Ubuntu moves away from GNOME | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu moves away from GNOME

networkworld.com

25 pointse1ven22 comments

The main problem I see with this [1] is mostly exactly what they, Canonical, try to want to reach desperately: To differ even at substantial costs.

See, I'm not one of these "Linux on the desktop" guys, but I do use it on a daily basis and have a rich social network that slipped into Linux-Land by various means. Be it talking about it, seeing cool things on my desktop or just being annoyed by the big players. Some of them, a majority even, runs Ubuntu now. It's just really easy to work with, the guys do (did?) quite an amazing job.

What I fear is that someone with that large of a market penetration wanders off and creates "yet another desktop". We're used to KDE and Gnome, I know lots of people that use fluxbox/openbox, there's the tiling wm niche, you can run Moblin/MeeGo and I'm sure I forget the best wm anyway and the comments are going to try to enlighten me.

Moving into a new direction is painful. It breaks with everything and everyone else. You should have a good reason and a compelling argument. Forking OpenOffice.org is a good example in my book. Unity is the fork that no one on the forking side wants to acknowledge. And for what? To "diversify the platform" (i.e. marketing crap)? Ubuntu UI patches (think notifications/libindicator for example) are already debated today and even create problems with upstream packages _now_. Going for a completely new shell/ui is just going to increase the burden here and will end up with this: "Please create a package for Gnome (on linux or bsd, for whatever distribution) and a special one for Ubuntu."

1: Disclaimer is the same for me as for the guy in the link: Gnome member and (occasional) contributor.

"Ubuntu UI patches (think notifications/libindicator for example) are already debated today and even create problems with upstream packages _now_."

This is the problem, not 'we want to be different so badly'. Why do design decisions made by Canonical have to be debated? Don't they have the right to make any kind of desktop changes they want without having to get them 'approved' by Gnome?

Hell, yes!

But you miss two things here. The less important one is just that the Gnome brand, as it is, sucks. Not because the experience is bad, it is just not well defined. I.e. you cannot say "this is not Gnome" or "this is Gnome". Which _is_ hard if you want consistency.

This point is alone the Gnome's guys fault though and needs to be handled there. If Gnome can come up with a definite set of rules what they consider fine, everyone else can either agree or use the source, make it "different" - but without calling it Gnome anymore. Think the Firefox brand.

The bigger problem is something else though: The samples I gave _break_ existing applications. They are not only UI bling or moving window buttons around, they are patches to functionality - and sometimes poorly done.

Now - again: They have all the right in the world to do that. But unfortunately our world isn't perfect and this lead to several problems in the past: The (downstream only) patch sucked, causing loss of functionality. Ubuntu users empirically complain not at all (those that are less tech savvy), or in Launchpad only (which would be great for bugs that are Ubuntu specific, but only if the patch itself is maintained well).

This leads to a good share of the huge Ubuntu user base to think that this application of yours is crap - while really just someone thought that an integrated menu of some sorts would be a nice idea and can easily be tacked on to every upstream Gnome package.

Combined these two issues shine: It's supposed to be Gnome and it breaks in subtle ways -> Bad Gnome? Do what you want, UI or otherwise, but take the blame and show some respect towards the free time of the upstream guys.. You know what Uncle Ben said about great power..

You make good points (admittedly to someone not as versed in the finer details as yourself) and I thank you for your reply.

Would it have made a difference if Ubuntu had removed all Gnome branding from their desktop? Then things like this wouldn't matter, no? -- "It's supposed to be Gnome and it breaks in subtle ways -> Bad Gnome?"

If Ubuntu users do not complain or complain only in Launchpad, wouldn't they also be the type of user who doesn't know what Gnome is unless it's labeled as such? How would they think Gnome is crap if nothing was labeled as Gnome?

I don't want to claim the expert title either.. :)

Regarding the specific questions:

I doubt that it would be good if Canonical would actually fork Gnome (or the drop the brand). Leave aside my attachment to the brand as it is: Canonical has done a lot of good things for this platform in the past. I think it would be detrimental so the adoption of Gnome to send them away (or let them leave). A middle ground of some sorts needs to be found.

How would those users think Gnome is crap if nothing is labeled as Gnome: Here I was referring to the Gnome ecosystem. If they patch GEdit to do X but it crashes now on every 10th launch, the application is getting the blame. You are right: I'm not sure if the connection between blaming application X and losing faith in the desktop project isn't overly pessimistic, now that I think about it again.

> Would it have made a difference if Ubuntu had removed all Gnome branding from their desktop? Then things like this wouldn't matter, no?

GNOME has never clearly defined the confines of what kind of differentiation is "doing GNOME", and what kind is "breaking away from GNOME". There's also no clear answer to the question of whether GNOME should be a complete end-user product, or a supermarket for makers of end-user products to pick and choose components from, or something in between, or something else.

Every distribution patches GNOME. Just about nobody ever uses GNOME as it comes in the tarballs, except for development and bug triage. Moblin, Maemo (now together as MeeGo), OLPC, Nokia and others have shipped vastly differentiated systems meant for different niches built on the GNOME stack, without much anybody labeling them as infidels. If people suddenly hold Ubuntu to a different standard solely on the grounds of differentiation, that's not fair.

Differentiation or fragmentation are not going to be the actually problematic parts of the switch to Unity from a community standpoint. The two worst bits of news are: 1) that as an unaffiliated contributor who intends to fix or improve a major part of Ubuntu's default desktop environment, you didn't have to sign a disturbing contributor agreement that doesn't guarantee the freedom of your code in the future until now, but from now on, you probably will 2) Ubuntu's default desktop environment is now a single-stakeholder product that one company will exert very strong control over, regardless of how well they handle the community side. The latter is also incredibly good news UX-wise, but I digress.

The title of this article doesn't conform with the facts. According to Jono Bacon[1]:

"There is going to be some questions about this decision in relation to GNOME. I want to make something crystal clear: Ubuntu is a GNOME distribution, we ship the GNOME stack, we will continue to ship GNOME apps, and we optimize Ubuntu for GNOME. The only difference is that Unity is a different shell for GNOME, but we continue to support the latest GNOME Shell development work in the Ubuntu archives."

[1] http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/10/25/ubuntu-11-04-to-ship-uni...

Let's be straight: Jono Bacon, while a nice guy, is employed by Canonical. That does give him the insider credibility, but he's also obviously "we're the nice guys" biased. He's the "Ubuntu Community Manager" (last I checked that was the title?) after all and his job is to promote the use of Ubuntu and to keep the community alive and favorable.

Let's bring Dave Neary[1] to the table for readers that might want to understand why the title of the article _might_ (you judge - but probably only time will tell) be perfectly valid. I'd suggest reading both links to understand the corporate message and statement of intention on the one side and a (note: Not _the_, obviously there's not a single Gnome hive mind) representative opinion for the disappointment about these latest decisions on the other side.

1: http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/10/25/ubuntu-to-move-to-un...

And for those as confused as me, Unity is this: http://unity.ubuntu.com/

Maybe someone else can elaborate on what a GNOME Shell is?

A new simplified GUI by GNOME

http://vimeo.com/13797705

I can see the resemblance. Thank you for that link.

Without having tried Unity, it looks nice. I'd much rather use an OSX-inspired GUI than a WinXP-inspired GUI. :P

I do wish, though, there was more willingness in the OSS community to push the boundaries of UI, using completely new ideas such as 10/GUI: http://10gui.com/

"I do wish, though, there was more willingness in the OSS community to push the boundaries of UI..."

We kinda did: http://www.suckless.org

Sometimes you have to move backwards to move forwards...

Unity looks nice, but its improvements over GNOME seem to be mainly cosmetic -- not compelling enough to pull me away from the simplicity of dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org/), at least not yet.

I don't think people who know what a window manager is are the target market for Unity.

As a person who knows what a wm is and just tried out Unity, I can confirm this on my part.

Unity looks silly to me. This moreover confirms to me that Ubuntu is turning the distro into something that everyone's mom/dad can use. While that's fine for popularizing linux, that isn't the OS I signed up for years ago. Switching to Arch is going to be painful but I guess I'll be better off for it.

> This moreover confirms to me that Ubuntu is turning the distro into something that everyone's mom/dad can use. While that's fine for popularizing linux, that isn't the OS I signed up for years ago.

Weather you were aware of it or not, that is exactly the distro you signed up for. Being end-user friendly has always been a primary goal of Ubuntu.

That doesn't have to be a conflict. Just as you can easily use KDE or XFCE with Ubuntu through the Kubuntu and Xubuntu distributions, I'm sure you can easily choose "classic" GNOME.

or... GNubuntu :-D

Nobody will force you to use Unity. As a power user you should already know that even when Unity becomes the default on Ubuntu you will still be able to use any other window manager.

Do you say that in a capacity as a desktop power user or as a server admin?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com