Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps

#181

Post by bokchoi » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 10:16 PM UTC

hysan wrote: post #54

I'm pretty sure anything I'd suggest would already be included in other people's lists so I'm going to request something different. Personally, I'd like a well maintained set of applications that integrates nicely into the default desktop. So things like global shortcuts (ideally having them be the same for common actions), panel and notification integrations, nicely setup default launcher icons, works well with the…

Yes, this is the most important aspect. Functional, stable, maintained, consistent, and nicely integrated applications.

Re: Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps

#182

Post by Shorel » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 10:38 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #154

Jackneill wrote: post #80

Another humble wish: a subl/vscode like ctrl+shift+p multifunctional menu, where you can write commands, launch things, etc.

The Gnome runner and Krunner from KDE both do this. I'm not sure if the Gnome variant supports arbitrary commands like Krunner does, but they at least have opening applications, unit conversion, and web search.

It's not the same.

He means something that can access all commands available in a given application, not a launcher.

Ubuntu's Unity has that, giving search access to all the menu entries in the opened application.

Sublime Text implementation is even more powerful, giving search access to all commands, and the list includes commands provided by extra packages added to Sublime.

So I can do, for example: 'ctrl+shift+p', install package, gitsavvy, ; 'ctrl+shift+p', git diff current file, ;

Re: Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps

#183

Post by Shorel » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 10:43 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #145

TeMPOraL wrote: post #140

Web Browser: Chrome non-free, Emacs Email Client: Gmail web, Emacs Terminal: xterm, fish shell, Emacs IDE: Emacs File manager: default, Emacs Basic Text Editor: Emacs IRC/Messaging Client: Emacs PDF Reader: whatever that default one is, Emacs Office Suite: LibreOffice Calendar: Emacs Video Player: VLC Music Player: Spotify non-free Photo Viewer: whatever the default is Screen recording: OBS I'm not joking with that E…

I downvoted because I don't think it's constructive to force Emacs on everyone. In my post, I thought of including vim as the default text editor (I have set it as default on my work and home computers, also when opening a text/code file from a browser or file manager) and definitely as the default terminal editor (instead of nano), but many people are just not going to make use of it. If you want something specific,…

The few applications I care about having the very last versions in Ubuntu, have a PPA, and I just use the PPA.

Frequent breaks are worse IMO.

Re: Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps

#184

Post by lousken » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 10:44 PM UTC

Web browser: Firefox

Email: None, Thunderbird

Terminal: xfce4-terminal

IDE: None, Qt creator, Visual studio code

File manager: Thunar, Nautilus, for terminal Midnight commander

Basic text editor: Mousepad, for terminal vim

IRC/Messaging Client: Empathy, Pidgin, none

PDF Reader: Okular, Firefox (integrated)

Office suite: LibreOffice

Calendar: Gnome native

Video player: smplayer (or any Mplayer version with GUI), for terminal ffplay

Music player: Clementine, for terminal cmus

Photo viewer: Ristretto

Screen recording: xfce4-screenshooter, OBS Studio

Extra

Shell: zsh

Password manager: Keepass, KeepassXC

Task manager: htop

Other: Numlockx, git

Basic photo editor similar to picpick/mspaint on windows: Pinta (guess is closest to that)

(currently xubuntu 16.04 user)

Re: Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps

#185

Post by Shorel » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 10:48 PM UTC

Web browser: Chromium. Bittorrent client: Deluge.

I use Kodi for videos and music and sublime text to edit texts, and I don't see any reason to force complex or proprietary software as the defaults.

Re: Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps

#186

Post by ccrush » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 10:54 PM UTC

Queue29 wrote: post #121

pksadiq wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you don't know: You can simply type the expressions in gnome-shell search to get results. eg.: if you type "3+5" (without quotes), the result 8 will be shown. You can also have complex expressions like "3kg in lb", "sin (90)" etc. Once the result is shown, you can simply press the Enter key to open the result in gnome-calculator.

I'm in the same boat as OP. When I type "calc", I want the calculator. LibreOffice Calc is on my list of things to immediately remove on every reformat.

Why don't you rename the shortcut to LibreOffice Excel?

Re: Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps

#187

Post by lucb1e » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 10:56 PM UTC

Shorel wrote: post #183

lucb1e wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted because I don't think it's constructive to force Emacs on everyone. In my post, I thought of including vim as the default text editor (I have set it as default on my work and home computers, also when opening a text/code file from a browser or file manager) and definitely as the default terminal editor (instead of nano), but many people are just not going to make use of it. If you want something specific,…

The few applications I care about having the very last versions in Ubuntu, have a PPA, and I just use the PPA. Frequent breaks are worse IMO.

Debian testing never broke for me. The only thing I can recall was Filezilla being unavailable to install for a few months, but that's not hard to solve (find a deb somewhere) and any existing installations were unaffected. I can't recall anything else ever breaking, while I do have the latest (and, presumably, greatest) software.

Re: Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps

#188

Post by itomato » Fri, Jul 21, 2017, 11:09 PM UTC

0xCMP wrote: post #57

itomato wrote: post #53

Crowdsourcing at its worst. Get with a modern Product Management philosophy, and quit begging the community for ideas. Crossposting to Reddit, Slashdot and HN on the same day smacks of utter desperation.

Or it's a community project asking for input from the community...

Why don't they get a website or mailing list or something?

Re: Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps

#189

Post by zanny » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 12:00 AM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #171

zanny wrote: post #160

Meta-observation: There are three primary applications everyone wants fairly uniformly. Firefox, LO, and VLC. It is really interesting from an integration perspective to consider all three: * Firefox pulls in gtk3 and gtk2 dependencies. * VLC pulls in Qt and sdl1. * LO pulls in Python. Of note, both Firefox and VLC use ffmpeg, which is nice. But my macro point - the most popular applications for Linux right now all u…

Its foolishness to try to find a whole list of apps that use the same gui toolkit instead of the best apps, python is installed by default on every linux system under the sun, and you can't just convert from installed size to memory usage. The universe just doesn't work that way.

Its not installed size to memory usage. Its shared common libraries vs unshared libraries. Pulling in Qt means every Qt app will load so's for all the same things the core GTK libraries do, and take up memory that in a purely GTK environment would never be used because all the apps shared the same libraries in memory. This also dramatically affects the performance of app switching and opening new apps.

This is how Android has a tiny memory footprint - one gui toolkit, one runtime, one way to do everything. You really notice on Android when you open an NDK app that isn't using the Android Frameworks GUI components because they take a long time to open.

This is also why Windows in general is a bloated mess - depending on what software you are running it might be Windows Forms or XDA or their new app frameworks (Metro and/or 10) or .net or Qt or the old style COM API from the 95-98 days. Or worse, nowadays, you can get an Electron app that starts up its own browser rendering engine and doesn't share anything with the Chrome instance you have running at the same time despite using the same libraries. None share fundamental primitives, so opening programs from each toolkit eats memory alive. And then every program you install pretty much has to assume you don't have any library dependencies installed as well, so they pull down their entire toolkit in some .Z patch version that is incompatible with any other app using it so almost the same library gets loaded multiple times.

Re: Ask HN: Ubuntu Desktop Default Apps

#190

Post by petecox » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 12:39 AM UTC

Web Browser: Firefox

Chrome and Vivaldi each have their own apt repository, so why Ubuntu would bundle or package them, I'm not sure but give the option of adding an entry to sources.list. I mainly use Chrome for websites requiring flash support and letting Google manage that rather than the FOSS Chromium is simpler.

Basic Text Editor: Geany. Decent feature set and it has support in Windows and I prefer cross platform tools. Video Player, Music Player: VLC. Again it works on multiple operating systems and with few dramas. Office Suite: Libreoffice, again it's cross platform. I have written a couple of things in Lyx but it's niche. PDF Reader: NOT Okular - it's very versatile but chokes when rendering image-heavy 40 page film festival brochures. Atril or whatever the Gnome version is called are snappier.

Email Client: On linux, I use webmail. Too many hoops to jump through in getting Office365 and Gmail working seamlessly without typing in a bunch of IMAP/SMTP settings voodoo - lack in patience and too lazy in 2017 for that! Would revisit if something worked out of the box.

The rest? Well you've committed to Gnome and the default apps would suffice.