HN tells me this was 2402 days ago. Oh how quickly the kilodays fly by. But I am glad that after a mere twenty four hundred days Canonical finally listened to my advice.
I have been using mostly Xubuntu during the unity years so this thing did not affect me much. So I can look at the unity mistake not with anger but with interest and curiosity.
And when you look at the whole thing dispassionately and with perspective, you have to admit that this was not a mistake that Canonical made exclusively. It was a mistake the entire computing and software industry made. It was one of those strange turns into dead ends that happen to industries sometimes.
After the first ipad came out, the entire industry was absolutely certain that the future was tablets. Everyone started changing their user interfaces for tablets. And they did not care how much their customers complained, they just forced it down their throats because that was the future darn it.
But it turned out that the tablet future never happened. Even now I had to pay extra for a touch screen laptop because there was no other choice, when I "use" the touchscreen option only inadvertently.
The good thing about linux is that they can never railroad you into anything. So I switched to Xubuntu and that was that.
Unfortunately, it just looks like a tablet OS, it doesn't behave as such.
I've tried to make it work dozens times, and while I can navigate across the opened windows and start a new one (just don't try it with Dash to Dock), I simply get stuck somewhere. The virtual keyboard doesn't show up, or the virtual keyboard does show up but it doesn't detect key presses.
And it's not intuitive. Let's say that I want to open the application launcher and start an app that isn't in my favorites. I can't scroll over the icons because that selects and moves the icons. I have to scroll on the side, where no icons are present. And even then, I can't make a small touch gesture. I have to scroll through all the vertical space on my touchscreen to get to the next grid of apps.
I can't use my 2 in 1 in a tablet mode for anything more complicated than the simplest tasks (like reading PDFs in Evince, which works wonderfully).
While it looks like a tablet interface, I use gnome 3 on the desktop with two 4k monitors and it works great. (I mention 4k, because while I'd love to use a tiling manager I haven't found good support for UI scaling outside gnome and KDE).
Not sure what it's called, but the app launcher + window switcher that comes up when you hit super is really fast / useful even with lots of windows and apps (https://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/).
Have been running i3 sans Gnome for about 6 years now in a minimal Fedora install.
Throw in the tiny `xcalib` package (all 100KB of it) for easy screen inversion (i.e. hotkey toggle light/dark "theme") and you get an easy-on-the-eyes UI with sane window management.
Running Xorg is still possible and it's not bad at all. With a recent Intel chipset it might be even faster right now. I'm all in for Wayland, but others than Gnome are not there yet.
I'm using Sway on my notebook, but I still have Plasma as a fallback. General window management works reasonably well, but some particular Wayland protocol extensions are missing (for example, relative pointer motion, without which games like Minecraft don't work).
This. It's easy to just hit C-M-F2 and start an Xorg server if necessary. And, until now, I've had to do that way more often because of bad GUI applications that ignore the possibility of there being a tiling WM instead of problems with wayland...
Strange to relate, I find Gnome 3 to be fairly keyboard friendly. Coming from dwm/dmenu and using small laptops so tending to use all applications full-screen.
Perhaps we need different UI logics that can be selected from a configuration application?
> But it turned out that the tablet future never happened.
I see as many tablets walking around town, taking the subway, etc as I do laptops, when 6 years ago I saw none, so the tablet future definitely happened, and we are living in it. It’s just that it turned out to be a new category of device that coexists with laptops, rather than replaces them like some pundits thought.
they've definitely let the desktop os be swayed by touch idioms (which you could reasonably argue was good or bad), but they didn't try to unify it all into a single os, like a windows and ubuntu.
I was merely pointing out that Apple was not immune to the paradigm; it isn't a bad thing but needs clear thought of the differences between the two platforms.
Windows 8 might have been a step back but 10 is a job damn well done imo.
My only concern in computing is that of vendor lock in, on the desk/laptop/living room - I'm using a self assembled PC, Surface pro and Xbox One X and the integration is outright amazing but on the mobile side I have an iPhone and an Apple watch which can work very well with each other but not so well with the other ecosystem.
Windows is trying to better work with non Windows devices since Satya whereas on the Mac side, anything but iPhone is (and has been) crapshoot. Cloud storage and syncing services (Google Photos, Drive/Dropbox) are godsend but I feel I've gotten way off point now.
A problem with Apple is that you can't change it if something doesn't work for you. If I don't like GNOME or Unity, I can easily switch to xmonad, i3, awesome, openbox, fluxbox, xfce, lxde, kde, or many other options.
yes & no; via the accessability hooks 3rd party programs can change a surprisingly large amount, but obviously it's not as flexible as the complete control you have writing your own window manager.
to me the big advantage of apple is there's just so many people running the exact same setup. ~ once a year new stuff comes out, some stuff breaks, it gets fixed.
with linux you might be literally the only person running some particular combination of software; you seemed more on your own for fixing stuff. this was years ago, so maybe things have settled down a bit...
lots of users + all-at-once release = lots of crying.
but that also means everyone has the same setup, same problems, and stuff gets fixed quickly.
that's my experience anyway. it'd be fun if someone tried a side-by-side daily-experience report of say ubuntu, windows, and macOS. our own personal perspectives are always colored by time and chance.
Linux works great. It provides freedom in more ways than just the UI.
It's interesting that the main attraction of a company that advertises "think different" is to force everyone to use the exact same setup. I've never seen a Mac desktop that looked different from every other Mac user.
glad linux is working for ya. "think different" is mostly just a marketing slogan, but it's also not inconsistent to think that people want to "think different" by working on their shit, not customizing their desktop. :-)
You don't have to spend a lot of time customizing the desktop. It works fine out of the box. The difference is that you have an option to customize the desktop and are not locked in.
In any case, customizing one's computer teaches useful tech skills. I've solved many problems that better programmers couldn't solve, because they didn't know basic unix stuff.
totally agree knowing unix stuff is really handy, but mac has all that stuff there too. all it's missing is X and custom window managers (and you can even run that, if you really want to).
I actually like Unity (especially Unity of Ubuntu 12 and 14 LTS). And Ubuntu Mate with its Gnome 2 inspired shell sounds great.
But plain Gnome 3 took the wrong direction, it's too tablet OS alike, a unfortunate regression compared Gnome 2 in usability. Unfortunately KDE also took the wrong direction, after the great KDE3, with KDE4 the started from scratch again, what a big mistake. Basically Gnome and KDE wasted years with rewriting, that turned out worse, and can be blamed that Linux desktop is still at less than 5%.
So let's hope Ubuntu 18 LTS transform Gnome 3 to look subjectly less ugly (more traditional) and at least add back the removed toolbars and menubars to the Gnome Texteditor, filemanager, etc.
Who came up with the single toolbar button in Gnome 3 Texteditor with only a paste functionality and thought it is a good idea? Bring back the Gnome2 Texteditor as featured in Ubuntu Mate.
I want the tab-support in Terminal app back. Why was it removed in Gnome3?
KDE Plasma 5 is actually at a great state right now. It works well and you can customize it to me whatever kind of desktop you like. Canonical could have made it into whatever they wanted it to be.
It's built on top of a Qt, that works everywhere instead of GTK that just focuses on being there for GNOME. In addition to that canonical has already been using Qt for the past few years and could have just continued on with it. Alas, the decision has been made and they're not going to be changing their mind anytime soon.
I don't think KDE is really quite there yet. For me and from what I've seen and heard it can be extremely unstable (and that's using KDE Neon which ships the up-to-date version of KDE). Hell, at this point I'm giving up on S3 sleep and KDE because after starting it up again KDE is sure to crash a lot when doing simple things like switching to other apps etc.
I'm using Plasma 5 and I cannot confirm any of this. Things have been very stable ever since I switched to it (from Plasma 4) about three years ago. Much stabler than Plasma 4 in its early days (that was, admittedly, a huge crash-fest). And S3 sleep is causing literally zero problems.
You might want to try gnome flashback. It's GTK3 but you can make it look like Gnome 2, compiz cube included. I've been using it since Unity and Gnome 3.
I used the Gnome flashback at its inception, when it was called "Gnome fallback", and I had the impression that it was a hammered product.
I'm still very skeptical of it, because I think it will be always a second-class citizen.
In particular, it is a paradox in itself, since it's used by people who refuse the Gnome direction, but it's maintained by people who are into the Gnome direction.
I think ideally G.F. efforts should be directed towards MATE, although of course, that's not realistic.
I agree that it's second class but it works and that's what matters. It was a little worse than Gnome 2 until 16.04. They improved it quite a lot at that time and I can say that I have back my Gnome 2 desktop now. I hope they keep it in the next Gnome and Ubuntu releases. I hate DEs with a top bar (MacOs, Unity, Gnome 3 among the others) because it steals space in one of the most important places of the screen and it gets in my way. Among the DEs I somewhat like only Gnome Flashback lets me move all of its contents to the bottom bar and delete it.
I'd advice to have at least a brief look at MATE, since its whole point is to maintain the Gnome 2 feel. They're also receiving truckloads of money, so there's lots of manpower behind, but the most interesting thing is that they took the opposite direction of Gnome 3 - they're giving a lot of flexibility to the users (see all the panel options at https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-artful-final-releas...).
It's low cpu/memory usage on my 2 GB RAM laptop with a Celeron processor. (A Chromebook converted to Linux.)
It overloads a ton of meta keys for moving windows around, moving between workspaces, etc. Very natural once you get used to it on my small keyboard, small 13" screen, and 1366x768 resolution.
And once again Canonical is like... f it... after telling us Unity was the new thing and everyone had to get used to it... f it... let's go back.
Even if Unity was somehow worse, I still would have had more respect for them if they had stuck with their original decision. Now they basically look like they have no idea what they're doing and when anyone asks, they'll give bullshit answers they won't stand by in a year or two. All their arguments are just PR speak for "whatever I want right now."
Going back to Gnome proves to me that there is no grand design behind their decisions. Just hubris and condescension.
>Even if Unity was somehow worse, I still would have had more respect for them if they had stuck with their original decision. Now they basically look like they have no idea what they're doing and when anyone asks, they'll give bullshit answers they won't stand by in a year or two. All their arguments are just PR speak for "whatever I want right now."
On the other hand, it's been six years. That's quite a run (in contrast, gnome 2 switched to gnome 3 only after about 4 years), and considering that Ubuntu as a company is explicitly pivoting to focus on the GUI-less target (pretty much the idea of GNU on the Desktop taking over the world is quite dead, and if Ubuntu goes public, they'll want to focus on what makes money), it's quite expected.
Absolutely not for me. When Gnome and Canonical both went crazy (Gnome 2 -> 3 and Unity even existing, respectively) I stayed with Gnome 2 for a while, switched to Mate for a bit, and eventually found that KDE 4 had settled down and was just as customizable as KDE 3 was (for my purposes, at least), and have been using Kubuntu ever since.
I don't mind them experimenting with new ways of doing things at all, I just really don't understand why this needs to be done in a way that prevents people from doing things the way they've done it before if they decide they don't like the way you're doing things.
I switched from Konqueror to Dolphin after it handled what I needed. I switched from Virtual Desktops to "Activities" after it was also good enough for my needs. I never used widgets in their original usage (placed seemingly at random on the desktop) but use them inside of the task bar. I use sloppy focus follow mouse and mouse raise only on titlebar click so I can use windowed applications in actual nontrivial ways.
It doesn't matter if you glossed over that run-on paragraph above. tl;dr: KDE can have opinions, so can I. At least KDE respects that.
I don't mind them experimenting with new ways of doing things at all, I just really don't understand why this needs to be done in a way that prevents people from doing things the way they've done it before if they decide they don't like the way you're doing things.
Same reason it happened with Firefox: trying to attract more users. The broader you want your user base to be, the less customizable you have to be. Regular users can't handle heavy customization: it's too complicated and they freeze up.
Power users interested in extreme customization of their environment will always be a tiny niche. Add to that the Anna Karenina Principle [0] and it makes even less sense to try to compete for such users.
The keyword is "trying." When they intentionally disable functionality they are throwing away the userbase that depends on that functionality for the hope of getting a bigger userbase in return.
But there's no need to be that myopic. Like I said, I don't mind if they add these features and make that the default way of doing things. I don't mind if they bury the "less broad" functionality deep in some hidden configuration that I have to get at. Just keep it around for those users, give them QA articles on how to re-enable their way of doing things, and then you can have both.
There have been countless counter-examples to this "priciple", by the way: The Digg to Reddit migration being the foremost in my mind, but also the Windows Mobile to Windows Phone migration and the last Firefox redesign (that was eventually mostly rolled back or made optional again after hemorrhaging users).
>Same reason it happened with Firefox: trying to attract more users.
The thing is that Linux users are self-selected power users. If you want something to just do your work, you'll stay with Windows or macOS (or whatever your computer came with).
And while I don't need the power of i3, I don't see why my desktop can't have a maximize button
> The thing is that Linux users are self-selected power users. If you want something to just do your work, you'll stay with Windows or macOS (or whatever your computer came with).
Not always, I had my dad using linux for years because he got a new lease of life out of an old machine and this was a time when windows would get random malware installed just from regular web browsing. The default solitaire that came with Kubunutu alone satisfied 90% of his computing needs. The configurability of KDE was a constant issue though, even when I locked the the taskbar/desktop he found a way to screw it up.
The problem isn't configurability, just the way it's handled. KDE (at least in my terribly outdated experience) adds all kinds of options in things like right click menus or application menus, this confuses and scares ordinary users. I find the gnome approach of having a dedicated app (tweak tool) for configuration is much better for ordinary/casual users, it moves all the clutter to a dedicated place instead of stringing it out everywhere. For power users there is nothing wrong with putting the config in a dot file or scripting language.
I too have installed Kubuntu for many, many people. Literally every week I would have to reset someone's borked KDE settings because they accidentally clicked or right clicked or dragged in the wrong place. After install I would simply ` cp .kde{,.BAK}` and set up SSH to restore it when needed.
For one user I even added `cp .kde{.BAK,}` to their login script. I wish that I remembered how, actually, because there seems to be only one way to get that to run before KDE reads it and I can't remember now.
I love configurability and everything from my fountain pen to my car is heavily modified. But normal people cannot seem to deal with the ability to modify their surroundings.
If accidentally clicking or dragging results in messing up their settings, I'd say the problem is a brittle user interface, not normal people having problems configuring their surroundings. If normal people cannot use the user interface, then the user interface has a design failure ("bug"), by definition. (Unless the intended audience is not normal people, but if that is the case for Linux, we shouldn't be installing Linux for normal users.)
> For one user I even added `cp .kde{.BAK,}` to their login script. I wish that I remembered how, actually, because there seems to be only one way to get that to run before KDE reads it and I can't remember now.
A quick reading of `/usr/bin/startkde` suggests that `~/.config/startupconfig` is sourced sufficiently early. Alternatively, `~/.profile` (or `/etc/profile`, for that matter) should also work, although that might be asking for trouble if the user knows how to open a terminal emulator.
I don't think it's anything particularly to do with the users themselves but rather the difficulty of supporting both well without making one of the two groups suffer.
Is KDE back to KDE3 functionality? If so I will give it another try. But KDE4.x was sooo bad, it was a complete rewrite and every single decision was ill-advised. In retrospective it almost looks like someone had great fun running both KDE and Gnome to the ground and keep users away from Linux desktop. I mean KDE3 and Gnome2 were good, almost perfect. KDE was more Windows alike and had ton of settings to adjust things. Gnome 2 was more MacOS alike and more opinionated with little settings. When KDE4 tanked, I switched to Gnome 2. When Gnome 3 tanked I switched to Ubuntu with Unity. Now Ubuntu 17 tanked with its shitty Gnome 3 where Terminal app has no tab-support and Gnome Texteditor is a weird zombie that lost most of the Gnome3 Texteditor functionality and toolbars. I hope Ubuntu 18 LTS comes with some reasonable improvements to Gnome 3, or I will look elsewhere.
KDE 4 was the biggest disappointment I had in the Linux world. It became usable to me a few years later.
KDE 5 is fine, doing a few changes like disabling plasma volume and starting KMix at startup instead. Still have to use pavucontrol occasionally, though.
Yesterday I discovered you can switch the menu style (right click -> alternatives) to a more classic type (like KDE 3, plus favorites), or to a full screen win8 type (for tablets).
You can also download Simple Menu [1] and Tiled Menu [2] with a right-click on the panel, then Add Widgets -> Get New Widgets.
I think, they'll be available in that Alternatives-menu then. If not, you can add them through Add Widgets.
Plasma treats everything as either a widget(/"Plasmoid") or as a panel.
So, you also have to have your widgets unlocked for all of this to work (including the Alternatives-menu).
KDE 4 was on par with KDE 3 since about the 4.4 or 4.5 release, a few years ago. I too was a KDE 3, then Trinity, holdout.
KDE 5, last I tried, was still missing some features and had troubles with panel positioning on multi-monitor setups. It is also missing all the little touches that made KDE 3/4 so pleasant to work with, such as Ctrl-U to clear a field (lifted right from Emacs). I stick with KDE 4 on CentOS.
Greybeards who still used SunOS because they didn't like the Mac/Windows way of doing things.
It enables things like:
1. Found a web tutorial on how to do something in *nix with a bunch of shell commands interspersed between paragraphs? Keep a small terminal open in a corner on top of the fullscreen browser, read the article and actually click-and-select commands and then copy-paste in the terminal by just moving your mouse back and forth between the applications.
2. Looking at a scanned PDF and want to do a bit of math to confirm the numbers you're reading? Load up a calculator and type into it when the mouse is hovering over, go back to scroll the PDF. Easy peasy.
Basically by separating the actions of window positioning from using it, you can actually use more than just fullscreen windows one at a time.
2 works in Windows, xfce and Unity too, mostly (and has been for years). The focus stays on the calculator if you wanna type into it, but you can still scroll whatever your mouse is over.
1 certainly works in any Linux DE I've ever used, as long as I make the terminal stay in the foreground whether it's focused or not. Personally, I prefer to use guake for sucha usecase, however.
2 works on macOS too, for what it’s worth. (My memory of this, which may not be entirely reliable, is that Linux and OS X both had 2 forever. I wish I could say the same for 1.)
Those were examples. The key point is that this is generic behavior for any window at any time. It doesn't have to be special-cased (with the calculator) and it happens all the time (making the terminal stay in the foreground is at least two clicks, for instance).
It never worked well in Windows for me. I tried, a lot. The main problem is that it doesn't have a focus stealing prevention like KWin (and maybe other Linux desktops) and eventually got annoyed and got used back to regular focus activation.
How was the KDE 4 -> 5 transition? I test-drive KDE every now and then, but every time I get the impression that they're always tweaking this and that at the expense of stability. When they first announced KDE 5, my first reaction was "But KDE 4 has only just become usable!" But it seems it was more of an incremental update than a complete rewrite like KDE 3 -> 4. As a daily user, do you find KDE 5 stable enough nowadays?
KDE 4 to 5 was very smooth, though I waited ~3 months for reports from others before I jumped. :)
It feels like KDE 5 was focused primarily on polish rather than new features. (I honestly can't think of a feature in KDE 5 that wasn't in KDE 4.)
My only complaint I have for KDE 5 is that the system tray applets can occasionally disappear after multiple sleep/awake cycles on my laptop without rebooting, but right-clicking on the tray, disabling an applet, then reenabling it causes anything missing to reappear, which is probably the most minor thing someone can have for a desktop environment!
Oh, and people confuse my KDE laptop for a Windows laptop because it looks a lot like Windows Vista by default.
Yeah, KDE 4 looked a lot like Vista, KDE 3 looked like Windows 95, and KDE 5 looks like Windows 10.
Not complaining, I think it's nice that at least one major DE is consistently taking ideas from Windows when everyone else tries to copy the latest Apple product.
For the past, oh, 10 years or so, it feels like every time I try a new release of one of the prominent Linux DEs, I keep going back to Xfce after a short while, because it "just works", can be customized exactly how I want it to be, and doesn't try to break my flow with every major release, because someone in UX has a new Grand Unifying Theory of What Users Really Want (Even if They Don't Know It).
I agree with you SO MUCH.
I've been using Gnome lately on my XPS13 because HiDPI support in Xfce is not quite there yet (while in honesty is pretty well supported in Gnome), and I hate it with a passion. It seems like they decided to reinvent every single well established UX paradigm there was, and somehow managed to make every one of them worse.
Random example: they managed to break Alt+Tab; you now need to think whether the other window you want was created by the same executable that created the one in the foreground right now or not. Plus if you use Ctrl+Shift+T in chromium you will never be able to Alt+Tab to it again.
Other random example: pushing the computer power button does not pop up a shutdown dialog because "shutting down is disruptive"!
You can change what alt-tab does, either the power-user way using dconf-editor, or a normal user way using an extension. In this case, install Alternate Tab extension, which will make the alt-tab work exactly as you want.
You can also configure, what will happen when the power button is pressed (I think it puts the computer to sleep by default). In this case, you don't have to install anything, it is in the control center.
You can indeed change the Alt-Tab behaviour with an extension, but not what the power button does. It used to be possible, but they decided it was to disruptive and removed the option, which is the standard Gnome policy.
I found an extension to show the shutdown dialog via Alt+PowerButton though.
Not sure what kind of Gnome you are using, but in Gnome 3.26 as shipped with Fedora 27, in the Settings, Power options, you have three options what can happen, when you press the power button: "sleep" (the default), "shutdown" and "do nothing".
When you select the second option, "shutdown", and then press the power button, it will throw a dialog at you, that the machine will shutdown in 60 seconds (and will display countdown), together with "cancel", "reboot" and "shutdown" buttons.
I'm actually somewhat concerned that in the move to Wayland those of us who just want the window manager, and not a desktop environment will be forgotten. To me it seems silly to use a lot of processing power on a desktop environment that want be seen or used most of the time anyway.
Evilwm still seems like the window manager that got thing mostly right to me. It draws the windows and there's a keyboard short cut for opening an Xterm (and for moving and resizing the windows), you don't really need much more than that. Sadly it seem that the focus for the simplest window managers is tiling, which I also to like.
Hopefully a non-tiling, dead simple window manager for Wayland will appear in the future.
I've never heard of EvilWM until your comment. I'd be curious to test it out, but wondered if there are any more screenshots of it. (This one is just not enough to judge: http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/images/cap1.jpg )
I use OpenBox on Debian since 5 years. But it's not because Gnome or KDE is broken, it's just because I don't need all of the stuff a regular desktop provides. I think your comment implies regular desktops are broken but I don't think so. They're not perfect but not to the point of being unusable.
I think a lot of the problem with Gnome 3, Unity and Windows 8 was that they decided to revolutionise the way people worked, by pushing them towards different paradigms.
These paradigms may or may not have been well thought out and useful, I'm not here to make that judgement, however what they did (particularly with Gnome 3 and windows 8) was push you to use the new way, either with no concessions at all to other ways of working, or vague promises that they would come later. This presents users with a learning curve and that's offputting when really you just want to get stuff done in pretty much the same way you did yesterday.
For me the crucial point is that Windows (pre 8 and 10), MacOS and Linux DEs like Xfce, MATE and various others don't try to push you, and do things in a fairly 'standard' way. A menu bar may have moved, some graphics look better than others, there might be a clock in a different place. But they don't force you to full screen, try to hide all the things you've done before, make choices for you on which applications to use for what, etc etc, behaviour is pretty predictable. And if it's not, you can make a few tweaks without much fuss.
So they aren't broken, but they do present a barrier to entry, and often a lack of flexibility (I'm specifically not talking about KDE as I haven't used it on over a decade).
They're not broken to the point of being unusable, but they're a pain to use.
And it's not just a DE vs WM thing. I'm fine with Gnome 2, for example - it also "just works" in that sense. And Xfce is really a DE these days, as well (I'd say that feature-wise, it's on par with earlier Gnome 2 releases now).
Unless you are frequently switching monitor setups and would like a panel for each monitor. After coming from i3 I expected that to be a simple feature but I guess Xfce devs don't.
I have been using XFCE, but I'm in the process of switching.
I think they project is going to die in the future, not necessarily in an abandonment sense, but it will severely lag behind, due to lack of resources (I also think the developers behind it are not really good).
Thunar (the file manager) had, for around an year, a bug where around 20% of the time, moving/deleting a file would cause a crash - this was in fact marked as critical.
There have been some clumsy attempts to fix it, until the fix came out after a long time.
Thunar is also, mysteriously, for several reasons, an enemy of keyboard users (try to use it this way, and you'll understand).
It's not realistic to switch file manager, as there is a disconnection in the desktop usage workflows, and unfortunately, the file manager is a core part of a DE.
Of course, not everybody has such requirements from a file manager/DE, so it may be a good choice for many, although it's not really true that all the other Ubuntu distros are so disruptive, in particular, at least a comparable one isn't (and I suspect there are more than one).
Yes, I've used xubuntu for the past years, not just because everything "just works" at the right minimal level for me but also for it's lightness and performance.
It's weird that after so many years Linux DEs are still in this immature state. And we again find ourselves looking for something more permanent that "just works". I was hoping for unity to be it, but apparently the bar was too high for canonical, so now I'm looking at either lxde or xfce too.
Xfce is by far my preferred DE but I always worry that the project looks seriously understaffed and has many rough edges that never seem to be ironed out.
I upgraded to 17.10. I use an old small screen Thinkpad and Gnome 3 used the top third of the screen for menus! I tried all of the plugins to no avail. I switched back to Unity because I like to see my screen. I hope to see a gnome 3 extension to mimic the unified top bar thing
Workspace switching with and without window is as you mention. Drag to left/right too. With 3.26 you can also drag the left/right split to arbitrary positions that may be more beneficial to the task at hand.
GNOME uses Super (Windows) by default instead of Alt for drag/resize. You can change it (and lots of other stuff) in the Tweaks application.
Resize uses secondary click instead of middle I think, but also available in Tweaks.
For what it's worth, you can have all this in Plasma 5:
* The "Switch to adjacent workspace" and "Move Window to adjacent workspace" actions are not bound to shortcuts by default, but you can do so via System Settings > Shortcuts > Global Shortcuts > KWin.
* Alt+Left and Alt+Right for drag and resize, but can be configured to be the same as in Unity in System Settings > Window Management > Window Behavior > Window Actions.
* Quick-tiling (full, half, quarter) is enabled by default.
My main app-switching feature across machines, OSes an desktop environments has been Super+[1-9] to focus my pinned app number [1-9] on the taskbar.
This works in Windows. It worked in Unity. It works with my custom i3/sway setup.
I never quite got it working in Gnome/KDE though.
This single key-combo is super-crucial to my flow, and if Canonical has shipped a default-config which preserves this behaviour from Unity, I'd be super happy to give it a spin.
That's a terrible restriction for people who have many virtual desktops. I've used 10 in two rows for years (or 9 in xmonad) so that's my mental model of where everything is located.
I really like Ubuntu 17.10 sans Ubuntu. I'm running the default gnome-session. Its fast and Wayland has made Gnome feel really ... fluid? It doesn't _feel_ like a Linux machine anymore. Compositing _feels_ better than a Windows or OSX machine.
I wholeheartedly agree. What I really want is a super conservative LTS system that keeps the core - OS, window manager, file manager, network, etc - on super stable and old versions, and my apps - Firefox, Emacs, Spotify, ... - updated to the latest release. I'm tired of "new" desktop environments, and rewrites that means I'll now have to live with years of bug fixing until I get a stable system.
I'm hoping that Ubuntu slowly becomes this, especially with the move to the very stable Gnome 3.
I should add that I also want to use the most standardized desktop environment I can find. Which these days seems to be Win10, macOS, Ubuntu, and maybe a KDE based one?
Rationally, I think this maturity is the best thing that could happen to my system. However, I must admit I grow bored if I don't introduce some new widget/functionality from time to time.
I was hesitant to switch from Gnome to Unity. Interestingly, I'm now nervous to switch back. I guess one grows accustomed to and fond of what one uses.
I felt the same way, been along for the ride since Ubuntu 10.04. I just switched to 17.10 a couple weeks ago and I'd say it's my favorite Linux desktop I've ever used.
I disagree, even without DW, Ubuntu should have an advantage in many many polls, and in automated measurements. Ubuntu has a non-insubstantial corporate install base that should've been registered in user agent statistics, while MINT is a wholly community driven project that don't even have an official "default" browser.
I don't understand why everyone seems to think Gnome 3 is a tablet UI. I had a touchscreen laptop for a couple of years and my experience is that it really isn't.
It's actually not bad as a keyboard-driven UI, though: it's a rare event that I'll trigger the overlay with the mouse, or even interact with it at all with the mouse beyond dragging windows into different workspaces or dragging workspaces around (the latter being the one thing I don't think you can do with the keyboard).
I use Ubuntu daily, so I ended up stepping onto this land mine. Overall, I don't think Gnome is completely unusable, but some little things made me jump back to Unity (which can be chosen when logging in).
In 17.10, Unity has better desktop scaling, performs better when doing a menu search, makes better use of screen space, has more advanced virtual desktop capabilities, has the best global menu on any linux desktop, and while isn't bug free is fairly predictable.
Gnome is very customizable, is more attractive looking on Ubuntu 17.10 out of the box, has better notifications, and doesn't generate the questionable error messages that Unity does.
That being said, it feels like replacing a Toyota with a Buick.
The difference is that Unity was getting better while Gnome is getting worse. The people at Gnome are lacking even the most basic knowledge when it comes to UX. The whole DE is a clusterfuck.
Can someone explain to me what HUD means in this context? They say HUD is gone, and GNOME developers are strongly against ever having one. The screenshots show something looking like an overlay with global search. To me, that's what a HUD is.
Ahhh they mean the per-application HUD. That is indeed tremendously useful, like the OS X searchable menus and Sublime's command palette. I can't see why anyone would be against that functionality.
If I had to guess: Because GNOME devs pursue their religious quest for simplicity ^W dumbing things down so far that they cannot acknowledge anymore that an application might have more than 5 menu items.
I've had the exact opposite reaction to the change. So many common actions seem needlessly difficult. Take –for example– joining a wifi network. In Unity, you'd click on the wifi icon in the upper-right, then click on the network you want to join. Two clicks. In Gnome, you click in the upper-right, then click on the wifi icon to expand options, then click on "Select Network", then click on the network you want to join, then click "Connect". Five clicks! It's absurd.
The story is similar for things like power settings or selecting sound input/output sources. I wish the Gnome team would imitate macOS or Windows instead of coming up with their own uniquely frustrating interfaces.
It's been a long time since I've used a full desktop environment, but back sometime around Ubuntu 10.04 it was by default the two-click Unity version you described. Even nowadays (on 16.04) if I start nm-applet, it's just two clicks.
Out of curiosity, did you just install Ubuntu 17.10, removed Ubuntu-gnome and then manually installed plain Gnome on top? Any special steps to make it work (like booting to a secondary wm while you uninstall and reinstall gnome)?
I'm still on 14.04 with vanilla Gnome (with my own extensions, etc), so I'm happy to see Canonical moving out of the desktop business, and retiring Unity for good. I just wish they offered a vanilla Gnome, instead of this heavily customized Unity-looking one.
Can't you just install them side-by-side? Then after confirming "real" Gnome works, uninstall Ubuntu's Gnome. Or do they somehow conflict with each other?
I gave a chance to GNOME 3 times in last couple of years with Fedora 24, 25 and 26 and it was equally bad everytime. Memory Leaks reduced it to a crawling mess in a few hours of uptime, the desktop would freeze up permanently while doing even most basic task like switching windows or bringing up their Expose-thing, mouse will start jittering and lagging anytime icons/textures were being loaded, extensions and themes broke again and again. Who would have though putting a Javascript interpreter in the critical pipeline of (what was supposed to be) a reponsive animation-guided GUI would be a bad idea?
Gave KDE a shot and beside all the bloat ans slowness, the damn thing kept crashing on my lock screen. Seriously?
I have switched to Sway now which itself is far from perfect (GTK3 apps keep breaking now and again, visible tooltips in XWayland windows prevent workspace switching) but at least it doesn't hang up my machine every couple of hours or prevent me from unlocking it.
How the hell did we got here? What exactly are the priorities of people working on this stuff? Here's hoping that XFCE gets ported to Wayland soon enough.
I would guess that this is a driver issue, the developers have their priorities mostly straight and would not ship a desktop where this was the expected behavior.
Anecdotal and late to the party, but I once encountered a bug in the Fedora installer. The installer guided me through the process of reporting the bug, including screenshot taking, including and uploading. It told me helpful tips on writing the bug report itself. I believe it even guided me on how to create an account, and so I got frequent updates in my spam account on how the bug got fixed and when and what happened with it.
Recently I tried out their new Fedora 27 release, did the same steps to reproduce the bug, and no bug encountered! I was extremely impressed, being totally new to open source and the development of it.
Your experience may have been neutral at worst, mine was super positive. I highly recommend you try! I got a fun experience out of that little tech adventure.
I should note in fairness that many bugs I report into Apple's black hole of a bug reporting tool also don't end up fixed. Maybe I just report weird bugs :-)
(An example of one I reported against Mac OS that got emailed as fixed, but still happens, though less frequently: Sometimes when alt-tabbing, the system will act as though the tab key were never released.)
Glad to see an actually positive comment - I've just installed on my desktop after being mostly a mac user for the past few years (before that unity/gnome 2), and I'm seriously impressed. Everything is so smooth and the UI is both beautiful and functional.
Last time I've used Ubuntu was about 5 years ago. And it seems to look the same now. I wonder if anything meaningful was achieved during that time in terms of UI/UX besides switching desktop environments back and forth.
I upgraded from 17.04 to 17.10. The widget in my Gnome Terminal window that shows me how many columns and rows the terminal has (if I change them) disappeared. I posted this to the Ubuntu forums, they said Wayland kills this feature, but if I fall back to Gnome over Xorg it would work. Which it does. I hope they don't deprecate Xorg because I'm sure there are a lot of things like this which work in X but don't work yet automagically with Wayland.
"It's worth noting that in my testing, GNOME uses slightly more RAM and CPU than Unity on the same hardware doing the same things. The increase is only about 10 percent more on the RAM, and, let's face it, neither of them are lightweight desktops. If you want something light, try i3."
Best advice in the article ;) I did try i3 and like it a lot. I have it running on a Chromebook now as my main machine.
I just wish Gnome 2 was left as is and Gnome 3 would named Gnome Tablet Edition with those big useless buttons on a 27" screen where I click them with my mouse instead of my big fingers. When Unity was introduced, I learnt to use AwesomeWM (similar to i3) and even manually configuring it was a better experience then both Unity and Gnome 3. Alternatively, I used LXDE, which is simple enough for me.
One I never understood why people complained of Gnome changing their UI until 3.26 where they removed support for tray icons. Apps like deluge and megasync became a mess(megasync refuses to work) because there's no tray icon. Unfortunately I have been unable to find any DE that has the same navigation style
The article says that Ubuntu 17.10 is exciting again.
I don't want exciting.
Particularly when they drop nice features like the HUD and the integrated global menu and title bar.
And that's coming from a MATE user who never got on with Unity. I will hang on to my useful places menu, my functioning file explorer and refined taskbar thank you very much!
Removing global menu and placing the clock in the middle was a mistake. Now I have 2-3 lines less code in my editor, so why was wasting space considered a good idea?
I can think of having to ship in time for a "test run" 17.10 release (the one before the 18.04 LTS) as the only justification. I hope it will be worth it and they will be able to prepare 18.04 LTS all the better because of that. You don't have to update the OS every 6 months, anyway.
All distros "look" the same to me, because I use a tiling window manager. I don't see a desktop, I just see what I'm working on. The gnome2/gnome3/unity silliness was partly why.
I've tried Gnome in the past, didn't get it, and moved back to either Mate or Unity. Then I heard that Ubuntu would move to Gnome, and I decided to make an effort. It turned out that the default settings make Gnome into something I really don't like, while it's really customizable into something that resembles Mate close enough. I haven't gone back since.
The Gnome project should add two shortcuts on the desktop with scripts to set Gnome to mimick Mate or Unity, so users get their old desktop back with a few clicks.
I accidentally my whole Fedora-installation yesterday, so I guess this is a good a chance as any to try out how Ubuntu feels on the desktop these days.
I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu for this. All I want is a canonical (no pun intended) Linux distro so that app developers doesn't have to target a gazillion variations. So I really want to see Ubuntu succeed.
So far, I've had my laptop freeze completely 3-4 times a week, fans spinning, not responding to any input in any way shape or form. This didn't happen in Fedora. Other than that, it's basically Fedora with different colors.
I have read most of the comments. I find myself chuckling at the memory of people telling me that using cwm with X is too...whatever. I haven't had to change my workflow for something like eight years and it's still being developed with incremental improvements. I don't understand the desire to constantly mess with the dashboard when all I want to do is drive the car.
Look is subjective, but I not going to argue that the default Ubuntu colour scheme isn't absolutely horrible. A new colour scheme could make the default Ubuntu desktop more approachable to new users.
"Ubuntu's developers have put considerable effort into making GNOME cosmetically similar to Unity". I am a "ubuntu gnome" user since the start of unity (I have used it 2 weeks, it was unusable for me). Do you mean that I will have to accept the defects of gnome plus the ugly misbehaving unity dock combined ? Should I leave for fedora ?
By default it's pretty Unity like. Fortunately by adding just one package it gives you an almost pure GNOME experience. Meaning: all the changes made for Unity-like behaviour only happen in the Unity session. They put quite a bit of work into making that happen (various blogposts by a Canonical/Ubuntu employee).
After ubuntu announced the return of gnome as it primary DE I started looking for another distro/ubuntu variant with a good DE. So far ubuntu MATE and ubuntu budgie have been the better ones.
So if you are in the market for a new ubuntu flavor you should try both.
Anyone tried it recently? How stable is it? Particularly, does it support multiple external displays with different scaling properly on Intel with Wayland?
Unfortunately the live USB allows to test only on Xorg, Wayland is not available.
Can't one just get a paid version without the amazon search? I know it can be uninstalled, but still, feels better that no such thing exists in the first place.
It's not though.. because of how it works. When you enable online searching, it sends those searches off to Ubuntu's servers and 3rd parties.. and Ubuntu explicitly says they will collect and store everything you type into the dash along with your IP address.
And because of how central the dash is to Ubuntu... it's a huge piece of spyware.
Depending on whether you have opted in or out (see the “Online Search” section below), we may also send your keystrokes as a search term to productsearch.ubuntu.com and selected third parties so that we may complement your search results with online search results from such third parties including: Facebook, Twitter, BBC and Amazon. Canonical and these selected third parties will collect your search terms and use them to provide you with search results while using Ubuntu.
By searching in the dash you consent to:
the collection and use of your search terms and IP address in this way; and
the storage of your search terms and IP address by Canonical and such selected third parties (if applicable).
it is worth of note that gnome 3 only now is getting to 90% of what it was during gnome 2. what was that? six years too? I have no idea. I am a KDE user now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504972
HN tells me this was 2402 days ago. Oh how quickly the kilodays fly by. But I am glad that after a mere twenty four hundred days Canonical finally listened to my advice.
I have been using mostly Xubuntu during the unity years so this thing did not affect me much. So I can look at the unity mistake not with anger but with interest and curiosity.
And when you look at the whole thing dispassionately and with perspective, you have to admit that this was not a mistake that Canonical made exclusively. It was a mistake the entire computing and software industry made. It was one of those strange turns into dead ends that happen to industries sometimes.
After the first ipad came out, the entire industry was absolutely certain that the future was tablets. Everyone started changing their user interfaces for tablets. And they did not care how much their customers complained, they just forced it down their throats because that was the future darn it.
But it turned out that the tablet future never happened. Even now I had to pay extra for a touch screen laptop because there was no other choice, when I "use" the touchscreen option only inadvertently.
The good thing about linux is that they can never railroad you into anything. So I switched to Xubuntu and that was that.