ubuntustudio-dev team mailing list archive

["Len Ovens" <len@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 15, 2013 9:29 am, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 10:23:34AM -0600, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
>>    Isn't the worst that could happen is that a user would need to reboot
>> to
>>    run a non-Unity session? But I'd hope that LightDM would support
>> Wayland
>>    too as I believe KDE and GNOME will be moving to it by default next
>> year.
>
> needing to kill and start a new graphics server is a new requirement
> and quite a user-unfriendly one, it would need thinking how to make it
> as elegant as possible.
>
> Canonical was going to port LightDM to Wayland but now does not plan
> to so someone else would have to do this.  KDE might be interesting
> but more likely will switch to SDDM, another inelegant difference in
> switching from one desktop environement another.

I am probably not the best person to comment. Please have patience with my
misconceptions.

My understanding is that starting with the mini.iso any flavour can be
built. There is a generic desktop on top of that and then the DE on top of
that.

What _seems_ simple to me is to replace the generic desktop meta with an x
based meta or wayland based meta for flavours not using unity. Yes I know,
very simplistic. We already have two (or more) lib paths to handle 32bit
and 64bit libs on the same machine. This would add another fork in the
path. I am not sure unbuntu would want to do that to keep the community
happy. It would put unity in an interesting situation if kubuntu,lubuntu,
xubuntu, ubuntustudio, etc. all work seamless together, but the user has
to watch the video server startup over again to use unity.

In other words what would Canonical's response be to the whole community
going in a direction that made every other flavour but vanilla work
together and everything glitch when switching to a unity session. Would
they see it as a glitch when switching away from unity (who would want to
do that anyway?), or would they see it as making unity look bad?

How many people (outside ubuntu community developers and testers) switch
from DE to DE? I would think that most people want to work in one DE. Once
they have chosen a DE they would want to boot and always login to that one
DE. So the main thing is to have a reboot to the same DE go smoothly. (or
a logout/in)

In a situation where more than one person uses the computer, my guess is
that the people using it will end up shying away from unity as a DE choice
unless it is everyone's choice.

Speaking from a ubuntustudio POV, we use xfce based on xubuntu and will
follow whatever method they use... for now at least. My experience with
Unity is that anyone who has tried to use it in an audio production
environment has switched to xfce because of audio artifacts. (of course I
will have only heard from those with problems not from those who had
things work for them)  Ubuntustudio ships with a wider assortment of SW
that any other flavour (as far as I know) with an ISO almost 2.5G. Many of
the Apps we ship use different libs and often it is just not possible to
find another app that does the same thing. We already are missing
GCDMaster which really has no replacement. The workarounds are all
cumbersome and generally require either duplicating files or hand editing
a "TOC" file. The one common thing for all our GUI SW has been X. We still
have some SW using XAW libs (I think I have it right) for their GUI. We
don't have the man power to "make things work" with MIR.

-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net