Gnome Shell and Unity | Hacker News Reader

Gnome Shell and Unity

smotko.si

19 pointsSmotko29 comments

I can understand his question. I've used Gnome Shell the last months, now with 12.04beta i'm running with Unity for the next weeks. They both have very similar concepts. In the end, i'll probably go with Gnome Shell, because it's very similar and not some "we'll do our own, screw the rest of the linux comunity" thing. Never got why Canonical just couldn't build on Gnome, Unity would certainly be possible to be built on the foundations of gnome 3.x..

edit: Yes, also https://extensions.gnome.org/ is pretty neat.

If I'm remembering right, Shuttleworth decided to go his own way because at the time Gnome Shell looked radically different than it does now, and he didn't forsee it--or the political environment around it--improving enough to bother building upon. However since he made that decision and showed some Unity prototypes, the Gnome Shell design did change a lot and now it resembles Unity much more than it did back then.

Yeah, Canonical wanted to participate in Gnome3, but nobody listened to their complaints about Gnome3.

I agree, Canonical should have made Unity upon gnome 3.x. Those compiz patches and are really nasty.

Compiz also seems to be in trouble: http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/apology-2/

It might be of interest to mention a few things here

1) Gnome Shell when installed along side Unity will have the Unity style 'rollover' scrollbars. These can be disabled, but that setting is desktop wide, so you lose the rollover scrollbars in your Unity session

2) Gnome Classic is a reasonable facsimile of Gnome 2 UI for end users who do not require extensive panel customisation or lots of applets. I'm thinking of the army of people who will upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04.4 to 12.04.x over the next year or so. I've tested the 'software update' upgrade process from 10.04 to 12.04 and it works really well. When 12.04 is released, the software update application in all 10.04 installations will provide a 'distribution upgrade' button. I imagine a lot of people will get a bit of a shock when they upgrade, go and have coffee and come back to Unity!

3) Unity2d is rather nice in my opinion and avoids the compiz issues that people sometimes see depending on their hardware. Unity2d now has HUD which is interesting.

4) If you install 12.04 command line from the netinstall iso, you can just apt-get gnome-core and get a relatively stock gnome-shell/gnome-classic desktop. You need to install some sound libraries and then choose your applications.

I use Gnome Shell partially because I don't want compiz. Compiz consumes way too many resources from my computer. Unity is great. No doubt, but it shouldn't be a compiz plugin, it should work the same way Gnome Shell does, not with Compiz.

A lot of people complain about customization on both, so I just say: try Awesome WM. This window manager is very easy to use and very simple to customize, it really lives up to its name (awesome).

I use both Gnome Shell and Awesome WM on Arch Linux, I like both of them, although I've been using more and more Gnome Shell lately, partially because Gnome 3.4 is almost in the stable repositories, and I am very anxious for it.

Have to ask, what is the appeal of a tiling WM ? Do we have the option to swtich between apps ? Do you _have to_ use tiles ?

For example, if I am working on a terminal and have firefox open, how much trouble would it be to switch between them (would alt + tab work ?).

I tried reading wiki-pages about tiling managers in general, but they are sparse on this kind of information.

I used dwm/dmenu with an appropriate .desktop file to set up a session, and a simple script to autostart a few applications (network-manager, feh) as my desktop environment for some time. See

http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/linux-dwm-window-manager-on-de...

Windows can be tiled, full screen ('monacle') or floating in dwm. You can alter the config file to associate a window type with an application, e.g. GIMP will always be floating.

You have a screen divided into a main pane on the left. I set mine to occupy about 65% of the width of a 1920by1080 screen. The right hand area is a 'stack' of other windows which appear as you invoke applications using dmenu (click super, type program name).

You can switch between the active window with the mouse (focus follows pointer) or using keyboard shortcuts (vi related in the stock version). You can also swap windows on the 'stack' in the right hand side into the main tile, so the window that was in the main tile goes onto the stack. You can also 'cycle' the windows through the tiles like a yank buffer.

The best bit was tags. Basically you have 9 workspaces, but it is possible to bring the windows in workspace 7 (say) into the stack in workspace 1.

The main problem I had was the issue of popup windows for tiled applications. Sometimes they were recognised and became floating windows, sometimes they opened in the main pane with the result that the main application window became the first on the stack, which was distracting.

I have no good experience using a tiling window manager, but some months ago I started using QuickTile ( http://ssokolow.com/quicktile/ ) to tile windows in Gnome 3. That's the best of two worlds.

There is also a shell extension for that, but it is still too crude for daily usage: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/28/gtile/

I like that they stuck with Compiz. Linux is fragmented in no small part due to developers wanting to create shiny new software instead of supporting more boring older software. When that happens we get 100 window managers all with their little quirks and all of them liable to be discarded at the drop of a hat. I mean, just look at this massive list of window managers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_window_manager#X_Window_manag...

Despite Compiz's flaws Canonical did the right thing by sticking to and polishing an existing WM instead of creating yet another WM with its own weird flaws and bugs. Plus, I like wobbly windows :)

Well, the Gnome project stuck to Metacity and evolved it into Mutter. Mutter is just Metacity + Clutter.

I prefer mutter to compiz too. I don't really care about resources as both of the shells run smooth on my laptop, but compiz can't show full screen flash video (youtube) on my secondary monitor, which is a little annoying.

I've heard awesome things about Awesome. I need to give it a try in the near future. Thanks!

Have you tried Unity2d? Metacity window manager and now has HUD

Segfaults on proprietary AMD hardware every 10 minutes? Why do people even bother to release something like that? I understand that AMD drivers are a pain and I understand that you sometimes want to get a feature out into the open to gather feedback, but if you break too many people in horrible ways you lose users and that is the opposite of what we want. We want more users and especially new users, and those are easily scared by unstable core components. There is a set of people that are looking for the latest fancy desktop technology available, but those shouldn't be the primary concern of projects as huge as Gnome.

RHEL 6 and the clones, and Debian stable, are fairly solid on most hardware I believe.

Its worth mentioning that Ubuntu 12.04 is still in testing.

Debian doesn't ship with proprietary drivers, so it's not a valid comparison.

You are correct in stating that Debian does not supply proprietary drivers on its installation sets. I was, however, able to get the nvidia proprietary drivers installed in about 10 minutes including download time on our somewhat slow broadband. I believe but can't confirm that the same is true for AMD drivers.

So my 'comparison' is valid: if you need stable, use an RHEL clone or Debian or openSuse.

> We finally have some accessible options to customize the look and feel of the Unity desktop

How does it compare to KDE? I used Gnome(2) for some time but it was really (and I mean really) bad when it comes to customization of basically anything. I then switched to KDE which I found to be great in this area. I didn't like the look (and with my limited taste couldn't help it much) but I loved I could customize virtually anything. Just few clicks in GUI. I've used gnome-shell briefly and I think you can mess around with the javascript to configure a lot of things. But there was almost no configuration for the users.

So, my question. How is it now, compared to KDE? Both Gnome and Unity. Are some 3rd party tools (I'd imagine there would be for the gnome-shell at least) which could help?

I've tried KDE briefly a few months ago and I didn't like it. The reason was they were way to many customization options. I spent more than an our going through all the settings and I got completely overwhelmed.

Gnome Shell has little to no options out of the box, but it has extension that do just that.

Unity recently added some basic options into the default (new tab in the appearance dialog). They didn't add a lot of options but just the ones I seem to need :)

I'm sure KDE is more customizable, because the goal of both Gnome and Unity is to keep the number of preferences to the minimum. On the other hand, many settings not shown in the UI are still available via gconf.

I would love to use Gnome Shell but that thing comes bundled with a window manager that you can't change. And for a power user a finely tuned window manager that makes managing windows easy—if not transparent—both from keyboard and mouse is a non-negotiable starting point. Ditto for Unity. Both are actually worse than even Metacity, when it comes to keyboard bindings. Now I'm with Gnome3 with the Gnome2 emulation mode but I don't know how long that lasts.

That surprises me, since GNOME 3's window-manager is basically Metacity, and (although it took some wrangling) I got all my custom GNOME 2 keyboard shortcuts set up on GNOME 3.

Sure, even Metacity isn't going to be as configurable as... oh, Awesome or XMonad, but I've found it much more reliable than Compiz (I managed to completely break Unity once by playing with the Compiz configuration tool).

What in particular do you mean by "making managing windows easy"?

I just tried to refer to the fact that I like to use a window manager separate from the desktop environment. You can't change the window manager in Gnome 3, except in the Gnome 2 emulation mode which I'm using[1].

And while Metacity could be used as an emergency replacement with a good configuration, the Metacity/Mutter in Gnome 3 had serious trouble emulating all the keypresses I needed. Especially Mod4 (or win key) was very problematic and unfortunately I've settled on that key for anything window related many, many years ago.

[1] Now that I think of it, Unity also has Unity 2D which might support a regular window manager instead of a compositing one.

The beauty of UNIX is that I can choose to use XFCE... and over there is a hacker who has been using FVWM since 1995 and probably will continue using it for another fifteen years.

I don't know what graphics protocol we will be using then, but it will still speak some flavor of X.

I really hope that until then we'll manage to migrate to Wayland, or some other technology more modern than X11.

You acknowledge the irony in trying to migrate away from X11 (a thirty-year-old technology) to "some other technology more modern", while staying with Unix (a forty-year-ald technology), right?

By which I mean, there are problems with X11, but age is just a correlated factor, not a cause, so it doesn't help to say we need something newer. Weyland makes different design decisions, and some of them might turn out to be better in the long run and some of them might not.

(Personally, I expect Weyland's lack of a "window manager" process will annoy me vastly more than the protocol quirks of X11, which have mostly been papered over by GTK+ and Qt by now.)

I used Unity for a little while when 11.04 came out, but ultimately switched to Gnome Shell. I think the thing that bugged me most was the feeling that Unity was starting to place Ubuntu/Canonical services front-and-center in a manner that I couldn't customize away.

I found myself preferring Gnome Shell over Unity. extensions.gnome.org and the nice scriptability with JS and CSS won me over as a hacker. Also Unity had performance issues on my system.

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