Why Did Ubuntu Drop Unity? Mark Shuttleworth Explains (omgubuntu.co.uk) 215
Ubuntu's decision to ditch Unity took many of us by surprise earlier this year. Now Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth shares more details about why Ubuntu chose to drop Unity. From a report: Shuttleworth says he, along with the other 'leads' at Canonical, came to a consensual view that they should put the company on the path to becoming a public company. And to appear attractive to potential investors the company has to focus on its areas of profitability -- something Unity, Ubuntu phone, Unity 8 and convergence were not part of: "[The decision] meant that we couldn't have on our books (effectively) very substantial projects which clearly have no commercial angle to them at all. It doesn't mean that we would consider changing the terms of Ubuntu for example, because it's foundational to everything we do. And we don't have to, effectively," he said. Money may have meant Unity's demise but the wider Ubuntu project is in rude health. as Shuttleworth explains: "One of the things I'm most proud of is in the last 7 years is that Ubuntu itself became completely sustainable. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and Ubuntu could continue. It's kind of magical, right? Here's a platform that is a world class enterprise platform, that's completely freely available, and yet it is sustainable. Jane Silber is largely to thank for that." While it's all-too-easy for desktop users to focus on, well, the desktop, there is far more to Canonical (the company) than the 6-monthly releases we look forward to. Losing Unity may have been a big blow for desktop users but it helped to balance other parts of the company: "There are huge possibilities for us in the enterprise beyond that, in terms of really defining how cloud infrastructure is built, how cloud applications are operated, and so on. And, in IoT, looking at that next wave of possibility, innovators creating stuff on IoT. And all of that is ample for us to essentially put ourselves on course to IPO around that." Dropping Unity wasn't easy for Mark, though: "We had this big chunk of work, which was Unity, which I really loved. I think the engineering of Unity 8 was pretty spectacularly good, and the deep ideas of how you bring these different form factors together was pretty beautiful.
It's a shame (Score:4, Interesting)
I was happily using Ubuntu until 17.10. Gnome desktop scaling is very primitive compared to Unity and made my small hi-res screen look awful at 125% and 150% scaling. So I've gone back to Windows 10, which is a shame really.
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A shame, but what about KDE Plasma 5.x? Does it scale well?
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Good news, you don't have to use Gnome. A cool thing about Linux is that you can install a whole different desktop environment very easily.
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The reason why I went to Mac is that the Linux community for some reason can not decide on a standard desktop environment, which is why most companies didn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole when I left.
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So on what criteria should an application developer choose a toolkit? Or is it expected that users of desktop GNU/Linux will have all toolkits (GTK+, Qt, Wine, Mono, etc.) installed in order to run all applications?
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Good news, you don't have to use Gnome. A cool thing about Linux is that you can install a whole different desktop environment very easily.
I've been using Linux for decades but this attitude always puzzles me. Most folk don't have the skill, time or energy to integrate the applications they want with a different flavour of desktop. In the mainstream, you take the desktop you're offered with the applications which are integrated for that distro. FWIW, I switched to Mint to avoid Unity.
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Good news, you don't have to use Gnome. A cool thing about Linux is that you can install a whole different desktop environment very easily.
I've been using Linux for decades but this attitude always puzzles me. Most folk don't have the skill, time or energy to integrate the applications they want with a different flavour of desktop. In the mainstream, you take the desktop you're offered with the applications which are integrated for that distro. FWIW, I switched to Mint to avoid Unity.
That's why I don't even bother anymore with Linux "desktop". I use it exclusively for server side stuff. Every damned linux distro has its own way of doing things and their own GUIs for administering a system (I don't even bother using them, command line purity, baby.)
For desktop, Windows or Mac. Change code, do limited compilation or testing. Push code to git or whatever. Ssh to linux server. Pull code down. Run full build, etc. Happy? Push to integration branch and let CI builds have it.
And that's
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Actually his message was fairly clear in that Ubuntu's primary audience are not the "1337" hackers that like to build their own kernels, or swap desktop environments every other day, but rather those people who just want something other than windows on their system.
So perhaps we should say that you who hide behind the anonymous coward, go and live your life in your mom's basement cursing all the noobs who will destroy Linux for you by wanting a default desktop that doesn't suck balls.
Re:It's a shame (Score:4, Informative)
As someone using an HP Spectre X360 13" laptop (1920x1080 screen) with a 27" Samsung 4K monitor, I can happily say that desktop scaling sucked *ss on Unity and has merely switched to sucking the dog's bollocks under Gnome. Either way, you'll be left with a bad taste in your mouth.
Windows 10 can somehow figure out if i'm using my laptop with a 4k 27" screen, or with a 1600x1200 21" screen (I have the 21" at work). Once logged in, the scaling matches between both screens. It "just works". Ubuntu has *never* done this, on any screen setup i've had.
25 years with Linux, however, and i'm not giving up now...
Re:It's a shame (Score:5, Informative)
In my experience Linux Mint with Cinnamon scales well.
The only thing is that on my dual monitor setup with one 4k screen (4096x2160) and another at 1900x1200 the 1900x1200 uses the same scaling (so too large). That's where Win 10k wins as it manages to scale only the 4k and keep the other screen 'unscaled'
Other than that, Cinnamon does a good job IMO
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Windows 10 can somehow figure out if i'm using my laptop with a 4k 27" screen, or with a 1600x1200 21" screen (I have the 21" at work). Once logged in, the scaling matches between both screens. It "just works". Ubuntu has *never* done this, on any screen setup i've had.
Windows used to be fucking terrible at this and the only one that seemed to do a good job of it was OSX but Windows 10 certainly does seem to have gotten it sorted for the most part, obviously the various application GUI frameworks makes it somewhat more challenging but it's getting better and better. Still haven't found a Linux DWM that handles this well (perhaps there is one though?), though then there is the problem of even more GUI frameworks on Linux than there are on Windows or Mac.
Re: It's a shame (Score:2)
Try using it with multiple screens on a Surface Book and watch it get very confused
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Re:It's a shame (Score:5, Insightful)
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In retrospect that would have been the ideal solution.
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I've studied buy-in and stakeholder management as specific technical skills. I'm well-aware that there's such a thing as "difficult to work with", although it's sort of relative.
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I was happily using Ubuntu until 17.10. Gnome desktop scaling is very primitive compared to Unity and made my small hi-res screen look awful at 125% and 150% scaling. So I've gone back to Windows 10...
There are plenty of Ubuntu-derived distros using other DEs. Did you try any of them? Completely dropping Linux because of a lack of Unity seems a bit extreme.
Re:It's a shame (Score:5, Informative)
No, but I've downloaded Kubuntu and will try that out later.
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Yep I'm very disappointed with 17.10 dual / hybrid GPU supported is now completely fucked and worked perfectly before. XPS15 (9530) I too find the scaling options poor and the touchscreen support is patchy at best. Worst Ubuntu release in years.
Re:It's a shame (Score:4, Insightful)
No, I'm pretty new to using Linux so I wasn't aware that that was an option.
Re:It's a shame (Score:4, Insightful)
This thread is the Linux community in a nutshell.
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Until parent post, I was unaware that 2SN was a recognized gender. See wire-wrapped rubber hose [powertrackhose.com]. (The diameters might be small, but look at the burst pressures! 23,200 psi in the quarter inch! Now that's some serious sex appeal!)
--
Sign me Prob'ly clueless in PDX
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They won't fork the the thread because they don't know how. They'll sure talk about it at great length, though.
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You forgot the "H" for the heterosexual community. If they want to be inclusive, they really should include everyone.
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Die CIS scum.
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Ive been using KDE since the late 90's. And in my opinion it is better than the rest unless you want to get something that's able to be super personalized like enlightenment. As far as KDE goes, their Plasma desktop is turning out to be quite nice. Still with very little overhead, as normal, especially compared to gnome or unity.
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Finding a relevant solution for your problem ... rather harder, because there is no one vendor, and so no one place to ask for help. But that is what search engines are designed for.
Re:It's a shame (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is how you get people on Linux. Through insults and abuse. Good job, jackass.
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Guess what? A lot of Linux users don't want other people to start using Linux. More mainstream users = more pressure to be like mainstream OSes, more people who don't know what they're doing, more "user friendly" solutions that involve making everything less configurable.
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True, but too fucking late.
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That's right, because other people deciding what they like makes your favorite open source disappear. Like, how KDE went away because Gnome started. ;)
Seriously, if a bunch of new users come on board and use Mint, they'll be all the more open to a better engineered solution. The real point is to have open source solutions that compete on merit rather than corporate marketing and lock-in.
Re:It's a shame (Score:5, Funny)
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This is a tech news website. I expect people that post their opinions here on Linux to know what apt get does.
There's a difference between knowing what apt get does and knowing why someone should prefer kubuntu-desktop that over the dozen or so competitor packages (this is Linux, after all) which purport to solve the same problems.
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It says:
E: Invalid operation get
Re:It's a shame (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally speaking, as a software developer (I'm currently working on a cross-platform game), I try to leave my development systems as close to stock as possible on the platforms my customers are likely to be using. That means I use Windows 10, macOS 10.12 (Sierra), and Ubuntu (16.04 LTS) w/ the default Unity desktop. I'll probably create a new Unity partition for 17.xx soon, and I'll certainly be leaving it with the stock desktop. This gives me the greatest chance of reproducing application bugs on these systems, and it also helps keep my development machines as stable as possible.
Whenever Windows 8 apologists said something like "stop complaining, you can just install xxx plugin to get your start menu back", they were completely missing the point. You shouldn't HAVE to customize your OS to get it to a practical, working state. Moreso, my experience is that every sort of major modification you make to your system simply increases the likelihood of introducing stability issues, causing strange application bugs, and all other sorts of headaches. Now, each time you ask for advice from someone, you have to explain "I'm not running the default environment", and the likelihood of getting problems resolved decreases.
So, complaints about a default desktop environment aren't necessarily lazy or trolling, even if there are workarounds. There really shouldn't be any excuse for a user to experience a sub-optimal desktop environment these days, especially in one of the world's most popular Linux distros.
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Whoops. That should read: "I'll probably create a new Ubuntu partition for 17.xx soon..."
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Generally speaking, as a software developer (I'm currently working on a cross-platform game), I try to leave my development systems as close to stock as possible on the platforms my customers are likely to be using. That means I use Windows 10, macOS 10.12 (Sierra), and Ubuntu (16.04 LTS) w/ the default Unity desktop. I'll probably create a new Unity partition for 17.xx soon, and I'll certainly be leaving it with the stock desktop. This gives me the greatest chance of reproducing application bugs on these systems, and it also helps keep my development machines as stable as possible.
Whenever Windows 8 apologists said something like "stop complaining, you can just install xxx plugin to get your start menu back", they were completely missing the point. You shouldn't HAVE to customize your OS to get it to a practical, working state. Moreso, my experience is that every sort of major modification you make to your system simply increases the likelihood of introducing stability issues, causing strange application bugs, and all other sorts of headaches. Now, each time you ask for advice from someone, you have to explain "I'm not running the default environment", and the likelihood of getting problems resolved decreases.
So, complaints about a default desktop environment aren't necessarily lazy or trolling, even if there are workarounds. There really shouldn't be any excuse for a user to experience a sub-optimal desktop environment these days, especially in one of the world's most popular Linux distros.
I totally agree with this. I work in multi-platform turn-key/COTS systems and variations of these kinds are a pita. Not only for development but for automated regression builds. We have to have sufficient permutations reflecting system changes to get some level of confidence. Worst migration we had was to adapt our systems to work on RH6 and RH7.
And that's on headless systems. Desktop changes are a PITA. Shit stops working all of the sudden because your system depends on A which depends on B which depend
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So how is something like Kubuntu (an Ubuntu distro with KDE instead of Unity or Gnome) any different from Windows 8 with Classic Shell? Or are you saying distros like Kubuntu are just pointless?
I wouldn't call it pointless, but my belief is that every variation you introduce to a complex system increases the chances of some odd interaction leading to bugs or instability, so there's a tradeoff to be made there.
One of the difficulties of developing for Linux is the ridiculous number of distros to test for. In practice, what this means is that more "alternative" distros like Kubuntu may simply get little to no QA time at all. So it's more of a "hope this works for you - run at your own risk" sort o
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sudo apt install kubuntu-desktop
KDE interface is in many ways more attractive than Gnome. However, after spending quite some time sifting the forums, it seems KDE is more buggy overall. I chose reliability over design, ie Gnome.
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Or possibly LKML.
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At least one of those words doesn't mean what you think it does.
Something, something, Dark Side (Score:5, Funny)
Something, something, systemd.
Emacs. (Score:2)
Vi?
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Vi not?
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Vii
Even with what remains, profitability a challenge. (Score:4, Interesting)
So Ubuntu Phone was an unmitigated commercial flop (as was Ubuntu on the TV). Ubuntu as a supported desktop OS is just not a prospect anyone is about to pay for.
So they can trumpet their share of cloud instances. That's a nice looking metric for them sure enough, but the whole reason is because they are the no-fuss no-cost option. It has not translated to people paying Canonical for much as of yet. They have been trying to drive this up from the instances to the infrastructure where there *could* be some consulting money to be had, but that has not been a huge commercial success as of yet.
Similarly, they can court IoT, but again we are talking about companies that shave every last fraction of a cent possible from their cost, volumes are extremely high and any cost is not tolerated. Popularity comes by being the no cost option. You may say 'quality', but that random ass yocto build you cobbled together seems good enough, fits in your memory footprint, and without paying anyone to do it for you. Sure your home grown is crap and will probably bite you in the ass down the road, but every penny counts and your device is probably going to just be rebadged as needed by other companies, so you don't even have much of a reputation to protect, statistically speaking of IoT device makers.
Despite some respectable technical effort and good judgement about what is and is not appropriate in a release cycle, as a business endeavor I think they are deeply challenged to find an 'in'.
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It's going to be fun when they try to explain Mir.
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Ubuntu as a supported desktop OS is just not a prospect anyone is about to pay for. (...) So they can trumpet their share of cloud instances. That's a nice looking metric for them sure enough, but the whole reason is because they are the no-fuss no-cost option. It has not translated to people paying Canonical for much as of yet.
So... good for the desktop? I mean Red Hat found their thing and unceremoniously dropped Red Hat Linux (their non-enterprise desktop offering) for a community testbed. As long as Canonical hasn't found its thing they need Ubuntu as marketing, almost every Linux user knows it even if it's not their daily driver. If they become "the cloud distro" and all their paying customers will use it for that anyway they don't need the desktop. Then they could just let Mint, Elementary or openSUSE take over or do a Fedor
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Re: Even with what remains, profitability a challe (Score:1)
Kind of a strong arm between a vendor that only supports Red Hat, and RedHat charging for what Microsoft provides for "free". I doubt we are paying $365 per year per server for Windows Server licensing.
Otherwise I would have run Ubuntu or CentOS. I prefer Ubuntu, more familiar with it.
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Unless you hire away Red Hat devs to be your support team, you're going to get better and cheaper support if you pay Red Hat instead of paying employee salaries. Some companies using Red Hat (or SLES) have a few thousand servers to support. They don't want to waste time on someone who messes around with RHES or SLES in their spare time. They want the experts.
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Distrowatch is not a measure of popularity. It's a measure of how many people on their site haven't heard of a particular distro but are curious to read about it.
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There's a desktop variant of RHEL - called WS. Did you think "enterprise" implied "on a server"?
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If pay a few bucks for Ubuntu if it wasn't shit. I'd love to get off Windows, I'm happy to pay for it, but basic stuff like the mouse and scaling have to work.
Re: Even with what remains, profitability a challe (Score:2)
You just like arguing don't you :P
Because Unity was crap... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Modded *down*??? Are you kidding me?
Apparently there's an Ubuntu shill out there with mod points - lol!
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The metaphors are non obvious. Canonical tried a bold experiment but most would seem content with a traditional taskbar/system tray inherited from Windows 95.
No menu bar and an app bar that isn't hierarchical. And swiping from sides of a screen to get various elements to show. Fine if you like autohide on Windows, I personally do not.
I flashed Ubuntu Touch from ubports.com recently. Unity 8 is supposed to be designed for phones but it feels weird there too. They might have had more success if they ditched U
Kind of obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
So these projects eventually became a money pit and the sensible thing was to dump them. The really sensible thing would have been to not start them in the first place, but I guess we should be thankful again that Ubuntu Linux is converging again instead of diverging.
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Now compare to Wayland's license which is a drop in replacement for X11. It's a no brainer why Canonical's support dried up.
Been using Ubuntu Mate for quite some time (Score:2)
Touch centric (Score:4, Interesting)
Still sucks balls for real work even after all this time. Both unity and gnome 3 are still absolutely horrible for a real workstation that you sit in front of all day. I'm sorry, but the touch gui people who insist that 5-7 years worth of work can even come close to what mouse and keyboard have evolved and matured into after 40 years? How arrogant can you get? Even newer technologies like voice are going to fail in a real working environment. Its mouse and keyboard for anyone until a true neural interface is working. That will be the only things that tops 40 years worth of experimentation and on the job R&D that mouse/keyboard has seen.
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Simple enough (Score:5, Informative)
I have been using Xubuntu since many years, and on a few occations Lubuntu (when hardware has been limited).
Windows is not getting more advanced as a "Window Manager" or a "Desktop". Neither is Mac OS X.
Xubuntu used to come with the "Dock" activated by default, now it is not.
Isn't it quite clear that simplicity is the way to go? Some kind of "start menu" for launching applications. Some way to switch between open applications. Some place to display clock and wifi status. And for those who want, drives/folders/files. And search.
Basically Windows NT4 and Mac OS 6 looked like this, and for good reasons.
More advanced Gnome, KDE or anything else seem to have very little purpose and audience.
Because Unity was crap... (Score:1, Flamebait)
... and everyone jumped ship to Linux Mint the instant Ubuntu started using it?
Posting again since the first post was modded down by an Ubuntu shill with mod pts...
Got any more buddy?
Because they didnt develop them in the open (Score:3)
Even if Red Hat is the main contributor or hire the main developers of some open source projects there are many "external" contributions. Canonical didnt take advantage of this because they wanted to control everything. Those projects didnt have to be a money sink.
Red Hat know how to benefit from the community the most. Thats the biggest difference between them.
Its a bit rough around the edges (Score:2)
In comparison to Unity there is a lot of stuff not working on gnome, like power management and hibernation.
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Please do not bring these form factors together (Score:2)
Sorry Mark, I do not share your enthusiasm for bringing form factors together, instead I regard that idea as a blight that has made both large and small form factors worse, especially the large form factor where I spend the bulk of my actual productive time.
Well, here I am, back to Debian and it feels good. Silver lining: it appears that competition with Ubuntu made Debian stronger, thanks for that.
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Oh wait, I just realized this article needs a car analogy. We should bring bicycle, sedan and semitrailer form factors closer together! Chew on it, Mark.
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Using the same interface for a tablet and a desktop is like steering an oil-tanker with handlebars.
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Isn't Mint built on top of Ubuntu?
Isn't every distro just a collection of the same base packages, some specific tools, a repo, and an installer?
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In Mint's case, it's an overlay of an additional repo on top of Ubuntu.
Whereas Debian and downstream Ubuntu do NOT share repositories.
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Unless it's Mint Debian Edition. [linuxmint.com]
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Hahaha nice troll, I almost actually responde.... shit. Dammit.
Re:LINUX DESKTOP IS DEAD (Score:4, Insightful)
How I wish this were true. I'm a pretty minimal GUI user and having a desktop that looks the same, and behaves pretty much the same, so I could get on with doing what I want to do would be a great thing.
5 years ago, it was all that 3D desktop crap, then we decided that what we needed was "clean" (i.e. not that 3D desktop crap). And now everybody has decided that we are so junked out on phones that we should starting swiping with our mouse.
I get grumpy when they move all the stuff around at the supermarket also.
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I'm thankful for TDE. Gnome and KDE4 nearly ended my pursuit of a linux desktop.
LK
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You're welcome.
I found TDE a few years ago when I was bemoaning the streaming pile of excrement that was KDE4.
One of the first things I do when setting up a new Linux desktop is install TDE.
LK
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Do you seriously think there's such a thing as an objectively good DE? What's good for one person is bad for another, that's why we have options.
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True, but he has a point - how many niches/use cases are there?
1) Lightweight.
2) Easy - looks like Win XP so Aunt Mary doesn't get confused.
3) OMG Shiny
4) Construction toy for 733t h4xorz to tinker with.
5) Shite for stoking developers' egos.
Re:clearly have no commercial angle (Score:5, Insightful)
Xubuntu user here. Not sure what I'm missing out on by using XFCE. Does what I need.
Exactly! The self-appointed UI "experts" behind Gnome, KDE and Unity seem to be convinced that there is something horribly incomplete, nay, wrong, about such more traditional desktop environments, which warrants the complete redesign that those three monstrosities entail.
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Studio Ubuntu user here. That's xubuntu tweaked for low latency which is needed in audio recording. I don't work with the audio studio apps, but this package comes with Inkscape, Blender, etc, and it seems like the low latency speeds up rendering somewhat.
I run this same package on a 16" laptop, 10" tablet, as well as my 27" quadcore desktop with no problems other than the obvious limitations (tablet and laptop suck at video editing, etc).
I don't do games; I don't need a freaking 4K display. I could use f
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It’s a British idiom.
Re: is in rude health (Score:1)
So I figured it meant they "rub it in your face", rather than being humble and discreet about their own health.
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Why go public? It’s so Shuttleworth can cash out.
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What would Unity do?
Cash-in on a bunch of Wall-Street folk investing without a clue, then ride their golden parachute until it hits pool water. In my response, I assume you meant to type "Ubuntu" and not "Unity." If you're really asking what a program would do when a company goes public well.... it will compute?
Re: Gnome has a lot of work (Score:2)
This is why Linux fails on the desktop
Re: Gnome has a lot of work (Score:2)
No because elitist overgrown adolescents like you put people off.
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That's like saying Bashful is taller than Doc.