Gnome replaces Unity

[Liam Proven]

On 14 October 2017 at 18:34, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Looking at the screenshots on the Mate website it doesn't look
> anything like Gnome Shell, so I am not sure I see why Ubuntu going to
> that has any relevance to the future of Mate.

It doesn't. However I've written about the significance of general
moves on Maté in an earlier comment.

>  Gnome Shell is much like
> Unity.

:-o

I find that astonishing. They are very dissimilar to me. They only
resemble one another compared to Windows.

You can _make_ GNOME Shell look and work a lot like Unity with a whole
bunch of extensions. I've done it.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/04/make-gnome-shell-look-feel-like-unity

There's even a tool to help now.

https://www.fossmint.com/gnome-layout-manager-make-gnome-into-unity-mac-windows/

The trouble is that it's mostly Ubuntu-only (I use SUSE at work) and
the result, while pretty, is very fragile. Extensions get upgraded all
the time, which must be done separately from OS upgrades as they are
not OS packages, and a combination that works together is very
dependent on the version. One version changes slightly and the whole
thing falls apart and you can't log out or launch apps.

I tried it on 3 distros (SUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu) and all experienced
similar problems. I am therefore not inclined to try it again. When
Ubuntu no longer supports Unity, I will probably switch to Xfce.

> I switched my wife over from Unity to Gnome Shell and she
> barely noticed the difference.

Remarkable.

I can only conclude that she is not a very demanding or intensive user.

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