Great news!!!
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| cmost Jun 03, 2013 10:32 PM EDT |
I really love what the Mint developers are up to these days!!! They're taking Linux in great directions while making sane desktop choices based on...here's a shock...what USERS actually want!! Cinnamon is a great project and it's getting better with each release. Removing Cinnamon's reliance on Gnome underpinnings, a desktop that by many accounts is heading in the wrong direction, is a good move as it will allow Cinnamon to grow in its own direction. As Cinnamon matures, and grows ever more powerful and complete, I envision many distros switching to it as either the default desktop or a major choice alongside KDE and XFCE, relegating Gnome to second-class status as a community spin or ditching it altogether. Great job Clem! |
| seatex Jun 03, 2013 10:53 PM EDT |
This is definitely another sound decision from Clem and the Mint team. Next major news from them (that wouldn't surprise me) would be that they are dropping the Ubuntu versions and going 100% Debian based (LMDE). This would free them from the Shuttleworth surprises and allow them to focus on stability, as well as making the Debian based version as easy for newbies as the Ubuntu version has been. |
| gary_newell Jun 04, 2013 3:29 AM EDT |
Linux Mint is a great distro and Cinnamon is sweet (no pun intended, well ok yep there was). I find the whole Gnome knocking thing a bit overkill really. I would still much rather use Gnome as opposed to KDE. I find KDE to be big and clunky still. KDE just doesn't excite me. |
| linux4567 Jun 04, 2013 3:40 AM EDT |
I'm still using KDE 3.5 (and it's TDE successor) which is still superior to all newer desktops, none of the newer desktops is as feature rich and allows as much customisation as KDE3.5/TDE. |
| Francy Jun 04, 2013 7:12 AM EDT |
@linux4567
I don't fully agree with you on the feature rich comment
but do agree on the customisation remark.
Also, it's more stable and faster. Others taste may vary ! |
| Browser72 Jun 04, 2013 6:35 PM EDT |
I believe the nominclature in this article and in this discussion needs some clarification. From the way I understood it, "Gnome" is a graphical scheme for handling a desktop environment, but not a particular desktop environment. It is a set of rules and methods of handling those rules and translating them to X, Wayland or Mir ... right? And "Gnome Shell" is a specific desktop environment of little favor that goes on top of Gnome. As does Unity. As does Cinnamon. Only now, Cinnamon will not agree on how it handles control of graphics on the screen with Fedora and Ubuntu. Couldn't this mean that gaming on Ubuntu and Fedora will be more seemless since they work on one standard? While gaming on Linux Mint could now go unsupported in instances where it works smoothly currently? Until I understand more about those questions, I'm hesitant to be excited about this. I wish the reporting on this matter was more clear for Linux noobs who are trying to understand the implications of all these OS technology choices we have. |
| montezuma Jun 04, 2013 7:40 PM EDT |
I agree that cinnamon is a great desktop choice. I use it on all my machines. I am a little wary however of this forking from gnome. A key aspect of a successful long term large software project is the number of developers involved. Gnome has a lot while cinnamon has fewer. Seems to me that in supporting an entire desktop stack as he is promising Clem is being rather ambitious. For all our sakes I hope he hasn't taken on too great a load..... |
| DrGeoffrey Jun 04, 2013 8:51 PM EDT |
If memory serves, and I cannot find the links right now, gnome developers expressed no interest (as in zero, zip, nada) in supporting, even if only indirectly, any other DE than gnome. At least one implied the intent to purposely sabotage any other DE attempting to rely on a gnome base. Which neatly explains why I've admired and tested cinnamon, but refused to use it on my production systems. |
| CFWhitman Jun 05, 2013 9:48 AM EDT |
@Browser72 Let's ignore Wayland and Mir for a moment (it's really easy to ignore Mir, since it's alpha or pre-alpha quality at the moment). The first layer on top of your operating system providing a graphical environment is X, or X-Window. It provides a method of drawing objects on the screen and various input methods, including a mouse cursor as well as keyboard support. To make this useful, you also need a window manager to draw windows on the screen (instead of having every graphical program run in the upper left corner) and control where they are placed, etc. Generally, window managers and individual applications rely on some kind of graphical toolkit with a predefined set of graphical objects that can be shared between several programs and/or window managers. This provides a shortcut to developers so that each piece of software doesn't have to provide everything itself. Toolkits include things like Qt, FLTK, Tk, Motif, and wxWidgets. The toolkit used by Gnome is GTK+ 3.0 (sometimes referred to as GTK3). For window managers, that's enough, and most further functionality is either built into the window manager itself or provided by selecting the appropriate third party components. For a desktop environment, more functionality is added (generally a window manager is included as just one part of a desktop environment). Desktop environments include additional objects and libraries that are available to any program that's designed to work with that desktop environment. You might hear someone refer to the KDE libraries (above and beyond Qt, which is the toolkit used by KDE) or the Gnome libraries. After that, we have the graphical shell, which is basically a term for a set of objects from the desktop environment libraries that is loaded by default when the desktop environment is started. Generally in the past no distinction has been made between the graphical shell and the libraries included as part of the desktop environment because there was only one shell included. Xfce is just Xfce, built on GTK+ 2 (work to switch to GTK+ 3 has started I believe) and including the Xfce objects and libraries in a default shell. The new versions of Gnome and KDE, though, provide the potential to switch between various shells. I haven't seen the specific intentions of the Cinnamon developers laid out anywhere, but it would seem that they are going to start maintaining their own versions of the desktop objects and libraries rather than just providing an alternate shell on top of the Gnome objects and libraries. Below that, at the toolkit level, they will still both be using GTK+ 3.0. Control of graphics on the screen for games happens below most and sometimes all of these levels. It happens at or, to an extent, below X itself. So Cinnamon switching to their own set of desktop environment libraries is not likely to have any effect on games at all. Generally the only effect things like the desktop environment libraries have on gaming performance is the amount of resources they consume by being loaded in the background. That's why you'll generally get better performance from demanding games by using a lighter weight environment to launch the game from. Also, various sets of libraries and toolkits, and even different major versions of the same toolkit (like GTK+ 2.0 and GTK+ 3.0) can be loaded at the same time. That's why you can run KDE applications in Gnome and Gnome applications in KDE or either type of application on a plain window manager like Fluxbox, as well as applications based on FLTK or wxWidgets in whichever environment you like. Edit: One thing I wanted to add is that the word "shell" as a description of the user interface does not really have a particularly specific meaning. The "shell" is basically the sum total of the user interface that you end up with. Thus you'll see that command line interfaces are called "shells," like bash (Bourne again shell), csh (the C shell), sh (the original Unix shell), and DOS Shell (a file manager that also fed commands to the DOS command interpreter). You can also see "shell" used to refer to various GUI interfaces like explorer.exe for Windows and various window managers for Linux/Unix as well as full blown desktop environments. Basically anything that ends up as the outer layer of the operating system that you interact with can be referred to as a "shell." |
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