Distro Wars
Can't see Canonical being happy that Gnome went with Fedora's and Suse's Flatpak rather than Canonical's Snappy.
New Gnome emerges blinking into the sunlight
Gnome's developers have let version 3.22 “Karlsruhe” (the city which hosts its primary European conference) loose on the world. The release builds on March's 3.20 “Delhi” release, and the major shift this time around is that it rounds out Flatpak support. The Flatpak – formerly xdg-app – framework has been fully assimilated; …
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 05:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's still smartphone-GUI-on-a-workstation.
Until they fix that, I'll stick with Cinnamon and/or MATE, which both were forked from GNOME for that very reason. I need usability more than Flatpak. Or Snappy. Same mistake Canonical made, as well as Microsoft. If the UI is a pain in the arse to use, I don't give a shit about the underlying tech innovations.
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 05:54 GMT Christian Berger
It's more than that
It's also all the complexity of a "smartphone-OS" on a workstation where you don't need it. Essentially that gives you a very brittle system that, when it works, does things you don't want it to do, and when it doesn't, is impossible to repair.
Plus it has features nobody asked for, like "Flatpak" or other means of claiming that you can somehow install malware from foreign sources (without source code) without utterly compromising your computer.... and instead of acknowledging that malware cannot be contained, they claim every breach from their sandboxes on the rest of the world.
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 06:15 GMT Christian Berger
Re: It's still smartphone-GUI-on-a-workstation.
I think the main factor with this is probably that Desktop people do not understand the mobile world. They think that Android got popular because it has all that complexity and limitations inside, after all on a typical Android installation you don't even have a file manager. While in reality Android just got popular because it kinda worked and it was cheap and it was backed by a huge company.
People now see the popularity of Android (and iOS and all of the other mobile OSes) and think they need to copy that.They see AppStores and believe that that is the future while completely missing the analogy to 1990s "Multimedia CD-Roms". They even believe unlogical things, like that you can trust on sandboxes and therefore run malware inside of them.
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 14:54 GMT YY
Re: It's still smartphone-GUI-on-a-workstation.
Old people don't understand improvements nor are they able to use it.
GNOME 3 is incredibly efficient, fast, beautiful and ergonomic. Why else do you think Linus uses it?
Stick with Cinnamon or MATE you fossil, and keep your negative reactions to GNOME in you retirement home.
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Friday 23rd September 2016 01:54 GMT Daniel Voyce
Re: It's still smartphone-GUI-on-a-workstation.
I'm running linux in a VM and Cinnamon and MATE both completely crap out without a proper 3D native device! Cinnamon feels bloated but it is by far the best looking of the GNOME forks and was my choice when running Ubuntu Natively. I am currently having to use gnome flashback on Ubuntu and its an acceptable evil, not horrifically ugly but also pretty speedy!
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Sunday 25th September 2016 05:14 GMT bombastic bob
Re: It's still smartphone-GUI-on-a-workstation.
(from linked-to article) "Flatpak is the next generation application distribution framework for Linux."
"Until they fix that, I'll stick with Cinnamon and/or MATE,"
I agree 100%! There's _NO_ reason to follow Micro-shaft's "circle the drain" FLATSO overly-touchy-feely development direction. When I saw 'Flatpak' I was thinking <u>FLATSO</u> like "Ape" and Win-10-nic. Am I wrong?
Desktops need a REAL 3D skeuomorphic interface. Like Mate. Or Cinnamon. But we STILL have to kick the millenials [who are "in charge" now and doing it "their way"] a bit for releasing the latest Mint (18) with *ONLY* the FLATSO decorations in the default themes, meaning you have to go through the 'CUSTOMIZE' choices to pick something *SANE* and not 2D FLUGLY FLATSO.
I want 3D looking *BUTTONS* in the window title bar, DANGIT!
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 06:34 GMT Charles 9
"They even believe unlogical things, like that you can trust on sandboxes and therefore run malware inside of them."
I thought the idea behind sandboxes WAS that if malware tried to run it would be contained. Or are you saying as long as malware exists, SOME malware will ALWAYS find a way to escape the sandbox?
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 07:28 GMT Mage
SOME malware will ALWAYS find a way to escape the sandbox?
A web browser ought to be like a sandbox, yet it's now the most common infection vector.
A host can be compromised via a program on a VM, it's hard, but not impossible.
The whole mentality of this GUI project is more suited to a phone or tablet, not a laptop or workstation where the main use is content creation and manipulation rather than content consumption and navigation.
I'll stick with Mate, it's why I'm not migrating to Win 10, but to Linux.
Ubuntu and Gnome need to realise that they are NOT going to out do MS and displace 82% Android on mobile devices. Their user base is content creation on laptops, workstations etc, yet they want to destroy that for a market that they have less chance in than MS, who in 15 years has gone from 20%+ to < 2% on Mobile gadgets!
Idiotic! Can't they see MS has alienated people with Win8 and Win10? Even Apple is iOSing MacOS, Why are they copying all the worst ideas of Apple and MS and Google?
A better alternate to Android (privacy, being able to disable evil in Kindle eReader and other Apps) would be nice. But it won't be Ubuntu/Gnome! I have Lollipop on a 7" tablet and most apps can't access external SD card or print or do SMB access on LAN, though some can. OTH why should Kindle App have access to creating user accounts, passwords and almost every other feature and be putting adverts in Notifications? (That can be turned off, but I can't disable permissions of any app)
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 08:51 GMT Christian Berger
"I thought the idea behind sandboxes WAS that if malware tried to run it would be contained. Or are you saying as long as malware exists, SOME malware will ALWAYS find a way to escape the sandbox?"
No, my point is that you must always make sure you don't run software from untrustworthy sources. That's why distributions have repositorries. The idea behind an "AppStore" is that as long as there are contracts, the code will be distributed. There is no check for malware as everyone believes that malware can't be to bad as it's limited by the sandbox.
The result is that on Plattforms like Android we have apps which do nothing more than opening a browser and pointing it to a website. Yet they contain code runing at high privilidges. You run code just to get some static information stored on a server somewhere. This is something which "Multimedia CD-Roms" used to do in the say and should be gone thanks to the World Wide Web and releaed technologies. (Of course there are now twats abusing Javascript)
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 11:25 GMT Charles 9
"No, my point is that you must always make sure you don't run software from untrustworthy sources."
And MY point is, "I'm with stupid." As long as you have to deal with stupid, you WILL have to deal with people running things from untrustworthy sources. Make people jump through hoops and people start finding ways around the hoops; it's human nature.
If you don't take stupid into consideration (because as the comedian said, you can't fix stupid), you're doing it wrong.
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 07:25 GMT frank ly
Old dog
I use the MATE desktop because it reminds me of Win XP (which was nice to use) and everything works fine in an understandable way. I've used LXDE on a old laptop and that's workable. I've tried Compiz and I've made an honest effort to use the KDE desktop so I could learn about all this modern bling. However, I just don't 'get it'.
What is the point? Can anybody explain it to me?
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 07:59 GMT itzman
Re: Old dog
Don't ask me, Mate ;-)
I find exactly the same. What is a desktop anyway? A place to launch programs from and maybe a scratch directory to store stuff temporarily.
As far as I am concerned smart phones and touch sensitive sceens are not Wow! New! but 'How can we make computers smaller and cheaper and still have some utility in them'
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 22:20 GMT Captain DaFt
Re: Old dog
"As far as I am concerned smart phones and touch sensitive sceens are not Wow! New! but 'How can we make computers smaller and cheaper and still have some utility in them'"
Touch sensitive screens on phones are actually all about, "How can we cut out the costs of designing resilient, usable keyboards, and make it sound sexy?"
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Friday 23rd September 2016 02:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Old dog
"Touch sensitive screens on phones are actually all about, "How can we cut out the costs of designing resilient, usable keyboards, and make it sound sexy?""
Because physics pretty much says you can't do it, especially not when constrained to a space less than 5 inches in length. Too many people have fat fingers and that results in typos. Not to mention the dreaded "Blackberry Thumb". Finally, keyboards are inherently mechanical, and mechanical stuff has an annoying tendency to break.
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 10:23 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Old dog
"I've made an honest effort to use the KDE desktop so I could learn about all this modern bling. However, I just don't 'get it'.
What is the point? Can anybody explain it to me"
Simple. KDE doesn't attempt to double guess what you what you want to do, where you want to put things on your desktop or what init you're using. It just lets you set things as you want and get on with it.
For myself, I set Folder view with a Desktop folder, icons aligned to grid but not locked in place*, kill the annoying bouncing cursor, turn off the magic top left to stop any window located there maximising and select classic menu. Depending on the size of the screen I might autohide the panel (task bar). And of course, I have multiple workspaces set up - who doesn't?
*This gives me the freedom to arrange icons how I want them. I keep a lot of stuff on the desktop** but this allows me to organise it; a number of desktops I tried don't seem to support this.
**I subscribe to the view that an empty desk is a sign of an empty head. And yes, I've always treated physical desktops the same way although with them stuff seems to wander about of its own accord. On KDE I can make it stay put.
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 10:38 GMT frank ly
@Doctor Syntax Re: Old dog
I agree with everything you say (apart from the empty dektop thing) and I do it all with MATE. Four workspaces is enough for me, I find.
I did think that KDE 'Activities' would be useful but it didn't seem to work in the way I thought it would. I can do what I hoped it would do by hibernating my computer.
Anyway, the important thing is that you've got something you're happy with and so have I.
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Thursday 22nd September 2016 13:22 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: @Doctor Syntax Old dog
"I did think that KDE 'Activities' would be useful but it didn't seem to work in the way I thought it would."
I just ignore them. I think they're a product of the madness that overtook so many UI designers, the notion that desktop and mobile interfaces could be converged combined with the fact that mobile interfaces are app-based and many desktop users work on documents, and often more documents than a Recent documents menu item can easily support. Unity was a product of the same thinking. In the Unix/Linux world, of course, we have choices; pity the poor, stuck between W8.x & 10.
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Sunday 25th September 2016 05:33 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Old dog
"What is the point? Can anybody explain it to me?"
(with reference to the migration of gnome in the same direction as Micro-shaft's 'circle the drain' 2D FLATSO touch-centric phone-GUI interfaces on desktop computers)
a) "new shiny" (as been pointed out already)
b) too many people used to XP, won't "up"grade
c) patents, copyrights, and locking users into Micro-shaft's "solution"
d) change for the sake of change
e) millenials getting to do things THEIR way (which can't be OUR way, because, millenials)
therefore, it's "Modern", with the built-in "get with the program, gramps" pejoratives.
Doesn't make it BETTER, though, like who wants an electric roller skate when you can have a MUSCLE CAR!
gnome 3 and micro-shaft seem to be in kahootz or something... (did MS start investing in the gnome stuff? I am pretty sure that one of their devs was a ".Not" and mono fan, but still...)
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Sunday 25th September 2016 05:35 GMT bombastic bob
Re: *nix?
"Isn't Gnome 3 still tied to systemd? Surely that makes it Linux only."
sadly, FreeBSD has gnome 3 in ports, last I looked. Most likely there's a set of cumbersome patches for the systemd-ness.
in fairness, gnome2 had its share too. haven't looked at mate, though. yet. It's in ports, too!
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Monday 26th September 2016 13:12 GMT ArthurKinnell
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Ahh, the joy of having freedom of choice!
I use Cinnamon on work PC and laptop, XFCE on some machines with server based roles. Mate on my own laptop and Cinnamon on my home PC. Played with gnome 3 over the years but the default full screen single menu bar nonsense just doesn't play ball with my mind.
The point is Linux users have choice, unless it's Unity.
Pint because I'm drinking.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
