Alternatives to Unity

[Johnny Rosenberg]

2012/12/8 Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
> On 7 December 2012 18:54, Johnny Rosenberg <gurus.knugum at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2012/12/7 Johnny Rosenberg <gurus.knugum at gmail.com>:
>>> 2012/12/7 Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
>>>> On 6 December 2012 15:52, Johnny Rosenberg <gurus.knugum at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm not the OP, but I have some follow-up questions that I think is on
>>>>> topic in this thread:
>>>>> Are those (Maté and Cinnamon) compatible with Compiz?
>>>>
>>>> Maté is GNOME 2 renamed, so yes, AFAIK.
>>>>
>>>> Cinnamon is based on GNOME 3 so it uses Mutter; I do not think it will
>>>> work with anything else.
>>>
>>>
>>> Okay, thanks.
>>
>> Oh, by the way, does Maté come with GTK+ 3?
>
> No, it's based on Gtk+ v2.
>
> There has been a little discussion of porting it to Gtk3. At first the
> project head was very much Not Keen & he posted a rant about this
> somewhere, but I can't find it any more. He may have taken it down.
>
> Later there is a passing mention of it.
>
> But it would be a very big task. Mind you, maintaining Gtk2 and
> keeping it current and bug-fixed would be a huge job, too.
>
> I am very concerned about all this forking going on in the GNOME community.
> From there just being GNOME 2, now we have:
>
> * Unity - Ubuntu only; some like it, many hate it;
> * GNOME Shell on GNOME 3 - mainly Red Hat; a few like it, many hate it;
> * Cinnamon on GNOME 3 - from Mint; widely liked but on a less-mainstream distro;
> * Maté, a fork of GNOME 2 - now adopted by Mint & arguably removes the
> need for Cinnamon.
>
> The only positive thing coming out of it, in my opinion, is that Xfce
> has got lots of new users and is improving.
>
> I'd like to see mergers between some of these projects. My dream
> scenario might be:
>
> * Unity abandons Compiz, moves to Mutter and integrates into GNOME 3
> using the same window manager - GNOME's favourites bar replaced by the
> Unity Launcher, Unity's virtual desktops replaced by GNOME 3's better
> version.
>
> * Meantime, Ubuntu work with Mint and use Mint's forked file manager
> Nemo in Unity. (Explanation: the GNOME project has trimmed so many
> features from Nautilus in GNOME 3.4 that both Ubuntu and Mint have
> cried "too much".

Why did they do that…?

>Ubuntu is retaining an older version for now; Mint
> has forked Nautilus to create Nemo.
>
> * Maté and Xfce port their desktops to Gtk3, meaning less ongoing work
> and maintenance and better cross-compatibility with Unity and GNOME 3.
>
> --
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