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

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

#261

Post by danShumway »

wilsonnb wrote: post #242
danShumway wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

I was using Gnome on Fedora for a while but I switched to Windows 10 a few months ago and can't say I've had any problems with the UX. Window snapping works. Minimizing windows works. You can do that thing where it shows a small version of everything you have open on both (win+tab on Win10, don't remember the Gnome shortcut). Recommending Linux to someone over Windows seems insane to me unless that person is literall…

I run Windows 10 on a Surface Pro 3 because Linux touch support is just too bad right now and because I have maybe two essential applications that don't run on Linux. I would switch it over in a heartbeat if I could, I think the UX is really bad, it's a nightmare for me to maintain.

I hate that the updates are so pushy; I boot into the computer maybe two or three times a month and pretty much every time it wants me to restart and update something. I hate that it installs new updates on startup, I don't know who decided that when I turned on a computer I'd want to wait 3-4 extra minutes for stuff to install. I've been bitten by that multiple times during work presentations and calls.

I hate how glitchy the core OS touch support is; the touch keyboard only pops up about half the time, and manually getting it to show up is a pain. Unbelievably, Gnome is more consistent - which is saying something because Linux touch support is so bad. Periodically, the dock will just decide it doesn't want to hide anymore. There's about a 50% chance if I switch it into tablet mode that screen rotation will work. The default permission prompts don't always tell me which application is requesting authentication. I have #?x! ads in my start menu.

The whole UX is just really... buggy and nonsensical and it feels like none of the designers ever tried to use it outside of demo conditions. Maybe that's my device or whatever, but I'm on a Surface Pro. Microsoft should be able to get that right.

I could go on, but there's not much point. In comparison, my Linux desktop basically never breaks. I set it up once, and it just works. Same for my parents. Especially with the rise of the web, app support is good enough for them and, again, they want their apps to be usable, not flashy, and Open Source usually fits that criteria just fine. The type of person who can get by with an Android tablet instead of a desktop, could also probably get by with a small Linux laptop and might even prefer it now.

There are obviously exceptions, but I don't have a lot of problem recommending Linux to people anymore, because I've found most people want a computer that is set up specifically for them, and then they just want it to work consistently. (Opinion me) most people do not want their computers to evolve, or delight them or something.

I think the demographic that Windows and Apple court is real, but narrower than you might suspect.

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

#262

Post by smallbigfish »

overcast wrote: post #20
willvarfar wrote: post #3

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.

Vast majority of people, technical or not, do not want to sit there and fiddle with their OS. They want it to just work, and have a consistent experience, from one release to the next, so they can get work done, or view pictures of their grand kids. The number of people who want more than that is a statistical rounding error. HN and other forums like it, have such a huge echo chamber, that they lose site of reality.

"Vast majority of people" want it _their_ way. And this is where enterprise-y software fail really hard. They think that making software as dumb as possible they will please the dumb.

In the real world it doesn't work like that. Dumb users don't know how to tweak things but they know that they can ask other people to help them.

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

#263

Post by jasonkostempski »

qznc wrote: post #74
sametmax wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I learned that Windows has another nice variation on this: When you vertically resize (not drag!) a window to the top, it vertically maximizes the window. On Linux I configure a double click on the top bar to do this. I like to vertically maximize my terminals.

In Xfce, you can put the mouse where it shows the resize arrow and double click to maximize in that direction. Windows has that for vertical but not horizontal. Neither has it for diagonal, it would be sweet if that pushed the activated corner to the desktop corner.

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

#264

Post by mpartel »

wilsonnb wrote: post #244
CalRobert wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I owe my career in part to the fact that I just bit the bullet, dumped windows, and switched to Ubuntu as my main OS about 7 years ago. In the war on general purpose computing they're still fighting the good fight.

I, for one, am happy that a war is being fought on general purpose computing because it seems to be the only way to make everything "just work" to an acceptable degree. The iPad is the least general and most locked down computer I've ever used but I love it because it just works. I've never had a problem with it. I was a diehard Linux guy for five or six years but now I run Windows 10 on all my computers and spend mo…

Curated stores are fine and can indeed improve quality, but it'll be a tremendously sad day when they'll be mandated by law.

Adding a 30% tax and central control on all software just because we believe users can't be taught to not install random crap is a very bleak outlook indeed. Freedom is sometimes messy, but almost always worth it.

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

#265

Post by wilsonnb »

mpartel wrote: post #264
wilsonnb wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, am happy that a war is being fought on general purpose computing because it seems to be the only way to make everything "just work" to an acceptable degree. The iPad is the least general and most locked down computer I've ever used but I love it because it just works. I've never had a problem with it. I was a diehard Linux guy for five or six years but now I run Windows 10 on all my computers and spend mo…

Curated stores are fine and can indeed improve quality, but it'll be a tremendously sad day when they'll be mandated by law. Adding a 30% tax and central control on all software just because we believe users can't be taught to not install random crap is a very bleak outlook indeed. Freedom is sometimes messy, but almost always worth it.

I do not support mandating those things by law.

I am content with letting the Linux people do their thing while I do my thing.

The only people I've only thought wanted to outlaw something are the most extreme Linux/GNU zealots who want to make it illegal for a company to lock down a computer even if it improves the user experience.

It stands to reason that such zealots exist on the other side of the argument as well, but I've never encountered them.

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

#266

Post by LarryPage »

da_chicken wrote: post #192
friesen wrote: post #130

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?

So instead of just typing your password, you prefer to wiggle your mouse first, and then start typing your password?

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

#267

Post by lobo_tuerto »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #246
tedge wrote: post #229

Ubuntu 18.04 is the first release to include my app, PikoPixel (pixel-art editor), in its repository (universe): https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/gnustep/pikopixel.app I had to tweak PP's packaging to get it to appear in the Ubuntu Software app, so I can provide a bit of info about this part of the article: My assumption for now is that the Ubuntu Software application only shows updates for packages that were insta…

If only we lived in a world where developers could just distribute their application binaries to the end user without having to rely on a storefront.

SourceForge?

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

#268

Post by lobo_tuerto »

slezyr wrote: post #56
billfruit wrote: post #19

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.

With antergos you can use nice graphic installer to install arch.

Same with Manjaro. I've been happily using the i3 distribution for like 6 months now. And I only have minor complains.

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

#269

Post by da_chicken »

yellowapple wrote: post #216
da_chicken wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If I'm going to wake up a computer whose monitor is dark, I typically hit the super key, arrow keys, or sometimes the space bar and would never hit Enter as the first key. Why? I remember when people used to just turn monitors off manually before monitor power management, and I remember blank screen savers with first gen energy saving monitors that would turn off if they detected a blank screen. It only takes once where the monitor is off and you hit a key to turn it back on and accidentally confirm some dialog or accept changes or execute a command before you start using keys that don't actually do anything.

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

#270

Post by Too »

cabalamat wrote: post #197
yoodenvranx wrote: post #49

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?

Maximize maximizes onto the current screen. I might want it maximized on another screen. The maximize button is also super tiny and harder to hit compared to the title bar.

I also think that in those rare cases you actually want to put a window at the top without maximizing it you are better off with a tiling window manager with keyboard shortcuts. In Windows you can quickly get top left quarter with win+left, win+up. On the other hand, win+up, ctrl+win+left also gives you full screen on another monitor.

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