Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

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I actually like Unity (especially Unity of Ubuntu 12 and 14 LTS). And Ubuntu Mate with its Gnome 2 inspired shell sounds great.

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?

KDE Plasma 5 is actually at a great state right now. It works well and you can customize it to me whatever kind of desktop you like. Canonical could have made it into whatever they wanted it to be.

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.

I've settled on it after trying most of the alternatives, for me it was the only reliable desktop with good high-dpi support.

I don't think KDE is really quite there yet. For me and from what I've seen and heard it can be extremely unstable (and that's using KDE Neon which ships the up-to-date version of KDE). Hell, at this point I'm giving up on S3 sleep and KDE because after starting it up again KDE is sure to crash a lot when doing simple things like switching to other apps etc.

I'm using Plasma 5 and I cannot confirm any of this. Things have been very stable ever since I switched to it (from Plasma 4) about three years ago. Much stabler than Plasma 4 in its early days (that was, admittedly, a huge crash-fest). And S3 sleep is causing literally zero problems.

> I want the tab-support in Terminal app back. Why was it removed in Gnome3?

have you tried Ctrl+Shift+T? (this opens a new tab on Fedora 27 with GNOME Terminal 3.26.2)

Will try. At least with Ubuntu 17 from spring, it had no related menu entries to open a tab in Terminal app.

If I remember correctly, the tab menu options only appear once you're using tabs.

That's definitely still how it works on ubuntu 17.10. Then ctrl pgup/pgdown to switch tab

You might want to try gnome flashback. It's GTK3 but you can make it look like Gnome 2, compiz cube included. I've been using it since Unity and Gnome 3.

I used the Gnome flashback at its inception, when it was called "Gnome fallback", and I had the impression that it was a hammered product.

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.

I agree that it's second class but it works and that's what matters. It was a little worse than Gnome 2 until 16.04. They improved it quite a lot at that time and I can say that I have back my Gnome 2 desktop now. I hope they keep it in the next Gnome and Ubuntu releases. I hate DEs with a top bar (MacOs, Unity, Gnome 3 among the others) because it steals space in one of the most important places of the screen and it gets in my way. Among the DEs I somewhat like only Gnome Flashback lets me move all of its contents to the bottom bar and delete it.

I'd advice to have at least a brief look at MATE, since its whole point is to maintain the Gnome 2 feel. They're also receiving truckloads of money, so there's lots of manpower behind, but the most interesting thing is that they took the opposite direction of Gnome 3 - they're giving a lot of flexibility to the users (see all the panel options at https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-artful-final-releas...).

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