23 ms·

And here again, of course, they are going to change the behavior of default shortcuts in a totally unnecessary way (Alt-Tab, really?) and move settings in diffe

by Iv 8y ago

And here again, of course, they are going to change the behavior of default shortcuts in a totally unnecessary way (Alt-Tab, really?) and move settings in different places so that all of stackoverflow's answers become obsolete. They also mention a "better" multi-monitor support. that scares me. I have a multi-monitor setup that works. I could do with a few more options but it works. Every change of behavior has required me to whack down some quirks. I am pretty sure the behavior when booting/rebooting with our without the screen connected, with or without the power plugged, is going to change in a way they found "logical, practical and intuitive" and that will waste me a few hours of correcting.

OrgNet 8y ago
> Alt+Tab handling now switches windows by default. Switching applications by default can be done with Super+Tab So if you have multiple windows of the same application, it will now switch between them? that's a good thing and that's how it used to be a while ago
- liquidify 8y ago
  I don't understand what the problem was. Alt tab to get to the program, then alt tilde to get to the window. It was a very natural feeling action.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    It's the difference between MacOS or Windows default behavior. Alt-tab between windows has always been the default on Windows, and it was the default for most open source window managers for a long time too. I believe Gnome changed their default to follow how MacOS worked a few years back. Now it seems Ubuntu is reverting back (or is this a Gnome change again?). Different people prefer different defaults. Personally I can't stand the MacOS version, and for the few years I used MacOS, it drove me nuts. That said, I don't use Ubuntu, so this doesn't matter to me either way.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      I use alt-tab, I get a window that looks a bit like this: https://i.imgur.com/mtynAgC.png https://i.imgur.com/mtynAgC.png However most of the time I switch focus by pointing my mouse to another window (mouse focus / click to raise)
    - lkbm 8y ago
      Every once-in-a-while I go on a Googling spree to see if there's a way I can switch Mac OS to the Windows/early Gnome style. I cannot fathom the Mac OS style being better. Maybe if you only had one monitor, one desktop, and minimized all windows not specific to your current task?
      - gorb314 8y ago
        Are you looking for Hyperswitch[0]? I've been using it ever since I needed to start using a mac. [0] https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch
        lkbm 8y ago
        Yes! This is great, thank you!
      - eitland 8y ago
        That was me as well until I got back to safety ;-) That and: - ctrl and fn being swapped on the laptop keyboard (but not on the full size keyboard), with no way to fix it in settings or bios. - movement and selection key combos varying wildly between apps. Rumours has it both can be fixed now. Meanwhile Windows is now less annoying to me than it has been since XP was fresh and KDE has left the 4 series behind so, all while Apple fans are raging furiously everywhere about the new keyboards, so I'm not asking dor a Mac bext time either it seems.
      - ilikehurdles 8y ago
        I don’t understand the problem though. Alt+tilde for windows, alt+tab for applications. I intentionally will use one over the other depending on what I want to switch to, and it has become second nature. I find the OS X approach way more manageable when working with many windows/apps.
  - epage 8y ago
    As a user, I don't think in terms of applications, I can think in terms of workflow which spans applications. I might be switching between certain browser windows, a terminal etc and I shouldn't be having to think "wait, this is an app switch vs a window switch".
    - ChristianBundy 8y ago
      I don't think it's too different than switching between browser tabs. - Ctrl + Tab: within window - Alt + Tab: between windows - Alt + ~: between applications I think the main problem is that these shortcuts are difficult to learn. For example, I didn't know about Alt + ~ until this thread (!), and I'm confused at how users are meant to learn shortcuts like that.
      - anowlcalledjosh 8y ago
        One difference between ctrl-tab and alt-~ (or alt-`, depending on your keyboard layout) is that tabs within a window are very close to each other, and obviously distinct from windows in their own right, whereas it's frequently not immediately obvious whether two windows belong to the same application.
      - brimstedt 8y ago
        and this is the reason I don't use tabs in browsers. To me, there is no "app x is a web page, I need to alt tab to browser then ctrl tab to the right tab". I don't use tabs in browsers, so it's always just aLt tab to get where I want
  - eitland 8y ago
    It - takes twice as long time, - forces me move your hands around - and forces me to think
    - prewett 8y ago
      I get the other two, but how does moving your finger from tab to the key right above it qualify as "moving your hands around"? I hit tab with my middle finger, which reaches ~ quite naturally. I'm really happy to find out about this, it works on macOS, so I'm going to be using it!
  - freedomben 8y ago
    My thoughts exactly. I actually prefer the alt-tab alt-tilde because it feels more natural to me. Thumb positioning is less accurate than finger (at least for me). I do dislike the constant changes, but I also think there's far more exciting things in the post to praise :-)
  - yongjik 8y ago
    Situation: have three iTerm windows (let's say X/Y/Z) and two Chrome windows (C/D). X/Y are running some stuff I'm not interested right now. Related stackoverflow answers are in tabs in C. Z is in the left part of the mornitor: I'm currently working on it. D is on the right side showing some dashboard. Was looking at D, pressed Alt-Tab to go back to Z. X and Y pop up from behind, completely obscuring D. Disgusted, press Alt-Tab again, and watch C covering Z. Groan. Yes, yes, I know, a true developer should be able to afford enough monitors to spread all windows evenly. Or use a tile-based window manager and memorize 12 hot keys for each mixture of task. Sigh.
- eitland 8y ago
  +1 from someone who -despite multiple attempts - cannot reprogram his brain to accept anything but "alt-tab switches windows". (And I think it should be configurable so people who prefer weird alt-tab behaviour won't have to suffer the way I had to ;-)
Lorkki 8y ago
Staying with the LTS release is a perfectly valid choice if you want a slower pace of changes.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  Except that these changes will eventually be part of 19.04 LTS and then what? As someone who stayed on 16.04 LTS until apt-get update started reporting "can't find respository, ignoring" on the Canonical servers, I can attest to the fact that this strategy only works for so long :-).
  - levesque 8y ago
    I think you mean 20.04 LTS.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - qznc 8y ago
    16.04 is still supported for two more years. 14.04 support ends in 12 days (or longer if you pay Canonical). https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
    - j1elo 8y ago
      This page also shows a nicely presented table with Ubuntu versions and expected support dates: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
  - ohyeshedid 8y ago
    There is no 19.x LTS, next LTS release would be 20.04.
    - etrautmann 8y ago
      Which itself is not obvious to many users. I made the mistake of installing 17.04 and it was a major headache to upgrade it after support was dropped.
linsomniac 8y ago
Funny, I read the "Alt-Tab" change and said "Finally!" I have a "scratch box" that I noodle around with and that I'm just running the stock desktop, and the alt-tab default was driving me crazy. It's unexpected, as someone who doesn't use it very often. (My normal desktop is i3wm). As far as better multimonitor support, one of my coworkers has had a lot of problems with his third monitor, some kernels are working and some aren't. I have no problems with my 3 monitors, but again I3...
- UI_at_80x24 8y ago
  It really bears repeating and pointing out that a lot of the really awesome things about i3 "just works" in a way that Gnome has lost many years ago. Considering its 'rough-hack-a-text-config.file' roots to make changes I really am impressed with it. I've used i3 for many years, (I recently moved to sway but I'm going to move back) and I am so impressed with how it gets out of my way.
  - linsomniac 8y ago
    I hadn't heard of sway, it looks interesting. But, you are switching away from it, so I guess not? I'm a little bit stuck, but it looks like sway has "gaps" support, in that my new monitor has a bug where the very left and right edges have a parallax issue with the backlight: so you can't read the left or right ~8 pixels of the screen. I'm using an undocumented feature of I3 to work around it. Don't want to change to a different monitor because otherwise I love this "cheap" 4K 42" panel. I had gone around and around about a new monitor, and don't want to open that process up again. So I'm using a kludge.
    - UI_at_80x24 7y ago
      I have one dislike of a 'Feature'; window-resizing, and one bug (related to window-resizing). Using keyboard+mouse: To resize you bring the mouse to the vertical or horizontal frame that you want to adjust, hold down the meta key (Win in my case), and right-click+move to adjust it. In i3: you only adjust that single frame. In Sway: you adjust the whole vertical & horizontal window size. This effects all other 'attached/touching' windows and unintentionally screws up some formatting for me. Like I said, 'feature'. I am using this on a cheap 42" 4k AOC monitor. I get 4k@60Hz.
kbenson 8y ago
> they are going to change the behavior of default shortcuts in a totally unnecessary way (Alt-Tab, really?) Well, in this case I believe they are changing defaults back from when they were last changed in a "totally unnecessary way" (I believe it was unnecessary when Gnome changed it originally, I'm sure others that prefer this mode disagree). At this point complaining about it just a roundabout way of stating your preferring window manager application switching mode.
sebastos 8y ago
>(Alt-Tab, really?) Yeah, but they're changing it _back_ to the way it should have been, and the way it used to be. Which is wayyyyyyyy better. >They also mention a "better" multi-monitor support. that scares me. I have a multi-monitor setup that works. I could do with a few more options but it works. I share your fear, but I have a multi-monitor setup that doesn't work. Half the the time I disconnect the monitor, all my windows get stranded in never-never land and I have to come up with some arcane way to rescue them from the desktop that isn't really there. So I don't think they have a particularly great framework with the status quo.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- doubleunplussed 8y ago
  If you're running under Xorg, alt-f2, 'r', enter will get you your lost windows back. For harder freezes I've been seeing where I can't interact with the GUI anymore, switching to a tty and running 'killall -3 gnome-shell' gives the best chance of recovering without losing all my processes. Not excuses for the bugs, but best workarounds I have so far.
nine_k 8y ago
Hmm. I run Xfce, and have all important key bindings explicitly written in one of its config files. For last about 10 years I just carried these files between machines, upgrades, and different distributions, and had all my binding, and most other desktop settings, intact. Is something similar possible with Gnome? That is, once you explicitly configured something, even if your setting is the same as the current default value, would it be preserved?
- jammygit 8y ago
  How well can you control your xfce desktop with keyboard shortcuts? One of the main reasons I use gnome is how easy it is to avoid touching my mouse.
  - ldiracdelta 7y ago
    Outrageously easy. I just discovered its full tiling ability in start->window manager -> Keybard tab, then scroll to "tiling". You can tile a window to left, right, top, bottom, top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right. Alt tabbing works just like windows.
- elcritch 8y ago
  That sound pretty nice. For the life of me I can’t figure out how to override certain key settings in KDE like “windows” key pulling up the kde menu. Gnome I think might allow that but then the other 99 other shortcuts seem hard coded. Much less have those changes persist for years. How does xfce commands interact with bindings in gtk/qt based apps? Can you set commands actions that work in say Firefox? On a side note, Windows key in Linux should map to meta and behave like command key in OS X so I can use GUI commands without screwing up emacs/vim/etc. Super/Meta are all over historical Unix programs but modern x11/guis/distros seem to refuse to allow you to actually bind keys to them. P.S. OS X has similar feature to xfce to setup key commands and have them just keep working across os updates for years. It’s easy to setup emacs like key binding for alt-f, ctrl-e, etc and have almost every text widget just inherit those commands. You just need to use the terminal/finder to set them.
ayoisaiah 8y ago
I no longer bother with Alt-Tab, I just use jumpapp[1] to switch between windows quickly. [1]: https://github.com/mkropat/jumpapp https://github.com/mkropat/jumpapp
- Vinnl 8y ago
  Funny, I do the same, but without a separate app: pressing Super+1 does that for the first application on the launcher, Super+2 for the second one, etc. By default.
tmalsburg2 8y ago
I recommend using the Xubuntu distribution. It's has been much more stable with respect to the UI: https://xubuntu.org/ https://xubuntu.org/
- pizza234 8y ago
  The Xubuntu has significant drawbacks, which need to be considered. Primarily, they have very low resources (and/or skills, it's unclear), which is a problem, since resources need to be distributed between bug fixes, improvements, and chasing library updates (see: GTK3 updates). A few days ago I've booted the 19.04 beta Xubuntu live image, and it was showing minuscule fonts on a 3000x2000 screen. This is a bit embarrassing for a stable DE. I don't discourage it in an active way, but one should consider it very carefully (there are alternatives nowadays, that are equally lean, but more stable and flexibile).
  - ldiracdelta 7y ago
    Not sure about 19.04. But 18.04 xfce runs great on my 40 " 4k monitor/Samsung tv

by Iv 8y ago

OrgNet 8y ago

> Alt+Tab handling now switches windows by default. Switching applications by default can be done with Super+Tab So if you have multiple windows of the same application, it will now switch between them? that's a good thing and that's how it used to be a while ago

liquidify 8y ago
I don't understand what the problem was. Alt tab to get to the program, then alt tilde to get to the window. It was a very natural feeling action.
- kbenson 8y ago
  It's the difference between MacOS or Windows default behavior. Alt-tab between windows has always been the default on Windows, and it was the default for most open source window managers for a long time too. I believe Gnome changed their default to follow how MacOS worked a few years back. Now it seems Ubuntu is reverting back (or is this a Gnome change again?). Different people prefer different defaults. Personally I can't stand the MacOS version, and for the few years I used MacOS, it drove me nuts. That said, I don't use Ubuntu, so this doesn't matter to me either way.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    I use alt-tab, I get a window that looks a bit like this: https://i.imgur.com/mtynAgC.png https://i.imgur.com/mtynAgC.png However most of the time I switch focus by pointing my mouse to another window (mouse focus / click to raise)
  - lkbm 8y ago
    Every once-in-a-while I go on a Googling spree to see if there's a way I can switch Mac OS to the Windows/early Gnome style. I cannot fathom the Mac OS style being better. Maybe if you only had one monitor, one desktop, and minimized all windows not specific to your current task?
    - gorb314 8y ago
      Are you looking for Hyperswitch[0]? I've been using it ever since I needed to start using a mac. [0] https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch
      - lkbm 8y ago
        Yes! This is great, thank you!
    - eitland 8y ago
      That was me as well until I got back to safety ;-) That and: - ctrl and fn being swapped on the laptop keyboard (but not on the full size keyboard), with no way to fix it in settings or bios. - movement and selection key combos varying wildly between apps. Rumours has it both can be fixed now. Meanwhile Windows is now less annoying to me than it has been since XP was fresh and KDE has left the 4 series behind so, all while Apple fans are raging furiously everywhere about the new keyboards, so I'm not asking dor a Mac bext time either it seems.
    - ilikehurdles 8y ago
      I don’t understand the problem though. Alt+tilde for windows, alt+tab for applications. I intentionally will use one over the other depending on what I want to switch to, and it has become second nature. I find the OS X approach way more manageable when working with many windows/apps.
- epage 8y ago
  As a user, I don't think in terms of applications, I can think in terms of workflow which spans applications. I might be switching between certain browser windows, a terminal etc and I shouldn't be having to think "wait, this is an app switch vs a window switch".
  - ChristianBundy 8y ago
    I don't think it's too different than switching between browser tabs. - Ctrl + Tab: within window - Alt + Tab: between windows - Alt + ~: between applications I think the main problem is that these shortcuts are difficult to learn. For example, I didn't know about Alt + ~ until this thread (!), and I'm confused at how users are meant to learn shortcuts like that.
    - anowlcalledjosh 8y ago
      One difference between ctrl-tab and alt-~ (or alt-`, depending on your keyboard layout) is that tabs within a window are very close to each other, and obviously distinct from windows in their own right, whereas it's frequently not immediately obvious whether two windows belong to the same application.
    - brimstedt 8y ago
      and this is the reason I don't use tabs in browsers. To me, there is no "app x is a web page, I need to alt tab to browser then ctrl tab to the right tab". I don't use tabs in browsers, so it's always just aLt tab to get where I want
- eitland 8y ago
  It - takes twice as long time, - forces me move your hands around - and forces me to think
  - prewett 8y ago
    I get the other two, but how does moving your finger from tab to the key right above it qualify as "moving your hands around"? I hit tab with my middle finger, which reaches ~ quite naturally. I'm really happy to find out about this, it works on macOS, so I'm going to be using it!
- freedomben 8y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I actually prefer the alt-tab alt-tilde because it feels more natural to me. Thumb positioning is less accurate than finger (at least for me). I do dislike the constant changes, but I also think there's far more exciting things in the post to praise :-)
- yongjik 8y ago
  Situation: have three iTerm windows (let's say X/Y/Z) and two Chrome windows (C/D). X/Y are running some stuff I'm not interested right now. Related stackoverflow answers are in tabs in C. Z is in the left part of the mornitor: I'm currently working on it. D is on the right side showing some dashboard. Was looking at D, pressed Alt-Tab to go back to Z. X and Y pop up from behind, completely obscuring D. Disgusted, press Alt-Tab again, and watch C covering Z. Groan. Yes, yes, I know, a true developer should be able to afford enough monitors to spread all windows evenly. Or use a tile-based window manager and memorize 12 hot keys for each mixture of task. Sigh.
eitland 8y ago
+1 from someone who -despite multiple attempts - cannot reprogram his brain to accept anything but "alt-tab switches windows". (And I think it should be configurable so people who prefer weird alt-tab behaviour won't have to suffer the way I had to ;-)

Lorkki 8y ago

Staying with the LTS release is a perfectly valid choice if you want a slower pace of changes.

ChuckMcM 8y ago
Except that these changes will eventually be part of 19.04 LTS and then what? As someone who stayed on 16.04 LTS until apt-get update started reporting "can't find respository, ignoring" on the Canonical servers, I can attest to the fact that this strategy only works for so long :-).
- levesque 8y ago
  I think you mean 20.04 LTS.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- qznc 8y ago
  16.04 is still supported for two more years. 14.04 support ends in 12 days (or longer if you pay Canonical). https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
  - j1elo 8y ago
    This page also shows a nicely presented table with Ubuntu versions and expected support dates: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
- ohyeshedid 8y ago
  There is no 19.x LTS, next LTS release would be 20.04.
  - etrautmann 8y ago
    Which itself is not obvious to many users. I made the mistake of installing 17.04 and it was a major headache to upgrade it after support was dropped.

linsomniac 8y ago

Funny, I read the "Alt-Tab" change and said "Finally!" I have a "scratch box" that I noodle around with and that I'm just running the stock desktop, and the alt-tab default was driving me crazy. It's unexpected, as someone who doesn't use it very often. (My normal desktop is i3wm). As far as better multimonitor support, one of my coworkers has had a lot of problems with his third monitor, some kernels are working and some aren't. I have no problems with my 3 monitors, but again I3...

UI_at_80x24 8y ago
It really bears repeating and pointing out that a lot of the really awesome things about i3 "just works" in a way that Gnome has lost many years ago. Considering its 'rough-hack-a-text-config.file' roots to make changes I really am impressed with it. I've used i3 for many years, (I recently moved to sway but I'm going to move back) and I am so impressed with how it gets out of my way.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  I hadn't heard of sway, it looks interesting. But, you are switching away from it, so I guess not? I'm a little bit stuck, but it looks like sway has "gaps" support, in that my new monitor has a bug where the very left and right edges have a parallax issue with the backlight: so you can't read the left or right ~8 pixels of the screen. I'm using an undocumented feature of I3 to work around it. Don't want to change to a different monitor because otherwise I love this "cheap" 4K 42" panel. I had gone around and around about a new monitor, and don't want to open that process up again. So I'm using a kludge.
  - UI_at_80x24 7y ago
    I have one dislike of a 'Feature'; window-resizing, and one bug (related to window-resizing). Using keyboard+mouse: To resize you bring the mouse to the vertical or horizontal frame that you want to adjust, hold down the meta key (Win in my case), and right-click+move to adjust it. In i3: you only adjust that single frame. In Sway: you adjust the whole vertical & horizontal window size. This effects all other 'attached/touching' windows and unintentionally screws up some formatting for me. Like I said, 'feature'. I am using this on a cheap 42" 4k AOC monitor. I get 4k@60Hz.

kbenson 8y ago

> they are going to change the behavior of default shortcuts in a totally unnecessary way (Alt-Tab, really?) Well, in this case I believe they are changing defaults back from when they were last changed in a "totally unnecessary way" (I believe it was unnecessary when Gnome changed it originally, I'm sure others that prefer this mode disagree). At this point complaining about it just a roundabout way of stating your preferring window manager application switching mode.

sebastos 8y ago

>(Alt-Tab, really?) Yeah, but they're changing it _back_ to the way it should have been, and the way it used to be. Which is wayyyyyyyy better. >They also mention a "better" multi-monitor support. that scares me. I have a multi-monitor setup that works. I could do with a few more options but it works. I share your fear, but I have a multi-monitor setup that doesn't work. Half the the time I disconnect the monitor, all my windows get stranded in never-never land and I have to come up with some arcane way to rescue them from the desktop that isn't really there. So I don't think they have a particularly great framework with the status quo.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
doubleunplussed 8y ago
If you're running under Xorg, alt-f2, 'r', enter will get you your lost windows back. For harder freezes I've been seeing where I can't interact with the GUI anymore, switching to a tty and running 'killall -3 gnome-shell' gives the best chance of recovering without losing all my processes. Not excuses for the bugs, but best workarounds I have so far.

nine_k 8y ago

Hmm. I run Xfce, and have all important key bindings explicitly written in one of its config files. For last about 10 years I just carried these files between machines, upgrades, and different distributions, and had all my binding, and most other desktop settings, intact. Is something similar possible with Gnome? That is, once you explicitly configured something, even if your setting is the same as the current default value, would it be preserved?

jammygit 8y ago
How well can you control your xfce desktop with keyboard shortcuts? One of the main reasons I use gnome is how easy it is to avoid touching my mouse.
- ldiracdelta 7y ago
  Outrageously easy. I just discovered its full tiling ability in start->window manager -> Keybard tab, then scroll to "tiling". You can tile a window to left, right, top, bottom, top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right. Alt tabbing works just like windows.
elcritch 8y ago
That sound pretty nice. For the life of me I can’t figure out how to override certain key settings in KDE like “windows” key pulling up the kde menu. Gnome I think might allow that but then the other 99 other shortcuts seem hard coded. Much less have those changes persist for years. How does xfce commands interact with bindings in gtk/qt based apps? Can you set commands actions that work in say Firefox? On a side note, Windows key in Linux should map to meta and behave like command key in OS X so I can use GUI commands without screwing up emacs/vim/etc. Super/Meta are all over historical Unix programs but modern x11/guis/distros seem to refuse to allow you to actually bind keys to them. P.S. OS X has similar feature to xfce to setup key commands and have them just keep working across os updates for years. It’s easy to setup emacs like key binding for alt-f, ctrl-e, etc and have almost every text widget just inherit those commands. You just need to use the terminal/finder to set them.

ayoisaiah 8y ago

I no longer bother with Alt-Tab, I just use jumpapp[1] to switch between windows quickly. [1]: https://github.com/mkropat/jumpapp https://github.com/mkropat/jumpapp

Vinnl 8y ago
Funny, I do the same, but without a separate app: pressing Super+1 does that for the first application on the launcher, Super+2 for the second one, etc. By default.

tmalsburg2 8y ago

I recommend using the Xubuntu distribution. It's has been much more stable with respect to the UI: https://xubuntu.org/ https://xubuntu.org/

pizza234 8y ago
The Xubuntu has significant drawbacks, which need to be considered. Primarily, they have very low resources (and/or skills, it's unclear), which is a problem, since resources need to be distributed between bug fixes, improvements, and chasing library updates (see: GTK3 updates). A few days ago I've booted the 19.04 beta Xubuntu live image, and it was showing minuscule fonts on a 3000x2000 screen. This is a bit embarrassing for a stable DE. I don't discourage it in an active way, but one should consider it very carefully (there are alternatives nowadays, that are equally lean, but more stable and flexibile).
- ldiracdelta 7y ago
  Not sure about 19.04. But 18.04 xfce runs great on my 40 " 4k monitor/Samsung tv