Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop To Get Rid Of GNOME's Shell

[energyman]

ubuntu should just scrap the crap and switch over to KDE.

[KAMiKAZOW]

I'm wondering...

If Canonical switches from GNOME Shell to their own solution, what will be left of GNOME in Ubuntu other than the Gimp Toolkit?

Gconf? Nautilus?

I'm just guessing because I don't know the final package list but those are what I'd expect:
Zeitgeist, Keyring, Brasero, classic GNOME 2.x DE as fallback (Unity and Shell require accelerated OpenGL), Tracker, Nautilus, NetworkManager Applet, GNOME Power Manager, Mono,?

[pingufunkybeat]

I'm wondering...

If Canonical switches from GNOME Shell to their own solution, what will be left of GNOME in Ubuntu other than the Gimp Toolkit?

Gconf? Nautilus?

[pingufunkybeat]

I agree with you. In my opinion, Compiz is the only compositing manager that makes sense on Linux. Kwin is a Compiz wannabe, KDE 4 could have been way better since the beginning if they played nicely with Compiz, but no, they wanted their own crappy WM. Mutter is just a pain in the ass that makes no sense. It seems that all DEs are closed inside a bubble.

KWin is 100x the window manager Compiz is. In fact, this is why the KDE guys decided against switching to Compiz in the first place.

Compiz has far better and smoother GL effects. No arguments there. But it doesn't even come within the same galaxy as KWin when it comes to actually MANAGING WINDOWS. I gave up on Compiz after a couple of years of trying to get used to it. Going back to KWin was a revelation.

The fact that the effects are less sexy than with Compiz is really a minor gripe at the end of the day, as you turn most of them off for serious work anyway.

[KAMiKAZOW]

People, Unity desktop edition won't be like UNE's Unity. It will use Compiz and other elements.

And what exactly are those "other elements"?

In my opinion, Compiz is the only compositing manager that makes sense on Linux. Kwin is a Compiz wannabe, KDE 4 could have been way better since the beginning if they played nicely with Compiz, but no, they wanted their own crappy WM.

Unlike Compiz KWin actually works without hardware accelerated OpenGL. It has three modes: Hardware OpenGL, compositing via XRender, and no composite at all.
Adding composite features to KWin was less work than to extend Compiz with the missing features. One result is that the work flow stays smooth when KWin is switching from composite mode to unaccelerated or the other way around. In current GNOME environments hacks are used to switch back and forth between Compiz and Metacity, resulting in entirely different decorations ? and button orders ? being loaded.

Compiz is also heavily tied to desktop technologies. OTOH KDE is also developing an shell for smartphone form factors. KWin is easier to adapt to it than Compiz. GNOME-based Maemo uses the Matchbox window manager for that reason and not Compiz.

Oh and btw, KDE and Compiz play nicely with each other. They are currently jointly developing a composite manager spec. The atmosphere has always been more friendly between KWin and Compiz than Metacity and Compiz.

Only Canonical decided to ship unity/mutter with their netbook edition, despite mutter's well known problems. So they should take the responsibility for it and not resort to KDE/Kwin tactics of blaming upstream for their own cock-ups.

Canonical is a commercial enterprise while KWin is developed by hobbyists. You can't blame hobbyists for only developing with the hardware they own. If KWin indeed works choppy on certain hardware combinations (it works very fine for me), distributions could just as well ship Compiz-KDE ? it's fully compatible with KWin (or even better: spend their money to fix what's actually broken instead of just working around glitches).

I have yet to try Mutter but performance of a single window manager is no reasonable reason for switching the whole desktop environment. Canonical could just as well port the necessary features to Compiz and use Shell with it. Since Shell and Unity both use Clutter, the performance is likely similar anyway.

Btw, according to ArsTechnica Shuttleworth stated that GNOME and Canonical don't have the same design philosophy ... that Canonical believes in a unified global menu while GNOME doesn't.
One could be inclined to actually believe that claim if Canonical ever shipped http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/ by default and now made the technical argument that gnome2-globalmenu no longer works with Shell and Canonical was forced to adopt Unity for Ubuntu Desktop as well.
That leaves me with http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/10/17...admits-it.html and Canonical's desire to control Unity's copyright in order to allow proprietary variants by OEMs.

[virtualspectre8]

Anyway cheerios to the compiz devs, as right know they seem to be the only ones that can actually make a compositing manager with good performance.

I agree with you. In my opinion, Compiz is the only compositing manager that makes sense on Linux. Kwin is a Compiz wannabe, KDE 4 could have been way better since the beginning if they played nicely with Compiz, but no, they wanted their own crappy WM. Mutter is just a pain in the ass that makes no sense. It seems that all DEs are closed inside a bubble.

[monraaf]

Guys, the performance problems of Unity where due to using Mutter which will no longer be used and they did the first Unity with a small team in just 6 months and it is pretty good for that. Now they have a huge team working on just improving Unity to make it shine really bright. They even hired smspillaz, the well known Compiz developer and will use the Compiz rewrite (0.9 and later) for Unity.

Hate him if you want, but they know what they're doing as they had to think about Gnome-panel vs. Gnome-shell vs. Unity for a long time now.

I agree that the performance of mutter in its current state is abysmal compared to compiz, this is a well known fact. So no sane distro is shipping gnome-shell/mutter as default because it's simply not ready yet. Only Canonical decided to ship unity/mutter with their netbook edition, despite mutter's well known problems. So they should take the responsibility for it and not resort to KDE/Kwin tactics of blaming upstream for their own cock-ups. In the light of this unity/mutter disaster I'm not sure how exactly you can come to the conclusion that they (canonical) know what they are doing.

Anyway cheerios to the compiz devs, as right know they seem to be the only ones that can actually make a compositing manager with good performance.

[virtualspectre8]

People, Unity desktop edition won't be like UNE's Unity. It will use Compiz and other elements.

[KAMiKAZOW]

Hopefully there will be an Ubuntu fork that uses the default gnome desktop.

It's called Debian ;-)

[iznogood]

Ubuntu is full of stupid decisions lately, starting with this multitouch effort and now this. For me its easy, just change distro. Hopefully there will be an Ubuntu fork that uses the default gnome desktop.

But what about simple users who do not know or care about all that ? Only lately some people started to know Linux and Gnome, and getting used to this desktop and now its about to change again.

I hope they won't go through with this effort, its pure stupidity