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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

#151
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nope! You can configure the bars as you like.

Indeed. Remember Gnome 2? It's pretty much like that.

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

#152

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.

dwm and demu from Suckless for over 12 years.

When I start X11, dwm and a xterm my ram consumption is only 60MB.

https://dwm.suckless.org/

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

#153
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tried that as well with the same results (blurry text). The best approach I found was to install gnome-tweak-tool, and set the font scaling factor to 1.5. Chrome and a lot of other apps scale everything including ui elements by 1.5. The window manager and some other apps don't seem to support this though.

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

#154

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)?

I try using KDE every couple of years and I can't even put my finger on why it grosses me out so much. The "K" start to every piece of software is obnoxious, I don't know if this is true today but I remember one of my first times using KDE and searching for "calculator" or something and being unable to find it because it was "kalculator". Terrible UX. I think what really gets me is I use Windows at work and KDE is to…

> I don't know if this is true today

It's not.

Also, I can't stand the ugliness of GNOME, while Plasma looks mostly neat and clean.

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

#155

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 use only i3 and no DE. It has really improved my productivity with features like sending windows to other screens at the touch of a button and floating windows across all workspaces.

Sure it was a pain to set it up (and having to configure stuff like i3-lock and suspend) but I did it once years ago and have not changed anything since then.

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

#156

Earlier 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…

We need the equivalent of CSS user stylesheets for UX, where user preferences can contextually override publisher/designer preferences. The relationship between the user and other sources of “design input” can be adversarial. Open-source rule engines can help users to negotiate this adversarial space.

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

#157
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when they break horribly. Some of them modifies gsettings directly, so even if you remove it, you still have to clean them up manually.

It's up to developer/maintainer to provide rollback. My experience with Gnome 3 isn't deep because I've switched to KDE after 2 months of tinkering and feel happy ever since.

KDE is kinda okay now, but I just can't forget the nuclear clusterfuck called kde 4 back in the day.

I kinda tolerate gnome 3 (despite its marvellously obvious flaws) for now and if I find it way too annoying, I'll rip it out and use fluxbox or smg similarly low level wm.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

We need the equivalent of CSS user stylesheets for UX, where user preferences can contextually override publisher/designer preferences. The relationship between the user and other sources of “design input” can be adversarial. Open-source rule engines can help users to negotiate this adversarial space.

> CSS user stylesheets for UX

Isn’t this, quite literally, what Gnome Shell Extensions are?

https://extensions.gnome.org/

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

#159
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,…

You get more then a basic install, like in Arch you had to search then read the wiki then install packages from AUR(not a safe repo of scripts) to get good looking fonts. So in Ubuntu fonts just work on some other distros you need to do extra work to get better looking fonts, get flash, get codecs, get proprietary drivers. There is a very good reason Ubuntu got popular and it is not because the installer look good.

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

#160
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We tried widgets on the desktop: both macOS and Windows had them in previous versions, announced to great fanfare. Nobody used them and they were quietly removed.

Same thing with notification centers: another thing that both Mac and Windows added assuming it would be just as vital on the desktop as it was on phones. AFAICT they see very little use; I can't remember the last time I opened the notification center on either the Macs or PCs I use.

Not that new developments on the desktop aren't welcome, but widgets aren't it. Not every innovation that works on mobile can or should be brought to the desktop.

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