[resolved] Crisis in Ubuntu land

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raevol
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[resolved] Crisis in Ubuntu land

Post by raevol »

So, if you haven't heard the news, things have gone to hell in the world of Ubuntu. Source here: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/ ... nvergence/ I'll summarize:

Canonical is giving up on convergence, the phone, and some other stuff. As much of an Ubuntu fan as I am, this doesn't really bother me.

What bothers me, is they're giving up on Unity and switching back to Gnome. I *hate* Gnome. With a passion. I wish that project would die in a fire. I used Xubuntu until Unity was in a mature, usable state, just to avoid Gnome.

So now I'm stuck in a quandry. I need to find a new DE. I may go back to XFCE, but I'm not sure. XFCE definitely had some ugly thorns when I used it last. Maybe those things are fixed, but knowing how small open-source projects work, my hopes are pretty low.

And then there's the question, if I am going to move away from the vanilla version of Ubuntu, should I stick with Ubuntu at all? Its saving graces for me for all these years have been timely browser updates, easy Nvidia driver installs, and Unity. Now that Unity is going away, should I shop around and see if the other distros have caught up on the other two in the years its been since I've been using Ubuntu?

Anyway, figured I would share. Feel free to contribute your thoughts to this mess. It's a rough day for me.

Edit: Switched to XFCE. Also switched to an RX 480 on the AMDGPU drivers, and got a liquid cooler but that's tangential...
Last edited by raevol on 22 Apr 2017, 08:48, edited 1 time in total.
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GameEnder
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Re: Crisis in Ubuntu land

Post by GameEnder »

Out of curiosity what don't you like exactly about GNOME? Other then it has been forked to death. But that is more a Linux problem then a GNOME problem, every one loves to have there own version for there distro.
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raevol
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Re: Crisis in Ubuntu land

Post by raevol »

I don't like how un-customizable it is. If I could make gnome 3 work just like Unity, I would be happy. But from my experience with gnome in the past, thinking outside of the box is not allowed.
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Ace (SWE)
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Re: Crisis in Ubuntu land

Post by Ace (SWE) »

I heard that people had managed to - apparently without much difficulty - make KDE 5 behave just like Unity.
Maybe something worth looking into?

The Kubuntu project is still alive and well after all, and there's also the KDE Neon project which is Ubuntu based - and officially the KDE distribution.
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psi29a
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Re: Crisis in Ubuntu land

Post by psi29a »

Actually this is great news. I tried to work with Unity but it fucked up my workflow. switched to gnome-buntu years ago and love it. So for me, this the best news I've heard from Canonical in awhile.

They've dumped upstart for systemd, fine... one less thing to deal with. Now they've dumped Mir and Unity? Great, now they can focus on other things like Wayland and Gnome3 which I'm quite happy with.

In short, Canonical/Ubuntu is now sailing in the direction I've been going for years. :)

In other good news, this tightens the relationship between Debian and Ubuntu.
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raevol
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Re: Crisis in Ubuntu land

Post by raevol »

psi29a, can I get a screenshot of your gnome setup? I should really give it a try... I hated Unity before I tried it, so maybe I shouldn't be so hypocritical.
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Sslaxx
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Re: Crisis in Ubuntu land

Post by Sslaxx »

About damned time. Canonical have been sailing against the wind too long with Mir, good to see it dead - hopefully that will help save Wayland from its current moribund state. Don't particularly care for Unity, so no tears they've scrapped that too.
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psi29a
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Re: Crisis in Ubuntu land

Post by psi29a »

Nothing special, I've not 'tricked' out my Gnome... the defaults work fine for me.

I don't use any extensions or 'tweaks' aside from using the dark theme.

For me is that Gnome3 stays out of my way, no funky bar that's always there.

It is pretty keyboard friendly and I don't have to reach over to my mouse/nipple/trackpad to do anything.

I admit I'm addicted to the super key (windows key) which is key in having an overview of what is going on in addition to running commands. The other most used hotkey(s) has been the left control and alt keys while pressing up and down to allow switching between virtual desktops. However these things are not unique to Gnome3, I'm sure other WMs (including Unity) has something similar or can be configured to do the same.
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Svetomech
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Re: Crisis in Ubuntu land

Post by Svetomech »

I'd suggest trying Cinnamon. It's fantastic.
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raevol
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Re: Crisis in Ubuntu land

Post by raevol »

@psi29a I'll give it a shot. Currently trying to figure out how to get guest additions to work in a debian sid virtualbox vm...
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