Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME

[torsionbar28]

Unity was confusing and unpleasant to use, disrupting traditional desktop metaphors and harming productivity. Gnome 3 is much the same. Change != improvement. Why re-invent the wheel? The future of the productive business desktop and technical workstation is something like MATE. We don't need a phone or tablet GUI on the desktop, we need a desktop that behaves like a desktop, exactly the way professional users expect it to. Want to develop funky bizarre new GUI's? Great, make them an optional add-on - not the default install.

[Cerberus]

Unity was confusing and unpleasant to use, disrupting traditional desktop metaphors and harming productivity. Gnome 3 is much the same. Change != improvement. Why re-invent the wheel? The future of the productive business desktop and technical workstation is something like MATE. We don't need a phone or tablet GUI on the desktop, we need a desktop that behaves like a desktop, exactly the way professional users expect it to. Want to develop funky bizarre new GUI's? Great, make them an optional add-on - not the default install.

There is a whole lot of "we" out there that disagrees with you, they are professionals and they gladly used Unity, NASA included or you think they are amateurs. There is no WE, everyone uses what he or she likes and Linux has A LOT of desktop environments to choose from, why are you bitching about something YOU dont like and have the audacity to project the "we" like your opinion is valid for everyone? Use some other *buntu flavor or some other distribution and move on. Linux users can be such crybabies sometimes.

[RickXy]

Ended the same fate as Upstart.

[schmidtbag]

Oh and X11 also works across a network. Pretty cool huh!

Isn't the network transparency one of the core reasons why X11 is being replaced? From what I understand, that's one of the core reasons why X11 was so insecure and patched to death.

As for X11 "solving" the architectural incompatibilities - how? X11 isn't responsible for "solving" this, it was just around for so long that it is the fallback of pretty much all open-source environments. Designing a DE to be compatible with it is basically just a requirement. By your logic, that's like saying "the way to solve world hunger is to tell people to eat more". You can't make something a solution to a problem when the solution itself has fundamental problems, or, when there is a lot more to the problem than the proposed solution accounts for.

[nanonyme]

There might btw have been better chances keeping Mir by joining KDE camp instead since kwin tries hard to maintain multiplatform support (afaik Windows, X11, Wayland). Mir could have been just yet another platform

[Tomin]

That table isn't right. When i install GNOME3 desktop on my Gentoo linux i get about 1GB of ram usage, with KDE/Plasma5 about 400MB of RAM!. Also Gnome apps are slower and uses too much of cpu time and hdd load on startup.

I think the difference is that you are measuring different thing than what was in the blog post. He uses some setup to measure just the WM or DE memory usage and doesn't include the whole system ram use. I think the numbers in the article are quite as expected. I think it's interesting that in part 2, he mentions that his KDE test setup used Openbox and not KWin, which would have resulted in 100 MB more ram used. He should have mentioned that though, maybe even have separate KDE/KWin and KDE/Openbox entries.

That said I wonder if you loaded Qt libraries when you used Gnome, but not GTK+ libraries on KDE, although it's probably quite hard to not have any program needing them.

[bregma]

Oh and X11 also works across a network. Pretty cool huh!

X11 works great across the network as long as you don't want to touch the GPU or rendering hardware. It's ideal for, say, connecting to headless servers over a secure SSH connection and using the command line. It's not practical for what most people use their computers for on a day-to-day basis, like games or browsing kitten videos. On desktop, it just gives you a gaping security hole with no benefit.

[darkcoder]

This will affect the company and product image in the long run. They look like one of those small hobyst distributions that keep changing ideas just to be on the spot.

And that's why real corporations use RHEL.

[Tomin]

There might btw have been better chances keeping Mir by joining KDE camp instead since kwin tries hard to maintain multiplatform support (afaik Windows, X11, Wayland). Mir could have been just yet another platform

I doubt that Mir was a factor at all. I mean they've probably decided, that because they end phone development, there is no sense to keep Mir anymore. Anyway, I think even if they kept Unity and/or phones, they could have achieved their goals with Wayland just as well as with Mir. Of course they would need to write or adapt some Wayland compositor in that case. I wonder, if Unity could be changed to use either Mutter or KWin instead of Compiz and Mir.

[Cerberus]

This will affect the company and product image in the long run. They look like one of those small hobyst distributions that keep changing ideas just to be on the spot.

And that's why real corporations use RHEL.

You missed the whole point of this decision, Ubuntu ditched these projects precisely in order to focus on profitable areas like servers, cloud and IoT. Clients dont care much about Linux desktop, the money is in the servers, cloud and IoT.