What Do We Want CLDG to Become?

Forum Announcements
1

Why release preconfigured desktop OS at all? I mean, if one wants it Gentoo-way: Calculate Linux Scratch is a good example of minimal distribution, providing you with basic tools to build your own system. Tempting as it may seem, this self-made approach is not efficient in case of corporate users, who need immediate access to remote disks, clickable icons, eye-candy keyboard switching, intuitive instant messaging… Unless you were born to compile, there’s no need to build everything from zero: a standard Calculate desktop is easily customizable.

Almost two years ago now, we released Calculate Linux Desktop featuring GNOME 3. And since nobody knew what GNOME 2 future would be, we decided to rebrand the original GNOME 3 with the standard Calculate looks; client-server solutions were also added. To cut a long story short, a lot was done to preserve the CLDG edition.

Two updates were released since then, GNOME 3.4 and 3.6. The main thing we learned through them was that GNOME developers set very rigid (and not necessarily fine) standards, immobilizing interfaces, changing the API completely, etc. Then we tried Cinnamon, but it didn’t actually solve the problem. Numerous bugs were detected in betas and as far as release candidates, and we found ourselves unable to deal with some of them at all. Only editing the source code might solve these. Some patches have been applied, but we’ll need still more time to fix everything.

What should we do?

# Stop supporting CLDG. Let me remind you, quite earnestly, that it crashes sometimes, so…
# Provide a Calculate Linux Scratch GNOME edition (CLSG) - that is, a minimalistic GNOME desktop - instead of CLDG. We already were doing this once, in fact.
# Continue supporting GNOME3, whatever small bugs there may be: we’d fix them all eventually.
# Return to GNOME2 while it is still marked as stable in Portage, as it will remain there for at least some months more, or so we may hope. By the moment the Gentoo team stop supporting it, either Linux Mint will come up with a complete GNOME3 rewrite, or MATE will be made stable. Looks like this is the best solution for now … though a temporary one, of course.

Which one do you think better? We really need your opinion.

2

My unbiased view would be Option 4.
I think this ties in with your vision of creating a stable and elegant distribution.
To a general user, any bugs on the UI create a negative impression of the entire distribution.
I tried Cinnamon and it was a lot better than Gnome3, but not perfect.
Looking at the work you guys put into XFCE, I’m sure you will make Gnome2 look and feel great.
The Consort Desktop (used by Salusos) is a good example : http://solusos.com/blog/2013/01/the-consort-desktop-environment/

My biased view would be to Drop CLDG :slight_smile:

3

I think, that Calculate need to have default DE. I think, that it must be XFCE. All others can be compiled from sources.

4

The Default DE should be KDE as it is the best, full blown and matured one which really is enterprise ready.
KDE 4.10 is in beta testing and finally has massive improvements with the (before often sluggish and memory hungry) semantic-desktop switch (akonadi, etc), This will be IMHO a release that is on pair with the decent stable (but aged) 3.5.12 Desktop release.
This is a safe bet for any company.

XFCE is more for minimalistics and not nice to use or nice to watch. It is lacking a lot of Groupware stuff and things that are handy in a networked company.

Gnome 3.8 will be really better than all the releases before, if you see that more and more old Gnome 2 apps are finally ported then, where 3.6 is in between two chairs, so Gnome will become better, but:

1. Gnome has again radical views and plans changes for 2014 already: Gnome OS, and a kind of Unity DE that fits on mobiles… see the news on phoronix.
So maybe the headache starts after a better 3.8 again …
2. Linux Mint is doing a great Job with MATE but way too slow - there are so many bugs, again it would take months…

My proposal:

1. I think let’s ditch Gnome 3 until it is really good (maybe 3.8.1) and just offer a CLSG as proposed before (good alternative).
2. Switch immediately to Cinnamon and help them polishing it, its by far more stable than MATE and Cinnamon on Linux Mint just looks great with low ressources AND is better than XFCE to my opinion. This is what runs now (Linux Mint Nadia 14 Cinnamon) on all our 10 Company Laptops.

Yes, and I would like to put KDE on all our Corporate Computers and real workstations and if somebody likes I would also be fine with Cinnamon.

But either Gnome 3.6 or XFCE - no way!

5

Better KDE is on Suse. Suse’s team are the team of KDE making. Are you think, that it help to make CL most popular?
Better and newest Gnome is on Fedora. We can’t struggle with this two giant’s, can’t we?

6

Роман Здорик wrote:

Better KDE is on Suse.

C’mon, KDE is way too slow on SuSE :wink: This is exactly where CL is better, I believe.

Personally, I would also stick to CLD as the main edition. As for GNOME, Cinnamon is nice, but GNOME2 remains my favourite (MATE will follow it, I guess).

…says an Openbox girl.

7

Роман Здорик wrote:

Better KDE is on Suse. Suse’s team are the team of KDE making. Are you think, that it help to make CL most popular?

Integration is really good, but I like the polished CL Desktop better, and its faster, true :wink:

Better and newest Gnome is on Fedora. We can’t struggle with this two giant’s, can’t we?

Fedora is ditching Gnome in the next Release in favour of MATE.

8

And what 'bout XFCE?

9

Роман Здорик wrote:

And what 'bout XFCE?

XFCE remains the little favourite of the team :slight_smile:

10

Give up, Gain time

11

I had using Calculate Linux 3 years. But when i used the version binding with gnome 3, i had to give it up, because gnome 3 is ugly and unstable.

I still like the original gnome 2.