Fedora 16: Linux home for lost Ubuntu GNOMEs | Hacker News Reader

Fedora 16: Linux home for lost Ubuntu GNOMEs

theregister.co.uk

49 pointsdarkduck40 comments

I recently tested the gnome-shell in Fedora 15 for the first time. This is my showstopper list:

  1. Application oriented
  2. Alt+tab sucks (mostly because of #1)
  3. Terminal doesn't open new window by sefault.
  4. Terminal is single-process (see #1)
  5. Can't use other window manager.
  6. Sometimes slow

Now using XFCE. Will see how many of these got fixed with the new version.

Fedora 15 has Gnome 3.0 Fedora 16 will have Gnome 3.2

Here are my findings of Fedora 15 with Gnome 3: http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2011/05/fedora-15-with-gnome-3...

Sounds like a free version of Mac OS X to me.

(Fanboy downvote protection: I'm on my third year using a Mac. I love mag-safe. I love how it is usable out-of-the-box. I love the screen, the backlit keyboard. List goes on.

I was happy to see

  * window resizing by any border and a 
  * decent attempt at fixing fullscreen and virtual desktops in Lion this year.

For next update I'm hoping for Apple to introduce a

  * "super-intuitive CMD-Tab that will let you switch 
    through all you *windows* in the order the were last 
    used" and 
  * "Menus now follow your windows" so there's less need 
    to move across a laptop screen and a full Cinema 
    Display to find the menu. Sounds familiar btw.

A sad thing Gnome keeps copying not only the good stuff but also the super annoying.)

"Menus now follow your windows" so there's less need to move across a laptop screen and a full Cinema Display to find the menu.

Maybe you're looking for SecondBar: http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=79 ?

     * "super-intuitive CMD-Tab that will let you switch 
       through all you *windows* in the order the were last 
       used" and

Ugh! Please no! Switching between application rather than window is my main reason of switching to Mac back in PowerPC days.

You may love Witch[1] though. Or a good-ol' Ctrl+(fn)+F4.

[1] http://manytricks.com/witch/

No idea why someone would prefer app switching, but the info in your post proves you're an awesome person! I've looked all over for a window switching solution and never found ctl+fn+f4. Ahhh, much better.

  > decent attempt at fixing fullscreen and virtual desktops in Lion this year.

I'm confused, because I found both of these things to be horrendous. Not trying to flame or troll or anything, just curious.

I liked the Spaces implementation in Snow Leopard. It had faults, but I could define a NxM grid of virtual desktops and rely on them always being there. In Lion I get a horizontal strip of N + (Number of Fullscreen Apps), no exceptions.

Which brings me to my next point: Fullscreen is entirely broken. There are two cases where I used fullscreen before, and Lion broke them both:

1. Fullscreen terminal windows. I don't want a logical "Space" for that, I just want a terminal that's the full width and height of my display, then I can Cmd+Tab to other windows (browser, etc) to bring them forward or back as necessary. Thankfully iTerm 2 lets me restore pre-Lion functionality here.

2. Video. I frequently fullscreen a video on my laptop display while working on a second display, and tell Quicktime to display on every desktop. In Lion, if I fullscreen Quicktime, it blanks my second display (seriously who thought this was a good plan?) and moves itself to its own space. VLC kind of covers for me here.

I'm just curious what you like about spaces and fullscreen in Lion, because I'm having difficulty thinking of anything good about them.

On OSX you can use Cmd+` to switch between the windows of the active app. The Cmd+Tab behavior on OSX was annoying to me too when I first started using a Mac but now that I'm used to the Cmd+Tab and Cmd+` combo I actually prefer it to the way Alt+Tab works in Windows.

> 2. Alt+tab sucks (mostly because of #1)

Try alt+esc instead.

alt+tab will cycle between apps, alt+thingAboveTab will cycle between windows belong to the current app.

> 3. Terminal doesn't open new window by sefault.

True. But ctrl+click on Terminal will open a new Terminal for you.

You completely miss the point.

You can configure those in the usual place. With unity you can't.

Also, paid advertisement. I only see ppl going to debian from Ubuntu

I like Debian and run it on my servers, but it isn't really for desktop users that want to run the latest and greatest software.

Now, Linux Mint is a viable alternative to Ubuntu users who prefer Gnome 2: http://www.linuxmint.com/

Aside from the freeze while they're polishing a new stable release, debian testing isn't a bad way to run the "latest and greatest" on your desktop. Hopefully the "constantly usable testing" idea will gain traction and make it even better. https://lwn.net/Articles/406301/

I rather the almost-latest but stablest, but thank you :)

just moved from ubuntu because of unity on all my computers except my netbook (never used gnome there anyway), and i'm not missing anything.

How is that ?

They don't let you use Gnome 2.x so in fact they are using the same strategy that Ubuntu is using: forcing users to use what they what them to use.

You also can easily switch to Gnome 3 on Ubuntu. At least there is a "classic mode" on Ubuntu.

Gnome guys were the ones that behave wrong here, with their pride, they changed a lot of things(in a wrong way) and did not let their users to vote giving them the option to use it.

E.g I need compiz cube, when you give a talk people watching need to know what you did with the screen. Every time I talked with devs about it they say that "you don't really need that, it is a flashy thing". Sorry I need it way more than "auto logging on IMs".

The new "cube equivalent" both on gnome and Unity crash on my computers.

No one is forced to use anything. Two companies offer a ~primary~ (ignoring Kubuntu, Xubuntu et al and you can get KDE etc. on Fedora as well) desktop experience. You take it or leave it. For some the difference is that one offers something created in-house while the others offer something created in public.

Fedora 15 has a classic mode. I'm not sure about 16, but I'd expect the same.

You could replace the sentence about Gnome with one putting Canonical/Ubuntu as a subject and it would be just as misplaced and just as (..) correct.

You are really the first guy (no kidding) that I heard describing the spinning cube as a worthy feature. I don't understand your usecase, but you have to agree that you're in a minority here, no?

I think it's a wonderful use case, even though I'd be too annoyed to use it. When somebody else is looking at your screen and you quickly switch desktops, they might not understand what's happening. The cube shows what's you've done quite clearly.

In any case, both Unity and Gnome Shell still have animations when switching between workspaces. You shouldn't specifically need the cube.

There is a "classic" mode in Gnome 3 as well. It appears to me it didn't receive much love, but it's functional.

It takes a lot of effort to keep the fallback mode working. I don't see how you think it didn't receive much development work. Loads of work went into the 3.0 fallback mode, and the same for 3.2.

It doesn't appear to be used much though, so when the software rendering is good enough, it likely will be removed.

I like GNOME 3 a lot better than Unity, but until it can give me multiple independent virtual desktops on all my monitors, I'll be sticking with one of the few window managers that can: Enlightenment (0.17 from the Bodhi Linux repositories running on 11.10).

Haven't used e for a long time. Is that feature the single criteria for you? If not, can you list some more ~nice~ things here to lure potential candidates (me) into giving it a try again?

That's one criteria, but I've found I'm just more productive using E because it mostly gets out of your way. It also looks good and it's a lot faster, even on modern hardware, than GNOME 3 or KDE or Unity. It finally comes with a basic compositing manager module and a 'scale windows' plugin for Expose like effects, although I don't really need to use it much since its pager window has minimized icons that give me visual cues as to where I put certain apps. It's not a whole DE, and I do run gnome-settings-daemon in the background and use Nautilus or PCManFM to browse files and such, but I keep going back to it and I've been using it since 2005.

In dconf, try changing “/schemas/desktop/gnome/shell/windows/workspaces_only_on_primary” to false.

Did that already - it creates one big virtual desktop like in GNOME 2.x, but does NOT give me 2 workspace switchers (one for each monitor) so that I can change the workspace on one independently. That's what I'm after.

Have you tried XMonad?

I think i3 does what you want.

http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#multi_monitor

I doubt many people will switch distros from Ubuntu to Fedora due only to GNOME 3 because the former still has many advantages (huge repositories, apt-get, large community, overall fit and polish, etc..) and on 11.10 GNOME 3 is a fully supported DE, only an apt-get away in the repositories.

I'm not many people but I did switch for Gnome 3. I miss APT but now I know yum so it's not a massive loss.

I've also switched my family, who were using ubuntu, over as well - mainly as none of them got on well with Unity and that if I've got to support something - it may as well be something I'm using!

But why couldn't you just do apt-get install gnome-shell?

If something's the default it tends to get more focus and polish.

I probably could've done it that way, but at the time of the move Gnome 3 wasn't in the repos, nor was GTK3 and I don't see the point in swimming against the flow.

GNOME 3 is still absent from the 11.04 repositories (although GTK3 was there from day 1). However, the Ubuntu GNOME maintainers have an officially-unofficial GNOME 3 PPA, which I'm using right now and am very happy with.

I greatly admire Fedora's tradition of sticking close to whatever upstream releases, but I don't think I could leave behind the breadth of Ubuntu/Debian's package archive, or the ability to do in-place version upgrades.

The upgrade path of Fedora is a bit clunky.

It's basically: rpm --import https://fedoraproject.org/static/A82BA4B7.txt yum update yum yum clean all yum --releasever=16 --disableplugin=presto distro-sync

I am pretty sure I upgraded 15->16 in place using a liveCD/install CD which was cool.

(Disclaimer: Fedora user here)

Do you happen to know a couple of examples for differences in the relevant repositories? I mean - I agree that they are probably not equal and w/o checking I'd even agree that probably Debian + Ubuntu + PPA > Fedora in terms of numbers. But I've yet to stumble upon a problem.

apt-get (did you mean aptitude? What's the difference?) and yum are ~comparable~ for most use cases. End users probably care more about a decent UI instead of the underlying package format. One point for Ubuntu here, the 'Store' thing looks nifty.

Community is too broad to comment. Look at the fedoraproject site, there seem to be lots of passionate people over there (no clue, I tend to live on my own island here).

"Fit and polish" is where you lost me. This is just too subjective a claim to make.

So - up until this point I'd say "Both are the same".

Now I happen to use Fedora. Why?

- I was turned off by Ubuntu's polish in the past. Purely personal and matter of taste:

* Most early themes (brown? really?)

* Crappy release names

* A 'better than Debian/the rest' attitude (regarding backports, crying for an 'Ubuntu' SO subsite instead of a 'Linux' one etc..)

- I disliked design decisions

* Multiple patches (most famous: The notification area) to Gnome just didn't sit right with me. I wanted a "vanilla" Gnome experience

* Now: Creating an in-house shell replacement that disconnects Ubuntu from all the rest.

* Future: Wayland, pressed forward instead of offering it and letting competition decide if it's a project worth looking at

> apt-get (did you mean aptitude? What's the difference?)

aptitude is a TUI front-end for apt-get (which is to yum as dpkg is to rpm). synaptic and the Ubuntu Store are GUIs into the same system, though I think the store is further layered over aptdaemon and/or PackageKit. (I don't use the store much, since I'm used to synaptic, so I'm foggy on the details there. At any rate, the store UI isn't blocked while installs progress.)

aptitude also has a CLI. For a while it was recommended over apt-get/apt-cache/apt-file because it tracked packages that were installed only in order to satisfy dependencies and let you automatically remove them when you uninstalled the package that needed them. However, now apt-get does that too.

You can search for a name with aptitude, whereas you can't with apt-get. Thats why I prefer the former anyway.

You can't moan at the guy for being subjective and then moan about your opinion on themes, release names, design decisions.

Wayland will come to Fedora as well as Ubuntu - an apt-get/yum install will no doubt provide that choice.

I like fedora as it's got Gnome 3 as a default, it's an open development (rather than large code dumps chucked over the wall ala https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659693 ) and it's cutting edge/test bed for new stuff.

Fair enough, what I meant by "fit and polish" is the visual identity of Ubuntu, from the custom font, to the icons, color scheme and ultimately Unity. They don't meet everyone's personal taste, but I don't think anyone can argue that Canonical doesn't spend a lot of time and effort on this front.

This is one of the biggest reasons I use Ubuntu over Fedora- their font rendering patches and the custom font are so much nicer looking than anything I've been able to achieve in any other distribution (or even Windows), and they look that way by default.

I guess the author hasn't heard of Debian.

DNRTFA

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