I'm a fan of Cinnamon. I wasn't expecting to like it, but I do, and much more than Gnome 3. Cinnamon's old fashioned flexible panel interface still can't be beat.
Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better
121–130 of 297 posts
Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better
#122Earlier 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.
I run Xfce on Debian, I have Gnome 3 in reserve. And occasionally try it out. I quite like the notification area/panel under Gnome. Font clarity seems a little different (better). Workspaces are okay, plug-able drives are handled well, network manager is pretty good these days, as it now has a CLI alternative. But I don't like the application launcher. Not a fan of scrolling through loads of icons. Nautilus has got i…
Xubuntu at least has the whisker menu system, which gives you search bar in menu. Without it one can remove system menu and replace it with Xfce app-finder launcher. Then it's best to change a setting to place windows near the mouse pointer.
Note: I'm currently not using Xfce at home, but I use some older version at work.
Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better
#123> Ubuntu has done a bit of tweaking so that you can actually put launchers, folders, and files on your desktop, which should be welcome news for many Ubuntu users. How long that will last is an open question, though, since GNOME just completely removed the code that made it possible for Canonical to enable this feature. I was curious about this and went spelunking for more information. https://community.ubuntu.com/t/…
It seems strange that Gnome is heading to an non-intuitive direction. You could have all the cool stuff but I think you also should provide the familiar Desktop metaphor elements. I already made a comment about the missing type-ahead search in Nautilus file browser, which decision destroys many people's workflows.
>> It seems strange that Gnome is heading to an non-intuitive direction.
Really? I've never heard anything but non-intuitive ramblings from UI design people. None of them seem to ever actually use computers. Rather, they dream up use cases based on contrived scenarios. I want one thing: The icon is where it was yesterday. Gnome, unity all the others have one job: Let me launch the program I need and get the F out of my way. UI stability is why I years ago abandoned the chaos of Ubuntu for the stability of Mint.
Windows XP got it right. Start button->office->word. Start button -> Email. Most everything after that is fluff.
Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better
#124I'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…
Does XFCE suffer with the Gnome3 affliction of having a top menu bar and a program menu bar underneath? I am left looking through a letter box at my software. Unity was good at this...Gnome3 is not
Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
I would really like to run Arch, but last time I checked it was a manual process (so I am on Majaro). The docs are really good. I am expert enough to get a lot of benefit from that amount of detail, but not expert enough to be bothered with the manual install process. One thing that gets me is ~12 years ago I used to install distros all the time. There was a semi standard way to partition your drive, / home and swap.…
I feel the same. 12-20 years ago, I was installing Linux distros (and NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD...) multiple times in a week. It was such a wonderful playground. As a software developer, now days, I just want something to work without fiddling with it for days. That said, I just installed Arch again a week or so ago. I have 2 observations: 1. Getting it bootstrapped and running is downright annoying. I see little value in it other than teaching someone what an installer _would_ do for them. Do you know how to chroot? mkinitrd? fdisk? install a bootloader? ensure that you have the right drivers/modules to run your WiFi chipset? manually configure everything??? The end product _does_ give you a feeling of accomplishment... but, I'm still not sure it's worth the cost. 2. ArchLinux docs are about the best I've seen. Kudos to the community for doing such a fine job.
Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been using XFCE for 5 or 6 years, the _best_ thing about it are it's developers, they don't keep updating it. XFCE avoids the plague which affects rest of the software industry (me included) - dedicate design, marketing, and development teams who constantly have to add something to justify their jobs and bonuses. Look at the number of app updates on mobile phones, every freaking week there is a update availabl…
I've been a big Xubuntu fan for quite a while myself. I recently put 18.04 on a VM to give it a test drive, and found that they've tweaked XFCE so that you have to be ridiculously precise at moving the mouse to a lower corner if you want to resize a window. The margin for getting a lower-corner drag cursor seems to be one pixel at best. Argh. I've seen this problem over and over on a variety of Ubuntu versions over t…
The tweak I found was essentially learning a new way to resize windows. Hold ALT and right-click-drag from anywhere inside the windows at the lower right corner and it'll grab the window and resize it as you move the mouse.
I know it's not a fix, and it is still cumbersome if all you have at the moment is a laptop trackpad. But it beats having to update your destkop environment's chrome and all that jazz. I find XFCE's window chrome pleasing and minimal, the only issue is exactly that, you only have 1px of hot area at the borders.
Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better
#127I switched to arch linux a couple of weeks ago after being an ubuntu user for 8 years. After installing gnome3 I see not much difference between arch linux and Ubuntu. Sure, maintaining packages is quite different (and better) in arch linux than Ubuntu. I guess I was always a fan of desktop managers and not quite concerned about the distro.
The AUR is also really cool, no more of "add this dodgy PPA", instead you download a file that allows to install dependencies and compile the original sources. It's more transparent, and if you don't care, you can install pacaur that hides all of this behind a pacman interface
I'd say that a minor annoyance is: "here, clone this repo, hop inside the folder, oh... and grab these patches/diffs and pray that you can patch the source. Otherwise, you're not getting that cool feature that you saw on /r/unixporn". There's something to be said for downloading a binary, where someone has already fought through the compilation errors. Totally agree that the quality of AUR package (untouched by patches) are really good.
Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems strange that Gnome is heading to an non-intuitive direction. You could have all the cool stuff but I think you also should provide the familiar Desktop metaphor elements. I already made a comment about the missing type-ahead search in Nautilus file browser, which decision destroys many people's workflows.
>> It seems strange that Gnome is heading to an non-intuitive direction. Really? I've never heard anything but non-intuitive ramblings from UI design people. None of them seem to ever actually use computers. Rather, they dream up use cases based on contrived scenarios. I want one thing: The icon is where it was yesterday. Gnome, unity all the others have one job: Let me launch the program I need and get the F out of…
Seconded. Also I have the impression that everyone in the UI design space forgot that the software is means to an end, not an experience, and it's supposed to help users achieve their goals in maximally efficient way.
(Oh wait, but actually companies make money by making software into experience, so I guess that's where the overall trend comes from.)
Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better
#129Anyone else use a tiling window manager like i3wm? https://i3wm.org/ Since I mostly work in the terminal, it improves my productivity quite a bit when I can navigate around and open apps without touching the mouse.
I do. I've tried most of the popular window managers, but this is the only one that managed to 'disappear' when I used it. Organizing my work is effortless, and it's super light on resources.
Re: Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree! I started using alt+rmb because I couldn't resize windows the normal way, because of the minimal xfce windowing chrome. Found this way as a workaround and now I can't really live without it. I agree, Windows/Mac window resizing now feels like handling a cumbersome dinosaur :-)