Now I am comfortable to say I tried GNOME and Unity. I have used each for about a month now when I intended to use them only for a week or so. That says something about the redesigns. I liked it. But that is too simple a statement about something like GNOME, isn’t it!
You can switch between the GNOME 3.x shell and Unity easily, if you wanted to. There are too many common aspects to wage a war between them – modern compositing window managers, keyboard-oriented launchers, dashboard with shortcuts to applications, dock on the left side, panel on the top, smooth effects. Since the underlying framework is still GNOME’s you will see some more similarities in the applications. There are also some striking similarities with my OS X, especially in the way the dock handles open applications and UI controls.
The bigger difference is in the technology of the interfaces – Mutter and Compiz. Although they too normalize to similar behaviour in the end. The biggest difference is in Ubuntu’s aim of using it across all Ubuntu products – TVs, mobiles apart from desktops, laptops and netbooks. This might make Unity more modular in future than the shell. Other differences, IMHO, are minor and can be worked around. As an end user they are cousins – same age, same face, just different clothes.
I intended to use GNOME for only a week, but continued to use it because it intrigued me. I will be lying if I say that I did not like the smooth effects. They definitely have their impact. Even my family members, who are non-techie end users, enjoyed the new desktop paradigms. I tried to fit it into my workflow. However, now I am back with my Xfce and Xmonad setups. In spite of being cleaner, the new GNOME Shell and Unity paradigms do not get out of the way enough! For me, using desktop environments and window managers should not be about them at all. Xfce can do that, XMonad is great at that. GNOME Shell and Unity might get there, but today using them is still about them, maybe because they are in works. I have a similar rant about KDE 4.x version.
I will look forward to their development and how this desktop space evolves. I will definitely recommend new users to try these new desktop interfaces. This might pull in more users who have been skeptic about Linux, either as too technical to use, or too old-school. For people like me, Linux already works.
It is getting scarier! I hope good sense prevails and we don’t go through the nightmare. Vinton Cerf had said: The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. [Continue]
The Hungarian Government is asking its public administration to move to open document standards (via The H). It is also asking its schools to move to open source office suites. While it is not explicitly specified this combination hints use of ODF and OpenOffice or LibreOffice. This will provide a big push for open standards, and associated open source software in Hungary.
NASA has tightened its embrace for the open source philosophy. code.nasa.gov (via Information Week), a new Web site, showcases NASA’s projects and talks about contributions from others. NASA is one of my favourite mentions as a big open source user whenever people bring up the less-secure FUD for open source projects. I point them to various articles or blog posts which mention this. This makes it a lot easier.
Django has a nice way of publishing content across sites. Using the sites framework one can publish the content on multiple sites and retrieve it for specific sites. There is a configuration parameter – SITE_ID – using which you can specify which the site for which content is to be retrieved. Though not widely discussed, as my friend realized, it can make your content disappear. I got a frantic call from an acquaintance about Django help. [Continue]
The Indian Government wants to manually pre-screen content that goes on sites like Twitter and Facebook. This does not seem like a well thought initiative. Not only is the volume of such content impossible to be monitored manually, the Government fails to understand that these sites are usually the pointers to other sites where the actual content is stored. So, virtually our people will have to go through the whole of Internet to carry out this censorship. And on the talk of censorship this might lead to biggest dilution of freedom of speech in our country. [Continue]
Looks like Adobe is all set to become a HTML5 company. Following their decision to stop development on mobile flash, Adobe has decided to donate Flex SDK to the Apache Software Foundation. And it is not only Flex, Adobe seems to be lightening up of a lot of technologies. However, this is not new, Adobe has handed over technologies to Apache before. It is quotes like this that indicates that Adobe is unmarshalling its technologies for more transparent ones: Does Adobe recommend we use Flex or HTML5 for our enterprise application development? [Continue]
It is great to hear that the Tamil Nadu state’s IT department is going to use BOSS. It is great to hear about Government organizations adopting open source. And it is a double joy to hear that Indian Government organizations are adopting Indianized Linux.
This is a novel initiative – cross-promoting open source and gaming. The Free Game Alliance is a collection of games created to sponsor and bring to everyone the concept of Open Source and to have the participating projects support each other. Hundreds of volunteers, enthusiast about game development, are working in their spare time to learn about game development, to let their imagination run free, and to develop games as they always wanted to. Many of them do not have enough visibility or enough support to really become finished products and that’s something FGA wants to improve! This can become a common joint for gamers and programmers. [Continue]
We lose yet another legend. Dennis Ritchie has passed away. The best statement that I remember about the C language is from his book: … C is not a big language … This has taught me a lot more than programming. His work – on Unix OS, or this book or the C language itself – stands for creating concise yet powerful solutions. RIP Dennis Ritchie.
