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such nastiness.such nastiness.Posted Jul 29, 2012 7:24 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)In reply to: such nastiness. by slashdot Parent article: Otte: staring into the abyss
As trivially demonstrated by the negligible number of people who've moved from Linux to OS X.
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such nastiness. Posted Jul 29, 2012 15:58 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Negligible? I don't think that word mens what you think it means.
such nastiness. Posted Jul 29, 2012 20:29 UTC (Sun) by krakensden (subscriber, #72039) [Link]
you missed the sarcasm...
such nastiness. Posted Jul 29, 2012 21:24 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
I can't tell if Matthew is being sarcastic or not.
I know Gnome 3 caused me to buy a Mac (can't afford downtime when consulting, already burned by KDE). No idea how many others have done the same thing. Anyone have numbers?
such nastiness. Posted Jul 30, 2012 3:43 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I would assume he is being dryly sarcastic. I can understand though, I too switched to Mac OS X as my primary Unix desktop around 5 years ago from Linux. I was at a recent perl conference and it was maybe 50% Mac and 25% each for Windows and Ubuntu.
I can understand with GNOME 3 that they were trying to grab for the Brass Ring and get onto the next wave, Ubuntu is trying too as is Win8 (Mac OS X is succeeding). I've played with the latest Fedora and Ubuntu in VMs and I prefer Unity to Gnome Shell.
Switching to Apple Posted Jul 31, 2012 15:08 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Buying a Mac is a pretty drastic response, and IMO is a sellout to everything the Free Software movement stands for. There are other desktop environments besides the Big 2 and some of them are a pretty painless transition from GNOME 2.
Switching to Apple Posted Jul 31, 2012 18:18 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
True, but there are bigger sellouts. In my mind, here's the continuum:
consoles - ipad/iphone - windows - mac - android - linuxes - gnewsense
I'm just trying to find a stable platform for work while staying as close to open source as I can. I have strong ideals but I can't bill for trying out desktop environments and tracking down display bugs.
When F15 dropped, I had some tight deadlines. After finding Gnome3 unusable on both my work computers (yes, bugs filed), I spent two vacation days trying, xfce, lxde, and E17. All failed for different reasons (often ssh-agent unreliability/conflicts, which we use heavily). Any suggestions on what else to try? KDE4 wasted a lot of time, not feeling real compelled to go back there.
I found myself out of time and out of options... I needed something that would work THAT DAY and the the Mac was a desperation move. It saved my job. I miss FFM but, other than that, I was productive within 1/2 hour of opening the box. Plus, I must say, the 13" Air is a phenomenal form factor. C'mon ultrabooks, catch up!
It's somewhat heartbreaking... I've used Linux for work since 1997 (with some forays into Solaris). When a Linux desktop environment appears that just works reliably and long term (c'mon Cinnamon!), I'll put Linux on this Air. Maybe in two years.
And, if Apple ever pulls a Gnome3, KDE4, or Windows8, I'll switch to something else.
Relative sellout-ness Posted Jul 31, 2012 18:52 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Interesting continuum. I'm not sure that Windows is more of a sellout than Mac. I'd either reverse that or have them tied. Any suggestions on what else to try? I'm surprised XFCE failed for you... it works well for me and I have no issues with ssh-agent. C'mon ultrabooks, catch up! My daughter runs Debian on a Toshiba Satellite Z830 and I drool with envy...
Relative sellout-ness Posted Jul 31, 2012 20:28 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Here's my XFCE story: https://lwn.net/Articles/474610/ :)
That post ends on a positive note but I never quite got it stable... I don't remember what the problem was, something related to running half XFCE services and half Gnome I'm sure.
Haven't tried .10 yet, maybe ssh-agent is fixed.
Relative sellout-ness Posted Jul 31, 2012 20:36 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Actually, starting here might make more sense: https://lwn.net/Articles/474469/
Wow, was I thrashing. You can almost hear the panic in my voice. :)
Relative sellout-ness Posted Aug 1, 2012 0:09 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Ah, OK. I guess we have different use-cases for desktop environments. I use XFCE to launch my web browser, my mail client, and as many xterms as I can decently run. :) Once those are up, I'm a command-line guy... I hardly use the "desktop" stuff for anything.
Relative sellout-ness Posted Aug 1, 2012 0:26 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Those are pretty much my needs too... ssh-agent is command line.
I do require working sound, power manager, and network manager though.
Relative sellout-ness Posted Aug 1, 2012 11:20 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
Suggestion: try kubuntu. Eliminate things you don't need, and you'll have a lean desktop environment, with working sound, power management, and network management. There are also many GOOD media-management apps (if you need them) like Amarok and Digikam, but if you don't need them, you also have lightweight viewers/players available. Konsole is fast, and I use YaKuake for my command-line needs (being able to switch to it with a hotkey is nice)... They are both tabbed, but I usually use tmux for the remote-ability, so I use the tabs only sporadically. People dislike kmail/kontact, but I have been using it with lots of email successfully for a long time now. I use VirtualBox a lot for my other-OS needs. And wine, too, via wine-ppa. I use mainly Chrome, but I have Firefox installed for fallback (and for having a second browser, going thru a different proxy setup).
such nastiness. Posted Jul 29, 2012 18:42 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Apple has fairly strong commercial incentives to pitch OS-X just right. There is a feedback loop there: if Apple get things badly wrong, they will start to do badly on metrics that are quite clear to them.
The GNOME 2 transition was at least the product of substantial amount of user-interaction testing. There was a corporate body which had decided it needed to replace the desktop of its OS[1]. It spent a good bit of money on the HCI issues, and employing programmers to work on GNOME (e.g. accessibility was another of major interests, IIRC). There were objective reasons to believe that the GNOME 2 changes were good, and hence that it would succeed, regardless of any negative random comments.
GNOME 3 however does not appear to have any commercial feedback loop. It's not even clear there's any systematic, objective HCI testing being done to guide or validate the GNOME 3 changes - if there is, the results aren't being made public (at least some of the GNOME2 HCI testing was, at least in summary form).
It's possible RedHat might one day ship GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell in a supported workstation product. However, given the historical rate of releases of RedHats' supported Linux, that day is likely to be at least 5 years away.
So much of the GNOME 3 debate appears to be based on, at best, hand-waving (I'm being charitable): "GNOME 3 is awful", "Well I like it, nyah!", "All the users have gone to OS-X! That proves {GNOME changes are, change is not} an issue for them!". It would be really good to introduce some objective metrics back into things. Such as objective HCI testing, and, ideally, commercial pressure.
The worst course it to let things drift for 5 years or more, until RedHat ship GNOME 3 in a commercial product. That's a very very very long time in the computer world.
1. It still provided the old desktop alongside GNOME 2, you had a choice at login…
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