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Linux Mint introduces CinnamonLinux Mint introduces CinnamonPosted Jan 3, 2012 19:10 UTC (Tue) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136)Parent article: Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon
It seems gnome shell is the main culprit of increasing fragmentation in Linux. Ubuntu ships Unity and Mint decides to make Cinnamon. OpenSuse is using KDE and I wonder what Debian will decide to do? Probably every major distribution avoids shell.
PS. Don't count Fedora, because of an obvious reason.
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Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 3, 2012 19:16 UTC (Tue) by bobsol (subscriber, #54641) [Link]
obvious reason?
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 9:09 UTC (Wed) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]
As far as I know the gnome shell is backed by Red Hat or some of its developers, so they support their project.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 14:46 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Except, as an end-user, there doesn't seem to be any way for me to pay RedHat to get support for GNOME3 desktop.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 7, 2012 12:33 UTC (Sat) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]
It seems you're doomed to their mercy. From my POV decisions of people who stand behind the shell are illogical. There are few things I have a problem with:
1. What's the target shell is aiming at? According to some Gnome/RedHat developers it seems shells only target are people who will actually like it. That's illogical, because if they want Linux desktop to succeed they shouldn't just count on good luck.
2. They're in much worse position than Microsoft, so they don't call the tune when comes to trends and I wonder why they decided to made completely different desktop environment?
3. The most popular distributions are turning back from shell, but it seems the shell developers doesn't even care.
If the shell is made just for fun then everything is fine.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 7, 2012 18:03 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I think you make a good summary but one thing is I don't think they are trying to push trends in any particular direction, that would be silly, they are trying to use a crystal ball and predicting that net books, tablets, etc are going to be a significant, growing and possibly dominant segment of the market so the infrastructure needs to be in place to support that in a first class way.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 7, 2012 18:36 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I don't think that there is anyone who disagrees with having first class support for small screen devices (netbooks, tablets)
what people object to is the diminished support of larger screens (i.e. traditional desktops and laptops) by treating them the same way that they think will work better for small screen devices.
in other words, first class support for small screens should be in addition to, not instead of, first class support for larger screens
it's not that they are betting that they will be possibly dominant, it's that they are betting that they will be completely dominant, to the point where nobody will care about large or multiscreen devices.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 3, 2012 19:26 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]
Debian, as usual, will say "all of the above" if at all possible.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 3, 2012 19:45 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] To be fair, openSUSE choose to make KDE default before GNOME 3 was even a pre-release. I remember that one reason behind that decision was to have a distribution where one could play with different versions on GNOME and always have a safe haven of KDE.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 3, 2012 19:59 UTC (Tue) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]
This statement is odd, because it implies everyone has been using GNOME 2 until now, and they have to invent new desktops now that GNOME 2 is no longer supported. KDE has always been there and I don't see what stops anyone from using it. Almost the same can be said about Enlightenment and LXDE (and others which I haven't yet tried).
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 3, 2012 20:51 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Prior to GNOME 3, I believe all mainstream Linux distros were pretty content to use the upstream desktop, be it KDE, GNOME, XFCE, or whatever, with only minor cosmetic modifications. GNOME 3 seems to have spurred several distros to make major changes to the GNOME desktop. I believe that's because there's widespread dissatisfaction with GNOME 3 (or at least, perceived dissatisfaction) and that the GNOME developers should really pay attention.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 3, 2012 21:48 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
It's new, therefore is irritating. It's also not quite as capable, so it's less useful. So being irritating and less useful right off the bat is not going to endear people to your software.
There are a lot of things that the Gnome devs did terrifically right with Gnome 3. They didn't break any APIs for applications, for example.
The one bad thing they did, hindsight being 20/20, is that they probably should of either concentrated on a Gnome 2-mode for Gnome-shell or just allowed Gnome 2 and Gnome shell to ship parallel and be installed on the same system easily.
Now people are told all over the place how horrible it is and they just assume that it's true. When it's not. It's actually very solid piece of software that has gone through much testing and several significant revisions before it's initial release. It's far more flexible and capable then the previous version while at the same time being easier to use. There is a lot to like.
More, or less, Gnome has just become a victim of it's own success at becoming the de facto platform for Linux desktop.
Also what we may be seeing is some fall out from Linux going through it's massive changes in the past couple years. If you have been a long time Linux user and you have been satisfied with how things have been done in the past so you have not been paying much attention.... then it's very easy to get the feeling that somebody has just played a dirty trick on you:
Linux is a completely different beast now then it was. Packagekit, Policykit, dbus, Network Manager, Pulse Audio, dconf, Gnome Shell, SystemD, cgroups etc. A hundred little things beyond that.
All these things are friggen fantastic. But it takes time to adjust and learn new things and when the old things worked well enough for your purposes then it's supremely irritating and will be little more then a huge time sink.
Like NetworkManager. Most people, I think, just assume that it has no place on a server. That it's only for laptops and such. Well just in the past month or so I've taken the time to learn how to configure it completely from the command line. Bring up devices, configure them, etc. All without touching a GUI. It works very well and provides a unified interface for most connection types. What it doesn't provide you can just slap in a ifup/ifdown type script and let network manager dispatcher deal with it.
Its just going to take time. It's disappointing to see all the distros fracturing away with their own little custom systems. There is no chance that they will reach the same level of maturity that they are accustomed to with Gnome in any sort of reasonable timeline. They can make it look the same and have the same cosmetic features easily enough, but it's just going to go back to the 'death by a thousand paper cuts' type thing.
I'm just happy to have Fedora. That is a fantastic OS. Fedora 16, after being out a couple months to fix the BS, is easily one of the best Linux releases ever. For my purposes at least.
FreeIPA is awesome beyond belief. It's soooo easy to setup. Documentation is decent. The way they are able to get the NSS mozilla stuff integrated with everything is great. Makes it much easier to use software like OpenSwan when it uses the same thing as everything else. SystemD is a bit.. different.. a acquired taste, but after getting familiar with it the only truly irritating thing about it is it's verbosity. I could go on for a very long time.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 2:06 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] So you see no significance in the fact that GNOME 3 is the first desktop environment which distros have altered significantly from upstream? I find it quite significant. All the other things you mentioned are neither here nor there, because to my knowledge, distros don't extensively change them from upstream.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 2:37 UTC (Wed) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]
If I'm not mistaken, GNOME 3 is the first desktop environment (for Linux) to _require_ full graphics acceleration (unless I'm confusing it with Unity...). This puts it in the position of baring the brunt of the blame for the craptastic nature of Linux graphics, sort of like how before it people were blaming PulseAudio for what was really the fault of buggy ALSA drivers.
I think the main difference in this case is that fixing the graphics issue is a lot harder... people had already been working on it for /years/, while the ALSA situation were bugs that were infrequently exposed with existing apps. Plus, graphics drivers being a rather black magic.
(again, assuming I'm not confusing GNOME 3 with Unity... which would be rather embarrassing right about now)
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 13:35 UTC (Wed) by bats999 (subscriber, #70285) [Link]
I personally have a different opinion re the state of Linux graphics. GNOME3? Meh...but IMHO the nouveau project's work is amazing. It makes me realize how far things have come. That being said, my hardware is a generation or two old - the "sweet spot" for free software.
As far as ALSA/Pulse, I only have one word...ice1712. Can't we all just get along?
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 21:06 UTC (Wed) by sciurus (subscriber, #58832) [Link]
You're not confused. Unity has a 2D-mode that's almost identical to its hardware-accelerated mode. It runs well on my netbook using an atom processor and the psb-gfx driver.
GNOME 3's fallback mode is a stripped down GNOME 2 style desktop. There are plans [0] to make GNOME Shell run on hardware without 3D acceleration, but that will require a fast processor.
[0] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome_shell_softwa...
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 6, 2012 10:20 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> You're not confused. Unity has a 2D-mode that's almost identical to its hardware-accelerated mode. It runs well on my netbook using an atom processor and the psb-gfx driver.
> GNOME 3's fallback mode is a stripped down GNOME 2 style desktop. There are plans [0] to make GNOME Shell run on hardware without 3D acceleration, but that will require a fast processor.
> [0] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome_shell_softwa...
I can't help thinking I must be missing something obvious, but 99% of the time it looks to me as though GNOME Shell's rendering ends up drawing everything on screen exactly the way it would look if it were rendered in 2D (the other 1% being the time it is doing its fancy zoom effects, which still end up being just 2D zooms). So I wonder why a software renderer can't spot that and just optimise the 3D projection to simple 2D blits.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 6, 2012 17:39 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I think this represents a common misunderstanding, that 2D and 3D exist and are two different things, or that 3D is complicated and slow and 2D simple and fast. What you have is a generic co-processor that can accelerate all sorts of image processing useful for 2D as well as vector processing which is useful for 3D graphics. The GPU has its own memory which can be filled with cached pixmaps, can run its own programs to manipulate and composite those pixmaps and generally accelerate graphics. When a dedicated GPU is not available, the engineering effort has been to write a target for x86 so that CPU can be treated as just another brand of GPU. The CPU doesn't have the vast number of cores and optimized hardware for handling pixmap operations so some of the effects, which are computationally cheap on a regular GPU, can be turned off when running on the CPU. When running on the CPU it'll be using the same kind of algorithms and data structures that a "simple 2D" implementation would.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 7, 2012 21:55 UTC (Sat) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> I think this represents a common misunderstanding, that 2D and 3D exist and are two different things, or that 3D is complicated and slow and 2D simple and fast [...]
Is it really a misunderstanding on my part to think that a simple one-to-one blit (likely accelerated at that!) is significantly faster than a perspective transformation of the same image done on the CPU without any help from a GPU?
Heh... Posted Jan 7, 2012 22:56 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Is it really a misunderstanding on my part to think that a simple one-to-one blit (likely accelerated at that!) is significantly faster than a perspective transformation of the same image done on the CPU without any help from a GPU? Hmm... Yup, that's your misunderstanding. The Times They Are a-Changin'. Accelerated 2D no longer exist. Contemporary GPUs no longer have it. Either you have accelerated 2D and accelerated 3D or you have nothing accelerated at all.
And if don't have a GPU then we still have a CPU which can theoretically execute about 64 billion simple operations per second (working on @4GHz and using SSE2, of course). It can transfer only 25 million bytes from memory at the same second. That's three orders of magnitude difference. More then enough to make sure perspective transformation is limited by DRAM speed, not by CPU speed (the same as with one-to-one blit). I assume here both "a simple one-to-one blit" and "perspective transformation" are written optimally: it easy to make both of them exhaustingly slow, of course...
Heh... Posted Jan 8, 2012 16:04 UTC (Sun) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> The Times They Are a-Changin'. Accelerated 2D no longer exist. Contemporary GPUs no longer have it. Either you have accelerated 2D and accelerated 3D or you have nothing accelerated at all.
I was under the impression though that even if the same underlying hardware is used free drivers are more likely to manage the first well than the second.
> And if don't have a GPU then we still have a CPU which can theoretically execute about 64 billion simple operations per second (working on @4GHz and using SSE2, of course). It can transfer only 25 million bytes from memory at the same second. That's three orders of magnitude difference.
Thank you, point taken.
Heh... Posted Jan 9, 2012 13:06 UTC (Mon) by etienne (subscriber, #25256) [Link]
> transfer only 25 million bytes from memory at the same second.
Wiki PCIe 2.0 bandwidth: per-lane throughput rises from 250 MB/s to 500 MB/s
Yup. My mistake. Posted Jan 9, 2012 13:14 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Oops. I've actually looked on real tests but they were messed up (they had title "Memory Bandwidth, MB/s" and under that numbers between 20 and 25... now they are fixed and title says "Memory Bandwidth, MB/s" which of course makes a hell of difference). Yes, your calculation looks correct - this means that in the absence of GPU acceleration perspective effect should be coded very carefully to saturate PCIe.
Oops... Posted Jan 9, 2012 16:01 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Sorry for repeating the typo :-( "Memory Bandwidth, MB/s" was replaced with "Memory Bandwidth, GB/s"... Numbers are still between 20 and 25. For LGA 2011 CPUs it's between 40 and 45, but only if there are at least 6-8 threads working in parallel. For a single thread it's the same 20-25 GB/s.
Oops... Posted Jan 9, 2012 17:20 UTC (Mon) by etienne (subscriber, #25256) [Link]
25 Gbits/s / 8 = 3 Gbytes/s
screen definition of 1600x1200 in 32 bits = 7.3 Mbytes Maximum "total update" frequency: 3000 / 7 = 428 times/seconds.
That is obviously when you saturate the PCIe link, which may not be possible on PC.
Heh... Posted Jan 9, 2012 16:22 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
> Accelerated 2D no longer exist.
It does in all my machines, thank you. It's not the GPU, but the APIs and driver support for those APIs what define what is accelerated or not.
And, by the way, there are many old GPU out there that do not fit your probable definition of "contemporary". Most are more than powerful enough for the mundane task of zooming and moving windows all day long without breaking a sweat, but are ignored because they do not support OpenGL 1.4 or newer (this definition fits ALL of my FOUR machines, for instance, none of wich is going to be replaced any time soon).
Well... Posted Jan 9, 2012 17:51 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] And, by the way, there are many old GPU out there that do not fit your probable definition of "contemporary". If they are old then they are probably not a contemporary. Most PCs are replaced in 4-5 years thus anything older can be safely ignored when you develop new program. With smartphones and tables replacement time is even shorter. It's not the GPU, but the APIs and driver support for those APIs what define what is accelerated or not. If your driver translates accelerated 2D to accelerated 3D and there are no "pure 2D hardware" then it's just unnecessary abstraction layer and you'll be better of you'll rip it out. Most are more than powerful enough for the mundane task of zooming and moving windows all day long without breaking a sweat, but are ignored because they do not support OpenGL 1.4 or newer (this definition fits ALL of my FOUR machines, for instance, none of wich is going to be replaced any time soon). Well, it's nice to play with a piece of computer history, but if you are developing something then you should draw a line somewhere. OpenGL 2.0 is pretty good place to draw the line IMNSHO (I'm kinda surprised GNOME Shell have chosen OpenGL 1.4) because OpenGL ES 2.0 (which is what you get on all contemporary embedded platforms) actually removed fixed-function pipeline - thus you either need to write two sets of code (one for OpenGL 1.4+ and one form OpenGL 2.0+/OpenGL ES 2.0+) or you drop support for all the obsoleted systems. ATI added support for OpenGL 2.0 in 2002, NVidia in 2004 thus it's already old enough to not be a problem in practice unless Intel GPU is used and even Intel supports OpenGL 2.1+ now...
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 6:20 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> So you see no significance in the fact that GNOME 3 is the first desktop environment which distros have altered significantly from upstream? I find it quite significant.
Well distributions have always modified their DE environments. There is only a small handful of systems that ever offered a 'Vanilla' gnome offering. Swapping out window managers, for example, is extremely common. Using compiz, trying to strip out PA, throwing docks in it, etc.
Unity efforts itself existed long before Gnome-shell came out.
Mate is just another in a long line of Gnome fork attempts. Anybody remember GoneME? Mate will stick around longer then the othes, this time, because people value backwards compatibility.
Cinnemon is the only fork of Gnome-Shell to make it Gnome-2-like that I know of.
As far as Gnome 2, itself, I could not stand using it until 2.8 or so. People pissed and moaned about Gnome 1.x and sawfish being gone (which I thought was just a blighted environment from day one) for years and years.
So I don't know what significance I need to read into it beyond the fact that people's attitudes and reaction to change hasn't changed over the past 20 years so. Human nature being what it always has been.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 13:33 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] So I don't know what significance I need to read into it beyond the fact that people's attitudes and reaction to change hasn't changed over the past 20 years so. Human nature being what it always has been. You've got it. Human nature is very hard to change and those social experiments that attempt to deny human nature (things like "Communism", "No sex before marriage", "War on drugs" and "GNOME 3") are doomed to fail.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 17:32 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
> (things like "Communism", "No sex before marriage", "War on drugs" and "GNOME 3")
OK, that was hilarious. If you'd explicitly named a religion you could have guaranteed 100 replies. :)
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 9:09 UTC (Wed) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
> So you see no significance in the fact that GNOME 3 is the first desktop environment which distros have altered significantly from upstream?
Depends on what you consider "significantly altered": some distributions have disabled by default nepomuk-things in their release of KDE4, considering probably that KDE developers have enabled it by default before it was ready for end users, given that nepomukeries have a prominent places in KDE4 announces I consider this a significant alteration YMMV.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 6:31 UTC (Wed) by ebiederm (subscriber, #35028) [Link]
Gnome 3 changed the metaphor used to communicate with human beings that have been in use for 20 years or more. That is not just a case of who moved the cheese but a much deeper change and one for me that so far in several experiments makes gnome 3 inappropriate for my normal desktop workflow.
Sure on my phone with limited memory and limited screen space I can see guaranteeint that there is only one copy of an application running at once. I find the design a bit dubious for not using multiple processes but I in a limited environment that was built to work that way from the ground up it seems to work.
On my desktop where I need to use the computer intensely. Where I sometimes have login sessions almost as long as the gnome 3 development cycle. Where I run a lot of programs, and frequently those programs are the deliberately multiple instances of the same application, the entire paradigm of gnome 3 seems does not work for me. I find that when I try and use gnome 3 I am constantly fighting the way gnome shell works and it hinders my productivity.
Which makes the situation with gnome shell very unfortunate because otherwise I like the level of intergration that seems to go on under the hood with gnome.
Fundamentally changing the metaphor you use to communicate with me, is an ABI breakage of a very fundamental sort, and not something that should be filled under it is just new and people are having trouble adjusting.
So far playing what I have seen of linux mint makes a version of gnome 3 that I can stay to visit for occasional tasks but I can't see how to be productive with gnome 3.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 17:56 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
> Well just in the past month or so I've taken the time to learn how to configure it completely from the command line. Bring up devices, configure them, etc. All without touching a GUI.
Would LOVE to see a blog post on this. That sounds awesome.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 5, 2012 11:12 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
"It's new, therefore is irritating."
Yeah, Windows users all hate Windows 7 because it's not the same XP they've been using, and everyone is bitching about the change.
... wait, that's not true at all.
"Fedora 16, after being out a couple months to fix the BS, is easily one of the best Linux releases ever"
That's like bragging about a night of passion that ends with getting slugged in the junk. Normal, sane, non-indoctrinated, non-Kool-Aid-drinking people would consider that a pretty bad night. People who are just obsessed with making their every decision look like golden wisdom to salvage their withered self-esteem will say, "yeah, but apart from the trip to the hospital and likely lifelong sterilization, it was pretty good sex!"
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 5, 2012 21:03 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
> Yeah, Windows users all hate Windows 7 because it's not the same XP they've been using...
Dunno about most folks, but I when I was forced to use Win7 I almost instantly made it look as much like the previous versions as possible. Same as with XP I used the classic theme instead of the Fisher Price look. And about all I do with it is keep it around to update the BIOS on my Thinkpad, play an occasional game, etc. Some of us are creatures of habit.
And yes, I ditched GNOME3 for XFCE as soon as I saw the first Beta of F15.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 6, 2012 1:50 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] And the great thing about Windows 7 is that it's possible to edit the menus even with the classic look. Try that with the fallback mode of GNOME3! Alacarte is totally broken (yes, there is a bug for that).
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 5, 2012 21:20 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
> Like NetworkManager. Most people, I think, just assume that it has no place on a server.
It still doesn't have a purpose on either a server OR a lab PC. It was created to solve the problem of Wifi on laptops and blindly adopted the One User Who Is Admin model of Windows to solve it. Later it has tried to grow into a more general solution but suffers from the original flawed design. Over the years NM has grown to where it can ALMOST but not quite replace the old network config scripts. Would it have really been this much trouble to have added a WiFi manager to the old tools that already did everything else, but in a more UNIX way?
The little network system tray icon only belongs on laptops.
As for dconf, isn't that just the Windows Registry tarted up a bit and sprinkled with lots of magic XML pixie dust? Microsoft has finally realized the Registry was a Bad Idea... quick, we must adopt it!
As for SystemD I'm undecided. On the one hand it really is attempting to do some interesting and useful things that the old methods couldn't do as well if at all. On the other hand, despite a lot of documentation (yea), too much in the form of blog posts (boo), it is still almost as opaque as SELInux for an average mortal such as myself who can understand the /etc/init.d scripts. And on the gripping hand, it was designed by a UNIX Hater so it has the alien tech vibe, thus I tend to dislike it on aesthetic grounds for vague reasons.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 4, 2012 9:19 UTC (Wed) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]
I'm sorry, but I didn't mean this. I was just wondering about distributions that were shipping Gnome 2. While Gnome 3 is so different, the change will be so big that they can choose different desktop as well. Personally, I'd love to see everyone using KDE which is my desktop of choice.
Linux Mint introduces Cinnamon Posted Jan 5, 2012 12:46 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] > increasing fragmentation in Linux I don't consider it "fragmentation". The difference between these (Cinnamon, GNOME Shell, Unity) is far less than, for example, between GNOME and KDE; they're just different "desktop shells" built on top of the same GNOME libraries, not completely different application development frameworks. And that's actually a good thing — because the framework libraries aren't tied to a single desktop environment any more. (KDE also has some alternatives to the original desktop shell now.)
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