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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

#171

Post by jschwartzi »

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.

Widgets on the phone work great because the launcher is where I end up every time I press the power key. Widgets on the desktop are useless because the desktop is always obscured by things I'm actively working on, and the only time I will see a widget is when I'm not using my computer for anything at all.

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

#172

Post by FrozenVoid »

Jedd wrote: 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,…

When people say "easy to install" they mean easier to install and configure to their environment. Providing intuitive interfaces and making everything more automated. For example my 'hostname' was automatically set to motherboard model during install.

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

#173

Post by jessaustin »

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
  Server:         127.0.0.53
  Address:        127.0.0.53#53

  ** server can't find laser: SERVFAIL

  $ nslookup laser 192.168.88.1
  Server:         192.168.88.1
  Address:        192.168.88.1#53

  Non-authoritative answer:
  Name:   laser
  Address: 192.168.88.5
Not clear to me whether this is a problem with systemd or with ubuntu integration of systemd. Glancing at /var/log/syslog, it seems systemd-resolved is restarting every four minutes, which seems unnecessary.

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

#174

Post by hedora »

_phaq wrote: post #169
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/…

> 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) usability regressions vs gnome 2.

It is funny how little usability testing is done on desktop environments these days (I also wonder if Microsoft bothered with Win 8, or if apple is with iOS these days cough podcasts cough).

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

#175

Post by Sylos »

danpalmer wrote: post #109
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/…

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…

As others have already commented, I don't trust them to add it back in.

And it would fit their design philosophy to permanently remove it, which has been moving away from the concept of files as a whole. Instead, you're supposed to launch the app that does what you're trying to do and then open the file that you want to edit through that.

Another feature removal that has shown this direction, is the removal of the option to create an empty file from the context menu in the file manager.

Again, instead open the app that creates the type of file that you want and then create the new file in there.

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

#176

Post by reitanqild »

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…

Gnome 2 had their problems with UX too. I remember especially one release where the designers had found out that "spatial" was important and the implementation of their focus on that meant that every folder I opened opened in a new window.

Also I think the general idea that options == bad started in the Gnome 2 era.

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

#177

Post by thinkmassive »

jschwartzi wrote: post #171
thinkmassive wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Widgets on the phone work great because the launcher is where I end up every time I press the power key. Widgets on the desktop are useless because the desktop is always obscured by things I'm actively working on, and the only time I will see a widget is when I'm not using my computer for anything at all.

Fair point. I don’t use a desktop at all because I use a tiling window manager.

When I worked at a Linux distro (endlessos.com) they had modified Gnome to have a universal search bar on the desktop. It was targeted at a different group of users than me, but it seemed to make sense based on that group.

Hopefully Gnome does sufficient user testing to deliver a useful experience to some significant group.

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

#179

Post by bengalister »

kcdigital wrote: post #87

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 do. Actually I got into i3 because of the poor performance of my laptop at work (I do NodeJs/Springboot development btw). I must run Linux (Ubuntu 18.04 now) in a VM on a Windows 7 host and with Gnome it was too memory hungry and the UI was freezing quite often.

I feel very productive with it and I use the mouse way less than I used to. I liked it so much that at home I also do development on Arch Linux (also in a VM) and also use i3. My i3 config is in private git repo. Nothing fancy like I see on reddit.com/r/unixporn with i3 gaps. I basically copied almost all the config from https://github.com/jessfraz/dotfiles

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

#180

Post by sergiusens »

habosa wrote: post #85

Been using 16.04LTS on my personal laptop for a few years, just moved to 18.04. I feel like the biggest improvement by far is the Snap package manager and its integration with the Ubuntu software store. After 10+ years of doing personal computing on Linux this is the first time that installing my main apps has ever felt sane! I was blown away by being able to install the latest Android studio, with a launcher icon, i…

It was introduced a bit earlier than 16.04LTS, but the desktop support really came a bit later than that LTS release (around the time of the point release).

I have been using it since then, but then again I am one of the developers of snapcraft.

Regardless of my affiliation I really appreciate having a base system that is relatively static and have my apps just roll, and if you don't want to roll too far, you can stick to a major release if the publisher of the snap provides a channel with a track you can subscribe to (instead of following the default track, `latest`). If things go ad, you can always revert, which is a big plus from my perspective as it is clean and per snap.

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