Weekend Flame (Unity vs Gnome3)

[Samuel Thurston]

On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 4:12 AM, Angelus <angelusiones at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have seen the discussion about the sense of this sounder list. That and
> another thoughts have bring me to write this thread. The title is only a
> joke , flames have another trollability level xD , but what i want to light
> up is what is going to happen with gnome 3 now . We have been waiting the

Ha ha! well played.

> deep changes that we can see now. Unity is not so bad , but i must say that
> the comparison with gnome 3 let it in a very ugly position .
> On one side , we have a new and collaborative unity , with a long way to
> walk , but with a more commitment with Ubuntu.
> On the other side , we have the robust and independent Gnome (3 in this
> thread) , with a long way walked , but with less desire to be influenced by
> Ubuntu.

I get the feeling that Gnome 3 is in its way very similar to how KDE4
was at its launch, which is to say it still has a long way to go.
Even though Gnome is what people are familiar with, you don't have to
look far to find widespread criticism that the Gnome team is deaf to
its users. Still they seem to make a nice, usable desktop and that
counts for a lot!

> I think we can't change for 11.04 unity for ubuntu , it will be risky and
> without sense at these days . But i think we must aim this competition for
> the next Ubuntu 11.10 .

Sadly it's too late for this assessment.  11.04 launches in 3(?) weeks
and unity will be the default desktop.  I agree that this is alarming
given the state of Unity. But also pushing the switch to 11.10 would
not be acceptable because it is an LTS release so drastic changes are
to be avoided.  (i think they learned their lesson from a few LTS's
ago)

> Many of us (me included) have thought that Gnome
> couldn't be adapted to these modern times. As we have seen , the change have
> recently made ,have strike with a very big punctuation , without think about
> the time that the changes have used . Also I prefer robust and deep changes
> with time , than fast ones made like in KDE ,

This was, IIRC at least part of the justification of choosing Gnome as
the primary desktop... that canonical was positioning ubuntu for
corporate deployment and that a slow-and-steady development philosophy
was considered preferential for a stable business computing
environment.  But now it's "forget corporate desktops, we'll go after
the mobile market."

My feeling is rather than make the switch outright, why didn't they
get unity working well on its own, before deciding to make it the
primary DE for a release?