Looks very lean. I had no idea this WM existed.
We're _REALLY_ going to wish we had this sort of choice with Windows, in
several months, when our users complain about "the funny squares that
ate the start menu" in Windows 8, and we can't simply switch in the
desktop they'd rather have.
Vive La Différence!
-Jeff
On 08/31/2012 01:41 PM, Jason Axelson wrote:
Hey Jeff,
I've been using Ubuntu 12.04 for the last 6 months or something and I
like it. Although I also don't run unity and instead run "Awesome
Window Manager" which is a cool tiling window manager.
Jason
On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Jeff Mings <je...@lava.net> wrote:
A reflection on the state of the Linux desktop, written to hopefully spare
others a lot of wasted time:
It was time to upgrade my primary desktop. I prefer Centos for servers
and Ubuntu for desktops, and Ubuntu 12.04.1 was just released, suggesting a
more refined bundle of Ubuntu. I've already deployed 12.04 on a number of
other machines, but my main personal desktop was still using the last
Long-Term-Service release, 10.04, with the Gnome 2 desktop.
Many of you have seen the newer Unity desktop that is now the default
for Ubuntu. It's very pretty and impressive as a potential interface for
unifying tablets, phones and PCs, but much of the desktop workflow just
isn't suited to getting things done quickly. You can fix Unity's biggest
issue, the baffling omission of a regular menu, by using the Gnome Classic
Menu Indicator. However, there are a number of other issues with getting
work done quickly with Unity, so I decided to try Gnome 3 again.
Gnome 3 is remarkably beautiful, fluid and elegant. After a bit of
tweaking and familiarization, I decided I could move to the newest version
of Gnome. When I last tried it, several months ago on a different distro,
it didn't seem as polished. My cautious approval was short-lived. When
Remmina, a VNC/RDP client that generally works very well, decided to die, I
lost every bit of control of Gnome 3. Remmina is built on GTK (probably the
Gnome Tool Kit libraries for Gnome 2) and shouldn't have stopped in such a
debilitating fashion. I couldn't reach other desktops, menus or the Gnome 3
dock using the mouse or the keyboard shortcuts. The only graceful exit was
to jump to shell (Ctrl-Alt-F4) and kill the user I was logged in as. I
tried this twice more, trying to see if I was missing something, but the
same thing happened. Gnome 3 is not really ready for prime time.
I had previously tried "regressing" to Gnome 2 under other Ubuntu 12.04
and found that the Mate Desktop, a fork of Gnome 2, is the best way to do
it. You can install Gnome 2 via the Ubuntu repositories, but certain bits
are missing, or just don't work correctly, probably because of conflicts
with Unity and its LDM desktop manager. At http://mate-desktop.org/ you'll
see that the project has reached version 1.4. It works very well, as you
would expect Gnome 2 to behave, and installation is trivial.
Gnome 2 is a great mature desktop environment that fosters productivity
- RedHat Enterprise Linux comes with it by default with good reason. If
you're using Ubuntu 12.04 and don't like Unity, go straight to Mate Desktop
and don't waste your time playing with the others.
-Jeff Mings
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