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

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31–40 of 391 posts

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

#31
When the display goes to sleep due to lack of input or whatever, you have to drag upwards with your mouse to unlock the screen. Like some common dirty frickin' smart phone.

Yes!

Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes the window. FOR GODS SAKE WHY.

Double yes!

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

#32

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…

GNOME is what you get when you build a team for political reasons instead of hiring good developers and designers.

To make it good you'd have to exchange the whole team first. It's LXDE for me from here on out.

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

#33
post #31

When the display goes to sleep due to lack of input or whatever, you have to drag upwards with your mouse to unlock the screen. Like some common dirty frickin' smart phone. Yes! Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes the window. FOR GODS SAKE WHY. Double yes!

I will never understand why Ubuntu took a very nice desktop Linux distribution, and fucked it up with all these mobile and tablet centric UI absurdities.

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

#34

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.

XFCE is slowly dying, and I think the issues are a symptom of this.

The file manager, for a very long time, had a reproducible issue (>20% of the time) where moving a file would cause a crash; based on the Ubuntu bug tracker, took an year and half to fix, and it was (appropriately) marked as critical.

It's clearly lacks development resources (and I also personally question the development quality).

I still use XUbuntu, but I think the future for low-resource machines will be LUbuntu (lowest power) and MATE (low power). MATE is also well funded, well organized, and very configurable.

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

#35
I have a desktop. The first thing I test after installation of Ubuntu is the remote access using ssh, then the wakeonlan, then the remote access using vnc (already painful with 16.04), then the sharing of hard disk directories. Finally, I test the playback of BD and CD.

I do not need much customization: ensure that the alt key is not blocked and works fine with photoshop. On the desktop, I will probably only remove the dock on the left.

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

#36
post #11
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.

The problem with sane defaults is that everyone seems to have their own idea what the default should be.

To me, sanity is not conforming to old idiosyncrasies. I have had multiple people yell at me in person when I bring up clipboard. This is probably the single most embarrasing thing I have ever seen in Unix or Unix-like systems. We can't even get copy pasting right.

Sane defaults mean a single clipboard. If I copy something, it replaces the contents of the single clipboard. If you want to keep track of all the old things you copied, that's fine but all the ways of pasting should always paste the last thing you copied. If we can't agree on something simple as this, we can't agree on defaults (and should give up on computing).

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

#37
post #11
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.

The problem with sane defaults is that everyone seems to have their own idea what the default should be.

First, This is only a problem if you have very diverse needs and most users' needs aren't.

We need to run a browser, a terminal, a file manager, maybe some media apps, and a text editor if you don't do that in the terminal. This is not like a vim config of an industry veteran, it shouldn't require tweaking from the OS. Just get out of the way.

I can tweak the number of workspaces or the colours temperature for day and night. These are matters of personal preferences. But the way to launch apps, connect to wifi, or display a clock should just be ergonomic.

Second, tweaks don't solve this problem.

There's a handful of talented tweakers and power users. They will use Sway or whatever anyway. Everyone else when confronted with lots of knobs ends up with something worse than a competent designer could have provided by default.

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

#38

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.

Nope, I want a thing that Just Works.

These days I use Kubuntu, but literally the only configuration thing I change is the desktop wallpaper. Everything else works how I want it out of the box.

I wouldn't even know how to diagnose shit anymore, and I grew up on Slackware. I had time to customize stuff when I was a kid, now it's time to work.

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

#39

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.

>though admittedly the installation process is much more elaborate than of Ubuntu

The only thing that's more difficult about the Arch install is that you have to be able to follow written instructions...

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

#40

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.

My wife mentors a young single mother who is working to finish her GED. Her GED program provided her with a laptop: an old Thinkpad T430 running Ubuntu. She would have been just as well-served with a Chromebook, but I'm sure the Thinkpad was cheaper (perhaps free) for the organization.
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