Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.bityard.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 391 posts

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

#321

Post by pmontra »

da_chicken wrote: post #269
yellowapple wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

I move the mouse, actually the touchpad. It's safer than hitting a key. Then the password prompt appears. Why force us to swype up too? And why up when on phones we swype horizontally, patents?

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

#322

Post by pmontra »

blfr wrote: post #7
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.

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 is that the sane and tested defaults that I want are probably very different from the ones you want. That's why customization is important.

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

#323

Post by devin_lane »

blfr wrote: post #7
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.

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.

It's very disheartening to me that these are seen as exclusive options. I use Ubuntu because I want the "it just works" part that comes from being a very popular and commonly used distro, but I also need the customization, because I want my mouse and keyboard to do the things that I need to do, not what made sense to someone else. You mention that you enjoyed Unity, which I also do, but my Unity is heavily customized through CCSM. It seems based on your comment that this high level of customization did not detract from your ability to enjoy Unity, so why do you ask for no customization?

When we ask for customization, we're not saying that the default setup can't be usable, or that hours of tweaking should be required before getting started. We're saying that when there is a feature that doesn't behave as desired, we would like the option to modify it. "It works this way and that's final" is already well served by other operating systems, why do you feel Ubuntu should copy this?

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

#324

Post by ben940830298432 »

megaman22 wrote: post #33
panarky wrote: 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.

Gnome is more keyboard centric than mobile centric.

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

#325

Post by vatueil »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #149
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.

Like this in theory but they manage to screw it up. The new size is a state that is lost when moving again. :(

Personally I appreciate that, so YMMV. Makes it easy to divide the screen between two windows and then return the windows to normal size without manually resizing them.

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

#326

Post by Animats »

This was a useful review. He installed it into a virtual machine, though, so he didn't have to struggle with Linux driver issues. That's usually the biggest headache with a Linux install.

He's right to view this from a naive user standpoint.

Ubuntu put an ad on the desktop? What do they think they're doing? Push back hard against that. Windows 10's ads have produced much hatred, and soon you won't be able to turn them off unless you buy the Enterprise version.

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

#328

Post by adrianratnapala »

> The bar on the left is obviously a vertical imitation of the Mac OS X dock.

Which is a horizontal "imitation" of the NeXTStep doc, which I learned about from WindowMaker. And which is the obvious extension of a plain-old button-bar for the use case of a Window manager. So Kudos to old Stevie J, but still ...

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

#329

Post by cuddlybacon »

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.

For a while I used a distro called Chakra[0] that had a neat semi-rolling release model[1]. It seemed like a nice compromise. The system was stable, but end user apps were up to date.

[0] - https://www.chakralinux.org [1] - https://wiki.chakralinux.org/index.php?title=Half-Rolling_Re...

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

#330

Post by adrianratnapala »

Animats wrote: post #326

This was a useful review. He installed it into a virtual machine, though, so he didn't have to struggle with Linux driver issues. That's usually the biggest headache with a Linux install. He's right to view this from a naive user standpoint. Ubuntu put an ad on the desktop? What do they think they're doing? Push back hard against that. Windows 10's ads have produced much hatred, and soon you won't be able to turn the…

No he first tried it out on a VM, but then seems to have put it on a laptop. There is quite a lot of discussion about what happens when you close the lid, plug and unplug monitors etc.
Post reply on HN