So ok, here’s a question for the Linux fans.

Seems that Ubuntu are depreciating Gnome in favour of Unity from 11.04 onwards (with the dev path ultimately dropping Gnome entirely). This is something of a contentious move.

I was wondering what the STW jury thought of this?

(I have no opinion as I’ve not seen Unity first hand outside of screenshots yet).

Fewer competing WMs has to be a good thing.

I concur.

Might be good, I’m using the 11.04 beta and like it a lot. Let’s see what the future brings for us.

gnome is a bit patchy in my experience, hopefully Unity is better, although i have never tried it.

Never used Unity, but very open to moving towards the Unity / Gnome 3 desktop style… after all, if I don’t get on with them somebody is bound to fork Gnome 2 or there’s always KDE!

I would rather stick with Gnome 3 – Unity seems to be re-inventing the wheel…

As an aside my boot time (after POST complete to login screen) is now just over 3 seconds… SSD’s make a superb difference!

Early doors but I’ve had unity on my home PC and found it nothing but a buggy mess. I suspect they’ll improve it before dropping gnome though!

I only use long term supported releases, so am currently on 10.04LTS which is Gnome as standard. When it gets close to the time for release of the next LTS, I’ll bosh the beta onto an old machine and see how I get on with Unity. If I don’t like it I’ll just install whatever desktop/GUI I fancy onto the next LTS; that after all is one of the reasons for running linux, you can do whatever you want to it. Or I’ll install Debian/Mandriva etc.

I’m sure come the first stable release with Unity, there’ll be plenty of guides for the less confident to revert to Gnome/KDE etc. if they suffer an allergic reaction.

So I’ve a few years until I need to think about this, as 10.04 is supported for a long time yet.

Fewer competing WMs has to be a good thing

Sadly Unity + Gnome3 + Gnome2(forked or otherwise) + KDE + XFCE + the others, is not fewer.

Glad to see someone stimulating some innovation though.

I won’t judge any of them until I’ve tried them all for 1-2 weeks each, and I ignore all rants by people that haven’t tried them. Waiting for Natty release, then I’ll force myself to do a week each of Unity, Gnome3, XFCE and KDE. Still more than happy with Gnome2 though, and will defect to XFCE if I don’t like Gnome3/Unity and Gnome2 gets thrown on the scrapheap.

What is shipped doesn’t matter at all imho (except to those that don’t realise you can have any/all of the desktops with Ubuntu) you just need to install the one(s) you want.

will there be a gubuntu, I’ve only seen screenies but I am not happy based on them.

Gnome is the best name though…