[ubuntu-za] 11.04 Beta 2

[Wikus]

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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