more gnome bashing

[Anastasis]

LOL Awesome analogy...lets do it!

Nothing could have convinced me about how good Unity has become except spending 6 solid months with Gnome 3. I can now honestly say that I hate that DE more than the day I first saw it. The only ubuntu spin that has been able to do anything at all interesting with Gnome 3 is Deepin. Yes, including even Mint.

I came to become quite fond of Linux Deepin in the last several months. I like the ideas. It's fresh. It feels light. It's simple. It's about the best anyone could hope for when working under the confines of the Gnome Episode 3 .

But alas, I will confess something that I never thought I would. I actually like the Ubuntu Unity DE now. I really do. I just makes sense and now I understand why. I think it was a smart and right decision for Ubuntu to make.

SO! That being said......I am willing...a little willing.... to give my old OS ...one....more....shot.

One more.

I also like the Deepin sound theme. I'm not going to copy it, I'm just going to whip out my old keyboard and synthesizers and see if I can't find something inspiring after the same order.

[KBD47]

That's the way I've felt since recently trying Gnome Shell again with Fedora. It feels as horrible to use now as it did last year when I tried it. Unity seems a welcome relief after using Shell. The only truly tolerable Gnome 3 I've seen is in the SolusOS 2 desktop, it feels much like Gnome 2. Now that I think about it, SolusOS would be a great base and desktop for a Debian Christian Edition.

[Anastasis]

That's the way I've felt since recently trying Gnome Shell again with Fedora. It feels as horrible to use now as it did last year when I tried it. Unity seems a welcome relief after using Shell. The only truly tolerable Gnome 3 I've seen is in the SolusOS 2 desktop, it feels much like Gnome 2. Now that I think about it, SolusOS would be a great base and desktop for a Debian Christian Edition.

Alright, bro. Haven't given Solus a proper spin yet in making the round. So since I have some time before bed I'm gonna take a look at it to see.

It's also highly entertaining to see how creative some people can get at hacking the Gnome. :p

[Anastasis]

Oh WOW!

Reporting to you from the live iso of SolusOS.

Now, now, now.. what have we here?

What light through yonder window breaks!

Wait a minute...oh my GOODNESS...is that..it IS!

That just said, 'ADD TO PANEL!'

This can't be happening. It's too much to ask for. You mean I actually have CONTROL over my panel again! I'm nearly in tears of joy!

WAIT WAIT WAIT! I know. I'm dreaming, right? I'm fantasizing. Cause, if I didn't know better, it almost seems to be functional a lot like Gnome 2 was before they MURDERED MY LITTLE DEAR FRIEND!!!

MY FRIEND! My friend that let me run HDATE! AND..and...and...MOVE STUFF!

I can't believe it.

Look at this...'Lock to panel'. Can you get a load of that? Man. It's been a year and a half since I've seen those wonderful words. I missed you Gnome 2! Kiss kiss kiss. Hug hug.. sigh. :)

BUT WAIT! THere's MOOORE!!

Ladies and gentleman, it would be good enough if it were Gnome 2. But did. yu know..that it'z actually...I know it's hard to believe...that is actually GNOME 3.4!

It's kind of like when Gandolf the White returns to be what Sauron should have been.

Ok. I'm sold. There's no more to it. I have a functional desktop again. It's Debian based, which uber groovy cool. And I don't have to be a complete mergatroid and go with Archlinux.

I'm happy again. I'm installing it right now.

[Z06Gal]

Couldn't agree more Anastasis. I have been running SolusOS 1.1 x64 since it came out and it is simply the best distro I have ever used. It is extremely stable, fast, and very light even running compiz. The devs have listened to users and have really come up with a beauty :D

[Anastasis]

Couldn't agree more Anastasis. I have been running SolusOS 1.1 x64 since it came out and it is simply the best distro I have ever used. It is extremely stable, fast, and very light even running compiz. The devs have listened to users and have really come up with a beauty :D

Correct. I'm at the office right now and not on my home laptop, but very quickly let me state why SolusOS might just become my linux this year.

The Gnome 2 panel and gtk apps have mostly been ported to Gnome 3 environment. This environment is heavily tweaked (understatement. more like completely rewritten) by the SolusOS team to look and behave exactly like Gnome2. THIS is what should have been done by the Gnome development team from the outset of this mess of a project.

You know what all this proves to me? It proves that exactly and precisely everything that people have accused the Gnome team of doing over the past 2 years has been 100% true! It isn't that they could not have given the user base the continuity of use that even MS-Windows delivers, it is simply that they gave the Gnome and Linux community a grand SNUB. Yeah. That's exactly right. That's what they were accused of, and now SolusOS has proven it to be true.

What SolusOS has done is take an administrator's point of view on the matter. It uses the latest stable release of Debian (which it should) and offers many other perks. For example, I don't have to hunt down that Skype repo anymore. Good. Fantastic.

It also means that there is plenty of room to develop on GTK3, so new development will not be hindered, while also offering continuity of use in porting the older apps into the new Gnome environment. Are you going to tell me that Gnome couldn't have done this? Please!

No. It's what I said it was last year. Gnome just decided it was going to go insane with it's own preoccupied hubris and give everyone the grand snub. Well, sorry but that just doesn't cut it, folks. I cannot believe that such community outrage and annoyance has been caused by this arrogant Gnome team that could have been solved with just a little bit more concern for the administrator and actual user base in mind! Then maybe we wouldn't have had to go through all this useless nonsense. I even have my lockscreen button back now. It's all been ported. Yeah. I can actually use Hdate on the new ported Gnome panel and lock it or move like anything else.

Therefore, since SolusOS has now done what all the king's horses and all the kings men haven't been able to accomplish for 2 years, they get kudos from me.

Did it really take a rocket scientist to figure all this out? No. But it did require a smart and erudite development team that knows how an OS is supposed to work and offer the number 1 most important feature -- continuity of use.

Whoever is the brains behind SolusOS, I can tell you that they've had a lot of computer science, IT, and administrative background behind them. Why? Because it makes sense. For the first time in nearly 2 years, I see now how Gnome 3 could actually work and not drive everyone barking mad in the process.

[KBD47]

Wow Anastasis, I could really use your energy today lol! But getting back to UCE, I'm looking forward to the release of UCE. Last night I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my father-in-law's computer that was eaten up with Windows viruses. Ubuntu made it easy to install the wireless driver he needed. I set it up in the Gnome Fallback mode, and I think he is going to be happy with it. Gnome Classic/Fallback desktop may be an important option for those who just can't adjust to Unity.
edit: Classic/Fallback will also be important for those with old hardware or low spec hardware, though I suspect the UCE built on Debian will be a big help in that area as well.

[Z06Gal]

Excellent post Anastasis and I couldn't agree more. I have found that the devs spend alot of time in the IRC channel answering questions for the Solus users which speaks volumes in my opinion. Many people user their computers for work and need to have some control over their desktop. Solus has provided that and from what I have seen, will continue to do so when Solus 2 is released. A Debian stable system with up to date software on a desktop that you can actually customize to do exactly what you want it to do ;)

[Anastasis]

Wow Anastasis, I could really use your energy today lol! But getting back to UCE, I'm looking forward to the release of UCE. Last night I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my father-in-law's computer that was eaten up with Windows viruses. Ubuntu made it easy to install the wireless driver he needed. I set it up in the Gnome Fallback mode, and I think he is going to be happy with it. Gnome Classic/Fallback desktop may be an important option for those who just can't adjust to Unity.
edit: Classic/Fallback will also be important for those with old hardware or low spec hardware, though I suspect the UCE built on Debian will be a big help in that area as well.

How about both? I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that for the absolute Linux beginner, Ubuntu is still the most user friendly. It's not just Linux for humans, it's Linux for neophytes.

Actually, in this particular case, that's not a bad thing. I mean, honestly, how many church administrators, secretaries and pastors/ministers do you think are going to spend any time pouring over the finer points of the perfect gparted setup for all their partitions? Yeah.

No, Ubuntu CE needs to go forth and prosper. Ubuntu still has the best support out there, and just because I might think that Unity is just about as cute and sweet as Hello Kitty on a bumper sticker, doesn't mean it won't be useful in a church or Christian home context.

In the mean time, I'm tinckering around with Debian alternatives, and I'm liking what SolusOS is doing. What Gnome 3 developement did last year is not only annoying, it's asinine. They simply dumped a ton of perfectly good and useful applications to make their 'way-cool' alternative EMO, stifflingly useless DE. What SolusOS is trying to do is make gtk3 what it should and could have been. And I will be keeping a close eye on this for some time. (The Gnome development team should have spent all those years in developing Gnome 3 in porting everything first for the sake of continuity of use. That would have been the responsible, professional and ethical thing to do. But what am I talking about? Why would I expect that from a bunch of .... eh.)

Blessings. ;)

P.S. I mean, at least Canonical was smart enough to dump the default Gnome 3. Any team that can do that can't be all bad. I mean, seriously, you have to hand it to Ubuntu for developing Unity. It's not bad for a Gnome 3 hack, I'd say. It's about as good as anyone could do with that DE--not much.

[Kirk M]

...Did it really take a rocket scientist to figure all this out?...

Nah, just Ikey Doherty, a slightly underpowered laptop and a flaky wireless connection (don't tell him I said so, please). :lolflag: