Ubuntu 18.04 is a huge update, but I say that mostly in the best sense of big updates. It brings a ton of new stuff, both under the hood and on the desktop, without creating too much disruption to your workflows. The one exception to that is HUD users, who may want to stick with the version of Unity still in the Ubuntu repos.
The amount of time and effort wasted by switching to Unity and now switching back to GNOME shows – even this latest release looks and feels so dated to me.
“I don’t see anything” … Yes?
Gnome sucks, it tried to make the leap to tablets and instead fell into the chasm of usability that Windows 8/10 occupy. MATE/Cinnamon picked up the slack and are the future of GTK based desktops. GTK itself needs an overhaul though, the C++ support is atrocious, you can’t even auto connect signal handlers to class methods in Glade. This means every single callback has to be manually connected, thousands of useless lines of boilerplate code. If Ubuntu wants to actually push the Linux desktop forward instead of pretending to be doing anything, they should be working on fixing these major core problems with the platform. Not running off on stupid UI metaphors.
Edited 2018-05-09 20:33 UTC
Gnome 3 sucks.
Gnome 2 works and is seemingly as popular as ever.
My choice of Linux is CentOS 7 with Cinnamon. I got fed up with the way Ubuntu adds kernel patches into their OS. Far too many shades of NIH for my liking.
The $100 million spent on UI/UX testing by Sun Microsystems is as relevant today as it was in 2004. That’s why MATE will not die and will continue to grow in popularity. At the end of the day when you run 2x 2560×1600 displays you don’t give a damn about the hipster UIs. You want a Windows 2000 style UI that gets out of the way and lets you get to work. Preferably with modern conveniences like network-manager to handle wifi config. The only real complaint I have aside from a few unique tools not being quite right, is pulseaudio/jack/bluetooth integration is still garbage with jack/pulseaudio regularly needing to be killed to get things done. Steam is on point and makes gaming simple (some more AAA would be nice) WINE mostly works but still has some annoying nasty issues (e.g OpenGL surfaces drawing over tool windows in a 3D modeller), which in my case ReactOS has actually resolved, and thanks to VIRGL and 3D acceleration being available in VMs is rapidly disappearing as a problem.
Edited 2018-05-10 19:21 UTC
Has Sun really spent that much?
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2001-July/msg000…
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2003/09/gnome2-4/2/
They actually had a specialist team working on it. I was at Linux.conf.au 2004 when they presented a talk about it. It’s too bad more people don’t follow the Gnome 2.0 HIG. There’s a reason why MATE is so popular…
Edited 2018-05-13 20:29 UTC
If you try Gnome on a tablet, you’ll notice that it doesn’t work. It works very well on laptops. Ramming the pointer into the top left corner and then starting typing is just so much more efficient than pointing and clicking.
I wouldn’t want to use it on screens bigger than 15″ myself, though.
In that case skip the pointer and just make a key pop up that search feature. Otherwise you might as well point and click since you’ve already wasted time moving the pointer.
Dude. It’s literally as quick as hitting spacebar.
I could see myself using gnome shell on a 22″ screen, but when I upgraded my 14″ laptop to ubuntu 18.04 it was painful to see how much vertical space was now wasted compared to unity. Especially in the two programs I use most, terminal and firefox. I just couldn’t live with it so I spend an hour trying to find the right combination of extensions that could give me my screen real estate back, but after getting real close it started crashing all the time. In the end I just gave up and apt-installed the unity7 desktop that’s still there and working really well.
Whatever all the haters say, unity7 has amazing keyboard-only workflow support, and especially on smaller screens it stays out of the way as much as possible. The ‘dash’ is the big sore point, it’s too slow and the ‘lenses’ or whatever they are called never really worked well for anything. Luckily it can be mostly ignored. In gnome shell I can’t easily ignore that 10% of my too small screen is used to paint a menu bar I seldom use, an empty title bar, and a mostly empty top bar. All three stacked on top of each other.
The ‘gnome’ applications I hardly ever use are a bit better with screen estate, but the flip side is that they are more cumbersome to use since the gnome replacement for real menus requires more clicks to do anything.
I see what you mean. There’s contrast between text and background. Non-bland distinctive icons everywhere. I can even tell a button from a label. 🙂
I always used gnome until unity arrived, but after using gnome again for a while in 18.04 I just couldn’t take it, but switched to kubuntu. Seriously, this kde/plasma is so much better it’s outright ridiculous.
I even managed to make it do global menus better than unity did. And the way notifications, clipboard, etc are shared between my computer and phone, ouyeah!
…with Android phone?
Yes, with an android phone.
Edited 2018-05-11 15:30 UTC
Since about 20+ years ago I’ve used a 2×2 desktop, 2 screens wide and 2 screens tall. With an icon to let me switch desktops as well as keyboard command.
The principal of least surprises implies a few things:
* Moving the mouse to the right should end up on the desktop to the right
* moving a window to the right should move the window to the desktop to the right
* Moving right from the right most window loops around to the left (similarly for top/bottom).
* so at any point you can move off any of the 4 edges to another workspace.
* most importantly mouse and window moving across workspaces should work EXACTLY like they do within a workspace.
This makes for a nice natural workspace 4 times larger than your monitor (or in my case dual monitors).
Ubuntu 18.04 failed pretty big on this. Impressively bad actually:
* You can’t have a 2×2 works space, you have to order them vertically (1×4)
* when switching the left monitor moves, but not the right
* you can’t loop around
* you can’t move drag windows between workspaces just like you can within a workspace
* You can’t go off the edge of any screen.
Feels like Windows and OSX used to before they figured out workspaces.
I wouldn’t harp on it so much, but the biggest thing that changes between releases is the GUI and 18.04’s seems worse.
Multi-monitor support has always been a sore point in Gnome 3.x.
Those who complain have been told they’re using their computers wrong.
KDE should accommodate you nicely, however.
Edited 2018-05-09 23:51 UTC
KDE is not a better system for people used to GNOME. Mate or Cinnamon are more natural migration paths.
I don’t agree with a lot of what you’ve said, but it doesn’t matter: it’s your computer and you should be able to use it in the way it makes more sense to you. At least we agree on that.
I actually love this, it allows me to have a fixed window where I can have my e-mail, for example. But the good news is that this is actually configurable already in the Ubuntu settings, so you should be able to change the behaviour.
For the rest of your complaints, maybe there are some GNOME Shell extensions that allow you to do it…?
Since KDE3 days I haven’t found a descent Linux desktop environment…but I liked this new Unity a lot!
It’s a good start, looks like Ubuntu’s desktop started to make sense again.
I’ve been using the Xubuntu flavour for years. Works great. Never really cared for the main distro itself.
Edited 2018-05-10 05:33 UTC
I really don’t see why you think it was wasted. Unity was used for many years before it was replaced. I guess the lesson we should learn, according to you, is to never try something new or different in case at some point it will be replaced with something else. Because learning from experience it totally useless.
I was going to say the same thing. They tried something. They didn’t think it’d keep going and they moved on. I’m sure they learned a lot from it.
Not like it’s any money out of my pocket- far from it. My current employment is built around Ubuntu. I’d say it was a success, as not just my company, but others chose Ubuntu over the myriad of other distros that have been around for far longer.
Ubuntu has never been better – best laugh of the week!
bloated, eye candy, does a disservice to Linux… plenty of better distro’s about…
If only it was just on Unity.
How about Mir, which is dumped for Wayland; Compiz which is replaced by Mutter; how about the whole Ubuntu Phone which was a bottomless pit of time, effort and money and went nowhere?
The most ironic element of it all is that it feels like Canonical has no idea why Ubuntu became so dominant in the Linux world, which is ease of installation, hardware support and simplicity, and keep trying to become Apple.
Do not agree really, I’ve had high expectations of 18.04, so I’ve installed it, after playing with it for couple of days, I’ve gone back to Fedora. Not much of the difference but at least it updates faster. I liked 16.04 though unity desktop was simple and fast and kind of miss top bar application’s menu in gnome now.
In the early days Ubuntu worked by the principle: This is a distribution, we don’t develop our own stuff if there are viable open source alternatives, we just select the best default ones and make a slick package of it, integrating the parts.
That was very successful.
Sadly many in the FLOSS community where jealous of the press and user base and started criticizing Ubuntu for not contributing new code beyond bug-fixes. As if they where under some ethical obligation to do that. Somehow that critique took hold and Ubuntu started trying to develop software. All of those projects have ended up less than great. Most just quietly disappearing. It is not what the project was set up to do in the first place and despite lots of brave effort and large sums it just doesn’t seem to be working out.
I do not understand the “looks and feels so dated” comment. How it was supposed to look and feel? I for one, as a Fedora/MATE user, recently updated to F28 and I do like everything looks and feels the same, I would be upset if they didn’t.
The fact that they do offer now a minimal installation option is a good direction.
It’s easier to just ensure a base version of the OS (and keep it up to date) and on top of this to install containerized third party apps that at least in theory are gaining some popularity.
Yeah, yeah… UIs and such are great, but, can I download an app without having to wait for the repo dudes to repackage it for my “distro”? Can I have good Nvidia drivers? No? Next OS please.
And that’s how 99% of the computing population chooses OSes.
Yes, if the developers themselves don’t make ubuntu packages (which they usually do), then there are ubuntu repositories for pretty much every application.