Re: [LUAU] A reflection on the state of the Linux desktop
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
Re: [LUAU] A reflection on the state of the Linux desktop
Looks very lean. I had no idea this WM existed. We're _REALLY_ going to wish we had this sort of choice with Windows, in several months, when our users complain about the funny squares that ate the start menu in Windows 8, and we can't simply switch in the desktop they'd rather have. Vive La Différence! -Jeff On 08/31/2012 01:41 PM, Jason Axelson wrote: 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 ___ LUAU@lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org mailing list http://lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org/listinfo.cgi/luau-freesoftwarehawaii.org
Re: [LUAU] A reflection on the state of the Linux desktop
On Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:17:03 -1000 Jeff Mings je...@lava.net wrote: Gnome 3 is not really ready for prime time. 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. Thanks for your impressions of Unity and Gnome. I fear Gnome 3 will make Gnome a mere shadow of its former self. The Gnome team's lack of responsiveness reminds me of the XFree86 crew, and Oracle. Here's hoping Mate stays viable. My own path over the years has been different. I was always partial to KDE. I was smart enough to avoid the earliest versions of KDE 4, making the jump to 4.3. I noticed several things: There was less functionality than 3.5 (mostly rectified now). The memory footprint was larger. You could run KDE with 256 meg. of RAM. Now you really need 512. There was lots of stuff running in the background, and things got worse if you ran KDE-PIM. Eventuallly, I found substitutes for the KDE apps I ran. I use the version 3.5 version of KDEaddressbook from Trinity. I switched from Kmail to Claws. I do my calendar stuff with an on-line app that comes with the domain I use, instead of Korganizer. With most of the KDE apps gone, KDE went too. Eventually I settled on XFCE 4.8. I use it on Ubuntu Lucid and Debian Squeeze. With Squeeze, it uses less than 90 meg. on a fresh boot to desktop. It's very flexible, and above all, stable. I also use Remmina to connect to a Vino server, both running under XFCE. Hey, they work. ___ LUAU@lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org mailing list http://lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org/listinfo.cgi/luau-freesoftwarehawaii.org
Re: [LUAU] A reflection on the state of the Linux desktop
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Peter Besenbruch pe...@besenbruch.info wrote: On Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:17:03 -1000 Jeff Mings je...@lava.net wrote: Gnome 3 is not really ready for prime time. 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. Thanks for your impressions of Unity and Gnome. I fear Gnome 3 will make Gnome a mere shadow of its former self. The Gnome team's lack of responsiveness reminds me of the XFree86 crew, and Oracle. Here's hoping Mate stays viable. My own path over the years has been different. I was always partial to KDE. I was smart enough to avoid the earliest versions of KDE 4, making the jump to 4.3. I noticed several things: There was less functionality than 3.5 (mostly rectified now). The memory footprint was larger. You could run KDE with 256 meg. of RAM. Now you really need 512. There was lots of stuff running in the background, and things got worse if you ran KDE-PIM. Eventuallly, I found substitutes for the KDE apps I ran. I use the version 3.5 version of KDEaddressbook from Trinity. I switched from Kmail to Claws. I do my calendar stuff with an on-line app that comes with the domain I use, instead of Korganizer. With most of the KDE apps gone, KDE went too. Eventually I settled on XFCE 4.8. I use it on Ubuntu Lucid and Debian Squeeze. With Squeeze, it uses less than 90 meg. on a fresh boot to desktop. It's very flexible, and above all, stable. I also use Remmina to connect to a Vino server, both running under XFCE. Hey, they work. When KDE made the jump from 3 to 4 it annoyed me because I used Konsole (which was awesome) as my primary terminal which was then replaced by a crappy bare bones KDE 4 Konsole... I eventually switched to just running Gnome terminal. I still use desktop Linux at work but Gnome 3 in fallback mode. I have a laptop too that I installed with XFCE and that works great. The problem is that larger open source projects such as Gnome and KDE don't have the resources to put out a new major release of their desktop early on. So they need to just release it and improve it over time. In the meanwhile users suffer and the whole usage is different. ... Except I know I'm not alone but my primary laptop is now a MacBook Air 13. The main problem is that Linux laptops suck with suspend/resume/hibernate and battery life. In the end it just feels so much better to throw the lid of the laptop down and lift it up without hoping things don't go bad. And in the end, I'm still just using the terminal mostly and Linux has won the server battle. - Julian ___ LUAU@lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org mailing list http://lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org/listinfo.cgi/luau-freesoftwarehawaii.org
Re: [LUAU] A reflection on the state of the Linux desktop
When KDE made the jump from 3 to 4 it annoyed me because I used Konsole (which was awesome) as my primary terminal which was then replaced by a crappy bare bones KDE 4 Konsole... I eventually switched to just running Gnome terminal. Konsole was wonderful. I agree. The problem is that larger open source projects such as Gnome and KDE don't have the resources to put out a new major release of their desktop early on. So they need to just release it and improve it over time. In the meanwhile users suffer and the whole usage is different. I'm a strong proponent of gradualism. I seem to remember OSX having it's troubles in the first four versions, or so. XFCE has evolved gradually, and it shows in exceptional stability. ... Except I know I'm not alone but my primary laptop is now a MacBook Air 13. The main problem is that Linux laptops suck with suspend/resume/hibernate and battery life. In the end it just feels so much better to throw the lid of the laptop down and lift it up without hoping things don't go bad. And in the end, I'm still just using the terminal mostly and Linux has won the server battle. Which is what I do with mine, and it works, always. Yes, you have to know what works and what doesn't with Linux, but there's a lot that does, including Macbook Air, if I read correctly. Failing that, there is always ZaReason, and companies like that. btw. I just ordered this: http://tinyurl.com/cnwhdny ___ LUAU@lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org mailing list http://lists.freesoftwarehawaii.org/listinfo.cgi/luau-freesoftwarehawaii.org
