A reflection on the state of the Linux desktop, written to hopefully
spare others a lot of wasted time:
It was time to upgrade my primary desktop. I prefer Centos for
servers and Ubuntu for desktops, and Ubuntu 12.04.1 was just released,
suggesting a more refined bundle of Ubuntu. I've already deployed 12.04
on a number of other machines, but my main personal desktop was still
using the last Long-Term-Service release, 10.04, with the Gnome 2 desktop.
Many of you have seen the newer Unity desktop that is now the
default for Ubuntu. It's very pretty and impressive as a potential
interface for unifying tablets, phones and PCs, but much of the desktop
workflow just isn't suited to getting things done quickly. You can fix
Unity's biggest issue, the baffling omission of a regular menu, by using
the Gnome Classic Menu Indicator. However, there are a number of other
issues with getting work done quickly with Unity, so I decided to try
Gnome 3 again.
Gnome 3 is remarkably beautiful, fluid and elegant. After a bit of
tweaking and familiarization, I decided I could move to the newest
version of Gnome. When I last tried it, several months ago on a
different distro, it didn't seem as polished. My cautious approval was
short-lived. When Remmina, a VNC/RDP client that generally works very
well, decided to die, I lost every bit of control of Gnome 3. Remmina
is built on GTK (probably the Gnome Tool Kit libraries for Gnome 2) and
shouldn't have stopped in such a debilitating fashion. I couldn't reach
other desktops, menus or the Gnome 3 dock using the mouse or the
keyboard shortcuts. The only graceful exit was to jump to shell
(Ctrl-Alt-F4) and kill the user I was logged in as. I tried this twice
more, trying to see if I was missing something, but the same thing
happened. Gnome 3 is not really ready for prime time.
I had previously tried "regressing" to Gnome 2 under other Ubuntu
12.04 and found that the Mate Desktop, a fork of Gnome 2, is the best
way to do it. You can install Gnome 2 via the Ubuntu repositories, but
certain bits are missing, or just don't work correctly, probably because
of conflicts with Unity and its LDM desktop manager. At
http://mate-desktop.org/ you'll see that the project has reached version
1.4. It works very well, as you would expect Gnome 2 to behave, and
installation is trivial.
Gnome 2 is a great mature desktop environment that fosters
productivity - RedHat Enterprise Linux comes with it by default with
good reason. If you're using Ubuntu 12.04 and don't like Unity, go
straight to Mate Desktop and don't waste your time playing with the others.
-Jeff Mings
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