Hacker News Reader

Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

I think it was the inability for GUI's to stay stable. Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. My opinion, yes, but I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2.

Couple this with the fact that for a decade, the actual GUI was tied very, very heavily to the apps. So you had to use Gedit in Gnome, or whatever the KDE version of a fucking text editor is. Seemed really, really stupid. Can't we just have a relatively standard GUI text editor across platforms? Or were we all just expected to use vi and emacs?

When the windowing layers stopped moving around so much, and Greg Kroah-Hartman and co. had gotten the driver problems under control, we suddenly had a bunch of different Linuxes that were no longer compatible with each other due to packaging systems. So, now users had to download a deb, or a yum package, or a gentoo package... It was all very confusing for desktop users, especially beginners.

My quote to sum this up would be: "Why are these packages in my repository if they won't work after I install them because I'm using KDE/Gnome/Cinnamon?"

[1]: Unity took Ubuntu from being the default Linux I could put on anything, to a bloated, slow moving sack of crap. I could put Ubuntu on a 2001 laptop and be completely fine, fast enough, usable enough to do just about everything I needed.

Put Unity Ubuntu on that same machine, and it's unusable garbage. I can't even hit alt-F5 to get to another terminal because Unity slows the whole rig down to an absolute crawl. Like, can't even move the mouse, 5 minutes between keypress and action taking place. Fuck Unity. I blame Unity about 40% for killing the Linux desktop.

View on HN

I don't think it's the gui. I'm a relatively savvy user running Debian on a Thinkpad for more than five years now. Printing is still touch and go. I spent countless hours to get sleep working correctly. It is broken now and I don't have the energy to fix it knowing that nothing I do is guaranteed to last through the next apt update. Wifi will mysteriously refuse to connect with some routers (a daily struggle at the uni).

Most of my frustrations come down to these three basic things: printing, power management, and wifi.

I was excited to delve deep into OS internals to troubleshoot in the beginning, bit now I'm just annoyed.

All of those being moving targets...

Sleep has never been a problem for me on any Thinkpad with Ubuntu. Debian, on the other hand, was nothing like pain for bluetooth, wifi, suspend. And don't get me started about the UMTS dongle I once bought that was useless under Debian but worked out of the box (even with a wizard) on Ubuntu. Then again, that dongle never really worked under Windows either (the drivers it auto-installed caused blue screens, and when they didn't, the abominably ugly software that came with it, never found the dongle).

Printing still sucks. Out of the box Ubuntu with my WF-3540...

Add Printer shows the printer. Great! I hit Add and it says "Here's the OpenPrinting driver for it". Great!

I click "Use this driver". It spins. And then acts like nothing has happened. I click it again. Same. I hit Cancel. Oh. Now my printer is installed... with the Generic Text Driver.

So I go to OpenPrinting.org directly and download the driver myself. Oh, now I see the issue. A whole bunch of dependencies that are prompted for here, but weren't prompted for or installed in the printing dialog.

Okay, let's try this again.

Printer Found. Great. Add it. Okay, my driver is in the driver list. Progress. Select, and Add.

"Success!".

I hit Print Test Page. Nothing comes out. "Processing..." Nothing.

Then I look.

And despite having found my printer on the network, Add Printer has added it "connected to localhost". WTF?

Alright. Delete printer.

Add printer. Ignore the found printer, find my printer's IP address manually, and add it that way. Go through things and now I am actually able to print, and everything works great.

But holy crap.

It's 2017.

It's Ubuntu.

How the hell is something this simple this broken?

Don't use the apps, use cups directly. It's not right but it'll get you printing.

http://localhost:631

Is it just me or did they forgot to add css? Nothing wrong with a HTML-BASED backend. But for Tux sake, get some fancy Frontend-Dev to have it look nice out of the box

I have the same thing happen when I download the .deb file for Chrome from the site, open it in the Software Installer (or whatever it's called), it opens an icon in my tray and sits there forever, doing nothing. It's not until I do a sudo dpkg -i that I know that dependencies are missing and that's the reason it won't install. Explain that to a newbie.

Just as a counterpoint, I use Debian on a Thinkpad as well, and while I don't print, wifi and sleep work without problems, and so did a SIM card I put into it for 3G - it 'just worked', and the only config I needed to do was pick which one of my ISP's "AP" names to use. That was surprisingly easy.

As another counter-counterpoint: I use Debian on a T460, and sound and wifi don't work out of the box. While it may be OOTB for some people that doesn't mean it's everyone. I think I've only had one laptop in the past 10 years (~4 laptops) that has worked OOTB with Linux.

Oh, I just mean that some things work really smoothly - it's not just a basket case. I didn't have to install or modify anything with the 3G modem and the network manager just took care of it (and prefers a wifi connection if one is live), which was surprising. This is an option that the biggest prestige laptop maker doesn't even offer.

Debian in particular won't work OOTB on most computers because their philosophy excludes proprietary drivers in the base install... and wifi loves proprietary drivers. That's a 'Debian-philosophy-specific' issue, not a 'linux' issue.

I've had an IBM Thinkpad (2003-2009), a Lenovo netbook (2009-2011), a Sager-branded Clevo (2011-2016), and an HP Envy 15t (current). The Thinkpad...well, 2003 was still a rough time. Especially early on, the basics worked, but everything else was a fight. The netbook had to be connected to ethernet to grab the Broadcom wireless firmware. The Sager had Intel+Nvidia dual GPUs before that was a well-suported use case. The HP is the first machine I can think of where everything "just worked". I improved battery life by tweaking some things, but it was a longer fight to get Windows 7 working on it.

Comparing those to Windows installs on the same hardware at the time I bought them, the HP was lovely, the Lenovo was about equivalent, and the IBM and Sager stank (it'd be cheating to say that loading modern distros on them would be much nicer ;-) )

> Put Unity Ubuntu on that same machine, and it's unusable garbage. I can't even hit alt-F5 to get to another terminal because Unity slows the whole rig down to an absolute crawl. Like, can't even move the mouse, 5 minutes between keypress and action taking place. Fuck Unity. I blame Unity about 40% for killing the Linux desktop.

Have you tried Xubuntu? It fills the gap that Ubuntu used to, and it's my go-to desktop OS now (apart from on my MacBook because only OS X is usable on high DPI displays). I've also installed it for non-technical friends and family and they've found it much more familiar than recent Windows versions.

In an age when the family computer is just as likely to be running Android or iOS, I think the Linux desktop has a niche and we need to start evangelizing it again. Even for the typical home user it feels more powerful than ever when you compare it to such "appliance" operating systems, which Windows and OS X seem determined to become.

I've long ago moved on from this. This was many years ago. We put a lot of Linux desktops in a lot of homes, though. Thousands a year.

Like the OP, I absolutely despise Unity and tried to find a different route. I came across xubuntu - tried it and absolutely love the simplicity. It's minimal, gets out of the way when you need it; but, best of all, it's USABLE. Can't praise it enough.

To expand on this, Ubuntu MATE is also a viable option if you literally want Ubuntu with the old DE (since MATE is a fork of GNOME2).

XFCE: lightweight and powerful

That's my choice as well

Good thing about XFCE is that xrdp still works when you need it.

I've tried so many Linux distros over the years, and Xubuntu impressed me enough that I've abandoned all other distros for around 5 years now. It's got the perfect balance of trade-offs that make it fast, usable, and low-maintenance.

Thumbs up to Xubuntu - best GUI across vendors. The latest Unity desktop is a vast improvement over the initial rollouts (this my current work environment).

> I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2.

Yes! Ironically this was what a lot of people hated about Microsoft, and why the XP->Vista and 7->8->10 changes were so unpopular. Everything moves around and works in a different way, imposing a re-learning cost. But the developers like it because they're bored with the old system and think the new one is better.

Exactly! Those keyboard shortcuts and menu positions are part of my daily WORKFLOW! Stop moving them around and changing them! It is utterly infuriating to have to relearn your desktop GUI behavior.

Why is there no such thing as LTS for GUI interface paradigms? There should be an LTS interface version of every GUI.

Well, there is; it's "regular" OS LTS.

Ubuntu won't change the GUI during LTS (5 years).

But that means all the software on your system will be 5 years old.

Yes...that's the downside of LTS. You can't get the new features because they may break the old ones.

If by "LTS" you simply mean "more backwards compatible" well I agree and pray for the day.

I would be fine with not getting new OS features. The problem is that the repo system ties application software versions to OS versions.

I want to install SomeApp. My options are:

* `apt-get install someapp` and get v0.6.0.1abzrhotfix2 from 5 years ago

* Google to see if a third party repackaging repo exists, decide whether I trust the maintainer of that repo with root access to my machine, `apt-add-repo blah blah`, `apt-get update && apt-get install someapp`, hope that apt works and doesn't spit out a bunch of "Depends: blah blah but it is not going to be installed, you have held broken packages"

* Go to someapp.com, download someapp.deb if it exists

* Try to install it with the GUI, get an error, use dpkg -i instead, find out it has a bunch of dependencies, install them and hope they're abi compatible, also hope I don't get "Errors while processing:"

* Download source code, learn the flavour-of-the-month C++ build system, try to compile, fail, try to install dependencies, some fail because my distro only provides incompatible forked versions for political reasons, have to download the source for those too, have to either build statically or use LD_PRELOAD hacks

Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it. It will probably work even if I have a rather old version of the OS, it almost certainly won't conflict with anything else I have installed, it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate, and I definitely won't need to google any command line flags. And when I do upgrade my OS, I probably won't be forced to upgrade the app too if I've found a specific version that works exactly how I need it to.

> Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it.

I much prefer the repo system to the Windows "I wonder if I can trust this site to deliver a safe .exe, and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad?"

> it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate,

Yes, because every application needs its own phone-home updater (with questionable security), with bonus "value-add" crapware popping up to remind me it exists.

Yep, it's bad.

On Windows I wind up using http://ninite.com/ for my "package manager" equivalent and hope the software I want is there.

>I wonder if I can trust this site to deliver a safe .exe

Your first point is only applicable if you are downloading unknown, untrustworthy software from tophotfreeawesomedownloadsnow.com.

>and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad

I agree that this is a severe problem for non-technical users. For those users, there is a lot to be said for a walled-garden app store (which could take the form of a GUI apt wrapper, I suppose). More experienced users know what the link and download should look like, rendering those ads a mere annoyance. I doubt anyone reading hackernews has fallen for those things.

>Yes, because every application needs its own phone-home updater (with questionable security)

For what it's worth, I usually disable auto-updaters for any desktop app that isn't network-reliant. I manually update if I find a bug or want a new feature, knowing that I can always re-install the old version if I find the new one is worse. I appreciate that this has its own downsides (especially if the user doesn't keep themselves updated on security advisories), but the point is that I /can/ do this whereas it's pretty much impossible on desktop Linux. I would have to choose between several undesirable alternatives, as I detailed above.

>with bonus "value-add" crapware popping up to remind me it exists

I don't have this issue with software I use. If I noticed it, I would try the following steps in order:

* Block network, if the reminders are fetched from the web

* Disable any reminder features in the app's own settings menu

* Revert to an older version of the app which didn't do this

* Consider alternatives, of which there are probably several

Your first reaction is probably "none of that should be necessary and there is generally no crapware on desktop Linux", and this is true. But as soon as you try to use anything that isn't the version in your distro's repo, you are in for a world of painful incompatibilities and package manager hell. For every app you want to do this with.

You have /less/ freedom to set up the system how you want it than you do on Windows/OSX, because even though you technically /can/ install whatever you want, it is horribly time-consuming and aggravating to actually do so.

There are some known-good sources of Windows software, ranging from Major Geeks to the Windows Store.

You can also use the Chocolatey package manager for Windows.

https://chocolatey.org/packages

Not exactly. Many patches are back ported but barely features thats true

I installed Libreoffice 5.3 on my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS yesterday, from their PPA. I kept up to date with LO for 4 years in the same way when I was on 12.04. Same for PostgreSQL. There are plenty of PPAs maintained by the developers of single applications and they tend to support the LTSrd for a while.

It's no coincidence. Libre software devs saw what MS and Apple were doing and went "oh no we have to do the same to stay relevant!" Couple that with the rampant egos typical for an OSS project lead and you have today's situation. Of the big 3 (or is it 4 now) DEs, I feel KDE has stayed the most sane and provides the same desktop metaphors. Then again, they mostly bet on the "semantic desktop" direction, which was thankfully stillborn and didn't impact the actual GUI much.

I feel like Xfce and LXDE actually do a decent job here, too (respectively). Both have stayed pretty consistent over the last decade from what I've seen.

openSUSE + Xfce is my go-to for installing a desktop system for a new Linux user. While openSUSE moves a couple things around relative to a typical Xfce installation, they tend to feel a bit more natural to Windows XP users (which, amazingly enough, still exist). Users can typically be relatively productive after some basic education to cover the day-to-day usage quirks ("use Writer instead of Word; use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer; etc.").

The only thing I significantly dislike about it for non-technical users is the scary warning that pops up if you drag a menu item to the desktop and try to run it; sure, it's easy to fix (click on "Mark Executable"), but that's still very unusual and unintuitive, and your average user doesn't know or care what "Mark Executable" means (they might know what "Launch Anyway and Don't Ask Me Again" means, though).

Both have stayed pretty consistent over the last decade from what I've seen.

I used LXDE until they removed the tree panel in the file manager, many years ago. After having left KDE because another update that killed my workflow and reading that GNOME was not any better for this matter, it made me abandon Linux desktop completely, after two years of exclusive use.

I wonder if they brought the tree back, but... too late.

Unfortunately KDE gets rewritten with every iteration of Qt, so it's foolish to expect it to work.

Having worked at Microsoft, I'm convinced that, internally, running applications through the Microsoft menu jumbler is the main justification for most upgrades.

So it's like Calculus textbooks. 13th edition versus 12th edition: let's add 8 pages of new contents, mostly about the early life of Leibniz, but most importantly, let's scramble all the exercise numbers.

Exactly.

Comments like these really make me believe that it is people like you who are killing the Linux desktop.

Of all the window managers and desktop environments I have tried the last years on Linux, Unity, Gnome3, and Cinnamon are the only ones that don't look and behave as if they are from fucking 2003. Those others might be enough for those people who have stopped adapting and like to be left alone under their rock, but for me it's just frustrating having to use Desktops that are basically some half baked variation of Windows XP.

Let me put it this way: if the desktop environments you so eloquently despise wouldn't exist, I would be writing this comment on a Mac and not on Linux.

I think the problem here is if people were happy with what they had in 2003, why change it? Not everything UI-wise in 7 or later is better than in XP I'd say. And apparently many people agree. Actually I am still using 7 and all the UI stuff that's nixer than XP or even 2000 is just eyecandy and nothing "I would totally never go back". Because I would - if I needed a stable Windows that only came with XP's UI - so be it.

FWIW, I noticed recently that I've been using xmonad for 5 years (+/- 2 weeks) and still 100% happy. It lets me work efficiently and nothing has changed.

If people were happy with Windows XP in 2003, why change it and install Linux? We deviated from what was good enough 15 years ago! Let's put XP back on the clients and Solaris back on the servers! /s

When I started using Linux, it was about thinking out of the box and about change. It had many exciting window managers that put everything in Windows to shame when it came to customizing and style.

Nowadays I have the feeling, Linux has become the resort of the grumpy and disenfranchized, clutching to whatever was cool when they were young. The levelheaded and progressive jumped ship to OSX and are now probably contemplating switching to Windows 10 after Apple dropped the ball for them. This leaves all Linux progress like Gnome and Systemd maintained by inept pompous hipsters.

/rant

If XP was secure, performant on modern hardware, stable and supported by new programs i would still be using it. More then that the reason i quit windows98 was that warcraft 3 doesn't work on it. Windows 7 configuration menus are god awful and windows10 ones are far worse then that.

You are making a fallacy in saying that old equals bad/ugly. XFCE is keeping it oldschool and can still look amazing (xubuntu looks great IMO).

There's much to talk about when talking about GUI things. Much indeed. Many things are even quantifiable, instead of being pure personal preference. Just remember that Microsoft spent a lot of effort into studies in what culminated to be windows95, while many other projects did not (the study that ended up being gnome3 is a joke in comparison).

Honestly gnome shell is the greatest thing ever. My focus and productivity skyrocketet. I see how people who would prefer to run XP dont like it. But no reason to make it bad.

My productivity went up when i stopped arguing about DEs online. It is currently taking a dip, though.

I havent worked in a week. So best time to argue DEs :)

I can agree on this, the booster was super key to show all window, I've never been this fast to context switch between window.

Yeah exactly. And super to start apps. Find documents. Its all just a super away

Xfce, kde (possibly unity, maybe enlightenment) can do the former. Dmenu (probably unity, kde, other standalone programs) and enlightenment can do the latter (Enlightenments Everything launcher is amazing).

windows has this feature where you hold alt after alt-tab and then click on the respective window icon instead of using arrow keys to navigate

i want to bring this to lxde someday

There are actually issues with Windows XP, the only thing is that IMO people learned how to work around those issues.

I think UIs should either change very gradually and only in ways that literally are better, but also have a way of ensuring the options aren't removed entirely, or at the very least if the option is obscure ala options removed in Gnome 2, then they should be kept and allow someone to create a tweaking tool to change them.

If a huge change is to be made, like the Gnome Shell, then it should be done in a development release and ALL of the compatible UI should be kept on the desktop, with an easy UI option to switch between the modes. It turns out that Gnome Shell could do this - but only after a time.

UX and UIs are one of those things you really should be incredibly careful about foisting on anyone. If you do it, you need to do it somewhat gently.

I'd use OSX if it could do focus follow mouse and had a trackpoint.

Focus follow mouse would be a disaster with the way menus work in MacOS.

Why?

Menus are at the top of the screen, so to reach them you'd probably focus another app first.

kwm will do that.

You should try using Mission Control (Exposé and Spaces) with gestures on a MacBook touchpad.

I'm not sure about the feature you talk about, but maybe have a look at accessibility settings of MacOS. They putted a lot of advanced settings in there targeted at various kind of handicap. However these feature can also be used to improve productivity.

Some developers even uses accessibility interface to add custom overlays & controls (Steam for instance).

> focus follow mouse

For Windows there is Taekwindow, at least:

http://taekwindow.net/

> people were happy with what they had in 2003, why change it?

Because the people who were willing to run a Linux desktop in 2003 are not in any way a representative sample of the population. That's like saying "if assembly was good enough for the first batch of programmers, why would we need higher level languages?"

You forgot KDE/Plasma5. I think the most novel concepts are being developed there

KDE has always tried to play catch-up with Windows regarding style, leaving users in some kind of uncanny valley. And I'm not very impressed with what I've seen lately in KDE. That said, I'm hopeful something useful will come out of it.

I know this sounds ridiculous but KDE/Plasma5 is great if you manage to change the style to something else. Numix + icons is a good candidate. You can choose QtCurve for KDE/Qt5/Qt4 apps and skin that with Numix + Numix Colors and GTK2/GTK3 have native Numix widgets.

I've made peace with Breeze Dark at the moment, it's not so bad.

But optics aside KDE5 is mighty powerful. Dolphin is a great filemanager and I'm missing it on Windows. On the fly ssh/sftp/webdav is also a great feature.

The Plasma NM applet for NetworkManager is also great - especially if you often change settings for interfaces.

The menu works fine, searching is almost instant. I'm using the current KDE from Arch Linux and it's pretty stable for me.

Overall I'm happy and I'm not looking at Unity - that also has it's merits but the whole Nautilus/gvfs ecosystem was kind of unstable for me. YMMV.

What I dislike about KDE are the widgets - besides the essential stuff like time,battery everything feels clunky and slow - the system for adding them is also not so great. I've also never used 'Activities' the whole concept feels pretty much out of place. I'm also setting up my Desktop as background and ignore the "folder in a plasmoid widget" story that is bullshit IMHO.

I'm also avoiding akonadi/kmail/korganizer etc.pp - these might have improved but still felt clumsy last time I looked.

IMHO it's getting better but it's no silver bullet. For most users the default presentation and UI and settings are just confusing and ugly IMHO - if you look past that you will find a lot of good, stable and well thought ideas.

I'm running KDE now on all my Desktop Linux boxes and I can't remember the last time I had some hassle with it. It does what I want, it goes mostly out of my way and it doesn't look too bad.

For all the stuff it only uses 300-400MB RSS memory after a fresh reboot with a few Konsole windows running.

And really don't forget that KDE actually has a file picker that lets you browse by thumbnail, something that has been missing in Gnome since a bug about it was filed in 2005, and it's still not there (yet).

Plasma was before there was anything similar on Windows.

But to be honest my perfect linux enviroment was kde 3.5. And I don't think "regular" people had any problems with uncanny valley. When I left for university I installed kde 3.5 on my parents' and my sisters' computers. My sister switched to windows 8 years later because of some apps she needs for work, parents still use Linux (but recently I installed them kde 5).

> Of all the window managers and desktop environments I have tried the last years on Linux, Unity, Gnome3, and Cinnamon are the only ones that don't look and behave as if they are from fucking 2003.

As opposed to, for example, macOS, whose UI has changed almost nothing since OS X launched in 2001, and even then was not a dramatic departure from Classic which dates to the 1980s.

Because it's not broken and change for the sake of change is not an improvement.

There is nothing wrong with creating UI experiments, the problem is that they keep discontinuing support for the existing one which is not broken and people want to continue using. (Microsoft is even worse than Linux in this regard). If you want to create a new UI, create it independent of the old one and let people choose. If more people continue to choose the old one, you have lost. Try again until you have something which is enough better that it actually justifies relearning everything.

An example of this is that a few years ago everyone seems to have decided that 3D transitions are inherently necessary. Not "nice to have but you can turn it off if it causes trouble," but "if you don't have working 3D hardware you can't run this anymore."

Which would be almost excusable if the state of Linux 3D drivers wasn't notoriously bad and installing Linux on older PCs wasn't extremely common.

And they justify these things by pointing to Microsoft and Apple, but those companies have ulterior motives. Microsoft rearranges everything on a regular basis to pressure people to upgrade. Apple increases the hardware requirements for newer versions of their OS because they want you to buy a new Mac. This is not behavior worthy of being emulated.

> "don't look and behave as if they are from fucking 2003"

2003 desktop environment was fine. Actually, there weren't significant benefits after Windows 95. On the contrary, modifications simply confuse users. I'm a big LXDE & MATE fan for this reason. If it works, don't fix it.

> people like you

You cross into incivility when you do that, so please don't do that. I'm sure you can make your point principled instead of personal.

Sorry, I will keep that in mind.

Can someone please explain to me why everyone says that Gnome went off the rails? Gnome 3 to me was, except for leaving behind a lot of legacy systems, an extremely usable and downright pretty UI. Menu, search, windows, and virtual desktops all available from one keypress or one hotspot. I thought that was a stroke of genius myself.

I think the general reason is that it's a lot 'more' with not many benefits. Things seem to be blown up and large, almost garishly so. The window title areas are large, and on systems with bad or no graphics acceleration it will complain and make you use Gnome Shell, which is ironically, in the opinion of many, nicer than Gnome 3 default UI.

I think more than anything it's good old nostalgia. The applications menu is no more, instead it's a grid where you have to search for what you want or whatever. There's a massive screen overlay instead of a nice little dropdown.

Multiple desktops was a good feature that's come with Gnome 3, though.

If I recall, perhaps some indication of the intentions of Gnome 3 can be seen by the fact that you are prompted to drag up (really?! on a desktop?!) in order to unlock after you've entered screensaver or something. So there could be some of the same reasons why people initially disliked the Win 8 view.

But mostly, Gnome 2 was just so simple and familiar, though I don't know if that's my hindsight or whatever. Point and click to what you want to run, put things on your desktop, do whatever. No BS.

I think part of the issue with GNOME 3 is that the instructions on screen for how to use the UI hide the most efficient ways to do so.

The application launcher for me is universally used by hitting super, typing what I want, and hitting enter. I never actually click on anything. Same with swiping up on the login screen, you can do that on a touch screen, but you can also just start typing your password.

I too am totally in love with gnome shell. Guess people just hate on new workflows because szre it takes a few hours to adapt

I used it for a few months when it came out, then switched to Mate. My biggest problem was that for a lot of things that I wanted to change or configure, the official how-to was (paraphrased) "Actually, you don't want to configure that. We designed the system not to work that way." I decided to "vote with my feet".

My biggest problem with Gnome isn't even the UI, it's their constant attempts to break well-established APIs. Here's one well known instance:

https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685

Note the wording of the bug - they aren't just asking the app to adapt to a GNOME 3 change, they're asking it to do so by removing a feature that remains fully supported on other DEs. And if you read the comments, the justification is, "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately".

It was that incident that made me conclude that GNOME is a destructive force in the Linux (and, broadly, Unix-like) ecosystem these days, at least if you don't like monocultures.

I agree. In the past I was always a kde guy but I've been running gnome for the last few weeks with a few tweaks and the dark theme on and I find it really beautiful and simple, especially the fonts. I'm a programmer who normally wouldn't notice if I was using a serif font or not, but whatever gnome uses by default is very pretty.

It was a big change in workflow, and the developers gave off a paternalistic vibe (that I guess had been there in Gnome development for years, but Gnome 3 was the first time that I felt like it really impacted me).

I used Gnome 2 because it did what I wanted. Gnome 3 felt like style over substance (I'll agree wholeheartedly on "downright pretty UI"), and it couldn't be configured to act in a way I liked. I felt like I wasn't the kind of user they were targeting, so I switched to Mate when it came out.

Depending on who you ask, Gnome 3 was either a long-overdue redesign with great results or a dependable tool ditching its legacy to chase after some UX designer's dream.

It's been enough time. Might be time for me to look at it again. My patterns have shifted some, and it's possible that it would be a better fit for me now than it was then.

Curiously my experience of Unity on Ubuntu 16.04 is the exact opposite. It's by far the fastest Linux desktop I have tried and I have been tinkering with Linux desktops since the early 2000s. My experience has been so dramatically different from some of the negative reviews I had read online that I can only conclude these are from older buggy versions or perhaps mis-configured or non accelerated GUI drivers.

For me it's been much faster and smoother than my 13 retina Macbook Pro and Window 7 Desktop and this on an ancient i3 2100 system with 4GB ram and old 6770 Radeon card.

My only regret is I didn't try it earlier because of all the negativity floating around about it. I suggest anyone interested in Linux desktops ignore the negativity and try Unity on Ubuntu 16.04 with an open mind. Its fast, lightweight and reasonably sleek and minimal.

This! The negativity regarding Unity is hurting Linux. So many people I know who tried a switch in the last couple of years were put off Linux because their Linux-friends pushed them to Mate or Xfce, running on Arch, or something similar. Those friends heavily warned against Unity and Ubuntu as if they were the devil. Showing those who were interested in a switch what a modern Linux desktop looks and feels like was a revelation to them.

> I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2.

You would like the MATE desktop.

Http://ubuntu-mate.com

I used this on my desktop Linux machine now! I love it!

2001 laptop? Even contemporary systems (Win XP) would be slow on that.

> Inside, it had plenty of power, an 850MHz Pentium III-M, 256MB of RAM, and 802.11b for wireless networking (if you could find a wireless network, that is). Plus it had 20GB of storage, FireWire and even one USB port.

LOL, I use this very laptop with XP all the time. Yes, it is slow for modern tasks. But the XP OS is responsive! I can move the mouse, navigate menus, open the text editor. I can do this on this 2001 machine using Debian with no GUI, but not with Unity over Ubuntu.

This was an issue because where I used to work, we installed old computers with Ubuntu and gave them to poor families and schools. The SECOND Unity arrived, we were fucked. We had to go and build our own image with Gnome as the default and install that. It was really stupid, and I never saw our users have any easier a time with Unity than they did with Gnome. It was a gratuitous change for change's sake.

Unity needs graphic acceleration. Of course it does not work on something like that. Use Lubuntu and it will work just fine.

XP on such machine is not responsive. Maybe it could be usable, if you uninstall half of operating system, and replace most programs (IE with Opera 12.X....). Or better is to use Win2k.

No! Lightweight Linux distro, is your best bet to revive such junk today.

EDIT: fixed typo; I restored a few netbooks in EE, but whatever.

I think Microsoft's low-level HW engineering skills are underappreciated. Sure, IOS and Android rule the world, but the responsiveness of a Surface tablet kills them both on that one axis.

That said, IMO the problem is not so much that Unity exists, but that they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines. To be fair, what Google and Apple do to mobile devices more than a year old or so is every bit as bad IMO so I can cut them some slack.

What this has achieved for me is a migration back to desktop machines from IPad and Android tablets. My 2013 IPad Air is now pretty much a brick with IOS 9 and my Nexus 7 from 2013 is unusable. Compare and contrast with my 2009 Core 2 Quad desktop that's still going strong.

Finally, consider the hideous electronic waste we generate by effectively forcing people to upgrade HW every year or two.

Agreed on the Unity stuff. I think Unity could be fine and dandy on its own, but it should NOT be the default UI for a system designed and distributed under the auspices of being the super inclusive Linux of the 3rd world. Which is kinda what Ubuntu was trying to be.

If you want to be inclusive and spread technology to those that don't have it and can't afford it, you HAVE to support very, very low grade hardware.

> they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines.

They actually did; they just ignored the feedback and insisted that Daddy Mark knows best, completely throwing away all of the reasons that Ubuntu is actually named Ubuntu (namely: they stopped listening to the community).

I was willing to forgive Unity, though (hell, I kinda liked it, at least on systems that could actually run it). It was the combination of repeated awesome-looking but inexplicably-stifled projects (Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu for Android) and the Amazon Lens that resulted in me swearing off the community in which I was once happy to be a part.

Indeed. Decent responsive GUIs have been available for decades, and it's one of the great failings of the industry that we can't keep them that way, either in open source or the commercial world.

Of course it works fine with XP, that was the target specs in 2001 when that OS was released. Maybe try a Linux distribution from 2001 and you'd have a fair comparison.

I remember how XP was received. It was slow as hell compared to Win98 and even to Windows 2000. And 256MB RAM is too little for XP, W2K would be probably fine.

I have successfully run XP on 96MB of RAM. It ran surprisingly okay on a fresh install. Multitasking, Firefox and everything. As it aged though it declined badly. XP never was very good at self-maintenance.

I have ironically had similar-to-worse results with running 2015 Android on 2011 hardware, which has 512MB of RAM. The cheek!

Also, XP was released in 2002, so it should work rather well on the previous year's hardware...

Wiki: General availability October 25, 2001; 15 years ago.

General minimum recommended for XP was/is 512MB.

Microsoft specified minimum is 64MB, recommended 128MB. XP RTM with 128MB RAM was perfectly usable, obviously it was not a good idea to run lots of crap in background.

Nice... Didn't Google before posting... Busted. :)

You're the hopeful kind I see. XP was utter shit on "medium" hardware of its time. It ate ram like no tomorrow compared to 98.

I've run relatively recent Linux distros on hardware with far tighter constraints (like on my Compaq Presario 1210; may you rest in peace, old friend). Damn Small Linux was king here, but distros like Tiny Core and Puppy are also designed for this exact use case.

256MB RAM is actually pretty generous for Windows XP, as is the Pentium III; neither were unheard of in "Made For Windows XP™" systems.

> Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate.

Completely agree, and as a user of Desktop Linux for a very long time - I always felt that Linux GUI have been inferior to the options available on Mac and Windows.

It's not for everyone, but I found a personal solution with tiling window managers (Xmonad, I3) and related tools (suckless' dmenu). They restore sanity by providing lightweight, shortcut focused GUI systems, that don't intrude but provide enough functionality to get things done.

For anyone searching and testing GUIs like XFCE, don't dismiss tiling window managers as being too complicated or a bridge too far. My experience is that they work wonderfully in practice.

But why switch to a tiling window manager when XFCE + dmenu + custom shortcuts is good enough?

I think people often forget: Do what works for you. If XFCE+ is good enough for you, then great! stick with it!

But if you want to try a different experience, or if you think that setup is inefficient (as I do), then try moving to something else!

What works for one person likely won't work for another.

And this is what killed the Linux desktop. 99% of the population does NOT want to try a gazillion desktops (of which the installation is error prone), just to find out what 'works best for you'.

You don't have to if you don't want to. Any sensible desktop distro has a DE configured for you out of the box, if you want to just start using it.

I personally find that movable-window designs are a UI failure, requiring too much user interaction. A tiling WM, OTOH, enables me to do what I want: work with one tool or another, and work with multiple tools when that's what I want (which, frankly, is rarely — other than consulting a browser or info window, it's not often that I need more than one window on my screen at a time.

For me it's because a tiling WM is simpler, more aesthetic and more responsive.

That's not my experience. I switched fron XP to Ubuntu 8.04 and I remember how the DE felt much better. I could do everything with half the clicks. Windows control panel dialog were so clunky in comparison. Four years later I discovered that KDE shares that clicks problem with Windows and I went back to Gnome after a few months. I'm on Gnome flashback now and specifically a Gnome 3 tweaked to look like Gnome 2 from 10.04 plus Compiz for the 3D desktop transitions (the cube).

I used Windows 8 and 10 on friends' laptops and I'm not impressed. BTW, everybody hated 8 because of the changes in the UI. They tend to be OK with 10, but it looks so old to me, like a window manager for some 16 colors home computer in the 80s (I used them back then) with 1080p resolution. Control Panel's dialogs in most cases are still the same from XP and I can't understand why they didn't redesigned them. They feel more and more out of place in the UI.

Mac's UI is somewhat similar to Gnome (actually the other way around, I think) but I never liked the menu at the top and the top bar. That's why I removed both from my Gnome and I never bought a Mac since the very beginning (I moved everything from the top bar to the bottom one.) Mac's UI feels zippier though, that's the advantage of building both the hw and the sw.

I agree about windows 8 and 10. Around the time of the Gnome versus KDE wars - I felt Windows XP, 7, and Server 2000/2003 were clean simple GUIs. I messed about with Compiz as well and thought it very neat. I was happiest on Linux with the simplicity of fvwm though, and I think modern tiling WMs replicate that experience for me.

Your post is a whole bucket of wrong.

You have always been able to mix and match apps from a different desktop.

Vim and emacs are awesome.

Package formats have never ever been compatible, not even all distros that use the same format are compatible in fact. For open source software this is less of an issue than it seems basically the production of a package is 1/100000 of the effort required to produce the program itself and can even be done by individuals far less skilled than the original dev.

This means with only a relatively tiny additional input of labor a program can be packaged for all the most common distros.

I don't prefer unity but I think you bazaarly overstate the case.

I see an awful lot of posts like OP here where they're for some reason thinking that using a specific distro, or even DE, locks them into using specific packages.

You can literally install anything on any Linux distro. Some things might take a bit of work, sure, but they're all just a Linux system underneath.

Install the right dependencies, get the app somehow (through a package manager, or source),put the files in the right place, and bobs your uncle.

Have you tried lubuntu [1], i.e. Ubuntu + LXDE [2]?

LXDE is my favorite desktop environment for being clean, modern looking and lightweight.

[1] http://lubuntu.net/ [2] http://lxde.org/

I'm tending to agree for the mass's at least, for me CDE was and still is a great desktop, least for somebody who just wants to pull up lots of terminals and have multi-desktop panels - just works. Simple, basic and sure lacks eye candy beyond Xeye's but then I own a lava lamp.

Yes mass basic users like their eye candy, and the diversity which is a strength in many area's is equally a weakness when it comes to desktops. GUI's and the overhead add so much in complications to code that if they keep changing then they tend to get ignored or badly utilized and that gives the user a mixed half-baked experience.

  This and they tend to be the epitome of feature-creep.

I just bought a sub-$300 laptop, which was unusable with the default Windows OS. It's snappy with Ubuntu/unity.

I don't think very many people care about running 2001 laptops anymore.

At least 10 years ago x11/xorg was a reliable component. Now there's an extra layer of churn below the desktop level too.

> I could put Ubuntu on a 2001 laptop and be completely fine, fast enough, usable enough to do just about everything I needed.

This use case is an edge case, and you could still serve it by using a non-default desktop (like lubuntu). Laptops from 2001 have super-weak cpus and gpus, and aren't a representative sample of desktop users.

At one of the two companies I work for, more than half the developers use Ubuntu, and all-but-one (me) use Unity and like it. I use KDE there because of old-school configurability, but after a couple of years of dealing with KDE's bugginess, it's time to move on, methinks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com