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Comment by nisa | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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