Ubuntu Studio Doesn't Like Unity Or GNOME Shell

Posted by Michael Larabel on May 17, 2011

Ubuntu Studio, an official Ubuntu Linux derivative designed for an optimal multi-media production experience, will not be following its "bigger brother" in using Canonical's Unity Desktop. But the Ubuntu Studio developers don't like the GNOME Shell as part of the GNOME 3.0 experience either, so they have drawn up a new set of plans.

Ubuntu Studio has traditionally used the standard GNOME 2.x shell, but going forward, they feel they wouldn't be happy with moving to the GNOME 3.0 Shell or to Canonical's Unity desktop like is found in Ubuntu 11.04. "The team simple feel that Unity and GNOME-Shell do not fit our target audience or intended workflow."

What Ubuntu Studio's development team has done instead is they have decided to re-base their Ubuntu derivative on the Xfce 4.8 desktop. Future releases of Ubuntu Studio will be using the Xfce desktop with a custom user-interface and will use the Avant Window Navigator with this alternative desktop. The announcement was made on the project's mailing list.

For those not concerned about multimedia applications, there is already Xubuntu as another official Ubuntu derivative that ships with the stock Xfce desktop.

Changing out GNOME for Xfce isn't the only major change planned for the Ubuntu Studio 11.10 release, but they are also investigating what to do with PulseAudio and whether it could be tossed out the window. It's not too likely they will be able to do away with PulseAudio completely, but according to this message they will try to at least better integrate JACK with PulseAudio.

Discuss this article in our forums, IRC channel, or email the author. You can also follow our content via RSS and on social networks like Facebook, Identi.ca, and Twitter (@Phoronix and @MichaelLarabel). Subscribe to Phoronix Premium to view our content without advertisements, view entire articles on a single page, and experience other benefits.
Latest Hardware Reviews
  1. Sumo Lounge Emperor
  2. Gallium3D Continues Improving OpenGL For Older Radeon GPUs
  3. 15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison
  4. Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux Comparison Shows Shortcomings
Latest Software Articles
  1. Intel Linux OpenGL Driver Leading Over Apple OS X
  2. The Cost Of Ubuntu Disk Encryption
  3. Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. XFS vs. F2FS On Linux 3.10
  4. AMD Radeon R600 GPU LLVM 3.3 Back-End Testing
Latest Linux News
  1. Linux Desktop Security Could Be A Whole Lot Better
  2. KDE 4.11 Will Be The Last Major KDE4 Workspaces Feature Release
  3. New NVIDIA Linux Driver Supports The GeForce GTX 780
  4. Chrome 28 To Offer More Speed Improvements
  5. Digia Announces "Boot To Qt" Project
  6. X.Org Libraries Hit By Round Of Security Issues
  7. Wayland's Weston Gets Output Scaling Support
  8. Raspberry Pi Gets New Wayland Weston Renderer
  9. Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 Release Brings New Packages
  10. Intel Ultrabook Performance Is Faster With Mesa 9.2
  11. Hot Relocation HDD To SSD Support For Btrfs
Latest Forum Talk
  1. Openbenchmarking.org main page is damaged
  2. Xserver 1.14 support will arrive with Catalyst...
  3. Microsoft Releases Skype For Linux 4.2, Has...
  4. X.Org Libraries Hit By Round Of Security Issues
  5. New NVIDIA Linux Driver Supports The GeForce GTX...
  6. Wayland's Weston Gets Output Scaling Support
  1. Computers
  2. Display Drivers
  3. Graphics Cards
  4. Motherboards
  5. Peripherals
  6. Processors
  7. Software
  8. Operating Systems
  9. All Articles
  1. Linux Benchmarking
  2. OpenBenchmarking.org
  3. Phoronix Test Suite