LMDE : unity & gnome classic desktop !

[JariTapio]

Hello!

LMDE Desktops, when will unity be on LMDE ?

[tdockery97]

Most likely when you put it there. I don't foresee Unity desktops on Debian.

[anzan]

Egad, no. One of the reasons so many people are leaving Ubuntu and coming to LMDE.

[rivenathos]

Yep, I seriously doubt the Debian guys will warmly welcome Unity. I agree that the Unity issue is prompting some people to switch to Linux Mint main edition, as well as the Linux Mint Debian Edition. Plus, there will most likely be another influx of those desiring to use pure Debian due to the changes coming from Ubuntu.

A great many people, myself included, have legacy hardware that will not run comfortably (or at all) with Compiz, so finding lighter-weight desktops such as LXDE and Fluxbox are upcoming possibilities. Luckily, Linux offers numerous choices.

[JariTapio]

Unity !

How do i install unity, and on what state it currently is ?
Is it allready playable ?

Finally, is there an easy way back to basic gnome desktop, if i install unity to my LMDE desktop ?

[tdockery97]

Since Mint is obviously installable on Debian, Unity should be also. I'm not a Unity expert, but it has a relationship with Gnome, so you can probably have both together and switch between the two just like on Ubuntu 11.04. Installing it is just a matter of finding the right packages and dependencies.

[anzan]

The repositories for other editions of Mint are all Ubuntu repos. LMDE is 100% Debian with a few Mint packages ported to Debian. Unless Unity were compiled for Debian, it would not work. Unity is not consistent with an upstream or vanilla GNOME desktop but adds Ubuntu services and demons (such as maximus) that curdle the GNOME DE.

[misGnomer]

The only positive of Canonical's Unity I can think of is its eventual support for "global menu".

For some reason GNOME hasn't warmed up to it (even with their GNOME Shell adventure) so it's probably up to the light-weight desktop projects to add that option (GTK needs plenty of massaging).

I believe there are quite a few people who prefer the classic desktop style and the global menu would IMO improve usability esp. on smaller screens which are again becoming quite common with netbooks and tablets et al.

[zerozero]

I think we should get some things here clear:
- most of the things we see in Ubuntu are not Debian-compatible, they weren't patched upstream;
- if we want those goodies we should stick with LM-*buntu based versions (Isadora or Julia);
- Try to mix wildly any Ubuntu repo or PPa in the LMDE is asking for troubles sooner or later, there are a few Debian repos that can give us most of the eye-candy goodies Ubuntu has.

Regarding Unity, is not an easy port to Debian, it requires several patched libraries that in short will rend our LMDE install crazy.
AdamW is trying to patch it to Fedora and you can here the problems he is facing:

It’s quite a big project, but I’m just started at the bottom of the dependency pile and seeing how far I can get. So far, I have review requests in for libindicator and dee. I need to do nux, and after libindicator goes in, the actual indicators. The remaining dependencies are a bit trickier: right now Unity needs a patched Compiz, which will become the upstream Compiz eventually but isn’t yet. I’m asking our Compiz maintainer if we can ship the ‘experimental’ branch for F15. bamf depends on a change to glib which hasn’t made it upstream yet; I’m trying to poke the appropriate people to get consensus on getting the change upstream. If we can clear those two, I’m hopeful it should be possible to have Unity available in the Fedora repos. Hell, we could make a spin of it.

http://www.happyassassin.net/2010/12/03 ... -possibly/

[anzan]

Exactly as zerozero said.

[asymmetros]

I heard that Gnome 3 is coming on most probably that April with the option of a new gnome-shell, very similar to unity. I mean that unity is not the only answer for a radical different desktop -and gnome.shell is not dependent upon a specific distro.