Hey Jeff, I've been using Ubuntu 12.04 for the last 6 months or something and I like it. Although I also don't run unity and instead run "Awesome Window Manager" which is a cool tiling window manager.
Jason On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Jeff Mings <je...@lava.net> wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ > LUAU@lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org mailing list > http://lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org/listinfo.cgi/luau-freesoftwarehawaii.org _______________________________________________ LUAU@lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org mailing list http://lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org/listinfo.cgi/luau-freesoftwarehawaii.org
