[ubuntu-za] 11.04 Beta 2

[William Walter Kinghorn]

Hi Wikus,

Next option, try Xubuntu

Xubuntu has also released 11.04 beta 2

William
________________________________________
From: ubuntu-za-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com [ubuntu-za-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Wikus [wikus at cheetah-microsystems.com]
Sent: 15 April 2011 20:15
To: Ubuntu South African Local Community
Subject: Re: [ubuntu-za] 11.04 Beta 2

Thanx for the inputs Jonathan.

Must say I am now even more worried than I were.

Something that bothers me about Unity , I couldn't even use unity at all before I installed my Nvidia drivers.
Now if Ubuntu classic and gnome might fall away completely in the future , how would you even get the desktop
started up without drivers.

I have never tried KDE. Maybe I should throw Kubuntu on my dev pc and have a look at it some time.


MaZaL
Fan of Ubuntu



On Fri, 2011-04-15 at 13:43 -0400, Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) wrote:


Hi Wikus

On 15/04/11 01:17 PM, Wikus wrote:
> I have just started to use the 11.04 Beta 2.
> I don't like unity at all. It is much harder now to find apps and files.
> I can see I am quickly gonna go back to Ubuntu classic desktop.
>
> It is also much slower than 10.04 (which is my main OS) It feels clunky
> and slow to respond to user input and running apps.
>
> I don't see myself being in any haste to change to 11.04 once it releases.
>
> Anybody else checked out 11.04 Beta 2 yet ?

The bad news is that the classic gnome environment won't be along much
longer either (probably just in 11.04 still), which will basically leave
you with a choice between Unity, Gnome Shell and KDE if you want a
full-featured desktop environment. I'm using Gnome Shell at the moment
and I'm kind of being nice when I call it a "full-featured desktop
environment". It has some very nice things, but it's clearly a .0 release.

Some UI choices are also very, very weird, like having your notification
area icons on the bottom right and having them hide with no obvious way
of knowing that they are there. Many of the UI problems can be fixed,
but I think the design choices they made aren't that great. It used
clutter/mutter as a back-end, which is slower than compiz, which becomes
very clear after a few minutes of using it. Not only is the interface
slower, but applications too. It's notable especially when scrolling in
my e-mail client or web browser. This is my biggest problem with Gnome
now, because all of the UI problems or smaller design problems could be
fixed, patched or worked around. I don't think they'll be able to fix
the performance issues without huge amounts of work or even possibly
some big redesign.

Unity is a lot faster and imho is over all better than gnome shell. It
has received some criticism because of Canonical's aggressive promotion
of it and their own technologies (like app indicators) in the system as
well as the copyright assignment to Canonical that contributors have to
agree too. Because Unity-3D depends on hardware-accelerated graphics,
there's also Unity-2D, which is written in Qt. Effectively many of
Unity's parts have to be written twice, bugs need to be fixed twice,
etc. Also, instead of the classic KDE vs Gnome decision, users will now
have to choose between Gnome Shell, Classic Gnome, Unity 3D, Unity 2D
and KDE. Yeaouch.

Both Unity and Gnome Shell also suffer from bigger gnome related
problems. They've mostly moved from using gconf to using the dconf
backend with gsettings, which is in theory very nice but is poorly
documented and harder to use. As a result, many gnome tools simply don't
work in either, such as Gnome Nanny, Pessulus and many other tools. Many
upstream applications who target Ubuntu have also started to depend on
some of Ubuntu's technologies (like app indicators) which isn't packaged
in other distributions yet and make it harder to get it packaged.

I tried KDE 4.6.1 recently and it's making really good progress. I still
prefer compiz over the kwin (I think that's what it's called) compositor
for both performance and features.

In short, my opinion is:
 * Unity isn't perfect, but it's problems are solvable
 * Gnome 3 has many problems, and some of the big ones will probably not
be solved until there's at least a partial rewrite again, maybe a Gnome 4?
 * Don't forget about KDE, it's not bad as it is right now and they're
making solid and sustained progress.

Disclaimer:
 * These opinions above are all just my own opinions
 * My every day work and play machine currently runs gnome-shell (on Debian)

I have my own views on what I think should've been done and what will
probably happen in the future, but I'll stop now before I bore anyone to
death with an even longer e-mail :)

-Jonathan




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