Solaris 11.4 To Move From GNOME 2 Desktop To GNOME Shell

[pavlerson]

Really Stability claim is bogus. Not wanting change is correct. Getting rid of hald and moving to KMS was about fixing unfixable issues that causes the desktop environment of unix/linux/bsd to randomly fail. There are other parts that were causing server side stability issues as well.

Enterprise IT needs serous kick in teeth. Its like them running out of date openssl with known security flaws because it would cost them more certifying the change.

Claiming stability makes it sound like Enterprise IT is some how doing something good. Not updating and improving resulting in leaving highly flawed items in usage does not sound anywhere near as good but it is the truth of their actions.

In Enterprise, stability is everything. Those large business servers that juggles billions of dollars every minute - what do you think is prioritized? Performance or stability? Those large business servers are also excusively used in a very controlled way and they are not exposed to the internet for any user. For instance, stock exchanges. They are not accessible to the internet to any random users. No, they are used in a very controlled exclusive way where all members are certified and often use direct T1 connections or something similar.

And how do you achieve stability? It is said that old mature code is stable, and new code is unstable. Some say that you can not use a new Windows version until the first expansion pack has arrived to iron out the bugs. That is the same reasoning why Enterprise does not want change - to achieve stability. If Red Hat use an old and battle tested kernel instead of the latest kernel - that is because the old kernel probably has less bugs and therefore is more stable. Production never use bleeding edge software, they always use old software. And in Enterprise IT, they use ancient and old software. The same with space rockets, they could use the latest and newest ARM cpus and what not, but instead they always use old cpus that are mature.

The more important something is, the less risk you take. And risk is uncertainty, and new things are uncertain. You want old mature tech, if your business is really important. That is why ancient slow Mainframes are still in use today and powers lot of the financial system.

If you have not worked in Enterprise IT, these priorities might be difficult to understand. Desktop users wants the latest and fastest. Enterprise wants stability. Dont touch. And this is why Solaris, AIX, Mainframes, etc - dont want the latest Gnome or whatever tech. Not because lack of developers. Different priorities. Stability.

[George99]

The key part is 'may/will break', Gnome Shell extensions break with pretty much every single release, and are required to get even a basically functional desktop.

That is why most basic Gnome Shell extensions are nowadays officially supported and maintained by Gnome. But also the unofficial extensions I use like Topicons Plus or OpenWeather are under active development and up to date.

[starshipeleven]

But Chromium has less features than Firefox, but no one complains about that because "there are extensions to reach the same level of functionality".

Uhm... no what you post here just makes no sense.

Chromium and Firefox without extensions have more or less the same feature set and user-accessible options (yeah, firefox exposes a boatload of stuff in about:config but that's like regedit on windows, most people won't use it because there is no info on what most of that does).
Which is why they had to eventually focus on performance again to remain relevant, as most people use both browsers vanilla, and there only raw performance and stability makes some kind of difference between the two competitors.

Firefox traditionally had far better extensions because it had a better API, which atm is not the case anymore because that API is deprecated, but afaik this is still a goal with their webextension API. Major extensions whose developer did engage Mozilla developers like Noscript did get their own new webextension API to work, albeit it is still a work in progress.

So, statements like "chrome/ium has less features than FF" and "chrome/ium can have extensions that reach the same level of functionality of firefox" are both false.

Both are around the same level of functionality, extensions are better on firefox (yes, still better than Chrome while not as good as the old FF).

[calc]

More like "I'd like to be able to have normal levels of customization as available in other Linux DEs without having to install extensions that may/will break".

I mean, MATE or even XFCE have less options than KDE (the usual suspect), for example, but still much more than GNOME without the Tweak Tool and extensions.

But Chromium has less features than Firefox, but no one complains about that because "there are extensions to reach the same level of functionality".

The key part is 'may/will break', Gnome Shell extensions break with pretty much every single release, and are required to get even a basically functional desktop.

[Vistaus]

More like "I'd like to be able to have normal levels of customization as available in other Linux DEs without having to install extensions that may/will break".

I mean, MATE or even XFCE have less options than KDE (the usual suspect), for example, but still much more than GNOME without the Tweak Tool and extensions.

But Chromium has less features than Firefox, but no one complains about that because "there are extensions to reach the same level of functionality".

[starshipeleven]

This is why large companies runs mainframes that are decades old. It is not about performance or the latest features. It is about stability. They pay ridicilous amount of money for uptime and stability, they are not interested in performance at all.

There is no force in the heavens and in hell that goes and forces anyone to update their systems. Many devices and businness servers are using some kind of outdated OS for the sake of running their core software.

But it's irrelevant because they are NOT accessible from outside of their own company network, and they don't care of better performance or something.

This argument is bullshit, because updating the UPSTREAM of an application or OS or anything does not affect deployed systems. This isn't Windows with mandatory updates, most database servers have total shit security anyway as they are mostly dumb appliances sitting in a secured internal network.

OTOH, C# powers desktop.

I've seen far more C# in company servers than Java. I've seen also a fuckton of Cobol programs still in use for banks and finance, and they still hire Cobol programmers here.

[starshipeleven]

In that case you're an exception, but most anti-GNOME Shell people keep repeating the argument "I don't want extensions to customize my DE 'cause every little feature should be integrated!!!" yet those same users don't care that browsers don't have every feature they want either and continue to customize them...

More like "I'd like to be able to have normal levels of customization as available in other Linux DEs without having to install extensions that may/will break".

I mean, MATE or even XFCE have less options than KDE (the usual suspect), for example, but still much more than GNOME without the Tweak Tool and extensions.

[starshipeleven]

This is why BSD and Solaris and Mainframes say "dont change anything". Because they are targeted to large business servers. Not desktop, as Linux is.

HAHAHAAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

No.

Linux is aimed at servers and embedded, Desktop is not a priority.

[Vistaus]

OpenBSD created dummy systemd packages for this.

Gnome 3 on FreeBSD seems to be mostly stuck on 3.18, which is couple of years old. Some components are 3.24 but none appear newer.

I agree that, for example, Nautilus in FreeBSD appears to be 3.18.5 so it's very old, but Sound Juicer for example never had a 3.26 release and is still stuck on 3.24: https://git.gnome.org/browse/sound-juicer/refs/
And gcr is still stuck at 3.20 even (!): https://git.gnome.org/browse/gcr/refs/ (okay, latest unstable in 3.27.4 but latest stable is still 3.20)

So while a few packages maybe out-of-date in FreeBSD, not all GNOME apps/components were updated upstream the last few years so some packages are older just because there is no newer upstream release.

[Vistaus]

I'll leave this bit of truth here:
browser extensions are more stable than GNOME 3 extensions as upstream does not break API very often if at all.

In that case you're an exception, but most anti-GNOME Shell people keep repeating the argument "I don't want extensions to customize my DE 'cause every little feature should be integrated!!!" yet those same users don't care that browsers don't have every feature they want either and continue to customize them...