Ubuntu 17.10: Return of the Gnome
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504972
HN tells me this was 2402 days ago. Oh how quickly the kilodays fly by. But I am glad that after a mere twenty four hundred days Canonical finally listened to my advice.
I have been using mostly Xubuntu during the unity years so this thing did not affect me much. So I can look at the unity mistake not with anger but with interest and curiosity.
And when you look at the whole thing dispassionately and with perspective, you have to admit that this was not a mistake that Canonical made exclusively. It was a mistake the entire computing and software industry made. It was one of those strange turns into dead ends that happen to industries sometimes.
After the first ipad came out, the entire industry was absolutely certain that the future was tablets. Everyone started changing their user interfaces for tablets. And they did not care how much their customers complained, they just forced it down their throats because that was the future darn it.
But it turned out that the tablet future never happened. Even now I had to pay extra for a touch screen laptop because there was no other choice, when I "use" the touchscreen option only inadvertently.
The good thing about linux is that they can never railroad you into anything. So I switched to Xubuntu and that was that.
I've tried to make it work dozens times, and while I can navigate across the opened windows and start a new one (just don't try it with Dash to Dock), I simply get stuck somewhere. The virtual keyboard doesn't show up, or the virtual keyboard does show up but it doesn't detect key presses.
And it's not intuitive. Let's say that I want to open the application launcher and start an app that isn't in my favorites. I can't scroll over the icons because that selects and moves the icons. I have to scroll on the side, where no icons are present. And even then, I can't make a small touch gesture. I have to scroll through all the vertical space on my touchscreen to get to the next grid of apps.
I can't use my 2 in 1 in a tablet mode for anything more complicated than the simplest tasks (like reading PDFs in Evince, which works wonderfully).
Not sure what it's called, but the app launcher + window switcher that comes up when you hit super is really fast / useful even with lots of windows and apps (https://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/).
Throw in the tiny `xcalib` package (all 100KB of it) for easy screen inversion (i.e. hotkey toggle light/dark "theme") and you get an easy-on-the-eyes UI with sane window management.
Perhaps we need different UI logics that can be selected from a configuration application?
I see as many tablets walking around town, taking the subway, etc as I do laptops, when 6 years ago I saw none, so the tablet future definitely happened, and we are living in it. It’s just that it turned out to be a new category of device that coexists with laptops, rather than replaces them like some pundits thought.
Windows 8 might have been a step back but 10 is a job damn well done imo.
My only concern in computing is that of vendor lock in, on the desk/laptop/living room - I'm using a self assembled PC, Surface pro and Xbox One X and the integration is outright amazing but on the mobile side I have an iPhone and an Apple watch which can work very well with each other but not so well with the other ecosystem.
Windows is trying to better work with non Windows devices since Satya whereas on the Mac side, anything but iPhone is (and has been) crapshoot. Cloud storage and syncing services (Google Photos, Drive/Dropbox) are godsend but I feel I've gotten way off point now.
Yes, and my MiiX does a nice job of flipping in and out of tablet mode when I attach and detach the keyboard.
to me the big advantage of apple is there's just so many people running the exact same setup. ~ once a year new stuff comes out, some stuff breaks, it gets fixed.
with linux you might be literally the only person running some particular combination of software; you seemed more on your own for fixing stuff. this was years ago, so maybe things have settled down a bit...
Then why is there so much crying all over HN over how hilariously broken any new macOS release is?
but that also means everyone has the same setup, same problems, and stuff gets fixed quickly.
that's my experience anyway. it'd be fun if someone tried a side-by-side daily-experience report of say ubuntu, windows, and macOS. our own personal perspectives are always colored by time and chance.
It's interesting that the main attraction of a company that advertises "think different" is to force everyone to use the exact same setup. I've never seen a Mac desktop that looked different from every other Mac user.
In any case, customizing one's computer teaches useful tech skills. I've solved many problems that better programmers couldn't solve, because they didn't know basic unix stuff.
But plain Gnome 3 took the wrong direction, it's too tablet OS alike, a unfortunate regression compared Gnome 2 in usability. Unfortunately KDE also took the wrong direction, after the great KDE3, with KDE4 the started from scratch again, what a big mistake. Basically Gnome and KDE wasted years with rewriting, that turned out worse, and can be blamed that Linux desktop is still at less than 5%.
So let's hope Ubuntu 18 LTS transform Gnome 3 to look subjectly less ugly (more traditional) and at least add back the removed toolbars and menubars to the Gnome Texteditor, filemanager, etc.
Who came up with the single toolbar button in Gnome 3 Texteditor with only a paste functionality and thought it is a good idea? Bring back the Gnome2 Texteditor as featured in Ubuntu Mate.
I want the tab-support in Terminal app back. Why was it removed in Gnome3?
It's built on top of a Qt, that works everywhere instead of GTK that just focuses on being there for GNOME. In addition to that canonical has already been using Qt for the past few years and could have just continued on with it. Alas, the decision has been made and they're not going to be changing their mind anytime soon.
have you tried Ctrl+Shift+T? (this opens a new tab on Fedora 27 with GNOME Terminal 3.26.2)
I'm still very skeptical of it, because I think it will be always a second-class citizen.
In particular, it is a paradox in itself, since it's used by people who refuse the Gnome direction, but it's maintained by people who are into the Gnome direction.
I think ideally G.F. efforts should be directed towards MATE, although of course, that's not realistic.
It's low cpu/memory usage on my 2 GB RAM laptop with a Celeron processor. (A Chromebook converted to Linux.)
It overloads a ton of meta keys for moving windows around, moving between workspaces, etc. Very natural once you get used to it on my small keyboard, small 13" screen, and 1366x768 resolution.
And once again Canonical is like... f it... after telling us Unity was the new thing and everyone had to get used to it... f it... let's go back.
Even if Unity was somehow worse, I still would have had more respect for them if they had stuck with their original decision. Now they basically look like they have no idea what they're doing and when anyone asks, they'll give bullshit answers they won't stand by in a year or two. All their arguments are just PR speak for "whatever I want right now."
Going back to Gnome proves to me that there is no grand design behind their decisions. Just hubris and condescension.
On the other hand, it's been six years. That's quite a run (in contrast, gnome 2 switched to gnome 3 only after about 4 years), and considering that Ubuntu as a company is explicitly pivoting to focus on the GUI-less target (pretty much the idea of GNU on the Desktop taking over the world is quite dead, and if Ubuntu goes public, they'll want to focus on what makes money), it's quite expected.
The question is if a community fork will emerge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSBMn6eGH88
https://twitter.com/ZardoZ89/status/935423675825782784
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/04/enjade-wants-recreate-uni...
I don't mind them experimenting with new ways of doing things at all, I just really don't understand why this needs to be done in a way that prevents people from doing things the way they've done it before if they decide they don't like the way you're doing things.
I switched from Konqueror to Dolphin after it handled what I needed. I switched from Virtual Desktops to "Activities" after it was also good enough for my needs. I never used widgets in their original usage (placed seemingly at random on the desktop) but use them inside of the task bar. I use sloppy focus follow mouse and mouse raise only on titlebar click so I can use windowed applications in actual nontrivial ways.
It doesn't matter if you glossed over that run-on paragraph above. tl;dr: KDE can have opinions, so can I. At least KDE respects that.
Same reason it happened with Firefox: trying to attract more users. The broader you want your user base to be, the less customizable you have to be. Regular users can't handle heavy customization: it's too complicated and they freeze up.
Power users interested in extreme customization of their environment will always be a tiny niche. Add to that the Anna Karenina Principle [0] and it makes even less sense to try to compete for such users.
Gnome and Unity actually removed features -- that's what this complaint is about.
But there's no need to be that myopic. Like I said, I don't mind if they add these features and make that the default way of doing things. I don't mind if they bury the "less broad" functionality deep in some hidden configuration that I have to get at. Just keep it around for those users, give them QA articles on how to re-enable their way of doing things, and then you can have both.
There have been countless counter-examples to this "priciple", by the way: The Digg to Reddit migration being the foremost in my mind, but also the Windows Mobile to Windows Phone migration and the last Firefox redesign (that was eventually mostly rolled back or made optional again after hemorrhaging users).
The thing is that Linux users are self-selected power users. If you want something to just do your work, you'll stay with Windows or macOS (or whatever your computer came with).
And while I don't need the power of i3, I don't see why my desktop can't have a maximize button
Not always, I had my dad using linux for years because he got a new lease of life out of an old machine and this was a time when windows would get random malware installed just from regular web browsing. The default solitaire that came with Kubunutu alone satisfied 90% of his computing needs. The configurability of KDE was a constant issue though, even when I locked the the taskbar/desktop he found a way to screw it up.
The problem isn't configurability, just the way it's handled. KDE (at least in my terribly outdated experience) adds all kinds of options in things like right click menus or application menus, this confuses and scares ordinary users. I find the gnome approach of having a dedicated app (tweak tool) for configuration is much better for ordinary/casual users, it moves all the clutter to a dedicated place instead of stringing it out everywhere. For power users there is nothing wrong with putting the config in a dot file or scripting language.
For one user I even added `cp .kde{.BAK,}` to their login script. I wish that I remembered how, actually, because there seems to be only one way to get that to run before KDE reads it and I can't remember now.
I love configurability and everything from my fountain pen to my car is heavily modified. But normal people cannot seem to deal with the ability to modify their surroundings.
Search in the page for "half the screen was grey" :)
A quick reading of `/usr/bin/startkde` suggests that `~/.config/startupconfig` is sourced sufficiently early. Alternatively, `~/.profile` (or `/etc/profile`, for that matter) should also work, although that might be asking for trouble if the user knows how to open a terminal emulator.
KDE 5 is fine, doing a few changes like disabling plasma volume and starting KMix at startup instead. Still have to use pavucontrol occasionally, though.
Yesterday I discovered you can switch the menu style (right click -> alternatives) to a more classic type (like KDE 3, plus favorites), or to a full screen win8 type (for tablets).
I think, they'll be available in that Alternatives-menu then. If not, you can add them through Add Widgets.
Plasma treats everything as either a widget(/"Plasmoid") or as a panel. So, you also have to have your widgets unlocked for all of this to work (including the Alternatives-menu).
[1]: https://store.kde.org/p/1169537/ [2]: https://store.kde.org/p/1160672
KDE 5, last I tried, was still missing some features and had troubles with panel positioning on multi-monitor setups. It is also missing all the little touches that made KDE 3/4 so pleasant to work with, such as Ctrl-U to clear a field (lifted right from Emacs). I stick with KDE 4 on CentOS.
That's sounds interesting. Where did you learn about this? It sounds like an unusual usage of the UI.
It enables things like:
1. Found a web tutorial on how to do something in *nix with a bunch of shell commands interspersed between paragraphs? Keep a small terminal open in a corner on top of the fullscreen browser, read the article and actually click-and-select commands and then copy-paste in the terminal by just moving your mouse back and forth between the applications.
2. Looking at a scanned PDF and want to do a bit of math to confirm the numbers you're reading? Load up a calculator and type into it when the mouse is hovering over, go back to scroll the PDF. Easy peasy.
Basically by separating the actions of window positioning from using it, you can actually use more than just fullscreen windows one at a time.
1 certainly works in any Linux DE I've ever used, as long as I make the terminal stay in the foreground whether it's focused or not. Personally, I prefer to use guake for sucha usecase, however.
It's also possible to switch to single-click for open.
Which is a very relaxing way to use Windows until you accidentally open every file in a folder!
It feels like KDE 5 was focused primarily on polish rather than new features. (I honestly can't think of a feature in KDE 5 that wasn't in KDE 4.)
My only complaint I have for KDE 5 is that the system tray applets can occasionally disappear after multiple sleep/awake cycles on my laptop without rebooting, but right-clicking on the tray, disabling an applet, then reenabling it causes anything missing to reappear, which is probably the most minor thing someone can have for a desktop environment!
Oh, and people confuse my KDE laptop for a Windows laptop because it looks a lot like Windows Vista by default.
Not complaining, I think it's nice that at least one major DE is consistently taking ideas from Windows when everyone else tries to copy the latest Apple product.
KDE 5 has more in common with 7 than it does with anything Metro.
You can also configure, what will happen when the power button is pressed (I think it puts the computer to sleep by default). In this case, you don't have to install anything, it is in the control center.
When you select the second option, "shutdown", and then press the power button, it will throw a dialog at you, that the machine will shutdown in 60 seconds (and will display countdown), together with "cancel", "reboot" and "shutdown" buttons.
Evilwm still seems like the window manager that got thing mostly right to me. It draws the windows and there's a keyboard short cut for opening an Xterm (and for moving and resizing the windows), you don't really need much more than that. Sadly it seem that the focus for the simplest window managers is tiling, which I also to like.
Hopefully a non-tiling, dead simple window manager for Wayland will appear in the future.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wayland#Window_managers...
I too have been longing for an Openbox port for Wayland but have sticked to Sway in the meanwhile.
These paradigms may or may not have been well thought out and useful, I'm not here to make that judgement, however what they did (particularly with Gnome 3 and windows 8) was push you to use the new way, either with no concessions at all to other ways of working, or vague promises that they would come later. This presents users with a learning curve and that's offputting when really you just want to get stuff done in pretty much the same way you did yesterday.
For me the crucial point is that Windows (pre 8 and 10), MacOS and Linux DEs like Xfce, MATE and various others don't try to push you, and do things in a fairly 'standard' way. A menu bar may have moved, some graphics look better than others, there might be a clock in a different place. But they don't force you to full screen, try to hide all the things you've done before, make choices for you on which applications to use for what, etc etc, behaviour is pretty predictable. And if it's not, you can make a few tweaks without much fuss.
So they aren't broken, but they do present a barrier to entry, and often a lack of flexibility (I'm specifically not talking about KDE as I haven't used it on over a decade).
And it's not just a DE vs WM thing. I'm fine with Gnome 2, for example - it also "just works" in that sense. And Xfce is really a DE these days, as well (I'd say that feature-wise, it's on par with earlier Gnome 2 releases now).
I think they project is going to die in the future, not necessarily in an abandonment sense, but it will severely lag behind, due to lack of resources (I also think the developers behind it are not really good).
Thunar (the file manager) had, for around an year, a bug where around 20% of the time, moving/deleting a file would cause a crash - this was in fact marked as critical. There have been some clumsy attempts to fix it, until the fix came out after a long time.
Thunar is also, mysteriously, for several reasons, an enemy of keyboard users (try to use it this way, and you'll understand).
It's not realistic to switch file manager, as there is a disconnection in the desktop usage workflows, and unfortunately, the file manager is a core part of a DE.
Of course, not everybody has such requirements from a file manager/DE, so it may be a good choice for many, although it's not really true that all the other Ubuntu distros are so disruptive, in particular, at least a comparable one isn't (and I suspect there are more than one).
As soon as the whole kerfuffle hit with gnome 2 being forcibly deprecated, I tried Xfce, found it lightweight and configurable, and stuck with it.
Never regretted it, as a desktop it works and it keeps out of my way. Perfect.
* Ctrl + Alt + left/right/up/down to switch workspaces
* Ctrl + Alt + Shift + left/right/up/down to move the current window to a different workspace
* Alt + Left mouse button to drag windows
* Alt + Middle mouse button to resize windows
* Drag a window to the left or right edge to resize it to that half of the screen.
No idea how much of this is Gnome/remains in 17.10. Or how easy it is to set up. I guess I need to give it a try.
GNOME uses Super (Windows) by default instead of Alt for drag/resize. You can change it (and lots of other stuff) in the Tweaks application.
Resize uses secondary click instead of middle I think, but also available in Tweaks.
* Super + Alt + up/down to switch workspaces
* Super + Alt + Shift + up/down to move the current window to a different workspace
* Super + left click to drag windows
* Super + left/right to resize to half screen
* Super + up/down to maximize/restore
* Drag a window to the left or right edge to resize it to that half of the screen.
hth
> * Super + Alt + Shift + up/down to move the current window to a different workspace
These are pgup/pgdown, I believe?
* The "Switch to adjacent workspace" and "Move Window to adjacent workspace" actions are not bound to shortcuts by default, but you can do so via System Settings > Shortcuts > Global Shortcuts > KWin.
* Alt+Left and Alt+Right for drag and resize, but can be configured to be the same as in Unity in System Settings > Window Management > Window Behavior > Window Actions.
* Quick-tiling (full, half, quarter) is enabled by default.
This works in Windows. It worked in Unity. It works with my custom i3/sway setup.
I never quite got it working in Gnome/KDE though.
This single key-combo is super-crucial to my flow, and if Canonical has shipped a default-config which preserves this behaviour from Unity, I'd be super happy to give it a spin.
Right click on any application, go to "Special Application Settings" and set a shortcut for it.
Highly recommended.
I felt the same with the last Debian stable. But I was kinda happy about that. Because it means it's reaching maturity.
I'm hoping that Ubuntu slowly becomes this, especially with the move to the very stable Gnome 3.
My argument is the same as what Linus points out in this rant (5:33): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&feature=youtu.be...
I want life to be easy for app developers, having to target a gazillion different Linux based platforms kind of sucks.
Jesus, wtf. I hate popular tech press like this and wired so much
So my parent "no evidence other than DW clicks" is aimed at Mint, not Ubuntu.
It's actually not bad as a keyboard-driven UI, though: it's a rare event that I'll trigger the overlay with the mouse, or even interact with it at all with the mouse beyond dragging windows into different workspaces or dragging workspaces around (the latter being the one thing I don't think you can do with the keyboard).
Gnome is very customizable, is more attractive looking on Ubuntu 17.10 out of the box, has better notifications, and doesn't generate the questionable error messages that Unity does.
That being said, it feels like replacing a Toyota with a Buick.
Damn, I love javascript on the desktop.
The difference is that Unity was getting better while Gnome is getting worse. The people at Gnome are lacking even the most basic knowledge when it comes to UX. The whole DE is a clusterfuck.
The story is similar for things like power settings or selecting sound input/output sources. I wish the Gnome team would imitate macOS or Windows instead of coming up with their own uniquely frustrating interfaces.
It's been a long time since I've used a full desktop environment, but back sometime around Ubuntu 10.04 it was by default the two-click Unity version you described. Even nowadays (on 16.04) if I start nm-applet, it's just two clicks.
Progress! /s
I'm still on 14.04 with vanilla Gnome (with my own extensions, etc), so I'm happy to see Canonical moving out of the desktop business, and retiring Unity for good. I just wish they offered a vanilla Gnome, instead of this heavily customized Unity-looking one.
After all, Ubuntu's GNOME is just GNOME with some extensions slapped on top.
Gave KDE a shot and beside all the bloat ans slowness, the damn thing kept crashing on my lock screen. Seriously?
I have switched to Sway now which itself is far from perfect (GTK3 apps keep breaking now and again, visible tooltips in XWayland windows prevent workspace switching) but at least it doesn't hang up my machine every couple of hours or prevent me from unlocking it.
How the hell did we got here? What exactly are the priorities of people working on this stuff? Here's hoping that XFCE gets ported to Wayland soon enough.
edit: sounds like bug-fixing nowadays in gnome may be better than i remembered / have experienced.
Recently I tried out their new Fedora 27 release, did the same steps to reproduce the bug, and no bug encountered! I was extremely impressed, being totally new to open source and the development of it.
Your experience may have been neutral at worst, mine was super positive. I highly recommend you try! I got a fun experience out of that little tech adventure.
I should note in fairness that many bugs I report into Apple's black hole of a bug reporting tool also don't end up fixed. Maybe I just report weird bugs :-)
(An example of one I reported against Mac OS that got emailed as fixed, but still happens, though less frequently: Sometimes when alt-tabbing, the system will act as though the tab key were never released.)
In any case, the software is free, and reporting bugs is one way of contributing back.
Great job, Canonical!
Best advice in the article ;) I did try i3 and like it a lot. I have it running on a Chromebook now as my main machine.
I don't want exciting.
Particularly when they drop nice features like the HUD and the integrated global menu and title bar.
And that's coming from a MATE user who never got on with Unity. I will hang on to my useful places menu, my functioning file explorer and refined taskbar thank you very much!
The Gnome project should add two shortcuts on the desktop with scripts to set Gnome to mimick Mate or Unity, so users get their old desktop back with a few clicks.
I guess that's life :)
So far, I've had my laptop freeze completely 3-4 times a week, fans spinning, not responding to any input in any way shape or form. This didn't happen in Fedora. Other than that, it's basically Fedora with different colors.
Out of curiosity, what happened? For me, it's been more than 7 years since I last accidentally a Linux installation.
I mean even the colors are ugly, why put dark orange colors, who thought it is a good idea?
Now I am using 17.10 and this new Ubuntu Gnome thingy and I am enjoying it.
Unfortunately the live USB allows to test only on Xorg, Wayland is not available.
If your GPU is Nvidia, tough luck: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html (this is from the lead developer of Sway, a Wayland-only window manager)
If you just want to just test things, pretty sure the Fedora Live image is Wayland by default for intel.
(The reason it failed was that I have the arm64 architecture installed to get cross tools, and those repos somehow return 404.)
I find it dodgy to discontinue 32-bit Ubuntu, as I remember it has been promised to exist until 18.04.
And because of how central the dash is to Ubuntu... it's a huge piece of spyware.
Depending on whether you have opted in or out (see the “Online Search” section below), we may also send your keystrokes as a search term to productsearch.ubuntu.com and selected third parties so that we may complement your search results with online search results from such third parties including: Facebook, Twitter, BBC and Amazon. Canonical and these selected third parties will collect your search terms and use them to provide you with search results while using Ubuntu.
By searching in the dash you consent to:
the collection and use of your search terms and IP address in this way; and
the storage of your search terms and IP address by Canonical and such selected third parties (if applicable).https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/privacy-poli...
The "Dash" is also specifically a UI element in Unity and not part of GNOME.
I imagine, they keep these parts of the Privacy Policy around for people still using Ubuntu 14.04.
But that being said, Gnome3 has a lot of chrome space.