5 ms·

I think this is the path that Ubuntu should follow, replace current pieces of software with lighter and smaller solutions. You can always replace them with mor

I think this is the path that Ubuntu should follow, replace current pieces of software with lighter and smaller solutions. You can always replace them with more advances packages through apt-get.

ldng 15y ago
Unity doesn't strikes me as particularly light ... I am not sure pissing off core GNOME developers with its ever changing new directions is going to help them in the long run. On the other hand I might be proved wrong if while increase its user base Ubuntu manage to convert some of them in core durable developer. IMHO, then it's not GNOME anymore. It's a new desktop akin to XFCE as they diverge more and more. It was foreseeable, especially in light of previous two year that's what was going to happen. Time will tell.
- balac 15y ago
  I'm glad they are deviating from core GNOME as they seem to have more focused art direction and better usability in general, for me Ubuntu is a much smoother and more pleasant Linux experience than any other distro for this reason.
  - ldng 15y ago
    Good for them, as long as they don't FUD on GNOME. Better usability ? I don't think so, I remember being orce fed the first version of message indactor with Gwibber, Pidgin and Evolution were 3 entries of the same menu behaving totally differently and unconsistently. Unity feels quite raw and bulky. I don't think my dad will search it's application by their exact names. INMHO, the Gnome-Shell menu is much better in that it let you see you apps a people familiar with any recent smartphone won't by lost. I can't say the same for Unity main menu.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  Quite frankly, who cares? I'm tired of the GNOME release plans: remove features, make GTK+ controls bulkier than ever. It's like they're trying to ensure that the same amount of stuff fits on a screen despite increased screen resolution. I'm happy to see the role Compiz is taking on. A recent rewrite that cleaned things up, replacing more and more window management tasks, support for non-accelerated backends. I'd love to see Compiz's wallpaper plugin mature and replace nautilus for the task. (It'd also allow for the global menu to not be awkward when the wallpaper has focus and for multiple wallpapers on different workspaces). Though frankly I'd love to see nautilus die in a fire anyway.
  - ldng 15y ago
    I don't care about them drifting away. I might even understand some point they made about GNOME. What I don't appreciate it's some people in Ubuntu world (that would be community and canonical) blaming GNOME Upstream for the drift. They want to lead their own platform somewhere else, fine, just do it. Don't pretend that you've been pushed to. The Gnome Zeitgeist project originated from the Ubuntu community and at first they weren't accepted for inclusion in the project and started to whine in a very ubuntuesque way. They weren't listening at all to the maintainer's rationale for rejection. Happily at some point they started to listen and will probably be a key piece of GNOME 3.2 Now, I can't say the same for some others projects from canonical. challenging upstream is one thing, not being open to dialogue another, pushing its agenda by FUDing another beast altogether. As for removing features ... what are talking about ? GNOME 3.0 ? It's not like it is a finished and dead product that won't evolve anymore ! Bulkier controls ?! Come man, just change your theme. Increased screen resolution ? Like Unity wasn't made for netbooks and tablet. I'll stop feeding the troll right here ;-)
    - drivebyacct2 15y ago
      What? Gnome 2.3 has been shedding features for sometime. Ability to change GDM theme? Gone. Ability to configure gnome screensavers? Gone. That's not even mentioning 3.0, but I understand that it's like KDE, in that 3.1 will be much better suited for full time use. You miss the point on the controls. Unity WAS made for netbooks and tablets. It conserves UI space in a more concise manner (not to mention that I enjoy the search/icon paradigm. It's what Windows 7 did with dock/search-start-menu. OS X has the Dock and spotlight. The jury is in, it's popular) Most of the themes I've seen for GNOME3 still look bulky. Maybe I haven't seen enough themes yet.
      - ldng 15y ago
        You're right about gdm, still I didn't noticed it until you told me. I think most people just change the wallpaper and at most apply a different control theme. Well I don't really get you point on the controls and screen estate then. To me "bulkier" controls precisely ease their use on netbooks and tablets. Well the search is a great feature if it is fuzzy and intelligent enough to match on related keyword. Now, for now, it doesn't quite work that way. Regular people don't dare searching because they might not even know what to search. So to me gnome-shell as a better compromise it does not force search on you. With Unity, if you don't want to search, you need extra clicks to get to the actual application list. There are currently 9 Gtk+3 themes on gnome-look.org that's hardly enough to leverage the possibilities of the theming engine. Better theme will come and will harness the power of the new the engine.
azakai 15y ago
> I think this is the path that Ubuntu should follow, replace current pieces of software with lighter and smaller solutions. I fully agree, but am not sure this is an example of that. The article says LightDM uses WebKit. Loading an entire html rendering engine for a login manager seems like overkill. I guess this explains why LightDM is smaller than GDM in code size - but is it smaller in total size when including all necessary libraries? Now, some of this might be offset if you have WebKit loaded anyhow as a shared library. This seems unlikely, though, 1. This is the login manager - it's before you load your desktop and web browser. (It might save loading it later though.) 2. The default browser in Ubuntu, Firefox, is not WebKit based. Neither is Opera for that matter (but it is not as popular). 3. The most popular WebKit based browser, Chrome, bundles its own version of WebKit - so there would be no sharing anyhow.
- steevdave 15y ago
  Empathy (the default IM client) uses webkit to render it's themes. It is quite likely to be a shared library. On natty, webkit is fairly hefty at 24MB but it doesn't take Empathy long to load at all. And by the time your login manager has started /usr is already mounted, assuming you are not using their default partitioning which is one huge partition.
  - azakai 15y ago
    It would be interesting to know how many users use Empathy. I don't myself, and maybe I'm not representative, but I don't think it is that many - Pidgin seems more popular among people I know. I don't follow the /usr bit - what does mounting /usr have to do with loading or not loading WebKit? WebKit is around 24MB, which is as you say quite hefty, but it's even worse as it depends on some other libraries - sqlite, libpng, etc.
- kklimonda 15y ago
  afair, WebKit is just one of backends that LightDM can use so it shouldn't really be a problem.
  - 15y ago

I think this is the path that Ubuntu should follow, replace current pieces of software with lighter and smaller solutions. You can always replace them with more advances packages through apt-get.

ldng 15y ago

Unity doesn't strikes me as particularly light ... I am not sure pissing off core GNOME developers with its ever changing new directions is going to help them in the long run. On the other hand I might be proved wrong if while increase its user base Ubuntu manage to convert some of them in core durable developer. IMHO, then it's not GNOME anymore. It's a new desktop akin to XFCE as they diverge more and more. It was foreseeable, especially in light of previous two year that's what was going to happen. Time will tell.

balac 15y ago
I'm glad they are deviating from core GNOME as they seem to have more focused art direction and better usability in general, for me Ubuntu is a much smoother and more pleasant Linux experience than any other distro for this reason.
- ldng 15y ago
  Good for them, as long as they don't FUD on GNOME. Better usability ? I don't think so, I remember being orce fed the first version of message indactor with Gwibber, Pidgin and Evolution were 3 entries of the same menu behaving totally differently and unconsistently. Unity feels quite raw and bulky. I don't think my dad will search it's application by their exact names. INMHO, the Gnome-Shell menu is much better in that it let you see you apps a people familiar with any recent smartphone won't by lost. I can't say the same for Unity main menu.
drivebyacct2 15y ago
Quite frankly, who cares? I'm tired of the GNOME release plans: remove features, make GTK+ controls bulkier than ever. It's like they're trying to ensure that the same amount of stuff fits on a screen despite increased screen resolution. I'm happy to see the role Compiz is taking on. A recent rewrite that cleaned things up, replacing more and more window management tasks, support for non-accelerated backends. I'd love to see Compiz's wallpaper plugin mature and replace nautilus for the task. (It'd also allow for the global menu to not be awkward when the wallpaper has focus and for multiple wallpapers on different workspaces). Though frankly I'd love to see nautilus die in a fire anyway.
- ldng 15y ago
  I don't care about them drifting away. I might even understand some point they made about GNOME. What I don't appreciate it's some people in Ubuntu world (that would be community and canonical) blaming GNOME Upstream for the drift. They want to lead their own platform somewhere else, fine, just do it. Don't pretend that you've been pushed to. The Gnome Zeitgeist project originated from the Ubuntu community and at first they weren't accepted for inclusion in the project and started to whine in a very ubuntuesque way. They weren't listening at all to the maintainer's rationale for rejection. Happily at some point they started to listen and will probably be a key piece of GNOME 3.2 Now, I can't say the same for some others projects from canonical. challenging upstream is one thing, not being open to dialogue another, pushing its agenda by FUDing another beast altogether. As for removing features ... what are talking about ? GNOME 3.0 ? It's not like it is a finished and dead product that won't evolve anymore ! Bulkier controls ?! Come man, just change your theme. Increased screen resolution ? Like Unity wasn't made for netbooks and tablet. I'll stop feeding the troll right here ;-)
  - drivebyacct2 15y ago
    What? Gnome 2.3 has been shedding features for sometime. Ability to change GDM theme? Gone. Ability to configure gnome screensavers? Gone. That's not even mentioning 3.0, but I understand that it's like KDE, in that 3.1 will be much better suited for full time use. You miss the point on the controls. Unity WAS made for netbooks and tablets. It conserves UI space in a more concise manner (not to mention that I enjoy the search/icon paradigm. It's what Windows 7 did with dock/search-start-menu. OS X has the Dock and spotlight. The jury is in, it's popular) Most of the themes I've seen for GNOME3 still look bulky. Maybe I haven't seen enough themes yet.
    - ldng 15y ago
      You're right about gdm, still I didn't noticed it until you told me. I think most people just change the wallpaper and at most apply a different control theme. Well I don't really get you point on the controls and screen estate then. To me "bulkier" controls precisely ease their use on netbooks and tablets. Well the search is a great feature if it is fuzzy and intelligent enough to match on related keyword. Now, for now, it doesn't quite work that way. Regular people don't dare searching because they might not even know what to search. So to me gnome-shell as a better compromise it does not force search on you. With Unity, if you don't want to search, you need extra clicks to get to the actual application list. There are currently 9 Gtk+3 themes on gnome-look.org that's hardly enough to leverage the possibilities of the theming engine. Better theme will come and will harness the power of the new the engine.

azakai 15y ago

> I think this is the path that Ubuntu should follow, replace current pieces of software with lighter and smaller solutions. I fully agree, but am not sure this is an example of that. The article says LightDM uses WebKit. Loading an entire html rendering engine for a login manager seems like overkill. I guess this explains why LightDM is smaller than GDM in code size - but is it smaller in total size when including all necessary libraries? Now, some of this might be offset if you have WebKit loaded anyhow as a shared library. This seems unlikely, though, 1. This is the login manager - it's before you load your desktop and web browser. (It might save loading it later though.) 2. The default browser in Ubuntu, Firefox, is not WebKit based. Neither is Opera for that matter (but it is not as popular). 3. The most popular WebKit based browser, Chrome, bundles its own version of WebKit - so there would be no sharing anyhow.

steevdave 15y ago
Empathy (the default IM client) uses webkit to render it's themes. It is quite likely to be a shared library. On natty, webkit is fairly hefty at 24MB but it doesn't take Empathy long to load at all. And by the time your login manager has started /usr is already mounted, assuming you are not using their default partitioning which is one huge partition.
- azakai 15y ago
  It would be interesting to know how many users use Empathy. I don't myself, and maybe I'm not representative, but I don't think it is that many - Pidgin seems more popular among people I know. I don't follow the /usr bit - what does mounting /usr have to do with loading or not loading WebKit? WebKit is around 24MB, which is as you say quite hefty, but it's even worse as it depends on some other libraries - sqlite, libpng, etc.
kklimonda 15y ago
afair, WebKit is just one of backends that LightDM can use so it shouldn't really be a problem.
- 15y ago