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Comment by feintruled | Hacker News Reader

Not before time! I would occasionally use it in the Windows style "start typing the app name" use case and it was annoying enough that it seemed to prioritize the online searches making you wait for a couple of seconds before it showed the local results, but it would also often bring up weird matches for adult content too!

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I switched to linux mint a while back and i have to say I'm very satisfied of how stable and easy to use it is.

It's basically Ubuntu LTS without all the buggy slow crap like unity.

Call me crazy, but I really like Unity. Back on windows, I always kept by taskbar on the left side anyway, and I prefer the dash search to anything else I've seen.

Me too, I prefer unity + auto-hide taskbar. At first there were some reservations until it got familiar, now anything else doesn't cut it. I hope they don't abandon it or change it drastically as is so often the way these things go.

Re Ubuntu, it helps that it works exceptionally well on anything remotely modern (6 year old PC here with SSD, won't be upgrading until it dies), and it is getting incrementally better with each release.

Same. It looks slick, is very fast (thanks to well defined and configurable keyboard shortcuts) and easy to use.

Whatever the haters have against it, in the end I get stuff done faster and spend less time configuring my DE.

The keyboard shortcuts for snapping are so key. I really struggle to manage windows on any computer that isn't running Unity.

What I don't get is why they didn't make them match the Windows hotkeys. It was ALT+START+LEFT to stick something left, for example. Why add the ALT?

I liked the idea of Unity, but they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in so many small places I get quickly enraged using it. Ubuntu Mate for me. ;)

IMHO, Unity is by far the best DE in Linux. It has come a long way since the horrors of the first few iterations of the product.

It has some critical flaws, but it's manageable. (The worst being poor workspaces support)

My favourite thing is hitting Alt and searching through menu items. It's what I miss most when using Gnome or Windows.

When I read "reinstall to upgrade" I decided Mint wasn't for me.

I use Xubuntu and it's pretty good - Ubuntu without the dumbed-down Unity stuff.

That's what happened with me on Mint. I appreciate how quickly I can re-install Linux and get everything back to how I want it, but I want that to be by choice not by design.

Debian has always had pretty good upgrade in place abilities. I was doing that 15 year ago and it worked well; I'm not giving it up.

I decided to reinstall Ubuntu a while ago, because I was upgrading in-place since 10.10, and I decided to create a local Ansible playbook and a bash script for whatever the Ansible playbook couldn't handle.

I added it to my dotfiles repo and it's been working perfectly. Not only for installing on a new machine, but for syncing changes across computers as well. I install some new software on my laptop, I add it to my provisioning file and commit one or two of its dotfiles, and, when I move to the desktop, its entire state is one "git pull; provision" away.

I have no idea why I haven't done this earlier. Here's the playbook, if you're curious:

https://www.pastery.net/ztduxp/

Yes, I hate this too. On my desktop, primarily Fedora, I often open applications by pressing hyper and then typing the partial name of the program and then pressing "enter". This takes way too long on windows, and doesn't always work. Why would I the start menu to search? I have a web browser always open anyway!

You just have to install Gnome Desktop and everything is fine.

Except the GUI of all the programs. I still can't use some dialogues in Eclipse because panels are cut off and buttons are outside of the not-resizable window. This stuff happens way too often in Gnome.

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