Ubuntu Unity Ported To Fedora Using OpenSUSE 128
sfcrazy writes "The general tendency within the open source community is to a whole new wheel to push your own cart. A majority of open source projects are suffering from duplication. Luckily, we just noticed a great example of such collaboration (or using resources by different competing projects) within the distro community. Ubuntu's popular Unity shell is being ported to Fedora (the distro which leads the development of Gnome shell and its also the breeding ground of many latest technologies which are used by the rest of the GNU/Linux world). Interestingly developers users openSUSE's build service to create this port. openSUSE leads the development of Gnome and KDE along with LibreOffice." Calling Unity "popular" seems like a stretch, but it's certainly where a lot of Ubuntu work has been lavished; the cooperation that open source code fosters at least lets whoever wants to use or develop it do so.
Great, sort of (Score:5, Informative)
So now that that's done, perhaps they can "port" Mate to Fedora too?
Gnome 3 and Unity isn't the answer. It's the question, and judging on user reaction, the answer is "no".
Re:Great, sort of (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, what?! No, this is just crap.
GNOME 3 and Unity are not the answer PRIMARILY because no one was asking the damned question!!
People Don't Want GNOME Shell and Don't Want Unity.
"New Coke" sucks. We want Coca-Cola Classic now. Can we have it back?
Re:Great, sort of (Score:5, Insightful)
I want unity. I like it. I've used a half a dozen different linux guis and unity is the one that lives on my desktop every day. Sure it's got issues, but they all do in one way or another.
Also, new coke was preferred in taste tests prior to release over "classic" coke and pepsi -combined-.
The reason it failed was because the coca-cola corporation had underestimated the extent to which they themselves had integrated coke into american lifestyles and memories, and any perceived change to that would be viewed by the american public as dicking around with their childhood.
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp [snopes.com]
honestly, new coke was pretty good. I miss it.
Re:Great, sort of (Score:5, Informative)
In taste tests, people also routinely say they like Pepsi more than Coke. But this is purely becuase the taste tests are just small samples while many people can't stand drinking a full can of Pepsi because it's too sweet. [wikipedia.org] This was the same with New Coke. The taste tests of old vs new Coke gave them an erroneous result because it used the same flawed testing as the Pepsi Challenge.
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I dunno, I think pepsi does pretty well for themselves.
especially considering that at the time of the whole coke classic / new coke debacle, pepsi was handily outselling coke.
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The point wasn't how well Pepsi sells or sold, the point is those new Coke taste tests gave erroneous results such as the Pepsi Challenge did. And Pepsi wasn't outselling Coke as your own link says:
and it was only Coke's greater availability in restricted markets (such as soda vending machines and fast food outlets) that was keeping its numbers ahead of Pepsi's.
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keep reading.
[quote] market surveys at the end of 1985 showed Pepsi ahead of New Coke and Classic Coke combined. [/quote]
also, since you said that "many people can't stand to drink a full can of pepsi" I was showing that however many your "many people" are, they aren't enough to stop pepsi from selling a metric shitload of product.
Re:Great, sort of (Score:5, Informative)
Meh. I liked Crystal Pepsi. The caramel coloring in colas is purely for looks, and it curdles in you mouth.
But unless Unity supports desktop applets and user program launchers, I'm not going near it. Of all the insanely stupid things Gnome3 did...
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I liked crystal pepsi too. it was a little different, but in a good way.
pepsi crystal, which came out a few years later, was not the same thing at all!
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Cherry Coke was pretty good, although Dr. Pepper is better.
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Cherry Coke was pretty good, although Dr. Pepper is better.
Drinking Dr Pepper is better than dying of thirst when you're too dehydrated to produce your own piss to drink, but that's about it.
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None of this matters because RC Cola is better than Coke -or- Pepsi
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None of this matters because RC Cola is better than Coke -or- Pepsi
Shasta, bitches!
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all true hackers drink jolt!
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all true hackers drink jolt!
I tried Jolt when it first came out, and it felt like someone had attached a car battery to my teeth.
Re:Great, sort of (Score:5, Interesting)
Case in point, a "blind" taste-test offered at a local waterpark that I was at as a teenager, with signs all around it clearly defining it as the "Pepsi Challenge"
This particular taste test was giving out prizes/awards. I had noticed that some people walked away with a bottle of pepsi, and some walked away with a chocolate bar, but nobody got to choose (they were simply being handed the prize).
I (correctly) assumed that those who chose Pepsi as the favorite received the beverage, and those who chose coke got the snack.
I prefer Coke, but I was thirsty and I knew which tasted like which. I chose Pepsi, and got a free beverage.
I told my friends, they attempted, and all got the same result.
At that point it wasn't a contest of coke vs pepsi, it was a contest of free beverage vs free snack on a hot, sunny day in a waterpark.
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And if they're not chilled or served with ice, coke and pepsi also taste like shit.
I know this will seem like heresy to Americans, soz.
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Seeing as they are porting it, I am sure we want it. Also, the "new coke" sucks thing is kinda stupid, seeing as when they tested for the new coke, most people agreed it tasted a lot better, but people didn't want a new taste, so basically you are saying that for the sake of not having to adapt, we should throw away an improvement. That said, I don't know if unity is an improvement. It has a few not so bad features, but I do miss a lot of things as well.
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Yes, in sip tests people liked New Coke more, but ths was a flawed testing method consistent with the erroneous results of the 'Pepsi Challenge'.
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I also like unity quite a bit. I would like it more if it were stable. Coincidentally, just yesterday I worked on an old man's windows computer and he had his taskbar on the left side of the screen the way unity has it. He said he does it since all the screens are widescreen it makes better use of his screen.
Proof yet again of the superior customising facilities available on Windows compared to the one-size-fits-all approach of Linux. Hold on a sec...
Re:Great, sort of (Score:4, Interesting)
First Apple, then Microsoft, and now Canonical seem obsessed with making their desktops "pretty" rather than functional.
Mozilla also seems to have the same obsession..... just installed Firefox 13 on my brother's laptop, and I swear it looked like Chromium. He asked me to "make it look like it used to look" so I backed it off to Firefox 10 LTS which has the full dropdown menu. Change for the sake of change is usually bad, especially when the users just want it to work.
Take a look at cars: They've kept the same standard interface for as long as I can remember (back to the 60s at least). The shifter moved from the steering wheel to the floor, but otherwise I could drive an old 60s car or a modern 2013 car without difficulty.
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First Apple, then Microsoft, and now Canonical seem obsessed with making their desktops "pretty" rather than functional.
False Dichotomy
Take a look at cars: They've kept the same standard interface for as long as I can remember (back to the 60s at least). The shifter moved from the steering wheel to the floor, but otherwise I could drive an old 60s car or a modern 2013 car without difficulty.
And as far as Unity, the launcher moved from the bottom to the left. Yes you could list other changes, but I could list other changes to cars in the past 50 year as well.
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False Dichotomy
True. Unity is neither functional nor pretty.
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"Troll" != "I disagree".
Even ACs are allowed to express their opinions.
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you can get the "old" firefox interface with any of the newer versions. I've got 14.0.1 installed right now with the old look.
just go into "view" -> "toolbars" and change the "menu bar" setting.
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People hating on Firefox tend to ignore that, unlike Chrome, the UI is customizable. I'm running nightly and it doesn't look all that different from Firefox 3.6, and aside from them playing with the locations of some buttons (always reversible) it hasn't changed much, and rarely in ways that weren't reversible.
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And you ignore the fact that most users don't want to dick around with shit just to get back to what should be the sensible default.
Re:Great, sort of (Score:4, Insightful)
huh? I thought one of the main knocks on unity was that linux users weren't allowed to dick around with the UI as much as they've classically been allowed to?
man, damned if you do, damned if you don't...
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Huh? He was talking about the Firefox UI. Even still, if people have to needlessly dick around to get your DE or prgram usable you have failed big time. No one said take away cuatomizability, but you need sensible defaults or you just drive people away.
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huh? I thought one of the main knocks on unity was that linux users weren't allowed to dick around with the UI as much as they've classically been allowed to?
And the reason people want to 'dick around with it' is because by default it sucks. It's OK on a tiny netbook screen, but it's horrible when you're trying to do real work on a real screen.
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And you ignore the fact that most users don't want to dick around with shit just to get back to what should be the sensible default.
This!
I've been an OS X user for almost 12 years now and am firmly expecting to drop it and switch to Linux next month when 10.8 doesn't fix the shit they messed up with 10.7. Apple's been messing with their UI for years now, but it's finally gotten to the level that it pisses me off daily that almost all my "muscle memory" is now broken because they've changed things too much. Sure some things can be reverted back to how they were (or some semblance there of), but little of it is documented and I shouldn't
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This what? Finish your sentences.
It's the new "me too!" and just as irritating.
There is an additional implication of elitism about it, as though the writer is saying "I do not have the time to write in English due to the fantastically important work I am doing, but I thought I would just let you mere mortal know that I find your ideas acceptable."
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People hating on Firefox tend to ignore that, unlike Chrome, the UI is customizable. I'm running nightly and it doesn't look all that different from Firefox 3.6, and aside from them playing with the locations of some buttons (always reversible) it hasn't changed much, and rarely in ways that weren't reversible.
I can't minimize the bookmark and tab bars anymore. I really miss that. Now you have to go through the View menu where you can remove the bookmark bar from view, but not toggle it like the minimize button did. And the tab bar seems stuck no matter what.
Some might be comfortable with those changes, but they're still irreversible changes.
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>>>In the title bar at the top, right-click on the space to the right of the "Open a new tab" button [+]. Click on "Menu Bar" in the context menu.
Yeah I did but still doesn't look the same as the older interface my brother had on Firefox 4. So I went to the LTS version (10) with 2 years of support & the same look he wanted.
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I seem to be the lone voice here, and I don't understand. I *love* Unity. it is far and away the best, most usable UI I have worked with. Ever.
I say that as a dedicated Emacs user. Unity follows the Emacs philosophy into the graphical desktop - the fewer times I need to reach for that damned mouse, the better. Any app I want to launch is four key strokes away. Any menu item is three or four keystrokes away, and I don't have to remember the arcane sequence of accelerators, I just start typing what I wa
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Because it's only recently reached what could be called beta quality, it still sucks at multiple monitors, global menus are fucking lame, scroll bars that by default disappear are stupid and unintuitive, the dash is laggy, it's terrible at touch even when your monitor has touch capability, not allowing people to move the launch bar without needless dicking around, the fact that you need a third party program just to adjust fonts and other basic configuration, etc, etc.
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What I don't get is why people moan so much about unity, when if they dont like it, there are 18 gazillion other linuxes out there to use. Or even just switch to classic mode! Unity is different on purpose, shitting all over it for its minor faults is akin to kicking a baby in the shins because they haven't properly preserved the grammar of their mother language.
Of course it isn't perfect, but the whole point is: at least its something different! Stagnant pools breed vermin...
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Being buggy is a 'mnor fault', now?
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There is no other kind of successful Emacs user.
Exactly the point. You don't need a graphical interface. You already know the names of all the apps you want to run. But my mother and father do need a graphical interface, and they don't know the names of all the apps -- however few they are. They can't touch type and look at the screen at the s
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I say that as a dedicated Emacs user. Unity follows the Emacs philosophy
Use self-modifying code and eat CPU through busy-polling?
Jokes aside, I am sure that there are people who like Unity (and some who even like Gnome 3). But I think the great majority don't; especially those who are used to working with lots of different apps, or use xdm or VMs.
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I encourage you to have a look at the latest Unity in Precise Pangolin (Ubuntu 12.04).
They've fixed the worst problems and it actually works quite well for a developer workstation now.
-AltTab only cycles through the windows on the current virtual desktop, not all desktops.
-It's actually nice having icons in fixed locations. Good for muscle memory.
-Global menu is nice on a laptop. On a huge monitor it may not be. But you can turn it off with one of the tweak programs.
-"You have to know the name of the app" i
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Unity has never, and will never be the answer.
Honestly who thought porting Unity to SUSE was a good thing? Ubuntu users hated it, and because of that, many Gnome users have abandoned Ubuntu in favor of Mint. You can see a direct correlation on distrowatch between Mints sudden surge in ranking, and Ubuntu's sudden drop. It's really no surprise.
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To be fair, the main reasons for the backlash are the same:
In fact, the response to KDE 4 was quite similar. The Linux desktop folks need to learn how to test properly and to take some marketing lessons from Apple. It's the least they could do.
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The problem with KDE 4.0 was that it was simply nowhere near release quality; huge chunks of it were either massively buggy or simply not implemented, and it took them until 4.3 to get it to a state that I was prepared to use it as my desktop. At that point it worked pretty much identically to KDE 3.x, even though the underlying code had been completely rewritten, and I could just ignore the new stuff I had no use for such as activities without it affecting
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Blah, blah, blah. Throwing a bunch of buzzwords together doesn't make a coherent sentence, let alone anything resembling an argument.
If you're going to take the time to say something, at least take the extra second or two to add actual content.
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Blah, blah, blah. Throwing a bunch of buzzwords together doesn't make a coherent sentence, let alone anything resembling an argument.
IIf you count "cell phone" and "desktop" as buzzwords, I can only assume you have just been released from a very long spell in solitary confinement. You are aware that the US landed a man on the moon, right?
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Gnome 3 and Unity isn't the answer. It's the question, and judging on user reaction, the answer is "no".
Well, somehow I have to thank Gnome 3/Unity. Without it I'd never have tried Sawfish, XFCE, finally moved my POP account into a private IMAP server, learned Mutt, found DeadBeef, expanded my Conky-Configuration to include even more awesome stuff...I'd never have looked beyond Gnome if it wouldn't have been for those two.
So, this might sound crazy, but thank you Gnome and Canonical! Thank you for pushing a technology which made me look beyond what I already had, and let me find even better things! Thank you!
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Maybe the question is "How do we make KDE 4.x look better?"
One summary, so many errors (Score:1, Insightful)
>> "Interestingly developers users openSUSE's build service"
Developers users? Developers used? Developers are using?
>> "A majority of open source projects are suffering from duplication. Luckily, we just noticed a great example of such collaboration"
I think there is a sentence missing in there. Or maybe the author doesn't know what duplication and collaboration mean?
>> "Calling Unity "popular" seems like a stretch"
Really? It's only the default desktop of the most widely used Linux distribu
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All of the Ubuntu Users I know switch to Gnome 3 or Xfce as their first step after install. This is obviously a small-ish sample size (15 or so, and mostly IT people), I'm currently tolerating Gnome 3. I find that Unity, in addition to some of it's design faults is too slow.
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... of course, my opinion shouldn't be trusted because I don't know the peoper "its" to use.
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Yeah, that's it. That's the reason your opinion shouldn't be trusted. I mean, you typing while drunk wouldn't figure into it at all.
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I don't know the peoper "its" to use.
Today's not treating you too well, is it?
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What's unusual is that he was being a grammar Nazi towards himself which is strangely impressive.
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Interesting. None of the Ubuntu users I know are using anything other than Unity.
But then, none of them were Linux desktop users until Ubuntu 12.04 either.
(Well, I was, back in the 1990s. But not for like 12 years or so. The main thing I've found annoying about Unity is how hard it is to turn off virtual desktops/workspaces. Was tempted to switch back to TWM until I figured it out.)
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I'm sure I could answer my own question with 2 seconds of googling, but for the sake of discussion: What are the differences between Unity and Gnome 3 besides performance ?
I've been using Ubuntu for quite a few years now and have never considered switching desktops, particularly to Gnome (and isn't Unity just Gnome with some changes or am I *way* behind the times ?) xfce is just too ugly for me. I'm one of those rare tech people who actually doesn't mind sparing a few CPU cycles to have something nice to lo
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So, would I have any reason to want to switch from Unity to Gnome 3 ?
I don't use gnome3 myself, but I did try it out for a while, and it did a few things that might meet your needs better.
Gnome3 can look pretty good, with themes. To my personal taste, the default looks terrible, though. It's also a lot easier to customize than Unity is now, though this wasn't the case earlier.
I tried it out for a while, and I actually really like how it handles notifications, though your taste may go the opposite way. And Compiz still has issues with snapping on resize, so getting away
Unity better than Gnome Shell (Score:5, Interesting)
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That bottom area on Gnome 3 is one of its big flaws, I think. They display notifications there, but only when you hover your mouse over them. *Mail notifications*, stuff like that. Notifications are meant to be seen. I want toknow at a glance that I have an email to read. The only way I've found to fix this is with a third party mail notification program. Neither Thunderbird or Evolution will do it properly, even with some of the Gnome extensions.
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I don't have a Gnome Shell instance at moment, so I'm not sure if that's the case. I do remember seeing notifications on the bottom area and on the top panel. Now, I'm not sure if the messages that appeared on the top panel were notifications or merely tooltips. Maybe that's what the Fedora folks were thinking, to separate the tooltips from the notifications. I prefer
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You missed some:
The general tendency within the open source community is to a whole new wheel to push your own cart
Yes, open source developers tend to accidentally a whole wheel.
openSUSE leads the development of Gnome and KDE along with LibreOffice
What? openSUSE doesn't lead anything, they use the software, and usually assist in its development.
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I know the OBS, I have used it for a couple of years, and although it was for only one project, I know how cool, useful and unique it is. I would never dispute its value to both distributions and developers. However, it is not what the summary says.
Re:One summary, so many errors (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? It's only the default desktop of the most widely used Linux distribution in the world. Popularity doesn't mean you like it, it's a measure of how many people use/like it. More people use Unity than just about any other open source desktop available, that makes it pretty popular.
Unity's 'popularity' is almost entirely dependent on the strong Ubuntu brand (built with Gnome 2). How popular would Unity be if it were presented as an equal choice at installation with Gnome 2 (or MATE)? The spinoff distributions offer alternative defaults, of course, but Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Kubuntu have much lower profiles than the flagship Ubuntu brand. I'd be very surprised to see Unity enthusiastically adopted by the broader Linux community (packaging it is one thing; getting more than a handful of users to install it is quite another). Meanwhile, Ubuntu's 'new desktop paradigm' has probably done more than anything else to boost the popularity of Mint (v13 with MATE is much closer to 'classic Ubuntu' than any of Canonical's recent offerings).
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If you mean current Linux users, that's one issue. But another issue is: to what extent will Unity entice non-Linux users to become Linux users?
(I'm talking about on the desktop.)
I personally know very few people who use Ubuntu on the desktop. Of those people, none used it at all before 12.04, and none have switched away
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My sister started using Ubuntu (with Gnome 2) when it was 8.x. When Ubuntu switched everybody to Unity she deicded to give it a try before considering migrating to a different DE. She's not particularly fond of it, but she's put enough time into learning how to use it that she's not interested in switching. After all, the only thing she really wants
Yay we have (dis)Unity! (Score:2)
I'm not sure but I suspect this is the main reason I couldn't get Ubuntu to run on my 386 MB laptop. Unity was using too much memory and ran like a snail (similar to Vista). I switched to LXDE (lubuntu).
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386MB is a strange amount of RAM to have. Does that include a 2MB video card?
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Linux Mint's MATE interface is the way to go. lightweight, fast, familiar ui, and reasonably customizable.
Are you not entertained? (Score:1)
Why would you need to "port" it? (Score:2)
Does it not use the standard gnome/gtk/... libraries? I've heard Unity sucks pretty bad, but if it requires special "ubuntu" extensions, that's just sick.
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I am sure it does not need to be ported, only packaged for any distribution, the problem with Unity is that Ubuntu had to patch many applications to use the new features that it provides, like the notifications API for example. That they are building it on OpenSUSE service and not directly on Fedora repositories is probably (I am guessing) because Fedora has an strict policy of not patching upstream projects, if you need new features, add those to the original project (if you convince the project managers t
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Port is possibly the wrong term but to answer your questions, no, it doesn't use the standard upstream libraries. Canonical heavily patches and tweaks things to make them work. It's hack upon hack, the vast majority of which are rejected by upstream so Canonical just releases their own packages for it. This is why Unity will never be in the main Arch repos because their packages aren't compatible with upstream in most cases.
Title made my brain hurt... (Score:2)
Duplication (Score:1)
> A majority of open source projects are suffering from duplication.
Sometimes software is so bad that doing your own thing is the only alternative. Yes, I’m looking at you, Unity.
Why? How? (Score:4, Funny)
Doesn't the Geneva Convention prevent development and use of torture devices on non-combatants?
My thoughts (Score:3)
My Response to This: (Score:2)
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Fedora user.
And ported is a little misleading, just someone did quick package, but since they need non upstream patch to gnome, they will likely not be accepted by Fedora under this form.
Porting Unity to other distros... (Score:2)
UI Curmudgeons (Score:1)
A lot of people who "HATE" Unity gave it a single chance when it was first released, and have never tried it again. The 12.04 release is as good or better than any other window manager out there. If you have the hardware it has some "pretty" 3D effects if not you can go 2D and it still works and is snappy even on a low end system.
People resist change. Change is hard. When Apple changed the UI people ranted now the same people will defend it to the end. KDE 3 vs 4 it took how many releases before people
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Also, largely incompatible with remote X (xdm) and Virtual Machines, meaning the users will have to deal with two different desktop environments for the same OS.
And old school users who use focus-folllows-mouse without click-to-raise (because it allows for dozens of overlapping windows with sane copy/paste) have a hard time with both Unity and Gnome 3.
Both seem to be designed for users who use one instance of one program at a time, on a single monitor. That may be what many users do, but really hinders pow
Citation needed... (Score:1)
A majority of open source projects are suffering from duplication.
Is there any evidence at all that any open source project is suffering from duplication? What are the supposed harms? Does software that does the same thing as another piece of software somehow split the psychic essence of the concept so that each is only half as effective?
I really wish we'd just kill this myth. There's little reason to suppose it's true, and not a single shred of evidence for it.
The reason often cited is that if the developers weren't re-inventing the wheel, they would be producing some
English... (Score:2)
Would someone translate that to English please?
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"The general tendency within the open source community is to a whole new wheel to push your own cart."
I think they a verb.