> Ubuntu has done a bit of tweaking so that you can actually put launchers, folders, and files on your desktop, which should be welcome news for many Ubuntu users. How long that will last is an open question, though, since GNOME just completely removed the code that made it possible for Canonical to enable this feature.
I was curious about this and went spelunking for more information.
I understand the need to remove cruft that blocks progress, but the Desktop filesystem metaphor is used by almost every single computer user I have ever seen. It seems wilfully destructive to remove something that is depended on by so many without making sure there's a replacement in place first.
> It seems wilfully destructive to remove something that is depended on by so many without making sure there's a replacement in place first.
Could cut straight to the GNOME logo after that sentence. This is sort of what they do, yeah.
And they do have their niche with that, which is big enterprise-y, centrally administered systems.
If the user doesn't need to administer things themselves, then not exposing ways of administration in the GUI means less ways for the user to hurt themselves. Or rather to do something not so smart and then need tech support to fix it. Can't accidently hide your panel, if you actually cannot hide your panel at all.
I have no problem with one of the many desktop environments specializing in that, but the Linux desktop is mainly controlled by companies who then develop and set GNOME as default on their distros, which are also used by people who do need to administer their PC.
Ubuntu and Fedora have GNOME as default. Debian, too, which doesn't really have an opinion, but it's what they've always used and it's stable. Arch and Gentoo don't have an opinion at all, for obvious reasons.
openSUSE is still holding against, but SUSE uses GNOME in SLED, too, and has been spreading a sort of "We like all desktop environments in *SUSE-land"-mentality, which makes me feel like they're wanting to swap out KDE here, too, at some point.
But yeah, if you haven't yet, do yourself and the Linux desktop a favor and give KDE a fair try. Or pretty much anything else than GNOME.
I'm not saying it's impossible for you to like GNOME better, but there's so many desktop environments out there that are developed from users for users, which are actually objectively better than GNOME in so many categories. Even the most lightweight of desktop environments like LXDE/LXQt often have more features than GNOME.
And KDE is what you get when you take this feature per resource usage ratio of these lightweight environments and then multiply it by the resources that a modern system can easily provide. If you ever wanted to have all of the features and options that a desktop OS could have, KDE comes far too close to that. It's the flagship experience for power users (not the type that only ever wants to see a terminal).
Devuan and Mint do a decent job shipping gnome 2 style environments by default.
As far as I know, Gnome 2 is the last example of a Linux desktop environment that underwent professional usability testing (on regular people and power users) before shipping.
Personally, these days, I prefer minimalist WM’s and CLI administration tools for stuff like WiFi, but all the newer heavy DE’s I’ve tried have obvious (to me) usability regressions vs gnome 2.
It is funny how little usability testing is done on desktop environments these days (I also wonder if Microsoft bothered with Win 8, or if apple is with iOS these days cough podcasts cough).
"Devuan and Mint do a decent job shipping gnome 2 style environments by default."
I've been very, very impressed with the MATE desktop. It's actually GNOME 2, carefully upgraded to GTK 3, then with a sensible set of improvements. It's available on most distributions, but the lead developer is also the lead for Ubuntu MATE.
Gnome 2 had their problems with UX too. I remember especially one release where the designers had found out that "spatial" was important and the implementation of their focus on that meant that every folder I opened opened in a new window.
Also I think the general idea that options == bad started in the Gnome 2 era.
> As far as I know, Gnome 2 is the last example of a Linux desktop environment that underwent professional usability testing (on regular people and power users) before shipping.
not sure what you mean by 'professional', but KDE is still there chugging along (and IIRC default by suse, which is basically the 'red hat' of europe..)
As much as KDE is better than GNOME in almost every way (opinion: mine), this is the one use-case that GNOME is built for. For use in centrally administered environments where the user is not really supposed to touch anything. Which is the primary use-case for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (or other enterprise desktop distros, too).
openSUSE is still on KDE and I'm really hoping that SUSE doesn't violently take that over to make it their GNOME vessel.
openSUSE's primary use-case is for home-users, who do need to administer their PC, and it's sort of a power user distro anyways (YaST, btrfs+Snapper, not Ubuntu), so KDE is perfect for that.
> Could cut straight to the GNOME logo after that sentence. This is sort of what they do, yeah. And they do have their niche with that, which is big enterprise-y, centrally administered systems.
Does Gnome really have a niche there? I know of three places with large Linux deployments (as in hundreds of stations). None of them use Gnome -- its interaction model is so weird and foreign that getting people who aren't Linux/FOSS enthusiasts to use it difficult, painful and frustrating for everyone, users included.
All three are SuSE shops, actually. All three run KDE; one of them is more relaxed when it comes to software engineers so a couple of folks run Cinnamon, but that's about it.
The unsettling phenomenon is that most non-techie users don't need something super smart and intuitive, they want something like Windows, because that's what they've used so far to get their work done and they see no reason to learn something new.
If it's different, but approachable, they'll adjust (perhaps that's the value in customizable DEs like KDE; you can start with something that everyone's comfortable with, then they can tweak it to make it "better"). But if it's radically different and you need someone to explain them exactly why it's better and how they've been using computers wrong this whole time, that doesn't work in the real world.
I think there are two different kinds of "power users" that people have been conflating without noticing.
• There are the kind that want more "power" exposed through the GUI, with administration happening through the same interface as regular usage. This culminates in things like Windows Server administration via snap-ins. This is traditionally what a "power user" refers to.
• There are the kind that want to treat their PC or mobile device as, effectively, single-node enterprise systems, with administration happening through alternative interfaces that were designed specifically for administration, usually of large clusters of systems. These are the folks who are at home with Windows Group Policy Objects; Linux config files; MDM profiles on mobile; etc. Basically, sysadmins who happen to be administering their home network. These also get called "power users", though maybe "hobbyists" (that hobby being https://reddit.com/r/homelab/ building) might be more apropos.
Most modern OSes seem to be moving away from supporting the first kind of "power user", seemingly because features that support that use-case are also "sharp edges" where less-knowledgeable users can hurt themselves.
But modern OSes are exposing ever-more configuration functionality to the second kind of "power user." Windows now lets you do more things through PowerShell commands than you ever could through the Control Panel. macOS has always left the more arcane functionality to the terminal, creating POSIX-ish tools like diskutil(8), defaults(8), scutil(8), lsregister(8), etc. And Linux, underneath, is still just glued together 99% via editable plaintext files (the newest iteration being systemd unit files.)
As "the second kind of power user", I like using GNOME just fine. (It's actually a little bit "more powerful" for me than macOS is, even, because I'm also the third kind of power user: a developer willing to tweak the GNOME source to get what I want. ;)
From what I understand, and I don't follow this particularly closely, so I might be wrong...
They are removing the ability to have a Nautilus backed set of Desktop icons, with the intention of replacing this with something built in a more standard way for the rest of Gnome (which I think means web technologies?). As I understand it this not about removing desktop icons, it is about replacing unmaintained legacy code with more a modern alternative. I don't think the alternative is ready yet, but that's not to say that the direction they want to go is not having the feature.
Yes, that's the logic behind GNOME's move, but it doesn't address the user's concerns. First of all they are removing code of a popular feature before it has been replaced. Secondly, they are adding to code duplication by creating 2 totally separate code bases.
In both OS X and Windows your desktop is just a folder with a background set to icon grid view. From right clicking to dragging, the UX is and should be identical to the file manager. So it makes sense to have that part of the UI handled by the program that's already a file browser.
Now a developer is going to recreate all of the features provided by Nautilus in a JavaScript and CSS extension. Any differences will make a janky experience for the end user.
Why should the desktop metaphor be constrained to “just a folder with a background set to grid view” though? Phones are already far ahead of most desktops by having widgets. Perhaps we’ll see innovation in the area of desktop UIs from Gnome when they get the next generation in place.
You are not the first one to think so. It's been tried, in various forms, since the late 1980s, by Microsoft, by third-party companies writing software for Windows, by Apple, by virtually every major open source desktop, with precisely the same results: desktop widgets are fun gimmicks that people fiddle with for a day or two, then forget about them. No one uses them.
We tried widgets on the desktop: both macOS and Windows had them in previous versions, announced to great fanfare. Nobody used them and they were quietly removed.
Same thing with notification centers: another thing that both Mac and Windows added assuming it would be just as vital on the desktop as it was on phones. AFAICT they see very little use; I can't remember the last time I opened the notification center on either the Macs or PCs I use.
Not that new developments on the desktop aren't welcome, but widgets aren't it. Not every innovation that works on mobile can or should be brought to the desktop.
The usefulness of the notification center depends on the applications you run, I think. I recall putting a lot of work into 3rd party notification centers ages ago on PCs that didn't have a system one.
Certainly I use the PC one enough that I have the keyboard shortcut memorized and use it a bunch (Win+A). Interestingly, I find I often need it most in games, as the Windows version of the Xbox Guide, the Game Guide Bar, (even with the improvements in the recent April release), doesn't make it as easy to interact with things like Party Chat and Game Invite notifications as the Xbox Guide does on the Xbox One (where the Guide doubles as the Notification Center).
Widgets on the phone work great because the launcher is where I end up every time I press the power key. Widgets on the desktop are useless because the desktop is always obscured by things I'm actively working on, and the only time I will see a widget is when I'm not using my computer for anything at all.
Fair point. I don’t use a desktop at all because I use a tiling window manager.
When I worked at a Linux distro (endlessos.com) they had modified Gnome to have a universal search bar on the desktop. It was targeted at a different group of users than me, but it seemed to make sense based on that group.
Hopefully Gnome does sufficient user testing to deliver a useful experience to some significant group.
I would certainly use a search bar, especially if it had the capability to launch terminal programs or open a terminal in a certain directory. Most widgets I see on my phone are things like calendars or counters, which on a desktop OS should go in the same space as running programs.
On macOS the desktop actually has slightly different behavior than a typical Finder window. Normally the desktop shows Hard disks, External disks, and Connected Servers; but if you open "~/Desktop" in a Finder window none of those items will be present.
Honestly, I never use the desktop for anything so getting rid of it isn't a big deal to me. Could you explain what kind of things you use it for? What's so bad about viewing the desktop through a window?
For me that's basically the "current place I'm working on". If I got a project, I'll have a dedicated directory. But a lot of stuff I are not a project, or will be done forever in a few hours.
So the desktop is a transition area, easily accessible, where I can put all the file I need for the task at hand right now. It's also the place I see everyday when logging it, so I can review what needs to be filed, and what need to be deleted. Clean desktop every morning, clean mind.
Yep, same here. It's kinda like my 'scratch space' - a quick place to drop downloads, screenshots, work on them a bit, and have them easily accessible from all workspaces.
As others have already commented, I don't trust them to add it back in.
And it would fit their design philosophy to permanently remove it, which has been moving away from the concept of files as a whole. Instead, you're supposed to launch the app that does what you're trying to do and then open the file that you want to edit through that.
Another feature removal that has shown this direction, is the removal of the option to create an empty file from the context menu in the file manager.
Again, instead open the app that creates the type of file that you want and then create the new file in there.
This is not the first feature that is removed before the replacement API is added, it is similar with the tray icons, tray icons are removed and only special GNOME apps can use a "tray like icon" for now until (and if) GNOME developers add a stable API so third party apps can use it.
Good riddance. I just want to maximize or tile my windows -- I've never found it useful to have desktop icons. The desktop just ends up as a sea of icons that you have to hunt through to find the one you want.
In other news people like you and I are such freaking minority that a well-targeted meteor rain can kill us all off. My usual desktop is Xmonad w/o any bars etc, Emacs w/ 2 windows and qutebrowser. I'm not a programmer, so people that look at my computer are usually non-techies, and they usually find it frightening.
> It seems wilfully destructive to remove something that is depended on by so many without making sure there's a replacement in place first.
Seems the answer is in that last link of yours:
>Nautilus had have a feature called “the desktop” which adds icons on the background of the user workspace, similar to Windows.[..]
if you look you will see that the desktop is composed by more than 10.000 lines of code
That's a big mess and I finally understand why opening nautilus on i3wm always completely messes the desktop up. Using the file manager as a hack to build a desktop is a bad abstraction and I can understand why it they'd want to rebuild it.
> the Desktop filesystem metaphor is used by almost every single computer user I have ever seen
Smartphones, tablets, and Chromebooks are incredibly popular and lack a desktop. ChromeOS is the most similar to GNOME here, in that it has a desktop wallpaper but you cannot create anything there.
Most of these smartphones and tablets have homescreens which serve a pretty similar purpose. And people are used to having links to all their favorite apps on it.
Yeah, but I've yet to see somebody to be productive on those.
Either the setup is too limitating : trying to do anything multi task on a phone OS is excuciating, you can't have your 3D rendering software/IDE/veracrypt/... installed in chrome OS, you don't have enough hard drive space,
Or on the other end of the spectrum, I even got friends who are minimalistic, they have no windows decoration, all is keyboard based, with an arch and dvorak layout, doing everything in VIM. Well in the end, they are slower, because they have to keep so many things in their head to do the most basic thing. Like 70 keyboard shorcut (on 3 different keyboard in case they are not on their perfect seup) layout and the position/index of their windows and names of files to just edit + switch. You can literally see them think before every action that requires context switching, which is brain power that they don't use for fixing the problem. And by the way, they spend a lot of time taking care of that setup, despite the fact they advertise it as rock solid.
It seems strange that Gnome is heading to an non-intuitive direction. You could have all the cool stuff but I think you also should provide the familiar Desktop metaphor elements. I already made a comment about the missing type-ahead search in Nautilus file browser, which decision destroys many people's workflows.
>> It seems strange that Gnome is heading to an non-intuitive direction.
Really? I've never heard anything but non-intuitive ramblings from UI design people. None of them seem to ever actually use computers. Rather, they dream up use cases based on contrived scenarios. I want one thing: The icon is where it was yesterday. Gnome, unity all the others have one job: Let me launch the program I need and get the F out of my way. UI stability is why I years ago abandoned the chaos of Ubuntu for the stability of Mint.
Windows XP got it right. Start button->office->word. Start button -> Email. Most everything after that is fluff.
I'd say Windows 95 in this context. XP was the first stable version of Windows (yes, the first one deserved to be called Windows 1.0), but the Start menu was working well in Windows 95/98/ME, too.
I love it for this. I got burned by both KDE4 and Gnome... 3? (starting as actually usable WM, then getting drunk on success and thinking they can and should reinvent the modern desktop). I would love Xfce even more if they fixed some small UX shortcomings (like being able to sort opened apps the way you want to, being unable to set anything in Indicator plugin and similar), but even so it's at least stable and useful. Kudos to developers!
You can enable drag-and-drop in the Window Buttons panel Item. As for Indicator, yeah, it's a bit of a mystery. But I don't think much is missing there.
Other examples of missing stuff:
- Complex shortcuts: you can't set keyA and also keyA+keyB as shortcuts work on keyPress rather than keyRelease. So no SuperKey and also SuperKey+L/D/R and such.
- Easy window resize: the dragging thing is exactly 1 pixel wide. Gotta use Alt+Right-click to resize.
But you get used to XFCE's tiny quirks, it really gets like heaven after some work.
Yes but that doesn't fit the accepted narrative that Gnome has sucked since V3 and the devs hate the users so much they go out of their way to make them less productive.
Incidentally, I'm part of the silent majority that enjoys Gnome and loves the emphasis on clean simplicity. No, it's not perfect, but it's moving in the right direction.
Seconded. Also I have the impression that everyone in the UI design space forgot that the software is means to an end, not an experience, and it's supposed to help users achieve their goals in maximally efficient way.
(Oh wait, but actually companies make money by making software into experience, so I guess that's where the overall trend comes from.)
We need the equivalent of CSS user stylesheets for UX, where user preferences can contextually override publisher/designer preferences. The relationship between the user and other sources of “design input” can be adversarial. Open-source rule engines can help users to negotiate this adversarial space.
Gnome extensions are weird because the UX around them very much feels like an attempt to actively discourage their use.
-using the website to install extensions requires both a browser extension and installing chrome-gnome-shell, not installed by default by most distros
-UI to configure extensions is in Tweak Tool, again not installed by default in most distros and full of the things GNOME people don't really want you to touch but will begrudgingly allow
-the second most popular extension is an improved UI for managing extensions
-the API is poorly documented and new releases always break tons of extensions
> missing type-ahead search in Nautilus file browser
I'd forgotten this! Very frustrating when you're used to using this to switch to a file in that directory. I also missed split-screen functionality, and the inability to right click and fire up a terminal from that location. Oh, and also looks like they've dropped being able to double-click on an executable .sh file to run it.
>> missing type-ahead search in Nautilus file browser
> I'd forgotten this! Very frustrating when you're used to using this to switch to a file in that directory.
I agree, but FWIW you can press Ctrl-L to focus the address bar, which allows you to enter a relative path, e.g. name of a file/directory in the current directory.
Depends on the distribution you use. Some (Debian, Ubuntu) make it extremely annoying to apply your own patches to packages, while others (Arch, Gentoo) make it very easy.
This one is so annoying to me. I keep typing names of file and it searches it recursively, so instead of going to what I want faster, I waste time.
It's such a weird decision, as searching recursively something is a rare task, so having a dedicated button would be fine. While going to a file/folder in the current dir is pretty much the basic interaction with a file manager.
I don't get their reasoning there.
If somebody knows of any trick to get the old behavior back (even patching the damn nautilus), I'll take it. I'll probably upgrade in a few month and I'll need it badly.
I've been skipping all the Unity drama by staying on Xubuntu which is really snappy and stays out of your way.
Also, Gnome on this laptop (Dell Inspiron 15 7000) gave me (and several others users, as per forum post https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2358975 and some bug reports I found on the internet) a freeze or stutter every 10 or so seconds. So instead of having to start debugging shit from a fresh Linux install like I used to do in early 199x linux days, I chose to install xubuntu and just get to work and be productive.
Try XFCE today, really (and install all gnome apps should you need to run something from that desktop environment: they integrate great with xfce).
I have been using XFCE for 5 or 6 years, the _best_ thing about it are it's developers, they don't keep updating it.
XFCE avoids the plague which affects rest of the software industry (me included) - dedicate design, marketing, and development teams who constantly have to add something to justify their jobs and bonuses. Look at the number of app updates on mobile phones, every freaking week there is a update available. If you don't update they will eventually block older versions.
I've been a big Xubuntu fan for quite a while myself. I recently put 18.04 on a VM to give it a test drive, and found that they've tweaked XFCE so that you have to be ridiculously precise at moving the mouse to a lower corner if you want to resize a window. The margin for getting a lower-corner drag cursor seems to be one pixel at best.
Argh. I've seen this problem over and over on a variety of Ubuntu versions over the years, as if they don't want me resizing windows.
Is there any way to tweak this? I'm not at all liking it. My 16.04 installations are much better in this regard.
This isn't a solution but `a just in case you are not aware` You can press alt+right click and hold then drag near the corner of the window to resize it (alt+left drag moves it).
I understand that there are times when that isn't work so it's nice to have both options. ( I wrote a browser based windowing system and have experimented with having the bezels on the windows be quite large and/or auto-expanding when the mouse nears them to make resizes as easy as possible since hard to hit pixel thing annoys me so much)
"Apparently this problem has been around for years, and one bug report has been closed "won't fix". The issue has been reopened with Bug 11808 - Xfwm: Increase the resize border of window.
The width of the grab area is controlled by the theme." 1
Most people appear to circumvent the problem by using another means of resizing windows.
"As soon as your keyboard-shortcut (in Xfce upstream its Alt+F8) is hit, you can then resize the window by either moving your mouse (no need to click or drag) or use your keyboard arrow keys." 2
The tweak I found was essentially learning a new way to resize windows. Hold ALT and right-click-drag from anywhere inside the windows at the lower right corner and it'll grab the window and resize it as you move the mouse.
I know it's not a fix, and it is still cumbersome if all you have at the moment is a laptop trackpad. But it beats having to update your destkop environment's chrome and all that jazz. I find XFCE's window chrome pleasing and minimal, the only issue is exactly that, you only have 1px of hot area at the borders.
Doesn't this depend on the theme you choose in Window Manager settings? Kokodi or Moheli might give you more pixels to grab than whatever theme you're using now.
I would not say they are immune, simply that they have the "metabolism" of sloths. In other words, a small team of volunteers rather than a big group of full time developers working for a big name corporation.
There are two reasons as you probably know. In the mobile sphere you can't really afford not updating your app because it will fail to comply with the newer standards and eventually it will be removed from the app store. It's unfortunate, it's against the interest of conservative mobile device users, but there's nothing we can do about it.
that's one good thing about opensource software that is not sponsored by corporations, they don't need to waste money just because they have a bunch of engineers on their payrolls
I used Xubuntu for a while but I was always fascinated by how bad a couple aspects of XFCE are. They maintain documentation [1] on oddball ways of resizing windows instead of just giving people what they want. I suspect MATE just does what most people want out of the box.
To their credit, the Alt+RMB method for resizing windows is, along with Alt+LMB for moving windows, really amazing. I get annoyed when I have to go back to the old way on my Mac and Windows systems.
I agree! I started using alt+rmb because I couldn't resize windows the normal way, because of the minimal xfce windowing chrome. Found this way as a workaround and now I can't really live without it. I agree, Windows/Mac window resizing now feels like handling a cumbersome dinosaur :-)
I get where you guys are coming from on this. The problem is more acute for those of us who switch between two or three different OSes as a matter of course and spend the least amount of time in Linux. That's where something like MATE really shines.
BetterTouchTool can do moving and resizing on macos, I've got them set to "FN+control" and "FN+control+option". Still haven't found anything good for Windows.
Another keyboard-only method which I haven't seen mentioned yet, that I learned in Windows but seems to work well even in Linux, is to press alt+space and then
'm' followed by arrow keys to move the window around, or
'r' followed by arrow keys to resize the window
For people like me on laptops with trackpads, these keyboard shortcuts work really well.
XUbuntu is great, and the distro I use for my desktop, but I'd also suggest checking out Ubuntu Mate 18.04. It's "old school" similar to XFCE, largely without animations to slow things down, and the 18.04 version replaced the old menu with brisk-menu which is fast, super key activated, and has search (basically it works a lot like XFCE's).
Ubuntu Mate uses gtk 3 and probably in general more modern technology than XFCE, with a similar style. Definitely worth considering.
I've been running a customized version of Mate for a few years. It's sleek and efficient. Had some screen flicker issues at first, but switching window managers to Compiz (I think) fixed it.
I even brought an old Macbook back to life by throwing Mate on it in place of MacOs.
Using xubuntu now. You're right. It does just stay out of the way, and that's what I want.
The applications delivery the value on the desktop, not the desktop environment. The DE vendors (Gnome/Unity in particular) need to work that out and just get out of the way.
Exactly my approach. Periodically I ask what are the advantages of an environment like Gnome that would make it worth it for me to put up with the resource usage. I haven't heard anything compelling yet.
Many years ago I used to use light weight window managers. I remember using icewm after I got fed up with enlightenment, but I think it was Fluxbox that I kept for a long time -- up until about 2010.
However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.
> However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.
You don't need to run a full DE to have tray icons. I'm running i3 and the network manager applet + other tray items work just fine.
This is somewhat orthogonal to what window manager you are running though. Most tiling WMs (e.g. xmonad) combine nicely with xfce[1], giving you all the convenience features you mention while still not having to mess around with moving and resizing windows. I've been using that combination for years and wouldn't want to switch back to either plain xmonad or plain xfce.
You can have those with a window manager too, but in this case you need to do more fiddling
I use xmonad with stalonetray [1] (which as you may guess from the name is a standalone notification tray) and dzen2 [2] as a notification area for basic information ( battery / cpu / temperature / wifi status ).
With them I cover enough of my needs and I don't feel the need to anything more complex.
I think that it would be nice to have some middle ground between a full desktop environment and bare-bone and manually configured window manager though.
LXDE/LXQt is what I think of when I read your descriptions.
It's Openbox (which is a really capable, lightweight non-tiling window manager) plus a panel plus Xfce Power Manager and similar applications to handle the desktop environment stuff.
I run Xfce on Debian, I have Gnome 3 in reserve. And occasionally try it out. I quite like the notification area/panel under Gnome. Font clarity seems a little different (better). Workspaces are okay, plug-able drives are handled well, network manager is pretty good these days, as it now has a CLI alternative. But I don't like the application launcher. Not a fan of scrolling through loads of icons.
Nautilus has got increasingly shitty. So there's less Gnome now in my Xfce.
I tried Win 10 recently, it was horrible.
In conclusion they all have warts. But Xfce is okay in a Win95 kind of way. It could be better.
Xubuntu at least has the whisker menu system, which gives you search bar in menu. Without it one can remove system menu and replace it with Xfce app-finder launcher. Then it's best to change a setting to place windows near the mouse pointer.
Note: I'm currently not using Xfce at home, but I use some older version at work.
Almost the same, but i3-gaps instead of XFCE. Ubuntu update is just a `do-release-upgrade` and reboot. Nothing changes.
The only thing I don't really like in the Ubuntu's model is the bi-yearly updates and the PPA system. Every time you upgrade the distro the PPA's get disabled and there's a lot of work enabling them and fixing the packages.
That being said, I installed NixOS to my other laptop and after two days got a configuration that just installs and configures everything I need. I might overwrite this Ubuntu installation with it and go rolling with the master.
Why gaps, though? I'm not looking to pick a fight at all. I'm only curious. I just don't understand gaps.
I've been using i3 for years, and I tried out gaps when it first started popping up in the ricing forums (like https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ [please note, it's not actual porn]).
Do you use gaps so that you can see little bits of your background image? Is it purely aesthetic? I can understand beefing up the borders so that there's some space between tiles, but the gaps seem like unnecessary waste of space.
Same story as most here; XUbuntu for the past 7-8 years. Mostly run it in a VM from Win 10 for Dev work. I really need to get that global menu bar installed after I upgrade to 18.04 though.
I need Win10 for low latency music work and for the odd game, all development work happens in Xubuntu VMs.
Windows is essentially a shell where I juggle vms when I need a dev environment for a specific client.
I use VirtualBox as my virtualization solution and what I found was that using Xubuntu made the whole "linux in a vm" experience much more snappier, and since I basically work with 'text' and don't fiddle with music+video inside the vm, I often forget I'm inside a VM when it's fullscreened. With Ubuntu/Unity the whole VM experience gets slowed to a crawl because Unity wants to XDamage/Composite everything and virtualbox's "accelerated drivers" aren't that good to make it perform good.
When I was rolling on company hardware(MacBook Pro) I got incredibly frustrated with the experience of running even Xubuntu in VirtualBox; the OSX Virtualbox experience is beyond abysmal :| This lead me to purchasing a personal VMware license for OSX.
Back on Windows 10 I re-evaluated VirtualBox, Hyper-V with the new linux enhanced session support(poor experience TBH), and VMware workstation player. VMware ended up being the best experience in terms of responsiveness IMHO. You may want to give it a go. It's free for personal use, but unfortunately workstation pro is quite expensive.
Did you have to do anything special to get it installed? I had a ton of UEFI trouble trying to install linux at all on that model, and Xubuntu would lock up at the splash screen if installation completed. Ubuntu works well after a similarly painful installation though.
In essence there shouldn't be a difference between installing Ubuntu or Xubuntu. But if you encountered that hurdle, here's how you can get xfce on 'ubuntu': install the "xubuntu-desktop" package from apt and it'll be available as an option on your session chooser at the login screen. this is a virtual package which installs the whole xfce desktop environment. it is essentially what xubuntu does :)
XFCE is nice, but I've been using Window Maker since before Ubuntu even existed, I've carried my basic GUI across multiple distros, and I use it on Ubuntu to this day.
https://windowmaker.org/ -- Really, though, it's in the package repos of just about any distro...
Does XFCE suffer with the Gnome3 affliction of having a top menu bar and a program menu bar underneath? I am left looking through a letter box at my software. Unity was good at this...Gnome3 is not
> but two deserve a quick mention. The first is Kubuntu, which for my money is the flavor to beat. If you haven't tried KDE lately, you really should give Kubuntu a go. KDE is no longer the memory hog it once was, and Plasma 5.12 offers an incredibly nice, polished, and smooth experience.
Strongly agree. KDE/plasma continue to make great progress and it's my personal favorite. Looks gorgeous out of the box, is light on memory and the cpu, and offers great customization options. Since it uses a layout similar to Windows 7/10 people coming from the mentioned operating systems feel right at home and it eases the transition to linux (I've installed Kubuntu for a few non-technical people and so far no complaints!). If you're interested in following KDE's progress, check out Nate Graham's blog [0] where he publishes a weekly post going over new features and bug fixes in KDE applications and plasma. Really looking forward to plasma 5.13.
KDE too has cycled through removing the ability to put things on the desktop and reverted to allowing a "folder view" and then back to a traditional windows desktop (as one option).
They still do some kookie stuff with Plasma -- from big things like Activities to little annoying things like removing the drag-resize from the application menu (I fix the size in ~/.config after every update), and removing the KDE version info from the Dolphin file manager about menu. Weird little changes that make you wonder if someone's gone insane.
Mind you I disable just about every automation and haven't used KDE apps like kmail for a long time.
You always had an ability to put things on the desktop in Plasma, even in KDE 4.0. It just worked in a completely different way, unrelated to the "Desktop" folder in the filesystem.
Also, Alt+PPM works well for resizing the Plasma menus now. It was missing for some time due to architectural changes.
There was, in a form of the icon plasmoid. It worked and behaved completely differently than Folder View does, but if you really wanted, you could have some icons on the desktop. It still works, by the way - it gets created when you drag'n'drop something into the non-Folder View based desktop.
I think drag'n'dropping might have been added shortly after 4.0, but the icon widget was there from the beginning for sure.
I'm on Ubuntu 18.04 (upgraded from 16.04) and I'm still using Unity. Technically Unity is not gone, but it's no longer a default, Gnome is.
I've tried Gnome and was very disappointed. No global menu integration which means losing useful screen space for no good reason. Tray icons somehow look squished and ragged. No fractional scaling is a massive issue for me since I'm working with dual 27 inch 4K displays. Tray bar only shows only on one of the monitors and you need a plugin to make it appear on both which is just ridiculous. No more convenient built in features/options like auto resizing a window to 1/4 of the screen by dragging it with a mouse to one of the corners, etc.
I'm with you. Maybe it's just that I'm familiar with Unity but GNOME feels like a step back in almost every aspect.
On the other hand you can just install KDE Plasma that went a long way and works fine if you just stick to the UI - all your pain points should work out of the box or can be configured using systemsettings. KDE applications are a mixed bag - I love dolphin but kmail and other stuff feels strange. Also printing is way better in GNOME apps, not sure why exactly.
Another serious issue with Gnome IMHO, also shared with Unity, is way too small window edges so that attempting to drag-to-resize a window becomes an exercise in patience.
I'm on a laptop most of the time and, like you, have absolutely no desire to go back to wasteful non-global menus. Have you eyed a replacement DE for Unity/Ubuntu going forward?
Edit: OTOH, Ubuntu have clearly spent a good amount of effort to customize Gnome so here's hoping they can morph it to work like Unity even more (OHD, global menu)
I've tried KDE Plasma too but didn't like it either. To me it looked like 15 years behind Unity in terms of polishing, aesthetics and design/look consistency of base applications such as file and task managers. Unfortunately Unity was just right for me and everything else feels like a massive step down without tweaking the shit out of it and still not quite getting wanted result.
I believe the resize issue is fixed on Gnome3 for awhile now, or maybe it was some issue with Ubuntu's default theme?
Global Menus is unfortunately something that I still miss, although I was able to recover some screen space with an Extension called Pixel Saver, which merges the window control bar with the panel by removing the window decorations and adding the buttons to the panel. Not ideal, but useful.
Are you aware that you can hold down Alt and right-click-drag on a window to resize it? Alt+left-click-drag moves the window. (I believe it's Alt on GNOME, might be the Windows/Super/Meta/Logo-key instead.)
So, when you have your hand on the keyboard, this can be much more convenient.
This. Lack of fractional scaling is a big deal. I have 15" Full HD screen on my laptop, and everything is too small without fractional scaling (I prefer to have it set at 1.125/1.25).
I tried that as well with the same results (blurry text). The best approach I found was to install gnome-tweak-tool, and set the font scaling factor to 1.5. Chrome and a lot of other apps scale everything including ui elements by 1.5. The window manager and some other apps don't seem to support this though.
Ubuntu on my new ThinkPad X1 Carbn with 1440p 14" screen is awful due to no fractional scaling. At 150% it is perfect but with the only options being 100% or 200% it is close to useless for me. Such a shame. Guess I will need to look at how to get Wayland working to see if I can get fractional scaling back. Seems those who have got it working still have a load of issues with jaggy fonts though. I had hoped that in 2018 these things would have been solved. Even Microsoft has managed to implement a high quality solution.
The experimental fractional scaling that GNOME provides is nice but only works w/ apps that have been ported to Wayland. Everything that runs in XWayland (Firefox, Thunderbird, emacs) shows up as extremely blurry.
I've got the exact same 1440p screen as you on my Thinkpad (which wants to be run at 1.5x or 1.75x) and the best solution I've found is provided by KDE. Try installing Plasma (either by installing Kubuntu or just installing the desktop w/ apt) and setting Display->Scaling to 2X and then go into fonts separately and set "force font DPI" to 168. That's working remarkably well for both GTK and QT apps for me. 2X scaling for windows/icons keeps them from being tiny/blurry and setting the font size to 168 (aka 175%) prevents the fonts from being huge.
The Mutiny layout in UbuntuMATE 18.04 is really nice, and they've implemented the HUD, global menu, titlebar integration, and it's got HiDPI support now.
I think multimonitors is still an issue though - you can only have one dock, and it's best left on the screen on the left by the looks of it.
There was a global-menu extension for GNOME, but it's no longer supported. The reason for this apparently was the fact that the extension was not compatible with Wayland, so the developers moved on.
Exactly. I had setup some dock extensions before Ubuntu went back to gnome and I'm stuck with it now, can't seem to be able to switch back. Deactivating / uninstalling said extension didn't work. I uninstalled it years after installing so probably the settings changed name or something.
It's up to developer/maintainer to provide rollback.
My experience with Gnome 3 isn't deep because I've switched to KDE after 2 months of tinkering and feel happy ever since.
KDE is kinda okay now, but I just can't forget the nuclear clusterfuck called kde 4 back in the day.
I kinda tolerate gnome 3 (despite its marvellously obvious flaws) for now and if I find it way too annoying, I'll rip it out and use fluxbox or smg similarly low level wm.
Since 20+ years ago I used decent window managers that let me have a 2x2 workspace. VERY simple to use. Moving the mouse works within a workspace and the same way across workspaces (mouse off any edge).
Moving windows worked within workspaces (click, drag, drop) same as across workspaces (click, drag, drop).
Basically the principal of least surprise. Moving the mouse and clicking shouldn't have special rules across workspaces unrelated to the rules of working within a workspace.
So basically you could basically intuitively work on a space much larger than your screen without having to think about it.
Ubuntu 18.04 forces vertical workspaces (so 1x4). In the dual monitor config it only moves the left monitor across desktops. And moving windows between workspaces is a nightmare. Step one is move the mouse to the top left corner and click activities to expose. Step 2 displays all your windows as tiny icons, 2/3rd of your screen is just the background, so they aren't much bigger then icons, and theor position once exposed is unrelated to the original position. So now you have to refind your window, then drop it into one of the workspaces. But you can't watch or tell where it lands. So then you have to switch workspaces and refind that window.
Quite the pain compared to 16.04 (or any decent window manager since olvwm 20+ years ago) it's just drag and drop.
Additionally there's no spatial relationship. So a window that's off your top edge of your workspace doesn't show up in the workspace above yours. It's basically just 4 unrelated workspaces. They also prevent wrap around, so you can't go from 1 to 4, but have to visit 2 and 3 first.
Reminds me of the first hacks to OSX and Windows to get more than one desktop. Linux folks figured this out 20+ years ago with olvwm, ctwm, and many others.
>>> In the dual monitor config it only moves the left monitor across desktops
There is a fix for this in display settings.
I have personally gotten used to the vertical alignment and new key patterns. Still using 17.10 but performance seems improved from unity and looking to maybe get back into a bit of gtk development ;)
Oh, goodness. Use your keybindings! Don't "move your mouse to the corner", press the windows key. Ctrl-Alt-Up/Down will scroll between desktops rapidly and visually. Add Shift and it will carry the focused window along with you.
When you move a window, it "lands" exactly where it started, moving a window between virtual desktops doesn't change it's X/Y position (why would it? what do you want to happen?).
Basically, you're having trouble learning your new tools. But different and bad are not the same thing. Spend a little longer and try harder.
Everyone hates new desktops when they try them the first time. "Everyone" hated Unity too. And Gnome 2. And Gnome 1. And KDE4...
This isn't strictly related to your suggestion, but a more general comment.
Am I the only one who finds it a bit frustrating that any time someone complains about missing/bad functionality in gnome, someone recommends to install an extension, but when a user complains about stability or performance, their number of extensions are blamed?
No you are not the only one. I've had performance problem with GNOME on my Dell XPS 13 for a while. Initially it was mostly sluggish animations. After couple of years, with regular updates, my fan is continuously spinning and it visibly feels slow. I don't use very few popular extensions (hide title on maximize, the ubuntu defaults).
I mostly use i3 which is perfect, but one of those days when I feel like using a full desktop environment, I just can't. On positive side however, scaling for hidpi screen seems to work out of box in Ubuntu 18.04.
CTR+SHIFT+(ARROW UP|DOWN)should move the current window to the workspace up or down without losing focus. A minor setting on Gnome tweak allows you to have workspaces on all monitors as well.
I wonder if it was an effect of people who didn't like it complained and threw hissy fits. Those that liked or didn't mind, didn't say anything.
So it _seemed_ as if everyone hated and they just had to replace it. I've observed that pattern happen with product features before. A customer chimes vocally that they hate something, another does etc. An issue is created, work starts, then a whole new wave of complain come later that "hey I did like that feature, why did you remove it".
Wonder how the decision was made, did they do a more formal survey or just went by the vocal critics on HN and other sites?
(Now having said that, I don't dislike the new interface, so not complaining about GNOME, just mainly interested in how the decision process worked).
Unity wasn't perfect but I personally really enjoyed it after the initial adjustment period. I mostly switch between a web browser, a terminal, and a text editor. I like how Unity let me run the applications I needed while staying out of my way and taking up mininal screen space.
I believe it was discontinued due to Canonical's strategy of dropping mobile support. Unity was an effort to have a unified desktop across devices, I believe.
Canonical is pivoting towards enterprise software [1]
I loved Unity, and was pretty apprehensive about the change back to Gnome in 17.10. To my surprise, having hated gnome 3 when it came out years ago, the transition has been almost painless.
The Ubuntu team have done a great job, the "new" settings screens are especially nice IMO.
With KDE that got so much better in the last 2-3 years, Qt license that is not an issue anymore since a long time... why so many distros are still using GNOME (especially version 3)?
I try using KDE every couple of years and I can't even put my finger on why it grosses me out so much. The "K" start to every piece of software is obnoxious, I don't know if this is true today but I remember one of my first times using KDE and searching for "calculator" or something and being unable to find it because it was "kalculator". Terrible UX.
I think what really gets me is I use Windows at work and KDE is too close to windows in some respects but isn't...it's also too close to other Linux DE's but isn't. Feels really awkward, and isn't very pretty. I don't necessarily agree with the design decisions of GNOME Shell and GTK but I think they still look a lot better than KDE and Qt.
They are somewhat moving away from calling everything and the kitchensync something with K, but the calculator is still called KCalc.
Luckily, the search has gotten a lot better, so it will actually find KCalc when you type in "calculator".
You can also type "1+1" into the search bar and it will tell you the result right there.
And there's also an option to have the menu show applications with their generic names. So, for example "File Manager" instead of "Dolphin". Depending on the distro, this option may be default-on, too.
And now would be a good time to try it again, by the way. The last three years were spent with a major rewrite. Now it has most of the features that you'd expect from a KDE again, is stable and has been stable for long enough that most distros actually have a stable version in their repos (even Kubuntu is decent for once.)
I think we have a mini-Microsoft now in the space. It's nowhere near as big of a problem because Canonical doesn't have that tight of a grip on the industry, but I get the feeling a lot of "officially supported" things only support Ubuntu and users feel it's stuck to Ubuntu with whatever their stock choices are, just like nobody can use a different OS because all their Windows software is "stuck" on whatever the newest version they "force" users to upgrade to.
I run xmonad from within a Gnome session, at least on my laptop. I looks like the PPA lazy people like myself use to do the integration has been updated for 18.04[1] so I'm going to move my laptop over shortly.
I use only i3 and no DE. It has really improved my productivity with features like sending windows to other screens at the touch of a button and floating windows across all workspaces.
Sure it was a pain to set it up (and having to configure stuff like i3-lock and suspend) but I did it once years ago and have not changed anything since then.
I do. Actually I got into i3 because of the poor performance of my laptop at work (I do NodeJs/Springboot development btw).
I must run Linux (Ubuntu 18.04 now) in a VM on a Windows 7 host and with Gnome it was too memory hungry and the UI was freezing quite often.
I feel very productive with it and I use the mouse way less than I used to.
I liked it so much that at home I also do development on Arch Linux (also in a VM) and also use i3. My i3 config is in private git repo. Nothing fancy like I see on reddit.com/r/unixporn with i3 gaps. I basically copied almost all the config from https://github.com/jessfraz/dotfiles
I do. I've tried most of the popular window managers, but this is the only one that managed to 'disappear' when I used it. Organizing my work is effortless, and it's super light on resources.
I love i3. It's the only computer interface I have used where I feel like there is absolutely no friction between me and the applications I need to run.
I don't really have to make any modifications to the config either. I change the fonts to my liking and swap dmenu for rofi and I'm more or less good to go.
Yup. I'm probably one of three people still using ion3, which was last updated around 2009 (actually the "notion" fork that builds on modern linux). I've tried to switch but the muscle memory for my custom keybindings is too strong :(
Unity was never the main reason people chose to use Ubuntu -- it was always (well, from when I first heard about it until I lost interest (5 years ago)) the claim that Ubuntu is easier to install than Debian.
I never understood the fixation about ease of installing, as that's something I either did once every few years on custom hardware, or had automated already using a CFM. For stuff I installed manually (laptops, occasional desktop rebuilds) partitioning was always the thing that gave me the most pause - and a graphical installer vs text installer didn't really impact that process. Picking a new hostname wasn't any easier with a GUI than a text interface either.
The common claim was that Ubuntu had have better X, init (upstart), installer, and maybe some more recent exotic drivers -- but I was hard-pressed to identify the differentiating factors from Debian testing (what most of my friends & family were on, at my behest).
Big thing about distros like Ubuntu and Linux Mint is that they don't hide the "non-free" drivers and software from you, and actively ask you to install them during installation process or initial setup. Meanwhile in other distros, I imagine Debian too, it would probably require adding some software sources through apt, which is beyond casual PC user already.
>I never understood the fixation about ease of installing
The only time I use linux is when I need a linux VM for something. This happens maybe 2/3 times a year, and I can never remember all the random linux specific installation stuff. Ubuntu goes into enough detail that I don't need to google it, Debian doesn't.
My fixation is because I don't care about what version of linux I'm using, I'm not going to be using it for much, I just need a linux kernel and a reasonable package manager.
I honestly don't know what you're talking about with "random linux specific installation stuff". Installation of Linux hasn't really been any different from Windows since the early aughties as far as I can tell. Select keyboard layout, provide hostname, just let the partitioner use the whole disk automatically, configure the network, etc.
As someone who frequently hates on Desktop Linux, I agree with the sentiment that the fixation over ease of installing is pretty silly. Only a few distros in recent memory have anything remotely difficult about their installation process, and it's usually that they don't bother with any wizards and just make you do everything by hand from the shell, but those were meant for experts anyway.
Well, Windows 10 is literally pick language, pick a disk, log into your microsoft account (or create local). There are no technical decisions in the installer beyond picking a disk, and usually there is no choice there.
With Linux, I have to check what the three identical guided partition options mean, check what a network mirror is, work out which server packages I need, work out what GRUB is.
That's four pretty technical things. Honestly, I'm probably familiar enough to make a best guess these days, but I have no idea what the consequences of the choices are and google doesn't generally help as sometimes there is no right answer!
No technical decisions beyond picking a disk? That dialog is an entire partitioning tool[0], you're just choosing the easiest default, which in my experience is all you have to do for Linux installs too.
> With Linux, I have to check what the three identical guided partition options mean, check what a network mirror is, work out which server packages I need, work out what GRUB is.
While it is nice that you want to learn, you do not have to know any of that.
Boot, select disk, username+password, click next a few times, done.
I would really like to run Arch, but last time I checked it was a manual process (so I am on Majaro). The docs are really good. I am expert enough to get a lot of benefit from that amount of detail, but not expert enough to be bothered with the manual install process.
One thing that gets me is ~12 years ago I used to install distros all the time. There was a semi standard way to partition your drive, / home and swap. Now I look at the partitions that are produced and a lot of the time I have no idea what is going on. And please stop moving the bloody usb drive mount location about.
I feel the same. 12-20 years ago, I was installing Linux distros (and NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD...) multiple times in a week. It was such a wonderful playground. As a software developer, now days, I just want something to work without fiddling with it for days. That said, I just installed Arch again a week or so ago. I have 2 observations: 1. Getting it bootstrapped and running is downright annoying. I see little value in it other than teaching someone what an installer _would_ do for them. Do you know how to chroot? mkinitrd? fdisk? install a bootloader? ensure that you have the right drivers/modules to run your WiFi chipset? manually configure everything??? The end product _does_ give you a feeling of accomplishment... but, I'm still not sure it's worth the cost. 2. ArchLinux docs are about the best I've seen. Kudos to the community for doing such a fine job.
Are you re-installing, or re-starting, a VM for this?
If you're re-installing from scratch each time you're possibly doing that wrong.
An installation from scratch, in any case, should only ask you hostname, domain name, maybe wifi details (probably not for a VM), partitioning preference, and package / function (set of packages) --- none of this stuff benefits from a flashy / GUI installer.
> ... I just need a linux kernel and a reasonable package manager.
The only graphical installed I've seen was the corporate 'build' of redhat, a 65 page mammouth document that talked about 'disabling telnet'. WTF? Why the hell is telnetd even on the machine? They also had X on there -- on a frickin server.
That's when I spent some time doing an ubuntu build, which even as of 16.04 is ncurses based installer. Boot from pxe, give an IP address/gateway/dns/hostname etc, approve the automatic partitioning selection, select which support area looks after the machine (for user generation, monitoring, etc), and that's it.
Everything gets the same base install, including things like active directory based logons (with ssh keys for those who want them), automatically adds itself to nagios. Build a dev installation (which you select form pxelinux) and auto patching gets enabled, and syslogs get fired off the the right location.
On a VM this can of course be passed as part of the creation process, so it just take 5 minutes to build from scratch. When it comes to building on real hardware it's just a matter of typing the stuff into the boxes then going and making a cup of tea.
After the base install is on, you can then either apply an ansible script to do various package installs, or do it old-skool with apt-get install $package.
It's entirely possible that debian testing may work, however from a corporate signoff (and when you've got nearly 2,000 of these machines installed you need that) saying you're basing the company on 'Ubuntu LTS' is far better than basing it on "Debian Testing".
We've run this way for over a decade over 6 continents, it just works.
>Are you re-installing, or re-starting, a VM for this?
Yes, of course I am, as an amateur in linux it would be reckless for me reuse an existing linux installation in a different context. The only way I can safely re-use is docker.
>An installation from scratch, in any case, should only ask you hostname, domain name
Domain name has already lost me, I'm not a website, why do I need a domain? :)
In practice, you're usually asked about root, usernames, home folders, etc, too.
>none of this stuff benefits from a flashy / GUI installer
No it doesn't need a flashy installer, but I'm equally talking about the Ubuntu Server edition's text installer. I'm not sure if you're talking about GUI vs CLI or "graphical" vs "text-based oldschool GUI". I would say totally vanilla CLI installers absolutely don't explain things well.
> Yes, of course I am, as an amateur in linux it would be reckless for me reuse an existing linux installation in a different context. The only way I can safely re-use is docker.
If you're using Docker - or even know about it - you're not an amateur.
Since you're talking about your need to 'build a Linux VM for something' this also suggests you're significantly better than average on the GNU/Linux awareness scale.
But to your question -- if you're using a VM instance, make a base build, make it just right, and then snapshot it. When you need to spin up a new Linux VM for something, replicate the snapshot, do an apt-get update/upgrade (or equiv) and carry on. This is fairly common practice and saves having to remember your domain name, root password, home folders etc.
To your last point -- I rarely install Ubuntu, and can really only compare Debian vs various Microsoft installations processes for the past twenty years. GUI GNU/Linux installers were popularised by Ubuntu, and that's why that came up. You're right that totally vanilla CLI installers don't explain things well, but that's what we used to have on Windows 3.1 / 95 / 98 ... and people somehow managed to struggle on. Either average Microsoft users have become dumber (quite possible) or IT types continue to underestimate people's ability to read or work things out. Given almost everyone that installs an OS now has another device to hand to look up guides and answers, I'd suggest it's (installer complexity) even less of a distinction now.
Aside - Microsoft installers always had it much easier than most GNU/Linux installers simply because Microsoft installers (for a very, very long time) didn't give a flying if there was an existing operating system on the box. They'd just re-partition, re-format, install, and overwrite the MBR.
Pretty much every GNU/Linux installation process took great care to accommodate other OS's already in situ, and also documented the process and correct ordering required to be sociable with other OS's.
I went with it because if a project had binaries at all, there was likely a .deb tested with ubuntu. If there were drivers for linux, they were likely tested against ubuntu. Ease of installation is rarely talking about the install screen; it's talking about everything just working without having to dig around the internet, and installation is a good proxy for that.
> I went with it because if a project had binaries at all, there was likely a .deb tested with ubuntu.
Given that each release of Ubuntu starts as a fresh fork from Debian's testing branch, this is not a compelling case for Ubuntu over Debian.
> If there were drivers for linux, they were likely tested against ubuntu.
As above, and it doesn't really matter if you meant drivers for Linux (the kernel), or GNU/Linux (a distro).
I've never heard of any drivers that work on Debian but not on Ubuntu, or vice versa.
> Ease of installation is rarely talking about the install screen; it's talking about everything just working without having to dig around the internet, and installation is a good proxy for that.
When people talk about the ease of installation, they are almost definitely talking about the ease of installation.
"Just works" is a useful phrase to describe a range of (other) user experiences, but again it's not clear how Ubuntu has (and arguably had) any significant advantages over Debian.
To be fair there were other distros with good installers, where Ubuntu shone was with drivers and non free packages. Though I seem to remember installing scripts to install mp3 decoders, dvd readers and flash plugins all in one go.
This may be the case, but I expect it applies for a tiny percentage of (potential) users.
For a long time, anyone interested in dipping their toe into GNU/Linux would either use a live CD (Knoppix was huge) or they'd be encouraged by someone that would assist them.
At the risk of sounding dismissive, I'd suggest if someone couldn't summon the patience to follow a fairly straightforward keyboard/location/pick-a-host-name/yeah-use-my-whole-disk sequence of steps, then actually using a GNU/Linux operating system for more than a few days was probably not on the cards. I'm not suggesting it was ever an intentional gating process, but it probably did help to save some people from being even more frustrated.
You get more then a basic install, like in Arch you had to search then read the wiki then install packages from AUR(not a safe repo of scripts) to get good looking fonts. So in Ubuntu fonts just work on some other distros you need to do extra work to get better looking fonts, get flash, get codecs, get proprietary drivers. There is a very good reason Ubuntu got popular and it is not because the installer look good.
When people say "easy to install" they mean easier to install and configure to their environment. Providing intuitive interfaces and making everything more automated.
For example my 'hostname' was automatically set to motherboard model during install.
I'm on 17.10, installed it with GNOME and went back to Unity after a few hours. I was not a fan of Unity when it was released, but i guess it grew on me. Using GNOME again just didn't feel right. And screen recording was broken, if they fixed that then I may give it another go after upgrade.
Been using 16.04LTS on my personal laptop for a few years, just moved to 18.04.
I feel like the biggest improvement by far is the Snap package manager and its integration with the Ubuntu software store. After 10+ years of doing personal computing on Linux this is the first time that installing my main apps has ever felt sane!
I was blown away by being able to install the latest Android studio, with a launcher icon, in one click. No more tarballs and command line launchers and broken dependencies.
Has this been around for a while and I just didn't know about it?
It was introduced a bit earlier than 16.04LTS, but the desktop support really came a bit later than that LTS release (around the time of the point release).
I have been using it since then, but then again I am one of the developers of snapcraft.
Regardless of my affiliation I really appreciate having a base system that is relatively static and have my apps just roll, and if you don't want to roll too far, you can stick to a major release if the publisher of the snap provides a channel with a track you can subscribe to (instead of following the default track, `latest`). If things go ad, you can always revert, which is a big plus from my perspective as it is clean and per snap.
I always felt the the offical Ubuntu package manager was a dumbed down version that(though its been a while sine I have used Ubuntu). Synaptic definitely felt better for installing libraries instead of applications.
Once an Ubuntu release has been cut the debs within it can (for the most part) only receive bugfixes, not new features. Which means that as an LTS goes through its lifespan, the software within it slowly gets further and further out of date. Snaps, on the other hand, are as up-to-date as their publishers make them.
Not that it's Synaptic's fault, but some packages will have conflicting dependencies, especially if you're using PPA's to get recent software versions. It's not uncommon to get "foo (latest) requires bar >=3.1 but you have bar 2.8 installed. Baz (installed) requires bar 2.8". Snaps avoid conflicts by having each app contain it's dependencies, which could otherwise conflict.
> Snaps avoid conflicts by having each app contain it's dependencies, which could otherwise conflict.
It also negates the entire point of having a package management system, as you can’t upgrade a security issue in libfoo and get it fixed once, but have to wait for all the users of libfoo, and the users of users of libfoo, and so on, to provide a new version of the Snap package with a new fixed libfoo contained inside it.
I work for Canonical, but I also share maintainership of some snaps. From an automatic email I received recently:
“A scan of this snap shows that it was built with packages from the Ubuntu archive that have since received security updates. The following lists new USNs for affected binary packages in each snap revision:
…
Simply rebuilding the snap will pull in the new security updates and resolve this. If your snap also contains vendored code, now might be a good time to review it for any needed updates.“
Yes, you don’t get that library update everywhere all at once, but this gives each vendor a chance to make sure that update actually works with their app.
It definitely had it's quirks (e.g. the notify-send modals which didn't provide a way to manually close them), but it's still the DE I find myself most productive with.
No type-ahead search in Nautilus. Ubuntu actually dropped their unofficial patches one version ago, Gnome developers years ago. I cannot fathom how Gnome 3 developers think this is a good idea. We have tried to file bug reports, discuss with them, explain the use case. Still nothing. Very frustrating for us users.
After updating to 18.04, local DNS no longer works on this machine. It worked before. It seems that the systemd "stub" resolver isn't failing over to the LAN DNS server specified by DHCP. resolve.conf is just a single reference to systemd-resolved. It seems systemd-resolved knows about the LAN DNS server:
$ systemd-resolve --status | head -4
Global
DNS Servers: 192.168.88.1
<ISP IP 1>
<ISP IP 2>
Not clear to me whether this is a problem with systemd or with ubuntu integration of systemd. Glancing at /var/log/syslog, it seems systemd-resolved is restarting every four minutes, which seems unnecessary.
This is "by design"[0], though you should have seen it crop up in 17.04 when it became the default. I was bitten by it too and disabled systemd-resolved.
Thank you so much! This box came from the vendor on 16.04 and never ran on 17.04.
Of course, setting the following in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf did no good:
LLMNR=no
...because apparently systemd-resolved just ignores its configuration. (I did restart the service; it made no difference.) I re-commented that setting since it does nothing. In order to get this working, I instead had to change the symlink /etc/resolv.conf which previously pointed to /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf to instead point to /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf, another dynamic file which is also maintained by systemd-resolved.
So now I have systemd-resolved handling the info from the DHCP ack, but it isn't handling DNS. This works, but good grief.
It's one of many questionable design decisions in the systemd project, in my view. The other one that I really dislike is the entire logging system moving away from plain text files toward binary journals and complex commands to view them.
I'm fairly neutral on having systemd handle DNS. It seems unnecessary, but I'm not an OS dev. I do strongly prefer text logs, which are still in use on the system under discussion.
I used to dislike Unity, until I played around with macOS and got some experience with the global menu bar and similar concepts. Now I actually prefer Unity to all other desktop environments. Apart from that I can stand XFCE, but I still think Unity was the best thing to happen to Linux. Unfortunate that they're going back to GNOME.
I picked up a (very) cheap Acer Spin 1 as a dedicated machine for embedded development. 250 euros. Meant for Windows 10, but unusable for that with its 32GB of eMMC.
With a bit of effort installed Ubuntu 18.04 on it. Works great! Wifi, touch pad, even the touch screen and orientation all work out of the box. No messy driver configuration.
I did replace gnome with Unity (an `apt install ubuntu-unity-desktop` away), because it performs tons and tons better than gnome and with a 1.25 scale makes the 11" 1080P screen much more usable. Amazing how much computing you can get for this price...!
The real upgrade for me was in fact using dnf instead of apt. It seems and work so perfectly I don't even use any synaptic-like package manager.
Also yes, can confirm that GNOME is very well integrated in Fedora. That vanilla feel is so strange coming from Ubuntu, which heavily relies on modification on every package they have.
> It's a sensible change upon reflection given Wayland's long list of incomplete features like, for example, the lack of support for screen sharing in chat/VoIP apps and spotty support for VNC tools
I've been struggling with VNC on 17.10, eventually ended up installing RDP (XRDP), also buggy as hell.
Can anyone point out a good remote desktop solution for Ubuntu, that will preferably work in 18.04 ?
It would have appreciated the software updater telling me that that I won't be upgraded because I'm on the previous LTS instead of insisting that there aren't any upgrades available - this while I'm reading the release notes from Ubuntu. Bonus points for allowing me to upgrade anyway without resorting to the terminal.
As mentioned in the Ubuntu wiki, upgrades from 17.10 will not be enabled until a few days after the release of 18.04 and upgrades from 16.04 LTS will not be enabled until a few days after the release of 18.04.1, expected in late July 2018.
You can force the upgrade, however, with the following steps:
close Update Manager if it's still running
open a terminal in the same way you opened Update Manager
type update-manager -d and press enter
I switched to arch linux a couple of weeks ago after being an ubuntu user for 8 years. After installing gnome3 I see not much difference between arch linux and Ubuntu. Sure, maintaining packages is quite different (and better) in arch linux than Ubuntu. I guess I was always a fan of desktop managers and not quite concerned about the distro.
The AUR is also really cool, no more of "add this dodgy PPA", instead you download a file that allows to install dependencies and compile the original sources.
It's more transparent, and if you don't care, you can install pacaur that hides all of this behind a pacman interface
I'd say that a minor annoyance is: "here, clone this repo, hop inside the folder, oh... and grab these patches/diffs and pray that you can patch the source. Otherwise, you're not getting that cool feature that you saw on /r/unixporn". There's something to be said for downloading a binary, where someone has already fought through the compilation errors. Totally agree that the quality of AUR package (untouched by patches) are really good.
Yeah, choice of distro mainly matters in terms of how software is installed/updated, how recent the software is that you get in the distro's repositories, how well this software has been integration-tested how do the defaults look like (preinstalled software as well as settings) and most importantly of course, what color do they theme their stuff in?
If anything else irks you, you're probably looking for a different desktop environment or just to replace one application.
Ubuntu is mostly about issues with canonicals practices, (I mean come on, I can't be the only one who remembers the litany of times canonical has betrayed users?) but there are some major practical differences. For example, arch is rolling release, has the aur as opposed to random ppa lists, and arch tries to keep it simple (not minimalist according to an arch dev that's a common misconception).
Other than those sorta of things... you could say there's "not much difference" between almost any two distros. Especially since the Trojan horse systemd.
I personally don't trust canonical at all. I bet more would think like this if they read up on them a bit more.
I just dumped Windows 10 for full on Ubuntu 18 on my desktop and so far so good. Great that it has whatever you need only a shell command away. Thumbs up so far.
Yeah, until it doesn't because no one added it to the package repository, or the version in the repository is out of date, and there's not even a PPA. That's one of the big issues I have with the package manager centric application distribution model, it's basically an appstore. That wouldn't be a big deal, except that structuring the OS around the package manager as the one and only way software gets installed has lead to an environment where there is no standardized set of base system components a developer can target if they want to distribute their application any other way, so the options they're left with are 1) Statically link everything, which glibc is actively hostile to, or 2) bundle all your dependencies, a loader, and a wrapper script (or static binary) to ensure what you need is available and properly linked. Is it really any wonder why so little non-oss software is available?
There's really only one reason I do use GNOME Shell: the Pidgin IM integration and Panel OSD extensions popup a pidgin notification in the center screen where I can reply back to it inline without having to switch to the desktop where pidgin is running (or switch to the active pidgin window even if it's running on the other monitor with the static desktop). I do so much communication with various people throughout the day (using protocols supported by Pidgin) that this saves me a whole heck of a lot of time. I just wish it was available for other desktops.
I use Pidgin to connect to Skype, Facebook, XMPP and Google Hangouts with plugins. I communicate with lots of people on various networks and with only one program and even then only through notifications. I just need texting somehow and I'd be all set!
For people like me that need updated drivers for hardware reasons and really don't want to deal with a new UI, there is always the option of newer kernels.
I personally use this method, which is easy to use, upgrades automatically via the normal apt mechanism, and has never once failed me.
I'm a fan of Cinnamon. I wasn't expecting to like it, but I do, and much more than Gnome 3. Cinnamon's old fashioned flexible panel interface still can't be beat.
panic story time: updated yesterday. after the update, reboot. full disk encryption doesn't accept my password anymore. fuck. full panic mode. already searching for an usb stick to get a clean install, although it may take a couple of hours to get the machine back into a working state.
luckily my colleague knew what was going on. i had special characters in my password and after the update, the keyboard layout changed from german to english.
I love Gnome, but I have been in an almost constant fight with the taskbar in Gnome. Adding applications is not trivial (right-click doesn't work), removing them is also not trivial. Moving applications to the end of the list is easy (and happens often by accident), but moving them back to their original place is impossible (unless you want to play the game of moving applications to the end of the list until the list is in the correct order). I managed to have my taskbar disappear somehow at some point. I had to restore from backup to get it back. And I managed to change the background color to transparent, and I can't change it back. Also, at some point, I lost the workspaces widget. I hope that in the new version, things work a little smoother.
I don't know if this is on topic but I switched to Ubuntu 18.04 recently and ran into this fairly annoying bug [1]. Installing curl installs libcurl4, which then uninstalls any applications you have that have a dependency on libcurl3 (which turns out to be Slack, Virtualbox, and some others). They really need to figure out how to allow libcurl4 and libcurl3 to live side-by-side if that's possible.
Responses from ubuntu folks on that bug ticket have just been "Those packages are not official ubuntu packages so we can't do anything"
For some reason I can only run the snap with sudo, and thus any processes it spawns (clicking links or opening a file manager for example) run as root.
I've been trying to find out whether Ubuntu 18.04 still supports the gnome-flashback package. I've tried to install it via apt-get in a virtual machine but then there was no option to select it as my session after a reboot.
Without sounding too negative, I understand that this is a lot of work but I simply don't understand why Linux desktops, let it be Gnome, Unity, KDE or anything else always looks like a bunch of developers try to master usability.
right? Most DEs offer solutions to problems that simply don't exist. Take the launchbar on the left-hand side for instance. Being able to launch apps quickly is handy. But why waste valuable screen space for it? A simple launcher that can be activated with a keyboard shortcut is enough imho.
Why hasn't Canonical hired a designer to modernize the UI? Surely they can afford it. Is it a point of pride for it to remain outdated? I guess that's a feature from the POV of the primary Ubuntu target demo?
My experience is quite the contrary which makes me wonder, does it really behave so differently among systems?!? touchpad and bluetooth pairing (a2dp) are not working after suspend+resume. Notice: touchpad can be fixed with a script in /lib/sysetmd/system-sleep. Home encryption gone?!?! Why for fucks sake?!? This was one of the USPs for me to use it over Debian. Yeah it can be done manually, but for beginners this is a drawback...
BT applet, at least on Unity (yes, I'm one of those people) seems to be borked in that it can't enable BT after resume. I'm guessing it's because it remembers the wrong BT device ID (which gets incremented after every sleep/resume, at least on my system).
I have a problem after upgrading to 18.04 - even if CPU is idle fans are still working. Everything was fine on 17.10 (fan would only work on higher loads) then upgraded on my ultrabook to 18.04 and fan is working all the time. Anyone have similar experience/solved that?
THIS! This, so many times. Xfce lets you actually use your computer to accomplish tasks without getting in the way and/or forcing you any "intended usage".
It is so good and so light, it's light-years ahead of Gnome.
I still give them credit though. With Unity and Ubuntu phone they were trying to have one interface that worked in all devices.. 'convergence'. Hope one day we will have a linux that does this or at least an open source OS on our phones.
The closest to an answer to your question is to install Devuan, which is a Debian fork that was motivated exactly by people wanting freedom to choose their init system.
Unity has brought a lot of innovations, and it would have been a lot better to keep it around.
Gnome devs started making extremely unpopular changes that are hard or impossible to revert. Unity at least put some pressure on them to consider their users a little bit. If only for this reason, Unity's existence was a good thing even if you didn't like or didnt' use Unity.
The situation to me is similar to Chrome's dominance, with Firefox being around to be used by few people, but having the very important role of not leaving everything to one company/group/project.
I've tried using Gnome 3 but there are just a few things that drive me (and lots of other people) crazy and can't be changed. Along with the project's "our way or the highway" attitude that made me switch to Xfce. If Ubuntu keeps being based on Gnome, Gnome might keep leaking some of their great ideas to Ubuntu, which is bad IMHO.
Xfce is a little too barebone but very usable, and with an extremely positive community. Devs are normal human beings that never look down on you (from my experience)--which can't be said of all open source projects.
Gnome just never seems right. Unity is way more polished. Which is a shame. I initially supported gnome over unity when Ubuntu released it. But, once you get used to the polished feel, its not something you want to do with out. Gnome currently STILL feels like a step or 2 backwards.
Great to hear. Unity was easily the 2nd worst desktop experience I've had, behind windows 8. Windows 8 was easily fixed with a 3rd party tool to restore the start menu.
Unity was just so clunky, and no matter the hardware always seemed slow.
So did they actually fix anything? On 16.04 on my HP EliteBook the sound fucking dies every single time I do a resume. Not to mention the random times the terminal stops printing characters.
I was curious about this and went spelunking for more information.
I understand the need to remove cruft that blocks progress, but the Desktop filesystem metaphor is used by almost every single computer user I have ever seen. It seems wilfully destructive to remove something that is depended on by so many without making sure there's a replacement in place first.