On 04/08/2011 09:34 AM, Michael M. Moore wrote: > On Thu, 2011-04-07 at 23:39 -0700, Nathan W wrote: >> > >> > has anyone else tried it out yet? any impressions to share? > Have not tried it yet, but thanks for sharing your impressions. I'm > probably in a space that could be best described as "curious, but not > anxious" to try this out. For the time being, I'm using Ubuntu Maverick > (mostly because I failed to get either Arch or Debian installed or > working correctly on this laptop), and I'm not planning on upgrading to > Natty when it is released. I'll probably wait a few months, for kinks > to be ironed out. Natty won't be using Gnome 3 by default anyway, it'll > be using the similar-but-different "Unity," and I'm also curious (but > not anxious) to see how those two approaches to the desktop compare and > contrast. > > Fun but confusing times in *nix-o-sphere, all of which probably means > another year of this not being the fabled "year of Linux on the > desktop." > > Michael i've been following the Gnome3/Gnome Shell and Ubuntu Unity development for > a year now, and using Ubuntu Netbook Remix lightly for a few months on a lovely little System76 Starling 10" screen netbook. UNR's shell seems roughly like a step between the traditional Gnome desktop and Gnome Shell / Unity. So, from my sitting on the sidelines, i can extrapolate a bit from my experience with UNR.
UNR is fine on a small (typical tablet size, but larger than smartphone) screen, and would probably function well on a touchscreen. However, it definitely is a UI for a content-browsing, communication, and info-consumption device, with a tiny bit of casual content-creation capability. As a developer, it's NOT a suitable UI for the kinds of programming i do, for writing long documents, or for general-purpose computing. It's heavily dependent in a pointing device, you can't use it fully from the keyboard. Smartphone UIs such as those offered by iOS and Android are great at what they do. Tablets that use those OSen but lack phone capability are, to me (as some industry article mentioned this week), little better than portable TVs/media-consumption toys. It seems like Gnome Shell and Unity are trying to bridge both worlds - traditional GUI for large/multiple displays, and pointer- & gesture-dependent/small-form-factor displays. The early reviews of both Gnome Shell and Unity are pretty well split between love and hate. As someone who's lived almost daily since 1984 with the well-known desktop metaphor and WIMP (windows/icons/menus/pointer) interaction model, as well as with the *ix command line, i'd welcome a completely new interaction model for my meat-and-potatoes working environment if it made organizing information and workflow easier and more intuitive. ________________________________________ Joe Shisei Niski Portland, Oregon, USA 至誠 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
