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(Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

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Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#21

Post by jamesbritt »

pers3us wrote: post #13
jamesbritt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I just installed 10.10 on a Thinkpad W500 using the Trinity KDE3 dstro. I ever cared for Gnome; lack of easy menu hacking and navigation and not being able to set different backgrounds for each desktop were among my peeves. KDE4 didn't work for me, either. Too much slickness for stuff I had no use for. Lucky for me some smart, motivated people decided to keep KDE3 alive. My eternal thanks to them. A downside…

I think you should give Openbox or Fluxbox or LXDE a try. A lot many features to customize, and initially it will be pain in the ass, but eventually you will be satisfied.

Thanks for the suggestions. I've tried a few others, and have decided that KDE3.5 works quite well enough for most things, and I've gotten accustomed to the annoyances, so I'm good.

But the really nice thing is I can always toss on a new WM or whatever and try it out with very little trouble.

Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#23

Post by hasenj »

makmanalp wrote: post #16
hristov wrote: post #3

I am a longtime Ubuntu user and I turned off Unity as soon as I figured out how to do it. It is really really wrong IMO. Shuttleworth should realize that a desktop computer with a mouse is very different from an iPad and things that are all the rage for tablets are not necessarily good for desktops. For example on a desktop you have a mouse which has very high precision and accuracy, whereas on an iPad you have your…

Actually, unity has that feature where if you drag a window towards the side of the monitor, it'll tile to one half instead of the full monitor. What really bugs me is the dumb launch menu. I think it's pretty much the same idea as the one on macs. Who the hell decided that it was a good idea to group applications together? Why is everyone (win7 also) following suit? It's dumb to extrapolate that just because two win…

This is the first release. Consider it a glorified MVP.

It's not that this is the greatest idea ever! It's more like, given the constraints and the available options, this option has enough goodness to out-weigh the badness.

The grouping of multiple windows from the same application together is the only major problem I find with this setup, and even then it's not so major. It can probably be solved by providing a keyboard-shortcut to cycle current application windows.

Overall I like the launcher very much. In fact, it's my dream dock-clone: vertical, and integrated with the panel and window manager, and makes the windows-style task-list obsolete.

Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#24

Post by AlisdairO »

makmanalp wrote: post #16
hristov wrote: post #3

I am a longtime Ubuntu user and I turned off Unity as soon as I figured out how to do it. It is really really wrong IMO. Shuttleworth should realize that a desktop computer with a mouse is very different from an iPad and things that are all the rage for tablets are not necessarily good for desktops. For example on a desktop you have a mouse which has very high precision and accuracy, whereas on an iPad you have your…

Actually, unity has that feature where if you drag a window towards the side of the monitor, it'll tile to one half instead of the full monitor. What really bugs me is the dumb launch menu. I think it's pretty much the same idea as the one on macs. Who the hell decided that it was a good idea to group applications together? Why is everyone (win7 also) following suit? It's dumb to extrapolate that just because two win…

When I first started using macs, I hated the group-by-application idea too, but I've come to prefer it. Combined with application-specific expose, I find it scales so much better for when I have over 10 windows open on a non-huge screen - which I do most of the time. When I go back to a WM with a list of lots of windows open, I find myself hunting and pecking amongst all these tiny, almost indistinguishable icons, and it feels like it takes forever.

edit: What I'd quite like is another expose mode which shows, say, the last 6 windows you've worked on. While I often have a lot of stuff i want to keep open, I often have a relatively smaller immediate working set.

Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#26

Post by kamechan »

i like natty...except for unity.

i'm sure unity is great on a smaller screen, but on a 2560x1440 panel having a window take over the entire desktop when one maximizes it is a deal-breaker. tried to turn off this setting via compizconfig and the old way of doing it through the appearance > windows > maximize vertically setting (which i really loved) but the narwhal disobeys me and impales me with its unpleasant horn unless i go back to classic mode with no effects.

after getting all excited about 11.04, downloading it, reloading, and then being disappointed, i'm now back on 10.10. not crazy about mint's layout either, nor am i a huge fan of gnome3. i guess if i were going to make a major change at this point, it would be to xmonad (which i currently play with once in a while) and not to unity. at least xmonad is fast and intelligent.

Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#27

Post by clark-kent »

kamechan wrote: post #26

i like natty...except for unity. i'm sure unity is great on a smaller screen, but on a 2560x1440 panel having a window take over the entire desktop when one maximizes it is a deal-breaker. tried to turn off this setting via compizconfig and the old way of doing it through the appearance > windows > maximize vertically setting (which i really loved) but the narwhal disobeys me and impales me with its unpleasant horn u…

Its going to get better. I agree unity is still too buggy for prime time. But I think the designers nailed the fundamentals. I look forward to see what they have by 11.10.

Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#28

Post by kleiba »

spiffworks wrote: post #6

I have to say, as an Awesome WM user, I was sceptical of Unity. But after a day of using it, I think I might never go back to Awesome. It is just ridiculously well thought out, in a way that I have never experienced on Linux before. It really is a leap, if only for the methodology they used. I hope other distros start doing this kind of deep analysis.

Could you give examples for the features your find well thought out? Does Unity solve problems you had with Awesome?

Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#29

Post by justincormack »

chanks wrote: post #12

The sticking point for me with Unity was switching between multiple open windows. I typically have a dozen or so terminals and gedit and Chrome windows open across a half-dozen workspaces, but if I want to bring (let's say) a specific terminal on my current workspace to the foreground, I couldn't figure out a better way to do it than to open up Unity's display of all the many terminals I have running and try to pick…

Yeah I find that too. Problem is I cant identify the Chrome windows very accurately, and they keep reordering themselves by last used. I remembered the tabs by position, and reordered them, but the screen views are less useful, especially if lots of them have say wikipedia as the top site.

Re: (Ubuntu) 11.04, a leap forward

#30

Post by drdaeman »

mkelly wrote: post #4

One of the great things about Linux in general is that this is non-news plenty of users who don't use the default window manager anyway. Prefer something else? Just switch. You're not married to the window manager like you are on OS X and Windows. I'm very happy for that. (Edit: I should clarify that I'm writing this in anticipations that the general sentiment will be that Unity is terrible. If you don't think it's t…

One bad thing about GNU/Linux is with the current direction of things, at some point in time we won't have this easy anymore.

IMHO the complexity gets a bit too high, and cost of maintaining forks gets too big, so even free licensing does not really matter anymore. One has to be very motivated, to keep up with his fork.

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