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

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211–220 of 391 posts

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

#211
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!

Actually you can just directly type your password without dragging/pressing anything.

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

#212
post #145

Man, the Linux crowd really sucks. Why am I even reading these comments? I'm of the opinion that the Linux desktop has never been better, and I really enjoy using modern Linux desktops a lot more than I used to. To all those developers that made it possible for us to use this stuff on our computers with no strings attached: thank you. Ubuntu 18.04 is a great collection of these achievements (like many other current L…

I tend to be pretty critical of Linux because I do genuinely believe there's a lot of stuff in Linux that's really bad.

Would I ever give it up and switch to Windows/Mac? No, never in a million years. Compared to modern Windows 10, Gnome's UX is masterful.

Linux has actually come pretty far - set up is still annoying, and some problems are still unnecessarily difficult to solve, but for the most part once you get everything up and running you have a system that just works, and that will keep on working without you having to do much.

I've used Linux for a long time, but it's only recently that I've felt confident enough that I've started seriously recommending it to non-technical people. I've got my Mom running Ubuntu as her main computer, and over the past year it cut down on my technical support by about 2/3rds of what I was doing before.

I think it's easy to take the good things for granted. Yeah, to a certain degree Linux is crap, but pretty much all software I or anyone else ever makes is going to be crap - that's the hard lesson you have to learn when you start developing software.

It's still hands-down the best OS out there if you just want a stable, usable computer that respects you, and I still feel really grateful for it every time I boot up my computer to get actual work done.

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes the window. FOR GODS SAKE WHY. I use this all the time when working with several monitors. Just press Alt, click somewhere onto a window, move this window to a different monitor, smash window to the top of the screen. Bam, instant monitor-switching of full-screen windows. (And yes, usually I use keyboard shortcuts for this but when the hand is already on the mous…

I love those features so much. Dragging the window near a side of the screen make it fills half of it too.

And (at least in Xfce) dragging to a corner makes it fill that quarter of the screen. Really nice for building tri-window layouts where you need one tall and two short windows, which is how I typically arrange my windows when I use a tiling WM anyway, especially when programming: tall window for code, top short for Magit, bottom short for DirEd (if I have a high enough resolution, I might sometimes turn that into three smalls - Magit + DirEd + a REPL - which Xfce doesn't seem to support, unfortunately).

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

#214
post #203

Upgrading from 16.04, the experience is quite awkward. CLI wise, I love Ubuntu and 18.04 is just a refined version of a very functional desktop/server distribution. GUI wise though, it seems to have changed many defaults, a lot of which will require extensions or obscure gsettings/dconf commands. But mulitple monitor really felt like a mess compared to unity. Workspace switches only the laptop screen, no grid layout,…

I set up a Fedora/Cinnamon desktop at my last job and loved it.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes the window. FOR GODS SAKE WHY. I use this all the time when working with several monitors. Just press Alt, click somewhere onto a window, move this window to a different monitor, smash window to the top of the screen. Bam, instant monitor-switching of full-screen windows. (And yes, usually I use keyboard shortcuts for this but when the hand is already on the mous…

> I use this all the time when working with several monitors. Just press Alt, click somewhere onto a window, move this window to a different monitor, smash window to the top of the screen. Bam, instant monitor-switching of full-screen windows. 1. What's wrong with the maximise button? It wasn't broken, it didn't need fixing. 2. What if you want the window at the top of the screen without being maximised?

1. I think the maximise button is still there. I don't think they altered it at all.

2. If small targets like the maximise button aren't a problem for you, then stopping the windows drag a few pixels before the mouse hits the top of the screen should be easy for you as well.

The drag to the top is nice because it mirrors the drag to left and right side. Since this is Linux, I'm sure you can configure this stuff somewhere.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also just press enter and type your password like normal.

Yeah, but for the past 25 years or so, the conventional way to wake up a desktop computer whose monitor has gone to sleep was a nonspecific mouse wiggle or keyboard press. Why change that? Like how big of a deal was accidentally waking up your monitor? What problem are we fixing? What's our usability goal here? Is this requirement discoverable to the user or not?

For me it's not a very big deal; so many systems expect Enter now that I've turned Enter into my "nonspecific" keyboard press even in situations where it doesn't necessarily have to be Enter (like waking up a machine that's locked with XScreenSaver).

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

... and have a couple spare weeks if you're inexperienced with Arch and don't have an intimate knowledge of the entire Linux user space stack. Sure, if you're experienced with Arch it might appear to be just some written instructions; otherwise, it's more like 1,000 page text book on Linux.

For the record, Arch Linux has to have the best, thorough documentation I've ever read.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes the window. FOR GODS SAKE WHY. I use this all the time when working with several monitors. Just press Alt, click somewhere onto a window, move this window to a different monitor, smash window to the top of the screen. Bam, instant monitor-switching of full-screen windows. (And yes, usually I use keyboard shortcuts for this but when the hand is already on the mous…

> I use this all the time when working with several monitors. Just press Alt, click somewhere onto a window, move this window to a different monitor, smash window to the top of the screen. Bam, instant monitor-switching of full-screen windows. 1. What's wrong with the maximise button? It wasn't broken, it didn't need fixing. 2. What if you want the window at the top of the screen without being maximised?

> 2. What if you want the window at the top of the screen without being maximised?

I'm using Unity in Ubuntu 16.04, and there a window only gets maximized if you drag it very close to the top edge of the screen. If you drag it to the bottom of the top bar or anywhere in the bottom half of the top bar, it moves to the bottom edge of the top bar without maximizing.

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

#219
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!

> Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes the window. FOR GODS SAKE WHY. I use this all the time when working with several monitors. Just press Alt, click somewhere onto a window, move this window to a different monitor, smash window to the top of the screen. Bam, instant monitor-switching of full-screen windows. (And yes, usually I use keyboard shortcuts for this but when the hand is already on the mous…

You mean it has the super annoying snap to window edge that windows 10 has

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

#220
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!

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