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(I work at Google) A few employees in particularly security-sensitive positions don't have full root, and have to use "sudo" with a whitelist of commands, allo

(I work at Google) A few employees in particularly security-sensitive positions don't have full root, and have to use "sudo" with a whitelist of commands, allowed packages, and so on. It's fairly easy to get packages added to the whitelist, by filing a request with the security team. Users who need to run insecure operating systems, or need to install arbitrary packages, use heavily sandboxed VMs. Two members of my current team used xmonad before I got here, and I've helped two more to convert. I anticipate there will be more conversions after Precise comes along and forces everyone off GNOME 2. To my knowledge, none of them know anything about Haskell.

keithpeter 14y ago
I am fascinated by the preference for Xmonad as an alternative to Unity/Gnome Shell. Would Gnome 2 -> XFCE or Gnome 2 -> Gnome Classic not make more sense? Or is it more along the lines of: we have to change anyway so lets have a look at a workflow that really fits how we work? I say this as a humble end user who has gone dwm/dmenu -> Unity with 12.04
- jmillikin 14y ago
  GNOME Classic is really just a thin skin over GNOME 3; it doesn't have any of the useful features that the GNOME team removed from their software. XFCE and KDE just aren't very popular in my area, though I don't know why. I have seen people discuss moving to KDE on internal mailing lists, so there is some interest elsewhere in the company. The two people I helped convert have, to my knowledge, not bothered with customising xmonad. They just copied my config, changed a keybinding or two, and then left it alone.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Great, I'm just getting my head around people missing features in Gnome 2 so instead going to a 'bare backed' window manager like Xmonad.
    - jmillikin 14y ago
      I think it's largely a feeling of "what will they remove next"? Say an engineer is a a daily user of ten particular GNOME 2 features. GNOME 3 removes four of them, and hides three more. At that point, the engineer is wondering what will happen to the rest when GNOME 3.3 comes out. In contrast, environments which are explicitly intended to be customised very rarely disable or remove features. Someone who's been using the same configuration for ten years can know that if it works in release N, it'll probably work (maybe with a few minor tweaks) in release N+1. It's worth noting that XMonad has many more features than Metacity; it's not bare-bones by any means. Converting to it isn't like converting to a minimalist WM.
      - keithpeter 14y ago
        That is an interesting way of looking at the situation; Jef Raskin's idea of 'monotony' in the interface (one way of doing everything and that way fixed) is clearly not what you guys want. I take your point about Xmonad, and if you know Haskel you can add stuff as needed
    - sad_panda 14y ago
      I see it as risk avoidance. The learning curve with the basic WMs is steep but a one-time cost. With richer WMs, You pay a tax with your time and productivity every time the UI designers f* with your s*. It seems like UI designers these days are about making BOLD MOVES without apologies.
    - ori_b 14y ago
      The thing is that Gnome3 is relatively highly integrated, and contains implementations of various functionalities. Using a 3rd party tool tends not to work well, because the Gnome implementation conflicts. Using a bare bones window manager doesn't cause the same issues. It's not as integrated, but you can mix and match parts more easily.
    - ralphc 14y ago
      Look into the Mate desktop - it's a rebuild of Gnome 2 with maintainable code. Best way for a test spin now is get the Linux Mint Debian Mate iso and try it in a VM. I actually like Unity, but in Mint the Mate desktop is my favorite, looking forward to Mint 13 with it as a default.
  - AncientPC 14y ago
    Could you point out some of the useful features removed in GNOME 3 not available in fallback mode? I switched from GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3 -> GNOME 3 fallback + Xmonad. I tried to find a suitable alternative to GNOME 3 (Cinnamon, Unity, KDE, XFCE) but was excited to find out about fallback mode. It essentially behaves like GNOME 2 for me, except now I use Xmonad for WM instead of Mutter / Metacity.
    - luser001 14y ago
      I wasn't able to figure out how to remove the top and bottom panels (the window list thing at the bottom and the shutdown button thing on top). I like vertical real estate (would like to merge them into one, like I could with Ubuntu 10.10). And I like no toolbars on on top (to make it easier to click on my firefox tabs (see below)). My favorite GUI customization is to remove the "decorations" (window frame, title bar etc) of maximized windows (to get a little more vertical space). This also makes firefox's "tabs on top" feature look the same on Linux and Windows. You can do it with Compiz+XFCE (which I did in 10.10). Compiz isn't working for me under XFCE in 12.04, so I'm using a PyGTK script I found on the Net to do this.
      - AncientPC 14y ago
        If you're using Gnome 3 fallback you can add / remove applets like Gnome 2. The only difference is you have to alt + right-click on a panel / applet instead of just a regular right-click.
      - technomancy 14y ago
        Most of what you want is available via extensions. The Panel Settings extension lets you turn on autohide, which addressed my primary gripe. devilspie works great with gnome3 to get rid of decorations.
    - jmillikin 14y ago
      A few of my personal pet peeves (note: every disgruntled user has their own, largely disjoint set): 1. The applet to inhibit screen sleeping went away. Without it, I often look up from working on a hard problem to discover that my screens have been blanked out. 2. Something GNOME-ish keeps grabbing my mouse, and won't let it go until I log in with SSH and start killall-ing anything with "gnome" in the process name. It happens once a day or so, I haven't been able to purposefully reproduce it, and it's really annoying. 3. The settings applet was neutered. It now looks like a cheap knockoff of MacOS's system settings, except somehow with even less functionality. It also seems like the GNOME developers simply forgot about it until about a month before the release, because many features that appear to be present are barely functional. For example, Appearance -> Theme only changes gtk3 themes, and most of the gtk2 themes don't have a gtk3 counterpart, so now about half of my apps don't look like the other half. Another example: the new settings applet stores network proxy settings somewhere weird now, so neither Firefox nor Chrome find my proxy settings any more. 4. About half of the GNOME configuration has moved to gconf to dconf, but there's no rhyme or reason as to which half. When I discovered the new settings applet, I tried to change stuff with gconf/dconf, except I have no idea how to figure out which applications use what settings storage backend. 5. A lot of applications don't have key bindings any more, or had them greatly reduced. GNOME 2 was pretty good about this, but many GNOME 3 applications are completely unusable without using the mouse.
- simonz05 14y ago
  > Would Gnome 2 -> XFCE or Gnome 2 -> Gnome Classic not make more sense? In my experience, the more minimal window managers such as XFCE, Open Box and so on required lots of configuration to get right. Furthermore, they don't give you a big advantage over something like Gnome or KDE, except for being more configurable. I'm using the tiling window manager dwm with minimal changes to the default config (added 2 shortcuts and changed some colors) for almost 3 years now. I think the pure simplicity and stability of the software is compelling compared to a minimal version of Gnome.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Amazingly, I moved from dwm/dmenu back into Unity a couple of months ago and don't see any need to move back too quickly (Ctrl-Super-left-arrow and Ctrl-Super-right-arrow provide a basic, way basic, tiling behaviour on Unity).
    - sciurus 14y ago
      If you have a numpad, in Unity you can use ctrl-alt-[0-9]. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 7 - Place window in top left corner of screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 8 - Place window in top half of screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 9 - Place window in top right corner of screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 5 - Center/Maximize the window in the middle of the screen. In 12.04 this toggles between maximize and restore state Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 1 - Place window in the bottom left corner of the screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 2 - Place window in the bottom half of the screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 3 - Place window in the bottom right corner of the screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 0 - Maximize the current window.
- zem 14y ago
  i used to use xmonad + gnome2 (gnome2 for the desktop environment, xmonad as a replacement for the gnome window manager). now that gnome has dropped the ball, i've switched to xmonad + xfce. in either case, xmonad just replaces the window manager for me, not the entire desktop environment.
- Symmetry 14y ago
  There's no contradiction between wanting to use Gnome and wanting to use XMonad. Personally, I think I slightly prefer the default Unity experience over Gnome 2, Windows 7, or Max OS - but its hard to customize in the ways I want. However, with a simple sudo aptitude install xmonad suckless-tools gnome-session-fallback sudo vim /usr/share/gnome-sessions/gnome-classic.session and change the window manger to xmonad I'm happy as a clam.
dkersten 14y ago
My question is: why XMonad over one of the other tiling window managers, eg AwesomeWM? Just curious what XMonad has to offer that I may not know about (I personally use Musca).
- jrockway 14y ago
  Because XMonad is library for writing your own window manager rather than just a pre-built window manager. That means that everything will always work exactly how you want it to because you're the one programming it. Also, awesome used to crash a lot.
  - dkersten 14y ago
    I don't use awesome myself so I don't know about it crashing, but it appears to be a base to build your own system from, in the sense that most of the functionality comes from extensions written in Lua. Musca, my window manager of choice currently (though I am beginning to try out others too, just in case I'm missing something), is a very small WM with very few features, but a very simple way of extending it through scripting (in any language). Musca itself is tiny: little under 4K lines of C (including whitespace and comments), the binary is about 190KB. It delegates its "menu" to dmenu. If you want anything else, you use external scripts or programs.
- brandon 14y ago
  There's also a substantial Awesome user base at Google; I think the choice of tiling window manager is largely based on peer usage.
- yew 14y ago
  Not at Google, but: I chose xmonad when I was making the switch because it seemed to be the most stable of the tiling window managers at the time. I've stuck with it mostly out of inertia; I don't actually know much Haskell. I avoided awesome because I'm not a fan of Lua. Not as a matter of ideology; I just don't enjoy working with it.
- ralphc 14y ago
  Am I the only Ubuntu user that likes Unity? Then again it could just be because it reminds me of Macs and a Mac is my main machine.
eliasmacpherson 14y ago
What I am fascinated is the widespread migration caused by unity. In my circle, users have moved distributions to mint and debian, changed to using twm, dwm and xmonad. The despair at unity was caused by the bugs, and the fact that the ubuntu android distro required a proper screen to be utilised properly. It was not caused by the concept, but the implementation. If the user unfriendliness caused by unity was intended to support smartphones and smaller screen devices, why does the mobile unity require an external screen? Baffling! The user decisions made were relatively permanent. The users who made changes don't seem to be swayed by assertions that more recent versions of ubuntu have better implementations of unity.
- zanny 14y ago
  I know I am planning on using Unity 12.04 to push desktop Linux on some relatives who still are running XP. Considering getting them over to 7 would be just as much labor and 8 is significantly worse than Unity ever was, now is prime time for switching them off the sinking M$ ship.
- res0nat0r 14y ago
  Why did you feel forced to switch distros? My company just switched from RHEL to Ubuntu so we developers could have a < 7 year old OS release for our daily desktop use, and Unity was installed by default on our new Ubuntu desktops. I don't like Unity, but I simply replaced it with my two favourite window managers via 'apt-get install fluxbox awesome'. There is no need to replace your whole distro because you don't like the default window manager.
  - adgar 14y ago
    > There is no need to replace your whole distro because you don't like the default window manager. It's... a Google thing. I haven't gotten around to planning around Unity yet, but I'm not surprised by this. It's classic Google culture to just throw the baby out with the bathwater and build the damn thing over, (presumedly) better. Funny to see it happen on an individual level!
  - jmillikin 14y ago
krzyk 14y ago
I used for about a year IceWM and I loved everything in it (I always have a single window in full screen) besides the fact that it resized a simple modal boxes (e.g. firefox asking for proxy credentials) to full screen, which was really ugly. If I would switch (from XFCE) to xmonad, would it do such strange things to small modal boxes? I don't like to split my screen, I always have windows if full screen.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Do you know about XFCE and Alt-F11? The Alt-F11 keyboard shortcut (and the corresponding title bar menu command) in XFCE remove the window decorations and maximise what is left, so you get (say) the Web browser menu bar right at the top of the screen and the window covers any panels top and bottom.
  - krzyk 14y ago
    I didn't know about that shortcut, it's really nice :) But I still plan to test xmonad and see if it be a good fit for me.
- onli 14y ago
  That probably was a misconfiguration. IceWM has never done this on my system. Maybe you want to give it another chance :) (I'm very happy using IceWM without taskbar, but with simdock, conky for date/time and cpu/network-monitor and stalonetray)

keithpeter 14y ago

I am fascinated by the preference for Xmonad as an alternative to Unity/Gnome Shell. Would Gnome 2 -> XFCE or Gnome 2 -> Gnome Classic not make more sense? Or is it more along the lines of: we have to change anyway so lets have a look at a workflow that really fits how we work? I say this as a humble end user who has gone dwm/dmenu -> Unity with 12.04

jmillikin 14y ago
GNOME Classic is really just a thin skin over GNOME 3; it doesn't have any of the useful features that the GNOME team removed from their software. XFCE and KDE just aren't very popular in my area, though I don't know why. I have seen people discuss moving to KDE on internal mailing lists, so there is some interest elsewhere in the company. The two people I helped convert have, to my knowledge, not bothered with customising xmonad. They just copied my config, changed a keybinding or two, and then left it alone.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Great, I'm just getting my head around people missing features in Gnome 2 so instead going to a 'bare backed' window manager like Xmonad.
  - jmillikin 14y ago
    I think it's largely a feeling of "what will they remove next"? Say an engineer is a a daily user of ten particular GNOME 2 features. GNOME 3 removes four of them, and hides three more. At that point, the engineer is wondering what will happen to the rest when GNOME 3.3 comes out. In contrast, environments which are explicitly intended to be customised very rarely disable or remove features. Someone who's been using the same configuration for ten years can know that if it works in release N, it'll probably work (maybe with a few minor tweaks) in release N+1. It's worth noting that XMonad has many more features than Metacity; it's not bare-bones by any means. Converting to it isn't like converting to a minimalist WM.
    - keithpeter 14y ago
      That is an interesting way of looking at the situation; Jef Raskin's idea of 'monotony' in the interface (one way of doing everything and that way fixed) is clearly not what you guys want. I take your point about Xmonad, and if you know Haskel you can add stuff as needed
  - sad_panda 14y ago
    I see it as risk avoidance. The learning curve with the basic WMs is steep but a one-time cost. With richer WMs, You pay a tax with your time and productivity every time the UI designers f* with your s*. It seems like UI designers these days are about making BOLD MOVES without apologies.
  - ori_b 14y ago
    The thing is that Gnome3 is relatively highly integrated, and contains implementations of various functionalities. Using a 3rd party tool tends not to work well, because the Gnome implementation conflicts. Using a bare bones window manager doesn't cause the same issues. It's not as integrated, but you can mix and match parts more easily.
  - ralphc 14y ago
    Look into the Mate desktop - it's a rebuild of Gnome 2 with maintainable code. Best way for a test spin now is get the Linux Mint Debian Mate iso and try it in a VM. I actually like Unity, but in Mint the Mate desktop is my favorite, looking forward to Mint 13 with it as a default.
- AncientPC 14y ago
  Could you point out some of the useful features removed in GNOME 3 not available in fallback mode? I switched from GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3 -> GNOME 3 fallback + Xmonad. I tried to find a suitable alternative to GNOME 3 (Cinnamon, Unity, KDE, XFCE) but was excited to find out about fallback mode. It essentially behaves like GNOME 2 for me, except now I use Xmonad for WM instead of Mutter / Metacity.
  - luser001 14y ago
    I wasn't able to figure out how to remove the top and bottom panels (the window list thing at the bottom and the shutdown button thing on top). I like vertical real estate (would like to merge them into one, like I could with Ubuntu 10.10). And I like no toolbars on on top (to make it easier to click on my firefox tabs (see below)). My favorite GUI customization is to remove the "decorations" (window frame, title bar etc) of maximized windows (to get a little more vertical space). This also makes firefox's "tabs on top" feature look the same on Linux and Windows. You can do it with Compiz+XFCE (which I did in 10.10). Compiz isn't working for me under XFCE in 12.04, so I'm using a PyGTK script I found on the Net to do this.
    - AncientPC 14y ago
      If you're using Gnome 3 fallback you can add / remove applets like Gnome 2. The only difference is you have to alt + right-click on a panel / applet instead of just a regular right-click.
    - technomancy 14y ago
      Most of what you want is available via extensions. The Panel Settings extension lets you turn on autohide, which addressed my primary gripe. devilspie works great with gnome3 to get rid of decorations.
  - jmillikin 14y ago
    A few of my personal pet peeves (note: every disgruntled user has their own, largely disjoint set): 1. The applet to inhibit screen sleeping went away. Without it, I often look up from working on a hard problem to discover that my screens have been blanked out. 2. Something GNOME-ish keeps grabbing my mouse, and won't let it go until I log in with SSH and start killall-ing anything with "gnome" in the process name. It happens once a day or so, I haven't been able to purposefully reproduce it, and it's really annoying. 3. The settings applet was neutered. It now looks like a cheap knockoff of MacOS's system settings, except somehow with even less functionality. It also seems like the GNOME developers simply forgot about it until about a month before the release, because many features that appear to be present are barely functional. For example, Appearance -> Theme only changes gtk3 themes, and most of the gtk2 themes don't have a gtk3 counterpart, so now about half of my apps don't look like the other half. Another example: the new settings applet stores network proxy settings somewhere weird now, so neither Firefox nor Chrome find my proxy settings any more. 4. About half of the GNOME configuration has moved to gconf to dconf, but there's no rhyme or reason as to which half. When I discovered the new settings applet, I tried to change stuff with gconf/dconf, except I have no idea how to figure out which applications use what settings storage backend. 5. A lot of applications don't have key bindings any more, or had them greatly reduced. GNOME 2 was pretty good about this, but many GNOME 3 applications are completely unusable without using the mouse.
simonz05 14y ago
> Would Gnome 2 -> XFCE or Gnome 2 -> Gnome Classic not make more sense? In my experience, the more minimal window managers such as XFCE, Open Box and so on required lots of configuration to get right. Furthermore, they don't give you a big advantage over something like Gnome or KDE, except for being more configurable. I'm using the tiling window manager dwm with minimal changes to the default config (added 2 shortcuts and changed some colors) for almost 3 years now. I think the pure simplicity and stability of the software is compelling compared to a minimal version of Gnome.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Amazingly, I moved from dwm/dmenu back into Unity a couple of months ago and don't see any need to move back too quickly (Ctrl-Super-left-arrow and Ctrl-Super-right-arrow provide a basic, way basic, tiling behaviour on Unity).
  - sciurus 14y ago
    If you have a numpad, in Unity you can use ctrl-alt-[0-9]. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 7 - Place window in top left corner of screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 8 - Place window in top half of screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 9 - Place window in top right corner of screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 5 - Center/Maximize the window in the middle of the screen. In 12.04 this toggles between maximize and restore state Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 1 - Place window in the bottom left corner of the screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 2 - Place window in the bottom half of the screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 3 - Place window in the bottom right corner of the screen. Ctrl-Alt-Numpad 0 - Maximize the current window.
zem 14y ago
i used to use xmonad + gnome2 (gnome2 for the desktop environment, xmonad as a replacement for the gnome window manager). now that gnome has dropped the ball, i've switched to xmonad + xfce. in either case, xmonad just replaces the window manager for me, not the entire desktop environment.
Symmetry 14y ago
There's no contradiction between wanting to use Gnome and wanting to use XMonad. Personally, I think I slightly prefer the default Unity experience over Gnome 2, Windows 7, or Max OS - but its hard to customize in the ways I want. However, with a simple sudo aptitude install xmonad suckless-tools gnome-session-fallback sudo vim /usr/share/gnome-sessions/gnome-classic.session and change the window manger to xmonad I'm happy as a clam.

dkersten 14y ago

My question is: why XMonad over one of the other tiling window managers, eg AwesomeWM? Just curious what XMonad has to offer that I may not know about (I personally use Musca).

jrockway 14y ago
Because XMonad is library for writing your own window manager rather than just a pre-built window manager. That means that everything will always work exactly how you want it to because you're the one programming it. Also, awesome used to crash a lot.
- dkersten 14y ago
  I don't use awesome myself so I don't know about it crashing, but it appears to be a base to build your own system from, in the sense that most of the functionality comes from extensions written in Lua. Musca, my window manager of choice currently (though I am beginning to try out others too, just in case I'm missing something), is a very small WM with very few features, but a very simple way of extending it through scripting (in any language). Musca itself is tiny: little under 4K lines of C (including whitespace and comments), the binary is about 190KB. It delegates its "menu" to dmenu. If you want anything else, you use external scripts or programs.
brandon 14y ago
There's also a substantial Awesome user base at Google; I think the choice of tiling window manager is largely based on peer usage.
yew 14y ago
Not at Google, but: I chose xmonad when I was making the switch because it seemed to be the most stable of the tiling window managers at the time. I've stuck with it mostly out of inertia; I don't actually know much Haskell. I avoided awesome because I'm not a fan of Lua. Not as a matter of ideology; I just don't enjoy working with it.
ralphc 14y ago
Am I the only Ubuntu user that likes Unity? Then again it could just be because it reminds me of Macs and a Mac is my main machine.

eliasmacpherson 14y ago

What I am fascinated is the widespread migration caused by unity. In my circle, users have moved distributions to mint and debian, changed to using twm, dwm and xmonad. The despair at unity was caused by the bugs, and the fact that the ubuntu android distro required a proper screen to be utilised properly. It was not caused by the concept, but the implementation. If the user unfriendliness caused by unity was intended to support smartphones and smaller screen devices, why does the mobile unity require an external screen? Baffling! The user decisions made were relatively permanent. The users who made changes don't seem to be swayed by assertions that more recent versions of ubuntu have better implementations of unity.

zanny 14y ago
I know I am planning on using Unity 12.04 to push desktop Linux on some relatives who still are running XP. Considering getting them over to 7 would be just as much labor and 8 is significantly worse than Unity ever was, now is prime time for switching them off the sinking M$ ship.
res0nat0r 14y ago
Why did you feel forced to switch distros? My company just switched from RHEL to Ubuntu so we developers could have a < 7 year old OS release for our daily desktop use, and Unity was installed by default on our new Ubuntu desktops. I don't like Unity, but I simply replaced it with my two favourite window managers via 'apt-get install fluxbox awesome'. There is no need to replace your whole distro because you don't like the default window manager.
- adgar 14y ago
  > There is no need to replace your whole distro because you don't like the default window manager. It's... a Google thing. I haven't gotten around to planning around Unity yet, but I'm not surprised by this. It's classic Google culture to just throw the baby out with the bathwater and build the damn thing over, (presumedly) better. Funny to see it happen on an individual level!
- jmillikin 14y ago

krzyk 14y ago

I used for about a year IceWM and I loved everything in it (I always have a single window in full screen) besides the fact that it resized a simple modal boxes (e.g. firefox asking for proxy credentials) to full screen, which was really ugly. If I would switch (from XFCE) to xmonad, would it do such strange things to small modal boxes? I don't like to split my screen, I always have windows if full screen.

keithpeter 14y ago
Do you know about XFCE and Alt-F11? The Alt-F11 keyboard shortcut (and the corresponding title bar menu command) in XFCE remove the window decorations and maximise what is left, so you get (say) the Web browser menu bar right at the top of the screen and the window covers any panels top and bottom.
- krzyk 14y ago
  I didn't know about that shortcut, it's really nice :) But I still plan to test xmonad and see if it be a good fit for me.
onli 14y ago
That probably was a misconfiguration. IceWM has never done this on my system. Maybe you want to give it another chance :) (I'm very happy using IceWM without taskbar, but with simdock, conky for date/time and cpu/network-monitor and stalonetray)