[11.04]-Turn Off Unity & Use Classic Gnome?

[Tom H]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> If a Gubuntu declination isn't published (not officially, like
>> Lubuntu), you'll be able to use the regular ("Classic") GNOME or
>> install and use gnome-shell.


> Gubuntu is something else, or rather, several distros of that name
> have been announced over the years, including a Free-software-only one
> akin to GnuSense.
>
> "Ubuntu Gnome 3 Remix" is the officially-sanctioned style, I believe.

Whether the above name is sanctioned or not and whether it's been
mooted as the name for something else, an Ubuntu version with
gnome-shell's as the default's been referred to by many as Gubuntu.


> But between  Unity instead of GNOME 3 and Wayland instead of X.org,
> yes, I can see a "more mainstream" Ubuntu remix coming about in a year
> or two, certainly, one with plain ol' x.org and plain GNOME3.

While Unity's an Ubuntu-only project, Fedora's X devs are planning to
move to Wayland too so classic, plain X'll eventually be history for
many distros.


> But on the other hand, I heartily approve of Ubuntu's efforts to
> follow the "KISS principle". I kinda wish they'd get a bit more
> radical, as Apple have with OS X - they have pensioned off large
> chunks of the config files in /etc and so on and move things into
> network-distributable databases, for instance. That's not what I'd do,
> but it's an interesting approach.

Moving files from "/etc/" to "/Library" and "/System/Library" (and
possibly to "/Users/~user/Library") isn't necessarily progress! The
uppercase letters are already moronic.

Furthermore, OS X's config files are in PitA, crappy xml. GNOME (I
don't know about other DEs) unfortunately also uses xml so Linux has
already been infected (along with uppercase directories like
"/etc/NetworkManager"). I hope that Linux'll never have any xml config
file for an X-less box that's only accessed via ssh.


> One idea, for instance, is that the old distinction between the
> various /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin and so on folders are now
> historical. Rescuing a system now means booting from optical disk or
> USB stick, not bringing it up in single-user mode and then root going
> poking around. I mean, they've already banished the root user
> altogether. Time to banish its special directories, too.
>
> Merging them all might make life a lot simpler.

You're misrepresenting what Ubuntu's done. Ubuntu's disabled root
(just like OS X did) not banished it. There are many files owned by
root on a default install and you're logged in as root when you use
"sudo -i", sudo -s", or in single-user mode (with "/root" as a home
directory with many dot files). So neither root nor its use have been
banished - on Ubuntu and on OS X.

Booting into single-user mode might not be your first choice, but I'm
sure that it is for many, whether they are long-term Unix/Linux users
or WIndows/OS X switchers (safe mode). Single-user mode isn't just
about having only "/" mounted on a box with separate, unmounted
partitions for "/usr", "/var", ... but also about booting into a
(possibly read-only) system with as few daemons running as possible
and only one user logged in (root).

Whilst I'm not necessarily opposed to merging all the "*/bin"
directories into "/bin" and all the "*/sbin" directories into "/sbin",
it's not something that I lose sleep about nor, I suspect, something
that the Ubuntu developers would want to do without Debian doing the
same (good luck with that happening!) because they'd have to repackage
every deb. I'm not sure that I'd want the "*/bin" and the "*/sbin"
directories merged though.