3 ms·

I'm not convinced that much of the interesting work still to be done is on the desktop side of things. Gnome is pretty competent. I am sympathetic to the "I hat

I'm not convinced that much of the interesting work still to be done is on the desktop side of things. Gnome is pretty competent. I am sympathetic to the "I hate change" crowd who were upset by the 2->3 evolution, but I was able to adapt to Gnome 3 almost immediately, and never had an urge to go back...in many ways it is superior, and while it was annoying having so much of the flexibility of Gnome 2 disappear, I've found that in Fedora 23, most of the stuff that annoyed me with its absence is now available. There remains an active Cinnamon branch which keeps the old start menu and task bar ideas from earlier Gnome versions. Solus and Budgie appear to be sticking with the old paradigm, with a couple of custom add-ons (which almost certainly could have been simply Gnome add-ons for any distro), so nothing revolutionary there. And, that's OK, we probably don't need more desktop revolutions at this juncture. But, it's just not a compelling story, IMHO. It's a Linux distro, with a slightly different Gnome desktop. What could possibly compel me to get excited about that? It has a new package manager that I haven't heard of, but it seems to be a very rudimentary thing that does roughly what every other major package manager does, only without the decades of experience and bugfixing that have gone into RPM/dnf or dpkg/apt. If it were based on nix or guix, or similarly provided reproduce-able builds or some other novel concept, that would be interesting. I can't find any docs about the package manager to clarify if maybe it actually does do something novel. The description on the website makes me assume it is not merely simple but simplistic. I guess I sound kinda harsh, and I don't really mean people shouldn't work on stuff that they find fun. I just can't see from the description why it is exciting or novel. I may just be jaded from having seen literally hundreds of distros come and go in my 20 years of Linux usage.

iheartmemcache 11y ago
I've been using Linux for about that long (both in recreational and professional capacities), along with everything from IRIX 6.5 to back when Solaris was SunOS. On the desktop side of things this does offer something that XFCE, E, GNOME 2||3, or KDE has -- something pretty enough to ship to an end-user. This isn't objective analysis, I'm not a UI expert, and I don't have metrics to back this up. It looks pretty, in the same way that OS X looks pretty. I'm going to bet I've tried as many distros as you, as many DE's, as many WM's. I bet you remember RPM-hell after buying Red Hat at CompUSA too. This 'slightly different' UI is finally aesthetically pleasing enough where I'd feel comfortable giving this to grandma, my niece, or use in a business environment (lack of proper AD/GPO tooling that MS has is sorta problematic as YP/NIS and mounting NFS doesn't seem like the right solution, but that's easy enough to fix - the 'user adoption for those who don't know what GNU or what apt-get is' issue is what I'm addressing here). You're right, it's 'slightly different'. A Lexus ES300 is on the same chassis, the same engine, and shares the same drive train with the higher end Toyota Camry's. But those 'slight differences' (trim, maybe upgraded suspension for a softer ride and less ambient cabin noise) are enough to get the consumer to use it. As happenstance, this would occur as Win10 advances into what I argue is a really reliable, granularly secure, more-open-than-ever platform.
- rdtsc 11y ago
  > This 'slightly different' UI is finally aesthetically pleasing enough where I'd feel comfortable giving this to grandma, my niece, or use in a business environment I've supported Ubuntu for grandmas and other people not very computer literate in my extended family for more than a decade. For some remotely (i.e. not having physical access to the machine except once every 3-4 years) and so far the most valuable things I found was stability (LTS releases), security updates, enough mind-share to find answers to problems online, enough mind-share to have makers of hardware possibly contemplate supporting drivers for the distro, having hardware that works out of the box, predictable and simple UI. GUI aesthetics are nice and make a difference, but I found those other things to be more important. The predictable part broke when Ubuntu switched their UI to something else (Compiz/Unity?) I don't remember, but everyone got used to that eventually.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  That's a confusing assertion, to me. This is no more beautiful than recent Fedora versions with Gnome 3. The two are extremely similar in appearance. Very simple, very clean, nice little calendar, nice sidebar thingy. They are different in functionality (sidebars on Gnome 3 are for apps...available shortcuts on the left, and running apps and desktops on the right, and calendar is in the center and pops out of the top bar), but they look so similar that I could easily mistake one for the other, when the calendar and such is not open. The status bar and start menu at the bottom is the only notable difference, and that's certainly not the difference between "beautiful" and not. I agree that this desktop looks nice. But, it looks nice in ways that current Gnome on Fedora looks nice. Clean, unobtrusive menus and status info, etc. And, I think both are (finally) nicer than Mac OS X. I find Mac OS X (and Windows) too busy, in comparison. They both look a bit like Android, actually, which I also like. Edit: Screenshots of my current, stock, F23+Gnome 3 desktop, so we can be on the same page about what I'm talking about. http://imgur.com/a/j2uRT http://imgur.com/a/j2uRT
  - iheartmemcache 11y ago
    Ah, I guess my reference point was old. There the discrepancy lay. I hadn't tried Gnome since 3.1(?) (early 2014? does that sound right?) at which point it wasn't nearly as clean as your DE (which is super pretty, I'll readily admit). I think we're really on the same page for the most part. How much tweaking went into that? Do you have a write-up with what sort of steps you took to integrate that sort of functionality (added fonts/behavioral changes/dbus integration type components, etc)? I'm with you on the "beating OS X" threshold re: UI. Between the whole Atom/Electron/LightTable type WebKit environments, you can develop on any machine. Likewise IntelliJ(Cursive for Clojure), emacs and vim all work as well if not better on Linux. Unless you are tied into Xcode, the development experience for an engineer is finally desktop-ready as the (very challenging) OSX-interface parity threshold has been broken.

iheartmemcache 11y ago

I've been using Linux for about that long (both in recreational and professional capacities), along with everything from IRIX 6.5 to back when Solaris was SunOS. On the desktop side of things this does offer something that XFCE, E, GNOME 2||3, or KDE has -- something pretty enough to ship to an end-user. This isn't objective analysis, I'm not a UI expert, and I don't have metrics to back this up. It looks pretty, in the same way that OS X looks pretty. I'm going to bet I've tried as many distros as you, as many DE's, as many WM's. I bet you remember RPM-hell after buying Red Hat at CompUSA too. This 'slightly different' UI is finally aesthetically pleasing enough where I'd feel comfortable giving this to grandma, my niece, or use in a business environment (lack of proper AD/GPO tooling that MS has is sorta problematic as YP/NIS and mounting NFS doesn't seem like the right solution, but that's easy enough to fix - the 'user adoption for those who don't know what GNU or what apt-get is' issue is what I'm addressing here). You're right, it's 'slightly different'. A Lexus ES300 is on the same chassis, the same engine, and shares the same drive train with the higher end Toyota Camry's. But those 'slight differences' (trim, maybe upgraded suspension for a softer ride and less ambient cabin noise) are enough to get the consumer to use it. As happenstance, this would occur as Win10 advances into what I argue is a really reliable, granularly secure, more-open-than-ever platform.

rdtsc 11y ago
> This 'slightly different' UI is finally aesthetically pleasing enough where I'd feel comfortable giving this to grandma, my niece, or use in a business environment I've supported Ubuntu for grandmas and other people not very computer literate in my extended family for more than a decade. For some remotely (i.e. not having physical access to the machine except once every 3-4 years) and so far the most valuable things I found was stability (LTS releases), security updates, enough mind-share to find answers to problems online, enough mind-share to have makers of hardware possibly contemplate supporting drivers for the distro, having hardware that works out of the box, predictable and simple UI. GUI aesthetics are nice and make a difference, but I found those other things to be more important. The predictable part broke when Ubuntu switched their UI to something else (Compiz/Unity?) I don't remember, but everyone got used to that eventually.
SwellJoe 11y ago
That's a confusing assertion, to me. This is no more beautiful than recent Fedora versions with Gnome 3. The two are extremely similar in appearance. Very simple, very clean, nice little calendar, nice sidebar thingy. They are different in functionality (sidebars on Gnome 3 are for apps...available shortcuts on the left, and running apps and desktops on the right, and calendar is in the center and pops out of the top bar), but they look so similar that I could easily mistake one for the other, when the calendar and such is not open. The status bar and start menu at the bottom is the only notable difference, and that's certainly not the difference between "beautiful" and not. I agree that this desktop looks nice. But, it looks nice in ways that current Gnome on Fedora looks nice. Clean, unobtrusive menus and status info, etc. And, I think both are (finally) nicer than Mac OS X. I find Mac OS X (and Windows) too busy, in comparison. They both look a bit like Android, actually, which I also like. Edit: Screenshots of my current, stock, F23+Gnome 3 desktop, so we can be on the same page about what I'm talking about. http://imgur.com/a/j2uRT http://imgur.com/a/j2uRT
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  Ah, I guess my reference point was old. There the discrepancy lay. I hadn't tried Gnome since 3.1(?) (early 2014? does that sound right?) at which point it wasn't nearly as clean as your DE (which is super pretty, I'll readily admit). I think we're really on the same page for the most part. How much tweaking went into that? Do you have a write-up with what sort of steps you took to integrate that sort of functionality (added fonts/behavioral changes/dbus integration type components, etc)? I'm with you on the "beating OS X" threshold re: UI. Between the whole Atom/Electron/LightTable type WebKit environments, you can develop on any machine. Likewise IntelliJ(Cursive for Clojure), emacs and vim all work as well if not better on Linux. Unless you are tied into Xcode, the development experience for an engineer is finally desktop-ready as the (very challenging) OSX-interface parity threshold has been broken.