So, it's no secret that the Linux desktop - at least, the GNOME-side of things - is a bit in a state of disarray. Unity hasn't exactly gone down well with a lot of people, and GNOME 3, too, hasn't been met with universal praise. So, what to do? Linux Mint, currently one of the most popular Linux distributions out there, thinks they are on to the solution with their latest release, Linux Mint 12.
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Member since:2006-10-11
Member since:2009-07-17
Member since:2011-05-06
Come on! Gnome 2 looks like s**t compared to Mac OS X and Windows 7. It matters especially to new users. Unity looks great and brings Linux desktop back to the game. People commenting here just fail to think like average and new users.
Edited 2011-11-28 08:42 UTC
Member since:2006-11-02
Member since:2007-04-23
Member since:2006-07-14
That's because we aren't average and new users. And, just maybe, we want an interface that works for us. We shouldn't be criticised for advocating for our use cases.
Typed from my Fedora 16 distro within Gnome 3. Which, by the way is insane. It makes no sense what so ever. However, I'm beginning to question my own sanity because ... it sort works really well with the way I work.
Member since:2005-06-30
Gnome 2 looks great with the Nimbus theme and Avant window navigator. I don't see how GTK3 or Unity make this any better, since most major apps still use GTK2. FWIW, Firefox, Chrome, and Flash player are planning to default to GTK2 for the next several years. Even Gimp hasn't been ported yet.
Member since:2006-01-15
Member since:2009-12-05
Actually, Canonical does have the resources to make Unity good, they seem to lack the time. There's also the compiz piece of the puzzle. They have to work on that too.
One year for a project like that is not enough.
I'm currently on 10.04 but also have a seperate HDD for testing new distros. After a few weeks of XFCEs, KDEs and Gnome3s, I came crawling back to my 10.04 desktop.
Member since:2007-09-22
Member since:2011-04-11
"when you are doing something very new, don't force it on everyone, make it optional. "
The problem with that would be that the Gnome team would have to maintain Gnome 2 and Gnome 3, aka split manpower between the two DEs (Gnome 2 and Gnome 3). As if there wasn't already enough fragmentation of manpower between different DEs in Linuxland. The correct choice would be not taking such a radical departure from Gnome 2, because quite frankly they are not professional UI designers, so they should be doing evolutionary changes based on experience instead of radical changes based on what they think is right.
As i 've said before, the mess with the DEs in Linux is a bad one. I wish the Mint team the best of luck, but cannot count on it for my computing needs.
Edited 2011-11-28 12:34 UTC
Member since:2011-01-28
Lennie,
"I think the lesson should be:
when you are doing something very new, don't force it on everyone, make it optional."
I think you hit upon the biggest gripe of all. Why are linux users being corralled into a UI paradigm that is so rigid and non-customizable? Customisation used to be one of the greatest strengths of running a linux desktop. OSS was undeniably way ahead of either MS/Apple in this aspect. I would hope that gnome3/unity designers had a great compelling reason to completely disregarded this core strength, but from what I can see this tradeoff resulted in only lost functionality with absolutely nothing gained.
Maybe the focal shift away from functional purpose and towards eye candy is a sign of linux's growing mainstream popularity, but like Lennie, I ask why the designers are killing off features instead of incorporating them into gnome3/unity. To this end, I'm thankful for Mint's acknowledgement of the problem and their steps towards patching the UI holes which have cropped up.
Member since:2007-03-30
I don't know if these guys are professional at anything or not.
I want to think of it like this: Are they proven? Creating a new GUI design like GNOME 3 is a big deal that usually doesn't make it out of a person's head. Have these guys had success before, or are they just blowhards like the rest of us, playing in their sandbox?
Member since:
2011-04-11
Lesson learned from the Gnome 3 debacle: If you are not a professional UI designer, you may stick into copying (Gnome 2 is a copy of early macs, KDE a copy of Windows)
Lesson learned from the Unity debacle: Make sure you have the resources to make something before you start making it.
Am I the only one who thinks Linux Desktop might actually stand a chance if people kept refining 10.10 (solving the update and break problem, make things better for the developer etc) instead of jerking with new UIs?
Edited 2011-11-28 07:52 UTC