Re: [tlug] Ubuntu Gnome raves

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 4:23 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
> Raymond Wan writes:
>  > The link Charles sent was about Gnome (i.e., the first one in your
>  > list).  But I guess Gnome and Gnome (Metacity) are similar?  I'm
>  > actually not too sure...
>
> Yes.  X11 is deliberately designed as a set of cooperative modules
> that use screen space.  GNOME's basic concept is to extend that to (1)
> a more standardized set of desktop tools (icons, dock, theme engine)
> and (2) interprocess communication (originally CORBA, but I think
> they've abandoned that in favor of dbus).  So you can just plug and
> play window managers, and I suppose you're aware (vaguely perhaps)
> that different TLUGgers have pretty strong preferences for different
> WMs (icewm, metacity, fvwm are a few that come up).


Thanks for clarifying about this and about metacity.  I'm still not
very clear about X11, WMs, etc.  It's one of those things that I'd
Google for, read about it and say to myself "Ok!  Got it!" and then
weeks later I don't get it again.  I probably should sit down and read
it properly once and for all...

And yes, I have seen some strong opinions about WMs on the list before
but "vaguely" is a good way of describing my understanding.  :-)


>  > I also was worried at first that I'd have to install everything
>  > from scratch.  I know there may be conflicts with Unity and I'll
>  > just have to uninstall them one by one over time...
>
> I know several of the Ubuntu guys, and they're pretty careful about
> that kind of thing.  Of course you don't get any guarantees if it's
> not an LTS release, but they do try, it's pretty high on the priority
> list.


Yes, I'm not on an LTS right now.

Perhaps "conflicts" is a bit strong.  After having installed Gnome
last week, I proceeded to see how many unity packages were installed.
There were about 20-30.  I uninstalled the two packages unity and
unity8 and that only removed about 5.  What is the remaining 15-25
packages for?  Sure, I can remove them one-by-one but it does make me
wonder why they weren't removed at the same time.  Are they needed for
something else?  If I remove them, will something go horribly wrong?

They don't take up a lot of space, so I can keep them around.  But
this is what I meant by "conflict" and yes...my word choice was a bit
strong.

Thanks for the info!

Ray