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I think that building a good UI for the desktop is only possible if UI developers agree on "look-and-feel" and that may be simpler for Canonical than for a comm

by zeptomu 10y ago

I think that building a good UI for the desktop is only possible if UI developers agree on "look-and-feel" and that may be simpler for Canonical than for a community like Debian and they came to the conclusion that building their own is just the way to go. AFAIK their home-grown desktop is FOSS, so it's not like you are buying into a proprietary system and this is tremendous. When I started with Linux I used a distribution like Mandrake with a KDE Desktop and by default you got several text editors, browsers and other tools (the drop-down menu was huge) and for me as a starter (I did not know any programming then and just wanted to play with a different OS coming from a Microsoft stack) I was overwhelmed and although I could appreciate the customization it was hard to get started as there were too many options. Ubuntu changed that and they really thought a lot about how to improve the Linux Desktop experience and IMHO they did very, very well. E.g. I use Ubuntu as you can find lots of documentation, it is supported well in cloud infrastructure and they (re)distribute a lot of packages. In particular I do not get critics about the Desktop Environment. In no way made Ubuntu your Desktop less customizable and I use e.g. xmonad as my WM which is totally straight-forward and it just works. My mom uses the default Desktop and is pretty happy with it. That may be controversial, but I think there are often just 2 points of users; those that want it to just-work without any configuration and those who want to customize everything. I think Ubuntu is doing pretty well (currently, I hope that never changes) in both camps.

sjellis 10y ago
> I think that building a good UI for the desktop is only possible if UI developers agree on "look-and-feel" and that may be simpler for Canonical than for a community like Debian and they came to the conclusion that building their own is just the way to go. Yes, and it seems like a number of other distribution developers have come to the same conclusion as well. We really need some thoughtful analysis about this trend. > AFAIK their home-grown desktop is FOSS, so it's not like you are buying into a proprietary system and this is tremendous. Source availability is part of enabling a broader developer community, but there's a huge amount of other work that is needed, as well. I haven't looked at the current state of Unity development, but the reputation of the project is that it is built for Ubuntu. > Ubuntu changed that and they really thought a lot about how to improve the Linux Desktop experience and IMHO they did very, very well. I totally agree: Ubuntu really was revolutionary when it started. It's kind of amazing how many innovative things Mark Shuttleworth and his team did right at the start. > That may be controversial, but I think there are often just 2 points of users; those that want it to just-work without any configuration and those who want to customize everything. I think Ubuntu is doing pretty well (currently, I hope that never changes) in both camps. There is also a third audience for any piece of software that is large enough to be programmable: developers. For desktops, you have third-party theme authors as well as application developers, people that want to work on the desktop software itself, maintainers of other Linux OS components, and folks that want to use the source code to build their own custom projects.
- zeptomu 10y ago
  > developers. For desktops, you have third-party theme authors as well as application developers, people that want to work on the desktop software itself, maintainers of other Linux OS components, and folks that want to use the source code to build their own custom projects. I think they are part of the "possibility to customize-everything" crowd. The most important point for me in a distribution is its security record and a good package system to support all common use-cases. The default desktop should totally be targeted to casual users, as experienced users will not agree with your base-configuration system anyway (I remember YAST from SUSE), so I appreciate strong opinions there, in particular less is more (the original Ubuntu approach compared to other distributions at the time).
  - sjellis 10y ago
    > I think they are part of the "possibility to customize-everything" crowd. Sometimes, yes: I know developers that do customize heavily, but personally the furthest that I go is changing a desktop wallpaper :) (DevOps: I switch between systems all of the time). The sentence wasn't very clear, but I was really talking more about APIs and developer experience: one of the reasons why projects switch from GTK/GNOME tech to QT is that it's apparently much easier for them to work with.

by zeptomu 10y ago

sjellis 10y ago

> I think that building a good UI for the desktop is only possible if UI developers agree on "look-and-feel" and that may be simpler for Canonical than for a community like Debian and they came to the conclusion that building their own is just the way to go. Yes, and it seems like a number of other distribution developers have come to the same conclusion as well. We really need some thoughtful analysis about this trend. > AFAIK their home-grown desktop is FOSS, so it's not like you are buying into a proprietary system and this is tremendous. Source availability is part of enabling a broader developer community, but there's a huge amount of other work that is needed, as well. I haven't looked at the current state of Unity development, but the reputation of the project is that it is built for Ubuntu. > Ubuntu changed that and they really thought a lot about how to improve the Linux Desktop experience and IMHO they did very, very well. I totally agree: Ubuntu really was revolutionary when it started. It's kind of amazing how many innovative things Mark Shuttleworth and his team did right at the start. > That may be controversial, but I think there are often just 2 points of users; those that want it to just-work without any configuration and those who want to customize everything. I think Ubuntu is doing pretty well (currently, I hope that never changes) in both camps. There is also a third audience for any piece of software that is large enough to be programmable: developers. For desktops, you have third-party theme authors as well as application developers, people that want to work on the desktop software itself, maintainers of other Linux OS components, and folks that want to use the source code to build their own custom projects.

zeptomu 10y ago
> developers. For desktops, you have third-party theme authors as well as application developers, people that want to work on the desktop software itself, maintainers of other Linux OS components, and folks that want to use the source code to build their own custom projects. I think they are part of the "possibility to customize-everything" crowd. The most important point for me in a distribution is its security record and a good package system to support all common use-cases. The default desktop should totally be targeted to casual users, as experienced users will not agree with your base-configuration system anyway (I remember YAST from SUSE), so I appreciate strong opinions there, in particular less is more (the original Ubuntu approach compared to other distributions at the time).
- sjellis 10y ago
  > I think they are part of the "possibility to customize-everything" crowd. Sometimes, yes: I know developers that do customize heavily, but personally the furthest that I go is changing a desktop wallpaper :) (DevOps: I switch between systems all of the time). The sentence wasn't very clear, but I was really talking more about APIs and developer experience: one of the reasons why projects switch from GTK/GNOME tech to QT is that it's apparently much easier for them to work with.