Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ubuntu 17.04 review

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 123 posts

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#91

Post by popey »

qznc wrote: post #46

Canonical/Ubuntu has practically stopped innovating for the desktop. There are a few ideas which need a big player, but nobody steps up. 1. Copy update-in-the-background from Chrome OS/Android. If you want to actually improve it, try to provide an undo button (which will never work 100% though). Either use two partitions or disk snapshots for the background system. Do the wake-up-at-night-for-update trick of Android.…

Just a minor point but uappexplorer is a community maintained site which uses the snap store API to present apps in the store. It's open source, hosted on github and I'm sure they'd welcome contributors to help improve the look and feel. https://github.com/bhdouglass/uappexplorer

There's a few other ways to view the snaps in the store though. On the Ubuntu desktop there is snap support in Ubuntu Software, and if you "snap install snapweb" you'll get a pretty web portal on port 4200 on the local machine. This can also be installed on remote machines so you can manage the snaps installed there too.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#92

Post by oridecon »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #6
jasonkostempski wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xfce (Xubuntu) hasn't unexpectedly changed on me in about 10 years. YMMV but I haven't been surprised once and haven't seen any features in other DEs I wish it had.

Agreed. Except for that horrible screen tearing.

Install Compton

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#93

Post by im_down_w_otp »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #64
holtalanm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used KDE until they released that godawful Plasma desktop. Don't get me wrong, it looks absolutely BEAUTIFUL, but it crashes constantly, and it is a crapshoot on whether or not it will actually even BOOT within a virtual machine.

I use KDE Neon as my daily driver and I did not have a single crash in the last 4-5 months. I _love_ Plasma 5.9!

I will attest to the same. My whole Engineering team is going to be migrating to KDE Neon as the primary development environment. Several of us have been trialing it for months, and as far as Linux goes it's been fantastic.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#94

Post by reacweb »

unethical_ban wrote: post #53
reacweb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are all those shortcuts ? AFAIK, you can customize gnome easily.

3pt14159 put it well: There are more than a dozen really useful keyboard shortcuts for UI management, and tiling your windows. I mean, it's powerful - maybe one of the most standout features of Unity. You know what is really the icing on it? Hold down the "Super" key, and you get a menu showing all the UI keyboard shortcuts. It's a quick modal - no Alt-F1 help dialogs to navigate and close; no link to a website; a ha…

In 2013, when I have first chosen gnome, it was to replace the PC of my old parents. I have contributed to a gnome extension (translated in french) https://bitbucket.org/LukasKnuth/backslide to make it looks like their previous computer on windows XP.

AFAIK, ubuntu gnome is very stripped down by default, but it is easy to tailor to fit many needs. The extensions are often written in javascript.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#95

Post by fulafel »

3pt14159 wrote: post #3

> While speed may be the single most important element of a UI, there is plenty about GNOME that is going to disappoint Unity users. The biggest gripe I have is keyboard shortcuts. Unity had them in spades. For as graphical as Unity is/was, it was also very easy to drive without taking your hands off the keyboard. GNOME lacks that level of shortcuts. Can we please fix this before the convergence? Muscle memory and Li…

Unity really went overboard with it, and took over keys that applications had been using. Like Alt (!).

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#96

Post by [deleted] »

addicted wrote: post #50
jamescostian wrote: post #18

I never understood why Canonical's attempts to be "brave" (as Apple would call it) result in Canonical pulling out, while attempts by other companies like Apple don't. For example, Canonical made a very brave decision to switch to Unity, and now they're having to move away from Unity, which hints that there were enough users against it, and they pushed Canonical into this position (along with Canonical trying to allo…

Apple's user base is one that wants Apple to do all their thinking for them as far as computer decisions are concerned. Often this may lead to sub optimal solutions for them, but they are ok with this because the overall lack of worry with Apple products, and the fact that they have a good track record of making good decisions, still leaves them ahead in the net (this may be changing with pro Macs though). Linux user…

[deleted]

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#97

Post by qznc »

Shorel wrote: post #85
educar wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux users will not pay for appstore. There is no money to be made here. Just another timesink. You need to first attract significant non-developer users to Ubuntu (which is tied to making better laptops).

Yep, there was already a pay store with Ubuntu One. Bought some games there.

Nobody said it would be easy. On the other hand, there is Steam, which is an app store on Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu One store had technical issues and Snap solves at least a few of those if not all. For example, "works only on Ubuntu!" or "what about my dependencies?". It would be hilarious if Redhat users would buy their proprietary software from Canonical.

Still, the main challenge of an app store is not the technical side, but the business stuff: Get a critical mass of apps. It is also the reason why only Canonical or Red Hat could pull this off. It would be quite the hustle. Even Steve Jobs had some fights for the Apple App Store.

Some ideas to put there: Sublime Text, Gitlab EE, CLion, PyCharm, Zend Studio, Gurobi, Spotify, Netflix, TeamViewer, Matlab, Mathematica, SPSS, Stata, Maya, VMWare, Crossover Wine, Guitar Pro, Bricscad, Houdini, etc.

Another problem is the barrier of entry. How to get the customers to open an account? Once the account is open, buying stuff is one click and the 1$ apps will be bought on impulse. Cooperate with Humble Bundle and others for exclusive sales. The usual PR drill.

There are opportunities like App Store for Business. Where the company buys the IDE for all its employees via the app store and handles all the licencing there.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#98

Post by matt4077 »

jamescostian wrote: post #18

I never understood why Canonical's attempts to be "brave" (as Apple would call it) result in Canonical pulling out, while attempts by other companies like Apple don't. For example, Canonical made a very brave decision to switch to Unity, and now they're having to move away from Unity, which hints that there were enough users against it, and they pushed Canonical into this position (along with Canonical trying to allo…

When you're making controversial decisions, it tends to help to be right.

But Canonical (and every other distro) are in a somewhat difficult position. UI isn't just an incredible hard problem. There's also a dearth of talent because the relevant people aren't a natural part of the OSS community.

And, most importantly, UI suffers tremendously from the bazaar-model of development. It needs someone with near-dictatorial powers, and excellent taste, who can control the complete user experience from init to shutdown.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#99

Post by ac29 »

ashark wrote: post #76
holtalanm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used KDE until they released that godawful Plasma desktop. Don't get me wrong, it looks absolutely BEAUTIFUL, but it crashes constantly, and it is a crapshoot on whether or not it will actually even BOOT within a virtual machine.

OK, so it's not just me. I installed 17.04 over Win10 on my desktop a couple weeks ago—my first time making a serious go of Linux on the desktop since whenever Ubuntu wasted a ton of my time with their half-baked PulseAudio "upgrade", which was a long time ago at this point—and started with KDE (I know from some dabbling that I hate Unity), but was hitting application crashes and long busy-cursor issues at a rate of…

>Still no cure for awful tearing every time I scroll in FireFox :-/

What GPU are you using? There are various ways to fix this, depending on GPU/driver. I'd suggest looking in the Arch Wiki, even if you are using Ubuntu.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#100

Post by matt4077 »

addicted wrote: post #50
jamescostian wrote: post #18

I never understood why Canonical's attempts to be "brave" (as Apple would call it) result in Canonical pulling out, while attempts by other companies like Apple don't. For example, Canonical made a very brave decision to switch to Unity, and now they're having to move away from Unity, which hints that there were enough users against it, and they pushed Canonical into this position (along with Canonical trying to allo…

Apple's user base is one that wants Apple to do all their thinking for them as far as computer decisions are concerned. Often this may lead to sub optimal solutions for them, but they are ok with this because the overall lack of worry with Apple products, and the fact that they have a good track record of making good decisions, still leaves them ahead in the net (this may be changing with pro Macs though). Linux user…

Let me rephrase it in less condescending terms (or, more accurately, /different/ condescending terms):

Apple users want to get shit done, instead of compiling custom kernels to fix font rendering issues when using Wifi while headphones are plugged in.

"Pro user" means, for Apple, s/o using a computer to create something. It is not someone who's a professional at using computers, i. e. constantly optimising their 20+ USB gadgets and swapping hardware components.

Post reply on HN