I’ve recently had it with Ubuntu’s Unity.
Wait, why Unity?
Because my gdm was consuming so much CPU my laptop had its fan working non-stop. I’ve researched and tweaked and installed and removed – and finally moved to Unity to solve that. There may have been another solution, but that’s an old story now.
Thing is, that used to be Gnome 2, a great environment for a software developer. Easy keystrokes to move between your apps, intuitive mouse gestures. Unity presented with a very slick look, but a counter-productive environment. Perhaps it’s great for people opening one Firefox window and one Libre Office Writer document. It does not work as well for people with 3 different browsers, 5 terminals on 2 different desktops, eclipse with 4 separate perspectives, and Gimp, which opens up with 5 windows up front.
Unity does not handle these well at all. To invoke a new Firefox window you can’t just click on the launcher: that would just open up one of your already open windows (and the wrong one, by the way). You either have to work your way through the specific application you work with (Ctrl+N for new window), or create a special keyboard shortcut for your favorite app (e.g. Alt+Ctrl+T for new terminal, thankfully pre-defined). And, ARGGGH! So unintuitive at times! The “Show Desktop” seems to hide all windows except the very one which happens to be maximized and focused at the time (wasn’t that window the reason to show the desktop in the first place?). OK, this post is not about Unity.
The trouble is: Gnome 3 seems to be no better in some respects. Now I confess I did not spend a lot of time with it. I just did not have the patience to go through the whole deal again. But I do have people around me using it, and I get to hear their occasional ARGGGH! Comparing notes, I don’t see that it’s a better developer’s environment.
Back to Gnome 2? Not if you’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10, you can’t. And, besides, no going back in Gnome.
Back to KDE? I was an avid KDE user for years, but the premature 4.0 version made me run away. Yes, I suppose it’s possible now, but I first tried Xfce.
Wow, last time I looked at Xfce it was really lightweight, with all that implies: it used to be so poor, so minimal. Today, with the very slick work from Xubuntu, it is fairly feature rich, while remaining fairly simple. In fact, it now more resembles Gnome (I mean Gnome 2, the real Gnome) than Gnome itself.
Easy enough to customize the panels. Familiar window buttons, with no funny grouping. The ordering of window buttons alphabetically is weird, to say the least; I’m missing the option of reordering it manually (why should Thunderbird always be the last one? I want it first!). But otherwise very clear an obvious; no funny behavior.
A few days of test drive with plenty of consoles, eclipse windows, firefox windows, and I can say its easy to work with. That’s all I’m asking for: an easy to work with environment!
In time I may consider the Mate desktop environment (fork of Gnome 2).
But as long as they have this message on GitHub: “MATE Desktop Environment, a non-intuitive and unattractive desktop for users, using traditional computing desktop metaphor. Also known as the GNOME2 fork. — Read more”
– either supposed to be funny or hacked by someone — I’ll just wait.
If it’s successful, it will probably take a year or so to mature.
I really need a well integrated desktop environment that works right. For example, it needs to prompt me for a password when resuming from suspend. This worked fine on Gnome for many years, but Gnome 3 and the alternatives (KDE, Unity) are really unusable; that leaves me with XFCE, but the problem is it doesn’t work reliably on XFCE. I’ve run Linux on my desktop for over 10 years. On Friday I ordered a Mac.
Actually, “password back from suspend” works better for me on Xfce than on Unity (where for 2 seconds I could actually see the desktop before it got protected by password).
I bought a Mac 8 months ago. It took me a month to realize it was great for browsing, music editing etc., but extremely poor for development.
Consider: Unity and Gnome 3 mimic the OS/X desktop. So where does that lead us?
Consider: you open a shell. You try to compile some code. You type ‘make’. Unknown executable.
To install poor ‘make’ you need to register for Xtools and download 10G (!!!) worth of a bundle.
I eventually installed Linux on my MacBook Air, dual boot with OS/X.
Incidentally, that was *the* *most* *horrible* linux installation process I ever had. Most of that due to the fact Apple goes to great length to actually prevent you from installing other OS on their machines.
Example? You are only allowed to boot an OS from USB if it’s OS/X. You’re not allowed to boot Linux from USB.
A far more astonishing example? You are allowed to boot other OS from CD. But **only** if the drive is Apple’s SuperDrive. Is that crazy or what? You can’t boot a Linux CD on an external Toshiba CD drive you may have…
The external SuperDrive turned to be of poor quality, even in comparison to my older Lenovo laptop’s CD drive. Which made it stall during the installation process. Which meant I made 5 failed attempts of install during which the CD drive simply stopped working midway.
I’m not going to go through the post-install process… A nightmare of its own, and still uncompleted.
But, the machine is so slick…
MATE won’t become mainstream, just like Trinity (KDE 3.5 fork) hasn’t.
More support should be put behind XFCE. You even have Linus Torvalds who switched to it as his main desktop environment (first dumping KDE for Gnome 2, then dumping Gnome 3 for XFCE).
I actually like XFCE far more than I ever liked Gnome 2. I always had issues with the Gnome panel, and things just got really bloated. After bootup (with that hog GDM running in the background), my machine was using almost 1.5 gigs of RAM. With my clean XFCE install with wicd uses 256MB RAM after boot.
I predict that XFCE will eventually become stupid and fat like Gnome 2, at which point everyone will switch to LXDE, etc, etc, etc.
As for Apple products, I could never bring myself to spend $2500 on something that I can get in a different brand name for around $1200. Not only that, you are locked into hardware/software/accessory ecosystem with no way out. To top it off, OSX is nothing more than a slightly better version of Unity that costs money. No thanks.
@Jonas,
I’m still having plenty of trouble with keyboard volume keys; keyboard layout switching (xfce keeps forgetting the shortcut key — long time bug), and other minor issues.
Apple — when I bought the MacBook Air, there was nothing as light and thin. And I use it a lot on travel, so that’s very cool. Only today to competitors begin to produce laptops in same thinness and lightweightness. I think Acer has a new interesting model.
OS/X: not for me.