Questions about Ubuntu 18.04 live/install ISO

[Peter Flynn]

On 19/02/2019 11:22, Liam Proven wrote:
[...]
> What alternative is there? It's the only desktop on the installation
> media.

Ah, OK. I didn't know that. That would explain it.

> [...] GNOME offered "fallback mode" which looked like GNOME 2 but
> wasn't customisable. This was politically unacceptable -- partly
> because people liked the old look more,

Draw your own conclusions, people :-)

> [...] Ubuntu incorporated that, so full Unity 3D could run on
> anything, albeit with poor performance. But just as it enabled GNOME
> to kill off its own "fallback mode" which people were choosing
> instead of the new shell, it enabled Ubuntu to stop supporting 2
> parallel codebases and focus on one.

All makes sense, and at lease Ubuntu has lighter-weight variants.

> Up to a point you might be surprised.
> 
> e.g.
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-01/msg00496.html

:-) He missed the term 'buffer' in that one. Moot as far as I'm
concerned — I've worked all my life in technical fields which have their
own terminology, some of which is at odds with that from other fields,
and you just learn to cope. There is no mileage in telling historians
that their "footnotes" aren't actually footnotes but citations
masquerading as footnotes, and that if they want actual footnotes they
should learn to write without them. You have to let them submit their
book to a publisher and have it returned with all their footnotes
removed first. It's a learning curve.

P