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The technical audience who actually use Linux desktops want more customization not less, and the crowd that Ubuntu seems to be chasing doesn't seem to actually

The technical audience who actually use Linux desktops want more customization not less, and the crowd that Ubuntu seems to be chasing doesn't seem to actually exist? Hmm this doesn't make me want to leave xubuntu any time soon, although I too have noticed the recent xfce issues mentioned in the article.

blfr 9y ago
As a member of the technical audience who actually uses Linux (Ubuntu), I want almost no customization. I want sane and tested defaults, not a bunch of knobs to adjust things. I mourn the loss of the Unity Desktop which was virtually perfect OOTB. It had a great management of the screen space, especially on laptops, it was pretty, and it worked. I wouldn't even change the desktop background.
- DataWorker 9y ago
  And the integration with Amazon was underrated. It’s nice to search your files and always see some great product promotions without having to adjust knobs as you aptly put it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - _jal 9y ago
    I guess that's nice if you like it. I find that appalling, stupid and distracting ("Why, I was just searching my notes for details of a meeting from last year because the details suddenly became really important, but now that you mention it, now is the right time to consider dress shoes!"). Ads in the OS are awful. If this has to exist, it needs to be off by default with clear, easy-to-find knobs for removing the spyware. Of course, like everything advertising-related, the incentives are to do the opposite. In this case I personally find it in consequential for myself; I know what I'm doing and can easily remove Ubuntu's garbage. But it is an ugly trend and reduces my trust in their judgement.
    - bfa 9y ago
      I doubt the parent was being serious.
- b3orn 9y ago
  The problem with sane defaults is that everyone seems to have their own idea what the default should be.
  - mcny 9y ago
    To me, sanity is not conforming to old idiosyncrasies. I have had multiple people yell at me in person when I bring up clipboard. This is probably the single most embarrasing thing I have ever seen in Unix or Unix-like systems. We can't even get copy pasting right. Sane defaults mean a single clipboard. If I copy something, it replaces the contents of the single clipboard. If you want to keep track of all the old things you copied, that's fine but all the ways of pasting should always paste the last thing you copied. If we can't agree on something simple as this, we can't agree on defaults (and should give up on computing).
  - blfr 9y ago
    First, This is only a problem if you have very diverse needs and most users' needs aren't. We need to run a browser, a terminal, a file manager, maybe some media apps, and a text editor if you don't do that in the terminal. This is not like a vim config of an industry veteran, it shouldn't require tweaking from the OS. Just get out of the way. I can tweak the number of workspaces or the colours temperature for day and night. These are matters of personal preferences. But the way to launch apps, connect to wifi, or display a clock should just be ergonomic. Second, tweaks don't solve this problem. There's a handful of talented tweakers and power users. They will use Sway or whatever anyway. Everyone else when confronted with lots of knobs ends up with something worse than a competent designer could have provided by default.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    You can always install packages if you got exotic needs. But Ubuntu being the most popular desktop distro, I'd say they managed to find a popular mix.
  - copperx 9y ago
    That's not true. People want an "intuitive" UI, meaning familiar. While there are some outliers, most people find Windows and OS X UI conventions familiar. Sticking to these conventions as "sane defaults" pleases most users.
- daltonvlm 9y ago
  I totally agree.
- isostatic 9y ago
  I want my desktop to just work. Actual window manager should have multi desktops, keyboard shortcuts, focus follow mouse etc, and on a laptop an icon to select wifi hotspot, and an icon for volume. That's what Ubuntu gives me, that's why I've used it since replacing Debian testing in 2006. 3,500 servers on 6 contents can't be wrong either, with all our software distributed as debs, it just works.
- marktangotango 9y ago
  Seconded I just want to install and get work done. I don’t even change the wallpaper. I use xubuntu, not ubuntu though.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  I also want less customisation. I don't change configuration of my software unless I can possibly help it - waste of time. I don't even change my desktop wallpaper. So there are people like us - possibly a lot.
- cdancette 9y ago
  I really liked unity as it was always stayed out of the way, doing just what you asked, nothing less, nothing more.
- nmg 9y ago
  Second this — I like Compiz but the ccsm & gnome-tweak-tools tandem/overlapping configuration is a nightmare. Preferences must be imported/exported via GUI and they (frequently!) import improperly. Ccsm itself is a maze of dialogs, icons, and navbars that I dread to use. My customized GUI really needs to be consistent across my machines, and Unity makes this impossible to guarantee and automate. Just give me an .rc file, text-based configuration is my favorite part of Linux.
- pizza234 9y ago
  "Sane and tested defaults with no customization" is not realistic, because the expectations and use cases are different for every user. It's also particularly dangerous, since it leads to the "my way or the highway" GNOME mindset, which, in the extreme cases, entirely removes features without the option to enable them back, because... customization is bad.
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  I love Gnome for precisely the same reason you like Unity.
- Insanity 9y ago
  As a software engineer, I don't want to tweak my OS. I want a terminal / IDE and.. well that's pretty much it. As long as getting my tools to work is easy I don't care for the tweaking
  - lonk 9y ago
    You can give a chance to Slax: http://www.slax.org/ http://www.slax.org/
    - RaleyField 9y ago
      Hold me back. The installer is over http.
- bitcraft 9y ago
  Totally agree with you about not wanting a bunch of knobs to tweak things. It’s just too much time wasted to deal with when you are just wanting a desktop that works.
- pmontra 9y ago
  The problem is that the sane and tested defaults that I want are probably very different from the ones you want. That's why customization is important.
- devin_lane 9y ago
  It's very disheartening to me that these are seen as exclusive options. I use Ubuntu because I want the "it just works" part that comes from being a very popular and commonly used distro, but I also need the customization, because I want my mouse and keyboard to do the things that I need to do, not what made sense to someone else. You mention that you enjoyed Unity, which I also do, but my Unity is heavily customized through CCSM. It seems based on your comment that this high level of customization did not detract from your ability to enjoy Unity, so why do you ask for no customization? When we ask for customization, we're not saying that the default setup can't be usable, or that hours of tweaking should be required before getting started. We're saying that when there is a feature that doesn't behave as desired, we would like the option to modify it. "It works this way and that's final" is already well served by other operating systems, why do you feel Ubuntu should copy this?
overcast 9y ago
Vast majority of people, technical or not, do not want to sit there and fiddle with their OS. They want it to just work, and have a consistent experience, from one release to the next, so they can get work done, or view pictures of their grand kids. The number of people who want more than that is a statistical rounding error. HN and other forums like it, have such a huge echo chamber, that they lose site of reality.
- smallbigfish 9y ago
  "Vast majority of people" want it _their_ way. And this is where enterprise-y software fail really hard. They think that making software as dumb as possible they will please the dumb. In the real world it doesn't work like that. Dumb users don't know how to tweak things but they know that they can ask other people to help them.
  - overcast 9y ago
    Wrong. The vast majority of people do not want to think about it. They want it to work with minimal effort. Period. Saying otherwise is shortsighted.
pizza234 9y ago
XFCE is slowly dying, and I think the issues are a symptom of this. The file manager, for a very long time, had a reproducible issue (>20% of the time) where moving a file would cause a crash; based on the Ubuntu bug tracker, took an year and half to fix, and it was (appropriately) marked as critical. It's clearly lacks development resources (and I also personally question the development quality). I still use XUbuntu, but I think the future for low-resource machines will be LUbuntu (lowest power) and MATE (low power). MATE is also well funded, well organized, and very configurable.
- apple4ever 9y ago
  I absolutely love MATE, even for high power machines.
- sampo 9y ago
  The Gnome file manager (Nautilus) works just fine with the Xfce desktop as well. I use the Xubuntu desktop, but I use the Gnome apps instead of the Xfce apps.
  - pizza234 9y ago
    It does, but it's a hack, as there are integration problems. Thunar is still tightly integrated with the desktop, so if one uses an alternative file manager, operation like copying from the desktop and pasting into the (alternative) file manager won't have any effect.
Frondo 9y ago
Nope, I want a thing that Just Works. These days I use Kubuntu, but literally the only configuration thing I change is the desktop wallpaper. Everything else works how I want it out of the box. I wouldn't even know how to diagnose shit anymore, and I grew up on Slackware. I had time to customize stuff when I was a kid, now it's time to work.
- criddell 9y ago
  > I had time to customize stuff when I was a kid, now it's time to work. That's me exactly. I used to love tweaking Enlightenment(?) into a Hollywood-worthy environment. These days if I tweak something, it's probably to select a larger font because my eyesight isn't what it used to be.
organsnyder 9y ago
My wife mentors a young single mother who is working to finish her GED. Her GED program provided her with a laptop: an old Thinkpad T430 running Ubuntu. She would have been just as well-served with a Chromebook, but I'm sure the Thinkpad was cheaper (perhaps free) for the organization.
just_testing 9y ago
Yesterday, I finished converting a bike shop to Ubuntu Linux only. They are ridiculously happy because: - device drivers actually work - they don't have to worry anymore about viruses - they can use old machines without trouble So yeah, zero customization - but a way better experience than Windows. So, your crowd not only exists, but got me a new bicycle!
- bovermyer 9y ago
  That's awesome. Was that a barter deal? Fix-our-computers-get-a-bike?
  - just_testing 9y ago
    At first, it wasn't. Buuut so many great bikes (and I ride to work every single day) and it was hard to accept the money. I joke to people telling I am an addicted doing work for the drug dealer - of course I would receive in drugs, not money!
- crb912 9y ago
  lol
- emptyfile 9y ago
  Funny, device drivers are the precise reason I switched to Windows 10.
  - rkangel 9y ago
    In general, if you want AMD or Nvidia graphics drivers then Windows is easier. If you want anything else (including Intel graphics drivers) then Linux is easier.
    - ben-schaaf 9y ago
      I always find it funny how hardware manufacturers most of the time ship a bunch of drivers with their components. Windows drivers for wireless cards, motherboards, graphics cards, etc. Never needed any of those for Linux (The open source AMDGPU driver is good enough).
sametmax 9y ago
I'm part of the technical crowd you talk about and I specifically choose ubuntu because I don't want to tweak my distro too much. I want free software that is good enough out of the box. Also my mother uses ubuntu, and she doesn't customize anything. You see, the linux user base is more diverse than the way you describe it.

blfr 9y ago

As a member of the technical audience who actually uses Linux (Ubuntu), I want almost no customization. I want sane and tested defaults, not a bunch of knobs to adjust things. I mourn the loss of the Unity Desktop which was virtually perfect OOTB. It had a great management of the screen space, especially on laptops, it was pretty, and it worked. I wouldn't even change the desktop background.

DataWorker 9y ago
And the integration with Amazon was underrated. It’s nice to search your files and always see some great product promotions without having to adjust knobs as you aptly put it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- _jal 9y ago
  I guess that's nice if you like it. I find that appalling, stupid and distracting ("Why, I was just searching my notes for details of a meeting from last year because the details suddenly became really important, but now that you mention it, now is the right time to consider dress shoes!"). Ads in the OS are awful. If this has to exist, it needs to be off by default with clear, easy-to-find knobs for removing the spyware. Of course, like everything advertising-related, the incentives are to do the opposite. In this case I personally find it in consequential for myself; I know what I'm doing and can easily remove Ubuntu's garbage. But it is an ugly trend and reduces my trust in their judgement.
  - bfa 9y ago
    I doubt the parent was being serious.
b3orn 9y ago
The problem with sane defaults is that everyone seems to have their own idea what the default should be.
- mcny 9y ago
  To me, sanity is not conforming to old idiosyncrasies. I have had multiple people yell at me in person when I bring up clipboard. This is probably the single most embarrasing thing I have ever seen in Unix or Unix-like systems. We can't even get copy pasting right. Sane defaults mean a single clipboard. If I copy something, it replaces the contents of the single clipboard. If you want to keep track of all the old things you copied, that's fine but all the ways of pasting should always paste the last thing you copied. If we can't agree on something simple as this, we can't agree on defaults (and should give up on computing).
- blfr 9y ago
  First, This is only a problem if you have very diverse needs and most users' needs aren't. We need to run a browser, a terminal, a file manager, maybe some media apps, and a text editor if you don't do that in the terminal. This is not like a vim config of an industry veteran, it shouldn't require tweaking from the OS. Just get out of the way. I can tweak the number of workspaces or the colours temperature for day and night. These are matters of personal preferences. But the way to launch apps, connect to wifi, or display a clock should just be ergonomic. Second, tweaks don't solve this problem. There's a handful of talented tweakers and power users. They will use Sway or whatever anyway. Everyone else when confronted with lots of knobs ends up with something worse than a competent designer could have provided by default.
- sametmax 9y ago
  You can always install packages if you got exotic needs. But Ubuntu being the most popular desktop distro, I'd say they managed to find a popular mix.
- copperx 9y ago
  That's not true. People want an "intuitive" UI, meaning familiar. While there are some outliers, most people find Windows and OS X UI conventions familiar. Sticking to these conventions as "sane defaults" pleases most users.
daltonvlm 9y ago
I totally agree.
isostatic 9y ago
I want my desktop to just work. Actual window manager should have multi desktops, keyboard shortcuts, focus follow mouse etc, and on a laptop an icon to select wifi hotspot, and an icon for volume. That's what Ubuntu gives me, that's why I've used it since replacing Debian testing in 2006. 3,500 servers on 6 contents can't be wrong either, with all our software distributed as debs, it just works.
marktangotango 9y ago
Seconded I just want to install and get work done. I don’t even change the wallpaper. I use xubuntu, not ubuntu though.
chrisseaton 9y ago
I also want less customisation. I don't change configuration of my software unless I can possibly help it - waste of time. I don't even change my desktop wallpaper. So there are people like us - possibly a lot.
cdancette 9y ago
I really liked unity as it was always stayed out of the way, doing just what you asked, nothing less, nothing more.
nmg 9y ago
Second this — I like Compiz but the ccsm & gnome-tweak-tools tandem/overlapping configuration is a nightmare. Preferences must be imported/exported via GUI and they (frequently!) import improperly. Ccsm itself is a maze of dialogs, icons, and navbars that I dread to use. My customized GUI really needs to be consistent across my machines, and Unity makes this impossible to guarantee and automate. Just give me an .rc file, text-based configuration is my favorite part of Linux.
pizza234 9y ago
"Sane and tested defaults with no customization" is not realistic, because the expectations and use cases are different for every user. It's also particularly dangerous, since it leads to the "my way or the highway" GNOME mindset, which, in the extreme cases, entirely removes features without the option to enable them back, because... customization is bad.
gregknicholson 9y ago
I love Gnome for precisely the same reason you like Unity.
Insanity 9y ago
As a software engineer, I don't want to tweak my OS. I want a terminal / IDE and.. well that's pretty much it. As long as getting my tools to work is easy I don't care for the tweaking
- lonk 9y ago
  You can give a chance to Slax: http://www.slax.org/ http://www.slax.org/
  - RaleyField 9y ago
    Hold me back. The installer is over http.
bitcraft 9y ago
Totally agree with you about not wanting a bunch of knobs to tweak things. It’s just too much time wasted to deal with when you are just wanting a desktop that works.
pmontra 9y ago
The problem is that the sane and tested defaults that I want are probably very different from the ones you want. That's why customization is important.
devin_lane 9y ago
It's very disheartening to me that these are seen as exclusive options. I use Ubuntu because I want the "it just works" part that comes from being a very popular and commonly used distro, but I also need the customization, because I want my mouse and keyboard to do the things that I need to do, not what made sense to someone else. You mention that you enjoyed Unity, which I also do, but my Unity is heavily customized through CCSM. It seems based on your comment that this high level of customization did not detract from your ability to enjoy Unity, so why do you ask for no customization? When we ask for customization, we're not saying that the default setup can't be usable, or that hours of tweaking should be required before getting started. We're saying that when there is a feature that doesn't behave as desired, we would like the option to modify it. "It works this way and that's final" is already well served by other operating systems, why do you feel Ubuntu should copy this?

overcast 9y ago

Vast majority of people, technical or not, do not want to sit there and fiddle with their OS. They want it to just work, and have a consistent experience, from one release to the next, so they can get work done, or view pictures of their grand kids. The number of people who want more than that is a statistical rounding error. HN and other forums like it, have such a huge echo chamber, that they lose site of reality.

smallbigfish 9y ago
"Vast majority of people" want it _their_ way. And this is where enterprise-y software fail really hard. They think that making software as dumb as possible they will please the dumb. In the real world it doesn't work like that. Dumb users don't know how to tweak things but they know that they can ask other people to help them.
- overcast 9y ago
  Wrong. The vast majority of people do not want to think about it. They want it to work with minimal effort. Period. Saying otherwise is shortsighted.

pizza234 9y ago

XFCE is slowly dying, and I think the issues are a symptom of this. The file manager, for a very long time, had a reproducible issue (>20% of the time) where moving a file would cause a crash; based on the Ubuntu bug tracker, took an year and half to fix, and it was (appropriately) marked as critical. It's clearly lacks development resources (and I also personally question the development quality). I still use XUbuntu, but I think the future for low-resource machines will be LUbuntu (lowest power) and MATE (low power). MATE is also well funded, well organized, and very configurable.

apple4ever 9y ago
I absolutely love MATE, even for high power machines.
sampo 9y ago
The Gnome file manager (Nautilus) works just fine with the Xfce desktop as well. I use the Xubuntu desktop, but I use the Gnome apps instead of the Xfce apps.
- pizza234 9y ago
  It does, but it's a hack, as there are integration problems. Thunar is still tightly integrated with the desktop, so if one uses an alternative file manager, operation like copying from the desktop and pasting into the (alternative) file manager won't have any effect.

Frondo 9y ago

Nope, I want a thing that Just Works. These days I use Kubuntu, but literally the only configuration thing I change is the desktop wallpaper. Everything else works how I want it out of the box. I wouldn't even know how to diagnose shit anymore, and I grew up on Slackware. I had time to customize stuff when I was a kid, now it's time to work.

criddell 9y ago
> I had time to customize stuff when I was a kid, now it's time to work. That's me exactly. I used to love tweaking Enlightenment(?) into a Hollywood-worthy environment. These days if I tweak something, it's probably to select a larger font because my eyesight isn't what it used to be.

organsnyder 9y ago

My wife mentors a young single mother who is working to finish her GED. Her GED program provided her with a laptop: an old Thinkpad T430 running Ubuntu. She would have been just as well-served with a Chromebook, but I'm sure the Thinkpad was cheaper (perhaps free) for the organization.

just_testing 9y ago

Yesterday, I finished converting a bike shop to Ubuntu Linux only. They are ridiculously happy because: - device drivers actually work - they don't have to worry anymore about viruses - they can use old machines without trouble So yeah, zero customization - but a way better experience than Windows. So, your crowd not only exists, but got me a new bicycle!

bovermyer 9y ago
That's awesome. Was that a barter deal? Fix-our-computers-get-a-bike?
- just_testing 9y ago
  At first, it wasn't. Buuut so many great bikes (and I ride to work every single day) and it was hard to accept the money. I joke to people telling I am an addicted doing work for the drug dealer - of course I would receive in drugs, not money!
crb912 9y ago
lol
emptyfile 9y ago
Funny, device drivers are the precise reason I switched to Windows 10.
- rkangel 9y ago
  In general, if you want AMD or Nvidia graphics drivers then Windows is easier. If you want anything else (including Intel graphics drivers) then Linux is easier.
  - ben-schaaf 9y ago
    I always find it funny how hardware manufacturers most of the time ship a bunch of drivers with their components. Windows drivers for wireless cards, motherboards, graphics cards, etc. Never needed any of those for Linux (The open source AMDGPU driver is good enough).

sametmax 9y ago

I'm part of the technical crowd you talk about and I specifically choose ubuntu because I don't want to tweak my distro too much. I want free software that is good enough out of the box. Also my mother uses ubuntu, and she doesn't customize anything. You see, the linux user base is more diverse than the way you describe it.