<story><title>Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?</title><url>http://www.extremetech.com/computing/104581-linux-mint-the-new-ubuntu</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Personally I found it a bit snarky. By the same token I find that UI wars are the most vitriolic, after all they are the way you talk to the machine day in and day out. Screwing with that, screws with everything.&lt;p&gt;I have found Ubuntu&apos;s strategy interesting because it seemed clear that while KDE was following general guidelines around Microsoft OSes to be more accessible, and Gnome was following general guidelines around Apple OSes for similar reasons, Canonical sort of &apos;turned left&apos; and drove off the road to a new place.&lt;p&gt;I remember distinctly when I left Sun and had to give up my Suntools interface for what became Windows98 at the time. And it was hokey and painful and it crashed a lot, except that over the weeks and months it crashed less and less, all without a software update :-). And I realized it was not so subtley training me not to use features that failed. Of course if you use something long enough you become reasonably facile with it. When I switched my desktop to Linux I was always more comfortable with KDE for that reason, the whole &apos;start&apos; menu on the lower left, the control panel abstraction, the way things laid out on the screen.&lt;p&gt;When I went to Google I got a Macbook as my laptop choice, it was different, and I struggled at first, but once I became reasonably good at navigating around I found that I was also less annoyed with Gnome.&lt;p&gt;I think the Unity strategy at Canonical will pay them big dividends. Mostly because the Linux desktop market has been such a small part of the whole desktop market as to barely merit a full pixel width in a pie chart of desktop OSes. I believe that part of the reason for that is that the strategy of being &apos;kinda like&apos; MacOS or Windows in the GUI has failed Linux badly when it comes to non-technical users. It failed them because there was neither the cohesion of implementation, nor the quality of testing, in either KDE or Gnome which would ever cause a non-technical user to think the GUI was &apos;better&apos; than the one they left behind. Unity breaks that cycle because &lt;i&gt;it doesn&apos;t work like the GUI you used to use.&lt;/i&gt; and so I think users cut it some slack, they realize they are in a &apos;new&apos; place and learn how to do the things that they want to do in the way that this gui does them. And there isn&apos;t a mental comparison to their previous gui because it wasn&apos;t like this at all.&lt;p&gt;Assuming, and its a big assumption, that Canonical can execute on the Unity strategy well, it will continue to be the dominant Linux distro. Further it will increasingly leave behind every other distro, because while others may trade off market share amongst the technical users, where programmers slosh from one to the next, Unity will be gaining non-technical users who won&apos;t go anywhere else in the Linux space. Ever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>old-gregg</author><text>Great comment. But allow me to disagree on comparing Gnome 2 to OSX. In my opinion old Gnome was exactly what you&apos;re talking about: &quot;driving off the road&quot;. It wasn&apos;t like Windows or OSX, it was its own thing, the best desktop environment, in my opinion. The only element reminiscent of OSX (only visually, not functionally) perhaps was the menu at the top.&lt;p&gt;Unity, on the other hand, is the exact replica of Gnome 3, just not as polished graphically. They both have this weird &quot;buaaa mode&quot; where you&apos;re typing instead of clicking on a shortcut, they both destroy virtual desktop functionality and if anything, they&apos;re basically cloning OSX bad habits: instead of switching between windows on Alt+Tab they&apos;re now switching between apps (across virtual desktops!).&lt;p&gt;So I would suggest that the opposite is happening. Instead of staying in the &quot;new place&quot; Ubuntu is basically trying to get on the road and follow OSX.&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I&apos;m not even sure it&apos;s possible to &quot;drive off teh road to a new place&quot; when it comes to desktop UX without a significant change in hardware: we&apos;re still using basically the same computers as we did in late 80s, even the screen real estate hasn&apos;t improved much.</text></comment>
<story><title>Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?</title><url>http://www.extremetech.com/computing/104581-linux-mint-the-new-ubuntu</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Personally I found it a bit snarky. By the same token I find that UI wars are the most vitriolic, after all they are the way you talk to the machine day in and day out. Screwing with that, screws with everything.&lt;p&gt;I have found Ubuntu&apos;s strategy interesting because it seemed clear that while KDE was following general guidelines around Microsoft OSes to be more accessible, and Gnome was following general guidelines around Apple OSes for similar reasons, Canonical sort of &apos;turned left&apos; and drove off the road to a new place.&lt;p&gt;I remember distinctly when I left Sun and had to give up my Suntools interface for what became Windows98 at the time. And it was hokey and painful and it crashed a lot, except that over the weeks and months it crashed less and less, all without a software update :-). And I realized it was not so subtley training me not to use features that failed. Of course if you use something long enough you become reasonably facile with it. When I switched my desktop to Linux I was always more comfortable with KDE for that reason, the whole &apos;start&apos; menu on the lower left, the control panel abstraction, the way things laid out on the screen.&lt;p&gt;When I went to Google I got a Macbook as my laptop choice, it was different, and I struggled at first, but once I became reasonably good at navigating around I found that I was also less annoyed with Gnome.&lt;p&gt;I think the Unity strategy at Canonical will pay them big dividends. Mostly because the Linux desktop market has been such a small part of the whole desktop market as to barely merit a full pixel width in a pie chart of desktop OSes. I believe that part of the reason for that is that the strategy of being &apos;kinda like&apos; MacOS or Windows in the GUI has failed Linux badly when it comes to non-technical users. It failed them because there was neither the cohesion of implementation, nor the quality of testing, in either KDE or Gnome which would ever cause a non-technical user to think the GUI was &apos;better&apos; than the one they left behind. Unity breaks that cycle because &lt;i&gt;it doesn&apos;t work like the GUI you used to use.&lt;/i&gt; and so I think users cut it some slack, they realize they are in a &apos;new&apos; place and learn how to do the things that they want to do in the way that this gui does them. And there isn&apos;t a mental comparison to their previous gui because it wasn&apos;t like this at all.&lt;p&gt;Assuming, and its a big assumption, that Canonical can execute on the Unity strategy well, it will continue to be the dominant Linux distro. Further it will increasingly leave behind every other distro, because while others may trade off market share amongst the technical users, where programmers slosh from one to the next, Unity will be gaining non-technical users who won&apos;t go anywhere else in the Linux space. Ever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Zephyr314</author><text>You can still use KDE with (K)ubuntu &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kubuntu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.kubuntu.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I find that it is a stable solution and allows you to sidestep the Gnome/Unity wars.</text></comment>