Hacker News Reader

Comment by keithpeter | Hacker News Reader

I am fascinated by the preference for Xmonad as an alternative to Unity/Gnome Shell.

Would Gnome 2 -> XFCE or Gnome 2 -> Gnome Classic not make more sense?

Or is it more along the lines of: we have to change anyway so lets have a look at a workflow that really fits how we work?

I say this as a humble end user who has gone dwm/dmenu -> Unity with 12.04

View on HN

GNOME Classic is really just a thin skin over GNOME 3; it doesn't have any of the useful features that the GNOME team removed from their software.

XFCE and KDE just aren't very popular in my area, though I don't know why. I have seen people discuss moving to KDE on internal mailing lists, so there is some interest elsewhere in the company.

The two people I helped convert have, to my knowledge, not bothered with customising xmonad. They just copied my config, changed a keybinding or two, and then left it alone.

Could you point out some of the useful features removed in GNOME 3 not available in fallback mode?

I switched from GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3 -> GNOME 3 fallback + Xmonad. I tried to find a suitable alternative to GNOME 3 (Cinnamon, Unity, KDE, XFCE) but was excited to find out about fallback mode.

It essentially behaves like GNOME 2 for me, except now I use Xmonad for WM instead of Mutter / Metacity.

A few of my personal pet peeves (note: every disgruntled user has their own, largely disjoint set):

1. The applet to inhibit screen sleeping went away. Without it, I often look up from working on a hard problem to discover that my screens have been blanked out.

2. Something GNOME-ish keeps grabbing my mouse, and won't let it go until I log in with SSH and start killall-ing anything with "gnome" in the process name. It happens once a day or so, I haven't been able to purposefully reproduce it, and it's really annoying.

3. The settings applet was neutered. It now looks like a cheap knockoff of MacOS's system settings, except somehow with even less functionality. It also seems like the GNOME developers simply forgot about it until about a month before the release, because many features that appear to be present are barely functional. For example, Appearance -> Theme only changes gtk3 themes, and most of the gtk2 themes don't have a gtk3 counterpart, so now about half of my apps don't look like the other half. Another example: the new settings applet stores network proxy settings somewhere weird now, so neither Firefox nor Chrome find my proxy settings any more.

4. About half of the GNOME configuration has moved to gconf to dconf, but there's no rhyme or reason as to which half. When I discovered the new settings applet, I tried to change stuff with gconf/dconf, except I have no idea how to figure out which applications use what settings storage backend.

5. A lot of applications don't have key bindings any more, or had them greatly reduced. GNOME 2 was pretty good about this, but many GNOME 3 applications are completely unusable without using the mouse.

> 1. The applet to inhibit screen sleeping went away. Without it, I often look up from working on a hard problem to discover that my screens have been blanked out.

The Presentation Mode shell extension fixes this - adds an option to the drop-down menu on the power meter to turn on presentation mode, disabling screen blanking & locking.

> 4. About half of the GNOME configuration has moved to gconf to dconf, but there's no rhyme or reason as to which half. When I discovered the new settings applet, I tried to change stuff with gconf/dconf, except I have no idea how to figure out which applications use what settings storage backend.

I think finishing this migration is a work-in-progress.

Don't have immediate solutions for the rest of your gripes. Gnome 3 seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it thing; I find it to be great (modulo a few bugs and quirks, but it isn't everyone's cup of tea.

"2. Something GNOME-ish keeps grabbing my mouse, and won't let it go until I log in with SSH and start killall-ing anything with "gnome" in the process name. It happens once a day or so, I haven't been able to purposefully reproduce it, and it's really annoying."

That is a bug, I've not seen that on Ubuntu 12.04 using Unity or GS all through the testing period.

I gathered from what jmillikin said that it is certainly a bug, but it was probably not reported during the testing period for the same reason jmillikin didn't report it: it appears to be hard to reproduce.

Is there a tool (akin to xev) that would display which process currently has control of the mouse? I would think that tracking down the process that has grabbed the mouse would be the necessary first step toward stopping it from doing so.

I am surprised Google security would let you disable the screensaver anyway.

I wasn't able to figure out how to remove the top and bottom panels (the window list thing at the bottom and the shutdown button thing on top).

I like vertical real estate (would like to merge them into one, like I could with Ubuntu 10.10). And I like no toolbars on on top (to make it easier to click on my firefox tabs (see below)).

My favorite GUI customization is to remove the "decorations" (window frame, title bar etc) of maximized windows (to get a little more vertical space). This also makes firefox's "tabs on top" feature look the same on Linux and Windows.

You can do it with Compiz+XFCE (which I did in 10.10). Compiz isn't working for me under XFCE in 12.04, so I'm using a PyGTK script I found on the Net to do this.

If you're using Gnome 3 fallback you can add / remove applets like Gnome 2. The only difference is you have to alt + right-click on a panel / applet instead of just a regular right-click.

Most of what you want is available via extensions. The Panel Settings extension lets you turn on autohide, which addressed my primary gripe. devilspie works great with gnome3 to get rid of decorations.

Great, I'm just getting my head around people missing features in Gnome 2 so instead going to a 'bare backed' window manager like Xmonad.

I think it's largely a feeling of "what will they remove next"?

Say an engineer is a a daily user of ten particular GNOME 2 features. GNOME 3 removes four of them, and hides three more. At that point, the engineer is wondering what will happen to the rest when GNOME 3.3 comes out.

In contrast, environments which are explicitly intended to be customised very rarely disable or remove features. Someone who's been using the same configuration for ten years can know that if it works in release N, it'll probably work (maybe with a few minor tweaks) in release N+1.

It's worth noting that XMonad has many more features than Metacity; it's not bare-bones by any means. Converting to it isn't like converting to a minimalist WM.

That is an interesting way of looking at the situation; Jef Raskin's idea of 'monotony' in the interface (one way of doing everything and that way fixed) is clearly not what you guys want.

I take your point about Xmonad, and if you know Haskel you can add stuff as needed

The thing is that Gnome3 is relatively highly integrated, and contains implementations of various functionalities. Using a 3rd party tool tends not to work well, because the Gnome implementation conflicts.

Using a bare bones window manager doesn't cause the same issues. It's not as integrated, but you can mix and match parts more easily.

I see it as risk avoidance. The learning curve with the basic WMs is steep but a one-time cost. With richer WMs, You pay a tax with your time and productivity every time the UI designers f* with your s*. It seems like UI designers these days are about making BOLD MOVES without apologies.

Look into the Mate desktop - it's a rebuild of Gnome 2 with maintainable code. Best way for a test spin now is get the Linux Mint Debian Mate iso and try it in a VM. I actually like Unity, but in Mint the Mate desktop is my favorite, looking forward to Mint 13 with it as a default.

> Would Gnome 2 -> XFCE or Gnome 2 -> Gnome Classic not make more sense?

In my experience, the more minimal window managers such as XFCE, Open Box and so on required lots of configuration to get right. Furthermore, they don't give you a big advantage over something like Gnome or KDE, except for being more configurable. I'm using the tiling window manager dwm with minimal changes to the default config (added 2 shortcuts and changed some colors) for almost 3 years now. I think the pure simplicity and stability of the software is compelling compared to a minimal version of Gnome.

Amazingly, I moved from dwm/dmenu back into Unity a couple of months ago and don't see any need to move back too quickly (Ctrl-Super-left-arrow and Ctrl-Super-right-arrow provide a basic, way basic, tiling behaviour on Unity).

If you have a numpad, in Unity you can use ctrl-alt-[0-9].

    Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 7 - Place window in top left corner of screen.
    Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 8 - Place window in top half of screen.
    Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 9 - Place window in top right corner of screen.
    Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 5 - Center/Maximize the window in the middle of the screen. In 12.04 this toggles between maximize and restore state
    Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 1 - Place window in the bottom left corner of the screen.
    Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 2 - Place window in the bottom half of the screen.
    Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 3 - Place window in the bottom right corner of the screen.
    Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 0 - Maximize the current window.

i used to use xmonad + gnome2 (gnome2 for the desktop environment, xmonad as a replacement for the gnome window manager). now that gnome has dropped the ball, i've switched to xmonad + xfce. in either case, xmonad just replaces the window manager for me, not the entire desktop environment.

There's no contradiction between wanting to use Gnome and wanting to use XMonad. Personally, I think I slightly prefer the default Unity experience over Gnome 2, Windows 7, or Max OS - but its hard to customize in the ways I want. However, with a simple

  sudo aptitude install xmonad suckless-tools gnome-session-fallback
  sudo vim /usr/share/gnome-sessions/gnome-classic.session

and change the window manger to xmonad I'm happy as a clam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com