The Gnome Shell desktop on Debian Testing is working very well now, I managed to get the HDMI sound working with the audacious music player using the alsa output. Below is my /etc/asound.conf file containing the settings I am using to listen to my music. Gnome 3 is actually a good desktop environment, I was just getting annoyed with it due to the fact it was quite unstable before. Now it seems to be behaving very well indeed. The installation of extensions from https://extensions.gnome.org is working perfectly as well. Debian does work very well indeed. Gnome Shell is 1000×10e115 better than the Unity desktop due to the level of customization you may perform to change the look and feel of your desktop and move things around to better suit the way you work. That is the key to developing a Linux desktop that the users will actually want to have as their primary desktop environment. This is what the Ubuntu developers need to do, they need to entirely redesign the Unity desktop, or scrap it and create something else. The Linux Mint developers have created a desktop named Cinnamon and that does work very well indeed, it looks better than Unity as well. But Gnome Shell wins out in the customization stakes. The Linux desktop is faring better than the Windows 8 operating system that is lumped with the Metro interface that is a giant Windows `Phone 7 interface that is dividing computer users all over the world.
pcm.!default { type plug slave { pcm } } ctl.!default { type hw card 0 device 3 } |
That is not the way to treat your customers. Just because tablets and touch screen `phones are all the rage does not mean that Microsoft can just put a touch interface on Windows 8 and neuter that formerly very usable Windows 7 aero desktop interface. They had the same taskbar and start menu interface they had since Windows `95 and now it is gone. At least the Linux developers are not considering a Metro styled interface for Linux are they… I would not put that past Canonical, they are responsible for the Unity interface for Ubuntu, that is what they will be remembered for. As i have said before, the Gnome 1.0 interface was more like Windows `95 than the Macintosh operating system interface that the newer Linux distributions are trying to copy. The behavior of the Unity dock is just the same as the dock I have tried out on the Macintosh computers, the currently running application is highlighted with a little arrow pointing at its icon. And you could say the new menu opened by the Dock icon that allows you to search for and find applications is rather like the Macintosh OS Finder. The Unity desktop is slower than the Gnome Shell interface, and you may add the Gnome Shell Frippery bottom panel to allow easy access to your running applications. So if you have not tried out Gnome Shell on Debian Testing yet, then I urge you to give it a try and see what you think. it is not available for Debian Stable yet, so you will need to add the Testing repositories to be able to install the Gnome Shell desktop.
The Amiga desktop is another desktop interface that is very esthetically pleasing, the right vertical line of icons and the horizontal dock on the bottom and the panel on the top is similar to the Macintosh OSX desktop. The Amiga Workbench interface seems to be more attractive than the Windows `95 and Windows `98 interfaces, the Amiga OS is available for the x86 platform as the Aros operating system, this allows you to test out and use the Amiga Workbench desktop and applications on a modern Intel Personal Computer. This screen-shot from Wikipedia displays the Workbench and some applications running. Dosbox is available for Amiga allowing you to run Doom if you wish. I wish there was a Window manager for Linux that could replicate the Amiga Workbench, actually there is an ISO image available for download here: http://www.amigaforever.com/gnulinux/ that apparently has software for GNU/Linux systems allowing you to run the Workbench software on Linux. I will have to give that a try some time, although it seems that they are selling it. The CDE desktop from Sun that they deployed for the Solaris UNIX distribution would be another good window manager to port to Linux, but it is not free, so I guess we will not see that.