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

arstechnica.com

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

#141

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ploggingdev wrote: post #80

> but two deserve a quick mention. The first is Kubuntu, which for my money is the flavor to beat. If you haven't tried KDE lately, you really should give Kubuntu a go. KDE is no longer the memory hog it once was, and Plasma 5.12 offers an incredibly nice, polished, and smooth experience. Strongly agree. KDE/plasma continue to make great progress and it's my personal favorite. Looks gorgeous out of the box, is light…

KDE too has cycled through removing the ability to put things on the desktop and reverted to allowing a "folder view" and then back to a traditional windows desktop (as one option).

They still do some kookie stuff with Plasma -- from big things like Activities to little annoying things like removing the drag-resize from the application menu (I fix the size in ~/.config after every update), and removing the KDE version info from the Dolphin file manager about menu. Weird little changes that make you wonder if someone's gone insane.

Mind you I disable just about every automation and haven't used KDE apps like kmail for a long time.

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

#142

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

collyw wrote: post #99
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #83

Earlier 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.…

> And please stop moving the bloody usb drive mount location about.

Asking the Linux community to have consistency and standards is like asking rain not to be wet I'm afraid.

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

#143

Post by dm319 »

tuomosipola wrote: post #105
shabbyrobe wrote: post #77

> 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.

> missing type-ahead search in Nautilus file browser

I'd forgotten this! Very frustrating when you're used to using this to switch to a file in that directory. I also missed split-screen functionality, and the inability to right click and fire up a terminal from that location. Oh, and also looks like they've dropped being able to double-click on an executable .sh file to run it.

Luckily none of this bothers me as there is Caja.

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

#144

Post by justin66 »

fb03 wrote: post #130
themodelplumber wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

I get where you guys are coming from on this. The problem is more acute for those of us who switch between two or three different OSes as a matter of course and spend the least amount of time in Linux. That's where something like MATE really shines.

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

#145

Post by thinkmassive »

lbenes wrote: post #132
danpalmer wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, and I don't follow this particularly closely, so I might be wrong... They are removing the ability to have a Nautilus backed set of Desktop icons, with the intention of replacing this with something built in a more standard way for the rest of Gnome (which I think means web technologies?). As I understand it this not about removing desktop icons, it is about replacing unmaintained legacy code…

Yes, that's the logic behind GNOME's move, but it doesn't address the user's concerns. First of all they are removing code of a popular feature before it has been replaced. Secondly, they are adding to code duplication by creating 2 totally separate code bases. In both OS X and Windows your desktop is just a folder with a background set to icon grid view. From right clicking to dragging, the UX is and should be ident…

Why should the desktop metaphor be constrained to “just a folder with a background set to grid view” though? Phones are already far ahead of most desktops by having widgets. Perhaps we’ll see innovation in the area of desktop UIs from Gnome when they get the next generation in place.

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

#146

Post by catach »

obelix_ wrote: post #115
djanogo wrote: post #76

Earlier 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…

Just curious, how these Devs develop immunity to the "plague"?

In this particular case, the small team size and the multi-year effort to upgrade the DE to GTK+ 3 is likely a strong contributor.

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

#147

Post by fb03 »

Rapzid wrote: post #120
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…

Same story as most here; XUbuntu for the past 7-8 years. Mostly run it in a VM from Win 10 for Dev work. I really need to get that global menu bar installed after I upgrade to 18.04 though.

We have exactly the same setup, then :-)

I need Win10 for low latency music work and for the odd game, all development work happens in Xubuntu VMs.

Windows is essentially a shell where I juggle vms when I need a dev environment for a specific client.

I use VirtualBox as my virtualization solution and what I found was that using Xubuntu made the whole "linux in a vm" experience much more snappier, and since I basically work with 'text' and don't fiddle with music+video inside the vm, I often forget I'm inside a VM when it's fullscreened. With Ubuntu/Unity the whole VM experience gets slowed to a crawl because Unity wants to XDamage/Composite everything and virtualbox's "accelerated drivers" aren't that good to make it perform good.

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

#148

Post by dm319 »

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…

Yes, they dropped the nicest bits of Unity.

The Mutiny layout in UbuntuMATE 18.04 is really nice, and they've implemented the HUD, global menu, titlebar integration, and it's got HiDPI support now.

I think multimonitors is still an issue though - you can only have one dock, and it's best left on the screen on the left by the looks of it.

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

#149

Post by colordrops »

Symmetry wrote: post #107
kcdigital wrote: post #87

Anyone 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 run xmonad from within a Gnome session, at least on my laptop. I looks like the PPA lazy people like myself use to do the integration has been updated for 18.04[1] so I'm going to move my laptop over shortly. [1] https://github.com/Gekkio/gnome-session-xmonad

I second this. Xmonad with gnome is nearly perfect once configured.

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

#150

Post by seba_dos1 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #141
ploggingdev wrote: post #80

> but two deserve a quick mention. The first is Kubuntu, which for my money is the flavor to beat. If you haven't tried KDE lately, you really should give Kubuntu a go. KDE is no longer the memory hog it once was, and Plasma 5.12 offers an incredibly nice, polished, and smooth experience. Strongly agree. KDE/plasma continue to make great progress and it's my personal favorite. Looks gorgeous out of the box, is light…

KDE too has cycled through removing the ability to put things on the desktop and reverted to allowing a "folder view" and then back to a traditional windows desktop (as one option). They still do some kookie stuff with Plasma -- from big things like Activities to little annoying things like removing the drag-resize from the application menu (I fix the size in ~/.config after every update), and removing the KDE versio…

You always had an ability to put things on the desktop in Plasma, even in KDE 4.0. It just worked in a completely different way, unrelated to the "Desktop" folder in the filesystem.

Also, Alt+PPM works well for resizing the Plasma menus now. It was missing for some time due to architectural changes.

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