"Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem. | Hacker News Reader

"Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem.

lunduke.com

24 pointsMisterLunduke33 comments

It's a shame that the dash is so slow - but there are some solutions:

    apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

and then apply http://askubuntu.com/a/68552/128873

You should also disable window animations and other funky stuff:

http://www.techdrivein.com/2013/03/4-simple-tweaks-to-improv...

It sucks that I have to write this here and that countless others wasted their time researching this.

Seriously people need to stop working around crap and just vote with their feet.

I just switched to Fedora 19 on the desktop and it's far better. It's lightning fast and everything just works out of the box; wifi, hibernate, SMB/CIFS networking, RDP. Miracle. Was zero config for me and it's polished.

It's got to the point, that I'll probably switch all my stuff to CentOS 7 when it comes out (this will be based on RHEL7 which is based on Fedora 19).

I just need stuff that works these days.

Two things here:

1) The cost of work-arounds is incredibly cheaper than surveying the distro space to find one that works for you.

2) It is likely the case that the benefits of using Ubuntu outweigh the cost of the work-arounds (at least this is true for me and probably many others).

Sometimes

1) doesn't scale well. The amount of work just to get Ubuntu into a usable shape is increasing per release. I can't tell you the number of hours I've pissed out of the window on it over the last few years. It's the equivalent hack status of Windows now which removes every competitive advantage I have by using it to start with.

2) There are no explicit benefits to using Ubuntu other than you probably already have it. The benefits are disppearing faster as to be honest it's not really a fairly compatible Linux distribution. There are Ubuntu-isms creeping into other things and this is seriously bad news. Canonical just want their slice like the Unix vendors in the 1990's.

Doesn't help me, because the underlying problem is that it won't show any results until they are all in. For some reason Unity needs to wake up my usually sleeping external drive and wait for it to spin up before I can even start the calculator, which is on my internal SSD.

There are some fundamental design flaws in the way the Dock works that unfortunately can be just "tweaked away".

Oh crazy. But I'm not surprised. After ranting to myself and colleagues for a few days after stumbling over a few bugs and trying to fix them... (By the way: Fixing bugs there is almost impossible without going insane - Gobject, Dbus, [put 10 other slightly broken technologies in here], gvfs - layers of abstractions and strange C code with subtle multithreading issues and almost no documentation)

...and after stumbling over a lot of Bugs in Unity or the underlying GNOME infrastructure that are more than 2 years open or just reappear every other Ubuntu release I've switched to KDE (Kubuntu).

I've only learned C++ and Java in university so it's probably partly my fault but I've found the whole GNOME / Unity Desktop ecosystem to be pretty hard to understand and impossible to debug. Then I've found this here: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html had a good laugh and stopped caring about it. Sorry to all the people that working hard to improve Desktop Linux but I'm sick of it.

While KDE is also not perfect I'm a happy user now.

Haven't tried it for probably about 10 years now. The only things I really care about are window management and terminal emulation. What are the biggest frustrations using KDE for you?

Window management has tons of options and actually usable virtual desktops - there is even a concept called activities where you can further configure your work spaces. Terminal emulation should be fine. Konsole is mature. There is also a Quake terminal for KDE called Yakuake. Gnome Terminal and Guake work fine through.

Biggest frustrations (not really frustrations as I could solve the issues after spending some time with the configuration options):

- The Desktop in a widget - you can easily configure it to a normal Desktop but the widget stuff is not really that great IMHO.

- I really did not like the default look. I've switched to QtCurve now and I'm quite happy. Some Desktop effects where too much for me but it's easily configurable. If you are familiar with KDE 3.5 you'll feel at home.

- I disabled the semantic Desktop. It hogs quite a few resources

- KMail is not really usable. But I didn't tried too hard. Thunderbird runs fine

- I'm using Pidgin because Kopete and Empathy do not support OTR encryption as far as I know

Overall everything is configurable. Which is really confusing at first. There is a learning curve but IMHO it's worth to take the time. 4.11 is really stable for me. No memory leaks or other strange behavior - quite low memory footprint. I'm really impressed. Sorry if I sound like a shill here but after using Unity for the last few years it was worth making the switch. YMMV

Why is the Unity dash so slow, and why does Canonical not seem to have any interest in speeding it up? Is it faster on their testing machines? Is it significantly faster on new hardware, if you're using an SSD, or if you have more than 4GB of RAM, or something? I quite like Unity generally, but the ridiculous slowness of the dash is a constant irritant.

it's a compiz plugin written in python. python is slow.

Does it start a new interpreter every time you open it or something?

The dash itself is written in C++. It gets some of its data from python plugins, but a) not when it's searching for local files or applications, for which it uses services compiled to native code and b) there's no reason python should be slow for stuff that isn't hugely computation intensive like, say, searching a list of filenames. Whatever Unity's problem is, the choice of implementation language is not it.

I am running 12.04 on a machine with a SSD and 16GB of RAM and it works perfectly. I was not even aware people were having this problem until I read this post.

I have no problem on my personal laptop (i7, 8GB RAM, SSD), but on my work laptop (i5,6GB, HDD) it is horrible. I can wait up to 10 seconds before it appears... I just disabled the Super key binding on that computer.

HDD vs SSD would be my guess. I suspect it does a lot of disk accesses like loading icons, loading .desktop files, opening index, ...

Is it faster, when you open it the second time?

On a very slow netbook, I noticed that Unity 12.04 (LTS version) opens quicker on the second and subsequent invocation than on the first. However, there is still a significant delay. I suspect the searches and time taken to build the various lenses is the reason. Gnome Shell appears to be a lot snappier because the search does not happen on that first screen.

Does anyone remember Mac OS Spotlight? Took ages when first introduced (10.3?) then got loads faster on the same hardware. I'm hoping the same will happen with Unity.

I suspect Canonical is playing the long game.

They know that the current generation of Linux desktop users may switch desktops or distros, but will just as easily switch back if Ubuntu trumps those.

For the broader audience, the Linux desktop is still not up to par with Windows or OSX, and that is Canonical's goal.

So basically, you're all just expendable guinea pigs, and all of your complaining is actually providing Canonical with cheap feedback.

Given that it's open source and we're not paying fuck all for it, I can't really say Canonical is doing it wrong.

I have a good machine with quad core processor, plenty of ram, and a very good GPU GTX675m, but it still lags like it is the first alpha version of Windows Vista.

I mainly use gnome-shell, but I fired up Unity on my Ubuntu 13.10 running Thinkpad T400 (~4 year old machine, core 2 duo) with 8 GB of RAM and a Samsung 840 pro SSD. the unity dash comes up instantaneously for me; certainly less than 1/2 a second. I'm guessing the SSD makes a big difference, as it does with all other computer performance issues. A 128GB MLC SSD costs less than $100 these days, and using one as your OS drive is by far the most incredible performance improvement you can make on a desktop machine.

I have a feeling it might be the lenses that connect to servers. I removed all unity-lens-* packages but unity-lens-applications and it's quite snappy.

I was using Gnome-Do and later Synapse before Unity arrived and it is much slower which is one of the top UI felonies for new software.

Ditto for Launchy, which is cross-platform and replicates every feature of Dash. There are a lot of these search-while-you-type launchers out there, and none of them are as slow as Canonical's implementation.

I once tried to run Unity under VirtualBox, and It was the fastest uninstalaltion/purge I have made so far.

For me, the answer was as simple as "Ctrl+Alt+T; sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop"

Dash, sometimes, is horribly slow. Rest of Unity has gotten usable, but Dash is a pain even now. Canonical should really focus on it's performance since it's the most important part of Unity experience.

It doesn't bother me that much because it never misses what I type. I can hit the Super key, then 't', then enter, and I know that it will eventually launch a terminal.

CTRL+ALT+T might be faster in your case.

True, but you get the idea... I don't have to wait for it to "launch" before I start typing, so I don't feel like it's breaking my train of thought. This is mostly true with typing an address in Firefox too, because the history pane seems to ignore me at first which is much more annoying.

Actually, you can't really trust that behavior if you ever install new software, or even change the way you use the computer by say starting to use some other program that starts with a "t" very often. The Dash optimizes for programs that you run frequently and some other program might win out if you run it more often than "terminal". The Dash is based on giving feedback to the user; that's why it needs to be fast.

If it wasn't for the HUD feature (tapping alt gives you a search bar to all the program's menu items) I would've switched to another DE already

are there any other DE's that provide something like that?

I use Kupfer in Xubuntu. It's sort of similar to Quicksilver on the Mac: http://engla.github.io/kupfer/

Doing Crossfit would probably break the Dash even more.

unity should go to hell, gnome-classic is so much better that it. I believe the high level of ubuntu is stupid to start the unity project, after years it's still a piece of shit.

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