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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

#251
post #241
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CSS user stylesheets for UX Isn’t this, quite literally, what Gnome Shell Extensions are? https://extensions.gnome.org/

Gnome extensions are weird because the UX around them very much feels like an attempt to actively discourage their use. -using the website to install extensions requires both a browser extension and installing chrome-gnome-shell, not installed by default by most distros -UI to configure extensions is in Tweak Tool, again not installed by default in most distros and full of the things GNOME people don't really want yo…

Extensions are a fig leaf towards power users in the hopes that they will be distracted long enough that they forget to complain between releases.

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

#252
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"?

I would not say they are immune, simply that they have the "metabolism" of sloths. In other words, a small team of volunteers rather than a big group of full time developers working for a big name corporation.

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

#253

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…

What's wrong with Windows key->type "email"->Enter? That's how GNOME works.

Yes but that doesn't fit the accepted narrative that Gnome has sucked since V3 and the devs hate the users so much they go out of their way to make them less productive.

Incidentally, I'm part of the silent majority that enjoys Gnome and loves the emphasis on clean simplicity. No, it's not perfect, but it's moving in the right direction.

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

#254

> 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.

In other news people like you and I are such freaking minority that a well-targeted meteor rain can kill us all off. My usual desktop is Xmonad w/o any bars etc, Emacs w/ 2 windows and qutebrowser. I'm not a programmer, so people that look at my computer are usually non-techies, and they usually find it frightening.

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

#255

> 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/…

I'd imagine Canonical could fork nautilus, or just use one of the other file managers for example from Mate, that allows for desktop icons.

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

#256
post #20

Since 20+ years ago I used decent window managers that let me have a 2x2 workspace. VERY simple to use. Moving the mouse works within a workspace and the same way across workspaces (mouse off any edge). Moving windows worked within workspaces (click, drag, drop) same as across workspaces (click, drag, drop). Basically the principal of least surprise. Moving the mouse and clicking shouldn't have special rules across w…

Does workspace grid [1] work on 18.04? Not sure how to get wrapping, though. [1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/484/workspace-grid/

It works for me just fine in a 2x2 grid

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

#257

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 20…

The experimental fractional scaling that GNOME provides is nice but only works w/ apps that have been ported to Wayland. Everything that runs in XWayland (Firefox, Thunderbird, emacs) shows up as extremely blurry.

I've got the exact same 1440p screen as you on my Thinkpad (which wants to be run at 1.5x or 1.75x) and the best solution I've found is provided by KDE. Try installing Plasma (either by installing Kubuntu or just installing the desktop w/ apt) and setting Display->Scaling to 2X and then go into fonts separately and set "force font DPI" to 168. That's working remarkably well for both GTK and QT apps for me. 2X scaling for windows/icons keeps them from being tiny/blurry and setting the font size to 168 (aka 175%) prevents the fonts from being huge.

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

#258

Earlier 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.

Many years ago I used to use light weight window managers. I remember using icewm after I got fed up with enlightenment, but I think it was Fluxbox that I kept for a long time -- up until about 2010. However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.

I have all those things with spectrwm and dmenu.

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes...

And ActiveX was basically Electron!

In reverse! Oh, you want your desktop app on a website eh?

Note that Active Desktop and ActiveX were not really related beyond being MS-powered internet technologies.

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

#260

After updating to 18.04, local DNS no longer works on this machine. It worked before. It seems that the systemd "stub" resolver isn't failing over to the LAN DNS server specified by DHCP. resolve.conf is just a single reference to systemd-resolved. It seems systemd-resolved knows about the LAN DNS server: $ systemd-resolve --status | head -4 Global DNS Servers: 192.168.88.1 It's not using it though: $ nslookup laser…

This is "by design"[0], though you should have seen it crop up in 17.04 when it became the default. I was bitten by it too and disabled systemd-resolved. 0: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6224#issuecomment-...

Thank you so much! This box came from the vendor on 16.04 and never ran on 17.04.

Of course, setting the following in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf did no good:

  LLMNR=no
...because apparently systemd-resolved just ignores its configuration. (I did restart the service; it made no difference.) I re-commented that setting since it does nothing. In order to get this working, I instead had to change the symlink /etc/resolv.conf which previously pointed to /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf to instead point to /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf, another dynamic file which is also maintained by systemd-resolved.

So now I have systemd-resolved handling the info from the DHCP ack, but it isn't handling DNS. This works, but good grief.

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