Ubuntu 18.04 to ship with Gnome Desktop, not Unity

[wowsers]

I've watched a couple videos of unity 8 in it's current state (I did try it myself about 5 months ago), and I can't say I'm too impressed about it, it still has the same issues I had back then, only with more polish than previously.

The reason me (and many others I think) dislike the Unity 8 interface (and Unity in general) is because of the overly simplified interfaces, instead of neatly packing icons and menus in pop-up/pop-down menus they have these huge buttons that take up very much screenspace in their apps, while this is useful for beginners (though not really because they gotta learn to use it as well) it still doesn't work well in practice. A good comparision is the GUI OSX has used for a long while now, it looks gorgeous, but when you try to do more power user related things it just falls apart in the seams. Want to go to your disk's root folder? Good luck figuring that out the first time without a google search, set up certificates for exporting games to OSX? Good luck figuring that out without a few google searches.

Now coming back to Ubuntu it used to slowly gt refined visually from revision to revision of the GNIME interface, this was a well mannered GUI, first time I ever used it (must have been 2007/2008) I could still find what I was looking for, it even had a pop-down menu for common places for nautilus right on the top bar. After a single day I was sold on how well I could use it, and up until 10.10 (the last version using GNOME 2) I really had no complaints, it just got better and better.
Then the Unity interface happened, gone were the days of knowing how I could even open gedit until I figured out I needed to search for it because browsing by applications is still a horrible thing, it began as being extremely buggy and resource intensive (something fixed since), and the left app-icon-tray thing was (and still is) very unintuitive to me (not coming from the OSX world).

So really what it probably boils down to was it was too different (from what the userbase was used to) at a time where the users was happy except for maby smooth corners on the windows, which both GNOME 3 and Unity fixed by having an actual alpha channel when rendering windows. And with GNOME 3 wayland on Fedora 25 working well the reason to develop a custom screen protocol that's very similar makes less sense.

[bcredeur97]

wow that is quite shocking...

[xAcid9]

About fucking time, as keyboard warrior i prefer Gnome shell over Unity. I spent less time using mouse in Gnome compare to Unity.

Still can't beat tiling WM though. Tiling is bae.

[ErickS89]

Would have gone with KDE, Budgie, or even a tiled or open window manager over Gnome 3... Was never a fan of Gnome 3. 

Unity was nice but wasn't great,  but oh well.

 

Unity and even Gnome 3 are too simplified, but Ubuntu(debian-dev) is just Linux so customize to your hearts content. 

[Misanthrope]

By the way what happened to their crowd funding campaign?

Quote

Canonical embarked on an ambitious crowdsourced campaign to fund a high-end, Linux-based smartphone called the Ubuntu Edge in mid-2013. The project had a solid showing but fell short of its lofty $32 million goal with only $12.8 million raised.

http://www.techspot.com/news/68863-canonical-pulls-out-mobile-industry-cites-lack-interest.html

 

Is Shuttleworth gonna give back that money or was it, like all crowd funding efforts, just another fucking scam?

[vorticalbox]

1 hour ago, Misanthrope said:

By the way what happened to their crowd funding campaign?

http://www.techspot.com/news/68863-canonical-pulls-out-mobile-industry-cites-lack-interest.html

 

Is Shuttleworth gonna give back that money or was it, like all crowd funding efforts, just another fucking scam?

Crowd funders are under no obligation to give back any money nor does donating money actually grant you any product.

[Misanthrope]

7 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

Crowd funders are under no obligation to give back any money nor does donating money actually grant you any product.

Just because it's a legal scam that doesn't means that it isn't a scam. I am aware of the limitations and rights of crowd funders, but most people crowd funding are honestly not aware or lie to themselves to think "this project will be different it won't be just a scam"

 

[vorticalbox]

2 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Just because it's a legal scam that doesn't means that it isn't a scam. I am aware of the limitations and rights of crowd funders, but most people crowd funding are honestly not aware or lie to themselves to think "this project will be different it won't be just a scam"

 

It was never a scam and the OS was actually developed and was ported to a number of phones this was to try and get the ball rolling on creating phones. Just because a project doesn't meet it's goal doesn't make it a scam and doesn't mean they should pay anything back.

 

You're not buying anything you're giving money to something you want to support. I'm sure that money went into other development offered, but as a just said it literally doesn't matter what they did or do with the money.

[Misanthrope]

6 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

It was never a scam and the OS was actually developed and was ported to a number of phones this was to try and get the ball rolling on creating phones. Just because a project doesn't meet it's goal doesn't make it a scam and doesn't mean they should pay anything back.

 

You're not buying anything you're giving money to something you want to support. I'm sure that money went into other development offered, but as a just said it literally doesn't matter what they did or do with the money.

"It literally doesn't matter what they did or do with the money" but somehow isn't a scam.

 

K.

[wowsers]

2 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

"It literally doesn't matter what they did or do with the money" but somehow isn't a scam.

 

K.

It's not really a scam, but the Ubuntu phone flopped, partly because android had gotten so good by the time the mobile Ubuntu OS was developed. It's not a scam simply because the goal wast reached, it technically was reached because the phone got released, lagging far behind on specs and usable apps didn't exactly help.

Also I'm pretty sure all money they got were invested to the project, again because it already got realized, but choosing to opt out of an unprofitable market (for Ubuntu) makes more sense even if that was their vision.

[suicidalfranco]

8 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

By the way what happened to their crowd funding campaign?

http://www.techspot.com/news/68863-canonical-pulls-out-mobile-industry-cites-lack-interest.html

 

Is Shuttleworth gonna give back that money or was it, like all crowd funding efforts, just another fucking scam?

the answer is just there

"The project had a solid showing but fell short of its lofty $32 million goal with only $12.8 million raised."

and like every crowd fund that doesn't hit it's goal: people got their money back.

Gosh Some people, seriously, are so dense

 

[Misanthrope]

10 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

the answer is just there

"The project had a solid showing but fell short of its lofty $32 million goal with only $12.8 million raised."

and like every crowd fund that doesn't hit it's goal: people got their money back.

Gosh Some people, seriously, are so dense

 

That's what I was asking chill out.

[MoonlightSylv]

I like GNOME a lot but I don't see myself switching to Linux until all my games are available on it.

[Misanthrope]

4 hours ago, wowsers said:

It's not really a scam, but the Ubuntu phone flopped, partly because android had gotten so good by the time the mobile Ubuntu OS was developed. It's not a scam simply because the goal wast reached, it technically was reached because the phone got released, lagging far behind on specs and usable apps didn't exactly help.

Also I'm pretty sure all money they got were invested to the project, again because it already got realized, but choosing to opt out of an unprofitable market (for Ubuntu) makes more sense even if that was their vision.

You know what happens when a regular investment goes south? Investers are prepared to take risk but there's regulations and shared profits. Crowd funding bypasses this by making this basically donations even though they present the projects as investment opportunities and usually fund terrible ideas and incredibly unlikely projects (Like being fucking stupid enough to think you can take on Google and Apple for a piece of the mobile market, for example) without no guarantees, no protections and no share of the profit if they're successful.

 

It's just a fucking scam, all crowd funding is, saying "Thanks to our kickstart backers who made this game possible!" for example isn't fucking enough they should be getting a share of the fucking profits. Whenever they're successful or faith they're inherently a scam, just one that happens to be legal like multi-level marketing.

[neverLucky]

I would rather see xfce instead of gnome but whatever helps the ecosystem fragmentation is good I guess...

[2FA]

10 minutes ago, neverLucky said:

I would rather see xfce instead of gnome but whatever helps the ecosystem fragmentation is good I guess...

That's already an official flavor, it's just the main supported version is switching to Gnome. 

[neverLucky]

25 minutes ago, DeadEyePsycho said:

That's already an official flavor, it's just the main supported version is switching to Gnome. 

I know, but that doesn't mean it can't be the main one. Xfce could greatly benefit from that, e.g. it takes years for them to fix thunar.

Gnome is polished enough, it's missing some features but I didn't notice any bugs (I don't like the UI though).

[2FA]

9 minutes ago, neverLucky said:

I know, but that doesn't mean it can't be the main one. Xfce could greatly benefit from that, e.g. it takes years for them to fix thunar.

Gnome is polished enough, it's missing some features but I didn't notice any bugs (I don't like the UI though).

 

True enough. Luckily Manjaro is getting really popular which has XFCE as one of the main DEs.

[wowsers]

12 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

You know what happens when a regular investment goes south? Investers are prepared to take risk but there's regulations and shared profits. Crowd funding bypasses this by making this basically donations even though they present the projects as investment opportunities and usually fund terrible ideas and incredibly unlikely projects (Like being fucking stupid enough to think you can take on Google and Apple for a piece of the mobile market, for example) without no guarantees, no protections and no share of the profit if they're successful.

 

It's just a fucking scam, all crowd funding is, saying "Thanks to our kickstart backers who made this game possible!" for example isn't fucking enough they should be getting a share of the fucking profits. Whenever they're successful or faith they're inherently a scam, just one that happens to be legal like multi-level marketing.

The goal of the Ubuntu phone was realized, the problem is that it honestly should have either come out half a year earlier which would have been appropriate hardware and not outdated, or half a year later with better hardware. The goal of getting an Ubuntu phone got realized, if they hadn't sunk money into developing the Unity GUI at the same time for Ubuntu (or started the Ubiny GUI at all) it might have been more successful. I can name a few failed kickstarters myself (ever heard of MN9?). But the problem with crowdfunding isn't lack of profit, the problem is that it isn't a direct investment. If things goes south at the crowdfunding stage the projects usually get killed, while you can at least have a discussion with an investor.

[Misanthrope]

3 hours ago, wowsers said:

The goal of the Ubuntu phone was realized, the problem is that it honestly should have either come out half a year earlier which would have been appropriate hardware and not outdated, or half a year later with better hardware. The goal of getting an Ubuntu phone got realized, if they hadn't sunk money into developing the Unity GUI at the same time for Ubuntu (or started the Ubiny GUI at all) it might have been more successful. I can name a few failed kickstarters myself (ever heard of MN9?). But the problem with crowdfunding isn't lack of profit, the problem is that it isn't a direct investment. If things goes south at the crowdfunding stage the projects usually get killed, while you can at least have a discussion with an investor.

Really?

 

Quote

In the car industry, Formula 1 provides a commercial testbed for cutting-edge technologies. The Ubuntu Edge project aims to do the same for the mobile phone industry -- to provide a low-volume, high-technology platform, crowdfunded by enthusiasts and mobile computing professionals. A pioneering project that accelerates the adoption of new technologies and drives them down into the mainstream.

 

This beautifully crafted smartphone is a proving ground for the most advanced mobile technologies on the horizon, a showpiece for true mobile innovation. And at the heart of it all is convergence: connect to any monitor and this Ubuntu phone transforms into an Ubuntu PC, with a fully integrated desktop OS and shared access to all files.

 

We’re fascinated by converged computing, the idea that the smartphone in your pocket can also be the brain of the PC on your desk. We’ve shaped Ubuntu so you can transition seamlessly between the two environments. Now all that’s needed is a phone that’s designed from the ground up to be a PC as well.

 

The Ubuntu Edge is our very own superphone, a catalyst to drive the next generation of personal computing.

I'll just say that if you honestly think any of that was "realized" then you're so generous as to be in denial.

[wowsers]

1 hour ago, Misanthrope said:

Really?

 

I'll just say that if you honestly think any of that was "realized" then you're so generous as to be in denial.

I can say I didn't remember the first half at all lol, we (people who cared all too much) already knew it was just gonna be an underpowered device with a few gimmics. The most cutting edge part of it was the fact it could be docked and used as regular desktop Ubuntu, but hardware wise it was really a POS when it came out due to it not getting an iteration (hardware wise before release) and development to be a true cutting edge device, but that text also says "low-volume" right there in the first paragraph, and Ubuntu phone was a low volume platform, and I can go as far as saying docking the device to get a desktop experience was a nice touch. But I will never say it was the most amazing thing that ever happened. The only thing it falls short on on that statement is the "innovative" docking to get a desktop, but we almost have that with modern android devices where some of them can be docked to use a mirrored android display.

Saying "it'll be a catalyst" is honest BS though, through and through, that is something they should be ashamed of (but then again doesn't all big tech companies do that as well?).

[Pretzel4000]

So basically, PC OS developers shouldn't go for mobile-styled desktops. It didn't go well for Microsoft or Ubuntu.

LOL

[wowsers]

6 hours ago, Pretzel4000 said:

So basically, PC OS developers shouldn't go for mobile-styled desktops. It didn't go well for Microsoft or Ubuntu.

LOL

Basically yeah that or they don't develop the same thing for a bajillion different things

[sof006]

On 2017-4-5 at 6:50 PM, SCHISCHKA said:

apt remove ubuntu-sdk

sudo*

[SCHISCHKA]

5 minutes ago, sof006 said:

sudo*

hmm do people really put sudo in front of every command in ubuntu? I came from Debian where i just log into root to do root things. Ubuntu, MacOS, *Windows are the only ones to do without a root account. Sudo is nice when you have more than one admin, but for a single user machine I just sudo -s to log into root on ubuntu