My most recent post outlined a few of the reasons why I was breaking away from Ubuntu. I’ve started using Mint, but I’m not sure how long its going to last.
Linux Mint provided me with the perfect experience out of the box. It looks great. It’s pretty much all of the wonders of the previous versions of Ubuntu without all of the added extras plus a few bonuses. I’m scared to update to the next release, though. The next release includes GNOME 3 and all of the reasons why I switched from Ubuntu in the first place.
The new version of Mint also includes MATE, but from my brief experience with it on Ubuntu it is a degraded GNOME 2 experience. It is a fork from a previous version of GNOME 2 before it included GNOME Shell. It doesn’t include all of the features that were present in GNOME 2. It was also pretty buggy when I used it. Overall, it didn’t feel like a stable or well crafted piece of software just yet. I may give it another shot.
I read through the Gentoo installation manual and it includes some pretty cool stuff. I’m thinking about learning more about how a Linux system works so that my choices of distributions will greatly increase. I’m sure that I could handle more than just Ubuntu and Linux Mint now but if I were to really learn how things were working I could have a lot more control over what software is being ran. I’m not sure if I have the time to get into this stuff, though, so I’m not doing anything big yet.
Some of the tighns to consider are:* If you combine all of the Linux desktops (i.e. non-servers) running non-Ubuntu Gnome, they still do not come anywhere near the number of Ubuntu desktops that are out there.* While this is the case, Ubuntu is marketed heavily for non-IT people. Meaning the percentage of people sending patches back is less than for other Linux distributions.* While this is the case, Ubuntu tools like apport make it so that even non-technical users will be at least reporting at least some bugs such as program crashes. Apport is turned off by default in stable releases though. Even during betas, bug reports are private until bug triagers make them public. Then there’s the question if they ever make it coherently upstream. And whether those developers working on the latest commit will bother to check if this bug from a release several months back is still around.* An important point – Canonical does not have the manpower to fork Gnome. Ubuntu users have exposed many bugs in Gnome, and they have been fixed upstream. What happens if Ubuntu starts moving further and further away from Gnome? Ubuntu just barely manages (and often does not manage) to get useful, coherent, reproducible bug reports upstream to Gnome, never mind having the capability to fix these tighns in-house. It does not have the capability, and I’m skeptical it ever will. Natty Narwhal has a handful of Unity components which Canonical has changed, and many more Gnome and freedesktop applications there as well, many of which are broken by the Unity changes. Who is going to fix these bugs which have appeared in the Gnome/fd.o applications Ubuntu still uses which broke due to changes in Unity? As they are piling up on Launchpad, and as Ubuntu 11.04 is only six weeks from release, I have to say that 11.04 will be shipping with them, and the more Unity diverges from Gnome, the worse it will get. I should note it is not always obvious right off the bat that the bug was caused by Unity either, so a lot of these Unity-caused bugs in Launchpad are not marked as such. I myself have massaged bugs and written patches for Ubuntu when it helped fd.o, Gnome and Ubuntu. I will continue to do so as well. But I am not going to do so for fork-related tighns, or problems caused by the fork. Who is going to fix these bugs I wonder? Canonical does not have the manpower to do this, and the community is not going to freely contribute time helping create a fork where none is needed.To quote Steve Ballmer, “Developers, developers, developers, developers”. You are right that Shuttleworth can snap his fingers, and 80% of the users of a Gnome module will disappear, and start using a Unity module. But the problem is, then Shuttleworth has to support that module. The users shift, but the developers do not. Many of them are working for Intel, Red Hat, Novell etc. Even ones like me who are independent, speaking for myself, I will still contribute to Ubuntu, but not on forked stuff or problems caused in other applications by the fork. This is something to consider.Anyone who is skeptical of what I am saying should read through some of these bug reports for nux, which is breaking compiz all over the placeAnd nux is what they are devoting manpower to. The real problem is Gnome and fd.o applications which are broken due to all of these Unity changes.