Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
On Wed, 28 May 2014, ttoine wrote: I do most of my multimedia production with Unity desktop and it is fine... I don't want to change anymore to another desktop, and I would be for just letting people choose what they want. You are destined to be disapointed :) I am sure Ubuntu will find another UI to change to not long after the kinks are worked out of this one. Things are always changing. All kidding aside though, What changes (if any) have you made to the default unity install? I know I could do whatever work I do from stock Unity, but can not help but think adding the applications I use most to the sidepanel/dock would make things much easier. What method do you use for starting apps? Do you use more than one workspace? Do you use dual monitors? Do the applications you use migrate to a favourites group that is easy to access? After all, Ubuntu has Unity per default, why not use Unity for Ubuntu Studio ? Less time on DE customisation, and more time on building good tuning tools, be sure that application are working well, etc. If we were setting up unity for studio what changes would you make to the stock Unity? (aside from eye candy) I get the feeling that adding all the MM apps to the dock would be way too much. Would adding dropdown menus for collections of apps be worthwhile? (I think this is possible as things are just with settings) In the end, our choice of xfce for a DE has proven popular. It has less emotional love/hate kinds of baggage and is more open for those who's freedom relies on not letting info into the wild. It allows useful work to be done on lower end/older HW than other DEs too. Yet it has all the features of an up to date DE and is quite stable. lxde as it sits is not going to be maintained much longer and that maintenance will not be as good as it might be if development was to continue. However, things are headed to LXQt which may be a great DE when it is done. I would like to have some extras that would make unity work better though. Gnome session is another animal though. My experience with it has been about the same as TWM... open a terminal and run things from there. I like a lot of things about GS, but the application access is just not there for me. It's auto workspace setup is something I would like to see more of for example. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
I do most of my multimedia production with Unity desktop and it is fine... I don't want to change anymore to another desktop, and I would be for just letting people choose what they want. After all, Ubuntu has Unity per default, why not use Unity for Ubuntu Studio ? Less time on DE customisation, and more time on building good tuning tools, be sure that application are working well, etc. Antoine Antoine THOMAS Tél: 0663137906 2014-05-28 7:32 GMT+02:00 Kaj Ailomaa zeque...@mousike.me: Personally, having used Gnome3 ever since it was released, I have no use whatsoever for a traditional DE. The main upsides with Gnome3 for me are two things: 1.speed 2.simplicity. Also, the menu is not central for Ubuntu Studio. It's only needed for DEs that have menus, as those menus otherwise get cluttered. Our job is to make multimedia production work on Ubuntu, generally - on all its flavors. And, really, there aren't that many things we need to worry about when it comes to the DE for that to happen. The custom menu is nice, again for the DEs that have menus. But, what we still are missing is gui tools for tuning the system appropriately. -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
On Wed, 2014-05-28 at 10:42 +0200, ttoine wrote: After all, Ubuntu has Unity per default, why not use Unity for Ubuntu Studio ? There are several reasons why experienced computer users likely don't use Unity. One of the famous examples is this one: On 7 December 2012, Richard Stallman said that Ubuntu contains spyware and should not be used by free software supporters. Jono Bacon rebuked him; he said that Ubuntu responded and implemented many of the requirements the community found important.[77][78][79] None of Ubuntu's official derivatives (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc.) include the feature or any variation of it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_%28user_interface%29#Privacy_controversy -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
I'm simply *needing* a distro that i don't have to install over again every two months, having to back-up, re-install most of my work-flow apps, choose a different OS to experiment with to *develop or create*. ✡ . . : : הליוס שמש : : . . Helios Reinaldo Martínez Domínguez +34 657 633 848 helios.vze.com reverbnationhttp://www.reverbnation.com/heliosexe hardwarelibre http://hardwarelibre.vze.com facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/heliusv manifiesto http://manifesto.2freedom.com icdie http://icdie.vze.com 2014-05-28 11:54 GMT+02:00 Ralf Mardorf ralf.mard...@alice-dsl.net: On Wed, 2014-05-28 at 10:42 +0200, ttoine wrote: After all, Ubuntu has Unity per default, why not use Unity for Ubuntu Studio ? There are several reasons why experienced computer users likely don't use Unity. One of the famous examples is this one: On 7 December 2012, Richard Stallman said that Ubuntu contains spyware and should not be used by free software supporters. Jono Bacon rebuked him; he said that Ubuntu responded and implemented many of the requirements the community found important.[77][78][79] None of Ubuntu's official derivatives (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc.) include the feature or any variation of it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_%28user_interface%29#Privacy_controversy -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 10:42 AM, ttoine tto...@ttoine.net wrote: I do most of my multimedia production with Unity desktop and it is fine... I don't want to change anymore to another desktop, and I would be for just letting people choose what they want. After all, Ubuntu has Unity per default, why not use Unity for Ubuntu Studio ? Less time on DE customisation, and more time on building good tuning tools, be sure that application are working well, etc. For me that wouldn't work since my computers wouldn't have enough power left to handle the audio and video for me. I like to keep everything as low as possible to let the computer put in everything on the applications I'm using. That's just me and newer hardware might not have any issue with Unity or other heavier DE. For my own work I would have to stick with something like Xfce anyway. As Ubuntu Studio is its own distribution I see no harm in it having its own DE. Not that that would matter if/when it's DE agnostic. 2014-05-28 7:32 GMT+02:00 Kaj Ailomaa zeque...@mousike.me: Personally, having used Gnome3 ever since it was released, I have no use whatsoever for a traditional DE. The main upsides with Gnome3 for me are two things: 1.speed 2.simplicity. Also, the menu is not central for Ubuntu Studio. It's only needed for DEs that have menus, as those menus otherwise get cluttered. Our job is to make multimedia production work on Ubuntu, generally - on all its flavors. And, really, there aren't that many things we need to worry about when it comes to the DE for that to happen. The custom menu is nice, again for the DEs that have menus. But, what we still are missing is gui tools for tuning the system appropriately. There is a factor about support to the community, I think. If everyone has different DE and menus it's a bit harder to help IMHO. If the goal is to support multimedia production on all Ubuntu flavors then is there really a need for a Ubuntu Studio distribution? /Jimmy -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Helios Martinez Dominguez helios.martinez.doming...@gmail.com wrote: I'm simply *needing* a distro that i don't have to install over again every two months, having to back-up, re-install most of my work-flow apps, choose a different OS to experiment with to *develop or create*. I don't really see your point here. Noone is forcing you to upgrade every 2 or 6 months? You can stick with LTS releases only and even that is not necessary. /Jimmy -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
The new DE's are all more popular than the old ones with folks who did NOT start using computers on desktops. That means both elders using them for the first time, and younger folks whose introduction to computing was phones or tablets. When what the Windows team called NewShell was under development prior to the release of Windows 95, the Internet was not available to the general public, and people most often used computers in the office for productivity tasks. As such, it was designed for that sort of use, and lowered the bar for what it took to be computer literate. It was in my opinion in improvement on what Apple had essentially fished out of the dumpster at Xerox because computers of 1980 could not be made powerful enough to use it at reasonable cost. For someone who had used phones or tablets until now, the Win95 interface, and especially one with multple workspaces is a stranger. In an office one would be taught to use it, but in the home that means rejection. For those of us who grew up on it, DE's inspired by phones or tablets break the workflow and cannot match it. I do not know if the maximum productivity index for Unity or Shell would equal a traditional DE when comparing skilled users of each for things like speed to switch apps, to move files from one program to another, to find and open a randomly chosen application, etc. I do know that someone who mostly uses one DE becomes trained to it and slows down in any other. Therefore, we have user requirements for multiple DE's. The best way to support that is probably US workflow metas that are desktop agnostic by avoiding DE specific requirements entirely. For now,if the applications target X they can use xwayland or xmir on DE's using those. That part of the issue is too big for any one distro to even touch. Only games and display intensive applications will suffer from the resulting framerate hit, and content creation like in Blender uses openGL directly. In my experience the bottleneck in GPU usage when rendering something is the CPU-GPU memory transfers, not the total GPU power. I've seen this in both the development version of kdenlive that supports Movit and in Blender. Oh and you are so right about Nautilus. Once the standard to which all other file managers were compared, it is now the most radical new style file manager out there. Caja is a fork of GNOME 2 nautilus, Nemo is a fork of early GNOME 3 nautilus before the UI changes. Unfortunately Nemo uses a transparancy patch that lightens the cinnamon desktop but makes it incompatable with seemingly any other window manager except gnome-shell. The patch can be reverted at compile time, there is a hacked version of Nemo aimed at Unity in which this is done. On 5/28/2014 at 12:35 AM, Len Ovens l...@ovenwerks.net wrote: On Tue, 27 May 2014, lukefro...@hushmail.com wrote: I have found that for video editing and news audio use nothing seems to beat the basic Win95 taskbar concept extended by multiple workspaces. GNOME2, MATE, Cinnamon LXDE, XFCE, and even IceWM all support this concept and thus are essentially used the same way once set up. I would tend to agree. It does work best for me because I am used to it. However, someone who wants to install Studio on Unity, wants to do that because they like the way unity looks and feels. If I make unity work like win95, I have taken their reason for choosing Unity away from them. People who like the newer DE style... or just want to be up to date (for good or ill) need to have something that works for them in the new workstyle. For us, the US dev team, That means thinking from a point of view that may feel just wrong. But a lot of new people are using computers and more people are trying out Linux too. There are boxes sold with Unity in them and it may be what someone has learned on and the win95 menu may just be awkward to them. To be honest, our whole customization of the menu is because the way it was made audio/video work a nightmare with all the applications in one big lump it was as bad as the win8 all the apps on the desktop. So the win95 menu is not perfect either though we have made it a lot better than it was. Differences between Thunar and old style Nautilus are behind a lot of that. Thunar is closer to old nautilus than what they have now. Software is not static. I don't know if that is good or bad... sometimes I wish there was just bug fixes and not UI changes :) -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
What is a DE? On Wednesday, May 28, 2014 10:43 AM, lukefro...@hushmail.com lukefro...@hushmail.com wrote: The new DE's are all more popular than the old ones with folks who did NOT start using computers on desktops. That means both elders using them for the first time, and younger folks whose introduction to computing was phones or tablets. When what the Windows team called NewShell was under development prior to the release of Windows 95, the Internet was not available to the general public, and people most often used computers in the office for productivity tasks. As such, it was designed for that sort of use, and lowered the bar for what it took to be computer literate. It was in my opinion in improvement on what Apple had essentially fished out of the dumpster at Xerox because computers of 1980 could not be made powerful enough to use it at reasonable cost. For someone who had used phones or tablets until now, the Win95 interface, and especially one with multple workspaces is a stranger. In an office one would be taught to use it, but in the home that means rejection. For those of us who grew up on it, DE's inspired by phones or tablets break the workflow and cannot match it. I do not know if the maximum productivity index for Unity or Shell would equal a traditional DE when comparing skilled users of each for things like speed to switch apps, to move files from one program to another, to find and open a randomly chosen application, etc. I do know that someone who mostly uses one DE becomes trained to it and slows down in any other. Therefore, we have user requirements for multiple DE's. The best way to support that is probably US workflow metas that are desktop agnostic by avoiding DE specific requirements entirely. For now,if the applications target X they can use xwayland or xmir on DE's using those. That part of the issue is too big for any one distro to even touch. Only games and display intensive applications will suffer from the resulting framerate hit, and content creation like in Blender uses openGL directly. In my experience the bottleneck in GPU usage when rendering something is the CPU-GPU memory transfers, not the total GPU power. I've seen this in both the development version of kdenlive that supports Movit and in Blender. Oh and you are so right about Nautilus. Once the standard to which all other file managers were compared, it is now the most radical new style file manager out there. Caja is a fork of GNOME 2 nautilus, Nemo is a fork of early GNOME 3 nautilus before the UI changes. Unfortunately Nemo uses a transparancy patch that lightens the cinnamon desktop but makes it incompatable with seemingly any other window manager except gnome-shell. The patch can be reverted at compile time, there is a hacked version of Nemo aimed at Unity in which this is done. On 5/28/2014 at 12:35 AM, Len Ovens l...@ovenwerks.net wrote: On Tue, 27 May 2014, lukefro...@hushmail.com wrote: I have found that for video editing and news audio use nothing seems to beat the basic Win95 taskbar concept extended by multiple workspaces. GNOME2, MATE, Cinnamon LXDE, XFCE, and even IceWM all support this concept and thus are essentially used the same way once set up. I would tend to agree. It does work best for me because I am used to it. However, someone who wants to install Studio on Unity, wants to do that because they like the way unity looks and feels. If I make unity work like win95, I have taken their reason for choosing Unity away from them. People who like the newer DE style... or just want to be up to date (for good or ill) need to have something that works for them in the new workstyle. For us, the US dev team, That means thinking from a point of view that may feel just wrong. But a lot of new people are using computers and more people are trying out Linux too. There are boxes sold with Unity in them and it may be what someone has learned on and the win95 menu may just be awkward to them. To be honest, our whole customization of the menu is because the way it was made audio/video work a nightmare with all the applications in one big lump it was as bad as the win8 all the apps on the desktop. So the win95 menu is not perfect either though we have made it a lot better than it was. Differences between Thunar and old style Nautilus are behind a lot of that. Thunar is closer to old nautilus than what they have now. Software is not static. I don't know if that is good or bad... sometimes I wish there was just bug fixes and not UI changes :) -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel-- ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
On Wed, 2014-05-28 at 13:37 -0700, leo wrote: What is a DE? You're aware that this is the development mailing list ;)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager Some of us using X with GUIs only run a WM. -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
On Wed, 28 May 2014, ttoine wrote: I do most of my multimedia production with Unity desktop and it is fine... I don't want to change anymore to another desktop, and I would be for just letting people choose what they want. After all, Ubuntu has Unity per default, why not use Unity for Ubuntu Studio ? Less time on DE customisation, and more time on building good tuning tools, be sure that application are working well, etc. My post was not intended to start a lets change the DE talk. I personally would not use unity for audio production without modification/tweaking. UbuntuStudio (and Ubuntu/linux in general) already gives us enough support headaches with getting Jackdbus to work for people even when it works fine. A person sees a daw (Ardour for example) and starts it... jackd gets started by that application and it is not stopped by that application. Now we have pulse-jack not able to work and have to teach the person to kill -9 the process from a terminal... that is just plain bad. It gets worse with Unity... hit the lens and type jack or control or what someone looking to start jack is going to type... worse type audio. None of the jack untilities shows up on the first page of applications. I have to go down three pages to find qjackctl and the only reason I would do so is because I _know_ I have to have it. Gnome 3 is worse, searching for jack, qjack, control, audio, etc. Tells me no items found. Even typing qjackctl (no user would know to do that) gives no results. The only way I can find it is to either start a terminal (so much for GUI) or to select show applications... and search by hand through the whole shot because if I start typing qj already all the app have been filtered out. Typing qjackctl does not work either. Ubuntu Gnome does have a classic session with a normal menu, but it is broken and non-standard having only one level of submenu which combines all the audio applications into a big mish-mash of unsorted applications... the very thing we worked to fix. It does not even in-line submenus as some menus do. It is made for the modern desktop with 10 to 20 applications spread over the normal range of app types first envisioned in the late 90s. I think the new side app dock (standard unix/linux way of starting apps before win95 came BTW) could be a very good way of doing things if at least a part of it could be switched in/out depending on the task at hand. It would also be very nice if all of these docks uses the same method of configuration. A standard is needed. I would envision the top icon on unity/G-shell would drop down a list of work flows and when a workflow was selected, the dock would show the applications as relevant to that work flow. new workflows would be downloadable. Perhaps having jackdbus start with the session would make this simpler... The idea of having to start (another) sound server before doing audio work is foreign to most people, even those who have used Linux for years. Having jackd be a script that runs jack_control could work too. In any case audio production is not straight forward at all, and even worse with the new DEs. Those who know the binary name of all the appliactions they use can probably alt F2 their way through any DE... in which case they may as well use TWM or openbox directly. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
On Wed, 28 May 2014, leo wrote: What is a DE? Desktop Environment. Everything that makes up a session, starts with a window manager which positions and decorates new windows. Then add dual monitor support, workspaces, a taskbar, a systray, a backdrop/background, a menu, sound server, clock all those things that are not a part of the application you are running that make the desktop nice to use. As Ralf has said, some people have only the window manager as their desktop environment. The original DE was a window manager with an open terminal. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
[ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
And some personal feelings as well. In the past I have tried lubuntu, xubuntu and KDE as they relate to use with the studio metas. I tried unity and gnome shell, but was not able to evaluate them well as they seemed to require more than my system had to offer. They seemed exclusive to those who could afford new and fast HW. Even my new laptop found it could not keep up with the computational requirements. In my mind this continued to make xfce the DE to use. I have used Linux for about 20 years now and started with slackware back when the default boot was text only and X was a play thing that needed more memory than most people could afford (I can get a whole system for what 16MB of Ram cost then). The WM at the time was TWM and then FVWM. KDE was the first modern style DE with a menu that did not have to be crafted by hand (or as was more aften the case, came with anything you might load so that the menu looked full, but many selections didn't do anything) but rather updated itself as SW was added. Effects became common and then gnome came along. There was a point that KDE started to use more cpu than I had and getting to artsy and effecty for me and so I started using gnome. I had a tape based studio with an Atari that I did sequencing on... the PCs didn't have anything as good or stable. I moved to AudioSlack when it came out with the hope I could record audio, but the SW wasn't really there yet and sub GB drives were still normal too. I tried other audio distros too. but found nothing better at the time. Somewhere in the early 2000s (2004 maybe?) I bought what was one of the better MB/RAM/Audio cards. and not too long after installed some different audio distros to try again... with some success. I don't know when I first started using UbuntuStudio maybe 2008-2010ish after a move to another city. I had done very little with my computer for a few years and liked the newer stuff happening in audio. Anyway, I like some of the features of the newer WM/DEs I have tried a modern version of FVWM, which is still being developed. It is fast and light there is not doubt, but it takes a lot of hand tweaking of config files to do anything. There has been a trend in linux distros not too long ago to include as many apps as possible. I am guessing there were two reasons for this: To show off how many free apps there are in the linux world and because it used to be hard to install stuff. Audio distros went through that too but there are now so many apps available there is just not enough room. So people have to be more picky. things seem to be swinging the other way now. Many distros are pretty bare. The installation tools are easy to use and really, most people use about three applications for everything. So unity, gnome shell, xfce-wisker and some of KDEs new environments are right on target for most users. I am noticing also, a simplification in the settings area. Many normal X settings are hidden. focus follows mouse cannot be set from the settings screen as an example. Having more than one workspace (FVWM was normally set up with at least 3 sets of 4 screens) is there, but hidden and not really set up... most users find it confusing. Linux is crossing over from a desktop made for development, to a system made for the end user. I think this is the right path. In the end it will bring better working hardware drivers to Linux. However, things are more tricky for distros like UbuntuStudio and other development based distros. There are desktops around that still have all the things that make development nice, but we have the task of making creative tools work well with the latest desktops too. They are not going away and it is the direction all DEs are going. The xdg based menus seem to be on their way out to be replaced by panel menus, lens based menus, and search based menus. (aside from the show everything as icons deal that android and win8 have chosen) We have talked about workflow based applications in the past and I think we were on the right track. I think it is what will fit in with the new DEs that we are seeing. Remove the clutter of the workflows not in use and present only the applications needed for one workflow at a time. What I am saying is that we can just map our applications over into some DEs (LXDE, xfce and KDE), but others we can't really. I have tried just adding an applications menu to unity and it does work, but it hacky and takes away from that DE. We need something better. There are add-on menus for gnome shell too, but I have not been impressed with their quality so far... they are also a hack right now. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
I have found that for video editing and news audio use nothing seems to beat the basic Win95 taskbar concept extended by multiple workspaces. GNOME2, MATE, Cinnamon LXDE, XFCE, and even IceWM all support this concept and thus are essentially used the same way once set up. Honestly, nothing has come along that is more functional to me than US Hardy's GNOME 2 with Compiz enabled and a 4 workspace grid or cube. GNOME 3 is pretty but hard to use for someone used to a traditional desktop, Cinnamon is gorgeous with the GNOME theme and works like the old GNOME 2 did but is heavy , XFCE is just enough different from GNOME2 to interrupt the workflow until you get used to it. Differences between Thunar and old style Nautilus are behind a lot of that. Now for the bad news: GNOME/Red Hat, Unity/Ubuntu, and KDE will all be handling the X/Wayland/Mir issue on their own schedules, so this is about to get messy for everyone else, especially those of us who favor any DE other than the Big Three, like 2011 but worse. As an example, if I had been sucessful in developing a metapackage to install Cinnamon with the US themes without a lot of hand configuration and in some cases rt kernel bugs, that work would have just been obsoleted by an upstream response to the Mir/Wayland transition. Mint is pinning Ubuntu at 14.04 and will not use the rolling releases, staying with 14.04LTS until 16.04LTS and relying on backports of end user applications. What do you want to be they won't be the last to throw in the towel and do this? As for me, I am keeping Cinnamon set up to look and work like GNOME 2/Compiz in UbuntuStudio Hardy did and will pin whatever I have to between LTS releases to keep it. I do in fact now have debs for my themes and icons, but am not sure they are up to standards for redistribution thus have not set up a PPA. I have the legacy theme packages ported to GTK3 with some customizations I've used since 2008, plus systemd, a working dracut with systemd in it, multi encrypted disk unlocker both for initramfs-tools and for dracut, and even a Plymouth theme using the KDE3 soft-green background image as on my desktop. The systemd, plymouth, and dracut stuff use some binaries harvested out of Debian Unstable packlages rather than locally built. All of this grew out of what started as UbuntuStudio Hardy back in 2008. On 5/27/2014 at 9:19 PM, Len Ovens l...@ovenwerks.net wrote: And some personal feelings as well. In the past I have tried lubuntu, xubuntu and KDE as they relate to use with the studio metas. I tried unity and gnome shell, but was not able to evaluate them well as they seemed to require more than my system had to offer. They seemed exclusive to those who could afford new and fast HW. Even my new laptop found it could not keep up with the computational requirements. In my mind this continued to make xfce the DE to use. I have used Linux for about 20 years now and started with slackware back when the default boot was text only and X was a play thing that needed more memory than most people could afford (I can get a whole system for what 16MB of Ram cost then). The WM at the time was TWM and then FVWM. KDE was the first modern style DE with a menu that did not have to be crafted by hand (or as was more aften the case, came with anything you might load so that the menu looked full, but many selections didn't do anything) but rather updated itself as SW was added. Effects became common and then gnome came along. There was a point that KDE started to use more cpu than I had and getting to artsy and effecty for me and so I started using gnome. I had a tape based studio with an Atari that I did sequencing on... the PCs didn't have anything as good or stable. I moved to AudioSlack when it came out with the hope I could record audio, but the SW wasn't really there yet and sub GB drives were still normal too. I tried other audio distros too. but found nothing better at the time. Somewhere in the early 2000s (2004 maybe?) I bought what was one of the better MB/RAM/Audio cards. and not too long after installed some different audio distros to try again... with some success. I don't know when I first started using UbuntuStudio maybe 2008-2010ish after a move to another city. I had done very little with my computer for a few years and liked the newer stuff happening in audio. Anyway, I like some of the features of the newer WM/DEs I have tried a modern version of FVWM, which is still being developed. It is fast and light there is not doubt, but it takes a lot of hand tweaking of config files to do anything. There has been a trend in linux distros not too long ago to include as many apps as possible. I am guessing there were two reasons for this: To show off how many free apps there are in the linux world and because it used to be hard to install stuff. Audio distros went through that too but there
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
On Tue, 27 May 2014, lukefro...@hushmail.com wrote: I have found that for video editing and news audio use nothing seems to beat the basic Win95 taskbar concept extended by multiple workspaces. GNOME2, MATE, Cinnamon LXDE, XFCE, and even IceWM all support this concept and thus are essentially used the same way once set up. I would tend to agree. It does work best for me because I am used to it. However, someone who wants to install Studio on Unity, wants to do that because they like the way unity looks and feels. If I make unity work like win95, I have taken their reason for choosing Unity away from them. People who like the newer DE style... or just want to be up to date (for good or ill) need to have something that works for them in the new workstyle. For us, the US dev team, That means thinking from a point of view that may feel just wrong. But a lot of new people are using computers and more people are trying out Linux too. There are boxes sold with Unity in them and it may be what someone has learned on and the win95 menu may just be awkward to them. To be honest, our whole customization of the menu is because the way it was made audio/video work a nightmare with all the applications in one big lump it was as bad as the win8 all the apps on the desktop. So the win95 menu is not perfect either though we have made it a lot better than it was. Differences between Thunar and old style Nautilus are behind a lot of that. Thunar is closer to old nautilus than what they have now. Software is not static. I don't know if that is good or bad... sometimes I wish there was just bug fixes and not UI changes :) -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
Re: [ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use
Personally, having used Gnome3 ever since it was released, I have no use whatsoever for a traditional DE. The main upsides with Gnome3 for me are two things: 1.speed 2.simplicity. Also, the menu is not central for Ubuntu Studio. It's only needed for DEs that have menus, as those menus otherwise get cluttered. Our job is to make multimedia production work on Ubuntu, generally - on all its flavors. And, really, there aren't that many things we need to worry about when it comes to the DE for that to happen. The custom menu is nice, again for the DEs that have menus. But, what we still are missing is gui tools for tuning the system appropriately. -- ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel
