[ale] DRAT! - Ubuntu 11.04 end of life

[mike at trausch.us]

On 11/03/2012 10:26 AM, Don Kramer wrote:
> A few quick comments:
>
> 1) If you want Ubuntu 12.04 with MATE: here's a distro that does that as
> the default install:
> http://www.snowlinux.de/482-snowlinux-2-qcreamq-download

(At least I) have left Ubuntu pretty much for good.  I was thinking 
about it before Unity, and Unity sealed the deal.  I've been getting the 
feeling more and more that they don't really care about the users, 
instead caring more about the "cool" "shiny" things that they can try to 
do.  To each their own, of course.

> 2) A lot of people behind Gnome 3?  Don't count on it:
> http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-abyss/

One blog post hardly qualifies; looking at git.gnome.org, it seems that 
most of the things that are stagnant are the bindings, and that's 
probably due to the fact that starting around the time of GTK+ 3 and its 
corresponding GLib release, bindings are generated through 
GObject-Introspection.  Vala has helped a lot with progression there.

Most everything else seems to be pretty active still.  I don't have the 
time right now to see who's doing what with them, but the fact that 
they're still active seems to speak well for the project.  Keeping in 
mind that GNOME is way more than just GTK+, GLib, and GNOME Shell, and 
most of GNOME is common among the forks, at least insofar as I can tell, 
I don't see it dying anytime soon.  As long as the forks contribute back 
for their duration, it's all good.

Maybe the people who lead the project could be convinced that having 
multiple frontends for the system isn't a bad thing.  I personally would 
be resistant to such a notion, since it'd spread resources out more than 
they already are, and (at least) I am relatively happy with GNOME 3's 
interface.  I use a lot of plugins, but it's not a big thing to me.  I 
like it a lot.

> 3) How long will these forks last? Well, the KDE 3.x fork Trinity is
> still being updated:
> http://www.trinitydesktop.org/

That's all fine and good, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the 
people running/maintaining forks of GNOME.

> My take on it is the Linux desktop is so fragmented as the point, go
> with what you want.  Heck, even at Google, there's an article from the
> last few months (can't find it at the moment), Googlers using Gobuntu I
> think are free to use whatever DE they want.

I think it's like ice ages: we'll eventually see a period of relative 
defragmentation appear once again.  Things are shaken up all over the 
place right now, and I think that most people are simply change-averse 
and therefore aren't willing to go with the flow.  Again, to each their own.

To those that don't like GNOME Shell out of the box, I say: check out 
extensions.gnome.org; there are a lot of useful extensions there that 
modify the behavior of the shell nicely.  If you don't find what you 
want there, you can learn JavaScript and create your own extension 
rather rapidly.  If you don't want to learn JavaScript, I'm pretty sure 
that it's possible to develop extensions in other languages, but 
JavaScript in this case would likely be the preferred thing, as they 
support that pretty much out of the box.

	--- Mike

-- 
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
                                    --- Carveth Read, “Logic”