Unity ROCKS!!!

[Graham Todd]

On Mon, 2 May 2011 12:18:49 +0100
Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> My point is that apparently the developers did, in fact, keep their
> >> > promise, because Ubuntu 11.04 is up and running without a hitch
> >> > on my old boat anchor, albeit without Unity.
> >> >  
> >> Yes, that true.  But, the word is that that is temporary.
> >>  Supposedly, plans are to discontinue the Gnome versions
> >> altogether. 

Well, Mark Shuttleworth has suggested that the Unity desktop is a "place
holder" until the complete Gnome3 can be part of a future Ubuntu
release.  So unless they change their minds, we shall be having Gnome3
- not Gnome2 - as the eventual desktop for Ubuntu.

As a number of posters have said, the Gnome2 desktop will be fading
from the repositories and will not be available unless a distro builds
itself around Gnome2 and keeps up the repositories.

There are many distros "based on Ubuntu" which could go in that
direction, or offer a Gnome2 and Gnome3 version.  But in the meantime,
you'll have to look at a live disk of a distro that supports Gnome3
(such as Fedora) to get a good idea of how it works and better base any
criticism of Unity you might have as a stop on the road to Gnome3.
 
> > i think the point of this branch of the thread was that future
> > versions of ubuntu wont support slow/old hardware ...
> >
> > ubuntu wont drop gnome, unity depends on many apps from it and was
> > implemented as a frontend to gnome ...

Unity is *not* a front-end to Gnome; it is a desktop environment in its
own right but (as I have said) it will be with us temporarily until
Gnome3 comes along to Ubuntu.

My needs are a little different to the general needs of Ubuntu users, I
guess, in that I am trying to produce (with others) a uniform free
software distribution that can be given to students joining the
university which I attend.  Originally we wished it to be based around
Ubuntu but we now have started considering Fedora as a suitable base.
If I had my way we'd be looking at Debian instead.......

That aside, I have seen next to nothing about how the Unity desktop
*should* behave and only plenty of pretty pictures of how it looks.
How can we identify any problems as bugs without this information?  How
can we be sure its not just because we're using the Unity desktop
incorrectly?


-- 
Graham