11 ms·

Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

176 points by octopus 15y ago

larrik 15y ago
As someone who's been using Ubuntu full time since 9.10 (though I'm really not a Linux "power user."), I was pretty much horrified by my upgrade to 11.10. In tweaking a few compiz settings, through their config GUI, I managed to crash compiz hard enough to need to reboot several times. Unity itself is incompatible with Desktop Cube for some reason, and trying to force it just breaks everything. (I like Desktop because it seems to be a more reliable desktop switcher, anecdotally.) I don't mean "force it" like changing the config directly. I mean "force it" like pressing the button that asks if I really want to activate it. So I tried out Gnome 3 for the first time. It tries so hard to LOOK like OS X, yet it winds up being way worse than either OS X or Gnome 2. Maybe I'll try Kubuntu. Or Linux Mint. Or just keep trying to like this new crap. I don't know.
- sixtofour 15y ago
  Any number of reasons to choose a particular distro, but let me lump them into "system administration style" and "GUI style." If you still like or prefer Ubuntu's system administration style (apt, packages, PPA, whatever), and you're just horrified by the desktop, then use another desktop or window manager. - Lubuntu (LXDE on Ubuntu, similar to Xubuntu) - LXDE and OpenBox manually installed. - OpenBox by itself manually installed. - Xubuntu. - XFCE manually installed. I went with Lubuntu, pretty happy with it. It's a little unfinished, but not terribly so. And I still have all the apty goodness that I enjoy in ubuntu. Or go upstream to Debian, or downstream to Mint, or over a branch with Crunchbang. Or a stream over to an RPM based distro. Or over into the next valley with Arch, Slack, etc. Get some strange with FreeBSD. If the mainstream Ubuntu desktop sucks for you (it does for me), then moving some small or large distance to fix it is going to be much easier than suffering day in and day out.
  - Raphael 15y ago
    Can you have a bunch of these installed concurrently and switch between them to try them out?
    - sixtofour 15y ago
      Yes you can, I used to have (G)ubuntu, KDE and XFCE installed simultaneously and switch between them. The problem I saw was that the menus got really crowded. Once you settle on one, you maybe want to start over with a backup and a fresh install.
- sbierwagen 15y ago
  sudo apt-get install xfce4 It looks quite a lot like GNOME 2, and is rather more lightweight. I finally switched once 11.10 made it clear that it wasn't going to let me use a working version of GNOME anymore.
  - parfe 15y ago
    xfce isn't a package. sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop xfce4
    - sbierwagen 15y ago
      Edited. I just checked my command history, and that is exactly what I ran. Install xfce4, log out and log back in with the new WM, and everything just worked.
- gldalmaso 15y ago
  I have a problem with people turning from Ubuntu because they lost a pet feature. Ubuntu is changing how to look at the desktop and surely what was built around the old api will not be fully supported at first. But it's just a matter of time before it's functional again. I'm pretty sure the Desktop Cube can be made to work seamlessly with Unity. But it's not Canonical's job to make it so. And if Canonical somehow managed to lock some of the desktop features into Unity, than we must simply pressure then into building something more flexible so as to allow other open source providers to work with a more pluggable interface.
  - emil0r 15y ago
    The way you interact with the desktop environment is a pet feature?
    - gldalmaso 15y ago
      You can still change desktops using the same shortcuts, just not using the same animation. So I'd say yes, in this case a pet feature.
  - jellicle 15y ago
    > But it's just a matter of time before it's functional again. And then another very short matter of time before it is non-functional again, since the then-current generation of developers will want to "build something new".
  - larrik 15y ago
    I'm not turning away because Desktop Cube doesn't work, I'm turning away because it completely messed up my system by simply trying to turn it on, through the GUI. I wasn't messing with my X configuration or any other insanities. I clicked a button in the settings, and had to Google around just to get back to a working computer. What other landmines are waiting for me? What if I install KDevelop or some other KDE-based program? Will that cause everything to break too? I don't know, but I never before had to be afraid to just try things. Now I have to worry if whatever I'm doing is "Canonical-approved," and I'm not okay with that. (I really doubt KDE is going to cause a problem, it was just an example.) For the record, I played with Gnome 3 a little more, and I'm willing to give it a longer chance. Avant Window Navigator is a must, though. Overall, it just seems like Gnome 3 and Unity have all of my least favorite parts of OS X jammed into it for no good reason.
T_S_ 15y ago
Eventually, by making a fresh account, taking checksums of its dotfiles, adding an applet, and taking checksums again, I found out that the new panel configuration lives in a file called .config/dconf/user that is an opaque binary blob. I think the OP is a perfect candidate for Arch Linux.
rbanffy 15y ago
While I disagree with esr on Unity (I kind of like it), he raises a very serious point about configuration being kept in binary blobs. I cringe when I see it in XML - blobs are an even worse idea.
- devs1010 15y ago
  Thats a rather bizarre way to store config data I can't see any architectural reason why this would be desirable, does anyone have any insight into this?
  - vrotaru 15y ago
    As far as I can tell the official reason for switching from gcong to gsetting is that the new backend is optimized for fast reading of config values. As for the old schema, there were two options separate xml files in a directory per-app and a big consolidated xml file. There were some measuring showing that the second variant which was opening just a file and not 50 was a lot faster and considerably reduced startup times. But now if you are going to put everything in a big pile of xml where it is hard to find and edit/remove/add options without a specialized tool you can as well use a binary format. At least, that's my reconstruction of events.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      So, the config system is slowly approaching a Windows registry... How about making opening the 50 or so files fast instead of putting everything into one big file and, then, into one smaller blob? Or we actually do like to make the same mistakes Microsoft does?
      - jerf 15y ago
        Relevent, though I don't know what side I come down on: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/26/6523907.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/26/65239... Sometimes pathological problems result in pathological solutions and I'm not going to step up and try to identify which spawned which. Goodness knows the happy UNIX story of happy text files configuring your happy isolated services has all kinds of horrific exceptions that don't appear in the happy part of the story, like Sendmail or .emacs.
dfc 15y ago
I always wanted to try out awesome but never had the motivation. Yesterday gnome3 packages started popping up in unstable so I gave it a whirl on an old machine. The only good thing I can say about gnome3 is that it finally gave me the incentive to make the leap to awesome...its truly awesome.
- william42 15y ago
  I didn't hate Unity, but I did hate that compiz started randomly crashing my GPU, so I ended up switching to xmonad and then awesome, and I couldn't be happier with awesome.
- davidhollander 15y ago
  I'm very happy with Awesome running on top of arch linux. If you like the configurability of awesome, also check out luakit: http://luakit.org/projects/luakit/ http://luakit.org/projects/luakit/ It's a lua binding to webkit that allows you to fully customize your web browser as well, with a configuration scheme similar to Awesome. By default it's configured with VIM bindings, imo better than the vimium or vimperator plugins.
  - william42 15y ago
    Luakit is definitely an interesting project. I'm checking it out, but I'm not ready to make it my primary browser, if only because the user documentation is bad enough that the best way for me to figure out how to open a URL is to read the configuration files.
    - davidhollander 15y ago
      Search this ArchLinux thread, lots of great tips: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97375 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97375 "o" or ":open" plus a url, "t" or ":tabopen" plus a url. "d" closes a tab. Press tab to autocomplete. "B" to add a bookmark. "H"\"L", back\forward in history. To perform a search, simply start your open or tabopen command with "google " or "duckduckgo " etc. If you are on a site that uses javascript keyboard controls, press CTRL-Z to enter pass through mode. ":wq" saves your session (pages that are open will be reloaded next time) and quits. If Javascript doesn't work in gmail or google plus, change > "AppleWebKit/%s.%s+" to > "AppleWebKit/%s.%s+ (KHTML, like Gecko)" in globals.lua and it will.
DanBC 15y ago
Binary blobs for configuration should be considered evil. I'm all for sane defaults and making design decisions and keeping options away from the users - not having huge preference panes. But keep a hand-editable text configuration file. I spent some time using IceWM (shipped with EEEpc 701) and the jwm. So I guess I'd be using jwm again.
- jodrellblank 15y ago
  Binary blobs for configuration should be considered evil. Next do you get to 'binary blobs for code should be considered evil', have a LISPiphany and found Symbolics?
  - kragen 15y ago
    Zetalisp didn't store code in binary blobs. There's a reason Smalltalk, Zope, and Interlisp are or were tiny-minority platforms.
waffle_ss 15y ago
I too disliked Unity at first when it reared its head in 11.04 (didn't help that it still had some obvious bugs), but I gave it a try and have grown to like it a lot. They've polished it up quite a bit in 11.10 and it's even better now. I definitely would not want to go back to the old menu-driven way. (I would add that most people I know that use Ubuntu are of the same opinion) Fully agree about the config hell, though. One time I wanted to back up my gnome terminal profile settings using gconftool, to discover that the terminal settings are stored in the middle of an XML file that covers a whole slew of gnome settings. So to do the backup/restore, I would either have to back up all of my gnome settings, or write a custom script to patch just the section of the XML file I need changed.
- hartror 15y ago
  After a couple of months of using Unity and trying to fit in with its way of doing thing I jumped back into classic and was immediately at home.
scrrr 15y ago
For what it's worth: I try to use the mouse only when necessary (even when browsing the web), and I like to launch my applications through text search. Actually I don't need the Unity sidebar at all, unless perhaps when I want to see what hidden apps are running. I arrange my windows using ctrl-alt + numpad and I switch between workspaces with ctrl-alt + arrow keys. The new active window switching with alt-tab and alt-shift-arrow keys is nice. All in all I'm happy with Unity and it got better with 11.10. Being 50% on Ubuntu and 50% on OSX I have to say that I wish OSX had a little bit more of Ubuntu-UI in it. Just writing this to offer a counter-point to all the anti-Unity posting. Perhaps everyone should try to play around with Unity shortcuts and see if it's really that bad. Here's a post detailing some of them: http://blog.sudobits.com/2011/09/04/ubuntu-11-10-oneiric-ocelot-keyboard-shortcuts-for-unity/ http://blog.sudobits.com/2011/09/04/ubuntu-11-10-oneiric-oce...
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  Preach it brother. I still use Gnome-Do (or Synapse sometimes) to launch apps via text search. I honestly think you could design an entire OS UX around that motif that would end up more efficient and more intuitive, even for new users. If the Start Menu and Google Instant had a baby, that would be the result.
  - kijin 15y ago
    Yes, desktop environments such as Unity seem to be designed with text search in mind. Instead of navigating a menu tree or filesystem tree, users are expected to "search" for whatever they're looking for. Which works pretty well... until you realize that these desktop environments are also pretending to target the tablet market, where text entry is an order of magnitude less convenient than it is on a regular computer.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      > target the tablet market that's why you have large-ish icons for frequently used applications and why you can pin them to the launcher bar.
devs1010 15y ago
I agree about Unity being terrible, I just hope the Ubuntu dev's are going to realize this and relegate it to an "experimental" UI and then go back to the classic as default
- w33ble 15y ago
  I'm hoping they backpedal too, especially for the next LTS. I'm pretty doubtful that they will though.
icarus_drowning 15y ago
The only really valid criticism I see here is the binary blob problem-- clearly this is a poor way to store user configuration data, and completely antithetical to the kinds of philosophies that undergird Linux and Ubuntu. But really, the core of the issue that's been raised by Unity is that Ubuntu seems to be moving away from catering to power users to cutting features essential to them in favor of appealing to more amateur users. One can lament that decision, and even disagree with it, but I don't know how fair I think it is to criticize Unity for lacking those kind of power user features. After all, it isn't like power users are exactly wanting when it comes to replacement options in the Linux space.
- IvarTJ 15y ago
  But aren’t the core users the most important? Shouldn’t Gnome 3 instead have been a spin-off or separate project from traditional Gnome?
  - stephen_g 15y ago
    No. There's just not enough resources (developers, designers, testers, etc) to do that. The Gnome project just decided that it was time to try and make a desktop that wasn't based on the Windows 95 (and up) desktop metaphor, and the only way that was going to work was to commit completely to that goal.
- naner 15y ago
  The only really valid criticism I see here is the binary blob problem-- clearly this is a poor way to store user configuration data I disagree. Enlightenment has been doing this from the start because it is faster to read and write than a specially formatted ASCII file and because the user is expected to do all configuration through the graphical interface. antithetical to the kinds of philosophies that undergird Linux This somewhat true but I believe editing text files by hand is the type of thing Ubuntu is trying to move away from. ESR is an old hat who has been using Linux since way back in the day and is set in his ways. I am too, but he should know Ubuntu isn't for him. They are focused on ease of use for new users, not accommodating all the idiosyncrasies of the old ones.
daedalus_j 15y ago
Interesting to note that nobody mentions Enlightenment or the Ubuntu-based Bodhi Linux disto. I really can't figure out if Enlightenment is simply living in a dark hole of obscurity or if it's actively ignored. (And if it's being ignored I'd love to know more about why, I've always enjoyed it as a desktop environment.)
- johnny22 15y ago
  i actively ignore it because it doesn't give me the nearly full stack integration that GNOME does.
- ubernostrum 15y ago
  For the Linux boxes I keep around, E16 is still, after over a decade, my preferred graphical shell. In fact, I don't think I've touched the config since around 2001. That said, I don't get all the bashing on GNOME and Unity; yeah, there are rough spots (and obligatory "power users" who think GUI means a window that shows one checkbox for each command-line option), but they're trying to do good and I applaud them for the attempt.
- greatquux 15y ago
  Very happy using oneiric ocelot with the bodhi repositories and their E17!
- jamesgeck0 15y ago
  One reason might be because e17, like Gnome 3, uses binary configuration files.
WayneDB 15y ago
Linux Mint 11 is a fantastic distribution for anyone who isn't into Unity or Gnome 3. I wish I had started using it sooner.
- sutro 15y ago
  Totally agree, both with the poster's very valid complaints about Unity and Gnome 3 and with the best alternative being Linux Mint. I lost so much time dealing with this terrible "upgrade." I will never again trust Canonical.
- hristov 15y ago
  Do they have good repositories? One thing I liked on Ununtu is that they have almost anything I need in their repositories. I never have to compile anything, or even run an install file.
  - kijin 15y ago
    Mint uses the same repositories as Ubuntu for the most part. You can also use the Debian Edition, which uses the same repositories as Debian Testing. Both repos are as comprehensive as they get.
hasenj 15y ago
Come on .. not another Unity rant. All Linux desktops before Unity sucked. Gnome 2.x sucked, big time. It looked ugly, and had only ugly themes. Its applications menu was completely useless. Its panel sucked. Its model for putting and managing launchers/shortcuts on the panel sucked. It was a complete mess. Most Linux users were using Docky + GNOME Do. I personally was using XFCE, because at least its panel was prettier and more customizable.
JulianMorrison 15y ago
Seriously, what is with Ubuntu and locked down panels? Would it be so hard to set up a user default in the home directory and then let me edit?
pspeter3 15y ago
I would suggest checking out Elementary OS. It has been a better experience for me.
Zak 15y ago
I'm inclined to agree with him. Unity will be cool some day, but I don't think it's there yet, and Gnome 3 was completely broken when I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10. Binary configuration files are an abomination against DMR. I'm fed up with Ubuntu pushing alpha-quality releases on users to get free testing. It's making Linux look bad. A couple years ago, Ubuntu was Debian that "just works" on the desktop. That's all I ever wanted, and I think I've found it again in Linux Mint Debian Edition.
- w33ble 15y ago
  I feel the same way. Unity wasn't ready for prime time, and I honestly believe it still isn't. They've forced the user's hand here and made it worse by not keeping changes speedy. Additionally, I hate nearly all the changes to the default applications they've made in the last 2 or 3 releases too, but that stuff is easier to fix. Back in 2006 I made the move to Ubuntu from Gentoo because I was tired of constantly tweaking things to make my system work. Ubuntu ushered in an era of Linux ease that nobody before them had, and as far as I'm concerned, nobody has since. Sadly, they've started to muck that all up. I don't see anyone else out there making a distro that "just works" and has the out-of-the-box functionality Ubuntu does either, which is the most upsetting part for me.
jimmyjazz14 15y ago
I have been using Gnome in its classic form for a very long time but, I switched to Gnome 3 after the upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version. I must admit it is starting to grow on me. When I first used Gnome 3 (back when it was first released) I hated it; it was buggy and the whole concept of gnome-shell seemed flawed. Now its seems many of the bugs have been worked out and the usability improvements of gnome-shell is starting to show. Gnome 3 is still far from perfect and there are still A LOT of things missing that I had grown to rely on from classic Gnome (like being able to arrange my panels) but Gnome 3 seems to be progressing and I have high hopes for its future. I am less hopeful for the future of Unity frankly because it has so many bad ideas built in to it. One such bad idea is the heavy reliance on hidden elements that need to be hovered over for them to be visible. Personally I think Ubuntu would do well to pick up Gnome 3 and run with it instead of Unity.
- bluedanieru 15y ago
  Not going to happen. It's a pet project and Canonical isn't as beholden to market economics as a company that sold its OS would be. Kubuntu is great, although a lot of people who say that seem to eventually settle on XFCE anyway.
- xiaomai 15y ago
  I'm also liking feeling pretty good about gnome3. It's missing some important configuration options for me (I don't want windows to auto-raise in sloppy mode), and I miss my system-monitor applet in the panel, but I think it will be great in another release or two.
azakai 15y ago
Why is there so much negativity? They are providing a free software option for you, and they work very hard on it. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. But why be angry at them? As for Ubuntu 11.10, I am posting this from there. Yes, Unity has some annoyances. But overall things work quite well.
- icebraining 15y ago
  He's providing feedback, even if in an indelicate way, and sharing useful information to other users, such as the binary blob configuration file. But overall things work quite well. It's an opinion. Clearly the author begs to differ.
mrinterweb 15y ago
Personally, I really prefer Unity to classic Gnome. Unity is the best desktop experience I have had. I've been using it since 11.04 out. Unity had some rough edges when it was first released, but a lot of that has been ironed out. I really like the direction Unity is going. I feel that it uses space in a more intelligent way. I am very glad that Canonical has taken the initiative to build a better desktop environment. Many people don't like change, and I feel that is the category that many of the people criticizing Unity fall into. I do agree that Unity is not as easily customizable as I would expect, but again, I enjoy most of the decisions that comprise Unity.
pinchyfingers 15y ago
Whatever, I spent so many years with Gentoo/Arch + Openbox/DWM that I'm just happy to install Ubuntu, copy over my dot files and have 98% of everything working within 30 min of downloading the distro.
yaix 15y ago
After having used Unity for many months, I recently switch back to "Gnome classic" and when I upgrade to 11.10 it will be Xubuntu. It would be great if Canonical concentrated their resources on making the system faster, like they did until recently (improved start up speed etc). However, now they seem to be dumping all work into reinventing the wheel by creating yet another Linux desktop GUI.
w33ble 15y ago
One of the commenters in the post mirrored my thoughts exactly; I'm sticking with the 10.04 LTS, and if this garbage isn't sorted out by the next LTS, I'm jumping the Ubuntu ship. I understand that everyone is trying to target touch screens and tablets, and that's fine as an added feature, but you can't leave the keyboard and mouse folk behind. That's especially true when they make up the overwhelming majority of your users. I'm actually quite surprised more people haven't spoken out against Metro in the new Windows for the same reason; that interface looks dreadful to use with a mouse. I've been told that Microsoft at least left in a "classic" interface that holds true to the name. If that's true, Canonical needs to take that page from their book...
- bluedanieru 15y ago
  My understanding is Metro is just the traditional start menu on steroids. At any rate, Microsoft seems better able to pivot than Canonical.
  - w33ble 15y ago
    That's sort of true. They are clearly targeting the touch market with it, but it's a lot more than just an application menu. It think it's a brilliant touch interface, but an awful mouse one, though, to be fair, I have yet to use it in any form. As I understand it though, Metro is just a layer on top of Windows, and it can be turned off if that's what you want to do.
    - Raphael 15y ago
      Metro is fine with a mouse. I would like to see it become the new widget layer on top of the desktop wallpaper, without hiding the old task bar, and preserving a Windows-7-style start menu.
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  I'm with you. I run 10.04 LTS on my home machine. I recently took 11.10 for a test-drive, and as a power user Unity just doesn't meet my needs. As a user, nothing about Gnome was broken for me. But in switching to Unity, now Ubuntu feels a lot less useful to me.
kand 15y ago
I was a Ubuntu user for the pass 2 years, only until the heat problem kicks in. I don't know why most people don't have this problem, but my computer is extremely hot while running basic graphical tricks, and moreover, this thing has not been fixed for the last 3 releases. And secondly, the Unity is extremely stupid for multiple monitor. If he has 3 monitors, how would he like it to constantly look to the left most monitor just to switch between tasks? I recently purchased an additional monitor, and because of this stupidity, I no longer use Ubuntu despite I hate Windows so much. This could be a reason why Ubuntu will NEVER get to offices, since most of them have multiple monitors. Wonder if we could have USERS to say what they want in each release? If Ubuntu continues this path, I'm afraid tech-savvy people will stop using it, not to mention many new users will never start trying.
- jamesgeck0 15y ago
  Most people don't have the problem because it's related to a specific piece of hardware in your machine. Search Launchpad and see if you can add any new details to the bug report, or file a new issue if one doesn't exist.
nice1 15y ago
Ubuntu's had a good run, but nothing last for ever. The great thing about free software is freedom.
marcloney 15y ago
When I first read this article, I got ready to post a hasty reply with all my pet hates about Gnome 3, Unity, etc, etc. Then I remembered the original reason I started using Linux, as a native Windows user, and that is "Choice". So you don't like Gnome. Guess what? Don't use it! You have so many other choices of window managers available to you. Shed a tear for those users on proprietary systems who don't have choice. Don't like the new Start menu? Nobody cares.
- gldalmaso 15y ago
  Right you are. Also, maybe since all the power-users are so dissatisfied, they could join and manage a new packaged Ubuntu, maybe OUBUNTU (old ubuntu). They have that choice. I for one am happy to have a linux distro geared towards everyday desktop use and modern devices, and that I can show my family/friends as an alternative choice and have them not reply that it's just so damn ugly.
- coffeeaddicted 15y ago
  I thought the same and starting trying out Window Managers. Until after a few installations/deinstallations I started getting conflicts and wasted a full weekend just getting back to a working system. Now I simply live with whatever my distros put on my desktops unless it got real stopper-bugs that prevent me from working. I guess the positive side is that I learn some new WM now regularly (a little more often this year than I'd hoped for maybe).
schiptsov 15y ago
Yes, all those better ways to do the configuration, such as gconf2, oneconf, and other shit is really annoying, same like people who missing power and flexibility of a text file, not an XML but plain old var=value, or, OK, some Yaml. But what can we do? The mediocre crowds are migrating from windows realms and they like to copy and paste, not to think and learn. ^_^
alexlarsson 15y ago
Reading this thread makes me pretty sad. Usually there are people on hacker news that at least know the background, and generally there is a measure of respect that other people might actually know something about what they work on. The Gnome developers (which includes me) have more than ten years of experience working on unix and developing a desktop for it. Please don't assume we're making decisions because we're stupid, we might actually have reasons to do what we do. Lemme try to explain some background on configuration storage in gnome. But first, the main complaint in the article is that you can't modify the layout of the fallback mode panel in gnome 3. This is just not true, you can modify them in the UI just like before, only you have to hold down alt when you bring up the menus, etc. This was done because a lot of people accidentally changed their panel around causing problems. I'm sure this change could have been better documented and whatnot, but it is possible. Once upon a time there was a design decision in Gnome to use so called "instant apply" configuration options, rather than having each config dialog button have "apply" buttons. You can disagree if you want, but this decision drives the design of the configuration framework. Basically, it implies having some kind of service that handles configuration changes that will tell other applications of configuration changes. Thus was born GConf. The original on-disk format for GConf was an on-disk tree that mirrored the gconf key hierarchy, where each directory had a %gconf.xml file that listed the keys in that directory. However, it turns out that this is a major performance problem when reading settings. Each such file you open causes two random access seeks on the hard drive. One to read the inode and one to read the data. Hard drive consecutive data read speeds are pretty high, but seeks are very slow (for physical reasons), which was significantly affecting login and app startup speed of gnome. So, we merged the all the separate files into xml tree files, using one per application. This cut down on seeks a lot and improved performance. (Of course, a negative aspect of this is that the xml files are not very human readable anymore. But the vast majority of readers do not access the text files directly anyway.) However, even after this gconf reads was a problem for log in performance. We do of course do local caching of gconf data in each process and we preload it in chunks, however during login the gconf daemon was acting as a serialization point for all processes that were starting up. Also, all these xml trees were pretty verbose, so parsing and loading also took some time. Over the years we increased our knowledge of the problem space, and eventually we came up with a replacement for GConf. It has two parts, one is the API, which lives in glib, called GSettings. Its an abstraction for settings with change notification that has client-side schemas (as opposed to server side schemas like with GConf, another thing we learned). The implementation is pluggable, there is an ini file backend, a win32 registry, and the DConf backend, which is the default for Linux distros. DConf uses a binary on-disk format that is mmapable and readable without "parsing". I.e. each app maps the config file readonly (sharing this memory), and lookups is done directly in the in-memory mapping without an intermediate parsed copy of the data. The data is stored in an efficient hash-table which allows very fast key lookups with few pagefaults in the file. The actual data is stored using GValue, an immutable binary datatype for recursive types that is in glib. So when a value is returned we don't even duplicate it but just return a wrapped reference to the data in the mmaped file. Writes to dconf do go through a daemon which handles write serialization and change notification. Communications with the dconf daemon is through dbus, which incidentally has an on-wire binary data format that is a subset of GValue. So, how does this help us? Well, for one thing we never block during login for reading configuration, as all reading is parallelized. Secondly we don't spend any time parsing files, as the config file, once mapped, is already in a compact "parsed" format. Thirdly, we never waste any memory storing copies of configuration data on the heap. Now, there are some obvious drawbacks with binary formats. For instance, you need tools to modify them, like the dconf-editor GUI app or "gsettings list-recursively". Secondly, you can't use text based tools like e.g. git, emacs or diff/patch to maintain them. But, you got to realize that we are not unaware of these problems. We are well aware of them, but we made the conscious decision that the real life problems with the many-text-files approach to configurations (as listed above) outweigh the advantages. Especially considering that most of our users don't need to directly modify the config files.
shareme 15y ago
whaa a poor power user did not get what they wanted..wha..wha... For background ESR work is not in UI but in small but important stuff like GPSd, etc.. He is work here..both GNOME and Ubuntu have made decisions that are making an impact as far as driving adoption of new users to the platform..both sets of developers deserve big round of applause..
FuzzyDunlop 15y ago
If Ubuntu has done anything wrong with the full-on switch to Unity in 11.10, it's that it's kindly done us the favour of removing a classic desktop and not even providing anything approaching similar to replace it. I can't speak for Gnome3 since it doesn't like my hardware at all, and its 'classic' mode seems broken (possibly as a result of compatibility issues). Anyway, that wouldn't be a problem at all, but Unity is still flawed, is totally unproductive for development work, and there's a distinct lack of customisation: The launch bar is useless, and doesn't work at all if you let a window snap to the left hand side. You can only add application shortcuts to it (why can't I add bookmark folders?). There are no configuration options to be seen (what if I don't want auto-hide?), and whatever options there are, they're minimal. Workspace switching isn't smooth at all and requires a strange number of clicks to make any use of. Auto-hiding menubars just obscures GUI elements I'd like to be able to see at all times. If they're not there, I have to stop and remember where to look, because I can't just glance at the top of the screen. The actual name of the app is always visible, but clicking it does nothing. This is unbelievably unintuitive. As for it replacing the classic desktop, I'm not sure what exactly was wrong with it, and why a GUI fit for a netbook or tablet is now being shoehorned into a desktop OS before it's had enough care and attention to bring it up to par with the standard desktop experience. I regret running the upgrade and as soon as I can I'm switching to something more productive and usable, because 11.10 and Unity feels like too big a jump into unfamiliar (and unstable) territory. And this is coming from an OS X user (who only uses Linux at work).
kragen 15y ago
schiptsov posted, in an apparently auto[dead] post: > Yes, all those better ways to do the configuration, such as gconf2, oneconf, and other shit is really annoying, same like people who missing power and flexibility of a text file, not an XML but plain old var=value, or, OK, some Yaml. But what can we do? The mediocre crowds are migrating from windows realms and they like to copy and paste, not to think and learn. ^_^ I just wanted to respond to schiptsov's comment by pointing out that copying and pasting is something you can do if you have a name=value or YAML text file, but not something you can do with gconf-editor. So if there are "mediocre crowds" who "like to copy and paste", they'll be better served by text-based configuration files.
kristianp 15y ago
I'm probably too late to this discussion, but I work at a windows shop, and use ubuntu at home and on servers, so it is an irritation that the ubuntu UI has become more mac-like, starting with the close button moving to the left-hand side. This is mainly because I find it inconsistent. I have put off upgrading ubuntu for this reason, currently I'm on 10.04. What I don't like about ubuntu since 10.04, is that it the UI has become "opionated", without having the customizability that pre-gnome desktop managers have. Specifically, there should be options to put the close/minimize/maximize buttons on whichever side I prefer, and whether to use mac-style menus or windows-style menus.

176 points by octopus 15y ago

As someone who's been using Ubuntu full time since 9.10 (though I'm really not a Linux "power user."), I was pretty much horrified by my upgrade to 11.10. In tweaking a few compiz settings, through their config GUI, I managed to crash compiz hard enough to need to reboot several times. Unity itself is incompatible with Desktop Cube for some reason, and trying to force it just breaks everything. (I like Desktop because it seems to be a more reliable desktop switcher, anecdotally.) I don't mean "force it" like changing the config directly. I mean "force it" like pressing the button that asks if I really want to activate it. So I tried out Gnome 3 for the first time. It tries so hard to LOOK like OS X, yet it winds up being way worse than either OS X or Gnome 2. Maybe I'll try Kubuntu. Or Linux Mint. Or just keep trying to like this new crap. I don't know.

sixtofour 15y ago
Any number of reasons to choose a particular distro, but let me lump them into "system administration style" and "GUI style." If you still like or prefer Ubuntu's system administration style (apt, packages, PPA, whatever), and you're just horrified by the desktop, then use another desktop or window manager. - Lubuntu (LXDE on Ubuntu, similar to Xubuntu) - LXDE and OpenBox manually installed. - OpenBox by itself manually installed. - Xubuntu. - XFCE manually installed. I went with Lubuntu, pretty happy with it. It's a little unfinished, but not terribly so. And I still have all the apty goodness that I enjoy in ubuntu. Or go upstream to Debian, or downstream to Mint, or over a branch with Crunchbang. Or a stream over to an RPM based distro. Or over into the next valley with Arch, Slack, etc. Get some strange with FreeBSD. If the mainstream Ubuntu desktop sucks for you (it does for me), then moving some small or large distance to fix it is going to be much easier than suffering day in and day out.
- Raphael 15y ago
  Can you have a bunch of these installed concurrently and switch between them to try them out?
  - sixtofour 15y ago
    Yes you can, I used to have (G)ubuntu, KDE and XFCE installed simultaneously and switch between them. The problem I saw was that the menus got really crowded. Once you settle on one, you maybe want to start over with a backup and a fresh install.
sbierwagen 15y ago
sudo apt-get install xfce4 It looks quite a lot like GNOME 2, and is rather more lightweight. I finally switched once 11.10 made it clear that it wasn't going to let me use a working version of GNOME anymore.
- parfe 15y ago
  xfce isn't a package. sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop xfce4
  - sbierwagen 15y ago
    Edited. I just checked my command history, and that is exactly what I ran. Install xfce4, log out and log back in with the new WM, and everything just worked.
gldalmaso 15y ago
I have a problem with people turning from Ubuntu because they lost a pet feature. Ubuntu is changing how to look at the desktop and surely what was built around the old api will not be fully supported at first. But it's just a matter of time before it's functional again. I'm pretty sure the Desktop Cube can be made to work seamlessly with Unity. But it's not Canonical's job to make it so. And if Canonical somehow managed to lock some of the desktop features into Unity, than we must simply pressure then into building something more flexible so as to allow other open source providers to work with a more pluggable interface.
- emil0r 15y ago
  The way you interact with the desktop environment is a pet feature?
  - gldalmaso 15y ago
    You can still change desktops using the same shortcuts, just not using the same animation. So I'd say yes, in this case a pet feature.
- jellicle 15y ago
  > But it's just a matter of time before it's functional again. And then another very short matter of time before it is non-functional again, since the then-current generation of developers will want to "build something new".
- larrik 15y ago
  I'm not turning away because Desktop Cube doesn't work, I'm turning away because it completely messed up my system by simply trying to turn it on, through the GUI. I wasn't messing with my X configuration or any other insanities. I clicked a button in the settings, and had to Google around just to get back to a working computer. What other landmines are waiting for me? What if I install KDevelop or some other KDE-based program? Will that cause everything to break too? I don't know, but I never before had to be afraid to just try things. Now I have to worry if whatever I'm doing is "Canonical-approved," and I'm not okay with that. (I really doubt KDE is going to cause a problem, it was just an example.) For the record, I played with Gnome 3 a little more, and I'm willing to give it a longer chance. Avant Window Navigator is a must, though. Overall, it just seems like Gnome 3 and Unity have all of my least favorite parts of OS X jammed into it for no good reason.

T_S_ 15y ago

Eventually, by making a fresh account, taking checksums of its dotfiles, adding an applet, and taking checksums again, I found out that the new panel configuration lives in a file called .config/dconf/user that is an opaque binary blob. I think the OP is a perfect candidate for Arch Linux.

rbanffy 15y ago

While I disagree with esr on Unity (I kind of like it), he raises a very serious point about configuration being kept in binary blobs. I cringe when I see it in XML - blobs are an even worse idea.

devs1010 15y ago
Thats a rather bizarre way to store config data I can't see any architectural reason why this would be desirable, does anyone have any insight into this?
- vrotaru 15y ago
  As far as I can tell the official reason for switching from gcong to gsetting is that the new backend is optimized for fast reading of config values. As for the old schema, there were two options separate xml files in a directory per-app and a big consolidated xml file. There were some measuring showing that the second variant which was opening just a file and not 50 was a lot faster and considerably reduced startup times. But now if you are going to put everything in a big pile of xml where it is hard to find and edit/remove/add options without a specialized tool you can as well use a binary format. At least, that's my reconstruction of events.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    So, the config system is slowly approaching a Windows registry... How about making opening the 50 or so files fast instead of putting everything into one big file and, then, into one smaller blob? Or we actually do like to make the same mistakes Microsoft does?
    - jerf 15y ago
      Relevent, though I don't know what side I come down on: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/26/6523907.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/26/65239... Sometimes pathological problems result in pathological solutions and I'm not going to step up and try to identify which spawned which. Goodness knows the happy UNIX story of happy text files configuring your happy isolated services has all kinds of horrific exceptions that don't appear in the happy part of the story, like Sendmail or .emacs.

dfc 15y ago

I always wanted to try out awesome but never had the motivation. Yesterday gnome3 packages started popping up in unstable so I gave it a whirl on an old machine. The only good thing I can say about gnome3 is that it finally gave me the incentive to make the leap to awesome...its truly awesome.

william42 15y ago
I didn't hate Unity, but I did hate that compiz started randomly crashing my GPU, so I ended up switching to xmonad and then awesome, and I couldn't be happier with awesome.
davidhollander 15y ago
I'm very happy with Awesome running on top of arch linux. If you like the configurability of awesome, also check out luakit: http://luakit.org/projects/luakit/ http://luakit.org/projects/luakit/ It's a lua binding to webkit that allows you to fully customize your web browser as well, with a configuration scheme similar to Awesome. By default it's configured with VIM bindings, imo better than the vimium or vimperator plugins.
- william42 15y ago
  Luakit is definitely an interesting project. I'm checking it out, but I'm not ready to make it my primary browser, if only because the user documentation is bad enough that the best way for me to figure out how to open a URL is to read the configuration files.
  - davidhollander 15y ago
    Search this ArchLinux thread, lots of great tips: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97375 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97375 "o" or ":open" plus a url, "t" or ":tabopen" plus a url. "d" closes a tab. Press tab to autocomplete. "B" to add a bookmark. "H"\"L", back\forward in history. To perform a search, simply start your open or tabopen command with "google " or "duckduckgo " etc. If you are on a site that uses javascript keyboard controls, press CTRL-Z to enter pass through mode. ":wq" saves your session (pages that are open will be reloaded next time) and quits. If Javascript doesn't work in gmail or google plus, change > "AppleWebKit/%s.%s+" to > "AppleWebKit/%s.%s+ (KHTML, like Gecko)" in globals.lua and it will.

DanBC 15y ago

Binary blobs for configuration should be considered evil. I'm all for sane defaults and making design decisions and keeping options away from the users - not having huge preference panes. But keep a hand-editable text configuration file. I spent some time using IceWM (shipped with EEEpc 701) and the jwm. So I guess I'd be using jwm again.

jodrellblank 15y ago
Binary blobs for configuration should be considered evil. Next do you get to 'binary blobs for code should be considered evil', have a LISPiphany and found Symbolics?
- kragen 15y ago
  Zetalisp didn't store code in binary blobs. There's a reason Smalltalk, Zope, and Interlisp are or were tiny-minority platforms.

waffle_ss 15y ago

I too disliked Unity at first when it reared its head in 11.04 (didn't help that it still had some obvious bugs), but I gave it a try and have grown to like it a lot. They've polished it up quite a bit in 11.10 and it's even better now. I definitely would not want to go back to the old menu-driven way. (I would add that most people I know that use Ubuntu are of the same opinion) Fully agree about the config hell, though. One time I wanted to back up my gnome terminal profile settings using gconftool, to discover that the terminal settings are stored in the middle of an XML file that covers a whole slew of gnome settings. So to do the backup/restore, I would either have to back up all of my gnome settings, or write a custom script to patch just the section of the XML file I need changed.

hartror 15y ago
After a couple of months of using Unity and trying to fit in with its way of doing thing I jumped back into classic and was immediately at home.

scrrr 15y ago

For what it's worth: I try to use the mouse only when necessary (even when browsing the web), and I like to launch my applications through text search. Actually I don't need the Unity sidebar at all, unless perhaps when I want to see what hidden apps are running. I arrange my windows using ctrl-alt + numpad and I switch between workspaces with ctrl-alt + arrow keys. The new active window switching with alt-tab and alt-shift-arrow keys is nice. All in all I'm happy with Unity and it got better with 11.10. Being 50% on Ubuntu and 50% on OSX I have to say that I wish OSX had a little bit more of Ubuntu-UI in it. Just writing this to offer a counter-point to all the anti-Unity posting. Perhaps everyone should try to play around with Unity shortcuts and see if it's really that bad. Here's a post detailing some of them: http://blog.sudobits.com/2011/09/04/ubuntu-11-10-oneiric-ocelot-keyboard-shortcuts-for-unity/ http://blog.sudobits.com/2011/09/04/ubuntu-11-10-oneiric-oce...

SkyMarshal 15y ago
Preach it brother. I still use Gnome-Do (or Synapse sometimes) to launch apps via text search. I honestly think you could design an entire OS UX around that motif that would end up more efficient and more intuitive, even for new users. If the Start Menu and Google Instant had a baby, that would be the result.
- kijin 15y ago
  Yes, desktop environments such as Unity seem to be designed with text search in mind. Instead of navigating a menu tree or filesystem tree, users are expected to "search" for whatever they're looking for. Which works pretty well... until you realize that these desktop environments are also pretending to target the tablet market, where text entry is an order of magnitude less convenient than it is on a regular computer.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    > target the tablet market that's why you have large-ish icons for frequently used applications and why you can pin them to the launcher bar.

devs1010 15y ago

I agree about Unity being terrible, I just hope the Ubuntu dev's are going to realize this and relegate it to an "experimental" UI and then go back to the classic as default

w33ble 15y ago
I'm hoping they backpedal too, especially for the next LTS. I'm pretty doubtful that they will though.

icarus_drowning 15y ago

The only really valid criticism I see here is the binary blob problem-- clearly this is a poor way to store user configuration data, and completely antithetical to the kinds of philosophies that undergird Linux and Ubuntu. But really, the core of the issue that's been raised by Unity is that Ubuntu seems to be moving away from catering to power users to cutting features essential to them in favor of appealing to more amateur users. One can lament that decision, and even disagree with it, but I don't know how fair I think it is to criticize Unity for lacking those kind of power user features. After all, it isn't like power users are exactly wanting when it comes to replacement options in the Linux space.

IvarTJ 15y ago
But aren’t the core users the most important? Shouldn’t Gnome 3 instead have been a spin-off or separate project from traditional Gnome?
- stephen_g 15y ago
  No. There's just not enough resources (developers, designers, testers, etc) to do that. The Gnome project just decided that it was time to try and make a desktop that wasn't based on the Windows 95 (and up) desktop metaphor, and the only way that was going to work was to commit completely to that goal.
naner 15y ago
The only really valid criticism I see here is the binary blob problem-- clearly this is a poor way to store user configuration data I disagree. Enlightenment has been doing this from the start because it is faster to read and write than a specially formatted ASCII file and because the user is expected to do all configuration through the graphical interface. antithetical to the kinds of philosophies that undergird Linux This somewhat true but I believe editing text files by hand is the type of thing Ubuntu is trying to move away from. ESR is an old hat who has been using Linux since way back in the day and is set in his ways. I am too, but he should know Ubuntu isn't for him. They are focused on ease of use for new users, not accommodating all the idiosyncrasies of the old ones.

daedalus_j 15y ago

Interesting to note that nobody mentions Enlightenment or the Ubuntu-based Bodhi Linux disto. I really can't figure out if Enlightenment is simply living in a dark hole of obscurity or if it's actively ignored. (And if it's being ignored I'd love to know more about why, I've always enjoyed it as a desktop environment.)

johnny22 15y ago
i actively ignore it because it doesn't give me the nearly full stack integration that GNOME does.
ubernostrum 15y ago
For the Linux boxes I keep around, E16 is still, after over a decade, my preferred graphical shell. In fact, I don't think I've touched the config since around 2001. That said, I don't get all the bashing on GNOME and Unity; yeah, there are rough spots (and obligatory "power users" who think GUI means a window that shows one checkbox for each command-line option), but they're trying to do good and I applaud them for the attempt.
greatquux 15y ago
Very happy using oneiric ocelot with the bodhi repositories and their E17!
jamesgeck0 15y ago
One reason might be because e17, like Gnome 3, uses binary configuration files.

WayneDB 15y ago

Linux Mint 11 is a fantastic distribution for anyone who isn't into Unity or Gnome 3. I wish I had started using it sooner.

sutro 15y ago
Totally agree, both with the poster's very valid complaints about Unity and Gnome 3 and with the best alternative being Linux Mint. I lost so much time dealing with this terrible "upgrade." I will never again trust Canonical.
hristov 15y ago
Do they have good repositories? One thing I liked on Ununtu is that they have almost anything I need in their repositories. I never have to compile anything, or even run an install file.
- kijin 15y ago
  Mint uses the same repositories as Ubuntu for the most part. You can also use the Debian Edition, which uses the same repositories as Debian Testing. Both repos are as comprehensive as they get.

hasenj 15y ago

Come on .. not another Unity rant. All Linux desktops before Unity sucked. Gnome 2.x sucked, big time. It looked ugly, and had only ugly themes. Its applications menu was completely useless. Its panel sucked. Its model for putting and managing launchers/shortcuts on the panel sucked. It was a complete mess. Most Linux users were using Docky + GNOME Do. I personally was using XFCE, because at least its panel was prettier and more customizable.

JulianMorrison 15y ago

Seriously, what is with Ubuntu and locked down panels? Would it be so hard to set up a user default in the home directory and then let me edit?

pspeter3 15y ago

I would suggest checking out Elementary OS. It has been a better experience for me.

Zak 15y ago

I'm inclined to agree with him. Unity will be cool some day, but I don't think it's there yet, and Gnome 3 was completely broken when I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10. Binary configuration files are an abomination against DMR. I'm fed up with Ubuntu pushing alpha-quality releases on users to get free testing. It's making Linux look bad. A couple years ago, Ubuntu was Debian that "just works" on the desktop. That's all I ever wanted, and I think I've found it again in Linux Mint Debian Edition.

w33ble 15y ago
I feel the same way. Unity wasn't ready for prime time, and I honestly believe it still isn't. They've forced the user's hand here and made it worse by not keeping changes speedy. Additionally, I hate nearly all the changes to the default applications they've made in the last 2 or 3 releases too, but that stuff is easier to fix. Back in 2006 I made the move to Ubuntu from Gentoo because I was tired of constantly tweaking things to make my system work. Ubuntu ushered in an era of Linux ease that nobody before them had, and as far as I'm concerned, nobody has since. Sadly, they've started to muck that all up. I don't see anyone else out there making a distro that "just works" and has the out-of-the-box functionality Ubuntu does either, which is the most upsetting part for me.

jimmyjazz14 15y ago

I have been using Gnome in its classic form for a very long time but, I switched to Gnome 3 after the upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version. I must admit it is starting to grow on me. When I first used Gnome 3 (back when it was first released) I hated it; it was buggy and the whole concept of gnome-shell seemed flawed. Now its seems many of the bugs have been worked out and the usability improvements of gnome-shell is starting to show. Gnome 3 is still far from perfect and there are still A LOT of things missing that I had grown to rely on from classic Gnome (like being able to arrange my panels) but Gnome 3 seems to be progressing and I have high hopes for its future. I am less hopeful for the future of Unity frankly because it has so many bad ideas built in to it. One such bad idea is the heavy reliance on hidden elements that need to be hovered over for them to be visible. Personally I think Ubuntu would do well to pick up Gnome 3 and run with it instead of Unity.

bluedanieru 15y ago
Not going to happen. It's a pet project and Canonical isn't as beholden to market economics as a company that sold its OS would be. Kubuntu is great, although a lot of people who say that seem to eventually settle on XFCE anyway.
xiaomai 15y ago
I'm also liking feeling pretty good about gnome3. It's missing some important configuration options for me (I don't want windows to auto-raise in sloppy mode), and I miss my system-monitor applet in the panel, but I think it will be great in another release or two.

azakai 15y ago

Why is there so much negativity? They are providing a free software option for you, and they work very hard on it. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. But why be angry at them? As for Ubuntu 11.10, I am posting this from there. Yes, Unity has some annoyances. But overall things work quite well.

icebraining 15y ago
He's providing feedback, even if in an indelicate way, and sharing useful information to other users, such as the binary blob configuration file. But overall things work quite well. It's an opinion. Clearly the author begs to differ.

mrinterweb 15y ago

Personally, I really prefer Unity to classic Gnome. Unity is the best desktop experience I have had. I've been using it since 11.04 out. Unity had some rough edges when it was first released, but a lot of that has been ironed out. I really like the direction Unity is going. I feel that it uses space in a more intelligent way. I am very glad that Canonical has taken the initiative to build a better desktop environment. Many people don't like change, and I feel that is the category that many of the people criticizing Unity fall into. I do agree that Unity is not as easily customizable as I would expect, but again, I enjoy most of the decisions that comprise Unity.

pinchyfingers 15y ago

Whatever, I spent so many years with Gentoo/Arch + Openbox/DWM that I'm just happy to install Ubuntu, copy over my dot files and have 98% of everything working within 30 min of downloading the distro.

yaix 15y ago

After having used Unity for many months, I recently switch back to "Gnome classic" and when I upgrade to 11.10 it will be Xubuntu. It would be great if Canonical concentrated their resources on making the system faster, like they did until recently (improved start up speed etc). However, now they seem to be dumping all work into reinventing the wheel by creating yet another Linux desktop GUI.

w33ble 15y ago

One of the commenters in the post mirrored my thoughts exactly; I'm sticking with the 10.04 LTS, and if this garbage isn't sorted out by the next LTS, I'm jumping the Ubuntu ship. I understand that everyone is trying to target touch screens and tablets, and that's fine as an added feature, but you can't leave the keyboard and mouse folk behind. That's especially true when they make up the overwhelming majority of your users. I'm actually quite surprised more people haven't spoken out against Metro in the new Windows for the same reason; that interface looks dreadful to use with a mouse. I've been told that Microsoft at least left in a "classic" interface that holds true to the name. If that's true, Canonical needs to take that page from their book...

bluedanieru 15y ago
My understanding is Metro is just the traditional start menu on steroids. At any rate, Microsoft seems better able to pivot than Canonical.
- w33ble 15y ago
  That's sort of true. They are clearly targeting the touch market with it, but it's a lot more than just an application menu. It think it's a brilliant touch interface, but an awful mouse one, though, to be fair, I have yet to use it in any form. As I understand it though, Metro is just a layer on top of Windows, and it can be turned off if that's what you want to do.
  - Raphael 15y ago
    Metro is fine with a mouse. I would like to see it become the new widget layer on top of the desktop wallpaper, without hiding the old task bar, and preserving a Windows-7-style start menu.
Matt_Cutts 15y ago
I'm with you. I run 10.04 LTS on my home machine. I recently took 11.10 for a test-drive, and as a power user Unity just doesn't meet my needs. As a user, nothing about Gnome was broken for me. But in switching to Unity, now Ubuntu feels a lot less useful to me.

kand 15y ago

I was a Ubuntu user for the pass 2 years, only until the heat problem kicks in. I don't know why most people don't have this problem, but my computer is extremely hot while running basic graphical tricks, and moreover, this thing has not been fixed for the last 3 releases. And secondly, the Unity is extremely stupid for multiple monitor. If he has 3 monitors, how would he like it to constantly look to the left most monitor just to switch between tasks? I recently purchased an additional monitor, and because of this stupidity, I no longer use Ubuntu despite I hate Windows so much. This could be a reason why Ubuntu will NEVER get to offices, since most of them have multiple monitors. Wonder if we could have USERS to say what they want in each release? If Ubuntu continues this path, I'm afraid tech-savvy people will stop using it, not to mention many new users will never start trying.

jamesgeck0 15y ago
Most people don't have the problem because it's related to a specific piece of hardware in your machine. Search Launchpad and see if you can add any new details to the bug report, or file a new issue if one doesn't exist.

nice1 15y ago

Ubuntu's had a good run, but nothing last for ever. The great thing about free software is freedom.

marcloney 15y ago

When I first read this article, I got ready to post a hasty reply with all my pet hates about Gnome 3, Unity, etc, etc. Then I remembered the original reason I started using Linux, as a native Windows user, and that is "Choice". So you don't like Gnome. Guess what? Don't use it! You have so many other choices of window managers available to you. Shed a tear for those users on proprietary systems who don't have choice. Don't like the new Start menu? Nobody cares.

gldalmaso 15y ago
Right you are. Also, maybe since all the power-users are so dissatisfied, they could join and manage a new packaged Ubuntu, maybe OUBUNTU (old ubuntu). They have that choice. I for one am happy to have a linux distro geared towards everyday desktop use and modern devices, and that I can show my family/friends as an alternative choice and have them not reply that it's just so damn ugly.
coffeeaddicted 15y ago
I thought the same and starting trying out Window Managers. Until after a few installations/deinstallations I started getting conflicts and wasted a full weekend just getting back to a working system. Now I simply live with whatever my distros put on my desktops unless it got real stopper-bugs that prevent me from working. I guess the positive side is that I learn some new WM now regularly (a little more often this year than I'd hoped for maybe).

schiptsov 15y ago

Yes, all those better ways to do the configuration, such as gconf2, oneconf, and other shit is really annoying, same like people who missing power and flexibility of a text file, not an XML but plain old var=value, or, OK, some Yaml. But what can we do? The mediocre crowds are migrating from windows realms and they like to copy and paste, not to think and learn. ^_^

alexlarsson 15y ago

Reading this thread makes me pretty sad. Usually there are people on hacker news that at least know the background, and generally there is a measure of respect that other people might actually know something about what they work on. The Gnome developers (which includes me) have more than ten years of experience working on unix and developing a desktop for it. Please don't assume we're making decisions because we're stupid, we might actually have reasons to do what we do. Lemme try to explain some background on configuration storage in gnome. But first, the main complaint in the article is that you can't modify the layout of the fallback mode panel in gnome 3. This is just not true, you can modify them in the UI just like before, only you have to hold down alt when you bring up the menus, etc. This was done because a lot of people accidentally changed their panel around causing problems. I'm sure this change could have been better documented and whatnot, but it is possible. Once upon a time there was a design decision in Gnome to use so called "instant apply" configuration options, rather than having each config dialog button have "apply" buttons. You can disagree if you want, but this decision drives the design of the configuration framework. Basically, it implies having some kind of service that handles configuration changes that will tell other applications of configuration changes. Thus was born GConf. The original on-disk format for GConf was an on-disk tree that mirrored the gconf key hierarchy, where each directory had a %gconf.xml file that listed the keys in that directory. However, it turns out that this is a major performance problem when reading settings. Each such file you open causes two random access seeks on the hard drive. One to read the inode and one to read the data. Hard drive consecutive data read speeds are pretty high, but seeks are very slow (for physical reasons), which was significantly affecting login and app startup speed of gnome. So, we merged the all the separate files into xml tree files, using one per application. This cut down on seeks a lot and improved performance. (Of course, a negative aspect of this is that the xml files are not very human readable anymore. But the vast majority of readers do not access the text files directly anyway.) However, even after this gconf reads was a problem for log in performance. We do of course do local caching of gconf data in each process and we preload it in chunks, however during login the gconf daemon was acting as a serialization point for all processes that were starting up. Also, all these xml trees were pretty verbose, so parsing and loading also took some time. Over the years we increased our knowledge of the problem space, and eventually we came up with a replacement for GConf. It has two parts, one is the API, which lives in glib, called GSettings. Its an abstraction for settings with change notification that has client-side schemas (as opposed to server side schemas like with GConf, another thing we learned). The implementation is pluggable, there is an ini file backend, a win32 registry, and the DConf backend, which is the default for Linux distros. DConf uses a binary on-disk format that is mmapable and readable without "parsing". I.e. each app maps the config file readonly (sharing this memory), and lookups is done directly in the in-memory mapping without an intermediate parsed copy of the data. The data is stored in an efficient hash-table which allows very fast key lookups with few pagefaults in the file. The actual data is stored using GValue, an immutable binary datatype for recursive types that is in glib. So when a value is returned we don't even duplicate it but just return a wrapped reference to the data in the mmaped file. Writes to dconf do go through a daemon which handles write serialization and change notification. Communications with the dconf daemon is through dbus, which incidentally has an on-wire binary data format that is a subset of GValue. So, how does this help us? Well, for one thing we never block during login for reading configuration, as all reading is parallelized. Secondly we don't spend any time parsing files, as the config file, once mapped, is already in a compact "parsed" format. Thirdly, we never waste any memory storing copies of configuration data on the heap. Now, there are some obvious drawbacks with binary formats. For instance, you need tools to modify them, like the dconf-editor GUI app or "gsettings list-recursively". Secondly, you can't use text based tools like e.g. git, emacs or diff/patch to maintain them. But, you got to realize that we are not unaware of these problems. We are well aware of them, but we made the conscious decision that the real life problems with the many-text-files approach to configurations (as listed above) outweigh the advantages. Especially considering that most of our users don't need to directly modify the config files.

shareme 15y ago

whaa a poor power user did not get what they wanted..wha..wha... For background ESR work is not in UI but in small but important stuff like GPSd, etc.. He is work here..both GNOME and Ubuntu have made decisions that are making an impact as far as driving adoption of new users to the platform..both sets of developers deserve big round of applause..

FuzzyDunlop 15y ago

If Ubuntu has done anything wrong with the full-on switch to Unity in 11.10, it's that it's kindly done us the favour of removing a classic desktop and not even providing anything approaching similar to replace it. I can't speak for Gnome3 since it doesn't like my hardware at all, and its 'classic' mode seems broken (possibly as a result of compatibility issues). Anyway, that wouldn't be a problem at all, but Unity is still flawed, is totally unproductive for development work, and there's a distinct lack of customisation: The launch bar is useless, and doesn't work at all if you let a window snap to the left hand side. You can only add application shortcuts to it (why can't I add bookmark folders?). There are no configuration options to be seen (what if I don't want auto-hide?), and whatever options there are, they're minimal. Workspace switching isn't smooth at all and requires a strange number of clicks to make any use of. Auto-hiding menubars just obscures GUI elements I'd like to be able to see at all times. If they're not there, I have to stop and remember where to look, because I can't just glance at the top of the screen. The actual name of the app is always visible, but clicking it does nothing. This is unbelievably unintuitive. As for it replacing the classic desktop, I'm not sure what exactly was wrong with it, and why a GUI fit for a netbook or tablet is now being shoehorned into a desktop OS before it's had enough care and attention to bring it up to par with the standard desktop experience. I regret running the upgrade and as soon as I can I'm switching to something more productive and usable, because 11.10 and Unity feels like too big a jump into unfamiliar (and unstable) territory. And this is coming from an OS X user (who only uses Linux at work).

kragen 15y ago

schiptsov posted, in an apparently auto[dead] post: > Yes, all those better ways to do the configuration, such as gconf2, oneconf, and other shit is really annoying, same like people who missing power and flexibility of a text file, not an XML but plain old var=value, or, OK, some Yaml. But what can we do? The mediocre crowds are migrating from windows realms and they like to copy and paste, not to think and learn. ^_^ I just wanted to respond to schiptsov's comment by pointing out that copying and pasting is something you can do if you have a name=value or YAML text file, but not something you can do with gconf-editor. So if there are "mediocre crowds" who "like to copy and paste", they'll be better served by text-based configuration files.

kristianp 15y ago

I'm probably too late to this discussion, but I work at a windows shop, and use ubuntu at home and on servers, so it is an irritation that the ubuntu UI has become more mac-like, starting with the close button moving to the left-hand side. This is mainly because I find it inconsistent. I have put off upgrading ubuntu for this reason, currently I'm on 10.04. What I don't like about ubuntu since 10.04, is that it the UI has become "opionated", without having the customizability that pre-gnome desktop managers have. Specifically, there should be options to put the close/minimize/maximize buttons on whichever side I prefer, and whether to use mac-style menus or windows-style menus.