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Comment by mattdeboard | Hacker News Reader

> "That’s why Unity in 2013 will be all about mobile"

Cool, but don't fuck up my desktop experience with your experimentation like you have been doing.

After hanging on to vanilla 11.04 (the last gnome2 release) until it became too out-of-date to use, I switched to xmonad with a dzen workspace display in place of gnome-panel. It took a fair amount of time to customize (which I can do now, no thanks to you, Ubuntu), but now my DE is optimal again.

I eventually wound up switching off Ubuntu altogether when I realized that I seriously disagreed with its general direction of removing customizability and features for marketing reasons, that I disliked most of its core applications, and that Arch, with its AUR, had a more complete and up-to-date repository of software that I cared about. That particular switch was pretty time consuming, but I learned a decent amount about the modern Linux userspace. I have a nice sleek system now that does what I want it to, and not the other way around.

Have a nice life, Ubuntu. Good luck getting grandma to install you.

Just switch to Xubuntu. Xfce isn't changing any time soon. None of the "interface innovation" Unity is notorious for.

I'll switch to Xubuntu too because I need remote access. It's not just a matter of UX. Cloud service doesn't solve my problem.

The future looks dark because applications won't be able to support Wyland and X11. There will be a fork and Ubuntu is betting on it with the goal to compete with Android and iOs. On this path, users like me are left as orphan. I've change OS before, I can do it again.

It's not just Ubuntu pushing Wayland, though. The Wayland project was started by a core X11 developer and seems to have the support of most X11 developers.

I've been switching DE like crazy the past year or so trying to find a comfy fit, I've settled on XFCE (Xubuntu) with the bottom panel replaced with Plank, and have completely fallen in love with it.

Is there a way to drag / drop arbitrary files onto the panel (ie, directories, executables, scripts, etc)? Setting up launchers and what not is so cumbersome.

I don't know about drag/drop, since I don't use that much, but it's easy to add panel applets for various things, including launching software and viewing directories. I usually just set up keyboard shortcuts for all my software using the Win key though. It's a lot faster than mousing over to the panel and clicking on an icon.

I just reinstalled it on my arch partition, they do now have that drag / drop to panel I mentioned, but it doesn't act like a dock still, so I had to put Cairo dock on. Going to toy with it some more tomorrow.

My use case is disjoint it seems. All I want is a pinnable launcher dock panel (preferrably with app integration, but that gets nutty), systemwide smart learning search with system key, a working system tray and clock, and decent multiheaded monitor support. None of the current Linux desktops really provide all those in tandem.

If Cairo does what you want out of a dock, then just use it alongside a regular Xfce panel for the system tray/clock. You can set up whatever system search software you want with an Xfce shortcut (in the Xfce settings). What problems are you having with multimonitor? I use ARandR to configure my monitors - again, in the Xfce settings, just set it to run when you hit the Fn key combo for monitor settings.

I may eventually, but for the time being I'm going to stick with 12.04 and Unity 2D which I like a lot.

Unity is all about fucked up. And gnome3 in 12.10 has been very unstable for me, getting rather frustrated.

Well, Unity 2D was actually really ok for me, but Unity 3D -- now the only option out of the box -- is really FUBAR. I just rolled my girlfriend's laptop back to 12.04, and am going to sit there until next LTS probably.

Didn't they kill Unity 2D recently?

Yeah, Unity 2D isn't an option in 12.10. Unity 3D doesn't support the video card driver in this laptop (a Radeon M6xxx series) so I'm pretty much hosed with my HDMI out. That was a dealbreaker for me.

Rolled back? Can I do that, or did you just reinstall? 12.04 was solid.

Yeah, just reinstalled.

I just switched to lubuntu, i recommend it even for powerful pcs

If Canonical could make a pretty interface that is as fast as Lubuntu, that would be great. For example Lubuntu works much better on Cortex A9-based Nexus 7 than Ubuntu.

Been using LXDE with Ubuntu for over a year now.

HUGE fan of LXDE, stable as a rock and perfect for my requirements. I require a couple of minutes of fiddling around with the launcher to get the positioning right but apart from that it's a very solid desktop.

LXDE's multi-monitor capability is broken in several ways, otherwise it's pretty good

Indeed. I used arandr to make an xrandr script that runs at login. Works beautifully.

Xrandr is a great program to know, especially if you use projectors a lot.

It's a shame they are pissing away the opportunity to become stronger on the desktop while Apple/MS focus on the tablet and phone market.

I assume they must be getting deals with some relatively big hardware manufacturers in that case. And hoping those manufacturers don't simply take the open source code from unity and use it to build their own system cutting canonical out of the loop altogether.

I think it's too late for that :). I can't even upgrade beyond 11.10 and I'm looking for alternative Linux flavors if anyone has some good suggestions. I've heard Mint is nice.

"Cool, but don't fuck up my desktop experience with your experimentation like you have been doing."

Yes, Microsoft has a patent on that with the release of Windows 8... :D

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