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Comment by stefanve | Hacker News Reader

I played with the beta and I have to say that it is way more polished than 12.04/12.10. I have played for many years with Linux (since early 1990s) but it was always to much of a hazel to use it as my main os. But since 12.04 I fully switched from OSX to Ubuntu the only thing I kind of missed was the polish of osx. 13.04 makes lots of things nicer and more fluid. I actually like Ubuntu better than osx. One thing left to do is to get some descent icons and getting rid of the default orange :)

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It's weird, I've been on Linux for almost 20 years and Ubuntu as my main computer for 10 and for me it's the opposite. I find OSX has finally almost caught up to Linux with Mountain Lion.

It's crazy how many OSX features come from the unix world but in a delayed, better looking fashion.

The last missing major piece for OSX was good multiple workspace management, which came in the form of mission control and the touchpad gestures that makes it so efficient. I don't know if its any good with a mouse though.

Efficient multiple workspaces is a critical productivity feature for me. It's like having multiple monitors without having to carry a desk and a bunch of monitors with me all the time.

The previous OSX implementation called 'spaces' took too many actions to switch workspaces unless you had your hands on the keyboard and had setup shortcuts. This made OSX unusable to me.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu also regressed by getting rid of the single-click workspace switcher (which was working beautifully since like 1995) and doing a multi-workspace UI that resembles Lion's 'spaces'. However, I was able to remedy this by setting my middle mouse button to bring up the workspace switcher which is really fast.

The other Ubuntu regression which annoys me to no end and again is the same in OSX is that clicking on a dock icon when you are in a workspace and there is an instance of the app opened in another workspace makes you automatically jump to the other one instead of opening a new instance in the current workspace.

This assumes I separate applications on a per workspace basis which is stupid. I already have a dock to get access to different applications. Workspaces are used to separate projects or workflows.

Each workspace needs its own browser window that holds the tabs related to the project being worked on and also its own terminals and text editors. I don't want to be yanked out of a context because I tried opening an editor and there wasn't one already in the workspace.

Hopefully this is eventually fixed in both OSX and Ubuntu.

I've always just used ctrl-alt-arrow for ubuntu (and other nixes)- add a shift and the current window comes along for a ride. When did this break? (I'm still on 12.04 LTS)

If your hands are on the keyboard that's fine but I also need a good solution for when I am using the pointing device.

You can swipe to a new space.

Do you regularly use the pointing device with both hands?

How would you press Control-Alt-KeyLeft with less than both hands?

it's possible on my laptop keyboard as the alt/ctrl are right next to the arrow keys, but admittedly it's not a particularly natural or comfortable way to do it

On a standard 104-key Windows-style keyboard (or the 101-key standard precursor, or anything with a generally similar layout), I'd use the right-side Ctrl, right-side Alt, and the Left arrow in the arrow key array (not the numeric pad). Should be pretty easy to one-hand even with fairly small hands.

For e.g. VT switching, the right-side modifier keys won't work.

> The other Ubuntu regression which annoys me to no end and again is the same in OSX is that clicking on a dock icon when you are in a workspace and there is an instance of the app opened in another workspace makes you automatically jump to the other one instead of opening a new instance in the current workspace.

If you middle click the icon it will open a new one instead of taking you to an existing one.

I didn't know that. Thanks for the tip. However, since I set my middle button to go to the workspace switcher there's a conflict.

I just tried it and it does open a new instance _and_ go to the switcher which is not great.

Also most of the time if there is already an app window in the workspace, I would want it to be made visible not a new instance to be opened.

You can also hold down shift and click on the icon to open up a new window.

Similarly if you use a keyboard shortcut to open your icons (like Win+1 to open the first icon) holding shift while pressing the shortcut will open a new window (Shift+Win+1 will open a new window for the first icon).

Speaking of which, one thing that most people coming to ubuntu from windows and OSX often don't spot (which I think you have, but I post mostly for the benefit of other readers) - Ubuntu, much as canonical has done a lot of custom work on it, is still linux. You can customise it in pretty much any and every way that you want. You can even not use Unity at all if you don't like it -- no reason to throw out all the great foundations and switch to a different distro just because you don't like one of the default UI settings :P

(There are several valid reasons for switching from one linux distro to another, it just makes me sad to see so many "I don't like Unity so I'm moving to Gentoo" posts -_-)

It is still possible to customize Ubuntu, but you cannot customize Unity itself. It is no longer the goal of canonical. Canonical is trying to make an OS for an average person, who doesn't care about customization. Power users (ie normal GNU/Linux users) are not their target audience.

I went through a phase in which I wanted to be able to go to great lengths to customize the UI. Lately I've realized that in the end, virtually all of my "power user" use cases are served by the terminal and emacs. When it comes to the UI, I just want something with reasonable behavior, that allows me to launch apps, and generally stays out of the way. Now days when I set up a new linux machine it's mostly just a matter of doing the default install, using aptitude to get the same old utilities, languages, and apps that I always use, and copying over whatever I want to keep in ~/.bashrc and ~/.emacs

I fully agree. I just want a desktop that stays out of the way. I have ubuntu and I have replaced unity by cinnamon. It is not very polished, but in a couple of minute, you can configure it to be usable.

The desktop that does the best job of staying out of your way is no desktop. I've been using Ubuntu for years without a desktop, just the dwm window manager. Now and then I ask people, because I know the desktops are evolving, what they might have to offer me, but I never get a coherent response.

I really like enlightenment, but the wifi connection manager in e17 baffles me. I've had it working, but it seems to want me to install something else- do I then take out network manager? etc etc.

Unity has a huge flaw, though: to find a program you have to know its name. That sounds silly to non-nixers, but for instance some are known as one thing but actually are named something quite different (e.g., 'Document Viewer' = 'Evince'). In cases where unity doesn't recognize both names this can be a problem.

I used to learn the command-line invocation by looking at the shortcut in the menu. No more in unity (at least I haven't learned how).

Same here. I usually use OpenBox then add a few commonly used programs to the menu. I often wish this was possible with Windows (might be with 3rd party software) but I understand that they have a different type of user in mind. There really isn't a need for a desktop though.

I would take a punt and suggest that the average punter couldn't describe what a desktop is. I'd struggle to define it. But think it includes: application launching, application management, window management, file management and a couple of helper applications: clipboard, network manager, notifications, workspaces and probably some input device management! It's no wonder why people give incoherent responses!

dwm is great, but I like twm slightly better due to its more conventional window management.

It's also extremely satisfying in a mischievous sort of way whenever I walk into some public place and pull out my T410 with that setup. I can't count the number of stares I get. One guy even asked me why I used a laptop from the 1990s.

I also use the Thinkpads - great with Linux, and I love the way the keyboard feels. I haven't noticed the stares, though.

Heh. You should see the looks I get with my Panasonic Toughbook CF-30 (running Arch Linux and i3wm). People must think I'm entering nuclear launch codes every time I use vim in public on the thing...

I think everyone goes through that phase. I use spend hours customizing my desktop. Finding the perfect image, icons, size of the task bar, setting up some crazy conky displays, etc... Now it's i3 with a plain black background.

I'm using i3 as well and am loving it.

Same. Terminal + Tmux + Vim + launcher (Gnome-Do or Synapse) + Vim keybindings for everything (browser, anything else) = couldn't care less what desktop I'm running (minus privacy concerns like embedded Amazon searches).

> no reason to throw out all the great foundations and switch to a different distro just because you don't like one of the default UI settings

Installing Cinnamon on Ubuntu was broken, and many things didn't integrate like they did with the default install, which is why I just switched to Mint in the first place rather than screwing around with UI settings.

I got fed up with the DEs and switched to #! after about 2 months.

I still think it's Openbox, Wmaker, or die.

If you don't like orange, take a look at Lubuntu 13.04. It has nice minimal icon set and is blue instead of orange.

Yeah it's fugly by half (Ubuntu that is). And I once even liked the browns! I prefer the subdued themes. I'm almost happy with Bluebird and Xfce, but I still have theme/colour scheme issues. I'm forever hoping for a pretty and consistent interface throughout Ubuntu.

One could first try installing Advanced Settings from the Ubuntu Software Center and playing around with the GTK+ theme and the icon theme.

Problem I've found is that there aren't any simple GUIs for creating/tweaking GTK3 themes. You could configure the colour scheme slightly (5 colours) with Gnome 2 and the older GTK engine. The other thing, is that you still have a mix of GTK3, GTK2 and non GTK apps, well at least I think that's true. OpenOffice being an example. It's an annoying problem for any distro, but the end result is that you end up with loads of inconsistency.

In short it's more of a pig for a user to configure their desktop style than it was in Windows 98.

So yes you could swap your theme, but I have yet to find many professional themes, and even the better ones like Bluebird, have issues.

if you want nice icons i can only recommend faenza from tiheum, he also has a ppa.

http://tiheum.deviantart.com/art/Faenza-Icons-173323228 https://launchpad.net/~tiheum/+archive/equinox

"too much of a hazel"? What does this mean?

I suspect he meant "too much of a hassle." I like his version too.

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