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Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

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Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#51

Post by digi_owl »

chupasaurus wrote: post #7
neverminder wrote: post #2

I'm on Ubuntu 18.04 (upgraded from 16.04) and I'm still using Unity. Technically Unity is not gone, but it's no longer a default, Gnome is. I've tried Gnome and was very disappointed. No global menu integration which means losing useful screen space for no good reason. Tray icons somehow look squished and ragged. No fractional scaling is a massive issue for me since I'm working with dual 27 inch 4K displays. Tray bar…

Gnome Shell is about extensions, you want something to work differently - find a suitable plugin or write it.

Funny, i thought that extensions where "here be dragons" territory where the APIs may break at any moment etc.

Meaning that it is a fig leaf from the Gnome devs to power users.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#52

Post by isostatic »

leephillips wrote: post #33
fb03 wrote: post #23

I've been skipping all the Unity drama by staying on Xubuntu which is really snappy and stays out of your way. Also, Gnome on this laptop (Dell Inspiron 15 7000) gave me (and several others users, as per forum post https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2358975 and some bug reports I found on the internet) a freeze or stutter every 10 or so seconds. So instead of having to start debugging shit from a fresh Linux i…

Exactly my approach. Periodically I ask what are the advantages of an environment like Gnome that would make it worth it for me to put up with the resource usage. I haven't heard anything compelling yet.

Many years ago I used to use light weight window managers. I remember using icewm after I got fed up with enlightenment, but I think it was Fluxbox that I kept for a long time -- up until about 2010.

However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#53

Post by mort96 »

fb03 wrote: post #23

I've been skipping all the Unity drama by staying on Xubuntu which is really snappy and stays out of your way. Also, Gnome on this laptop (Dell Inspiron 15 7000) gave me (and several others users, as per forum post https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2358975 and some bug reports I found on the internet) a freeze or stutter every 10 or so seconds. So instead of having to start debugging shit from a fresh Linux i…

XUbuntu is great, and the distro I use for my desktop, but I'd also suggest checking out Ubuntu Mate 18.04. It's "old school" similar to XFCE, largely without animations to slow things down, and the 18.04 version replaced the old menu with brisk-menu which is fast, super key activated, and has search (basically it works a lot like XFCE's).

Ubuntu Mate uses gtk 3 and probably in general more modern technology than XFCE, with a similar style. Definitely worth considering.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#54

Post by setquk »

fb03 wrote: post #23

I've been skipping all the Unity drama by staying on Xubuntu which is really snappy and stays out of your way. Also, Gnome on this laptop (Dell Inspiron 15 7000) gave me (and several others users, as per forum post https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2358975 and some bug reports I found on the internet) a freeze or stutter every 10 or so seconds. So instead of having to start debugging shit from a fresh Linux i…

Using xubuntu now. You're right. It does just stay out of the way, and that's what I want.

The applications delivery the value on the desktop, not the desktop environment. The DE vendors (Gnome/Unity in particular) need to work that out and just get out of the way.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#55

Post by setquk »

isostatic wrote: post #52
leephillips wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my approach. Periodically I ask what are the advantages of an environment like Gnome that would make it worth it for me to put up with the resource usage. I haven't heard anything compelling yet.

Many years ago I used to use light weight window managers. I remember using icewm after I got fed up with enlightenment, but I think it was Fluxbox that I kept for a long time -- up until about 2010. However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.

Same.

If they did a simple non tiling WM that had those little things in it and wasn't a piece of crap, I'd be there like a shot.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#57

Post by Milner08 »

rullopat wrote: post #42

With KDE that got so much better in the last 2-3 years, Qt license that is not an issue anymore since a long time... why so many distros are still using GNOME (especially version 3)?

Personally I feel KDE is still kind of horrible. I would much rather GNOME.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#58

Post by jaas »

random42_ wrote: post #45
toddkazakov wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Lack of fractional scaling is a big deal. I have 15" Full HD screen on my laptop, and everything is too small without fractional scaling (I prefer to have it set at 1.125/1.25).

GNOME 3.28 on Wayland has this as an experimental feature.

If you enable it you will find that the results are very blurry. It's unusable, to me.

Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

#59

Post by justin66 »

fb03 wrote: post #23

I've been skipping all the Unity drama by staying on Xubuntu which is really snappy and stays out of your way. Also, Gnome on this laptop (Dell Inspiron 15 7000) gave me (and several others users, as per forum post https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2358975 and some bug reports I found on the internet) a freeze or stutter every 10 or so seconds. So instead of having to start debugging shit from a fresh Linux i…

Ubuntu with MATE works as well.

I used Xubuntu for a while but I was always fascinated by how bad a couple aspects of XFCE are. They maintain documentation [1] on oddball ways of resizing windows instead of just giving people what they want. I suspect MATE just does what most people want out of the box.

[1] https://xubuntu.org/news/window-resizing-in-xubuntu-and-xfce...

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