5 ms·

As much as it pains me to admit it, I'm now using Cinnamon as a desktop environment. I really, really wanted Unity to work, but I've had continued performance p

by rufugee 14y ago

As much as it pains me to admit it, I'm now using Cinnamon as a desktop environment. I really, really wanted Unity to work, but I've had continued performance problems which make it ultimately unusable for me. I understand Ubuntu's need to turn a profit, but I really wish they'd focus on making Unity stable and performant before chasing down these other opportunities... Disclaimer: I run three monitors, so I'm probably different from the average Unity user.

ajasmin 14y ago
I really hope they get the tablet interface right. Unity on the desktop has been a bumpy road. Although it's getting better, each release has its quirks. I'm having a lot of issues with their new web app integration for instance. Since Ubuntu on the tablet is a literal clean slate, they can at least avoid the puzzle of making existing applications fit their desktop guidelines. A lot of popular apps still don't use the app menu for instance (GUI version of Vim, Eclipse, and even that new Steam for Ubuntu).
donniezazen 14y ago
Any mobile development will help laptop and desktop users. They recently cut down 200MBs of RAM usage in Unity. All apps from phone and tablet will be portable to desktop. I sincerely hope Ubuntu pursue's it to the end.
levesque 14y ago
I find that Unity feels sluggish and inelegant, performance wise. There is always a slight delay when I open the dash, and I generally dislike it's behavior. However, I stay with it because I dislike the alternatives, so no point switching for me. I think this is good news for Unity on the desktop because it means they will be tweaking the hell out of it for performance. I read that it's already better in 13.04, and we can probably expect it to get better over the releases. Other than that, I wouldn't use Ubuntu on tablets right now. I'm not enough of an early adopter to switch to this OS which is - let's face it - probably not ready for prime time and still pretty buggy. The first versions of Android sucked, I don't see why this would be an exception. Nailing it on the first try is very hard.
- mtgx 14y ago
  I really hope Canonical doesn't intend to release a quad core Cortex A15 Ubuntu tablet with even the slightest lag or stuttering. I'd rather they delay it for months until they fix that, instead of releasing it like that. People are not going to take that for tablets anymore, and not with today's hardware. From what I read somewhere, Ubuntu for phones was pretty CPU intensive, which could mean it didn't have hardware acceleration. I did notice some stutters when switching between apps in their own video. So that better not be happening when they actually release the devices, or people aren't going to give it a second thought. In Ubuntu mobile's case, the first impression will literally decide whether Ubuntu has a future in mobile or not. So they better make sure everything is absolutely flawless, instead of hurrying up to ship it. If Ubuntu for phones and tablets has the same performance issues as on desktop, then might as well call it a dead-end now.
  - fdr_cs 14y ago
    It does have hardware acceleration, it is using android hardware drivers
  - codygman 14y ago
    Sadly this sounds more like the Debian way than the Ubuntu way. I jumped ship on Ubuntu around 9.04 when it felt like they just started tacking on features without major quality control that led to degradation of Ubuntu. I tried 12.04 not too long ago, and some of the same lagginess/weird quirks were still there. Now that many ubuntians are now trying to push for less testing/more releasing in Debian, it's like a skyscraper company telling their foundation builders to use sack concrete instead of whats been tested and proven to work for many years.
- meztez 14y ago
  Some of you might have had bad experiences with Unity. I had some too, when it launched. But as it stands now it's integrated in my workflow and it's much faster/easier than anything I've experienced so far with Windows 7. I think for a lot of people that don't do much on a computer, Unity/Ubuntu makes way more sense than it's iOS and Win counterpart. It's cleaner, there is less "clutter" on the screen. Even from a tweaker/hacker perspective, when you are not working/coding and just want to relax and watch some content, Unity does the job pretty well. I prefer their vision of the post-PC era than what Win/iOS propose. At least it's an open platform and it integrates fluidly in your activity flow.
jcastro 14y ago
There's been a ton of performance improvements made to Unity for the past 6 months (mostly due to needing to work on things like Tablets). Here's an example of the work from Feb: - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-February/036436.html https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-February... - https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-r-reduced-power-ram https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-r-redu... For me the Dash is now finally fast/almost instant as opposed to 12.10. All these improvements will be in 13.04 (and the select safe ones will be backported to 12.04 over time).
- rufugee 14y ago
  Great...I'll look forward to the 13.04 beta. Thanks!
orofino 14y ago
I'm not using Unity, so I won't talk to that point, only the phone/tablet opportunity you think they should be ignoring. Apple is already a heavyweight in this area and Google/Samsung have a dominant second place. Viable tablet alternatives need to establish a foothold now, before there is too much lock in from the existing entrants. Every iOS or Play app that I buy will make me (as a consumer) less likely to switch platforms. This is true for me, even as an early adopter. For a normal consumer that doesn't have the free cash, nor the desire for constant change, it is a killer. Every month that they fail to have this out the door, they lose potential customers. [edit: just a bit of editing]
- mtgx 14y ago
  I actually think the tablet market is a lot more open for the taking than the smartphone market, contrary to what many tech writers thought a while ago that it's just going to be an "iPad market" just like the iPod market. The smartphone market is almost 1 billion units per year now (or will be this year), with the potential for 3-4 billion units. The tablet market is only around a 100 million market right now, with the potential for at least 2 billion units per year. The biggest chunk of these markets will belong to free and open source operating systems like Android and Ubuntu, so Ubuntu definite has a chance here. But most of the those markets will be lower-end devices, obviously, and Android can already work on very low-end hardware. Plus it has a much bigger momentum. If Ubuntu wants to have a significant market share of that, it needs become as "lean" as possible on low-end hardware, and make sure it makes people excited about it, so it gets a lot of buzz/marketing for free.
kombine 14y ago
I tried to use Cinnamon and it was a very poor experience. It is very immature, simple things that are the norm on existing desktop environments are not there. I can't say I use Unity too much, I'm more of a KDE user, but Unity is a lot more stable.
- endtime 14y ago
  When I used Unity at work, it would literally freeze every few days, and I'd have to ssh in from another machine and restart it. Tried Gnome 3 for a while but eventually gave up and went with Cinnamon.
  - rufugee 14y ago
    Same for me re: Unity. On Gnome 3, it was a 50/50 chance that the screensaver would be frozen when I returned to work the next morning. Sometimes dropping to a console and killing the screensaver process would work, but a lot of the time it required a full restart of gdm.
- null_ptr 14y ago
  What simple things was Cinammon lacking? I actualy enjoy using it more than any other DE I ever used. It keeps the traditional things I want and has a clean modern feel, and is easy to customize without overwhelming you with choices.
  - pekk 14y ago
    You are fully entitled to use whatever you want and enjoy it. However, the interface design of Windows 98 is 15 years away from being "modern." The best way you can sell this kind of design is to call it timeless, or say that one shouldn't fix what isn't broken.
    - vacri 14y ago
      There is absolutely nothing of content in your comment, it's all empty hand-waving. Why not specify something as the parent comment asked? I mean, the GP said that cinnamon was too simple and immature, and when asked why, your response is that this design is, essentially, overly mature.
sweetdreamerit 14y ago
i moved to xfce after one year of troubles with Unity
naner 14y ago
I've moved to Cinnamon, too. I tried Gnome 3 for a few weeks, went back to a simple window manager for awhile (I had used Openbox for years), and also tried Unity and KDE4. Turns out I'm used to a certain kind of workflow based on "traditional" desktops. I prefer having resizable floating windows to maximized windows, I rely on too much desktop infrastructure to just use a window manager anymore, and KDE has extremely busy and cluttered interfaces. I've never seen anything like it, it was overwhelming.
- themstheones 14y ago
  Can you install cinnamon on ubuntu? Or do you have to migrate to Mint?
  - vacri 14y ago
    Cinnamon is even in the Debian repos now.
hamax 14y ago
How public reacts to Canonical announcements: https://plus.google.com/104354412340246703061/posts/TUCPE7JE2ta https://plus.google.com/104354412340246703061/posts/TUCPE7JE...
kunai 14y ago
I've tried Unity on 13.04; Canonical's make a lot of tweaks to the environment and it's much faster and the apps in the dock launch instantly on click. Of course, I never use full desktop environments anyways; all of them are too big and resource-heavy, and their animations and cool whizzbangery always distracts me and interrupts my workflow. I only use WindowMaker now with GNUStep apps (with the exception of Firefox). It's old-school, but it works.
- codygman 14y ago
  I was using fluxbox, but then I had a stint with dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org/ http://dwm.suckless.org/). I got interested in haskell and finally settled on xmonad (http://xmonad.org/ http://xmonad.org/) with dmenu which seems to be insanely stable. This is the most distraction free environment with absolutely no limitations (in the scope of my work) I have ever worked with. Not to mention it'll run on any netbook easily, or other low spec computer.
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
When Unity came out, I reverted to gnome-classic for a while and tried Cinnamon, but found it to be the least stable - my system would occasionally freeze. Now I'm on Unity. It has improved to the point that it meets my needs (granted, I've only got one or two monitors running at a time) and stays out of the way. (I've got Docky running, which I find makes it easier to switch between applications.) I have also come to appreciate the elegance of the HUD as I've learned to use it.
- barrkel 14y ago
  I have to use Ubuntu at work, and Unity took a lot of customization to be workable. Compiz regularly crashes, but thankfully it automatically restarts. Now I don't need to panic when the whole screen stops updating. The "snap" window dragging feature is broken in the presence of multiple monitors; as you drag the mouse across the monitor boundary, the mouse pointer becomes momentarily disconnected from the window location, so that you are moving the window as if by a long invisible stick, not by its original grab location. The overlay scrollbars don't interact well with Eclipse; JUnit running tests outputs file paths that Eclipse turns into hyperlinks, and the hyperlink mouseover stops the scrollbar from from being triggered when the pointer approaches the child window border. The overlay scrollbar thing doesn't seem to have been fully thought through. Gnome-terminal is one of the slowest terminals I've ever used; it would literally slow down development by blocking on log-verbose tests. I've gone back to my old stalwart of rxvt. I don't understand the difference between Windows key and Alt key command prompts. I've given up trying to figure out how to register my various user-directory installed applications with the taskbar thing. So I've stopped using both, and now I start all my apps from the terminal, with shell scripts to redirect output if they are chatty. The Alt-Tab task switcher is broken just like the OS X one is, switching between its concept of applications rather than top level windows. This means alt-tabbing between Eclipse and Firefox would bring the Downloads window to the fore, leaving the actual browser hidden behind maximized Eclipse. Usability disaster. With some difficulty and playing around with preference managers that come with warning labels, I've rebound the keys to a slightly more usable window switcher. Oh, and the fun I had when I tried to bind Ctrl+Alt+F12 to a command in Eclipse; took me back decades to switching terminals with Alt+F keys. In short, Ubuntu Unity is horrifically bad. Linux is completely inappropriate for the desktop, unless you are so inept you only use a browser (get an ipad instead), or you are sufficiently skilled you think nothing of switching window managers. The trough in the middle is very ill served.
wpietri 14y ago
I'm still using Unity on two of my laptops. (They're both Thinkpads, which are very popular for Linux users.) Unity definitely still has performance and stability problems, as well as significant UI glitches. I don't think I've had more than a week of uptime out of either laptop, and I think the median is something like 2 days. That was not the case with earlier versions of Ubuntu on the same hardware. I like the ideas behind Unity, but the execution has been terrible. It's pretty obvious they're focused on arbitrary schedules over a solid user experience.
skriticos2 14y ago
I have nothing against Unity. Sure, it had it's issues when it started, but the LTS version is quite solid. Running a laptop from an Ubuntu OEM (System 76) with high end CPU (I7) and SSD I can't complain about performance or compatibility issues at all (though I'm only on a dual 1080p config). Steam also works quite OK. Though most of the time I'm in a terminal with vim, so I don't care much about most Unity features. It looks nicer than the dated GNOME 2 / 3 / KDE stuff though (personal taste). Also, I really got used to Ubuntu One file sync and music store and indicators.

by rufugee 14y ago

ajasmin 14y ago

I really hope they get the tablet interface right. Unity on the desktop has been a bumpy road. Although it's getting better, each release has its quirks. I'm having a lot of issues with their new web app integration for instance. Since Ubuntu on the tablet is a literal clean slate, they can at least avoid the puzzle of making existing applications fit their desktop guidelines. A lot of popular apps still don't use the app menu for instance (GUI version of Vim, Eclipse, and even that new Steam for Ubuntu).

donniezazen 14y ago

Any mobile development will help laptop and desktop users. They recently cut down 200MBs of RAM usage in Unity. All apps from phone and tablet will be portable to desktop. I sincerely hope Ubuntu pursue's it to the end.

levesque 14y ago

I find that Unity feels sluggish and inelegant, performance wise. There is always a slight delay when I open the dash, and I generally dislike it's behavior. However, I stay with it because I dislike the alternatives, so no point switching for me. I think this is good news for Unity on the desktop because it means they will be tweaking the hell out of it for performance. I read that it's already better in 13.04, and we can probably expect it to get better over the releases. Other than that, I wouldn't use Ubuntu on tablets right now. I'm not enough of an early adopter to switch to this OS which is - let's face it - probably not ready for prime time and still pretty buggy. The first versions of Android sucked, I don't see why this would be an exception. Nailing it on the first try is very hard.

mtgx 14y ago
I really hope Canonical doesn't intend to release a quad core Cortex A15 Ubuntu tablet with even the slightest lag or stuttering. I'd rather they delay it for months until they fix that, instead of releasing it like that. People are not going to take that for tablets anymore, and not with today's hardware. From what I read somewhere, Ubuntu for phones was pretty CPU intensive, which could mean it didn't have hardware acceleration. I did notice some stutters when switching between apps in their own video. So that better not be happening when they actually release the devices, or people aren't going to give it a second thought. In Ubuntu mobile's case, the first impression will literally decide whether Ubuntu has a future in mobile or not. So they better make sure everything is absolutely flawless, instead of hurrying up to ship it. If Ubuntu for phones and tablets has the same performance issues as on desktop, then might as well call it a dead-end now.
- fdr_cs 14y ago
  It does have hardware acceleration, it is using android hardware drivers
- codygman 14y ago
  Sadly this sounds more like the Debian way than the Ubuntu way. I jumped ship on Ubuntu around 9.04 when it felt like they just started tacking on features without major quality control that led to degradation of Ubuntu. I tried 12.04 not too long ago, and some of the same lagginess/weird quirks were still there. Now that many ubuntians are now trying to push for less testing/more releasing in Debian, it's like a skyscraper company telling their foundation builders to use sack concrete instead of whats been tested and proven to work for many years.
meztez 14y ago
Some of you might have had bad experiences with Unity. I had some too, when it launched. But as it stands now it's integrated in my workflow and it's much faster/easier than anything I've experienced so far with Windows 7. I think for a lot of people that don't do much on a computer, Unity/Ubuntu makes way more sense than it's iOS and Win counterpart. It's cleaner, there is less "clutter" on the screen. Even from a tweaker/hacker perspective, when you are not working/coding and just want to relax and watch some content, Unity does the job pretty well. I prefer their vision of the post-PC era than what Win/iOS propose. At least it's an open platform and it integrates fluidly in your activity flow.

jcastro 14y ago

There's been a ton of performance improvements made to Unity for the past 6 months (mostly due to needing to work on things like Tablets). Here's an example of the work from Feb: - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-February/036436.html https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-February... - https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-r-reduced-power-ram https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-r-redu... For me the Dash is now finally fast/almost instant as opposed to 12.10. All these improvements will be in 13.04 (and the select safe ones will be backported to 12.04 over time).

rufugee 14y ago
Great...I'll look forward to the 13.04 beta. Thanks!

orofino 14y ago

I'm not using Unity, so I won't talk to that point, only the phone/tablet opportunity you think they should be ignoring. Apple is already a heavyweight in this area and Google/Samsung have a dominant second place. Viable tablet alternatives need to establish a foothold now, before there is too much lock in from the existing entrants. Every iOS or Play app that I buy will make me (as a consumer) less likely to switch platforms. This is true for me, even as an early adopter. For a normal consumer that doesn't have the free cash, nor the desire for constant change, it is a killer. Every month that they fail to have this out the door, they lose potential customers. [edit: just a bit of editing]

mtgx 14y ago
I actually think the tablet market is a lot more open for the taking than the smartphone market, contrary to what many tech writers thought a while ago that it's just going to be an "iPad market" just like the iPod market. The smartphone market is almost 1 billion units per year now (or will be this year), with the potential for 3-4 billion units. The tablet market is only around a 100 million market right now, with the potential for at least 2 billion units per year. The biggest chunk of these markets will belong to free and open source operating systems like Android and Ubuntu, so Ubuntu definite has a chance here. But most of the those markets will be lower-end devices, obviously, and Android can already work on very low-end hardware. Plus it has a much bigger momentum. If Ubuntu wants to have a significant market share of that, it needs become as "lean" as possible on low-end hardware, and make sure it makes people excited about it, so it gets a lot of buzz/marketing for free.

kombine 14y ago

I tried to use Cinnamon and it was a very poor experience. It is very immature, simple things that are the norm on existing desktop environments are not there. I can't say I use Unity too much, I'm more of a KDE user, but Unity is a lot more stable.

endtime 14y ago
When I used Unity at work, it would literally freeze every few days, and I'd have to ssh in from another machine and restart it. Tried Gnome 3 for a while but eventually gave up and went with Cinnamon.
- rufugee 14y ago
  Same for me re: Unity. On Gnome 3, it was a 50/50 chance that the screensaver would be frozen when I returned to work the next morning. Sometimes dropping to a console and killing the screensaver process would work, but a lot of the time it required a full restart of gdm.
null_ptr 14y ago
What simple things was Cinammon lacking? I actualy enjoy using it more than any other DE I ever used. It keeps the traditional things I want and has a clean modern feel, and is easy to customize without overwhelming you with choices.
- pekk 14y ago
  You are fully entitled to use whatever you want and enjoy it. However, the interface design of Windows 98 is 15 years away from being "modern." The best way you can sell this kind of design is to call it timeless, or say that one shouldn't fix what isn't broken.
  - vacri 14y ago
    There is absolutely nothing of content in your comment, it's all empty hand-waving. Why not specify something as the parent comment asked? I mean, the GP said that cinnamon was too simple and immature, and when asked why, your response is that this design is, essentially, overly mature.

sweetdreamerit 14y ago

i moved to xfce after one year of troubles with Unity

naner 14y ago

I've moved to Cinnamon, too. I tried Gnome 3 for a few weeks, went back to a simple window manager for awhile (I had used Openbox for years), and also tried Unity and KDE4. Turns out I'm used to a certain kind of workflow based on "traditional" desktops. I prefer having resizable floating windows to maximized windows, I rely on too much desktop infrastructure to just use a window manager anymore, and KDE has extremely busy and cluttered interfaces. I've never seen anything like it, it was overwhelming.

themstheones 14y ago
Can you install cinnamon on ubuntu? Or do you have to migrate to Mint?
- vacri 14y ago
  Cinnamon is even in the Debian repos now.

hamax 14y ago

How public reacts to Canonical announcements: https://plus.google.com/104354412340246703061/posts/TUCPE7JE2ta https://plus.google.com/104354412340246703061/posts/TUCPE7JE...

kunai 14y ago

I've tried Unity on 13.04; Canonical's make a lot of tweaks to the environment and it's much faster and the apps in the dock launch instantly on click. Of course, I never use full desktop environments anyways; all of them are too big and resource-heavy, and their animations and cool whizzbangery always distracts me and interrupts my workflow. I only use WindowMaker now with GNUStep apps (with the exception of Firefox). It's old-school, but it works.

codygman 14y ago
I was using fluxbox, but then I had a stint with dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org/ http://dwm.suckless.org/). I got interested in haskell and finally settled on xmonad (http://xmonad.org/ http://xmonad.org/) with dmenu which seems to be insanely stable. This is the most distraction free environment with absolutely no limitations (in the scope of my work) I have ever worked with. Not to mention it'll run on any netbook easily, or other low spec computer.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

When Unity came out, I reverted to gnome-classic for a while and tried Cinnamon, but found it to be the least stable - my system would occasionally freeze. Now I'm on Unity. It has improved to the point that it meets my needs (granted, I've only got one or two monitors running at a time) and stays out of the way. (I've got Docky running, which I find makes it easier to switch between applications.) I have also come to appreciate the elegance of the HUD as I've learned to use it.

barrkel 14y ago
I have to use Ubuntu at work, and Unity took a lot of customization to be workable. Compiz regularly crashes, but thankfully it automatically restarts. Now I don't need to panic when the whole screen stops updating. The "snap" window dragging feature is broken in the presence of multiple monitors; as you drag the mouse across the monitor boundary, the mouse pointer becomes momentarily disconnected from the window location, so that you are moving the window as if by a long invisible stick, not by its original grab location. The overlay scrollbars don't interact well with Eclipse; JUnit running tests outputs file paths that Eclipse turns into hyperlinks, and the hyperlink mouseover stops the scrollbar from from being triggered when the pointer approaches the child window border. The overlay scrollbar thing doesn't seem to have been fully thought through. Gnome-terminal is one of the slowest terminals I've ever used; it would literally slow down development by blocking on log-verbose tests. I've gone back to my old stalwart of rxvt. I don't understand the difference between Windows key and Alt key command prompts. I've given up trying to figure out how to register my various user-directory installed applications with the taskbar thing. So I've stopped using both, and now I start all my apps from the terminal, with shell scripts to redirect output if they are chatty. The Alt-Tab task switcher is broken just like the OS X one is, switching between its concept of applications rather than top level windows. This means alt-tabbing between Eclipse and Firefox would bring the Downloads window to the fore, leaving the actual browser hidden behind maximized Eclipse. Usability disaster. With some difficulty and playing around with preference managers that come with warning labels, I've rebound the keys to a slightly more usable window switcher. Oh, and the fun I had when I tried to bind Ctrl+Alt+F12 to a command in Eclipse; took me back decades to switching terminals with Alt+F keys. In short, Ubuntu Unity is horrifically bad. Linux is completely inappropriate for the desktop, unless you are so inept you only use a browser (get an ipad instead), or you are sufficiently skilled you think nothing of switching window managers. The trough in the middle is very ill served.

wpietri 14y ago

I'm still using Unity on two of my laptops. (They're both Thinkpads, which are very popular for Linux users.) Unity definitely still has performance and stability problems, as well as significant UI glitches. I don't think I've had more than a week of uptime out of either laptop, and I think the median is something like 2 days. That was not the case with earlier versions of Ubuntu on the same hardware. I like the ideas behind Unity, but the execution has been terrible. It's pretty obvious they're focused on arbitrary schedules over a solid user experience.

skriticos2 14y ago

I have nothing against Unity. Sure, it had it's issues when it started, but the LTS version is quite solid. Running a laptop from an Ubuntu OEM (System 76) with high end CPU (I7) and SSD I can't complain about performance or compatibility issues at all (though I'm only on a dual 1080p config). Steam also works quite OK. Though most of the time I'm in a terminal with vim, so I don't care much about most Unity features. It looks nicer than the dated GNOME 2 / 3 / KDE stuff though (personal taste). Also, I really got used to Ubuntu One file sync and music store and indicators.