Enough is enough

July 24, 2011 gnome, ubuntu 14 Comments

I waited several month for Ubuntu 11.04 to stabilize on my good old Power G5. No way in hell. Even X does not start properly. Had to spend several months in MacOS :(( So… considering that I have no interest whatsoever in Unity and other heavily patched gnome components of Ubuntu …  It is Debian now, testing + gnome 3 from experimental. Well, gnome 3 starts in fallback mode only so far – but at least that’s better than absolutely non-working X.

On my laptop, virtualbox for some reason went to disagreement with Ubuntu (inside) as well, so now I have FC15 inside VB, with nearly vanilla gnome3 (working properly with gnome-shell!).

I was some kind of fan of Ubuntu. I am leaving that camp for now. Political reasons, personal reasons, technical reasons… Perhaps, for me 10.10 was the finest hour of Canonical. So long.

stracciatella

September 13, 2010 gnome, ubuntu 8 Comments

Do you speak Italian? I do not. Anyway, stracciatella is “vanilla-flavoured ice-cream with chocolate chips”. Ubuntu introduced that idea of nearly-vanilla GNOME quite a while ago (http://www.piware.de/2009/02/the-stracciatella-gnome-session/) but only today I tried a taste of it, with 10.10. Brrrr. Nonsense. Hardly usable (try to finish the session, for example:). A bit too much of “chocolate chips”. If you look at the Canonical discussions (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Jaunty/StracciatellaSession), there is one essential phrase: “This works on component granularity, not on the level of patches.” Very sensible remark, technically – and honest statement, too. But at the same time, it makes the whole idea more and more useless, as time goes by – because the size of patches applied to standard components grows with every release of Ubuntu. The result is something half-baked that I would not recommend to consume without 0.5 of vodka (I hope the original stracciatella is not that bad).

Whatever tensions are between Ubuntu and GNOME – I do not think it is fair from Canonical to make that kind of bad PR (feels more like FUD) by introducing “NEARLY vanilla” Gnome desktop.

PS I filed a bug in relation to g-s-d, closing it could add a bit more vanilla.

Testing 10.10

September 6, 2010 ubuntu 1 Comment

While considering various options, upgraded on G5 from 10.04 to 10.10. The upgrade was smooth – except that new kernel turns CPU fans on (oh, what a sound!) and then after couple of minutes the system halts (the hardware considers itself overheated). Beta quality multiplied by “informally” supported Power architecture… Still, thanks to Canonical for fixing the annoying issue with lvms (I encountered while upgrading to 10.04).

Keyboard indicator in Ubuntu 10.10: Disclaimer

August 20, 2010 g-s-d, gnome, libgnomekbd, ubuntu 32 Comments

TWIMC. The keyboard indicator to be shipped with Ubuntu 10.10 has little to do with the standard gnome keyboard layout indicator. Canonical moved the thing to libappindicator library which was not officially adopted by GNOME.

So, there are some important consequences:

  • If you are end-user running ubuntu 10.10 and you have complains about gnome keyboard indicator, you’re not really welcome to bugzilla.gnome.org. First, you should file your problem at Launchpad. If the Ubuntu team finds the problem down the stack, they sure will escalate it.
  • A lot of Ubuntu users (including myself) were happy to utilize non-documented but working support for flags in GNOME. In Ubuntu’s implementation that feature is not supported, AFAIK. You’re welcome to complain in Launchpad.
  • Single-click layout switching does not work any more (I was told). You’re welcome to complain in Launchpad

As a GNOME developer, I am very concerned about the fact that Ubuntu is starting to create its own version of GNOME. All distrovendors have patches, but Canonical seems to be gone a bit too far, on my taste.

As an end-user, I am quite irritated. I am thinking about switching back to Debian or Fedora (considering the fact that Ubuntu’s support for PowerPC is not great anyway).

I would appreciate if someone provides explanation on how to get original gnome keyboard indicator in Ubuntu 10.10. I did not install that version yet – but people are asking.