I've been using Redhat/Fedora/Ubuntu on and off for the last 12 years or so but I've largely stayed away from any Linux desktop environments for the past couple of years as I've embraced the Mac and the Cloud PaaS services. A couple weeks ago I had a chance to use Ubuntu Unity at work for a week and OMG WTF BBQ. The design of Unity had unleashed one the largest nerdrage moment I've ever had.
1) Alt-tab switcher highlights 2 big icons with the same color value. Which is my current app and which is the one I'm going to switch to? I have no idea. Takes too much brain power to process the signals.
2) Default binding of Alt to the search box thingy. Whose bright idea is this? Binding the key closest to the thumb = invitation to trigger the search box erroneously all the time, especially if you use Emacs or used to using readline shortcuts in the Terminal.
3) Where the hell do I go to configure anything? How do I rebind Alt so I can get readline keyboard shortcuts everywhere?
4) Why do I sometimes get multiple of the same app icon in the dock?
5) How do I switch to another instance of the same app? It doesn't work like Windows or the Mac, the only way I discovered was point my mouse to the tiny little arrowy markers on the left of the very subtly active app icon to trigger a Mission Control-like thingy.
6) Don't even get me started with the unavailability of Chromium on 12.10 and the Amazon search results...
If this doesn't kill Linux on the desktop (if it's not dead already), I don't know what will.
I'm a different data point. I've used nothing but Windows (98, XP and now 7) for over a decade. Lately I've been learning web development (Django) and realized a few weeks ago that to really do this right I needed to do linux. So I used VMware/bitnami to set up a VM with linux/python/django.
It was Ubuntu 12.04 without the desktop. Very hard to get around with the command line so I installed the unity desktop.
Bingo. Very easy for someone used to Windows. I couple minor quirks but I didn't find that any of the above issues bothered me.
I have had issues. But these have been things like figuring out where to set environment variables, learning the bare command line basics, learning how to get postgres going locally, etc. Nothing to do with the desktop, except for the fact that it doesn't provide an interface for everything that can possibly be done with command line - so as (someone learning to be) a developer, I've had to learn all the command line stuff anyway.
I have no idea whether other desktops are easier. All I can say is that the command line had a steep learning curve, while unity desktop took just a few minutes to get started and I was off working.
If you are comparing Unity to Mac OS X then of course you are going to be disappointed. IMHO and in those of many others, OS X has one of the most polished UIs out there, thanks in part to the fact that it is more than a decade old. Unity is relatively young by all standards.
1) I don't really understand what is the problem here. Could you be more explicit? Perhaps this is not your gripe, but since the switcher threw me off at first, this is what I have learned: if you want to switch b/ windows of the same application Alt-` will do the trick, same as in a Mac. If you press Alt-Tab and leave focus over an application with multiple windows the view will expand and show thumbnails of each one, if you can't wait you can switch from Tab to ` without releasing Alt and it will do the same thing.
2) I have never incorrectly pressed the Alt key, but alas, this is just me.
3) System Settings panel, to get there press the Win key(or equivalent) and start typing "settings", it should come up as the first result. You might perhaps find the different setting panels lacking in options sometimes, but a quick google search and a short trip to the command line has always worked for me.
4) I am assuming you mean to say that you have a launcher icon on the dock for a certain application and when you click it it spawns a new icon. This has happened to me mostly with applications that invoke a bash script to start (Matlab in my case). It is more of a problem of integration of external software with the Unity interface. This is to be expected for a relatively young platform.
5) See 1.
6) I don't know about Chromium but Google maintains their own repository so getting Chrome and keeping it updated is relatively simple. Perhaps there is a similar solution for Chromium? The Amazon thing really pissed me of at first, but uninstalling it was as simple as executing "sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping". There is also a setting in the Privacy settings panel that I think that does the same. Also 12.04 doesn't seem to include the Amazon lens.
I understand not liking Unity but there is no need to go in a self-described nerdrage rant. You could have found the answers to all of your questions with a quick google search, just like I did.
1) On my system, the square of the app you're switching to is shown brighter. I don't know why it doesn't happen on yours.
2) Alt always used to be bound (it didn't pop up a textbox, it selected the menu), especially in Windows (it might have been different in Gnome, I can't remember now, but I think it wasn't).
3) There's a control panel with all the configuration elements, but yes, compizconfig is a maze, and I don't think it's even installed by default.
4) I find this extremely frustrating too, it's the same on OS X. You open two terminals, you only get one button.
5) Same as OS X again (I don't know why you say it doesn't work like the Mac, when it's exactly the same). Alt+tab switches apps, Alt+` switches windows, like in OS X. I hate it.
6) Yeah, I don't know why they can't bundle Chromium in a PPA by default.
Ultimately, we're an entirely different market from regular users. The average "Linux on the desktop" user doesn't care about readline shortcuts, or configuration, or pressing the alt key. They want all their programs in a dock, and all my family/friends whom I've switched to Ubuntu (to decrease my support time, and it worked fabulously) swear by it.
Further annoyance with the alt search box thingie: you can clear it, and when you reboot it comes back again. So reconfigure it to something you'll never use like Rshift, l-alt, r-alt, super.
You can fix a lot of these problems with compiz-settings. For example - you can get a better alt+tab switcher and disable the default one.
> How do I switch to another instance of the same app?
If you don't find what you need, have a look through package management to see if there are any other compiz packages - these might give you more plugins.
All of your complaints are spot on, but for your #5 you can hit alt-` to cycle through multiple windows of one app.
For my own part, I just decided to switch back to Slackware when my roommate wanted to play Sword & Sworcery and Ubuntu kept trying to sell her a katana. You can only tolerate so much...
Gnome shell is not too bad now, and if you are looking for a modern desktop environment then I would recommend it - however it still has many problems, especially when it comes to configuration. Gnome gets this complaint a lot, and most of the time it is coming out the mouth of a "power user", however there are a lot of problems that still effect even the most basic user.
The printer configuration is a prime example of this - they have simplified it, and broken it horribly. It does not work in 99% of cases where the printer is not directly connected to the computer. You may argue that this is an edge case and that most printers are directly connected, but I think you would be surprised by how many printers are networked today. My parents have a wireless printer, it is not directly connected to anything, and it is impossible to set up using Gnome 3 control centre because the name has a space in it. Want to change the name so you can install the printer? Tough. You cannot do it unless you install the much older "system-config-printer" package.
Other things, such as being unable to set your desktop wallpaper to something outside of the root Pictures folder (It is not recursive, so a photo in ~/Pictures/Holiday-Shots/ cannot be set as your wallpaper), are what upsets me about Gnome - it could be fantastic if so much work was not going into removing features at the sake of making the UI a little simpler.
This is the basic problem for making GNU/Linux a user-friendly desktop environment - too many moving parts. GNU/Linux is complicated enough to say but it is actually an oversimplification - an average Linux install is actually Linux/GNU + multiple non-GNU system utlities & scripting languages/X/GTK + Qt + XUL + one or more of Tk, Wx, FOX etc./desktop manager[s] of your choice.
Commercially successful end-user Unices (Android and OS X/iOS) have not proceeded as Unity and Gnome3 are, by trying to reduce the existing complexity from above. Instead, they have burned most of it to the ground and started over.
Trying to simplify the existing system by brute force is really not a strategy that is bound to work well. You'll probably never get things simple enough, you'll break things along the way, not to mention cheesing off existing users.
Then again, burning everything to the ground has its own problems (see Netscape 4) especially if your team is geographically scattered, mostly part-time or volunteer.
I really do not know what the right answer is, but I think the question I have in mind when I use Linux is very different from the question that Ubuntu and Gnome are asking. Mostly I'm happy that my new Debian stable installation still comes with Gnome 2 out of the box.
I now run Ubuntu 12.10, but installed Cinnamon instead of Unity. I recommend it. It installs incredibly smoothly and runs side-by-side with the other desktop environments you can select on "login" screen. Absolutely complementary: you don't have to reinstall or change anything.
I guess I am old fashioned. The Unity innovations just don't seem to appeal to me.
I also run Windows 7 and I guess I will stay with it until the end of the road. I will not upgrade, not unless Microsoft comes up with something that essentially is still Windows 7, but with the eventual kernel/system improvements. Otherwise - only Linux the way forward.
Well, it's been said before but one of the biggest advantages of Linux as a desktop OS is the ability to easily and cleanly switch windowing environments.
I guess there are plenty of Windows 8 users who would love to be able to fire up powershell and type give-me-my-old-desktop-back and have the computer do that.
I had eagerly tried MATE for a while now. Only when I tried it last night (1.4) did it work well. I am a happy camper and feel much more at home with GNOME 2.
The headline would be more persuasive if the article offered anything other than anecdotal evidence that Mint is picking up significant numbers of disgruntled ex-GNOME 3 & Unity users. But it doesn't.
Yep. The whole quibble over the validity of DistroWatch got me motivated to search for something a little bit better; as it turns out, Wikimedia kindly publishes aggregate stats reports of traffic through its Squid proxies at http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera...
I hand-plotted a few months' of data before deciding it wasn't necessary to go further: from August 2012 to October 2012, Wikimedia saw an increase of 1.1 billion page requests from Linux operating systems (a 10% growth for Linux in that time period); of those, Ubuntu gained 230 million page requests while Mint remained steady at 11 million page requests during that period.
Just to be clear, I would have liked the story that Ubuntu users were flocking to Mint, but that appears to be a fiction at this point.
After using all desktop environments out there, I have settled down with Ubuntu's Unity because Ubuntu is very focused in providing a consistent desktop experience. Yours and Canonical's definition of desktop experience might be different but looking at other comparable interfaces Unity is very well organized. There are no surprising changes in each update like Gnome 3. Notification and system tray are traditional and consistent. I keep open 4 applications that I use all the time and switch between them either by mouse or alt+tab or alt+`.
If you want Gnome 2 back: CentOS / Scientific Linux / Springfield Linux fully supported for the next 4 years. Same kernel/applications generation as Ubuntu 10.04
XFCE4 on Debian Wheezy is pretty good. Will be updates coming down the line soon as they get ready to release Wheezy as stable.
Oh please! You may dismiss Distrowatch, but then you have to provide some better alternative metric. There isn't one. It is plain to anyone who checks the site regularly that although Ubuntu has more installations, Mint surpassed it in mindshare last year, closely followed by (gasp) Mageia! And I'm happy to see Puppy continuing to do well. It must be so boring to be a WinAppleSerf.
I actually tried the Cinnamon Mint boot CD last night. It seems like a nice mix between the 2. It's not as extreme on the effects as KDE while still having enough to smooth out the experience. I'll quite probably be trying Cinnamon as my primary desktop environment in a few days.
I've been using Ubuntu since 2006, and this year I forked off to Linux Mint Debian Edition with Mate, for all the reasons cited in the article, plus I'm just fed up with reinstalling every year or so, and spending far too long tweaking everything to my satisfaction each time.
LMDE is a compromise between that and a rolling distribution that is constantly updating the system - it's "semi-rolling" based on a scheme that Mint has come up with of Update Packs that come out every few months.
Mate is very smooth and works perfectly on my netbook.
I've been using exclusively Linux on the desktop with many distros since the late '90s and I've never been happier with it.
The lucky thing for Linux is that this was also the year that MS shot themselves in the foot with Win8. With the much-criticized distro ecosystem though, it is much easier for Linux to recover from mistakes like the Gnome3 and Unity fiasco. The bazaar really is better than the cathedral.
[+] [-] wyuenho|13 years ago|reply
1) Alt-tab switcher highlights 2 big icons with the same color value. Which is my current app and which is the one I'm going to switch to? I have no idea. Takes too much brain power to process the signals.
2) Default binding of Alt to the search box thingy. Whose bright idea is this? Binding the key closest to the thumb = invitation to trigger the search box erroneously all the time, especially if you use Emacs or used to using readline shortcuts in the Terminal.
3) Where the hell do I go to configure anything? How do I rebind Alt so I can get readline keyboard shortcuts everywhere?
4) Why do I sometimes get multiple of the same app icon in the dock?
5) How do I switch to another instance of the same app? It doesn't work like Windows or the Mac, the only way I discovered was point my mouse to the tiny little arrowy markers on the left of the very subtly active app icon to trigger a Mission Control-like thingy.
6) Don't even get me started with the unavailability of Chromium on 12.10 and the Amazon search results...
If this doesn't kill Linux on the desktop (if it's not dead already), I don't know what will.
[+] [-] FilterJoe|13 years ago|reply
It was Ubuntu 12.04 without the desktop. Very hard to get around with the command line so I installed the unity desktop.
Bingo. Very easy for someone used to Windows. I couple minor quirks but I didn't find that any of the above issues bothered me.
I have had issues. But these have been things like figuring out where to set environment variables, learning the bare command line basics, learning how to get postgres going locally, etc. Nothing to do with the desktop, except for the fact that it doesn't provide an interface for everything that can possibly be done with command line - so as (someone learning to be) a developer, I've had to learn all the command line stuff anyway.
I have no idea whether other desktops are easier. All I can say is that the command line had a steep learning curve, while unity desktop took just a few minutes to get started and I was off working.
[+] [-] elteto|13 years ago|reply
1) I don't really understand what is the problem here. Could you be more explicit? Perhaps this is not your gripe, but since the switcher threw me off at first, this is what I have learned: if you want to switch b/ windows of the same application Alt-` will do the trick, same as in a Mac. If you press Alt-Tab and leave focus over an application with multiple windows the view will expand and show thumbnails of each one, if you can't wait you can switch from Tab to ` without releasing Alt and it will do the same thing.
2) I have never incorrectly pressed the Alt key, but alas, this is just me.
3) System Settings panel, to get there press the Win key(or equivalent) and start typing "settings", it should come up as the first result. You might perhaps find the different setting panels lacking in options sometimes, but a quick google search and a short trip to the command line has always worked for me.
4) I am assuming you mean to say that you have a launcher icon on the dock for a certain application and when you click it it spawns a new icon. This has happened to me mostly with applications that invoke a bash script to start (Matlab in my case). It is more of a problem of integration of external software with the Unity interface. This is to be expected for a relatively young platform.
5) See 1.
6) I don't know about Chromium but Google maintains their own repository so getting Chrome and keeping it updated is relatively simple. Perhaps there is a similar solution for Chromium? The Amazon thing really pissed me of at first, but uninstalling it was as simple as executing "sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping". There is also a setting in the Privacy settings panel that I think that does the same. Also 12.04 doesn't seem to include the Amazon lens.
I understand not liking Unity but there is no need to go in a self-described nerdrage rant. You could have found the answers to all of your questions with a quick google search, just like I did.
[+] [-] StavrosK|13 years ago|reply
1) On my system, the square of the app you're switching to is shown brighter. I don't know why it doesn't happen on yours. 2) Alt always used to be bound (it didn't pop up a textbox, it selected the menu), especially in Windows (it might have been different in Gnome, I can't remember now, but I think it wasn't). 3) There's a control panel with all the configuration elements, but yes, compizconfig is a maze, and I don't think it's even installed by default. 4) I find this extremely frustrating too, it's the same on OS X. You open two terminals, you only get one button. 5) Same as OS X again (I don't know why you say it doesn't work like the Mac, when it's exactly the same). Alt+tab switches apps, Alt+` switches windows, like in OS X. I hate it. 6) Yeah, I don't know why they can't bundle Chromium in a PPA by default.
Ultimately, we're an entirely different market from regular users. The average "Linux on the desktop" user doesn't care about readline shortcuts, or configuration, or pressing the alt key. They want all their programs in a dock, and all my family/friends whom I've switched to Ubuntu (to decrease my support time, and it worked fabulously) swear by it.
[+] [-] cturner|13 years ago|reply
You can fix a lot of these problems with compiz-settings. For example - you can get a better alt+tab switcher and disable the default one.
> How do I switch to another instance of the same app?
Yup, you need compiz settings. Some of the plugins are very deliberate hacks around the shortfalls of unity. You could start here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/43875/how-do-i-adjust-the-alt...
If you don't find what you need, have a look through package management to see if there are any other compiz packages - these might give you more plugins.
[+] [-] rck|13 years ago|reply
For my own part, I just decided to switch back to Slackware when my roommate wanted to play Sword & Sworcery and Ubuntu kept trying to sell her a katana. You can only tolerate so much...
[+] [-] imglorp|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] JamesMcMinn|13 years ago|reply
The printer configuration is a prime example of this - they have simplified it, and broken it horribly. It does not work in 99% of cases where the printer is not directly connected to the computer. You may argue that this is an edge case and that most printers are directly connected, but I think you would be surprised by how many printers are networked today. My parents have a wireless printer, it is not directly connected to anything, and it is impossible to set up using Gnome 3 control centre because the name has a space in it. Want to change the name so you can install the printer? Tough. You cannot do it unless you install the much older "system-config-printer" package.
Other things, such as being unable to set your desktop wallpaper to something outside of the root Pictures folder (It is not recursive, so a photo in ~/Pictures/Holiday-Shots/ cannot be set as your wallpaper), are what upsets me about Gnome - it could be fantastic if so much work was not going into removing features at the sake of making the UI a little simpler.
[+] [-] slurry|13 years ago|reply
Commercially successful end-user Unices (Android and OS X/iOS) have not proceeded as Unity and Gnome3 are, by trying to reduce the existing complexity from above. Instead, they have burned most of it to the ground and started over.
Trying to simplify the existing system by brute force is really not a strategy that is bound to work well. You'll probably never get things simple enough, you'll break things along the way, not to mention cheesing off existing users.
Then again, burning everything to the ground has its own problems (see Netscape 4) especially if your team is geographically scattered, mostly part-time or volunteer.
I really do not know what the right answer is, but I think the question I have in mind when I use Linux is very different from the question that Ubuntu and Gnome are asking. Mostly I'm happy that my new Debian stable installation still comes with Gnome 2 out of the box.
[+] [-] watt|13 years ago|reply
I guess I am old fashioned. The Unity innovations just don't seem to appeal to me. I also run Windows 7 and I guess I will stay with it until the end of the road. I will not upgrade, not unless Microsoft comes up with something that essentially is still Windows 7, but with the eventual kernel/system improvements. Otherwise - only Linux the way forward.
[+] [-] jiggy2011|13 years ago|reply
I guess there are plenty of Windows 8 users who would love to be able to fire up powershell and type give-me-my-old-desktop-back and have the computer do that.
[+] [-] meaty|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdg|13 years ago|reply
http://mate-desktop.org/
I've only been using it for 30 hours, but so far it's working quite well and isn't getting in my way.
[+] [-] jevinskie|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattdeboard|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|13 years ago|reply
I hand-plotted a few months' of data before deciding it wasn't necessary to go further: from August 2012 to October 2012, Wikimedia saw an increase of 1.1 billion page requests from Linux operating systems (a 10% growth for Linux in that time period); of those, Ubuntu gained 230 million page requests while Mint remained steady at 11 million page requests during that period.
Just to be clear, I would have liked the story that Ubuntu users were flocking to Mint, but that appears to be a fiction at this point.
[+] [-] wyuenho|13 years ago|reply
http://distrowatch.com/
[+] [-] donniezazen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithpeter|13 years ago|reply
If you want Gnome 2 back: CentOS / Scientific Linux / Springfield Linux fully supported for the next 4 years. Same kernel/applications generation as Ubuntu 10.04
XFCE4 on Debian Wheezy is pretty good. Will be updates coming down the line soon as they get ready to release Wheezy as stable.
I can see myself going back to dwm/dmenu: http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/linux-dwm-window-manager-on-de...
[+] [-] darec1|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nacker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_wot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killahpriest|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdellabitta|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flogic|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tikhonj|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moccajoghurt|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ExpiredLink|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nacker|13 years ago|reply
LMDE is a compromise between that and a rolling distribution that is constantly updating the system - it's "semi-rolling" based on a scheme that Mint has come up with of Update Packs that come out every few months.
Mate is very smooth and works perfectly on my netbook.
I've been using exclusively Linux on the desktop with many distros since the late '90s and I've never been happier with it.
The lucky thing for Linux is that this was also the year that MS shot themselves in the foot with Win8. With the much-criticized distro ecosystem though, it is much easier for Linux to recover from mistakes like the Gnome3 and Unity fiasco. The bazaar really is better than the cathedral.