post #80
sampo wrote: post #19

Personally, I think Xubuntu desktop is better that Gnome2-based Ubuntu ever was. It's just that the default settings – only one panel (at the top), ugly blue theme & background image – are not very appealing and feel dated. But after adding a second panel, reorganizing panel contents, changing icons & windows themes and background image, Xubuntu desktop is very nice.

>It's just that the default settings – only one panel (at the top), ugly blue theme & background image – are not very appealing and feel dated. I used to run exclusively Linux distros, but then switched to OS X around 2008. Recently, I installed the Xubuntu Desktop and I felt that dated feeling you write about. My thought was, "Wow this hasn't changed" Even if it has changed, I couldn't tell at a glance. That's good…

I don't think the default Xubuntu theme has ever changed. Which is kind of a shame, but also kind of good. It's very consistent and makes some users who don't care about eye candy and hate change happy, but it scares off some newer users who have a strong association with old-looking meaning poor-functioning.

Given how many awesome XFCE themes there are out there, I'm surprised Xubuntu hasn't moved to something nicer looking.

Re: Ubuntu Mate

#85

Post by rquirk »

sampo wrote: post #19

Personally, I think Xubuntu desktop is better that Gnome2-based Ubuntu ever was. It's just that the default settings – only one panel (at the top), ugly blue theme & background image – are not very appealing and feel dated. But after adding a second panel, reorganizing panel contents, changing icons & windows themes and background image, Xubuntu desktop is very nice.

Focus follows mouse is buggy in 14.04 Xubuntu. There's no fast user switch (you can lock the screen and switch as a good-enough workaround). Suspend and restart causes the screen to not restore on occasions. Thunar doesn't have split mode (nautilus's F3). As you say the default theme is not great, I didn't like that focused and unfocused windows looked pretty much the same.

I don't know if it is better than gnome2 was but it pisses all over anything gnome3. The xfce panel is better and easier to tweak than the gnome equivalent (e.g adding a new item does not require finding a gap on the panel to right click), the places panel shortcut is really handy, xfce-terminal seems faster and less resource hungry when scrolling text than gnome-terminal, and I like the whisker menu. I just wish they had gone with the solid Xfce 4.10 for the LTS instead of the beta 4.11.

Re: Ubuntu Mate

#86

Post by sampo »

rquirk wrote: post #85
sampo wrote: post #19

Personally, I think Xubuntu desktop is better that Gnome2-based Ubuntu ever was. It's just that the default settings – only one panel (at the top), ugly blue theme & background image – are not very appealing and feel dated. But after adding a second panel, reorganizing panel contents, changing icons & windows themes and background image, Xubuntu desktop is very nice.

Focus follows mouse is buggy in 14.04 Xubuntu. There's no fast user switch (you can lock the screen and switch as a good-enough workaround). Suspend and restart causes the screen to not restore on occasions. Thunar doesn't have split mode (nautilus's F3). As you say the default theme is not great, I didn't like that focused and unfocused windows looked pretty much the same. I don't know if it is better than gnome2 wa…

> Thunar doesn't have split mode (nautilus's F3).

But there is no need to use Thunar, just install Nautilus and add a launch button for it into the panel.

...unless you're a heavy user of files on the desktop. But I think it's possible to configure an alternative file manager to manage those, too.

Re: Ubuntu Mate

#87

Post by [deleted] »

fingerprinter wrote: post #26

Gotta love how people just won't let go and move on. Imagine if all the diehard mac users ported OS9 to OSX because "OSX was forced on them". It's called progress. Gnome2 was a dying project when Unity was announced. Gnome3 was "coming soon", but flailing around. Unity is different, sure, but so was OSX to a degree when it came out. People need to move on. Unity is the present and future of Ubuntu. We've been talking…

[deleted]

Re: Ubuntu Mate

#88

Post by pooper »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #62
steanne wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's what cinnamon was supposed to do.

Two different philosophies. MATE is GNOME 2 brought to the modern world, whereas Cinnamon comes from yearning for the new application base, but thinking that the new shell just won't cut it. It was purely a fork of GNOME Shell initially, the applications weren't ported until later. MATE was a full fork from the start.

> fundamental design decisions

Besides the hefty minimum requirements, what other objections do you have to gnome 3? Sorry, I don't have a UX or design background so can you please help me understand in simple people language?

Re: Ubuntu Mate

#89

Post by pooper »

sampo wrote: post #86
rquirk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focus follows mouse is buggy in 14.04 Xubuntu. There's no fast user switch (you can lock the screen and switch as a good-enough workaround). Suspend and restart causes the screen to not restore on occasions. Thunar doesn't have split mode (nautilus's F3). As you say the default theme is not great, I didn't like that focused and unfocused windows looked pretty much the same. I don't know if it is better than gnome2 wa…

> Thunar doesn't have split mode (nautilus's F3). But there is no need to use Thunar, just install Nautilus and add a launch button for it into the panel. ...unless you're a heavy user of files on the desktop. But I think it's possible to configure an alternative file manager to manage those, too.

Care to share us your arrangement? Perhaps we can ask them to change the defaults?

Re: Ubuntu Mate

#90

Post by JasonFruit »

leorocky wrote: post #9
JasonFruit wrote: post #6

Looking at the recommended hardware specs, I see that it absolutely requires 512MB RAM and recommends at least 2GB, yet it says it has modest hardware requirements. Ubuntu Server has a minimum RAM requirement of 64MB and recommends 256MB; I know an X server takes some memory, but does a reasonable desktop environment have to require 448MB to 1.75GB to run? Probably memory use is not a high priority, but it still seem…

You cannot require the memory requirements of Ubuntu server with a desktop version of Ubuntu. Desktop Ubuntu's minimum is also 512MB: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequire...

Right, but I don't think that addresses my point at all. I'm not saying there should be no difference, but should there really be that much?
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