Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

[Posted April 6, 2017 by corbet]

Daniel Stone considers the future of the Linux desktop in the light of Ubuntu's return to GNOME. "The world in 2017, however, is a very different place. KMS provides us truly device-independent display control, Vulkan and EGL provide us GPU acceleration independent of window system, xkbcommon provides shared keyboard mechanics, and logind lets us do all these things without ever being root. GBM allocates our buffers, and the universal allocator, borne out of discussions with the whole community including NVIDIA, will soon join the family. Mir leans heavily on all these technologies, so the change is a bit less seismic than you might think."

Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Posted Apr 6, 2017 23:17 UTC (Thu) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (7 responses)

I yelled as loud as any with the first few iterations/years of Gnome 3, it was pretty bad. But, after a few tweaks, it is my work desktop of choice now + Ubuntu. (Home is still Mint / Cinammon)

Good news. Thanks for getting on board, Ubuntu, and the unity effort was neat, and a useful exercise. But it is time.

Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Posted Apr 7, 2017 8:40 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

I yelled as loud as any with the first few iterations/years of Gnome 3, it was pretty bad. But, after a few tweaks, it is my work desktop of choice now + Ubuntu.

Usually it means that it's time to “rethink the desktop”, sigh. And, what's worse, I know some people who really plan to do that. My only hope is that GNOME wouldn't follow this time, but I don't hold my breath.

Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Posted Apr 7, 2017 19:44 UTC (Fri) by nettings (subscriber, #429) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a hotkey to rethink your desktop. It's Ctrl-Alt-F1. Instant pain-free environment :-D

Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Posted Apr 7, 2017 21:00 UTC (Fri) by oever (guest, #987) [Link]

Some distros put the desktop alt-ctrl-f1 instead of alt-ctrl-f7.

Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Posted Apr 8, 2017 3:44 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I use xfce (with i3). I think xfce was written for those who don't want to reinvent the desktop.

Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Posted Apr 7, 2017 10:37 UTC (Fri) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] (2 responses)

I use Gnome 3 with Fedora 25. It became very smooth experience. Nowadays I do not need to install a bunch of extensions just to make things bearable. The only tweaks that I do to satisfy my taste is to install gnome-tweak-tool and gnome-shell-extension-alternate-tab to fix AltTab that Gnome folks blindly copied from Mac that is completely unusable for me.

I also find that Gnome-Shell is one of those rare Window Managers that play nicely with full screen application when one can just press the win key to get time, network status etc. that is otherwise is hidden by the full screen app. Also, Gnome shell is the only desktop among a few that I tried that just works on 4K Laptop screen with *no tweaks*.

Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Posted Apr 7, 2017 14:22 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Please ask your distribution to install gnome-tweak-tool by default. IMO the window management of gnome-shell/mutter has gone down a bit. It sometimes does weird things (focus on the wrong window).

Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Posted Apr 7, 2017 17:27 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

The only tweaks that I do to satisfy my taste is to install gnome-tweak-tool and gnome-shell-extension-alternate-tab to fix AltTab that Gnome folks blindly copied from Mac that is completely unusable for me.

You don't actually need alternate-tab to fix that anymore; just bind Alt-Tab to "switch-windows" instead of "switch-applications":

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-applications '@as []'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-windows '["<Alt>Tab"]'

Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Posted Apr 7, 2017 7:43 UTC (Fri) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

"For developers, a lot of the differentials in desktop technology (e.g. indicators, menus, scrollbars) between the two may now be at an end, making generic Linux an easier target for ISVs."

Of course that's completely ignoring the existence of KDE and a myriad other desktops. For users of those things may turn for the worse as ISVs will be even more tempted to think that Linux == GTK and we'll get more alien looking and hardly usable applications :/

Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Posted Apr 8, 2017 22:27 UTC (Sat) by zenaan (guest, #3778) [Link] (1 responses)

> From this point of view, nothing changes, because we all share the same bedrock infrastructure, borne of X.Org's incredibly long-sighted view that it had a duty to make itself replaceable.

Thank you X.org team and thank you Keith Packard!

Stone: Ubuntu rejoins the GNOME fold

Posted Apr 10, 2017 7:45 UTC (Mon) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

A very good point you make. I think this attitude has roots in X's "mechanism, not policy" mantra.

I hope strongly that once the dust settles a bit, whatever has taken over will show a comparable amount of foresight (I'll stick with X and Fvwm in the meantime :-)