GNOME Workstation OS(blog.monotonous.org) |
GNOME Workstation OS(blog.monotonous.org) |
For my money, the recent moves Linux Mint has been making are the most promising ones happening in the Linux ecosystem right now: Don't fix what isn't broken, and make a distribution the just works out of the box. When the Gnome 3 goofballs eliminate yet another piece of useful functionality, do a fork. (And now they've started selling Linux Mint branded hardware, another smart move. One of the real problems with Linux these days is that you just can't buy hardware with Linux pre-installed that is equal in quality to Apple's hardware.)
Or at least that's my two cents.
Well that depends on if you include Android or not and I don't really understand the logic not to.
Who gives a damn about these "personal computers"? They are toys for obsessive nerd hobbyists. Some of us have work to do.
Who gives a damn about this "multimedia?" It's all toy sound cards for vidgames and silly fragile CD ROMS. Some of us have work to do.
Who gives a damn about the consumer internet? It's all AOL sex chat and Pez dispenser trading. Some of us have work to do.
Who gives a damn about these "social networks?" It's for sex-crazed drunken college students, child molesters, and shut-ins. Some of us have work to do.
Who gives a damn about this "Linux?" Its a neo-communist academic experiment for people too poor to license a real commercial Unix (TM) or even Windows NT. Some of us have work to do.
Android is doing ok I think. Or do you just mean linux with a gnu/unix userland?
Android is just too good to be Linux. That sort of reasoning.
I selfishly hope this leads to better and closer collaboration between Unity and Gnome developers -- and maybe a 'partnership of equals' between Red Hat and Canonical, each playing to their respective strengths, on the further development and improvement of the Free desktop.
Developer mindshare is scattered due to the radical interface change. These developers want the older interface and were left something that was not in a very usable for most power users. Naturally, they moved to desktop environments that resemble the older interface (LXDE,XFCE,GNOME2) or started new projects (MATE,Cinnamon).
I find myself in a nomansland. I am constantly changing my DE because of all this bs. They bet the farm. All I want is stable and familiar Gnome2 DE! What a serious waste of time.
Is it just me or this article outlining the most natural path for any Linux desktop? Rather then chase the general consumer, focus on your core audience who is already using your OS for the server.
Not only is it a more natural customer base, but you also have an advantage by eating your dogfood. GNOME devs would have 1st hand knowledge of what works and what doesn't for engineers and developers. And this sort of domain knowledge is gold when it comes to designing good interfaces.
I would love to see this effort happen, and might even go back to Linux if it really created something great.
Maybe once enough people are actually on Linux, non-developers with professional skill sets will volunteer their time to Open Source projects, and we won't need to necessarily use money to gain access to their skills. For now, most of them are on Windows of MacOS, and are only going to devote time to their current ecosystem, if at all.
He should probably not talk about Gnome but about Ubuntu or RedHat focusing more other stuff or to the libreoffice teams or whatever.
Also: So far i enjoy the Gnome experience very much. It may have still some bugs but all in all, in my mind, the Gnome team succeeded with Gnome 3.x and the new design/layout/workflow.
Also, this is no artificial wall, this is reality. MS isn't responsible to fix Adobe Photoshop and Gnome isn't responsible to fix Blender.
Media creation software doesn't have to be high level pro stuff. Having Gnome ship with software that is great for amateurs who want to make youtube videos, mess around with filters on digital photos, or record themselves jamming on their guitar would be a great start.
The existing software like GIMP would certainly be powerful enough for this, the main work would be in reworking it's difficult UI.
If you wanted to provide a refuge for the amateur then you are playing towards one of your weaknesses. The camera that I buy at BestBuy is not going to have instructions ons on how to use it with linux. If your not targeting teh professional you have already lost.
If instead they'd focused on the Workstation market, which currently isn't really catered to by anyone serious, they could have got them selves into a nice little niche.
But really, I just don't want changes on the desktop at all. I live in Emacs, the rest should just work.
That aside, this article seems to think that new media production is being done on Linux. My experience is that this is owned by osx. Adobe's creative suite is the lifeblood of any media development and the Linux equivalents are not as good. If you're commercially invented to create new media then you'll use the best tools for the job.
Linux has contributed to media creation in rendering farms and such, but gnome played no part in that decision.
I wish people would stop putting this line without anything backing it up. We've had this conversation recently, and it turns out that actually not everyone hates Unity [1]. Besides my comments, here's a sampling:
"Unity is the best desktop I've ever used."
"I like Unity... I rarely go into a forum and announce how much I like something."
"'it's not as bad as everyone says.' This is the camp I fall in. "
"People that are happy with their desktop environment are not particularly likely to go to some site and talk about how good it is."
"unity is what you get by default on ubuntu? if so, i really like it"
"Never used Unity but I really enjoy Gnome 3"
Point being, you can't listen to people complaining then say "oh hey, there are 50 people complaining out of millions of users, this must be pretty awful". People will always complain more than they will praise, especially for a desktop environment. You might not like it, but you can't seriously extend that out to everyone save a few. Point being, people do like Unity and Gnome 3. But the people who would rather complain about something they don't like (and aren't forced to use) tend to be loudmouths. The silent majority just don't care.
So if you're stating that nobody except a few likes Unity or Gnome 3, I'm going to have to call your bluff.
I miss Unity so badly (well Linux in general) when forced to use Windows at work. I agree that the major focus of Linux should be science, development and data analysis. That's where a lot of the users are (its why I run Linux) and focusing on that would be, if not a huge market, a very dedicated and professional one.
Projects like Blender are amazing and others mentioned by the author are really almost replacements for Adobe, i really like GIMP's scheme scripting language for example which allows more flexability than proprietary adobe plugins. So I'd personally be really exited if GNOME started going in this direction.
Imagine for a second, linux with high quality media content creation tools, there's huge holes especially in video (nothing near comparable to After Effects or Final Cut Pro - forget ffmpeg for that )
Also as for myself I do all my development on Ubuntu / Debian while switching to windows for testing out on that platform (IE for example), but I only do browser/networking stuff.
Anyway, I like where he wants to go, and would love to see GNOME head in the direction...
I guess it depends what segment of the market you're looking at: 80% of the large VFX houses in the world use Linux to do the modelling, texturing, animation, lighting, rendering, compositing, using programs like: Maya, Mari, Mudbox, SoftImage, Houdini, Katana, PRMan, Arnold, Nuke.
All those high-end apps that are used everyday to create feature films (and tv shows and adverts) work on Linux.
Which is exactly why media production should be a target for linux development?
I've been running Ubuntu 11.04 (first release with Unity) for a while as a workstation desktop, and while there are warts that I'm sure are dealt with in 11.10 and 12.04, it's mostly annoyances. Nothing that has seriously impacted my productivity.
Open source tends to work better in mature markets where there is something relatively stable to copy and where there are a lot of players who are incentivized to cooperate and adhere to standards. That's not mobile right now, and by the time mobile turns that corner Android (currently locked down on most installs in a very non Free way) will probably be the open source contender of choice.
From what very little I know about GNOME, it sounds like a great plan. I just happen to think mobile is extraordinarily important and look forward to the day I ditch the iOS platform.
Yes, you have problems with locked bootloaders and closed hardware on some phones, American carrier-phones in particular. This is bad, but no fault of Android.
That most software on Android, a Linux-distro, may be closed source may sadden a FOSS proponent, but it still doesn't mean it's not Linux.
On my Android tablet I can fire up a terminal, hook up a keyboard via USB and then hack away in a Linux userland, using either supplied binaries, or busybox, or other Linux binaries compiled for the ARM architecture. And it will all work.
For lots of tasks where in the past I would need a PC, I no longer do. Because my Linux-based, mobile platform has me covered. If I want to build my own stuff, I can actually use the normal Linux toolchain to do so. I can do all that because Android, either you appreciate it or not, is Linux. There is no debating that.
And right now Android is dominating the mobile space. I think it's fair to say that Linux, in a form you appreciate or not, has succeeded where your traditional DE based Linux-environment has not.
There's a lot of closed source software for Android and many phones are sold with locked bootloaders.But it's possible to buy those without and google don't care if you root your phone.
So unless your definition is a system 100% open source software that is of no interest to "regular users" (not even Ubuntu qualifies) then this is unrealistic unless you are Richard Stallman.
As far as I'm aware Gnome have never really tried to get in on the phone/tablet space. I'm not aware if there is even a phone that you can purchase with Gnome installed.
Personally, I'm glad I have a phone which I have no need to "sync" with any of my PCs anymore. It just feels very, very old-fashioned.
Playlists can be very useful.
iSyncr and iTunes can do that but I haven't found a seamless solution for Linux yet.
So I don't know where you're getting the "Also Linux tends to be used almost purely for the processing side" from.
System resources are not much of an issue anymore, the amount of memory most window managers require compared with other applications is fairly negligible even with "heavyweight" Window managers. Unity+Nautilus together are using ~400MB/8GB on my Ubuntu 12.04 PC.
The hardcore "lightweight" WM fans only need a way to tile their terminal and XMonad already provides that.
With Ubuntu 12.04 every digital camera I've tried has just worked. I plug it in and and offers to import all of the photos for me straight away, no need for instructions or drivers.
Getting professional software would require either persuading enough of the big names in the business like Adobe , Steinberg , Avid etc to port their stuff to the platform or it would require Gnome contributors to create full equivalents for all of these programs from scratch with their already stretched resources so very impractical.
Creating an iPhoto type front end for GIMP seems a more achievable goal.
I don't think ~400MB for a window manager on a dekstop is a big deal in 2012 and being able to compose your desktop using javascript is a breath of fresh air vs using old arcane APIs. When you have as much excess horsepower as you do in a modern PC (for most tasks) it seems wasteful not to use some of it to make your life easier.
The proliferation of hardware using PVR based video chips has been a pain though.
No denying hardware support is a pain.
So the simplest solution is not to install Linux yourself! You can buy a computer that has Linux on it already. I guess you could also get a friend to install it for you :P. The advantage with getting preinstalled Linux is that not only won't you have to figure everything out yourself, but you also will have hardware chosen explicitly for Linux.
However, I find that I'm more productive now, with Unity, than I ever was with Gnome. In no particular order, I love how Unity (1) gets out of my way (I've set it to hide); (2) maximizes my usable screen real estate; (3) allows me to use complex apps like GIMP and Inkscape without having to remember their menu structures (!); and (4) lets me to do everything (including window placement) very quickly with the keyboard.[1]
Yes, Unity is different, but IMO it's also much better. Give it a six-month try!
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[1] Here's a comprehensive list of shortcuts: http://askubuntu.com/questions/28086/what-are-unitys-keyboar...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1027949
Basically, the unity bar is crowded due to apps on other workspaces. Also, switching between windows of the same app is slower (I think I can deal with this issue though).
Performance-wise, gnome3 is snappier than unity (compiz kind of sucks).
You can make the Unity launcher (i.e., the sidebar) less crowded. Just run "Appearance" (<Super><A>, "appea", <Enter>) and change Launcher Icon Size to 32. I had to do this myself for the same reason.
You can also switch quickly between all windows of the currently focused app -- just tap <Alt><`>. (The <`> key is right above the <Tab> key on US keyboards.)
Also, note that the little triangular pointers on the launcher are different for applications running in the current workspace versus those running in other workspaces.
2) I don't want to spend $500 to find out if certified really means everything works.