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A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

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21–30 of 391 posts

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#21
post #7

The technical audience who actually use Linux desktops want more customization not less, and the crowd that Ubuntu seems to be chasing doesn't seem to actually exist? Hmm this doesn't make me want to leave xubuntu any time soon, although I too have noticed the recent xfce issues mentioned in the article.

As a member of the technical audience who actually uses Linux (Ubuntu), I want almost no customization. I want sane and tested defaults, not a bunch of knobs to adjust things. I mourn the loss of the Unity Desktop which was virtually perfect OOTB. It had a great management of the screen space, especially on laptops, it was pretty, and it worked. I wouldn't even change the desktop background.

I also want less customisation. I don't change configuration of my software unless I can possibly help it - waste of time. I don't even change my desktop wallpaper. So there are people like us - possibly a lot.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#22
post #7

The technical audience who actually use Linux desktops want more customization not less, and the crowd that Ubuntu seems to be chasing doesn't seem to actually exist? Hmm this doesn't make me want to leave xubuntu any time soon, although I too have noticed the recent xfce issues mentioned in the article.

As a member of the technical audience who actually uses Linux (Ubuntu), I want almost no customization. I want sane and tested defaults, not a bunch of knobs to adjust things. I mourn the loss of the Unity Desktop which was virtually perfect OOTB. It had a great management of the screen space, especially on laptops, it was pretty, and it worked. I wouldn't even change the desktop background.

I really liked unity as it was always stayed out of the way, doing just what you asked, nothing less, nothing more.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#23
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a member of the technical audience who actually uses Linux (Ubuntu), I want almost no customization. I want sane and tested defaults, not a bunch of knobs to adjust things. I mourn the loss of the Unity Desktop which was virtually perfect OOTB. It had a great management of the screen space, especially on laptops, it was pretty, and it worked. I wouldn't even change the desktop background.

And the integration with Amazon was underrated. It’s nice to search your files and always see some great product promotions without having to adjust knobs as you aptly put it.

[deleted]

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#25
It seems like none of the dumb GNOME warts were plastered over.

There's still the idiotic, screen-taking-over activities menu (because, yknow, it should take 3840x2160 pixels to show a fucking app launcher. Did nobody learn from Windows 8? The GNOME devs are officially more hard-headed than Microsoft - an achievement of some note)

There's still the swipe-to-unlock desktop

There's the default Apple scrolling behavior

The author said it best:

I spend every day in a state of permanent quixotic hope that eventually humanity will comes to its senses and realize that computers and mobile devices are different kinds of technology with different purposes and different usage patterns.

Seriously, GNOME is a touch UI. The large buttons, the swipe mechanics, everything. Except nobody uses GNOME on the mobile devices it appears to be made for!

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#26
post #8

Ubuntu is dead for me since the release where they were sending the data you typed in the internal search across the internet. And Shuttleworth claimed it's not a big deal. Since then, I'm a happy Linux Mint user. And since we are talking about Linux distros: I tried a bunch of times to live with a distro that has no start bar at the bottom. Even after a few weeks my productivity does not recover. It's a mistery to m…

I'll take an Amazon integration that I can disable and that helps Canonical finance Ubuntu over an unprofessional security model any day.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#27
post #7

The technical audience who actually use Linux desktops want more customization not less, and the crowd that Ubuntu seems to be chasing doesn't seem to actually exist? Hmm this doesn't make me want to leave xubuntu any time soon, although I too have noticed the recent xfce issues mentioned in the article.

As a member of the technical audience who actually uses Linux (Ubuntu), I want almost no customization. I want sane and tested defaults, not a bunch of knobs to adjust things. I mourn the loss of the Unity Desktop which was virtually perfect OOTB. It had a great management of the screen space, especially on laptops, it was pretty, and it worked. I wouldn't even change the desktop background.

Second this — I like Compiz but the ccsm & gnome-tweak-tools tandem/overlapping configuration is a nightmare. Preferences must be imported/exported via GUI and they (frequently!) import improperly. Ccsm itself is a maze of dialogs, icons, and navbars that I dread to use.

My customized GUI really needs to be consistent across my machines, and Unity makes this impossible to guarantee and automate. Just give me an .rc file, text-based configuration is my favorite part of Linux.

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#28
post #12

A review of common sense. Stop using things built on top of junk. 30 years and still working on building an OS, great we'll be doing this for the next 100 years as well.

What OS are you using and what projects are you working on?

Re: A Lengthy, Pedantic Review of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

#30

Why doesn't Ubuntu (and many other distributions) change to a rolling release model. Having switched to Arch, though admittedly the installation process is much more elaborate than of Ubuntu, once you customise it to one's preference, it is much more convenient to keep upgrading individual packages as they are evolving.

Because rolling releases give you a terrible choice between constant upgrades all the time (read: resource and network usage and reboots), and if you don't, a high likelihood of something breaking when you finally do that pacman -Syu.

There's nothing wrong with snapshot releases in a distro focused on usability and stability.

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