Ubuntu 17.04 review

xfce (Xubuntu) hasn't unexpectedly changed on me in about 10 years. YMMV but I haven't been surprised once and haven't seen any features in other DEs I wish it had.

what are all those shortcuts ? AFAIK, you can customize gnome easily.

Relatedly: making "safe" keybinding choices as an application developer has been a problem for a long time. Especially when compiz was the new hotness, many application shortcuts needed to be rebound by the end user, because the authors had chosen ones that were now in conflict, especially ones involving Ctrl and Alt together.

Before that, Mozilla had gone through something with the Mozilla Suite, where seemingly every contributor wanted to ship their new feature with a keybinding for it, which meant there was an internal friction. But product leads and code reviewers were also burdened with respecting platform conventions, too. Eventually, there came a separate approval process for any proposed shortcut, with specific people tasked with managing allocations (and reclaiming past ones—this project management approach is what eventually led to Firefox).

The headache persists, because there tends to be no pattern for the assignment of shortcuts. When Unity was introduced, I'd hoped that they'd seize the opportunity of a clean break to reconcile problem, but that didn't happen.

Here is the scheme I've adopted:

1. If we pull back our scope a bit from the application, then operations on the window itself are performed with Super. (It helps that this key usually has Windows iconography on it).

2. Finally, if we pull all the way back, operations to be handled by the environment/desktop/graphical shell/what-have-you are performed with Alt+Super.

The implication of 1 is that to move a window around without having to drag its title bar, you'd use Super along with a mousedown anywhere in the window, rather than Alt+mousedown. It also means that the shortcut to close the current window is not Alt+F4, but instead it can be remapped to Super+F4. Same goes with Alt+Tab, which becomes Super+Tab. This is jarring at first and perhaps controversial. But even when I wanted to abandon my own scheme because of how bothersome this stuff felt at first, I found that after one day of use, I had become accustomed to it. So switching is really not as bothersome as kneejerk might have you believe.

Flipping between virtual desktops is Alt+Super+arrow rather than Ctrl+Alt+arrow (or other combinations that might be in use) and revealing the desktop by hiding all windows is Alt+Super+D. I have global launchers set up like this, too. E.g., Alt+Super+T brings up a new GNOME Terminal window.

What this means is that any combination of Ctrl or Alt or Ctrl+Alt (along with Ctrl+Shift, Alt+Shift, and Ctrl+Alt+Shift) in the keybindspace are reserved for use by the application. Go wild.

I put this scheme into place once whenever I buy a new machine or otherwise do a new system install, and then never have to worry about it again. The important thing to note that it entirely comes down to remapping the default "global" shortcuts so that the desktop/WM is not stomping on the application keybindspace. This is very easy—it doesn't involve trawling through dozens of apps' settings panels or config files so they comply; you remap the "global" desktop/WM shortcuts and you're done.

The result of adopting a scheme like this is zero conflicts, ever, and you end up feeling like you have more space. It might sound so cumbersome as to be unworkable, but don't underestimate the advantages of what a clean break, once-and-for-all decision like this brings around.

Unity really went overboard with it, and took over keys that applications had been using. Like Alt (!).

I replaced Unity with i3 and have been living happily ever after.

https://i3wm.org/

Marketing.

Even Microsoft can't afford bravery and have to revert almost every time.

I guess it's because Unity is not a good product. It is slow and eats too much battery.

> which hints that there were enough users against it

I'm pretty sure those users are a vocal minority.

Personally I loved Unity. The only thing I disliked about Unity and Ubuntu's UI in general is the lack of configuration options, having to install extra buggy configuration managers to do really basic stuff, like turning Caps Lock into Ctrl. But that's a problem with the whole Gnome ecosystem and not Unity.

And Unity I loved, because it has pretty good keyboard shortcuts, is space efficient and generally worked for me just fine out of the box.

Going back to why Canonical dropped it, I'm pretty sure that's because they are giving up on the Linux desktop in general.

As for the comparison with Apple, dude, you're comparing David and Goliath, except this is the real world.

There was a lovely TV show from the UK back in the 1980's called Yes Prime Minister - one of the frequent exchanges between the senior public servant, and the PM, when the former wanted the latter to back down on something, was for the phrase 'That's very brave of you ...' to be uttered. Brave does not necessarily imply profound, good, worthwhile, etc. Canonical's 'brave decision' to go out and create their own DE (despite two very competent options already existing) does not imply it was a good decision.

> When Apple makes a "pro" laptop without any USB A ports, people laugh, but then buy it.

This is the classic mixup of 'people'. The people that scoffed at a laptop with a single USB port (or a phone without a headphone jack, etc etc) are NOT the same people that bought those items.

> When Ubuntu makes a phone, Ubuntu regrets it.

The proverbial 800lb gorilla made a phone, and also regretted it. There are plenty of propositions explaining why two mobile phone platforms were all that the market could sustain.

Because Apple has enough money to force his decision onto the user. It will take something extreme to make the regret anything.

I would think it would be due to the sheer power differences of each organization. While I'm sure Canonical isn't strapped for cash, it's clear Apple is far larger of a company. The fact that Apple has built its user following, along with the huge number of nearly religious followers, against Ubuntu's (or Linux's, really) much smaller audience gives concessions to Apple to make moves such as this. If I had hundreds of billions in cash as a company, I'd feel much more comfortable making "deal with it" decisions affecting my users than if I were running a much smaller operation.

For most Mac users, the only OS option is OS X.

(Yes, you CAN run Linux on a Mac... but the experience isn't great. As far as I know, Linux still doesn't have support for suspend/hibernate when you close your MacBook Pro's cover. And although the Macs have the nicest touchpads, it seems weird to pay a 50% "Apple tax" if you're not even using Apple's OS. You lose half the benefits that Mac people buy into. So if you're a Linux person, then you might as well be using a PC.)

Since most Apple customer's are using Apple's OS, when they don't like a change, their options are:

(1) to switch to PC's, or

(2) to hold off on upgrades, but eventually get on board with the changes begrudgingly.

I've been seeing more #1's lately, but most fall into the #2 category.

In the Linux world, however, there are hundreds of distro alternatives. And half of them are Ubuntu-based, anyway. Don't like the UI/UX choices that stock Ubuntu is shoving down your throat? In an hour you can switch to Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, or even Mint... and still retain compatibility with the same APT sources. Don't like systemd, or something else deeper under the covers? Then it's a little more effort to switch to a completely different distro family, but not MUCH effort.

Open-source Linux distros just don't have the lock-in leverage to muscle their users around the way that propriety OS's do. By design.

Apple is in dominant market position.

Apple's user base is one that wants Apple to do all their thinking for them as far as computer decisions are concerned. Often this may lead to sub optimal solutions for them, but they are ok with this because the overall lack of worry with Apple products, and the fact that they have a good track record of making good decisions, still leaves them ahead in the net (this may be changing with pro Macs though).

Linux users, OTOH, have an opinion on everything. Worse, a vocal minority is simply anti anything that is popular, which means Ubuntu's goals were entirely in conflict with this segment of their base.

As soon as Canonical blows something off in Ubuntu, users can switch to whatever other Linux distribution they like (or remove/replace the misbehaving component, like it happened with the Amazon thing or early-ish versions of Unity). Apple users can't very easily switch to a better version of macOS (especially when they need to migrate their data out of the walled garden it's hosted in).

Apple/ios users don't really have a choice of hardware vendor. They're locked in, so they're stuck with what apple serves up or can feel the pain of migration (I'm in that boat).

Linux users are more fickle and can and will move to different distributions if they don't like one particular one.

Canonical needs to listen its users in a way that apple doesn't.

To be fair, we haven't seen what these changes Apple has made are going to do long term. Its clear there is some worry over there (the mac pro 2018 preview is very unlike apple)

It helps that Apple has three orders of magnitude more employees and four orders of magnitude more revenue than Canonical.

I think Canonical is attempting to identify other investors, and the 'due diligence' on that resulted in a desire to focus on server/container type activity and to pull out of projects that have no obvious commercial value in the medium term.

Have a look here...

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cl...

So nothing to do with organisational bravery, or indeed the relative quality of the design, just cold hard cash and revenue streams.

Developing Unity is a cost center. Presumably there's not much revenue from developing it. Presumably the money being spent on it is better spent on server side where people do pay Canonical money for support.

Admittedly, when Apple "killed skeumorphism" it had already been killed by most of their rivals some significant time before. Microsoft already had Metro; Google had flat, skeumorphic-free designs for a long time but never had made a big fuss over it (until that Duarte android thing got big). Ubuntu's Unity situation is rather different.

When you're making controversial decisions, it tends to help to be right.

But Canonical (and every other distro) are in a somewhat difficult position. UI isn't just an incredible hard problem. There's also a dearth of talent because the relevant people aren't a natural part of the OSS community.

And, most importantly, UI suffers tremendously from the bazaar-model of development. It needs someone with near-dictatorial powers, and excellent taste, who can control the complete user experience from init to shutdown.

I believe that the reason that Ubuntu is winning the server market is because it won the desktop market. Ubuntu is on most production servers because devs are more familiar with Ubuntu than alternatives since they use Ubuntu on their desktop. That's certainly the reason why I use Ubuntu or Debian on all the production servers I've spun up.

I'm sure Ubuntu is well aware of this issue, and of course they're also dog-fooding Ubuntu Desktop, so while progress may slow, I highly doubt it will stop.

In fact it might just speed up, since for the last few years they've been focusing their efforts on Unity 8. Now even though they'll be spending less resources on the desktop, the resources they do spend won't be disappearing into an unreleased project like Mir & Unity 8.

For giggles, I put Fedora on a Macbook Pro. Wayland + Gnome works surprisingly well, and I can see the appeal for some users. But I'm right there with you on XMonad.

I'm not wed to XMonad or any of the extensions, really (for example mostly vanilla dwm, which XMonad was based on, works fine). But I am wed to the keyboard shortcuts and basic functionality of XMonad + dmenu. I'd probably be very happy if there were an XMonad style tiling option in Wayland Gnome.

But, I can't help but feel a little weird about some of the free *nixen moving away from X11. I don't see Wayland running on OpenBSD any time soon, for example. I worry that this will be yet another thing that leaves the old world of diverse, but standards-adhering Unixes behind. I'm genuinely not even sure whether that's a bad thing, though my gut reaction is that a Linux monoculture isn't what I'd want.

Linux users will not pay for appstore. There is no money to be made here. Just another timesink. You need to first attract significant non-developer users to Ubuntu (which is tied to making better laptops).

Just a minor point but uappexplorer is a community maintained site which uses the snap store API to present apps in the store. It's open source, hosted on github and I'm sure they'd welcome contributors to help improve the look and feel. https://github.com/bhdouglass/uappexplorer

There's a few other ways to view the snaps in the store though. On the Ubuntu desktop there is snap support in Ubuntu Software, and if you "snap install snapweb" you'll get a pretty web portal on port 4200 on the local machine. This can also be installed on remote machines so you can manage the snaps installed there too.

> flatpak focuses on GNOME

It is developed by people involved in Gnome, but it's desktop-independent. http://flatpak.org/faq.html#Is_Flatpak_tied_to_GNOME_

I used KDE until they released that godawful Plasma desktop.

Don't get me wrong, it looks absolutely BEAUTIFUL, but it crashes constantly, and it is a crapshoot on whether or not it will actually even BOOT within a virtual machine.

I really like KDE. It's been stable for me for years on Ubuntu and now Arch

I revisit Kde every few years to see if they have finally managed to get hold of a designer. Since I use Unity and prefer it to OSX on my retina macbook and Windows 10 desktop, the recent announcement sent me on one of my visits.

I tried Kde Neon and was gobsmacked by the scale of change. With a few settings and a within a few minutes I was able to make it look and behave quite a bit like Unity. This was not the same KDE I remember.

It has improved dramatically and while the default is good you can feel the sheer flexibility of the underlying desktop. Kudos to the KDE team.

Unfortunately the Internet has a long memory and many will continue to repeat outdated information.

already using ubuntu gnome since 2013 because I did not like unity. I am so glad this is becoming the main flavour of ubuntu.

If I have well understood, any new installation of ubuntu should use ubuntu gnome in order to be future proof. Or am I missing something ?

Is this different from what you get by installing gnome-shell via apt?

Isn't that old gnome 2?

Another reason to distrust compositing without a fallback route for "low power" environments...

Gnome on 17.04 allows floats.

Please to be defining 'failed'.