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

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271–280 of 297 posts

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

#271

> 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.

No one forces you to use the feature, just because it's there. Other people do find it useful and they have every right to do so.

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

#272
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…

CTR+SHIFT+(ARROW UP|DOWN)should move the current window to the workspace up or down without losing focus. A minor setting on Gnome tweak allows you to have workspaces on all monitors as well.

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

#273

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 awesome wm.

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

#274

> It's a sensible change upon reflection given Wayland's long list of incomplete features like, for example, the lack of support for screen sharing in chat/VoIP apps and spotty support for VNC tools I've been struggling with VNC on 17.10, eventually ended up installing RDP (XRDP), also buggy as hell. Can anyone point out a good remote desktop solution for Ubuntu, that will preferably work in 18.04 ?

I haven't tried it but maybe give X2Go a look?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2Go

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

#275
post #132

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…

On macOS the desktop actually has slightly different behavior than a typical Finder window. Normally the desktop shows Hard disks, External disks, and Connected Servers; but if you open "~/Desktop" in a Finder window none of those items will be present.

Honestly, I never use the desktop for anything so getting rid of it isn't a big deal to me. Could you explain what kind of things you use it for? What's so bad about viewing the desktop through a window?

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

#276
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…

On macOS the desktop actually has slightly different behavior than a typical Finder window. Normally the desktop shows Hard disks, External disks, and Connected Servers; but if you open "~/Desktop" in a Finder window none of those items will be present. Honestly, I never use the desktop for anything so getting rid of it isn't a big deal to me. Could you explain what kind of things you use it for? What's so bad about…

For me that's basically the "current place I'm working on". If I got a project, I'll have a dedicated directory. But a lot of stuff I are not a project, or will be done forever in a few hours.

So the desktop is a transition area, easily accessible, where I can put all the file I need for the task at hand right now. It's also the place I see everyday when logging it, so I can review what needs to be filed, and what need to be deleted. Clean desktop every morning, clean mind.

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

#277

> 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.

This one is so annoying to me. I keep typing names of file and it searches it recursively, so instead of going to what I want faster, I waste time.

It's such a weird decision, as searching recursively something is a rare task, so having a dedicated button would be fine. While going to a file/folder in the current dir is pretty much the basic interaction with a file manager.

I don't get their reasoning there.

If somebody knows of any trick to get the old behavior back (even patching the damn nautilus), I'll take it. I'll probably upgrade in a few month and I'll need it badly.

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

#278
post #226
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

Restore sanity by applying the following patch: https://code.hackerspace.pl/q3k/q3kverlay/tree/x11-libs/gtk+... (or just use this overlay if you run Gentoo)

Any tutorial on this ? And above all, how to automate it so that it's applied after updates ?

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

#279
post #133

> 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/…

> the Desktop filesystem metaphor is used by almost every single computer user I have ever seen Smartphones, tablets, and Chromebooks are incredibly popular and lack a desktop. ChromeOS is the most similar to GNOME here, in that it has a desktop wallpaper but you cannot create anything there.

Yeah, but I've yet to see somebody to be productive on those.

Either the setup is too limitating : trying to do anything multi task on a phone OS is excuciating, you can't have your 3D rendering software/IDE/veracrypt/... installed in chrome OS, you don't have enough hard drive space,

Or on the other end of the spectrum, I even got friends who are minimalistic, they have no windows decoration, all is keyboard based, with an arch and dvorak layout, doing everything in VIM. Well in the end, they are slower, because they have to keep so many things in their head to do the most basic thing. Like 70 keyboard shorcut (on 3 different keyboard in case they are not on their perfect seup) layout and the position/index of their windows and names of files to just edit + switch. You can literally see them think before every action that requires context switching, which is brain power that they don't use for fixing the problem. And by the way, they spend a lot of time taking care of that setup, despite the fact they advertise it as rock solid.

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

#280
My experience is quite the contrary which makes me wonder, does it really behave so differently among systems?!? touchpad and bluetooth pairing (a2dp) are not working after suspend+resume. Notice: touchpad can be fixed with a script in /lib/sysetmd/system-sleep. Home encryption gone?!?! Why for fucks sake?!? This was one of the USPs for me to use it over Debian. Yeah it can be done manually, but for beginners this is a drawback...
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