6 ms·

"I tried to change window managers on My Ubuntu desktop and totally lost sound." - Once you do something as drastic as changing the default window manager on a

by dman 14y ago

"I tried to change window managers on My Ubuntu desktop and totally lost sound." - Once you do something as drastic as changing the default window manager on a distro you are largely on your own. In the past switching window managers would leave you without a network connection because Network Manager applet would begin after you login into gnome. However this appears to be fixed and was not an issue the last few times I tried. Having said all of this, I wonder if its reasonable to expect a distro to handle the situation where you completely swap out the user land that they ship with. The equivalent does not exist for windows / osx.

danielweber 14y ago
Then all the answers about "Unity isn't so bad, because you can switch away from it" become void.
- glesica 14y ago
  You can switch away from it, you just can't do it with "apt-get install <new window manager>". Try a distro that is designed for the WM you want to use. I agree that in an ideal world installing a new WM would "Just Work", but we don't live in that world. Try installing a new WM on OS X or Windows and see how well things go. Not trashing those operating systems, just pointing out that GNU/Linux does, indeed, offer more choice. The fact that the choices are not ideally convenient to switch between is really a fairly minor issue.
  - ethomson 14y ago
    You have to be joking me. "A distro that is designed for the WM you want to use"? What does that even mean? That I have to have a special twm distro? Or an fvwm2 distribution? tvtwm was always my favorite window manager, but I seem to recall it needed some patches to really be perfect. Do I have to find somebody to build me my own distribution that has those patches? A Window Manager manages windows, like the name suggests; it doesn't manage networking or sound. And if it does, then the whole system has failed to produce decent engineering boundaries and we should revert a few releases to when things had the correct levels of abstraction.
    - dman 14y ago
      You have to either get comfortable living in someone elses reality or accept the burden/freedom of creating your own reality.
    - wtetzner 14y ago
      I think part of the problem here is that window managers and desktop environments are being conflated. Desktop environments are sometimes set up to handle sound or networking. I agree that it's not a good design, but I don't think it's as ridiculous for a desktop environment to handle these things as it is for a window manager to do so.
    - cjh_ 14y ago
      I think GP's point was that you either 'deal with it' or find someone else (a packager for a distribution) to deal with it on your behalf, if you are having issues then a distribution is a possible solution.
    - bdunbar 14y ago
      > What does that even mean? I think it means 'use Slackware'.
    - glesica 14y ago
      Apologies, I was very much conflating WM and DE. However, you mentioned Unity, which is really both (Unity itself is a DE but it brings its own WM to the table and assumes that you will use it). My point was that if you insist on extensive customization, you should be prepared to do some work. If you don't want to spend a lot of time fiddling (I know I don't) then you find a distro that does things the way you want them done and you use it. Things are the same in the Windows and Mac world, for better or worse.
- dman 14y ago
  There are no magic elves and fairies lower down in the stack. Reliable user experiences come from a) Reducing degrees of freedom - remove the number of things the end user can tweak / change (the mac way) b) Monopolistic fiat - Publishing standards and strong arming vendors into supporting those (the wintel way) Linux tries to approximate reliability using a "many eyes make bugs shallow" approach. However this kind of reliability is stochastic. Think of it as a gaussian centered around the defaults that ship out of the box on hardware that is fairly commonplace. The more you push your end config away from that center the more likely it is that you will have a suboptimal experience.
- javert 14y ago
  My experience is, don't use Ubuntu if you don't want the defaults they ship. It's not meant to be customizable. I'd recommend Arch Linux. It just makes sense.
VLM 14y ago
Thats a huge failure of abstraction. File a bug. A window manager should manage windows not sound. Someone outside the linux community would have no idea that the thing that controls title bars also happens to control sound. On Debian with ratpoison / awesome / KDE / probably others it "just works" and you don't control your sound with your window or whatever. It would be like configuring your mouse by modifying your network settings or configuring your video card by modifying your joystick/gamepad settings.
- simonh 14y ago
  >A window manager should manage windows not sound Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whoe lot more than just a window manager. It includes system management and configuration GUI components, including preferences panes and utilities to control audio functions. Unity is trying to provide a comprehensive user interface to the entire OS, or as much of it as possible.
  - cjh_ 14y ago
    >Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whole lot more than just a window manager. That is why we distinguish between 'window manager' (only manages windows) and 'desktop environment' (a whole lot more).
    - simonh 14y ago
      Exactly. Unity is a desktop environment, not a window manager.
  - VLM 14y ago
    And look what an epic failure that paradigm has turned into. Much like swiss army knives have ended production of all other tools, etc. No matter how good of a job you do going down the wrong path, fundamentally, you're still going down the wrong path.
    - simonh 14y ago
bdunbar 14y ago
> Once you do something as drastic as changing the default window manager on a distro you are largely on your own. That's crazy. When did Linux get so _fragile_? A windows manager is the application that handles windows management. Applications (browser, word processor) don't care what WM is running, and neither should utilities. Changing a WM is strait forward. Exit, run 'xwmconfig', then startx and I'm back in. Maybe Slack has me spoiled, or something - are the so-called modern Linuxi really so crufty that changing a WM cripples the host?
- Daishiman 14y ago
  When users expect everything to "just work", it means that automated configuration has to integrate with a ton of components, thus supporting alternatives for every section of the stack becomes a huge endeavour.
- yew 14y ago
  Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years. Ideally you want a full Desktop environment, but at a minimum you need a session manager (for auto-starting everything else, communicating with the * kits, * buses, * agents, and * managers for device integration, etc . . .), a settings daemon (stores settings for applications that care to use it, might be more than one of these - Xfce has two or three at the moment), a desktop manager (like a WM but for desktops), a window manager, a compositor (for special effects, might be part of the WM), plus miscellaneous bars, launchers, and plugins for same. It's perfectly possible to split all this up, but then you have to make all the parts compatible. Most distros want more integration, not less.
  - gizmo686 14y ago
    >Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years. What distribution does not support startx out of the box. If you boot into terminal (or kill the X service), then startx should just do whatever the system does to start the X server anyway.

by dman 14y ago

danielweber 14y ago

Then all the answers about "Unity isn't so bad, because you can switch away from it" become void.

glesica 14y ago
You can switch away from it, you just can't do it with "apt-get install <new window manager>". Try a distro that is designed for the WM you want to use. I agree that in an ideal world installing a new WM would "Just Work", but we don't live in that world. Try installing a new WM on OS X or Windows and see how well things go. Not trashing those operating systems, just pointing out that GNU/Linux does, indeed, offer more choice. The fact that the choices are not ideally convenient to switch between is really a fairly minor issue.
- ethomson 14y ago
  You have to be joking me. "A distro that is designed for the WM you want to use"? What does that even mean? That I have to have a special twm distro? Or an fvwm2 distribution? tvtwm was always my favorite window manager, but I seem to recall it needed some patches to really be perfect. Do I have to find somebody to build me my own distribution that has those patches? A Window Manager manages windows, like the name suggests; it doesn't manage networking or sound. And if it does, then the whole system has failed to produce decent engineering boundaries and we should revert a few releases to when things had the correct levels of abstraction.
  - dman 14y ago
    You have to either get comfortable living in someone elses reality or accept the burden/freedom of creating your own reality.
  - wtetzner 14y ago
    I think part of the problem here is that window managers and desktop environments are being conflated. Desktop environments are sometimes set up to handle sound or networking. I agree that it's not a good design, but I don't think it's as ridiculous for a desktop environment to handle these things as it is for a window manager to do so.
  - cjh_ 14y ago
    I think GP's point was that you either 'deal with it' or find someone else (a packager for a distribution) to deal with it on your behalf, if you are having issues then a distribution is a possible solution.
  - bdunbar 14y ago
    > What does that even mean? I think it means 'use Slackware'.
  - glesica 14y ago
    Apologies, I was very much conflating WM and DE. However, you mentioned Unity, which is really both (Unity itself is a DE but it brings its own WM to the table and assumes that you will use it). My point was that if you insist on extensive customization, you should be prepared to do some work. If you don't want to spend a lot of time fiddling (I know I don't) then you find a distro that does things the way you want them done and you use it. Things are the same in the Windows and Mac world, for better or worse.
dman 14y ago
There are no magic elves and fairies lower down in the stack. Reliable user experiences come from a) Reducing degrees of freedom - remove the number of things the end user can tweak / change (the mac way) b) Monopolistic fiat - Publishing standards and strong arming vendors into supporting those (the wintel way) Linux tries to approximate reliability using a "many eyes make bugs shallow" approach. However this kind of reliability is stochastic. Think of it as a gaussian centered around the defaults that ship out of the box on hardware that is fairly commonplace. The more you push your end config away from that center the more likely it is that you will have a suboptimal experience.
javert 14y ago
My experience is, don't use Ubuntu if you don't want the defaults they ship. It's not meant to be customizable. I'd recommend Arch Linux. It just makes sense.

VLM 14y ago

Thats a huge failure of abstraction. File a bug. A window manager should manage windows not sound. Someone outside the linux community would have no idea that the thing that controls title bars also happens to control sound. On Debian with ratpoison / awesome / KDE / probably others it "just works" and you don't control your sound with your window or whatever. It would be like configuring your mouse by modifying your network settings or configuring your video card by modifying your joystick/gamepad settings.

simonh 14y ago
>A window manager should manage windows not sound Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whoe lot more than just a window manager. It includes system management and configuration GUI components, including preferences panes and utilities to control audio functions. Unity is trying to provide a comprehensive user interface to the entire OS, or as much of it as possible.
- cjh_ 14y ago
  >Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whole lot more than just a window manager. That is why we distinguish between 'window manager' (only manages windows) and 'desktop environment' (a whole lot more).
  - simonh 14y ago
    Exactly. Unity is a desktop environment, not a window manager.
- VLM 14y ago
  And look what an epic failure that paradigm has turned into. Much like swiss army knives have ended production of all other tools, etc. No matter how good of a job you do going down the wrong path, fundamentally, you're still going down the wrong path.
  - simonh 14y ago

bdunbar 14y ago

> Once you do something as drastic as changing the default window manager on a distro you are largely on your own. That's crazy. When did Linux get so _fragile_? A windows manager is the application that handles windows management. Applications (browser, word processor) don't care what WM is running, and neither should utilities. Changing a WM is strait forward. Exit, run 'xwmconfig', then startx and I'm back in. Maybe Slack has me spoiled, or something - are the so-called modern Linuxi really so crufty that changing a WM cripples the host?

Daishiman 14y ago
When users expect everything to "just work", it means that automated configuration has to integrate with a ton of components, thus supporting alternatives for every section of the stack becomes a huge endeavour.
yew 14y ago
Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years. Ideally you want a full Desktop environment, but at a minimum you need a session manager (for auto-starting everything else, communicating with the * kits, * buses, * agents, and * managers for device integration, etc . . .), a settings daemon (stores settings for applications that care to use it, might be more than one of these - Xfce has two or three at the moment), a desktop manager (like a WM but for desktops), a window manager, a compositor (for special effects, might be part of the WM), plus miscellaneous bars, launchers, and plugins for same. It's perfectly possible to split all this up, but then you have to make all the parts compatible. Most distros want more integration, not less.
- gizmo686 14y ago
  >Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years. What distribution does not support startx out of the box. If you boot into terminal (or kill the X service), then startx should just do whatever the system does to start the X server anyway.