Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

But really, the core of the issue that's been raised by Unity is that Ubuntu seems to be moving away from catering to power users to cutting features essential to them in favor of appealing to more amateur users. One can lament that decision, and even disagree with it, but I don't know how fair I think it is to criticize Unity for lacking those kind of power user features.

After all, it isn't like power users are exactly wanting when it comes to replacement options in the Linux space.

I try to use the mouse only when necessary (even when browsing the web), and I like to launch my applications through text search. Actually I don't need the Unity sidebar at all, unless perhaps when I want to see what hidden apps are running. I arrange my windows using ctrl-alt + numpad and I switch between workspaces with ctrl-alt + arrow keys. The new active window switching with alt-tab and alt-shift-arrow keys is nice. All in all I'm happy with Unity and it got better with 11.10. Being 50% on Ubuntu and 50% on OSX I have to say that I wish OSX had a little bit more of Ubuntu-UI in it.

Just writing this to offer a counter-point to all the anti-Unity posting. Perhaps everyone should try to play around with Unity shortcuts and see if it's really that bad.

Here's a post detailing some of them: http://blog.sudobits.com/2011/09/04/ubuntu-11-10-oneiric-oce...

In tweaking a few compiz settings, through their config GUI, I managed to crash compiz hard enough to need to reboot several times.

Unity itself is incompatible with Desktop Cube for some reason, and trying to force it just breaks everything. (I like Desktop because it seems to be a more reliable desktop switcher, anecdotally.) I don't mean "force it" like changing the config directly. I mean "force it" like pressing the button that asks if I really want to activate it.

So I tried out Gnome 3 for the first time. It tries so hard to LOOK like OS X, yet it winds up being way worse than either OS X or Gnome 2.

Maybe I'll try Kubuntu. Or Linux Mint. Or just keep trying to like this new crap. I don't know.

I'm actually quite surprised more people haven't spoken out against Metro in the new Windows for the same reason; that interface looks dreadful to use with a mouse. I've been told that Microsoft at least left in a "classic" interface that holds true to the name. If that's true, Canonical needs to take that page from their book...

Fully agree about the config hell, though. One time I wanted to back up my gnome terminal profile settings using gconftool, to discover that the terminal settings are stored in the middle of an XML file that covers a whole slew of gnome settings. So to do the backup/restore, I would either have to back up all of my gnome settings, or write a custom script to patch just the section of the XML file I need changed.

I'm fed up with Ubuntu pushing alpha-quality releases on users to get free testing. It's making Linux look bad. A couple years ago, Ubuntu was Debian that "just works" on the desktop. That's all I ever wanted, and I think I've found it again in Linux Mint Debian Edition.

I'm all for sane defaults and making design decisions and keeping options away from the users - not having huge preference panes. But keep a hand-editable text configuration file.

I spent some time using IceWM (shipped with EEEpc 701) and the jwm. So I guess I'd be using jwm again.

When I first used Gnome 3 (back when it was first released) I hated it; it was buggy and the whole concept of gnome-shell seemed flawed. Now its seems many of the bugs have been worked out and the usability improvements of gnome-shell is starting to show. Gnome 3 is still far from perfect and there are still A LOT of things missing that I had grown to rely on from classic Gnome (like being able to arrange my panels) but Gnome 3 seems to be progressing and I have high hopes for its future.

I am less hopeful for the future of Unity frankly because it has so many bad ideas built in to it. One such bad idea is the heavy reliance on hidden elements that need to be hovered over for them to be visible.

Personally I think Ubuntu would do well to pick up Gnome 3 and run with it instead of Unity.

Then I remembered the original reason I started using Linux, as a native Windows user, and that is "Choice". So you don't like Gnome. Guess what? Don't use it! You have so many other choices of window managers available to you.

Shed a tear for those users on proprietary systems who don't have choice. Don't like the new Start menu? Nobody cares.

I think the OP is a perfect candidate for Arch Linux.

Lemme try to explain some background on configuration storage in gnome.

But first, the main complaint in the article is that you can't modify the layout of the fallback mode panel in gnome 3. This is just not true, you can modify them in the UI just like before, only you have to hold down alt when you bring up the menus, etc. This was done because a lot of people accidentally changed their panel around causing problems. I'm sure this change could have been better documented and whatnot, but it is possible.

Once upon a time there was a design decision in Gnome to use so called "instant apply" configuration options, rather than having each config dialog button have "apply" buttons. You can disagree if you want, but this decision drives the design of the configuration framework. Basically, it implies having some kind of service that handles configuration changes that will tell other applications of configuration changes. Thus was born GConf.

The original on-disk format for GConf was an on-disk tree that mirrored the gconf key hierarchy, where each directory had a %gconf.xml file that listed the keys in that directory.

However, it turns out that this is a major performance problem when reading settings. Each such file you open causes two random access seeks on the hard drive. One to read the inode and one to read the data. Hard drive consecutive data read speeds are pretty high, but seeks are very slow (for physical reasons), which was significantly affecting login and app startup speed of gnome.

So, we merged the all the separate files into xml tree files, using one per application. This cut down on seeks a lot and improved performance. (Of course, a negative aspect of this is that the xml files are not very human readable anymore. But the vast majority of readers do not access the text files directly anyway.)

However, even after this gconf reads was a problem for log in performance. We do of course do local caching of gconf data in each process and we preload it in chunks, however during login the gconf daemon was acting as a serialization point for all processes that were starting up. Also, all these xml trees were pretty verbose, so parsing and loading also took some time.

Over the years we increased our knowledge of the problem space, and eventually we came up with a replacement for GConf. It has two parts, one is the API, which lives in glib, called GSettings. Its an abstraction for settings with change notification that has client-side schemas (as opposed to server side schemas like with GConf, another thing we learned). The implementation is pluggable, there is an ini file backend, a win32 registry, and the DConf backend, which is the default for Linux distros.

DConf uses a binary on-disk format that is mmapable and readable without "parsing". I.e. each app maps the config file readonly (sharing this memory), and lookups is done directly in the in-memory mapping without an intermediate parsed copy of the data. The data is stored in an efficient hash-table which allows very fast key lookups with few pagefaults in the file. The actual data is stored using GValue, an immutable binary datatype for recursive types that is in glib. So when a value is returned we don't even duplicate it but just return a wrapped reference to the data in the mmaped file.

Writes to dconf do go through a daemon which handles write serialization and change notification. Communications with the dconf daemon is through dbus, which incidentally has an on-wire binary data format that is a subset of GValue.

So, how does this help us? Well, for one thing we never block during login for reading configuration, as all reading is parallelized. Secondly we don't spend any time parsing files, as the config file, once mapped, is already in a compact "parsed" format. Thirdly, we never waste any memory storing copies of configuration data on the heap.

Now, there are some obvious drawbacks with binary formats. For instance, you need tools to modify them, like the dconf-editor GUI app or "gsettings list-recursively". Secondly, you can't use text based tools like e.g. git, emacs or diff/patch to maintain them.

But, you got to realize that we are not unaware of these problems. We are well aware of them, but we made the conscious decision that the real life problems with the many-text-files approach to configurations (as listed above) outweigh the advantages. Especially considering that most of our users don't need to directly modify the config files.

It would be great if Canonical concentrated their resources on making the system faster, like they did until recently (improved start up speed etc). However, now they seem to be dumping all work into reinventing the wheel by creating yet another Linux desktop GUI.

Anyway, that wouldn't be a problem at all, but Unity is still flawed, is totally unproductive for development work, and there's a distinct lack of customisation:

The launch bar is useless, and doesn't work at all if you let a window snap to the left hand side.

You can only add application shortcuts to it (why can't I add bookmark folders?).

There are no configuration options to be seen (what if I don't want auto-hide?), and whatever options there are, they're minimal.

Workspace switching isn't smooth at all and requires a strange number of clicks to make any use of.

Auto-hiding menubars just obscures GUI elements I'd like to be able to see at all times. If they're not there, I have to stop and remember where to look, because I can't just glance at the top of the screen. The actual name of the app is always visible, but clicking it does nothing. This is unbelievably unintuitive.

As for it replacing the classic desktop, I'm not sure what exactly was wrong with it, and why a GUI fit for a netbook or tablet is now being shoehorned into a desktop OS before it's had enough care and attention to bring it up to par with the standard desktop experience.

I regret running the upgrade and as soon as I can I'm switching to something more productive and usable, because 11.10 and Unity feels like too big a jump into unfamiliar (and unstable) territory.

And this is coming from an OS X user (who only uses Linux at work).

Wonder if we could have USERS to say what they want in each release? If Ubuntu continues this path, I'm afraid tech-savvy people will stop using it, not to mention many new users will never start trying.

What I don't like about ubuntu since 10.04, is that it the UI has become "opionated", without having the customizability that pre-gnome desktop managers have.

Specifically, there should be options to put the close/minimize/maximize buttons on whichever side I prefer, and whether to use mac-style menus or windows-style menus.

They are providing a free software option for you, and they work very hard on it. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. But why be angry at them?

As for Ubuntu 11.10, I am posting this from there. Yes, Unity has some annoyances. But overall things work quite well.

> Yes, all those better ways to do the configuration, such as gconf2, oneconf, and other shit is really annoying, same like people who missing power and flexibility of a text file, not an XML but plain old var=value, or, OK, some Yaml. But what can we do? The mediocre crowds are migrating from windows realms and they like to copy and paste, not to think and learn. ^_^

I just wanted to respond to schiptsov's comment by pointing out that copying and pasting is something you can do if you have a name=value or YAML text file, but not something you can do with gconf-editor. So if there are "mediocre crowds" who "like to copy and paste", they'll be better served by text-based configuration files.

For background ESR work is not in UI but in small but important stuff like GPSd, etc..

He is work here..both GNOME and Ubuntu have made decisions that are making an impact as far as driving adoption of new users to the platform..both sets of developers deserve big round of applause..

All Linux desktops before Unity sucked. Gnome 2.x sucked, big time. It looked ugly, and had only ugly themes. Its applications menu was completely useless. Its panel sucked. Its model for putting and managing launchers/shortcuts on the panel sucked. It was a complete mess.

Most Linux users were using Docky + GNOME Do.

I personally was using XFCE, because at least its panel was prettier and more customizable.