http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubuntu-11-0...ce-163030.shtml Instead from now on the desktop edition will be shipping with Unity. Personally I feel this is a huge step back for Ubuntu. I'm sure Unity will improve more from its current state till the final release of 11.04, but for a desktop I don't see it as being as useful as Gnome or KDE. Not to mention it's fairly redundant when more can be done with Gnome or KDE and a dock instead of Unity. I know some people liked it in the 10.10 netbook release, but to me it wasn't as useful as the netbook launcher in 10.04. They will still have Gnome available for download, but I worry it'll get the same treatment people complain about with KDE's support on Kubuntu.
Hmm...not sure how I feel about this. Like you say, it's likely to improve by April 28th, especially since Canonical develops it, but at the same time....I like GNOME! Not that I've really been using ubuntu much recently.
But isn't unity just a shell over GNOME? I'm currently using Ubuntu for my Java programming and a few other things, I have tried the latest Ubuntu Netbook Edition but Unity just doesn't seem to work on my 904HD Eee pc, maybe it's atom optimized? I did read however about the improvements that will be coming to the 11.04 to make it fit as a Desktop interface like the moveable dock bar, etc and that would be interesting. I guess we'll just have to wait and see for the beta to be released. Hopefully the new 11.04 version of Unity will actually run on my Netbook as well since I really like the idea of it been designed for monitors with a large width (1024px) but small height (600px).
Unity needs a lot more work to it before it's decent. Then again, Canonical likes to piss people off. I don't care for GNOME, but I'm sure that Unity is essentially a featureless thing for netbooks.
My feelings are quite mixed about this. I love KDE, but my PC just doesn't have what it takes to run it. I tried XFCE, but that was a whole other can of worms. GNOME is what I'm currently using, and it's what I'm used to. I'm not a big fan of GNOME Shell as it just feels so... different. Unity, on the other hand, is also different but isn't quite as jarring when switching from Gnome 2.x. I have been meaning to move to Gentoo (where KDE would probably run decent), but it takes so damn long to compile everything that I need. I actually tried Arch Linux for a while, but it just didn't feel... right. I'm a little repulsed that someone like me who entered the Linux world with Slackware is now only comfortable with Ubuntu. That in itself feels like a major step back for me. I'll probably cling onto 10.10 for as long as I can, and then see how far Unity has come in April. I'm probably not going to be impressed by either offering. I'm going to wait and see.
At first it looks like unity is a shell over Gnome, but it's actually it's own thing. Currently it has zero customization and you can't even add applets to the top panel. Those are my two biggest problems with it, but if they fixed those I might be slightly more open to it.
Which will lead to Stallman having a hissy fit about GNU being used in a project that isn't purely free open source software. :v:
Why didn't Arch Linux feel right for you? I've considered it to be "Gentoo without having to compile stuff", but are there things there which you feel that disrupt your goals for your distribution? I've been using it for a while, it's fine by me. I just need to finish reinstalling my desktop, which will have XFCE on it.
Meh. All that's changing is the default anyway. It's not like I can't just do "aptitude install gnome" if I want to, anyway. And I prefer XFce, so I don't really care what they do to GNOME.
This might help to clear a few up a few things about Unity: Unity: Some Further Clarification Points Glad to here that it's getting the performance resolved so it will actually run on my Netbook! I'm surprisingly excited to see how Unity will turn out on when it evolves into a desktop interface, I wonder if the November alpha build will have it included. We'll have to wait and see.
I'm just thankful that they're keeping the "classic" GNOME system for those who don't want to use Unity. All flashy 3D stuff gets disabled for me, as I'm a performance freak. I originally tried it with KDE, but the performance was a little subpar, but I think that has more to do with the fact that I ran on a stock kernel (does a Core2 optimised kernel have any noticeable difference from a stock x86 kernel?) and installed KDE by doing "pacman -S kde" instead of "pacman -S kdebase (and whatever else I needed)". Also, I had a tricky time with the font rendering, but I figured it out after replacing fontconfig, cairo, and libxft with the "-ubuntu" packages from the AUR. Switching to XFCE worked for me, but the kicker was when I found out that my headset doesn't play very well with ALSA or PulseAudio. Somehow, it works in Ubuntu through it's automatic detection, so I could probably get it to work if I gave it a chance. I might try Arch out again sometime. It was just a little test on another partition, so it wasn't intended to be used in my everyday activities. I have, however, rolled out Arch on my home server and never looked back after switching from Debian.
I for one applaud Ubuntu for this decision. Canonical has taken the lead in Linux desktop innovation, and this is a bold step in the right direction. Ubuntu is one of the only distros out there that doesn't just repackage stock GNOME with a new logo. While KDE 4 is definitely a major evolution from KDE 3, GNOME hasn't changed much at all since I was high school, and I'm 24 for fucks sake. After using recent versions of Ubuntu with little niceties like the notifier applet, using other distros is like downgrading to Windows 95. I hope Canonical continues to make bold decisions like this, and focuses on being a great OS rather than being confined to the box of "distro".
I understand what you're saying about GNOME. Of course though the main reason it hasn't changed a whole lot is because simply it works or can be made to work for you by customizing your panel any way you want. Simply put Unity does what Windows 7's superbar does (grouping programs, having favorite programs pinned), but it takes up twice the screen space and can't be customized at all. Seriously checking between Unity and GNOME (with the 10.04 netbook settings) on this netbook GNOME's panel takes up 1024*21 pixels while for Unity the top panel takes up 1024*24 and then the dock on the left takes up 58*576. The only flaw with the GNOME application picker doesn't group similar icons together so if I have a lot of programs open it takes up more space, but the icons are so small its not that big of a deal. Especially if I have a program like Gimp open where its toolbars float and it's very hard to work with if I can't use my full screen space horizontally. I guess personally I feel Canonical would have done better to continue to evolve GNOME's implementation into Ubuntu. Realistically they could have made Unity's dock an add-on to GNOME. Even if it was the default setting users could still have easily deleted the panel and added their own dock (I know I read about users complaining they wanted docky instead of the unity dock) or the standard application picker.
I'm waiting for Richard Stallman to kick the bucket so that the Free Software Foundation can be handed over to someone more competent.
From the article it says Ollie posted: I hope that even if you have sufficient hardware you can still choose the 2D experience (and then knock it down to one panel and have an efficient use of your screen's real estate). Overall I think this is a good move since I know a quite a few people that do like the sidebar/dock type things.
