call for unity7 testing, maintainers

[Chanath]

Testing Unity DE or Unity Session on 17.10 without gnome shell, gnome session, gdm etc for last hour or so. Now, 17.10 looks more like Ubuntu. Its the other way around than it was before; people installed gnome shell (ppa) on Ubuntu, here I installed real Ubuntu over Gnome Ubuntu and uninstalled the Gnome shell. If it'd be still working, I'll use it for work, the whole day.

I wasn't a Unity guy, mostly because I like Openbox more. I still very strongly think that Ubuntu should not kill Unity. Gnome shell is just Gnome shell, every distro out there has it.

[Chanath]

First day without Gnome-shell in Ubuntu 17.10. Booted in to Unity without any hassle. Opera-beta opened quickly, much more quickly than it was with Gnome. The first start with Files (Nautilus) is slow, but the consequent starts are snappier, not as snappy as Thunar. Gimp started quite fast. LibreOffice too. Gnome Software is still quite slow in populating itself. I won't be using this software anyway - usually look for software in Synaptic.

Life without Gnome-tweak-tool, Gnome-extensions in (real) Ubuntu. Upgraded in the morning. Upgrades would be checked few times in the day. A full working day with Ubuntu 17.10 Unity. Yesterday, the one-click workspaces (Ubuntu 17.04) helped me to organise my work flow. How many clicks, mouse movements to have few workspaces in Gnome?

Ubuntu was unique, but with Gnome-shell only, it won't be unique. It would most likely be seen as playing catching up with Fedora. Most people were attracted to that uniqueness. Who need a full screen menu?

[ventrical]

Sorry, but Canonical does not support universe packages.

Ubuntu flavors put some effort into supporting packages shipped in their default installs but for other packages there may be no security support at all. For Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the only non-Canonical flavor to offer more than 3 years of support is Ubuntu Kylin which was basically Ubuntu with a bit extra on top for that release. (Ubuntu Kylin 17.04 has diverged more.)

For instance I help maintain Ubuntu GNOME but I'm not really doing any updates for Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS any more because it is End of Life, but I might occasionally do an update for a package that is in main if it's an important enough issue that is easy enough to fix.

What I meant was that the maintainers would do most of the support work, the idea, having it the universe.

Regards..

[ventrical]

First day without Gnome-shell in Ubuntu 17.10. Booted in to Unity without any hassle. Opera-beta opened quickly, much more quickly than it was with Gnome. The first start with Files (Nautilus) is slow, but the consequent starts are snappier, not as snappy as Thunar. Gimp started quite fast. LibreOffice too. Gnome Software is still quite slow in populating itself. I won't be using this software anyway - usually look for software in Synaptic.

Life without Gnome-tweak-tool, Gnome-extensions in (real) Ubuntu. Upgraded in the morning. Upgrades would be checked few times in the day. A full working day with Ubuntu 17.10 Unity. Yesterday, the one-click workspaces (Ubuntu 17.04) helped me to organise my work flow. How many clicks, mouse movements to have few workspaces in Gnome?

Ubuntu was unique, but with Gnome-shell only, it won't be unique. It would most likely be seen as playing catching up with Fedora. Most people were attracted to that uniqueness. Who need a full screen menu?

@chanath.

I really do appreciate all your testing and experiments but the topic of the thread to to test unity7 alongside GNOME to see if it causes trouble with GNOME.

To keep unity7 viable we have to test it alongside GNOME and report any breakage.

Thanks..

[jbicha]

If anyone is looking to help maintain Unity, a relatively easy task is to update unity-control-center's Details page to show 17.10 instead of 17.04.

A bit more complicated way to fix it is to use gnome-control-center's ubuntu-gnome-version.patch so that it will pick up the correct version number automatically instead of needing to update the hard-coded version for every Ubuntu release.

[ventrical]

If anyone is looking to help maintain Unity, a relatively easy task is to update unity-control-center's Details page to show 17.10 instead of 17.04.

A bit more complicated way to fix it is to use gnome-control-center's ubuntu-gnome-version.patch so that it will pick up the correct version number automatically instead of needing to update the hard-coded version for every Ubuntu release.

Just getting back from vacation. Got locked out. Ill be looking at this.

Thanks..

[ventrical]

If anyone is looking to help maintain Unity, a relatively easy task is to update unity-control-center's Details page to show 17.10 instead of 17.04.

A bit more complicated way to fix it is to use gnome-control-center's ubuntu-gnome-version.patch so that it will pick up the correct version number automatically instead of needing to update the hard-coded version for every Ubuntu release.

So we have to manually put in the version number ??

m4_define([unity_control_center_version], 14.04.3)
AC_INIT([unity-control-center], [unity_control_center_version])

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~unity-c...:/configure.ac

Or do I need to go to a different page?

As I see it , the code should use a 'get' -ubuntu-version-number-whatever in the code but this particular source has it hemmed in
.

regards..

[ventrical]

so that it will pick up the correct version number automatically instead of needing to update the hard-coded version for every Ubuntu release.

Not sure why they did it this way.
Don't make sense.

Regards..

[Chanath]

When you install Unity Session, you install the last Unity session, that is 17.04. Unity being a DE, it doesn't really matter, what number of the distro it came last, as far as it works. Unity as DE works quite well with artful and without the gnome-shell. Now that the pressure if off on developing Unity, maybe the devs (few, who'd still care) would keep it stable and working. Ubuntu should have its own flagship DE, whatever its name, not someone else's.

[ventrical]

If anyone is looking to help maintain Unity, a relatively easy task is to update unity-control-center's Details page to show 17.10 instead of 17.04.

A bit more complicated way to fix it is to use gnome-control-center's ubuntu-gnome-version.patch so that it will pick up the correct version number automatically instead of needing to update the hard-coded version for every Ubuntu release.

@jbicha,

Can you at least point me to the source file at launchpad, the *specific* file that deals with this issue.

Regards..