So, it’s no secret that the Linux desktop – at least, the GNOME-side of things – is a bit in a state of disarray. Unity hasn’t exactly gone down well with a lot of people, and GNOME 3, too, hasn’t been met with universal praise. So, what to do? Linux Mint, currently one of the most popular Linux distributions out there, thinks they are on to the solution with their latest release, Linux Mint 12.
Linux Mint 12 has just been released, and solves the problem by adding several components to the core GNOME 3 experience to make it look, work, and behave more like GNOME 2. They’re called the Mint Gnome Shell Extensions.
“MGSE (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions) is a desktop layer on top of Gnome 3 that makes it possible for you to use Gnome 3 in a traditional way,” the team writes, “You can disable all components within MGSE to get a pure Gnome 3 experience, or you can enable all of them to get a Gnome 3 desktop that is similar to what you’ve been using before. Of course you can also pick and only enable the components you like to design your own desktop.”
I’ve dabbled around a bit in the final release, and at least in my experience, this is clearly not particularly stable or done just yet. It’s slow, often unresponsive, and I’ve even had several components – both GNOME 3 and MSGE – crash. It’s also a bit of a mess in the visual department – two different themes intermingling. It all has a very KDE 4.0-esque feel to it.
To satisfy those of us who just want a plain old GNOME 2 experience (for the love of god), Mint 12 also includes MATE, the GNOME 2 fork. I’m personally praying to the gods of computing that MATE picks up as much steam as possible, since I strongly dislike both Unity and GNOME 3 – whenever I use those two, I get the feeling like I’m fighting my own computer – and I’m not some sort of anti-change stuck-in-my-ways kind of guy, since you can give my any phone, desktop, or tablet, and I’ll get by just fine.
So, MATE promises me GNOME 2, and that makes me happy. I like GNOME 2. It’s elegant and understated, and at least in my eyes, very pretty. I never quite understood why GNOME 3 had to be so radically different, but alas, maybe I’m just stupid and don’t see the light. Whatever. In any case, despite the warnings of lacking functionality and stability, my experience with MATE has been far more positive than with FrankenGnome3, GNOME3-proper, or Unity.
The final change I want to highlight is the fact that Linux Mint has a new search provider – DuckDuckGo. We covered DuckDuckGo in January, and all the benefits I outlined then still apply today. The partnership is sure to be beneficial to both Mint and DuckDuckGo.
Head on to the downloads page to get Linux Mint 12.
Nobody seems to have fixed the fisher-price sized widgets (where the text seems to be drowning in the emptiness)
Or the massively oversized menu and toolbars that are just empty/wasted space.
Am being weird here, or does nobody have a problem with utterly wasted space (that hinders more than helps) ?
It was a serious issue for me with gtk2 made many times worse with gtk3
Edited 2011-11-27 23:24 UTC
Your comment is a lot of wasted space, yet it’s still here. Honestly if that’s your biggest problem with the interface then I wish I had your problems.
First impressions count and if this is so easy to fix (which you comments alludes to), why the fuck hasn’t it happened?
And disappoint those (including me) who consider the bigger widgets beautiful and find them better clickable?
You optimize for the most common use case and make those less popular still possible.
If you are in the majority of users which like it … then it is fine, if there are a majority of users that don’t like it then it must be changed and tough titties to you.
Nah, I don’t think he is implying that it is easy to fix. (it obviously isn’t)
He just thinks my comment is utterly invalid…
He kinda implied if you didn’t like it that you could change it in the configuration somewhere.
Apparently your opinion doesn’t count for squat on aesthetics … OH SHI- it based entirely on someone’s opinion. 🙂
Edited 2011-11-28 12:40 UTC
Exactly but more to the point, complaining about such superficial things is kind of like complaining about the color of the upholstery on the seats of a Boeing 747 jet liner when they screwed up and forgot to include wings.
No it isn’t.
Even if it was … I am still allowed to bitch about the seats not being the right colour, whether the wings are on or off … rubbish seats are still rubbish seats.
Except that one spends far greater time in applications than on the desktop shell. If the applications are an inefficient waste of space then that is clearly a problem.
Also I never said it was the only problem but it certainly irritates me the most about gnome V2 and V3.
One begins to build up the suspicion that they have so much space due to their inherent feature culling complex.
Talk about waste.
This makes me wonder… What are all the “desktop environment” developers smoking?? Clearly they all got their stash from the same suppliers. I’ll stick to Ubuntu 10.04 for a very looooong time to come, or simply switch to something like the good old window managers (JWM comes to mind). At least that way my computers stays usable and fast!
win xp “classic” ui & no wallpaper.
I think I’ve seen a tweak app that creates corrals or regions on desktop, but I’ve never tried anything like that.
Instead, I align icons based on what they do relative to my app windows do.
After some shock to XP flings the icons to the left side (tantrum), Desksave restores the arrangement.
The oversize|playskool|widget disease is akin to the ribbon disease.
Linux Mint 12 has the right idea, but like all things like this, it fails at some minor details.
1) Can’t Upgrade between versions.
2) GNOME 3 Mint edition is good, but very different from the Mint desktop I love.
3) MATE desktop is good too, but it’s stuck in the past with GTK 2.x
4) Why does Mint have to do *everything* different?
Why can’t they take the stuff that works on other distros and combine it with the stuff that works on Mint.
A MATE desktop built on GTK3 with the “Mint Menu” would be one of the greatest things ever made.
Edited 2011-11-27 23:34 UTC
Just one catch with that – someone has to actually port MATE to GTK3. And while in theory the Gnome devs have already done most of the work in that regard, the MATE devs are still going to be maintaining all the bits that upstream no longer support.
Which, for the most part, are the really ugly pieces that nobody wanted to touch, and had been bitrotting for years in the Gnome repos…
It took the Gnome devs almost two years with dozens of developers. And the Mate guys should repeat the same? With how many developers? Two or three? And when they are done they will have … tada! … something that is equivalent to Gnome 3 fallback mode.
Was this directed at me or to the original post? Because you seem to be agreeing with me…
…which will be depreciated and abandoned soon enough. Once GNOME 3 is able to run without 3D hardware acceleration. So your point is…?
Technically you can upgrade between versions, it just isn’t recommended. In my experience upgrading between Mint versions isn’t any worse than upgrading from one version of Ubuntu to another. Of course wiping the OS and reinstalling will usually take less time and be a lot less hassle.
Upgrading is where Linux Mint Debian Edition has a significant advantage over the main release. In theory, a rolling release like LMDE can be upgraded indefinitely without needing to be reinstalled, and the use of Mint’s tested update packs makes regular upgrading a lot easier to deal with.
Well, Unity may suck, but for me and for a lot of other people Canonical cracked the upgrading between versions (unless you have a million third party packages installed)
Ubuntu actually thouroughly tests upgrading. Mints small team probably does not.
I’m seriously considering Mint as an Ubuntu replacement. I’ll take my decision when Ubuntu releases a new version. The last two Ubuntu version are just too disappointing.
I replace Ubuntu on Some Machines of mine months ago.
2011 was the Return of Slackware on the desktop.
Definitely! But my choice was Slackware + JWM window manager. My computer stays in my control and fast.
Try Fuduntu
believe me bro, after long experience with more than 40 linux distros and other OSs (solaris, dexOS, visopsysOS, haikuOS, skyOS, etc) I stick with PinguyOS and Puppy, those are the splendid OS I ever use, take my advice and give it a try you won’t regret it.
I’ve used Ubuntu from 5.04 all the way to the point when 11.10 was released. Then I switched to LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) and couldn’t be happier. Gnome 2.x is still here (and I was told will stay here for a few more months) and it’s much more responsive than Ubuntu 11.04 (on Gnome 2.x, I couldn’t stand Unity for more than a few hours).
I’ll just waiting till all the Gnome 3 drama settles and we’re offered something usable solution (MGSE sounds like it might be the solution, but I surely don’t want to use it before it matures a bit).
Debian, it’s a better Ubuntu, and a better Mint. I’ve switched back entirely to Debian Stable + backports on my desktops, and xubuntu on my laptops. Stable gives Gnome 2.3, plus the awesome stability of Debian, without the Ubuntu bloat.
I haven’t tried it out yet, but I can already tell from screenshots that this is going to be a great experience on both the MATE and Gnome 3-esque desktop. The only thing that I haven’t seen yet is how Mint deals with all the icons. One thing that I liked about Gnome 3 is that (at least in the Fedora release) it could hide application icons on the bottom. I’ll see for myself if this is still in Gnome 3’s Mint remix. I’ll post again when I try it out for myself.
As for Mint changing everything, I don’t think that they change everything. They usually stuck with Ubuntu’s distro and made it much more like a “ready out of the box” distro than Ubuntu. I still had to tweak it, but I am always picky no matter what distro I try. I am glad that they didn’t stick with everything that Ubuntu had. Now if they only kept Add/Remove Programs in the repositories…
Everyone with a little bit of technical knowledge can immediately see that this MATE joke based on deprecated code and a junkyard of deprecated technologies and a lack of manpower can’t be realistically maintained for long. All developers who have deeper Gnome platform knowledge have moved forward with the Gnome 3 platform.
you lost me at “all developers”
what about the people abandoning gnome 3? the people scrambling for alternatives? how many of the top distrowatch hits use gnome 3 by default?
… “who have deeper Gnome platform knowledge”
Agreed – maintaining a project on the scale of Gnome or KDE is a huge effort, and that’s even more true of maintaining such a project without the experience of the original developers to tell you why things were done in certain ways.
I’ll be surprised if the MATE team can attract the numbers to keep the project going long-term…
I’m using it and loving it since the RC, it is stable, fast and memory friendly, I must confess I disabled all the extensions to get the vanilla GNOME-Shell experience.
I love Linux, I love Debian based distros, I love the GNOME-Shell and I love Mint.
If you’re just using GNOME Shell without the Mate extensions, you should consider using Ubuntu with GNOME Shell. That’s basically what you’re using anyway.
I did, but Ubuntu doesn’t install the Noveou drivers, the only way to get effects with it is installing the proprietary NVidia drivers, with Mint, detects and install Noveou drivers with effects out of the box.
I might give Mint a try. I’m running OpenSUSE 12 and while the distro isn’t bad overall, it’s weakest link is Gnome 3. Yes, Gnome 3 sucks less than Unity but it still sucks. I’m curious if Mint’s “FrankenGnome” will be more usable.
This is a list of different things I have noticed with this particular version of Linux Mint using a Dell 1545 laptop (3GB DDR2 667MHz RAM, 2.53 GHz Core2Duo, Intel HD Graphics).
What in the world happened to the fast boot up and shutdown times? On my laptop, Ubuntu 11.04 and Mint 11 shut down around 4 seconds. Mint 12 has 15 seconds (even with me turning off some of the startup items.)
I like the elegant touch to the start menu though, and the fact that my resolution cannot handle any of the recent Linux boot screens at all, I found that keeping the screen black was okay (after finding out that it actually booted alright.)
I kept with MATE, as I was thinking about Gnome 3 again being a tablet interface. I can see this particular Gnome 3 setup with an advantage. If you want to use a tablet with the touch screen interface, you can use the top part of the screen for your navigation. If you want to put it on your desk and use it to type or navigate like a desktop, you can use the bottom half. It just seemed redundant to have both for a laptop, so I used MATE, which really isn’t different from GNOME 2 other than that the bottom icons look a little closer together.
When I tried to use my sound buttons in MATE, they weren’t binded. When I used them with Gnome 3, a very pixelated Mac-like speaker showed up and made a noise similar to the Mac speaker sound. At least the keys were binded in Gnome 3.
Applications didn’t change except for adding gconf-editor into the menu, adding two extra terminal programs (which I uninstalled), and switching some programs into the system tools menu.
The only big problem outside of the interface and the slow speed is that there are many start-up items, including duplicates and some of these mentioned KDE.
I usually wait for bugs in most distros outside of Mint, but I think I am going to wait and see how it evolves for awhile. I’m going to keep it on my laptop, and may try it on my desktop to see the boot/shutdown times.
Why do you think of Gnome 3 as a tablet interface? I use it primarily on a desktop machine with a large screen, and it works great there.
However I can’t imagine it being very well suited to small screens, and don’t believe it was ever designed for that purpose. The default theme is just too inefficient of space to ever be usable on a system where pixels are a precious resource – it’s certainly not practical on my 1024×600 netbook screen.
It looks good on a desktop too, but I think of it as a tablet interface because of the applications menu, where you could scroll through all the programs and pick one. I think it would be alright if it were arranged just a little bit to remove some of the free space (to keep it inside the tablet limits).
I thought that it would also work as a tablet interface because open applications would either appear in the application icons area in the bottom or be in the applications screen, which is good for keeping the main desktop clear.
I think it might be okay for something sized like the iPad (the only tablet I’ve seen around where I live at). It might be a tight squeeze and may need some trimming.
With the laptop I tested it on, it was pretty good about space (and was pretty fast for using an Intel card), but it was a hassle scrolling through it with my touchpad (using a mouse is fine though.)
I tried Mint for the first time this past weekend. I was expecting/hoping it would be faster than the newer Ubuntus which have been loosing grounds wrt performance. I didn’t realise how close to Ubuntu it actually was. It uses Ubuntu’s repositories directly, and shares the same bugs.
Since Ubuntu 10.? my nvidia geforce video card is no longer detected correctly and the screen goes black on bootup, not even C-A-F1 works. I’m sure it works fine for most users, but it really sucks when you are one of the users for which it does not work. It turns out unsurprisingly this regression exists in Mint as well, but I was able to install a working nvidia driver from a chroot using the live CD.
Anyone familiar with Ubuntu will automatically feel at home with Mint since they’re practically the same under the hood. The differences are mainly the inclusion of patented software out of the box (with the DVD edition) so that Mint can play mp3’s, DVDs, DivX, etc. Also, Mint is giving users more choice in desktop environments.
I didn’t realise that Mint also has LMDE, a distro based directly on Debian Testing, which is what I though “Mint” was in the first place. It is supposed to be significantly faster than the Ubuntu release, and I can confirm the bootup is much faster.
However there is one damn problem that keeps me from being able to use it: the ps/2 mouse doesn’t work. It is the first time the problem has ever happened to me, I was even in back of the computer trying to reconnect it but it really was a software issue.
I tried comparing the configurations between both editions of Mint, but so far I’ve been unable to get LMDE to use my mouse and I’ve given up on it. I suspect I would like LMDE much better otherwise.
I’ve come across to Mint (as a long-time Ubuntu user) and I won’t be going back.
I’ve found Mint 12 to be *outstanding*. Solid as a rock, easy to use – wonderful all around!
Well done to the Mint devs!
Gnome 3 is unusable. Period. Sticking with Mint 11 until I find a new ship to jump to.
Troll much? I’ve been using Gnome3 for over a month now with almost no complaints.
Different people, different tastes. Stop with the hate.
I’m not trolling. Any Window manager where you can’t right click anything is useless. There’s a reason nobody still buys the 1990’s one button mac mouse. Mice have 2 buttons, and (suprise!) they each have a distinct and useful functionality.
Any WM that doesn’t have some right click usage is going in the garbage immediately. I don’t like Mac. I don’t like Gnome 3. I don’t like Unity. There’s a reason I use Linux, and it’s not because I don’t know what the second fucking button is for.
Linux is getting destroyed by their devs. I don’t know how much MS or Apple is paying them, but it’s working. Good job!
wtf are you on about? Right clicking works splendidly in gnome3. There are context menus everywhere; in the dock, in title bars, in the main program window (if the app has context menus), for copy/pasting/cutting text.
If right clicking isn’t working for you then its a problem with your machine, NOT a stock condition for Gnome3.
Seriously, wtf? Your post makes no sense unless you have some massive hardware or software issue. If this isn’t what you mean by “cant right click anything” then, please, fill me in.
Linux is getting destroyed by their devs.
Is an irony then, because it was till GNOME 3 that I was able to switch full time to Linux and I couldn’t be happier.
Lesson learned from the Gnome 3 debacle: If you are not a professional UI designer, you may stick into copying (Gnome 2 is a copy of early macs, KDE a copy of Windows)
Lesson learned from the Unity debacle: Make sure you have the resources to make something before you start making it.
Am I the only one who thinks Linux Desktop might actually stand a chance if people kept refining 10.10 (solving the update and break problem, make things better for the developer etc) instead of jerking with new UIs?
Edited 2011-11-28 07:52 UTC
If all you know is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
everything looks like a noggin
or a cockroach.
Come on! Gnome 2 looks like s**t compared to Mac OS X and Windows 7. It matters especially to new users. Unity looks great and brings Linux desktop back to the game. People commenting here just fail to think like average and new users.
Edited 2011-11-28 08:42 UTC
The problem being that it is hell to work with.
To me Unity’s annoying bugs are the problem, not Unity itself.
Looks aren’t everything…
Over 10 years ago Linux had Enlightenment which looked much better than anything offered by Apple/MS. I found it nice to look at for a while, and then went back to windowmaker which was simple, fast and usable.
That’s because we aren’t average and new users. And, just maybe, we want an interface that works for us. We shouldn’t be criticised for advocating for our use cases.
Typed from my Fedora 16 distro within Gnome 3. Which, by the way is insane. It makes no sense what so ever. However, I’m beginning to question my own sanity because … it sort works really well with the way I work.
Gnome 2 looks great with the Nimbus theme and Avant window navigator. I don’t see how GTK3 or Unity make this any better, since most major apps still use GTK2. FWIW, Firefox, Chrome, and Flash player are planning to default to GTK2 for the next several years. Even Gimp hasn’t been ported yet.
I must be developmentally-challenged, because I rather like Unity. That said, I hope Canonical can find a middle ground in satisfying both casual desktop users (I’m in that camp) with passionate long-term linux users (a lot of people who post here)…
Actually, Canonical does have the resources to make Unity good, they seem to lack the time. There’s also the compiz piece of the puzzle. They have to work on that too.
One year for a project like that is not enough.
I’m currently on 10.04 but also have a seperate HDD for testing new distros. After a few weeks of XFCEs, KDEs and Gnome3s, I came crawling back to my 10.04 desktop.
I think the lesson should be:
when you are doing something very new, don’t force it on everyone, make it optional.
Keep the old stuff in a working state, GNOME 3 fallback isn’t GNOME 2 for example.
Edited 2011-11-28 11:28 UTC
“when you are doing something very new, don’t force it on everyone, make it optional. ”
The problem with that would be that the Gnome team would have to maintain Gnome 2 and Gnome 3, aka split manpower between the two DEs (Gnome 2 and Gnome 3). As if there wasn’t already enough fragmentation of manpower between different DEs in Linuxland. The correct choice would be not taking such a radical departure from Gnome 2, because quite frankly they are not professional UI designers, so they should be doing evolutionary changes based on experience instead of radical changes based on what they think is right.
As i ‘ve said before, the mess with the DEs in Linux is a bad one. I wish the Mint team the best of luck, but cannot count on it for my computing needs.
Edited 2011-11-28 12:34 UTC
I mean GNOME3 almost got it right will fallback, a lot actually works.
It just needs more polishing so people who are used to GNOME2 actually want to use it.
Then people can try out GNOME3 and the community can make clear what they like and don’t like so it can be explained or changed, maybe an option added in the next update/upgrade.
KDE4, I think, didn’t even have the fallback.
You have to remember with GNOME3/KDE4 you are doing 2 big changes: Interface and hardware supported.
Edited 2011-11-28 14:10 UTC
I’m a big time KDE fan. I never liked the “treat your users like idiots” mantra that GNOME planners seemed to have. However, I feel the pain that GNOME users are going through right now. When KDE 4.0 came out it was buggy as hell. I stuck with KDE 3.x as long as I could and then switched to GNOME once KDE 3.x started to lose support. It wasn’t until KDE 4.3 that I went back. KDE 4.6 is awesome and just as stable as KDE 3.x was. GNOME 3.x is new and going through it’s growing pains right now. GNOME users need to keep hammering the developers to get something palatable to them. I think Mint 12’s approach is great. Hopefully some of their ideas will be adopted by the GNOME team and developed further.
What I like about GNOME3 it is pretty easy to add some scripting as extensions to manipulate the bahaviour of the GNOME shell.
Most of the changes, if not all, that Mint did should be in this repository:
https://github.com/linuxmint/MGSE
Still, there are certainly some striking differences between the KDE 4.0 and Gnome 3.0 releases. For KDE, I remember the bugs being mostly related to stability, and stuff that just plain didn’t work.
For Gnome, I’ve found the stability is actually pretty solid, barring a couple of Shell crashes very early on – the problems have mostly been usability issues, most of which have been fixed to my satisfaction with a couple of extensions (alt-tab behaviour, showing date in top bar).
Both, of course, also had complaints about missing functionality, but that’s only to be expected in a .0 release. There’s always going to be some stuff that just wasn’t ready in time, and wasn’t considered important enough to block the release.
Have you tried mode? Just wondering whether I am the only one who has problems with instability there (Arch Linux). I am not too much into KDE, so if I’ve overlooked a warning sign or something I am sorry. It looks fantastic, but it seems to at least have a lot of rough edges.
Something else I constantly experience is Akonadi making troubles. I know you can turn it off, but wouldn’t it be better to use something like BDB (or any of its variants, like Kyoto/Tokyo-Cabinet) to implement this? Reminds me of Amarok where I thought the same. A server appears to be a waste of resources, while still being slower than the mentioned alternative.
Lennie,
“I think the lesson should be:
when you are doing something very new, don’t force it on everyone, make it optional.”
I think you hit upon the biggest gripe of all. Why are linux users being corralled into a UI paradigm that is so rigid and non-customizable? Customisation used to be one of the greatest strengths of running a linux desktop. OSS was undeniably way ahead of either MS/Apple in this aspect. I would hope that gnome3/unity designers had a great compelling reason to completely disregarded this core strength, but from what I can see this tradeoff resulted in only lost functionality with absolutely nothing gained.
Maybe the focal shift away from functional purpose and towards eye candy is a sign of linux’s growing mainstream popularity, but like Lennie, I ask why the designers are killing off features instead of incorporating them into gnome3/unity. To this end, I’m thankful for Mint’s acknowledgement of the problem and their steps towards patching the UI holes which have cropped up.
I don’t know if these guys are professional at anything or not.
I want to think of it like this: Are they proven? Creating a new GUI design like GNOME 3 is a big deal that usually doesn’t make it out of a person’s head. Have these guys had success before, or are they just blowhards like the rest of us, playing in their sandbox?
I’ve installed Lisa on my “test box” and now on my main computer: so far so good, didn’t have a single crash. Thom, you write that
It’s slow, often unresponsive, and I’ve even had several components – both GNOME 3 and MSGE – crash.
I know this might sound like another “works for me!” comment, but did you install and update it? I just did that (about 190mb to download), plus installed the proprietary nVidia driver, and it surely isn’t slow even on my oldish test box. Also I’ve been adding Gnome Shell extensions and not a single crash (so far).
Now my only problem is that I don’t like green themes
Rehdon
Have you heard? The desktop is dead; tablets are in, and its all metro style apps from now on!
To those who dare to disagree, we will prove it to you. We will remove your options for traditional desktops. Nor KDE nor Gnome nor Win32 will save your miserable behinds this time- you will fit in or fsck off.
And now Gnome the third has for you, a new and improved workflow! Not the one you’re used to? how sad! Better get used to the new one now, better like it, better use it, we’ve decided whats best for you, and that makes it good!
The desktop is dead- there’s no future in it; we know what the future holds, and the desktop’s not in it! We have a cash cow now, or another bovine- out with the old, and in with the new, those freebie apps can now do adverts too.
Its Facebook or die and your name in the sky, those clouds may look dark, all their silver linings stark; but we’ll install apps on servers for you to do all your work, and cycle the adverts we think you may like.
Is it web v2, v3 or v4, that’s forcing the desktop right out of the door? Or simply those pimply faced teenagers who use computers in ways that are simply obtuse? Their jawbones grown slack from twitter abuse?
So there you have it folks, the bright new vision for a bright new future. Don’t think to buy your next OS, you will rent it instead. Don’t think to install your apps, they will be hosted in the cloud for rental. Who needs a full on multitasking multithreading OS and all the features of the desktop for that?
*clicks the “Like” button, then goes back to mindless content consumption*
…and returns to comment?
The computer automatically comments in place of my wired mind
Maybe the future is: tablet + screen + keyboard = desktop.
That for most users, I still need a powerful computer to develop and gamers too.
Yes, that is definitely more likely to happen.
Gamers ? I actually think most gamers are already stuck on gaming consoles. Or is that not the trend ?
Is/Are there any data on how the latest “big number” releases of the big DEs (KDE 4, Gnome 3) have had on alternative DEs like Xfce or LXDE? Any coinciding surges in numbers of users, or developers, or distros choosing them?
Outside of K/L/X/Ubuntu positions on Distrowatch (yeah, not entirely representative), Wikimedia seems to have started tracking different DE variants of Ubuntu since October: http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/SquidRepor…
A bit early to tell, and/or the October detection might have been not very reliable (or maybe K/L/Xubuntu really are that niche?), but should be worth following.
I’ve heavily used Gnome 2.x and KDE 4.x over the past several years, and I was fairly happy with both of them. I had also used XFCE in the past, but it always frustrated me with some missing feature or drove me off with a nasty bug. But this time I just installed openSUSE 12.1 with XFCE, and I’m really impressed. XFCE 4.8 has matured into a really, really nice lightweight and highly configurable desktop. I can’t believe how much it has improved. Definitely a good choice for Gnome 3.x refugees.
I have tried Mint and the problem is not GNOME Shell. The problem is having Ubuntu as upstream. It inherits all illness from this distro.
I have bashed GNOME Shell in previous posts here to death, but right now it’s what I have been forced to use. Surely its default fonts and settings are from hell, but with a little tweak (and no fallback mode) you can make yourself at home after getting used to. I came to this conclusion after experiencing about dozen of unacceptable KDE crashes. GNOME 3, the unholy mess, is what I am using now, with no crashes whatsoever, but this has to do with Arch Linux too.
My solution to the desktop dilemma was to give up and move to Arch Linux. Basically I installed the base and base-devel from installation and then, after a reboot, in this order:
xf86-ati-video
xorg-server
xorg-utils
gnome
gnome-extras
gnome-packagekit
firefox
flash-plugin
quodlibet
This gave me a basic desktop and gnome-packagekit handled the rest:
gstreamer-plugins (all packages)
libreoffice & language aids
hunspell
AUR gave me more tweaking:
ubuntu rendering engine packages
which is about 4 packages to create.
and of course, I always keep the Ubuntu fonts in ~/.fonts, because it’s the only thing in Ubuntu now I admirely recognize as a great thing. I need these sexy fonts!
Problem solved. GNOME 3 is not perfect, but is more stable than KDE. After two weeks of being forced into Shell, I had an apnea going back to GNOME 2 in another machine. I mean, it is still very messy when you open more than 8 windows on your desktop workspace. But I believe we have no choice other than adapt and hope things will get better. I hope KDE gets better too. I just don’t see hopes for the other lame desktops. It’s going to be it: GNOME and KDE. These two. And they will be like they are.
What I want to say is that Linux distros should focus more on being Arch based than Debian or Ubuntu based. Of course, I will miss the shiny delta rpm thing from Fedora, but I hope one day it will be introduced in pacman, with package signing, et all.
Please leave Ubuntu to do its own thing. Platform of the future? Well, no. Not now, at least. And it sounds arrogant. Haven’t we got hell of enough Debian and Ubuntu based stuff? Things really started to get messed up after 9.10 release.
Edited 2011-11-28 14:34 UTC
Arch based? Really? I’m a bit bored, if you would share what you’re smoking, that would be great! Debian is an amazing distro, don’t blame Debian for what Canonical has done to it.
Edited 2011-11-28 20:37 UTC
I can give you a few tips as to why Debian is not the hottie you think it is.
– Excessive -dev packages. They shouldn’t even exist. These were the days of 1GB hard drives?
– Too long cycle release. A Linux distro must be neither too hot or too cold. It’s gotta have balance. If stable is too old, what’s the point if I want a new software feature?
– Torvalds himself points it as “pointless exercise”.
– Debian is a stupid name, too. Mix of Deborah and Ian? Oh give me a break!
But I will give you the stability credit. But RHEL and clones are on par with it.
All you did was list why you don’t like Debian, and 1 point was a complaint about the name. You gave me the point I made about Debian’s security, and you complained about the amount of dev packages. I didn’t put down Arch, I was stymied by your wish for derivatives of it.
I like Debian, and if you like Arch, then use Arch, but why would you want derivatives of it? All of the derivatives of Debian try to make it easier to use, hell, that’s why I use Xubuntu on my laptop, because I am too lazy to configure the wireless card on my crappy dell. But it loses something in the derivation process, and I would think Arch would too.
I use Debian on my desktop because I think it kicks ass, none of it’s derivatives really do, so I don’t use them on my desktop.
Use the real thing. Be glad it exists, but don’t put me down for my preferences, we’re both Linux users.
You can use whatever you want. I just listed the reasons why I think Debian is not the universal operating system.
A lot of people use Debian Sid as their desktop myself included.
When using Sid or Testing, Debian is usually no further ahead or behind than any other distro. I’m running Gnome 3.2 just like everyone else is.
I have never found the dev packages to be excessive. why should I install packages i don’t need? I never even realised this was an issue for anyone.
Everything else is flamebait. (Linus and the name Debian itself.)
When people complain about Debian they are usually complaining about Stable. I haven’t used a stable Debian release since Etch went stable. Even then I used testing before that because Sarge was too old for me.
Debian will always be my primary OS. I use Debian Testing/Sid/Experimental and I will never change.
Deborah + Ian is not the kind of operating system I want to use, LOL. So amateurish. I understand many are fanatics about it, one day I may change my mind. My affair now is with Arch. Let’s see how long it lasts. So far it’s doing great, and not bloody devel packages. If I want something compiled, it’s all there already. Not that I will ever do, unless I use AUR.
apt-get was the RPM killer in those early days, but now delta-rpm and presto plugins kill apt in an instant. They have catched up.
I found Debian users to be mostly OS fan-boys. Logo is crap, name is crap. Sorry, open source projects like this should deliver more. Not only stability, but goo d marketing too.
Edited 2011-11-29 14:57 UTC
+1 for that. I don’t see why YUM isn’t used more often as the base of a distribution.
The first point you make is about the name again?
The only point you make is about RPM and i have to say that I haven’t got a good RPM knowledge after 2002.
But, I have looked at how RPM distros manage their packages. No matter how good RPM has become I have yet to see an RPM-based package manager beat even synaptic in practice.
The package managers are what drag RPM down.
Ahem, Synaptic is a frontend for apt. SUSE uses zipper, Mandriva/Maiega uses urpmi and Fedora and its variants yum. Once again, you fall into the trap comparing rpm with apt.
“I have yet to see an RPM-based package manager beat even synaptic in practice.” – me
I said I can’t comment on specifics of RPM and I haven’t. The simple act of using packages managers on RPM distros is painful.
Actually yast and zypper are quite good, with yast being perfectly functional but a bit weird on the ui design.
However I find yum to be slow, fragile and (on fedora at least) packageKit frontends to be utterly sucky and compound the problems even further (by compound I meant break everything, lock everything, crash and generally provide only pain)
I have never tried mandriva package management, so I can’t comment there.
Apt is a much more simple package format than rpm, which is probably why it is generally considered to be better. Simplicity = fewer problems.
Personally my favorite is pacman from Arch, which is hands down the simplest to grasp (even if there is no decent ui to go with it).
Edited 2011-11-29 23:37 UTC
Yes, the name is quite stupid. Deborah + Ian… it can’t be more amateur than this. Perhaps naming a puppy or a cat like that would suit better. Let me express that I find Ubuntu an ugly name, as well as Fedora. But they are ugly just for the sake of their own ugliness. Not a big deal: I find this way because they are close to ugly words in my native language which is portuguese. But Debian!? WTF. Arch name is OK. Not the nicest but it’s alright.
The Debian logo is quite ugly too. I certainly don’t know why it is called “Universal Operating System”. I have installed Debian once but… it was boring. I would have to check that again. I can give credit to Debian as for apt/dpkg in its glorious days, which worked and works quite well.
I like to keep bringing these points up because commercial software teaches us lessons. XFCE, weird names, don’t get us anywhere.
Synaptic has been dropped off Ubuntu and I don’t know any newbie user who uses it. Everyone is switching off to less complex package front-ends. Synaptic surely is good. But Delta & Presto for RPM with PackageKit sweeps everything away. I don’t use Fedora, but the guy who saw the need for delta rpm plugin really thought over this update cycle mess. Why do we have to download an entire package again? And last time I checked neither apt tools or front-ends actually do that.
Gnome Package Kit already uses delta rpm technology. It suffers a bit from lack of information, but I never used synaptic anymore after PK.
I see a lot of discussions about Gnome 2, Gnome 3, Unity… but no love for XFCE.
I switched from Gnome 2 to XFCE (Ubuntu to Arch) and haven’t looked back since. It’s light, stable, and I can configure it with Compiz the way I like it.
So for those who haven’t switched to XFCE, what are your reasons? Just curious.
GNOME 2 was more polished.
XFCE looks like crap, I think. It may work like heaven, but it certainly doesn’t look good and the name is crap. Developers want that way, let them be so.
If XFCE re-group its menus and do a GNOME 2 approach, not necessarily *clone* it, it will get better.
And that little mouse is something of a bad taste. Ugh!
Edited 2011-11-28 17:02 UTC
Yes, I miss the menu which also included an easy way to access your favorite… but I don’t think it’s ugly, with the correct theme (greybird), it’s not “ugly” in my opinion. And you can also change the mouse theme.
http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-281111-120652pm.php
Edited 2011-11-28 17:13 UTC
Sincerely, once you overcome the window switching in GNOME Shell, I don’t see XFCE any relevant. Shell sports a better theme in my opinion. When GNOME is 3.6 I believe many things will be improved, and Wayland can play a part on this too, with both GNOME and KDE.
Right click does not work in far too many places, I really miss right click and drag and select move like in windows, and I believe in some versions of gnome 2. XFCE is great, but it’s all these little details that make it not good enough for daily use.
You’re talking about Thunar, XFCE’s default file manager.
I find that a bit basic myself, but it’s easy to install an alternative and set it as the default. If you like Gnome’s file manager then you can run that in XFCE without any problems.
Tried XFCE4 a number of times over the last year. Compared to Gnome2, I really miss:
– Nautilus as a Desktop manager, mainly for the freedom of positioning of icons (I use my Desktop like I use the top of my desk, I put current files on it). You can run XFCE with Nautilus managing the Desktop, but I also miss:
– The Gnome clock, with the multiple locations, sunlight-over-the-globe and weather reports.
– The Gnome volume control, that allows you to set the volume output “over 100%â€, I don’t know yet how to do this in XFCE4 (though VLC will do this I think).
In one testbed I was running a mix of XFCE and Gnome (XFCE with Nautilus managing desktop icons, with 1 Gnome panel and 1 XFCE panel, the Gnome panel having the Gnome clock applet), but that sort of defeated the purpose, and it will still get outdated when Gnome2 is no longer maintained.
A better option than that for me would be Mate, but what I am running now on quite a few systems is Gnome-fallback (either based on Ubuntu, Mint or Debian), and that works well enough. I think it will be easier to maintain gnome-fallback when it is no longer deemed necessary (because of the graphical issues having been solved) than to maintain Mate. I like the newer GTK3 codebase and some improvements to gnome-panel. And I hope things will improve on the gnome3 base as well.
So for me the reasons are: gnome-panel with some of its applets, and nautilus, and the gtk3 base.
I installed this to give it a try. Unfortunately there are moderate number of obvious usability issues and bugs that I noticed in the first ten minutes:
1. The “start” menu isn’t in the corner of the screen. It is slightly to the right. How many times must people get this wrong?!
2. Similarly the scroll-bars aren’t right against the edge of the screen when windows are maximised. If you click right at the edge, in firefox it does nothing; in other apps it is the same as page down!
3. For some reason they changed the firefox icon to something unfamiliar.
4. The shell (gnome shell? whatever they use) crashed three times in the first five minutes of use. Fortunately it restarts quickly. Still…
5. Can’t seem to add shortcuts to the top panel like you could in gnome 2. It just shows a useless copy of the window title. I can’t work out the point of this.
6. The start menu is kind of awful. I have a 19″ screen! Why does it only show 9 items at once?! Also by default it shows the “recently used” apps, but to click them you have to carefully navigate around the hover-activated app category menus. Not a great design!
7. I think this might be gnome’s fault. But there’s not central place to set file associations.
8. Software centre has lots of buttons which give no feedback and perform blocking operations. When you click on a package, the software centre freezes for a second or two.
9. They have disabled the ability to move and resize many windows (e.g. application-modal dialogs).
10. The graphical sudo prompt doesn’t remember your authentication for any length of time, so if you want to install several packages from the software centre you have to enter your password once for each package!
I think I still prefer ubuntu.
Good points. Feels patchy, doesn’t it? It tries to please everyone. They would be better off away from Ubuntu and designing their own UI.
Edited 2011-11-28 18:29 UTC
Seriously, every time another distro moves to GNOME 3, it’s like the end of the world all over again. Nobody has made a new argument about it in months – just beating a herd of dead horses. Use it, or don’t, but stop being so butthurt about it.
Am I in a minority, or are many more people generally happy with it, and just not making a fuss?
You’re not alone, but I’ve no idea what the numbers are like. Certainly, there’s more noise from the unhappy people, but that’s normal – happy people don’t spend all their time complaining.
We could be a minority, or we could be an overwhelming majority – it’s impossible to tell if all you’re going by is people making noise on the internet…
Neil,
“Am I in a minority, or are many more people generally happy with it, and just not making a fuss?”
Whether gnome3 is usable or not depends on personal taste and workflow. I am glad that you are happy with gnome 3, but even so, a lot of functionality was unnecessarily lost…functionality which was not difficult or even necessary to use under gnome 2. For many of us, this makes gnome 3 considerably less evolved than gnome 2.
The last thing I want is for the gnome desktop to be forked and exist as multiple projects as is happening, I would far prefer gnome 3 be improved by incorporating the lost features. However why are the gnome developers so adamant that we shouldn’t even have a choice with gnome 3?
Mint’s success has been driven by those dissatisfied with Ubuntu’s disregard for user opinion. While the exact reasons for users shifting from ubuntu are open to speculation, I speculate the DE has a lot to do with it. The distrowatch stats have shown Mint rapidly overtake Ubuntu’s #1 spot, and that speaks volumes.
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
Note: “The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions.”
Edited 2011-11-28 21:53 UTC
I don’t know i we are a minority. But I also really like Gnome 3. I’m using Linux and Gnome since 1999 (1.0 then), when I was searching for a OS to replace our SUN workstations and servers at work. I use Gnome as a desktop at work and home. My laptop uses Fedora 16 and Gnome 3 since Fedora 15 was released.
I used all Gnome desktops till now, from 1.0 to 1.4 and from 2.0 to 2.24. I have seen the hate when Gnome switched to 2.0 and fine tuned it on the way, when smooth fonts, HAL and several other new thingies, like gconf, Nautilus, Evolution were introduced. The infighting is something that goes along with Gnome.
When I use one of our workstations at work which run Scientific Linux and Gnome 2 I have the feeling I step back in time. I’m productive and at home in both, but I more pleased with Gnome 3.
I have to admit I installed Cairo-dock on it. But I used this also in Gnome 2 (removing the bottom panel) and nobody forbids you to install extra things to your liking. My Gnome 2 desktop was enhanced with a few Compiz tricks to make it more functional and pleasing, things I don’t install on the scientific workstations, which are workhorses which use opengl a lot and have to be clean and stable, But I don’t miss those Compiz things in my new setup on my laptop.
Edited 2011-11-29 06:58 UTC
My Linux Mint 12 experience is starting to fail. Never have I encountered so many bugs in a Mint distro. Any desktop that I try to configure breaks when I try to configure it. My laptop is using an Intel integrated graphics card (which may be the problems). I am going to try my new desktop using an ATI card and see if it breaks too.
I am starting to think about going back to Mint 11 (I already did on my laptop). Simply said, it works well, and I shouldn’t need anything else for a long time. I’ll try Mint 12 again when I see improvements in MSGE and MATE.
Construct1545,
“My Linux Mint 12 experience is starting to fail. Never have I encountered so many bugs in a Mint distro….”
I’ve stated my own driver problems earlier, however in my case I confirmed the problems were actually upstream (Ubuntu). I’m curious if your problems are also upstream issues. Do you have the same problems with Ubuntu? I could be wrong, but I don’t think Mint devs write any drivers at all, they just copy them from upstream.
The price to please everyone? Failure.
there’s clearly some discontent in Linux desktop land if you have people working on both MATE and http://www.trinitydesktop.org/ , a fork of KDE3. I don’t know how well either will be able to continue with original devs off doing their own thing with those fancy new Gnome3 and KDE4 environments, but I wish them luck
This probably won’t please everyone but I installed Mint 12 yesterday, including stuff by way of dovecot, the LAMP stack, argyll and dispcal, Nvidia drivers, etc. So far “it just works TM”. The old Mint favourites/apps menu could do with a bit of a redesign but that’s hardly a big deal.
Otherwise the whole thing seems great. I’m coming from Mint Debian Edition which worked well, too, but providing you stuck religiously to Mint’s own updates, ime. The problem is that these updates were pretty out of date (Firefox still on 5, etc).
I never got on with Ubuntu which never did work for me, too buggy. The distro I always end up going back to is Debian Sid (like another poster) but if Mint 12 continues to work I may well stay with it. I’ve had less hassle installing this than installing anything else recently.
Edited 2011-11-29 15:55 UTC
I gave it a go last night and besides it being the familiar Mint set of apps that I like in an initial desktop I couldn’t help how I reacted to what they did with Gnome 3.
I felt like Jay in Dogma. “What’s this? Why is this here? What the heck is this for? Why is it doing that, what good does this do anything?”
I can appreciate what the Mint team has done to make what they feel is the best they can do with Gnome 3 and I hope it’s a success.
Meanwhile I’m reconsidering going back to something like Fluxbox or Openbox.
Linux Mint 12 works great! I just don’t like the graphical interface. It kind of reminds me of Windows Vista. They took a perfectly good graphical interface and added ‘features’ that I don’t really want. Unlike Vista, at least Linux Mint 12 is 100% compatible with my hardware. I tried Linux Mint 12 for a couple of days, but now I’m switching to Linux Mint Debian Edition XFCE instead. Sorry Clem.
In Clem’s defense he had to make a choice with Gnome. Gnome 2 has forked and he’s given you the option to choose or go with Gnome 3. They’ve tried their hardest to make sense of the phone interface that Gnome 3 is focusing on which is Mint extensions. You can choose that or go with the Gnome 2 fork of Mate. Basically he’s attempting to polish a “Turd” and has honestly done a decent job.
Me personally I’ve been using the Mint Debian edition with Gnome 2 and really like it, much better than the Ubuntu flavor.
… because, it doesn’t “fork” the desktop the way Unity does (completely different look’n’feel, new specific APIs etc.).
As far as I’m concerned, it made me realize I could get used and actually enjoy the plain Gnome Shell desktop. Only had to disable the Mint extensions and switch to the default theme.
When you think about it, Gnome 3 is not such a mess. Only two releases so far and it’s almost perfectly stable IMHO. KDE 4.x took much longer, and Unity is definitely not there yet.
My main complaint is : TOO MANY choices.
Regarding the distro choice… Arch is often refered to. It’s indeed good, I’ve used it for years and always ended up giving up because of the rolling-release-state-of-the-art-model : there are always regressions and things not working properly.
I mean : who cares if it’s not extremely recent or extremely good looking : it has to be stable first, this is the most important thing.