Mark Shuttleworth Talks Of New Ubuntu Installer Ideas With HTML5/Electron & Snaps

[Vasant1234]

Let me tell you Mark what was a GREAT application,... Unity 7 was. And you killed it. Ubuntu is becoming just another average distro day by day.

Well, you can't blame him for giving up on his desktop ambition. Ubuntu was not bringing in sufficient revenues to justify the investment. You are right, now it is just Debian repackaged.

[Tuxee]

Let me tell you Mark what was a GREAT application,... Unity 7 was. And you killed it. Ubuntu is becoming just another average distro day by day.

Oh, puhleeze. I can still the yearlong rants about how horrible and abysmal, how mind-numbingly stupid Unity was. It obviously needed extra distros and flavours to get rid of this cancer called Unity. Now they've put Unity to rest and all of a sudden people like you pop up and start whinning. Don't get me wrong: I found Unity quite usable but at the very same time I don't have any problems with Gnome Shell either.

[Quppa]

There's no need for this app to be cross-platform, so what's the appeal of Electron here? CSS is slowly getting better with grid and flexbox, but would one really choose it for a project like this when there are alternatives like QML available?

[Tuxee]

So the examples that Mark makes of "great applications" are both proprietary. Can he name even two great libre applications that use electron?

VS Code. Atom. Whether they are "great" remains debatable. Anyway, I can't understand all the fuss - we are talking about an installer tool, right? How often does this get in your way? Most likely: Once per installation. Should I care about memory consumption? Don't think so. Will the lack of speed be an issue? I suppose not.

[Drago]

Oh, puhleeze. I can still the yearlong rants about how horrible and abysmal, how mind-numbingly stupid Unity was. It obviously needed extra distros and flavours to get rid of this cancer called Unity. Now they've put Unity to rest and all of a sudden people like you pop up and start whinning. Don't get me wrong: I found Unity quite usable but at the very same time I don't have any problems with Gnome Shell either.

I have always loved Unity, and I love how minimal it is. Quite similar to OSX. I don't care about Dash, don't use it, however app menu in the title bar is a killer feature for me.

[mike44]

Unity 8 looks nicer, and, bonus, it's still alive

I'll try it in a while, hope it doesn't use more resources than Gnome with Unite extension.

[polarathene]

VS Code. Atom. Whether they are "great" remains debatable. Anyway, I can't understand all the fuss - we are talking about an installer tool, right? How often does this get in your way? Most likely: Once per installation. Should I care about memory consumption? Don't think so. Will the lack of speed be an issue? I suppose not.

Bet me to it :P Web technolgies can make some pretty neat UI/UX and there is a great many JS libs out there for doing cool stuff such as maps with Mapbox and Leaflet, any graphing/visualization stuff, carasouls(seem popular in installers?), video, animations(tweens or effects), UI layout and state + components(hello React+Redux). Dynamic/responsive, easy re-branding.

I get why Electron isn't loved much, but honestly for the installer part, I can totally see the point. The negatives aren't really relevant during that stage for a desktop install. Actual installer logic under the hood can function alongside Electron as the article states. It's just about providing the frontend that the user interacts with, and it's a good option

What I'd rather see though is a common installer framework/backend where you can use whatever frontend you like(Electron/Qt/Gtk). I just don't see the point of several distros DIYing their installers with a specific frontend, rather than collaborating on something solid and extensible that exposes an API to the frontends. I believe Calamares is kind of aiming for being capable of this to some extent.

[cen1]

Who cares about installers? Let me setup user, network and partitions and be done with it. This is 15min once a year.

[pabloski]

So the examples that Mark makes of "great applications" are both proprietary. Can he name even two great libre applications that use electron?

There are open applications too, like Atom, VSCode, Etcher, Brave ( the browser ). The real point is that Electron is slow and memory hungry. It is a monster from a tecnhological point of view. So why? If they want to try HTML5, why not something like Sciter?

I think the opensource community is in need of a reimplementation of Electron technology, because the idea is good but the execution is horrible. Having to copies of Nodejs inside Electron...seriously??

[andre30correia]

Let me tell you Mark what was a GREAT application,... Unity 7 was. And you killed it. Ubuntu is becoming just another average distro day by day.

agree the only really desktop integrated with everything