Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 297 posts

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

#181

Post by sjellis »

hedora wrote: post #174
_phaq wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems wilfully destructive to remove something that is depended on by so many without making sure there's a replacement in place first. Could cut straight to the GNOME logo after that sentence. This is sort of what they do, yeah. And they do have their niche with that, which is big enterprise-y, centrally administered systems. If the user doesn't need to administer things themselves, then not exposing ways of ad…

Devuan and Mint do a decent job shipping gnome 2 style environments by default. As far as I know, Gnome 2 is the last example of a Linux desktop environment that underwent professional usability testing (on regular people and power users) before shipping. Personally, these days, I prefer minimalist WM’s and CLI administration tools for stuff like WiFi, but all the newer heavy DE’s I’ve tried have obvious (to me) usab…

"Devuan and Mint do a decent job shipping gnome 2 style environments by default."

I've been very, very impressed with the MATE desktop. It's actually GNOME 2, carefully upgraded to GTK 3, then with a sensible set of improvements. It's available on most distributions, but the lead developer is also the lead for Ubuntu MATE.

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

#182

Post by Rapzid »

fb03 wrote: post #147
Rapzid wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 basicall…

When I was rolling on company hardware(MacBook Pro) I got incredibly frustrated with the experience of running even Xubuntu in VirtualBox; the OSX Virtualbox experience is beyond abysmal :| This lead me to purchasing a personal VMware license for OSX.

Back on Windows 10 I re-evaluated VirtualBox, Hyper-V with the new linux enhanced session support(poor experience TBH), and VMware workstation player. VMware ended up being the best experience in terms of responsiveness IMHO. You may want to give it a go. It's free for personal use, but unfortunately workstation pro is quite expensive.

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

#183

Post by xab9 »

awaaz wrote: post #164
justin66 wrote: post #59

Earlier 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...

Another keyboard-only method which I haven't seen mentioned yet, that I learned in Windows but seems to work well even in Linux, is to press alt+space and then 'm' followed by arrow keys to move the window around, or 'r' followed by arrow keys to resize the window For people like me on laptops with trackpads, these keyboard shortcuts work really well.

Fortunately gnome 3 people fixed this by removing all mnemonics, so you can only use the arrow keys to navigate the window menu.

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

#184

Post by criddell »

thinkmassive wrote: post #145
lbenes wrote: 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.

Was Microsoft ahead of its time with Active Desktop?

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

#185

Post by amenod »

lainga wrote: post #161
sandworm101 wrote: post #123

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…

>Let me launch the program I need and get the F out of my way. That is a philosophy DEs should have, but (if you'd like suggestions) which XFCE most cleanly follows.

I love it for this. I got burned by both KDE4 and Gnome... 3? (starting as actually usable WM, then getting drunk on success and thinking they can and should reinvent the modern desktop). I would love Xfce even more if they fixed some small UX shortcomings (like being able to sort opened apps the way you want to, being unable to set anything in Indicator plugin and similar), but even so it's at least stable and useful. Kudos to developers!

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

#186

Post by evand »

teddyh wrote: post #162
sangnoir wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What was wrong with Synaptic? >> broken dependencies. Not that it's Synaptic's fault, but some packages will have conflicting dependencies, especially if you're using PPA's to get recent software versions. It's not uncommon to get "foo (latest) requires bar >=3.1 but you have bar 2.8 installed. Baz (installed) requires bar 2.8". Snaps avoid conflicts by having each app contain it's dependencies, which could otherwi…

> Snaps avoid conflicts by having each app contain it's dependencies, which could otherwise conflict. It also negates the entire point of having a package management system, as you can’t upgrade a security issue in libfoo and get it fixed once, but have to wait for all the users of libfoo, and the users of users of libfoo, and so on, to provide a new version of the Snap package with a new fixed libfoo contained insid…

I work for Canonical, but I also share maintainership of some snaps. From an automatic email I received recently: “A scan of this snap shows that it was built with packages from the Ubuntu archive that have since received security updates. The following lists new USNs for affected binary packages in each snap revision: … Simply rebuilding the snap will pull in the new security updates and resolve this. If your snap also contains vendored code, now might be a good time to review it for any needed updates.“

Yes, you don’t get that library update everywhere all at once, but this gives each vendor a chance to make sure that update actually works with their app.

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

#187

Post by satysin »

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…

Ubuntu on my new ThinkPad X1 Carbn with 1440p 14" screen is awful due to no fractional scaling. At 150% it is perfect but with the only options being 100% or 200% it is close to useless for me. Such a shame. Guess I will need to look at how to get Wayland working to see if I can get fractional scaling back. Seems those who have got it working still have a load of issues with jaggy fonts though. I had hoped that in 2018 these things would have been solved. Even Microsoft has managed to implement a high quality solution.

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

#188

Post by symlinkk »

sangnoir wrote: post #118
collyw wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was wrong with Synaptic? I always felt the the offical Ubuntu package manager was a dumbed down version that(though its been a while sine I have used Ubuntu). Synaptic definitely felt better for installing libraries instead of applications.

> What was wrong with Synaptic? >> broken dependencies. Not that it's Synaptic's fault, but some packages will have conflicting dependencies, especially if you're using PPA's to get recent software versions. It's not uncommon to get "foo (latest) requires bar >=3.1 but you have bar 2.8 installed. Baz (installed) requires bar 2.8". Snaps avoid conflicts by having each app contain it's dependencies, which could otherwi…

Huh, so basically Windows had it right this whole time?

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

#189

Post by sonnhy »

sandGorgon wrote: post #178

To all those who are moving to xubuntu or mate because gnome is janky...well it can be janky on Ubuntu. Fedora 28 and Gnome were made for each other. They look and work brilliant. Try it out (and don't let dnf vs apt hold you back)

The real upgrade for me was in fact using dnf instead of apt. It seems and work so perfectly I don't even use any synaptic-like package manager. Also yes, can confirm that GNOME is very well integrated in Fedora. That vanilla feel is so strange coming from Ubuntu, which heavily relies on modification on every package they have.

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

#190

Post by bokchoi »

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/…

Good riddance. I just want to maximize or tile my windows -- I've never found it useful to have desktop icons. The desktop just ends up as a sea of icons that you have to hunt through to find the one you want.
Post reply on HN