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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

#81

Post by freehunter »

gnode wrote: post #68
Jedd wrote: post #22

Unity was never the main reason people chose to use Ubuntu -- it was always (well, from when I first heard about it until I lost interest (5 years ago)) the claim that Ubuntu is easier to install than Debian. I never understood the fixation about ease of installing , as that's something I either did once every few years on custom hardware, or had automated already using a CFM. For stuff I installed manually (laptops,…

For people who have little / no experience with Linux, an easy low-expertise required install makes all the difference.

Yup. If you can't get it installed, you can never try it, which means you can never be wowed and never switch to it full time.

Installing Linux used to be a huge problem, and that's why Ubuntu became popular. Other distros caught up, but it was really Ubuntu that pushed it.

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

#82

Post by themodelplumber »

justin66 wrote: post #59
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...

To their credit, the Alt+RMB method for resizing windows is, along with Alt+LMB for moving windows, really amazing. I get annoyed when I have to go back to the old way on my Mac and Windows systems.

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

#83

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Dayshine wrote: post #47
Jedd wrote: post #22

Unity was never the main reason people chose to use Ubuntu -- it was always (well, from when I first heard about it until I lost interest (5 years ago)) the claim that Ubuntu is easier to install than Debian. I never understood the fixation about ease of installing , as that's something I either did once every few years on custom hardware, or had automated already using a CFM. For stuff I installed manually (laptops,…

>I never understood the fixation about ease of installing The only time I use linux is when I need a linux VM for something. This happens maybe 2/3 times a year, and I can never remember all the random linux specific installation stuff. Ubuntu goes into enough detail that I don't need to google it, Debian doesn't. My fixation is because I don't care about what version of linux I'm using, I'm not going to be using it…

I honestly don't know what you're talking about with "random linux specific installation stuff". Installation of Linux hasn't really been any different from Windows since the early aughties as far as I can tell. Select keyboard layout, provide hostname, just let the partitioner use the whole disk automatically, configure the network, etc.

As someone who frequently hates on Desktop Linux, I agree with the sentiment that the fixation over ease of installing is pretty silly. Only a few distros in recent memory have anything remotely difficult about their installation process, and it's usually that they don't bother with any wizards and just make you do everything by hand from the shell, but those were meant for experts anyway.

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

#84

Post by skocznymroczny »

I used to dislike Unity, until I played around with macOS and got some experience with the global menu bar and similar concepts. Now I actually prefer Unity to all other desktop environments. Apart from that I can stand XFCE, but I still think Unity was the best thing to happen to Linux. Unfortunate that they're going back to GNOME.

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

#85

Post by habosa »

Been using 16.04LTS on my personal laptop for a few years, just moved to 18.04.

I feel like the biggest improvement by far is the Snap package manager and its integration with the Ubuntu software store. After 10+ years of doing personal computing on Linux this is the first time that installing my main apps has ever felt sane!

I was blown away by being able to install the latest Android studio, with a launcher icon, in one click. No more tarballs and command line launchers and broken dependencies.

Has this been around for a while and I just didn't know about it?

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

#86

Post by skocznymroczny »

Jedd wrote: post #22

Unity was never the main reason people chose to use Ubuntu -- it was always (well, from when I first heard about it until I lost interest (5 years ago)) the claim that Ubuntu is easier to install than Debian. I never understood the fixation about ease of installing , as that's something I either did once every few years on custom hardware, or had automated already using a CFM. For stuff I installed manually (laptops,…

Big thing about distros like Ubuntu and Linux Mint is that they don't hide the "non-free" drivers and software from you, and actively ask you to install them during installation process or initial setup. Meanwhile in other distros, I imagine Debian too, it would probably require adding some software sources through apt, which is beyond casual PC user already.

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

#89

Post by pimeys »

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…

Almost the same, but i3-gaps instead of XFCE. Ubuntu update is just a `do-release-upgrade` and reboot. Nothing changes.

The only thing I don't really like in the Ubuntu's model is the bi-yearly updates and the PPA system. Every time you upgrade the distro the PPA's get disabled and there's a lot of work enabling them and fixing the packages.

That being said, I installed NixOS to my other laptop and after two days got a configuration that just installs and configures everything I need. I might overwrite this Ubuntu installation with it and go rolling with the master.

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

#90

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

cdnsteve wrote: post #40

I just dumped Windows 10 for full on Ubuntu 18 on my desktop and so far so good. Great that it has whatever you need only a shell command away. Thumbs up so far.

Yeah, until it doesn't because no one added it to the package repository, or the version in the repository is out of date, and there's not even a PPA. That's one of the big issues I have with the package manager centric application distribution model, it's basically an appstore. That wouldn't be a big deal, except that structuring the OS around the package manager as the one and only way software gets installed has lead to an environment where there is no standardized set of base system components a developer can target if they want to distribute their application any other way, so the options they're left with are 1) Statically link everything, which glibc is actively hostile to, or 2) bundle all your dependencies, a loader, and a wrapper script (or static binary) to ensure what you need is available and properly linked. Is it really any wonder why so little non-oss software is available?
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