GNOME Shell No Longer Requires GPU Acceleration 237
An anonymous reader writes "The GNOME 3.0 Shell with the Mutter window manager no longer requires GPU acceleration to work, while still retaining the compositing window manager and OpenGL support. GNOME Shell can now work entirely on the CPU using the LLVM compiler via the Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver. This will be another change to Fedora 17 to no longer depend upon the GNOME3 fall-back, which is expected to eventually be deprecated and further anger GNOME2 fans."
Software GPU Emulation (Score:5, Insightful)
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The advantage is if your GPU is unsupported by your distro, not on the live disk or, otherwise not working you can get video acceleration working without having to muck about in the command line.
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> I'm tempted to call it "video deceleration".
Good point. When it said "it works without video acceleration", I was hoping to read that they had optimised the desktop, so it would run fine without a beefy 3D card. But I think your interpretation is closer to the truth.
And since this turns into Gnome bashing, I would like to add that it does not seem easy to find the right design of a graphical toolkit and desktop. Qt has its own pre-compiler, mind you, so you have to programme in Qt-C++, which is near
Re:Software GPU Emulation (Score:5, Informative)
Note that compositing != GPU acceleration. Mac OS X has always used compositing, but it was entirely software. There are still good reasons to do so. I'll compare for you:
No compositing, one frontbuffer: You don't get your own pixmap to draw onto. You have to send drawing commands to the display server to draw on your behalf, to prevent you from drawing wherever you want on the frontbuffer. Unfortunately, if you have something complicated to draw, the user gets to watch as the drawing happens. When drawing a new object, generally the algorithm used is to draw the background, and then draw the objects in order from back to front. This means whenever the screen is updated, the user will see flicker whenever any objects are updated because they may briefly flicker to the background color. To work around this most modern toolkits (Qt 4, GTK 3) render to a pixmap, and then just tell X to draw their pixmap when they are done. This avoids the flicker but uses a bit more RAM.
With a compositor, the application still draws to the pixmap, but instead of requesting the X server to immediately draw their pixmap to the screen, they pass it a handle to the pixmap and the display server can draw it whenever. This makes a lot of things easier, like vertical sync and effects, as well as things like color format and color space conversion.
Drawing the pixmap on the screen is really the same operations, no matter if compositing is on or off. And the API your compositor uses shouldn't matter too much either if the underlying implementation is optimized. The highly optimized Gallium3D blitter is going to just as good as the traditional X blitter, if not better. The only thing slowing it down in this case is the fact that OpenGL API is rather overkill for blitting, but hopefully the llvmpipe backend is optimized for this use case. And it's probably not worth it to make the compositor support two drawing APIs, like KDE, as they both end up doing the same thing anyway.
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No compositing, one frontbuffer: You don't get your own pixmap to draw onto. You have to send drawing commands to the display server to draw on your behalf, to prevent you from drawing wherever you want on the frontbuffer. Unfortunately, if you have something complicated to draw, the user gets to watch as the drawing happens. When drawing a new object, generally the algorithm used is to draw the background, and then draw the objects in order from back to front. This means whenever the screen is updated, the user will see flicker whenever any objects are updated because they may briefly flicker to the background color. To work around this most modern toolkits (Qt 4, GTK 3) render to a pixmap, and then just tell X to draw their pixmap when they are done. This avoids the flicker but uses a bit more RAM.
This is a bullshit way to look at it. You are confusing compositing, backingstores and backbuffers.
Compositing means to have a procedural transformation from a window pixel to a screen pixel, and allows you to do such things as transparency and 3D windows, it implies nothing of whether or not the window pixels are cached (Backing store). Basically anything besides 1->1 blitting of pixels from window coordinates to screen coordinates is compositing.
Backing stores, enabled in X11 with the +bs option and ma
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Sometimes it just has to work, and you don't care how fast it is. You might as well insist that Linux must have a swap partition instead of a swap file.
I wish Microsoft had put a DOS emulator into Windows a long time ago. Then we would have never gotten ME, and we wouldn't have XP Mode today.
GNOME is a study in how to not architect software. (Score:5, Interesting)
GNOME is a perfect study in how not to architect a software system. Everything about it is wrong.
The first mistake they made was trying to cobble half-assed object-oriented support onto C, rather than just using C++ or Objective-C. Everything about GObject is stupid and counterproductive. It makes writing code a real pain in the ass, since you need to use typecasting macros all over the place. Worse, this sort of code promotes library design that's slow and inefficient. To make it even worse, this style of C code is so convoluted that it is not optimized well by compilers, resulting in binaries that are far slower than they should be.
It basically goes totally downhill after that. This bullshit with GPU acceleration being required in the first place, and then this additional bullshit involving LLVM, is yet another in a long list of flaws and horrible decisions.
I encourage all of the developers that I mentor to use GNOME and to get a good look at its internals. I just make sure that they know not to do what GNOME has done. By seeing the mistakes firsthand, it's less likely that they'll repeat them in the future with the software that they create.
Re:GNOME is a study in how to not architect softwa (Score:5, Informative)
GNOME is a perfect study in how not to architect a software system. Everything about it is wrong.
The first mistake they made was trying to cobble half-assed object-oriented support onto C, rather than just using C++ or Objective-C. Everything about GObject is stupid and counterproductive. It makes writing code a real pain in the ass, since you need to use typecasting macros all over the place. Worse, this sort of code promotes library design that's slow and inefficient. To make it even worse, this style of C code is so convoluted that it is not optimized well by compilers, resulting in binaries that are far slower than they should be.
Nonsense. GObject gives you multi-language bindings for free and if you're just an application developer it only makes your life easier. You can develop GNOME programs in C++, Python, Java or whatever suits your tastes.
I don't think the overhead resulting from using C is substantial at all. Maybe you get more overhead than C++ by always using virtual calls but that is offset by not doing C++ magic like unnecessary constructor/destructor calls. You'll have to back this up if you want me to believe you.
It basically goes totally downhill after that. This bullshit with GPU acceleration being required in the first place, and then this additional bullshit involving LLVM, is yet another in a long list of flaws and horrible decisions.
I encourage all of the developers that I mentor to use GNOME and to get a good look at its internals. I just make sure that they know not to do what GNOME has done. By seeing the mistakes firsthand, it's less likely that they'll repeat them in the future with the software that they create.
I'm not a fan of GNOME and I agree that they are headed in the wrong direction, but the problems are not at all due to GObject or C. Cut the FUD when you criticise GNOME next time.
Re:GNOME is a study in how to not architect softwa (Score:5, Interesting)
Not the GP, but what he's saying is far more true to my experience than what you're saying. I don't think the GP's comment is spreading FUD, either, but just a truth that many GNOME'ers don't want to hear.
Have you ever tried to use the GObject bindings for other languages? The Python bindings are the only ones that aren't terrible, but they weren't that good either. The rest were very incomplete, very outdated, or didn't exist at all. The theoretical benefits or capabilities of GObject are worthless if we can't use them in practice. I've had a lot more success with interoperability between Java, Scala, and Clojure than I ever have had with any GObject-based code. The same goes for .NET when the languages are C#, VB.NET and F#. Those all work seamlessly with almost no effort, while GObject needs a lot of hand-holding and even then it often just doesn't work.
What the GP says about some C compilers not doing a good job optimizing unusual C code is correct, too. I used to work on a compiler that generated C for a proprietary OO language and this artificial C code confused the optimizers of several popular C compilers. We got much better performance when we wrote our own native back-end. So I could totally see some of GNOME's bad performance being caused by this.
Also, KDE is very good evidence to back up the GP's claims. It's comparable in size and complexity to GNOME, but is written using C++ instead of C. On every computer I've ever used, KDE has been a lot faster than GNOME. It is also a far nicer environment to work with when you're writing code. OO programming is more natural in C++ than it is in C using GObject.
Don't write off the GP's comments as FUD. There's a lot of evidence to show that they're real problems.
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Same'd.
Try to *look* at code you're talking about, OK? (Score:2, Interesting)
GObject or C++ or scripting language or whatever - function call overhead is negligible compared to all that work (and make-work) which a typical API function of a typical GUI widget is doing. When for other coders several years ago those same APIs, libraries and languages, and *worse* optimizing compilers, worked perfectly well on 10, and even 100, times less powerful hardware - trying now to blame other coders' ineptitude on GObject, GTK+, C compiler, X server, or whatever, is nothing but pathetic and idi
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> I've had a lot more success with interoperability between Java, Scala, and Clojure than I ever have had with any GObject-based code. The same goes for .NET when the languages are C#, VB.NET and F#. Those all work seamlessly with almost no effort, while GObject needs a lot of hand-holding and even then it often just doesn't work.
That's hardly a surprise. All JVM languages use the same object system underneath and were explicitly designed to interop with it. Same for CLR languages. When you use GObject,
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Bullshit. Constructors and destructors fall into several categories:
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It basically goes totally downhill after that. This bullshit with GPU acceleration being required in the first place, and then this additional bullshit involving LLVM, is yet another in a long list of flaws and horrible decisions.
Err.. The llvmpipe driver is developed by mesa and xorg to provide a software fallback driver that is faster than the dog slow swrast driver. Exactly why is this "bullshit" and a "horrible decision."?
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doesn't X already provide a 2D blitter? doesn't gtk et al support this still?
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Is that an attempt at recursive humor?
Presumably why they now have Vala.
AKA: Object Orientated?
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Is that an attempt at recursive humor?
I don't think so because it's confirmed by your good self below:
Presumably why they now have Vala.
Yep, that's why they've tacked on another non-native language.
AKA: Object Orientated?
I believe the point is it's object oriented in the worst possible way.
I certainly don't consider GObject/Gtk to be worse than QT or Apples API's.
Uh, huh.
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It's British English, dick'ead.
worse is better (Score:2)
google it.
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This bullshit with GPU acceleration being required in the first place, and then this additional bullshit involving LLVM, is yet another in a long list of flaws and horrible decisions.
WTF? LLVMpipe is not developed by GNOME. It's a Mesa project. LLVMpipe implementing compatibility with OpenGL API calls has nothing to do with GNOME's decision to rely on OpenGL for GNOME Shell.
The decision to use LLVMpipe instead of Fallback Mode isn't even a GNOME decision. It's a Fedora / Red Hat decision: LLVMpipe happens to be good enough now and that's why Fedora will ship it by default and Xorg will be configured to use LLVMpipe as fallback driver instead of the Vesa driver or so.
LLVMpipe is a very g
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Who says you have to code in raw GObject C? Did you have a look at Vala, which is awfully similar to C#, or Genie, which is much like Python, but both of which compile through C+GObject down to machine code without a virtual machine? They're strikingly beautiful and lightweight.
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If Mesa is getting a better software rast
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Thanks for quoting the entire post to make your six-word response.
Mod AC up hes his spot on...
Re:GNOME is a study in how to not architect softwa (Score:5, Insightful)
It was useful for the poster to quote the entire post because many of us often filter out all posts by Anonymous Cowards. By filtering out the ACs, you avoid a lot of crap and frosty pisses and enthusiastic racist name-calling.
It was an insightful post by someone who didn't care to create an account, even though it's very easy to create an account and Slashdot is very good about not misusing our email addresses. By quoting the good post in full, the GP performed a service to the community.
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yes because racist name calling is just so horrible compared to other kinds, that supposedly more mature people can't help throwing adolescent fits over it.
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I don't care so much about the name calling, racist or not, as I do about the extra work I have to do with my index finger scrolling down past them.
What is a 1000 word NGAA screed vs the huge energy output of my scrolling finger?
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I would rather see a few reposts of useful information than a hundred frosty pisses, goatses and lengthy GNAA screeds.
Maybe you disagree...
Re:GNOME is a study in how to not architect softwa (Score:4, Insightful)
You've had AC's disabled for a while, eh? I only ever see a few frosty pisses or goatse's or whatever per discussion, and a lot more useless shit from people who've actually signed in.
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And see a frost piss post...
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Re:GNOME is a study in how to not architect softwa (Score:5, Informative)
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uh, yeah it is
Re:Software GPU Emulation (Score:4, Interesting)
Am I the only person who runs my desktops as often through remoting as sitting at the console?
How fast will this be running over VNC?
remote X for Gnome apps (Score:3)
I often run remote GUI apps over SSH to my Ubuntu notebook. When you say that it doesn't work well with Gnome, does it also apply to single apps designed for Gnome (or designed for Gtk?), and would K* apps work better?
In practice, I regularly use Meld to compare 2 remote files, or Geany to edit them. As far as I understand, these 2 happen to be designed for Gnome/Gtk, rather than for KDE.
Would I be better off selecting KDE apps instead, or does it make no difference if I don't actually run the whole desktop
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No, but why use VNC?
To maintain state between remote clients.
That's just streaming a video of the remote desktop through TCP/IP. Use X the way it was designed.
Can't maintain state that way unless it's special like a SunRay.
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To maintain state between remote clients.
Forgive my ignorance, but what do you mean, exactly? How does using VNC help this as opposed to using x-forwarding? I honestly don't understand.
The reason I ask is because I routinely remotely access my desktop machine (ubuntu 11.04 running stock gnome desktop) from my ten year old laptop (bootable kubuntu feisty CD, running KDE) using 'ssh -C -Y' and then calling whatever application I want to use (usually eclipse) and it works just great. If I want to remotely run
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VNC or things like NX help in that if you turn off your laptop, your session is still running on your desktop. You can literally stop in the middle of what you're doing, suspend your laptop, and whatever you were doing with your remote session still keeps on chugging.
Also, in general, VNC or NX are much much faster than the straight X protocol. Even when compressed, there is something incredibly laggy and slow about the X protocol when you're throwing up windows that are non-text. A graphics-heavy applicati
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Forgive my ignorance, but what do you mean, exactly? How does using VNC help this as opposed to using x-forwarding?
It's probably something like this: Open VNC session, start application on remote, close session. Open VNC session, the app is still there as you left it. I'm not 100% sure if that's possible to do with X11.
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using 'ssh -C -Y' and then calling whatever application I want to use (usually eclipse) and it works just great. If I want to remotely run the desktop itself I just call 'startx' instead of the application. It works fine. I'm just confused as to why VNC could possibly offer any benefit over doing it the way I described.
OK, use case: You're right in the middle of working out a class in Eclipse, when you notice you have to leave *right now* to pick up the kid at day care. The class needs to be done tonight,
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If you disconnect for whatever reason, you can still resume your session.
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So nice that you actually post links to objective measurements...oh wait.
I find it to be perfectly workable, even on an underpowered Intel GPU. The only thing slow is the build up of the Applications menu, because it re-reads the /usr/share/applications/ directory every time you open the menu. I can see why they did that, but I have rather a lot of packages installed, so I get a multisecond delay when opening the Applications view.
Otherwise I find Gnome Shell to be no slower than Gnome2, and a perfectly goo
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Why would they want to re-read the directory when they could just cache the data, then only rebuild the cache when something changes in the directory? They could even limit it to files that change.
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Why would they want to re-read the directory when they could just cache the data, then only rebuild the cache when something changes in the directory?
Probably for the same reason that gnome-zeitgeist thrashes my disk for three minutes after booting up and then they scan through 50,000 thumbnails looking for the oldest ones to delete.
Or at least, they did until I uninstalled the zeitgeist crap and pointed ~/.thumbnails to /dev/null.
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Currently there's some 450 files in /usr/share/applications. They all get read and parsed, and then their icons loaded, whenever I open the Applications view.
And multisecond is maybe 2 or 3 seconds, I haven't timed it precisely, but it is a noticeable and irritating delay. I wish they'd cache the results a little more aggressively.
Mart
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Don't worry Gnome-shell is already slow. Terribly slow. Unbelievably slow. Unusably slow. I could give a load of other adjectives, but I think you get what I mean. The target devices (netbooks and tablets) usually can't handle it, and even proper desktops struggle...
Slow? Perhaps under software emulation it might be. But if you have hardware accelerated driver then no it isn't at all. There is absolutely no issue running GNOME shell on comparatively modest hardware. I have Linux running on a 5 year old PC with an old Radeon driver and it works perfectly well.
In certain ways compositing desktops are a lot faster than their older brethren. When a window is moved over other windows there is no longer any need to send out damage events to the other window's owners becaus
"fall-back .. to be eventually depreacated" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why didn't you just install a replacement instead? Oh well, it's your time. But if you know how to install two different distros, I don't see why you can't just install another DE in a fraction of the time.
I am wondering how much of the Unity bashing is actually real.
Gnome 2 still included (Score:5, Informative)
The summary is a troll (as is typical for slashdot). Gnome 2 is still included in Fedora 17. The only difference is that if you have selected Gnome 3 for your desktop (which is default), and GPU acceleration isn't working, it will now fallback to unaccelerated Gnome 3 rather than Gnome 2. Regardless of your opinion of Gnome 3, this just makes sense; it would be much more confusing to get a completely different desktop than you were expecting just because your video drivers got borked. Not to mention it is wasteful to have to install Gnome 2 as a fallback if you want to use Gnome 3.
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So much this.
So much whining about Gnome3 and Unity. There is more than that in the repos.
I've got FVWM and KDE installed. FVWM for when I'm abusing multiple virtual machines (because really, they have their own environments anyway), and KDE for my regular desktop.
Linux is about choice. Don't like it? Install something else.
--
BMO
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Yes, choice is good for geeks, however non geeks require a sane default (or at least a very simple way of seeing the options available and choosing one)... Many of them will never use anything but the default, and if they don't like the default they won't use the system at all.
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Yes, choice is good for geeks, however non geeks...
Can just use something else if they don't like it.
It is not a company, it doesn't need to pretend to be for everybody to get more sales.
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It's a matter of trust, you shouldn't upgrade your system and find that the WM no longer functions because some jack wagon decided to include alpha code in a release.
And yes, I did end up installing something else and whenever people ask me I warn them off Ubuntu due to the unpredictability of development.
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Linux is about choice. Don't like it? Install something else.
The issue is that with the latest ubuntu release, it's very difficult to install Gnome 2 (there's no repository for it, to my knowledge ... and Gnome's not a beast you'd wish to compile from source without a lot of spare time). Interestingly, following the release of Ubuntu 11.10, linux mint reported a 40% increase in their user base -- so a lot of people did install something else. But sometimes it's frustrating having to faff with your computer when you just want it to work; and switching to a new distr
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Note that there's a Debian-based mint and an Ubuntu-based mint -- the Ubuntu flavour is the standard one (and is the current Linux Mint 11 release, based on Natty). Any Ubuntu ppa should be fully compatible with the Ubuntu Mint version.
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Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? [nytimes.com]
I made my choice when I installed Ubuntu in the first place with the hope of not having to revisit my initial choice any time soon.
From Benford to Erd(slashcode fuckup)s [radiolab.org]
Erdos carried a suitcase from one city to another, arrived at the doorstep of any living mathematician, and declared "My brain is open!" Are you advocating that I carry my home directory with me from one distribution to another and declare "My
Re:"fall-back .. to be eventually depreacated" (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, though, I can't wrap my mind around why the most clunky, disgustingly inefficient windows managers are installed BY DEFAULT!
You'd think they were trying to copy Win7 and OS X's shinies in some half-arsed attempt to gain followers...
Oh, wait...
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Seriously, though, I can't wrap my mind around why the most clunky, disgustingly inefficient windows managers are installed BY DEFAULT!
Because not everyone is you. Despite the extremely loud GNOME 3 haters (who are apparently incapable of installing a different DE), a lot of people like it. It's actually the perfect example of how to make software: Ignore the people who aren't going to like it anyway.
Re:"fall-back .. to be eventually depreacated" (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't entirely agree. One thing that I liked about Ubuntu is that I could pretty much install it for anyone who wasn't computer literate and have them safely and easily do basic user tasks. To be able to support them well, I tend to use the same settings as they are so that I can help them even when I'm not in front of a computer.
You can imagine that those kind of people are less likely to cope with huge paradigm shifts like Gnome2->Unity? The two most important of these users I have are my own mother and my mother in law. I don't foresee much problems with my mom, she's a science person (Master in Chemistry) and she'll cope. It will take her effort, but she's aware these changes require it. Mother in law though? Oh, boy, I so dread Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (I only give them LTSes)
It's not that I cannot install a different distro or install a different DE. I can, it's just that Ubuntu (10.04 LTS) did give perfectly sane defaults with a reasonable interface with good discoverability. I personally see that gone with Unity.
I have looked into Debian for an alternative, but Ubuntu does give a significant amount of polish (I'd mention the "Language Support" applet, for which I haven't found a decent alternative in Debian. I live in a multi-lingual environment, and it's pretty much the best tool I've seen in any operating system. It's not the only thing ) Linux Mint has been highly recommended on slashdot, and I'll most likely check it out sooner or later. I should also give Lubuntu a shot (LXDE, I use that on my Asus EEE 701 4G). It might be the way out of this mess. When doing a PXE installation of Ubuntu 11.10 it's given as a true option.
All in all, switching to Unity is alienating the userbase. Tech people because they don't like the dumbed down aspect of it, and non-tech people because of the familiarity (and let's face it, pretty traditional way of doing things of GNome2). Except for the light destop environments, I see none of the big ones being even remotely desirable... I know people think that GNome2 looks old, I happen to disagree. It's mature. Iron out the tiny bugs and annoyances and you'd get a rock stable useful UI. However, we can't do that in the open source world. Always, new, alway rewrite alway try out the newest language. Cut it already and realize this needs to stop.
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For normal users (office, internet, maybe a few games), Unity isn't that big of a change. You're just clicking an icon in a different location. I switched and my kids and wife never asked me a question about why it was different. I don't know your family, obviously, but I'd say give them a little credit.
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How do they do it now?
With Unity, click on dash/icon thingy, click on "more apps", expand installed and click on calculator.
Now I assume it's click on start/icon thingy, go to applications, go to tools, choose calculator.
Really that much of a difference? It is _different_, yes. You'll have to show them the first time or two, more than likely. You really give them absolutely no credit in figuring out four clicks for themselves once you've shown them once or twice?
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Ok... Simple task: run a calculator. Ah, and we're talking mouse-bound users.. No usage of keyboard allowed.
That use case is totally retarded.
Why should people with a mouse not use the keyboard? In which world do people not use their keyboard when googling something? With the WWW so deeply rooted in our lifes, 'type to get results' is more natural than ever.
Many Mac users I know do not even start their applications via Dock or Finder. They simply enter the term in Spolight.
I'm a user of Plasma Desktop and despite a handful of apps (Firefox, Kontact, Juk,...) which I launch via QuickLaunch, I don't use the mouse a
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Ok... Simple task: run a calculator. Ah, and we're talking mouse-bound users.. No usage of keyboard allowed.
That's the discoverability... Right there... Calculator even is an easy example as the Unity search gets it right when typing "Calc".
Your kids and your wife? Most likely tech natives and they have a role model right there. Try doing this crap with the 50+ non-techy people (I must specify this because I know that otherwise I'll summon all the 50+ slashdot dwellers who will say they can cope... You're not the people I talk about)
Step 1: Install Kubuntu or Xubuntu
Step 2: There is no step 2
Seriously, the whole point of having multiple DEs is that you can pick the one you want. If your users can't figure out GNOME3, don't use it!
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I feel along with the sentiment. I do not look forward to putting Unity on my parents' computer but in my opinion there are a few changes that can be made to make it more friendly. First, remove the global menu bar, unless your users come from a Mac OS X background, it's not worth the retraining. Second change the backlight always on option in ccsm to toggle so it is easy to see when an application is running. I have big hopes for this alternate application launcher: https://launchpad.net/unity-lens-bliss [launchpad.net]
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Damnit I just posted so I can't mod you up as you deserve.
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Not really, it's a sane defaults thing. If you're going to install a WM as incompetently designed as Unity,then you had damn well provide a back up. I'm not sure if Canonical has gotten around to removing the back up, but it is on the road map if they haven't already doing it.
Unity was a buggy piece of shit. Once they fix the bugs it will be a ugly piece of shit that doesn't scale well to larger monitors and doesn't allow for repositioning.
Contrary to popular opinion around here, WM are a fairly big deal, t
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If only there was some way to install a different window manager...
Yes, Canonical should really add some code to do that and push it upstream so other Debian users don't have to use Unity!
Re:"fall-back .. to be eventually depreacated" (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but XFCE is getting pretty fat, too. It is no fun in a VM or on a netbook. In fact it is using compositing now, too.
I have moved on to LXDE as lightweight system - it still uses a rather traditional window manager instead of an integrated desktop.
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He seems to complaining more about xfce's performance and memory footprint, not how much disk space it gobbles up. A lot of Gnome's disk bloat is bundled apps that don't mean anything to your system performance if you don't run them.
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I haven't tried LMDE, but the standard Linux Mint is quite nice. When I get around to it, I'll be trying LMDE, but for the time being things work, and I don't generally have too much trouble getting my work done.
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look out for linux mint 12, it's supposed to have the most sane ui since gnome2
But still, apparently, using Gnome 3 ... and still, according to the screenshots on the blog, looking as fugly and stupidly designed as ever. At least they may possibly be including MATE, although the most recent blog post didn't seem to positive about the chances.
As a user who switched to linux mint because of Ubuntu's adoption of Unity and Gnome 3, I really hope they don't adopt Gnome 3 without a Gnome 2 fallback. Gnome 3 is a terrible UI concept, poorly executed, and no amount of linux mint window dres
xubuntu and lubuntu (Score:4, Insightful)
thank goodness for xubuntu and lubuntu! kubuntu too... the linux-for-OS-refugees world still has some shining lights.
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That's something I wish somebody would deal with. I always, always, always end up with at least one Gnome app on a KDE install or 1 KDE app on a Gnome install requiring me to have a lot of libraries installed for just one app.
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So fucking what? What harm does that do? It's not like the code path is ever going to get exercised except in the cases where you need it.
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You mean aside from bloating up the system and being that much more code that I have to recompile when I'm recompiling my software packages? It also happens to be that many more lines of code where there can be a potential vulnerability hiding. Not that I think it's particularly likely, but you never know.
this would be nice (Score:3, Informative)
Re:this would be nice (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the way the Gnome3 devs are all working against each other that really sucks.
You have a half-incomplete tablet UI allied to a half-incomplete laptop UI both of which get on the tits of desktop users;
- and my feeling of 'at least they are going somewhere different and interesting' has evaporated now I see Gnome 3.2 is identical to 3,0 in every single cockup. Only one of the real UI problems has been addressed; and more ill-considered and contradictory decisions have been imposed on us.
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These are my thoughts as well. I've read a few things here and there about how 3.2 is a great improvement over 3.0, but they never mention why.
Gnome 3.2 finally has the weather applet back. At this rate, somewhere around Gnome 3.72 it will be as usable and useful as Gnome 2.
At which point they'll ditch it for Gnome 4.
This is great news! (Score:3, Interesting)
I know there's a lot of resistance to GNOME Shell, but it's clearly the future of GNOME (like it or not) and the weird non-3d degraded mode that you get with GNOME 3 + no 3d is something that's not really fit for anybody.
Personally, I really like GNOME Shell and I'm glad to see that it will be supported on older hardware. I always found the decision to completely ignore this hardware to be questionable and damaging to Shell's adoption rate (as if it wasn't going to have a hard enough time to begin with). Surely they could have provided a similar UX without the eye candy for older systems - at least now we have a workaround!
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I'm curious, because I guess I don't understand Slashdot's moderation system, why did I get moderated -1 troll? I was not intending to troll anybody.
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You are certainly right, GNOME's future is tied to Shell, and it's very much unclear whether Shell will ever reach the same userbase that GNOME 2 had at its peak. Luckily, we have choice in this space, and I'm glad to see XFCE and friends enjoy increased exposure as a result.
Of course, some of us do like Shell, so the improved hardware support is very welcome. It may be that GNOME becomes a marginalized, oddball UI in time, but I've enjoyed similarly non-mainstream software for years - I mean, I do run Linu
Just reached a decent compromise on my machine (Score:4, Insightful)
Debian Sid introduced Gnome 3 a couple of weeks ago and I had a bit of a tough time to come to terms with it, but now I have reached a good compromise by installing tint2 and the alternate menu extension (which basically brings back the switch off menu item).
I'm rather pleased with this setup and the only thing I am really missing are a couple of applets, but nothing major.
Or, as other have said, XFCE is a great alternative, especially if you NEED external outputs (which gnome-shell still miserably fails to manage properly).
It's about time... (Score:5, Informative)
It's about time Slashdot stops accepting 'blogspam' links, such as Phoronix, instead of attributing the actual source itself. Phoronix didn't solve this, a developer did.
A badly written Slash summary (and 'article') which just links twice to the same braindead Phoronix article (which itself is a several day old duplicate) is bad. Very bad.
Dredged from the bottom of Phoronix:
Mailing list post: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-November/158976.html [fedoraproject.org]
Fedora 17 feature point: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome_shell_software_rendering [fedoraproject.org]
Personally, I have little doubt that the "anonymous reader" is Michael Larabel himself.
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Yeah, it's hard to stay "anonymous" when his stilted writing style sticks out like a baboon's arse.
What a lot of whiners... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a hell of a lot of whining about GNOME 3 here. I'm a free software developer of desktop software (AbiWord). I personally like GNOME 3 and its approach to do a new take on how best to present a computer interface to users. I also maintain systems for my mother and daughter who are definitely not computer geeks. They're both impressed and comfortable with GNOME 3.
So my extremely small sample imply that GNOME 3 is a good step. For the computers geeks out there there a plenty of alternatives. Find the one that works for you.
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there was a time when the average user (not geek) could handle a windows 95 esque desktop without a problem.. this further dumbing down into desktop-lite/tablet non-functionality is not helping anyone, geek or not. it just makes everyone more dependent on the nascent multivendor closed garden takover of the internet.
Can anybody point me to a good comparison? (Score:2)
I'm still in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I fear this thing called Gnome 3 that I'm going to have to install in the LTS. Can any either write up or point me towards a good informative write-up what exactly the biggest differences are which a Gnome 2 user might find confusing or annoying?
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... And also, does the above mean that Gnome is no longer using GCC to compile, but switching to the LLVM compiler? ...
LLVM is designed to be modular. It sounds like what they're doing is probably similar to what Apple did a few years back [uiuc.edu] - include LLVM bit-code files for functions that aren't handled natively, then hand those off to libllvm to emit native code when needed.
-Ster
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Yeah. I feel exactly the same. How many people reading this discussion are quietly enjoying GNOME 3 but don't care enough about the arguments to jump into the fray?
Re:I like Gnome Shell (Score:5, Insightful)
None. Not any.
It becomes clearer every day that people hate Gnome 3, and yet even as the soft noise builds to a roar, some people think it's merely a few haters bellyaching.
Listen, people hate the *shit* out of Gnome 3. It seems obvious that what started out as an attempt to create some sort of tablet-compatible UI which is also palatable on the desktop has now become a large liability. Gnome 3 has nothing that users asked for - it has been funded and driven by corporate interests (ahem INTEL) that wish to eventually provide some competition to Android's current domination in the Linux tablet market.
People hate Gnome 3. Developers hate Gnome 3. Gnome 3 is simply one of the worst abortions of a window manager to ever appear on Linux, and the situation is not going to get any better until people start fleeing and distributions leave it in the dust.
The writing's on the wall, but just because you avoid glancing in that direction that does not mean you can expect us all to swallow your fantasy about Gnome 3's awesome suitability.
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This driver is part of Mesa. Mesa is not part of GNOME.
This story ties into GNOME, because the driver now supports all the features required of Gnome-shell at an adequate speed.
You're right that Apple does do something similar. Shader compilation uses LLVM and if the graphics card is missing features it gets run on the CPU. You're wrong that xcode has anything to do with this. Xcode uses Clang which is a c compiler. Clang uses LLVM, but clang has nothing to do with 3d graphics.
I would rather people copy eac
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No, I can just switch to another desktop. But GNOME2 was the last UI that end users could be plopped down in front of cold. KDE is too wierd. XFCE can be configured to be pretty close to GNOME2 but out of the box it isn't and it still has a lot of sharp edges. The minor desktops are all aimed at people like me.
But by day I'm the admin in a public library and we have been putting the general public on Linux based lab PCs since 1997. The early days were a but rough but for years now a random person can j
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