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geekhack Community => Other Geeky Stuff => Topic started by: Jamesbeat on Thu, 01 March 2012, 09:18:26
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I may be late to the party here, but providing there's nothing wrong with my OS, I tend to stay at least one release behind to avoid the teething problems associated with using the latest version.
So, I 'upgraded' to Ubuntu 11.10 the other day, and was horrified to discover that my desktop had been replaced with a stupid social media tablet OS (Unity).
So, I tried Linux Mint, which still uses Gnome. Or so I thought.
Actually, it uses Gnome 3, which isn't Gnome at all, it's a stupid social media tablet OS!
I can't right click on my desktop, I can't make shortcuts, I can't even minimize windows and the new menu system is reminiscent of Windows.
It seems that both of these desktops are designed to make it easier for people to find their files and apps, but only for the type of person who doesn't care where their files are actually stored.
Instead of making things easier, I found myself having to point and click my mouse much more than before.
I know where all of my stuff is, get out of my way!
It's clear that they have both dumbed down their GUI's to make their distros more accessible to new Linux users, which is commendable, but to cripple it for power users is obscene.
The real irony is that I don't even consider myself to be a power user. Sure, I use my computer for more than facebook and twitter, but I'm not an IT professional.
I feel that the people being targeted by these new GUI's are people who probably don't need to use a computer in the first place, and would be better served by a smartphone or tablet.
I expect these types of systems on my cellphone, because my cellphone has a small screen and no keyboard/mouse.
I don't have a real estate problem on my computer screen, and it comes with a keyboard and mouse.
I feel like Unity and Gnome 3 are catering to the lowest common denominator in terms of hardware, and it seems like tablets have caused a race to the bottom for the desktop.
I tried to get used to Unity, and gave it way longer than it really deserved (over a week) before deciding I simply couldn't live with it.
I really made a genuine effort to get used to it, because using Ubuntu has many advantages which I don't want to live without.
Gnome 3 lasted a day and a half.
I'm trying to love KDE, but it messed up almost as soon as I installed it.
From a clean install, I tried to use the 'moron software center' or whatever it's called. First time worked ok, second time crashed. Now it crashes every time I try to open it.
I never liked KDE anyway because it's too similar to Windows, but this is the icing on the cake.
So where do I turn?
Linus Torvalds shares my opinion of Gnome 3 (it's an 'unholy mess') and has switched to Xfce (which presumably means he shares my opinion of Unity too).
I have tried Xfce, and while I do believe that it's the best of the lot at the moment, it's a bit too simple for my taste.
I guess I either have to use Xfce or install an older version of Ubuntu that still has Gnome 2.x, but this is less than ideal.
[/rant]
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e17 puts all the rest to shame. You should give it a shot.
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Try dwm if you have work to do :)
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Thanks for the quick replies and heads up.
Bodhi looks interesting, and should run pretty fast, since it has very low system requirements.
I guess I am just wary of using a new distro. I tried GOS a few years ago, and support waned and my system gradually went senile.
Ubuntu has been great for me because of the enormous backing it has. I felt like I could just stick with it and not have to mess around changing distros every few months, but I just can't live with Unity or KDE.
Incidentally, I just tried to shut down my laptop with Kubuntu installed, and it hung.
This is from a fresh install I did yesterday, and the only thing I did was install and use Firefox.
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Have you tried Linux Mint?
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I'm using KDE (Kubuntu at work) primarily because its programs at least let me override the stupid Windows convention of usurping Control for menu shortcuts.
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Did I ever mention ...
Posts 52,269
Probably!
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This is why I am using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. It should receive updates into 2013. By then, Ubuntu will need to have got their act right or people will have abandoned them for another distribution.
BTW, I use Window Maker (http://windowmaker.org/) as my window manager and Gnome 2 on the root window. Metacity does not do it for me.
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Sth: yes I did try Mint, it uses Gnome 3...
Ripster: where did you get that photo of me?!
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This is why I am using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. It should receive updates into 2013. By then, Ubuntu will need to have got things right with their next release or people will have abandoned them.
BTW, I use Window Maker (http://windowmaker.org/) as my window manager and Gnome 2 on the root window. Metacity does not do it for me.
I think you're vastly overestimating the vocal minority that seems to hate Unity. I don't have enough experience with it to judge, but I work with folks that use vanilla Ubuntu + Unity every day and love it.
There's a world of distros out there; Ubuntu is and should be free to continue developing whatever product they want. They don't need to do anything especially when they are developing a product on their time and dime to give away for free. They sure as hell don't make any money off of home users/hobbyists.
@Jamesbeat: Gotcha. I was under the impression they were using a combination of GNOME 3 and MATE stuff, but I don't keep up with GNOME and it's offshoots these days. If you like GNOME 2, MATE might be an option; otherwise XFCE is going to be as close as you'll get.
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10.04 is what I 'upgraded' from.
I'm tempted to just throw it back on there and wait and see how all this pans out.
Either that or get a copy of Windows *canned laughter*
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As others have mentioned, you are not stuck with the default WM. You can still "revert" to the "Ubuntu Classic" and remove Unity all together if you want.
My x120e (lenovo thinkpad) has some serious issues with the open source ATI video drivers, so am currently installing the proprietary (catalyst) ones. Running Fedora 16 right now as I decided to change it up (ubuntu has been my desktop standard for a while now).
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Based on the apparent knowledge of your replies and terminology, I would ask, why are you even using Linux?
I mean the title of this thread should be for ubuntu or Unity, not linux as a whole.
Thought their may have been a huge kernel change I missed!
With that being said, the whole point of linux, is an open source platform.
As such, any changes pushed by distro holders, that you do not agree with, change it.
You can configure just about everything in linux and make it run however you wish.
One of the greatest things is that it's not necessary to use any piece of poo that comes by default. Unlike on Mac O$ X or M$ Windows.
Um what poo comes with M$?
Last time I checked it comes with a stock OS with next to no 'pre-installed software'.
I do agree that Apple has bloated most of their releases with their own bloatware.
However, talking about distros in general, specifically ubutntu (and spin offs) are the base linux kernel with pre-installed SW/'bloatware'
Personally I am a huge fan of Gentoo.
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I do agree that Apple has bloated most of their releases with their own bloatware.
Huh? New Macs get iLife. OS installs are VERY barren. They're slightly more capable than a fresh unmodified Windows install (built in PDF support comes to mind).
Personally I am a huge fan of Gentoo.
Oh nvm, it all makes sense now. Have fun compiling ;)
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Based on the apparent knowledge of your replies and terminology, I would ask, why are you even using Linux?
I mean the title of this thread should be for ubuntu or Unity, not linux as a whole.
Thought their may have been a huge kernel change I missed!
Maybe your head is stuck so far up your own ass that you can't hear what the OP is saying. I'll paraphrase:
Why oh why is there this seeming trend towards tablet UI in the major Linux distros?
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Maybe your head is stuck so far up your own ass that you can't hear what the OP is saying. I'll paraphrase:
Why oh why is there this seeming trend towards tablet UI in the major Linux distros?
Oh man, you made me lol good sir, thanks!
I will reiterate what that statement was about;
The growing trend is across all OS window managers last time I checked.
I am trying to point out it's not a change with linux, it is a change with the theme in a window manager or front end environment.
It bothers me that people compile that into a general representation of something.
For example;
My return key stops working (because I have spilled a beverage into it). Obviously it is my computer that is not working and I am now mad at Microsoft because Windows will not work properly when I hit return.
But beyond that, for the OP sake, they are free to change the manager settings or theme, or swap to a different one.
This is the beauty of an opensource platform.
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Try OpenBSD with cwm. Simplicity perfected.
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I always run Suse. I love it. KDE ftw as well. KDE is not like Windows because KDE does what I tell it to. Problems I had with it were easily fixed.
Sent from my TF101 using Tapatalk
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I thought that 'What the heck has happened to the desktop environments bundled with the more mainstream Linux distributions' didn't quite have the same ring to it.
And it's not just Ubuntu, it's Mint (Gnome 3) too, and they are the two main players.
Linux is all about choice, but I feel that the choices offered by the two most popular distros are pretty awful.
I use Linux because it's stable, secure, and does what I want it to without getting in my way.
I have been using it for seven years now without any major hitches.
I enjoy the 'It just works' philosophy that Ubuntu has, and because Canonical has almost always lived up to that, I haven't really had much need to mess about with it too much.
I didn't realise that my lack of knowledge of the correct jargon disqualified me as a Linux user, I just use it as an operating system, not a way of life.
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Try OpenBSD with cwm. Simplicity perfected.
I just looked up screens of CWM and proceeded to barf on my keyboard. Good thing it's my ****ty rubber dome work board. CWM looks too distracting, have you tried DWM? once you get the hang of it you can just keep the bar hidden and operate like ratpoison on steroids.
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Why are there new environments like Unity? Because there is a huge push in the tablet space where an environment like that is needed.
As pointed out, use a different package or even different distro. You don't have to use it. It's not Windows 8, you still have a choice to not have to use a touch centric interface.
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What's wrong with "What the heck has happened to Unity"
Or "What the heck has happened to the Ubuntu UI"
The abruptness of your current title supports the fact you just want more people to come read your rant then actually talk about the topic.
Seven years on the OS _should_ mean that you understand this as a theme concern with the mainstream demographic, and the simple fix is to change the theme or change managers.
If the bigger concern, is that you are not a power user, and are having issues getting other options working, then ask for help.
Interchanging 'linux' with a distro, and a problem with an app vs the OS, does limit your credibility.
And often based on these ques, really question why you are doing something.
I thank you for your reasons, and accept it as a personal choice. Nothing wrong with that.
Just trying to ascertain if you are a fanboy vs someone who has made this choice.
Often the fix to something is with what they are doing, rather than how they are doing it.
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Why are there new environments like Unity? Because there is a huge push in the tablet space where an environment like that is needed.
As pointed out, use a different package or even different distro. You don't have to use it. It's not Windows 8, you still have a choice to not have to use a touch centric interface.
Got to think outside the current scope.
These GUI simple designs are amazing for 'simple' users as well as touchscreen displays.
While the current market has a draw to touchscreens being phones, tablets, and other handhelds.
A lot of this is getting ready for the market to make the jump to touchscreen LCDs for desktop PCs.
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Gnome isn't Linux
Gnome 3 isn't Linux
Ubuntu isn't Linux
The biggest advantage to GNU/Linux is being squashed in the name of ease of use. If you want easy get a Mac, if you want cheap and easy, use Ubuntu, if you want powerful use just about anything else from the UNIX world. I would recommend Debian for someone that wants to learn. I use Gentoo on all my systems, but thats a bit far off the deep end for a beginner. If you have a handle on how Linux works, try LFS (Linux from scratch) if you don't fail or go insane, you will know quite a lot about how Linux works, and what it actually is.
Linux/GNU/UNIX is powerful because it is flexible, narrowing it down to point and click is ridiculous.
If it were easy it wouldn't be very useful.
PS: Mac "Apple Thumper" fanboys, you are using UNIX, welcome to the club.
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My main gripe is not with Unity itself, I'm sure it would be ideal on a tablet.
The problem is that it seems that the general consensus within the industry is that people don't want or need desktop computers any more now there are tablets.
I don't have a tablet, but I do have an iphone.
I love it. I'm typing on it now.
However much I love my iphone though, I don't want to turn my desktop computer into one.
I'm sure Unity is great if all you use a computer for is to let the world know via twitter that you just got your nails done.
I'm also sure that the more you restrict the OS, the less likely inexperienced users are to mess it up, but to take away the ability to minimize windows or creat a shortcut on your desktop? No thanks, Gnome 3.
What I don't like is that, for the first time since switching to Linux, my computer is trying to tell me what to do instead of the other way around.
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Got to think outside the current scope.
These GUI simple designs are amazing for 'simple' users as well as touchscreen displays.
Man i remember when i thought my choice of de/wm made me better than other people. Ah, to be a teenager again...
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PS: Mac "Apple Thumper" fanboys, you are using UNIX, welcome to the club.
Are you trying to be incendiary here? I'm not aware of any Mac users that dislike the BSD underpinnings; they either don't know/care or it's a selling point.
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BTW, I use Window Maker (http://windowmaker.org/) as my window manager and Gnome 2 on the root window. Metacity does not do it for me.
WindowMaker is great, if occurred to me recently that if you took OpenDarwin and loaded it up with a full GNUStep stack and Window Maker, you would have a very new NExT Workstation, especially if you put it on Apple hardware.
I started out with RedHat, so I got used to Gnome, but I use window maker when Gnome is screwed up or on resource limited machines, its great.
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Are you trying to be incendiary here? I'm not aware of any Mac users that dislike the BSD underpinnings; they either don't know/care or it's a selling point.
I am trying to raise awareness that a lot of the cool things we do in Linux can be done on a Mac now, Like you said "either don't know", a lot of them don't.
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I'm noticing a common trend with the gentoo users... lol.
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I'm noticing a common trend with the gentoo users... lol.
Rice is nice.
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Vyr1s: it's not just Ubuntu with Unity, it's also Mint with Gnome 3, and probably a lot of other less well known distros too.
I know that Linux isn't a desktop environment, but for a lot of people (myself included to an extent) the two are intertwined when it comes to everyday use.
I was using 'Linux' in a more general, perhaps even slang way.
When people ask me whether I use Windows or Mac, I don't say "Neither, I use GNU/Linux", I say "Linux".
When I wrote the title of this thread, I was paraphrasing in the same way, because a thread title is similar to a headline and should be kept short.
I understand that it is important (often critically so) to speak correctly and use the correct terminology, but I also think that pedantry is bad too.
The problem with saying 'what's happened to Unity' or 'what's happened to Ubuntu' is that it's not just Ubuntu/Unity that's the problem.
Unity IS what happened to Ubuntu, and the problem is that the other major alternative (Mint) is using Gnome 3, which is also horrible.
I think you knew what I meant once you read the thread.
I'm not a power user, but I have picked up enough knowledge to, for instance, install different graphical environments and switch between them. The problem is that they seem to have ruined Gnome.
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I just looked up screens of CWM and proceeded to barf on my keyboard. Good thing it's my ****ty rubber dome work board. CWM looks too distracting, have you tried DWM? once you get the hang of it you can just keep the bar hidden and operate like ratpoison on steroids.
How can you like DWM and not like CWM they are simerlay (keyboard driven) just one is a tilling and the other is floating. Anyway the best 2 tiling window managers are Xmonad and Stumpwm.
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How can you like DWM and not like CWM they are simerlay (keyboard driven) just one is a tilling and the other is floating. Anyway the best 2 tiling window managers are Xmonad and Stumpwm.
dwmis tiling+floating and has almost no visual distractions. I don't like Xmo, stump, awesome et al. They're like mutant ogre behemoths compared to dwm, but I can see why the people who like it like it. I just have no need for the fluff, but these days I use linux/BSD as a utility rather than a daily workstation.
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I think you knew what I meant once you read the thread.
No doubt. Don't feed the trolls!
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Ahhh... window manager and desktop environment discussions. Love this stuff.
I agree with the OP's rant about Unity, and the weird direction which the Ubuntu project is headed. Unity's unforgivable sin, in my mind, is that it fails at it's intended purpose: to be a good netbook and tablet interface. I spent a lot of time struggling with it on my tablet (an atom-based plaything I bought on a whim a few months ago), as well as on my 11 inch laptop (sort of a semi-netbook). The whole interface is sluggish, non-intuitive, and inefficient. While I appreciate the effort to efficiently manage screen real estate, it comes at far too much of a cost in usability. As a tablet interface, it fails spectacularly - they don't even have a decent virtual keyboard. Even KDE's nascent Plasma Active provides a better user experience, to say nothing of Windows 8.
Gnome 3 at least has some redeeming features. It's fairly snappy, and has an over-arching design paradigm that makes sense. Unity, by contrast... I can think of nothing good to say about it. I think canonical would do very well to trash it and try a customized version of Gnome3 in the next Ubuntu. But whatever... the beauty of Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is that you can run whatever the hell desktop environment you want.
I've pretty much converted to KDE4 at this point on my travel laptop (with Ubuntu server edition as a base). It is the most complete and functional desktop environment out there right now, and I appreciate the "everything just works" aspect of it. The extreme feature bloat sometimes is bit much, but performance is pretty good regardless. Plus, with compiz you can get tiling using the Grid plugin (super-essential!).
All the servers at work run an old version of Gnome. It's fast, and perfectly serviceable. I hope Red Hat sticks with that for awhile (Fedora drank the Gnome 3 koolaid already)
I always like trying out other desktop environments. Bodhi has been impressing me lately (an E17 Ubuntu variant). It's too bad that none of the major distros ever embraced E17, it really does have so much potential. XFCE, openbox, LDXE and the like are all quite serviceable, of course. Knoppix, in particular, has a very slick config of LDXE - worth checking out. The tiling WMs are really interesting too: dwm, awesome, xmonad, i3, wmii, scrotwm, ion3. Awesome is probably the most usable, IMO (Sabyon has a nice Awesome based version of the distro). For netbooks and small laptops, I think tiling WMs make a lot of sense. A combination of tiling, virtual desktops and window tagging lets you manage a normally unwieldy number of apps on a very small screen.
Anyhow... I'm still using Windows 7 on my work computer, as well as on my gaming computer. Applications are more important than the OS, and the applications I need run on windows. A combination of Launchy, bblean and WinSplitRevolution gives it all window managing functionality I need :)
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Quite so. Programming Windows apps is what puts food on my table, and even when not programming I'm generally using apps for which there simply aren't contenders on Linux. Another aspect - even if there were contenders, we wouldn't use them, because if they processed the data incorrectly it would then be our fault - using a de facto standard app (which implies a Windows app, in our case) allows us to pass the blame :-)
I wish I had the time to mess about with stuff more than I do, but these days I want to have acheived something at the end of it... something more than knowing how to 'configure' and 'make' an OS. Been there done that.
Anyway, edit to add something on topic... the default desktop environment install should be usable on a typical desktop without pissing about, or it doesn't deserve its name! Anything less is worthy of a good rant!
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I'm a big fan of crunchbang for a no-nonsense approach to the desktop....it's over the top geeky and very minimalistic. I can't speak to the latest version and if they have or haven't changed it up, because I'm at least 2 releases behind (other things going on keeping me from messing around in Linux-land).
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What happened to Linux? It has moved on. I personally rather like Unity, not sure why people are complainting about it and actually I never heard real, concrete complaints just some random *****ing about not being able to lay back for a moment and trying to understand the workflow.
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I'm a crunchbanger too, and I HAVE to stay releases behind, since they dropped support for anything older than i686 on statler. My Via C7 has no cmov, so I can't update. Same goes with many other distros, dropping support for older hardware. I see that as a bigger issue than what desktop manger there is.
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The problem (for me) with Unity is that it seems to have traded enormous icons for simplicity.
There are two types of simplicity, one good, one bad.
Simple can be good if it makes the OS transparent, it is bad if the OS railroads you into a particular workflow, especially one that is harder to use than your current workflow.
I don't like the dock at the left hand side of the screen, but I have to hack the OS to move it?
For me, it makes everything more difficult.
I'm not arguing that it is bad, but I do think that Ubuntu has followed their philosophy of making Linux easy to use too far for my tastes.
If that means that more people get turned on to Linux, then that can only be a good thing.
The problem for me is that simplifying it has also made it difficult to use if you don't fit the description of the user that Canonical has in mind.
The real problem for me is that the other obvious choice for me (ie a distro that is popular and still uses Gnome, ie Mint) is also out of the question because Gnome has also been changed in (to me) a negative way.
As I said, I'm not a power user, and I liked Ubuntu. I can use the command line for basic stuff, but I prefer the GUI.
I liked the Ubuntu software center for its simplicity compared even to Synaptic.
I will now have to mess around with my OS instead of just using it.
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Ubuntu for the underlying OS is perfectly fine by me. I am in the boat as several users here as I am still on 10.04 LTS for my home and work machines.
I code in a Linux/BSD environments for other Linux environments. I love the Unix tools and openness of everything we use (not all the time of course). I understand the complaint in this thread is more directed at the WMs of modern distros, which I would agree with. The "engine" underneath it all is still a beautiful tool and it just gets a shinny exterior now and then when people decide we are doing something wrong.
The modern day WMs used to annoy me, but as with many things in life I have had to come to the conclusion that I am not the target audience. Luckily for me someone will keep making some bare bones distros that I can throw my *box WMs on.
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Had to chime in on this one. I use GNU/Linux daily for work (both server CLI and desktop). Since I'm not going to go the Unity/Gnome3 route, since I have an Android phone for that crap...
I've moved most systems to XFCE 4.8, which can be made to look and function almost exactly like Gnome2 with about ten minutes of work. And I've moved my two work systems to Window Maker. Takes a little more tuning, but far and away worth it in the end. Function is *excellent*, and system resource usage is almost non-existent.
Tried Unity on a system for kicks and just to see... Resource usage was ridiculous for the supposed "benefits".
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I use XFCE on arch. I don't understand how I use to use windows all the time. It is so restricting.
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I use linux professionaly and did upgrade to unity, rolled back to gnome, and then was forced to use unity again as I need to know whats going on there :(
The only advantage is the full screen working environment out of the box, I hate looking for my apps in the sidebar, I hate typing in the search field for apps that are not 100% compatible to that lame sidebar...
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I feel your pain, OP. I've been a long-time Debian user (20+ years). I started using Ubuntu when Warty came out. It was like having Debian that "just worked" on desktops and laptops, for which it was notoriously unreliable. I still use Debian on my servers. When Natty came out, I knew the writing was on the wall. They were planning to remove their classic "fallback" mode (which didn't work very well anyway) on Oneiric. I can't manage all of the workspaces and windows I have to manage using Unity's approach. Unity is fine for my personal laptop, which only has a few browsers and terminal windows open at a time. Back then, Linux Mint was still holding out with GNOME 2. However, they couldn't hold out forever. The rest of the GNOME-based world is moving to GNOME 3. I'm just not a KDE guy.
GNOME 3 does not mean that you have to use the Shell. However, Mint is probably one of the only examples that provides an alternative. With the latest release, you can use Linux Mint in one of three ways:
- GNOME Shell: this is the default.
- Cinnamon: this is a Shell replacement meant to provide the GNOME 2 desktop approach using GNOME 3.
- MATE: this is a fork of GNOME 2 that can co-exist with GNOME 3.
Long term, Cinnamon is probably the right approach and MATE is more of a stop-gap. At the moment, Cinnamon is a little rough around the edges as it coming entirely from the Linux Mint developers. MATE is a separate project and has been coming along nicely. All that said, consider giving the Shell a try. The extensions are what make it leaps ahead of Unity and also allow you to ease the transition over from the traditional app-menu-based system.
To give an example, after my tango with Natty and after trying out Mint's official "Lisa" release I settled on Mint's LDME (Linux Mint Debian Edition). It's a rolling distribution that follows Debian Testing, but throttles the changes in the form of update packs. The last official update pack (UP3) is getting a bit long in the tooth as it is still using GNOME 2. UP4 is being tested now and I've had it installed on my MacBook Pro. I've been trying to give the Shell a fair shake (as I did with Unity on the laptop) and I find I am more productive than I was with Unity. A few days ago I put it on my home workstation (I am on it now). With the right extenstions (check out the "Frippery" ones), it has been working fairly well. I use 8 work spaces here and am able to manage them OK. I have more like 10-12 at work, as I do a lot of things at once now and depend on the workspaces to be my brain context. I won't take the plunge at work just yet.
Another option that I tried again, briefly before switching to Mint, is Xcfe. It used to think of itself as a super-light weight, GNOME-like desktop. Now it is getting a little more fancy (and bloated) and I can see it filling in the gap that GNOME 2 is leaving behind at some point down the road. At the moment, it's still a bit too utilitarian for me. Filling in the super-stripped-down role that Xcfe used to have is LXDE, but I digress.
Good luck!
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Thank you for that long and incredibly helpful reply!
I've been too busy over the past few days to think about this mich, but come Monday, I'm going to tackle this problem in earnest.
There are a lot of options, none of them ideal, but it could be worse. Mint alone offers several different distros as you point out, so I guess I'll start my search there.
The real thing I'm afraid of is adopting a less well established distro and then finding that support has been dropped a few months down the line.
I'm pretty sure I'll be installing my home folder on a separate partition from now on to make switching distros less bothersome.
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Yes, that was a concern of mine as well. I hadn't paid much attention to Mint before this. Turns out they are the #4 distro, by certain counts anyway.
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I agree, I hate the direction Ubuntu has gone, but I still recommend it to all of my Linux n00b friends. Actually, KDE and Gnome have really gone downhill for me as well... they just seem to be Windows Vista-ing the linux desktop environment. It just feels bloated and gross. My favorite Linux desktops are XFCE, E17, and Fluxbox, depending on the machine. Unfortunately after more than a decade as a loyal Linux fan, I gave up on desktop Linux about a year ago, and use it exclusively for servers now. There are just too many tools specific to my industry that do not run on Linux, and if I'm going to run a Windows VM to run them, I might as well just run Windows.
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I was sort of getting used to unity... But then I discovered that there apparently is something wrong with the Intel video driver in GTK3 (or something, I am not that Linux savvy...). It only presented itself in KiCAD, but that was a real turnoff =P So I reverted back to Ubuntu 10.10, and it still works just fine. I hope they come up with something better for the 12.04 LTS though.
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Why not just
sudo apt-get install gnome-panelor
sudo apt-get install gnome-shellor even try installing MATE (http://ubuntuguide.net/ubuntu-11-10-install-classic-gnome2-desktop-linux-mint-mate)?
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I run Windows...inside of VirtualBox on Linux. :) It's amazing how often I need to "reboot" Windows due to upgrades or general flaxiness. I pretty much just use it for Quicken and a couple of other tools. For everything else I use Open Source. I also have CrossOver Linux, but I almost never use it anymore (Open/LibreOffice has come a long way).
That said, I do have a gaming rig, but I only turn it on when I want to play. That usually requires a 2nd reboot because of some MS hotfix. :mad2:
CrossOver does support Steam, which is fun when I just want to play a bit of Portal or another older game. My Linux box has a fairly old nVidia card (7900 or something).
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Friends don't let friends do Linux.
(Attachment) 42760[/ATTACH]
LOL. Even though I don't really do desktop support very much any more, I still give free support to my friends when they get viruses. Unfortunately, they keep looking at porn and doing online gambling, which continuously infect their PCs, and I always have to remove the viruses. Funny thing is all my friends have girlfriends, and we live in Vegas... so WTF. I even tried setting their desktop background to tubgirl and lemon party via local group policy(gpedit.msc) so that it cannot be changed before I return their PCs, and that didn't stop them from doing what they do. So now, they all have a dedicated linux partition to use exclusively for doing stupid crap.
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Honestly I've been using Debian exclusively for a while now. I've always stuck with Gnome but was using XFCE on an older system for a while.
I've used Open Suse , Suse Enterprise Desktop by Novell, Linux Mint and dabble in Ubuntu.
When I installed Ubuntu with Unity on my fiance's laptop I hated it.... Still do. Then I installed Debian Gnome and realize WTF... It's a GNOME issue....
but....
Debian's Gnome seems much better to me than Unity. I don't know if it's that I've gotten accustomed to it or what but it seems better navigated.
The one thing I miss the hell out of and always loved about Linux is the Rightclick>Terminal.
But with Gnome 3.1 it's super easy to modify that shortcut bar on the left to add it there. I was also VERY surprised to see that by installing the base system then only installing the Gnome-core package that it only uses about 160mb of memory at the desktop level. Install Chrome and Libre office and it gives me pretty much everything I need in a desktop for generic webbrowsing and document reading.
I haven't installed Gimp yet and don't do alot of movie watching with the system but I'm thoroughly enjoying the new Gnome now. (Using Debian SID)
In the past I too used Virtual box for Windows "must have" applications but for the most part I found that it's resource splitting made it miserable. Of course I was running on 512mb at the time. The biggest issue I've had with Debian of late is that Wine is not available in Wheezy as there have some core compatibility issues with it. (or did 6 months ago)
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Oh yeah.... I recommend using aptitude instead of apt-get. it seems to do a much better job with dependencies for me.
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I have 16GB in my main machine for this reason. :)
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It saddens me that buntu is considered the default "norm" in Linux, when that is far from the truth. Ubuntu is an autocracy, their release cycles are far too frequent to ever be considered stable... and "Unity"? Well, a more apt title would be "Dischord". It seems that the majority of comments in this threads are Ubuntu-centric: why? Marketing and mass FUD power. They tell you what they're developing, and whether or not the majority vote for it, TOUGH - they now dictate it as the (their) new "standard" :lol:
Personally, I have just abandoned Ubuntu as the broken mess that it is, after 5+ years of patiently using it, I'd had enough. Oh, and don't say anything even slightly controversial on their forums - not even a slightly tongue in cheek comment about another company or product, as they'll hurl supercillious, passive abuse at you (admin, that is) and slam the lid on the thread immediately. It's called "mind control", and Canonical know all about it!
Before you're put off Linux for life, what I installed was "Fedora 16 x86_64" ... and it's super stable, super easy. I can't get any serious work done in Windows, not that I "hate" it, bash it or any such nonsense; Windows 7 is pretty nice tbh, but I am a command line/bash addict. Try this (download the live CD):
[ATTACH=CONFIG]43082[/ATTACH]
Download it:
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/
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glossy, note that not many in this thread actually like Ubuntu - it was mentioned most because it's such a controversial distro. "What the heck happened to Linux"... what the heck happened to Ubuntu?
10.04LTS is the last release I can actually recommend.
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I've been a Linux user since .99 alphas back around `94. I've been a pro Linux admin since ~`99. I've never once used Ubuntu nor needed to support it. I've occasionally used Gnome on a live-CD for recovery tools, I don't think I've ever used KDE... Otherwise I might have something to add to the conversation.
Linux is not Ubuntu or Gnome or KDE. Too many people choose not to take advantage or don't even realize one simple fact: Linux is what YOU make of it. Don't like what you've got? Change it.
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I've been a Linux user since .99 alphas back around `94. I've been a pro Linux admin since ~`99. I've never once used Ubuntu nor needed to support it. I've occasionally used Gnome on a live-CD for recovery tools, I don't think I've ever used KDE... Otherwise I might have something to add to the conversation.
Linux is not Ubuntu or Gnome or KDE. Too many people choose not to take advantage or don't even realize one simple fact: Linux is what YOU make of it. Don't like what you've got? Change it.
Just when I thought you were getting so so close to the fact... you swerved and missed it! "Linux" is the kernel, nothing more.
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Yes, I decided not to make a fine point about the OP's use of the word "Linux". Linux is just the kernel. GNU makes the vast majority of the foundation libraries and tools upon which the rest of your system is built. Linux just happens to be the most popular kernel upon which GNU can run (and the best, IMO :). It is a common misnomer, but everyone still knows what you mean.
Ubuntu is/was a nice polishing-up of the Debian desktop. Back then, there was no "testing". You either ran stable or sid. Since then, testing has become a nice middle ground and the package maintainers for the desktop-related parts do a pretty good job of keeping everything working now. Ubuntu is going their own way now and that is their perogative. They don't want to miss the PC <-> tablet/smartphone convergence boat. Microsoft is realizing the same thing (meet Windows 8).
The great thing about GNU/Linux is that you can run whatever you want. You have 100% freedom. You can get the source code and change it to your liking, if you wish. As far as Fedora vs Ubuntu vs SuSE vs LFS vs Etc, that is basically a religious topic, just like GNOME vs KDE vs Xcfe vs twm vs etc. :)
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Thing is that it's not GNU/Linux either... it's GNU/and a ton of other ****/Linux.
That's why non-zealots just call it Linux. Suck it up.
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Meh, not really. The ton of other **** is built on GNU, for the most part. libc and friends, not to mention pretty much *everything* is built with gcc!
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But who cares? Why SHOULD they care?
It's a tool, it does what I want it to. While I appreciate open-source for the openness, I cannot stand the 'religiousity' of it. Keep your religion to yourself.
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Umm...OK. Well I guess I misunderstood your point. Yes, you can worship whom you please. :pray:
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But who cares? Why SHOULD they care?
It's a tool, it does what I want it to. While I appreciate open-source for the openness, I cannot stand the 'religiousity' of it. Keep your religion to yourself.
AMEN
duh, pun intended
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Umm...OK. Well I guess I misunderstood your point. Yes, you can worship whom you please. :pray:
I use the GNU toolchain almost exclusively on Solaris. You think it should be called GNU/Solaris in that case?
When I finish building my workbench I'm not going to call it my Makita workbench because that's what brand tool I built it with. I'm not gonna call it my Delta workbench because I built it to hold my Delta drill press. My workbench wouldn't exist if it weren't for the fact of my having those tools tho.
RMS's choice to turn certain ideas into a belief system doesn't mean he's right. Open source is a great idea and helps me get the job done and lets me fix things that are broken when I could have never built the thing I just fixed to begin with. GNU has a lovely set of tools and yes Linux wouldn't be the same thing if GNU didn't grow up together with it.
When it all comes down to it I don't care WHAT you *call* it... except that when there's a name that's shorter than all the rest that's what I'm gonna call it. It's no different than Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise... That's the first time I ever typed that out, it's Win2k8Ent where I come from, and you'll notice that the 'Microsoft' part gets dropped completely.
People call it Linux because it's easier, and then the zealots come and wank quixotic about GNU. It's tiresome and useless and all it does is irritate the non-believers and the rest are just the choir and they already pray the same line.
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The simplest answer is obviously to just switch to OpenBSD.
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Yes, I get it. You are very sensitive about semantics and don't like it when other people talk about them. That is fine. No need to get upset. I wasn't looking for a fight. I was just playing devil's advocate to your rant.
As to the "GNU/Linux" term, I think RMS was feeling a little left out when he ranted continually about that. Can't say I blame the poor guy. He is kind of passionate to a fault. :)
The fact is that you have to call it something and, like you implied, a lot of people just say "Linux". "Linux" is just weird that way if you think about it. Take the OpenBSD example above. OpenBSD is not just a kernel. It's a working system that includes a kernel and the rest of the tools you need to make use of it. The same is true with SunOS/Solaris. Yes, you can always add stuff on top. "Linux" is, technically, just a kernel. By itself it's kind of useless. I think that is why people get hung-up on calling something "Linux". Just look at how many distos there are for "linux". You don't find that with other kernels. It's just different.
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The simplest answer is obviously to just switch to OpenBSD.
:lol:
Gnome 3 is still "experimental" on *BSD distros... LOL. Ever wonder why you hear about Linux ALL the time, and *BSD hardly ever?
Multiply your headaches one thousand fold; why not! ^_^
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The fact is that you have to call it something and, like you implied, a lot of people just say "Linux". "Linux" is just weird that way if you think about it. "Linux" is, technically, just a kernel. By itself it's kind of useless. I think that is why people get hung-up on calling something "Linux". Just look at how many distos there are for "linux". You don't find that with other kernels. It's just different.
That's just it tho... When talking about a complete install, they say 'Linux' or whatever distro they're using. Talk about the kernel and it's the 'Linux kernel' Why? Because the toolchain isn't in your face, it does it's job and that's all. There is only 1 toolchain, no choice there if you're using Linux. That's why it doesn't matter to most people. The only choice is the distro, the WM or Gui Env. When you don't have a choice (and it isn't an issue) the item in question gets forgotten.
Debian is about the only root distro (root as in the base of the tree) that talks about GNU/Linux and they should because they do crazy **** like GNU/NetBSD and GNU/kFreeBSD and GNU/Hurd. In that context it makes sense.
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:lol:
Gnome 3 is still "experimental" on *BSD distros... LOL. Ever wonder why you hear about Linux ALL the time, and *BSD hardly ever?
Multiply your headaches one thousand fold; why not! ^_^
GNOME 3 is GNU, and I hate it so it doesn't matter even a little bit.
Also, you don't hear about BSD because it just sits there and works, and the dev/user communities don't argue about stupid **** like whether or not they should make sure they include everybody when naming their releases.
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*BSD ... Multiply your headaches one thousand fold
You've got that backwards... If it were merely a matter of 'I need this standard service and awesome stability' then *BSD is where it's at. Truth is, stability is taking a back seat to agility and modern features. The headaches come from trying to mix *BSD's ideals and reality with requirements that directly go against them.
*BSD is no headache if you don't try to make it do something it was never meant to do. Right tool for the job, after all.
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The main reason for a company to choose the BSD system to build something on is because of the license. No pesky GPL to ruin your fun. That is why Apple chose it. It is known for server stability, though, especially certain variants. I have played with it from time to time, but the sys admin differences from Debian are not worth the headache for me. Same is true for RedHat (though they have gotten much better at conforming to LSB than the last time I used them).
Yeah Debian sees themselves from outside the Linux bubble. They are one of the few distros that actively trying to build a system using different kernels. Maybe that is why I see it differently too. ;) I've been using Debian ever since the "Potato" release. At the time I was searching for something better than SuSE, which was no longer free.
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I jumped ship off Debian because using PostgreSQL was too much trouble otherwise, sitting on sid just to get closer to recent versions was irritating as well. Since I like to bleed, I'm on Gentoo now. Of course, not liking Gnome or KDE means being able to control dependencies is nice also. The off-standard parts of Gentoo are less painful than RH imho.
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I jumped ship off Debian because using PostgreSQL was too much trouble otherwise, sitting on sid just to get closer to recent versions was irritating as well. Since I like to bleed, I'm on Gentoo now. Of course, not liking Gnome or KDE means being able to control dependencies is nice also. The off-standard parts of Gentoo are less painful than RH imho.
What about MariaDB? Oracle sucks though. Debian testing is pretty damn close to bleeding; it's about as bleeding as Arch is with more testers to make sure things work.
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What about MariaDB? Oracle sucks though. Debian testing is pretty damn close to bleeding; it's about as bleeding as Arch is with more testers to make sure things work.
First I've ever heard of MariaDB, of course it didn't exist when I switched off Debian, and the projects I use that needed pgsql probably still don't support MySQL. I cannot comment on Oracle. Debian testing may be like that NOW...
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First I've ever heard of MariaDB, of course it didn't exist when I switched off Debian, and the projects I use that needed pgsql probably still don't support MySQL. I cannot comment on Oracle. Debian testing may be like that NOW...
MariaDB is basically what LibreOffice is to OpenOffice (not exactly; I don't think it's a fork) but it's basically the f/oss community's response to Oracle being ****s about MySQL licensing after the buyout.
And duh, I'm not talking about Linux 5-10 years ago. It doesn't really matter what it was like then; if you compare, Gentoo used to be awesome because of the performance increases you got from self-compilation, but these days it's just a pain in the ass with minimal performance gains.
btw I hope you don't take my posts personally...
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btw I hope you don't take my posts personally...
Generally, if I don't quote you I mean the proverbial 'you', besides this is the internet if I took anything personal here I'd have already jumped off my roof. I'll argue generalities, but the only thing I rant against is fanaticism where 'you should...' comes into play. 'You' can be a fanatic and go on about how you love whatever it is you want and why, don't even think of telling me I should love it for your reasons or that I should do anything for your reasons.
I did look it up (MariaDB), I don't have blinders on ;) Besides once you've worn nicely into a groove it takes a lot to throw you out of it. Hence why I've been sitting in Gentoo, I didn't move into it for performance I did it because I like the ultimate control over dependencies. Maybe Arch does what I want (buddy of mine has vaguely described that it does), but Gentoo has been doing what I ask without issue this entire time. If I run into a wall again, it'll be time to look at different distros again.
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Generally, if I don't quote you I mean the proverbial 'you', besides this is the internet if I took anything personal here I'd have already jumped off my roof. I'll argue generalities, but the only thing I rant against is fanaticism where 'you should...' comes into play. 'You' can be a fanatic and go on about how you love whatever it is you want and why, don't even think of telling me I should love it for your reasons or that I should do anything for your reasons.
I did look it up (MariaDB), I don't have blinders on ;) Besides once you've worn nicely into a groove it takes a lot to throw you out of it. Hence why I've been sitting in Gentoo, I didn't move into it for performance I did it because I like the ultimate control over dependencies. Maybe Arch does what I want (buddy of mine has vaguely described that it does), but Gentoo has been doing what I ask without issue this entire time. If I run into a wall again, it'll be time to look at different distros again.
Word. I only mentioned that cause sometimes I try to have rational discussions and end up sounding like a ****. Not my intent. Glad you found your place with Gentoo; I honestly love to extol Debian but I don't use it that often these days...
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Yeah, I gave Gentoo a whirl not long after they started making noise on Slashdot. This was after trying LFS and realizing that while fun, was not sustainable. It wasn't long before my system got trashed by some portage snafu (portage broke Perl which broke portage, IIRC). Anyway, it was very early in Gentoo's life. I'm sure they have improved a lot.
I remember having issues finding up to date PostgreSQL packages on Debian too. I can't remember where, but it wasn't hard to find outside packages that worked. This was just my server at home, so I don't know how "production ready" it was.
Ah "Linux" war stories. I remember downloading my first copy of RedHat on a large multitude of floppies and waiting many hours for a kernel build to complete on my 386. :p
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Some bible thumpers knocked on my door right just a few minutes ago.
Although both incredibly cute I told them I wasn't interested.
So Mormon's, then.
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Could be Jehovah's too. Pleasant dispositions aside, they're all a bunch of crazy ****s anyway.
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Hmmm... Only thing we get around here are ugly dude Jehovah's...
Slackware on 50+ floppies is where I started. Might have been fewer when I started but I only remember how high the number went. I did start getting ballsie on the later installs tho. 5 floppies and 3 computers, 2 downloading/overwriting floppies and the other one installing. Was nice that the uni lab let me bring my PC in to do that.
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Aren't Jehovahs normally black?
I've only seen 1... he had to have a white partner to wander around this neighborhood. All the properties are large enough that it's legal to fire a weapon on your own property. Seems to scare some people.
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I've only seen 1... he had to have a white partner to wander around this neighborhood. All the properties are large enough that it's legal to fire a weapon on your own property. Seems to scare some people.
You should probably move somewhere that isn't dominated by racists.
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The only way I could get the floppies was from my job as an Intern. It was a pretty boring job, so I had plenty of free time to download floppy images and print out lots of how-tos. No Internet access at home at the time. I had a hard time trying to find someone at my University that knew what email even was. I eventually found someone in the CS dept how could give me a UNIX account. I was an EE...we still used a VAX (no, I'm not that old...just a highly under-funded university).
I see Mormons every day, but that's because they live next door.
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You should probably move somewhere that isn't dominated by racists.
That's just it... not a racist neighborhood at all. None of the visiting door-2-door knockers know this but it's hard to mistake the noise of gunfire. Of course they also don't know that it's a firing range just up the road. There's more Asian than black in the mix here though.
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That's just it... not a racist neighborhood at all. None of the visiting door-2-door knockers know this but it's hard to mistake the noise of gunfire. Of course they also don't know that it's a firing range just up the road. There's more Asian than black in the mix here though.
Then why do black JWs feel like they need a white JW to go with them into your neighborhood?
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Which is why no one uses Cobol, I guess.
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Then why do black JWs feel like they need a white JW to go with them into your neighborhood?
Perhaps that gunfire I mentioned? Or maybe they don't realize that they're getting screamed at just because they're on private property and not for any other reason?
WTF do I know about why I've never seen a non-resident black person walking without a non-resident white escort?
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Perhaps that gunfire I mentioned? Or maybe they don't realize that they're getting screamed at just because they're on private property and not for any other reason?
WTF do I know about why I've never seen a non-resident black person walking without a non-resident white escort?
I don't know man, you live there.
[Something about linux or beards or whatever the fridge we're supposed to be talking about]
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Must be me then, not showering for days at a time, coming to the door in jeans and a wife-beater and my standard greeting of 'Hi, sorry you came all this way but turn around and gtf off my property.'
Almost did that when DHS showed up to do a clearance check on someone, that was a fun day.
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Those are always fun. Despite my best efforts, he got the job anyway.
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I think you're vastly overestimating the vocal minority that seems to hate Unity. I don't have enough experience with it to judge, but I work with folks that use vanilla Ubuntu + Unity every day and love it.
I pretty much like Unity. It's got keyboard shortcuts, and I most use a terminal and a web browser anyway. When I want something lighter, I just use fluxbox.
Linux is still Linux; looks a lot like Unix. If you want to use something else for a window manager, install it or build it.
I do agree that having the social media stuff baked in is lost on me.
I primarily use Ubuntu now, but if I still wanted to manage every bit myself, I'd probably go with Arch. Though at this point, I prefer just to have things work.
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dwmis tiling+floating and has almost no visual distractions. I don't like Xmo, stump, awesome et al. They're like mutant ogre behemoths compared to dwm, but I can see why the people who like it like it. I just have no need for the fluff, but these days I use linux/BSD as a utility rather than a daily workstation.
OK, you've basically convinced me to try out dwm. I use fluxbox when I just need to work, but sounds like dwm might also fit the bill.
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Though at this point, I prefer just to have things work.
You're right that age has something to do with it. Spending days installing LFS was easy when I had summers off. :p I can still taste the ecstasy of having the wireless NIC on my laptop "just work" after installing dapper on it.
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OK, you've basically convinced me to try out dwm. I use fluxbox when I just need to work, but sounds like dwm might also fit the bill.
It's real nice. Lots of people complain that you have to edit the config file and recompile every time you want to change something but the point is that you spend a while doing that and dial in your preferences and then never reconfigure (unless an update breaks config.h). Also it's 2000 SLOC or less. I've compiled it on a 6 year old laptop and it takes all of 10 seconds.
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Ubuntu is fine, as long as you use a lighter derivative such as Xubuntu / Lubuntu. I've been using it and upgrading it for years, love it! Haven't reinstalled my main computer OS from scratch in at least 4 years now.
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I think the founder of Cobol lives next door.
You live at Arlington cemetery?
Or is her ghost still teaching people mathematics and handing out nanoseconds?
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You're right that age has something to do with it. Spending days installing LFS was easy when I had summers off. :p I can still taste the ecstasy of having the wireless NIC on my laptop "just work" after installing dapper on it.
+1 LOL. Minimal distributions are a lot of fun, you get your system customized EXACTLY how you like it, and you get to learn a whole lot. Unfortunately, you end up spending more time configuring and tinkering with your system, than you do actually using it!!! Then, by the time you get everything the way you like it, you do something stupid like "emerge world" on Gentoo, then you have to spend even MORE time fixing stuff that got broken during the upgrade. Great for when you are single and in college, not so great when you are married with kids and a busy work schedule. Unless you build a minimal FreeBSD system, you don't have to worry about stuff getting broken in upgrades, since the packages are all way out of date and don't get updated very often compared to most Linux distros anyway. That's one of the reasons why it is so stable, except for Flash on FreeBSD... don't get me started on that, ROFL.
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Or you could all go and install Haiku (http://haiku-os.org/) :first:
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Yeah, I never really understood why people complain so much about Unity and GNOME3. Anyone who cares enough to nit-pick through it like that can certainly figure out how to install a different Desktop Environment.
I find it funny that for so long people criticized the Linux community and developers for not innovating, and once they do the same people are there to criticize it still.
None of it really matters anyway, nothing will ever be as good as Openbox. :cool:
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The people (journalists, I assume) that were complaining about innovating (can you cite a source, BTW?) are not the same people complaining about the change. But you are right, most of those people have moved away from GNOME. It was nice having a turn-key like Ubuntu that worked the way I wanted, but that is no longer the case. Linus Torvalds used Ubuntu, until recently.
Change always produces upset. GNOME2 had a similar effect (though there was no, massive paradigm shift). Luckily, there is a lot of choice.
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Anything Apple consumes the Tech blogs for a month. The only Apple product I have is a MacBook Pro and I started regretting it pretty quick. Luckily, work paid for that. :roll:
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It's funny, I actually do the opposite emulation that people here talk about. My home PC runs Win7 and when I want to do some srsbsnss I load up virtual box Ubuntu and get my vim on.
I ran Slackware with blackbox wm throughout college (tried mandrake and some others too) and loved all the tinkering. These days I'm ssh'd into a screen on a redhat dev server all day from OS X and do most of my work locally in MacVim and rsync it up.
As a commenter said above, I work full time and want to relax when I get home, not fight my OS to do what I want. Linux was going in a great direction and Ubuntu was the kick in the ass it needed to be more consumer friendly but the splintering and in fighting of the community convinced me that it'll never get where it needs to go to be considered as a serious option for non technical users.
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None of it really matters anyway, nothing will ever be as good as Openbox. :cool:
Quoted for accuracy. Getting a good Openbox config made for every system I use is the one of the best segments of time I have spent. I understand some people don't want to tinker with computers at home, which is why my wife runs her Win7 box for gaming when a Linux distro would handle it just fine.
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I don't see journalists writing much about Linux anymore. It's iPad this and iPad that.
I would think Apple are more known to the average consumer than Linux, or a Linux distribution.
It's nice to talk about things like this, but the bottom line is Canonical and other vested organisations aren't going to change their stance on what they do think is a good step forward; with Unity 2.0 and GNOME 3.x. And Canonical are making some improvements to the customisability of Unity in Ubuntu 12.04.
I think the next several years are going to be very interesting for not only Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, but also other operating systems such as Windows and OS X - but especially Windows, since Windows 8 introduces the new Metro user interface. Microsoft obviously thinks the future is touch-enabled devices - not just tablets, but other new comfortable form factors. It'll be very interesting to see how the future is for Windows, OS X and Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. I think in time many of the concerns will be sorted. For example, some people's complaints about Unity being uncustomisable is being answered with Ubuntu 12.04, which makes Unity much more customisable out of the box.
I do like Unity on Ubuntu, it works well although it does need readjustment and some refinements, some of which are seen in Ubuntu 12.04.
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There's no easy way to tell percentages. I would think it's a couple of times more than that, but it's not used often for a reason. Hardware capabilities for graphics and sound are usually badly supported and if you don't build your Linux it from the ground up, you get breakage that you have no clue how to fix. Still, the number of great free software that is being made shouldn't be ignored either. Chances are most people have at least one GTK or QT native app running on their Windows. I have a bunch of them.
Openbox+++
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(http://i.imgur.com/4Lb4u.gif)
Your numbers are wrong.
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You probably meant this:
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/PiratesVsTemp%28en%29.svg/800px-PiratesVsTemp%28en%29.svg.png)
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For a technical user, Linux is fantastic. I've been using it pretty much exclusively for both my business and personal computer needs for over a decade now. If would give up computers and change careers if I was forced to use windows!
Of course most computer users are not technical / savvy enough.
By analogy, manual transmissions are way better than auto/torque converter. But in this country, most drivers aren't savvy enough to drive them. In the rest of the world, most soccer moms drive a stick. Here in the US, guys buy automatic crap thinking they are "sports cars" because of fake hood scoops or fancy stripes, and have no idea how to drive a stick. Disgusting.
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The people (journalists, I assume) that were complaining about innovating (can you cite a source, BTW?) are not the same people complaining about the change.
No I don't have any specific citations, sorry. I mainly just meant people I've talked to and interacted with.
Quoted for accuracy. Getting a good Openbox config made for every system I use is the one of the best segments of time I have spent.
:)
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Linux shines on the PC. Let's be pragmatic here, while some people put Linux on tablets, it doesn't mean it's a good idea. I'm a Linux fan and wouldn't tolerate another OS on my main computer without throwing it out the window, but for phones and tablets, iOS / android are the better choice.
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I think even Microsoft used SCO Unix for its websites / mailservers even at the time they already had NT. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft makes use of some Linux machines in their datacenters today.
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I drive a Honda Odyssey and stick is not an option but the huge nav screen and backup camera with IR sensors please me greatly.
(http://www.ramsrule.com/herd/addon.php?5,module=embed_images,url=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.zaazu.com%2Fimg%2Fvomit-boy01-vomit-puke-sick-smiley-emoticon-000652-large.gif) I'd rather get the bus than drive that soccer-mom travesty of a vehicle.
Also, it's always seemed to me that the main drawback of Linux isn't the UI, or the fact it's a bit of a mess in general, but the lack of software. Usually when you say this you get a rush of 'nix fanboys lecturing you on how this assertion is wrong, but really unless you're into text editors and scripting tools (nothing wrong with that) what else is there? There's no Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, Media Composer, Quicken/Sage/Turbotax, etc., just a bunch of broken GNU clones with recursive acronym names like "gimp" or "assrape" or whatever.
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Also, it's always seemed to me that the main drawback of Linux isn't the UI, or the fact it's a bit of a mess in general, but the lack of software. Usually when you say this you get a rush of 'nix fanboys lecturing you on how this assertion is wrong, but really unless you're into text editors and scripting tools (nothing wrong with that) what else is there? There's no Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, Media Composer, Quicken/Sage/Turbotax, etc., just a bunch of broken GNU clones with recursive acronym names like "gimp" or "assrape" or whatever.
Um, you have no idea what you're talking about. Linux has TONS of excellent software. I use it for work and play, and could not possibly go back to windows without seriously destroying my productivity. I really do mean TONS of software. Like software where I could record over USB from my guitar processor. Software that converts/fixes my photos in batch mode. Software that allowed me to view x-ray and CT-Scan datafiles. Who needs microsoft office when you have LibreOffice? As for turbotax, I use Linux to do my taxes using the web version of turbotax. Not to mention the tons of software for networking, teensy/arduino programming, and other geeky/technical stuff.
You mentioned a handful of paid apps, all the apps I am referring to above are free. Here's some of the things I have done with gimp, another excellent and FREE program The first photo has the diodes/wires at the top "shopped", I copied them from another PCB's photo! The others are self-explanatory.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]44600[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]44601[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]44602[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]44603[/ATTACH]
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Like I said,
Usually when you say this you get a rush of 'nix fanboys lecturing you on how this assertion is wrong
and
broken GNU clones
I appreciate that software might work well for you, but personally I find the quality of the likes of LibreOffice and GIMP to be completely unacceptable. I don't care that they're free (as in beer or otherwise).
Admittedly Linux has a huge range of small, specific programs for niche purposes, but it completely fails when compared against commercial Windows software that fulfils more mainstream and common requirements (office work, accounting, payroll, graphic design, video editing, etc.).
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There's no Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, Media Composer, Quicken/Sage/Turbotax, etc., just a bunch of broken GNU clones with recursive acronym names like "gimp" or "assrape" or whatever.
The Gimp is not that bad. OpenOffice.org is good enough for most people, and there are lots of Windows users that also use it.
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Like I said,
and
I appreciate that software might work well for you, but personally I find the quality of the likes of LibreOffice and GIMP to be completely unacceptable. I don't care that they're free (as in beer or otherwise).
Admittedly Linux has a huge range of small, specific programs for niche purposes, but it completely fails when compared against commercial Windows software that fulfils more mainstream and common requirements (office work, accounting, payroll, graphic design, video editing, etc.).
Fine, carry on using your spyware programs (windows 7). Where you don't have the right hardware it shuts you out of your system.
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Alright, I will. What do you even mean by that anyway? Are you talking about WPA? Y'know as annoying as that is in theory, in reality it's not something you ever notice or care about. Certainly less of a hassle than using Linux and substandard software every day.
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Um, you have no idea what you're talking about. Linux has TONS of excellent software. I use it for work and play, and could not possibly go back to windows without seriously destroying my productivity. I really do mean TONS of software. Like software where I could record over USB from my guitar processor. Software that converts/fixes my photos in batch mode. Software that allowed me to view x-ray and CT-Scan datafiles. Who needs microsoft office when you have LibreOffice? As for turbotax, I use Linux to do my taxes using the web version of turbotax. Not to mention the tons of software for networking, teensy/arduino programming, and other geeky/technical stuff.
You mentioned a handful of paid apps, all the apps I am referring to above are free. Here's some of the things I have done with gimp, another excellent and FREE program The first photo has the diodes/wires at the top "shopped", I copied them from another PCB's photo! The others are self-explanatory.
(Attachment) 44600[/ATTACH] (Attachment) 44601[/ATTACH] (Attachment) 44602[/ATTACH] (Attachment) 44603[/ATTACH]
Linux does have tons of great software, and there are a lot of good Linux alternatives to Windows software. However, you need to recognize that not every Windows software has a Linux alternative, nor can you run them on Wine(they barely run on Windows because they were written so crappily LOL). The only way certain software will run on Linux is with a Windows VM, in which case, you might as well just run Windows. For a while I was running Windows via Virtualbox and seemless mode, and although if feels more native, if you think about it you are still just fakin' the funk. Some examples are poorly written proprietary software to manage PBX systems that have no web interface or a severely handicapped one, tools to manage Windows domains, and various other IT administration tools that only run on Windows. I would run Linux exclusively in a heartbeat if there weren't so many stupid industry specific Windows only applications that I needed, but that isn't the case. And no, RDP'ing to a bunch of servers is not an option because it is highly inefficient compared to running native tools on your desktop and pushing them out with Domain Admin credentials. Don't get me wrong, I'm a linux fanboy at heart and a user since the 90s, but it in no way can be a complete replacement for Windows for all people even for the tech savvy.
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Sure, not every Windows software has a linux replacement. But also, not every Linux software has a windows replacement. I would go as far as saying that Linux has more pieces of software that Windows lacks. So the argument goes both ways. Sure, I have an XP partition that I boot once in a year or so, to update firmware in a harddrive or some other proprietary thing, but that's far far less frequent than my need for the tons of everyday stuff that Linux does best.
Why would I have Windows as my main OS when 99% of the stuff I need are on Linux, and better? I would be miserable if my main OS only only had 1% usefulness and was 99% crap.
Again, this argument goes both ways. Therefore, each individual must decide which OS fulfils most things they need (no OS will fulfil ALL your needs). In my case, Linux is by a huge margin better for my needs than anything else.
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Alright, I will. What do you even mean by that anyway? Are you talking about WPA? Y'know as annoying as that is in theory, in reality it's not something you ever notice or care about. Certainly less of a hassle than using Linux and substandard software every day.
See the funny thing is, I run Windows 7 every single day and have a fair number of applications installed. Aside from the games and Steam they're all Windows ports/builds of Linux software. Of course I also use Linux 5 out of 7 days and aside from the games prefer that environment over Windows 99% of the time. There are a couple nice things I like about Win7 tho.
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Sure, not every Windows software has a linux replacement. But also, not every Linux software has a windows replacement. I would go as far as saying that Linux has more pieces of software that Windows lacks. So the argument goes both ways. Sure, I have an XP partition that I boot once in a year or so, to update firmware in a harddrive or some other proprietary thing, but that's far far less frequent than my need for the tons of everyday stuff that Linux does best.
Why would I have Windows as my main OS when 99% of the stuff I need are on Linux, and better? I would be miserable if my main OS only only had 1% usefulness and was 99% crap.
Again, this argument goes both ways. Therefore, each individual must decide which OS fulfils most things they need (no OS will fulfil ALL your needs). In my case, Linux is by a huge margin better for my needs than anything else.
I agree, just stating why I gave up on Linux for my desktop after more than a decade. I got tired of fighting with the rest of the world. Same reason I gave up Dvorak, even though it is superior, I got forced to use qwerty all the time either at other peoples desks doing customer support, or when the keys don't get mapped correctly through remote sessions using various remote solutions. LOL, to support your argument I always laugh when people try to run linux native stuff on windows via cygwin or some other bs hack. Although I don't use it as a desktop, I have plenty of servers that I take care of that run Linux because running LAMP on windows(WAMP) is just hackish and dumb in my opinion. Kind of like Micros, which is a POS solution that the hospitality industry uses. It uses cygwin, and always crashes at the most annoying times. I really wish it were 100% linux native, rather than linux software ported to run on Windows via some crappy emulation layer because it needs to also interact with various windows only applications and services.
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Hehe...I'm the opposite. I've been running Linux on my desktop at work since the late 90s. I'm so much more efficient when I can keep many workspaces open and have the window manager remember what I was doing in each. Windows never got workspaces right, and I tried many aftermarket tools, too.
It was a big pain, though, and there were periods where I had to use Windows for parts of my workflow. I did that by booting my native NT image from VMWare. At one point, IT was sniffing ports and shutting down my access to the switch. Had to make my machine vanish from their sniffers with iptables. Now the old IT empire is gone and they actually prefer it if we run Linux.
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I agree, just stating why I gave up on Linux for my desktop after more than a decade. I got tired of fighting with the rest of the world. Same reason I gave up Dvorak, even though it is superior, I got forced to use qwerty all the time either at other peoples desks doing customer support
Did it cross your mind to maintain both dvorak and qwerty skills? That's what I do, and it's serving me very well. I do up to 100WPM on dvorak and up to 80WPM on qwerty... no way I'm going to give up my favorite layout and favorite OS because of other people!
I gave up Linux, Dvorak, Colemak, ALPS and Bad Women and STILL Sordna wants me to try ergonomic keyboards.
Haha, I gave up on bad keyboards, you should try it sometime!
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I was stuck on the old Arch Linux lappy for the last couple of days and it was only halfway configured. That **** is painful and not fun.
It got better, though.
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Here's my $0.02:
Ubuntu is a distribution that uses upstream tools (i.e., Debian stuff) to package and distribute software. (They have some of their own, but the toolset is mostly Debian.) Think of the packages on your computer as a tree. Every time you install a package, e.g. dwm, you are adding a new "leaf" to the tree. However, dwm can't work by itself; it needs libraries and so on. So everything that dwm needs to work needs to be installed also; those are like intermediate branches that connect to the tree trunk.
You can install a "desktop environment" or you can simply pick the components you want to install, starting from e.g. a "server" install. This will require research and coca-cola, possibly even Japanese motorcycle pants, rollerblades, multicolored floppy disks, and a young Angelina Jolie.
If you don't want to take the "red pill" approach, I would suggest sticking with the same family of distributions until you are sure your best fortunes lie elsewhere. Others have suggested you try Debian. Ubuntu's philosophy can be understood by considering their bug # 1 is that "Microsoft has a majority market share." That is the space for which they are contending. Debian, in contrast, being a meritocracy and completely community-controlled, acknowledges that OSes will always suck, and so it sucks equally for everybody. Thus their desktop-style installs may be more up your alley, i.e. not catering to the latest touchy-touchy fad.
Whatever you do, don't switch distributions to "learn Linux". Compiling things akimbo Gentoo-style will only burn up your time, and maybe burn down your house if your CPU has insufficient cooling. The best you can do is read. Read manuals. Read source code. Get the source for the kernel on your system. Change it and see if it still works. It is amazing how many constants you can change in the sources before you get a crash :)
Each distribution comes with a set of defaults--installed software, and default configurations. The only way to ensure you are happy long term is to become familiar with choosing, installing, removing, and configuring software on your system. Each distribution (and other UNIX variants as well) comes with documentation on these tasks, often comprehensive documentation. Learning how to administer your system will take work. Once you have these basic skills (e.g. for a Debian-based system) you can use any system which uses the tools with minimal mental effort.
Finally, ask yourself what you are really getting out of it. Are you using bash, perl, sed, awk, python, etc. to solve problems? Does the system as you use it give you the tools to do your daily work? Or are you just using it to spite Micro$oft and Apple fan boys? If the system as you use it daily isn't giving you anything you can't get from windows, I would suggest you either force yourself to learn what the system offers and relearn how to do the daily tasks you do on your computer, or switch back to windows. If you're not happy don't stay that way.
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I just upgraded my ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) to 12.04 (Specific) development branch without much incident. I just love being able to perpetually upgrade my OS so easily, without losing my stuff.
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I have never been a fan of ubuntu. They install all the crap they think you want to start with. Usually this is a just that a bunch of crap. I'm only suprised it took this long for them to think that you needed something like unity that just radicaly changes things and install it by default and have users finaly realize: What the hell!
I have been a long time debian user. I have always liked to start from a base install and only add this stuff I want. I have usually stuck with either openbox or xfce to stay away from the bloat. My only issue with debian is stable is too crufty and testing the last few years might as well be the unstable branch. Because of this I have started looking for a new distro.
I have recently switched to archlinux and have to say I am quite impressed. The distro is not very far behind upstream but I have only hit a few bumps mainly because I upgraded before checking the web page and there was some manual intervention needed prior to upgrade. Only bad thing about arch is I do not feel the security has been taken serious enough compared to other distros but they have recently addressed this by finaly adding package signing.
For headless boxes though, I think freebsd blows linux out of the water. I have gone through a couple versions of basicly big 20 drive file servers for samba shares for all my multimedia etc. First with geom based raid5 now migrated over to ZFS. Every other softraid I have tried, linux and windows eventually ends up in significant data lose after refusing to rebuild when replacing a failed terabyte drive. Freebsd as far as storage server I think just plain rocks. If you havent used it before you should try it. Very stable. If only they had the number of developers linux does maybe they would be a viable desktop system as well. Just dreaming....
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Ubuntu is fine so long as you use a derivative like Lubuntu or Xubuntu, instead of the "flagship" product that gets these extreme UI refreshes, ie Unity. I'm using Xubuntu + compiz which works awesome for several years now.
Yeah, ZFS is amazing, too bad for that stupid Sun license being incompatible with GNU GPL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Linux
Hopefully Oracle will fix that...
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I expect no motion on the ZFS license at all, and for btrfs to be the Linux focus from Oracle.
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I've never had a issue with SoftRAID on Linux. Sorry to hear about yours.
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Better to use linux kernel raid (mdadm) and NOT fake-raid (dmraid) ...
more info here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto
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Well, I hope he wasn't trying to use FakeRAID. That's like the soft modem thing in the 90s. Trying to find an internal modem with an actual UART was a bit of a trick.
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Multitech modems always worked with Linux, and still do, even their latest USB ones.
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LOL! Either you weren't using Linux in the early 90s or you have a bad memory. "WinModems" most certainly did NOT work with Linux because they required proprietary firmware and drivers. They lacked anything resembling a UART because everything was emulated in software.
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I know! I always hunted for modems with rockwell UART, that's why I said Multitech is a brand whose modems always worked with Linux. It's an exceptional brand, they never made winmodems. Apart form their old ISA modems, even their PCI and later PCI-E and now USB modems work with Linux. Small but awesome company for modems and VOIP devices.
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Ah, sorry. I misread your post. I used a specific (and expensive) USR modem PCI modem at the time. Thankfully, those days are long over. :)
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Ok, you are forgiven and are on a clean slate again: AT&F
I'll reply to you promptly if you have any further comments: ATS0=1
Make sure I won't forget: AT&W
ATZ :-)
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I want to see sordna type out the handshake...
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Ubuntu is fine so long as you use a derivative like Lubuntu or Xubuntu
...or the "alternate" install method. I've been running ubuntu on no-graphics systems for a while and like it just fine (esp. the 5 year upgrades for LTS versions).
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Some of Ubuntu / Debian spin-off's are okay, crunchbang was one I especially liked. Fedora is fun to mess with and so is Sabayon - there are tons of choices out there that's for sure.
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If someone hasn't said this... apt-get install cinnamon
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I really wish Ubuntu would offer a "desktop-agnostic" install DVD, sort of like how Fedora and SUSE do. All that stuff is in the repositories anyway.
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You can always install ubuntu server, then cherry pick whatever UI packages you may want.
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On my main box (sig) Gentoo, with awesomeWM everything is compiled :D and is exactly as I want it.
On personal laptop Arch with awesomeWM
At work it's Debian with LXDE.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Linux :D
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FreeBSD has ZFS?!? Time to change oases again.
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Completely coincidentally ran into this today (from the planet.ubuntu.com twitter feed) : Install ZFS on Debian GNU/Linux (http://pthree.org/2012/04/17/install-zfs-on-debian-gnulinux/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pthree+%28pthree.org%29) .
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Is there any real advantage to running ZFS if you're a desktop user?
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Is there any real advantage to running ZFS if you're a desktop user?
Likely, no, unless you run a complex / high capacity RAID in your desktop.
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The only real advantage as a desktop user can be gotten w/ LVM and that is snap-shotting for backups and upgrades. Then if you want RAID, md as well.
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I'm not much a fan of Ubuntu at all either.
It's always been said that if you know Slackware, you know Linux and this is still true today. I'm not going to proselytize because it's still a minority of us that run Slack but if you truly want to learn the ins and outs of Linux, installing, setting up and maintaining Slackware will accomplish that. Everything else is just some flavor of Linux, with distro-specific quirks and ways of doing things. This is especially true of Ubuntu. I guess ultimately it's a difference of perspective/need. If you want to learn Linux for professional environments, learn RHEL/CentOS and/or Debian. Both are fantastic. If you want a fun desktop Linux to play with, I would actually probably push you towards Sabayon, which is fantastic. If your goal is just to learn Linux, Slackware is a great starting point. A distribution is more a tool or specific mindset for what you want your Linux to do...
And as far as my choice of window manager, I'm a true neckbeard...I use fluxbox. KDE isn't bad I guess.
I run Slackware (personal fun) & Debian (personal work) primarily, have had to use CentOS for work and get a lot of use out of both Sabayon and Liberté. I've given some time to working on smaller, niche Linux projects like GoboLinux.
P.S. Gnome blows. ;)
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I started on Slackware and floppies, but it's not the only distro that you can learn Linux on. RH and Ubuntu are definitely quirky and try to hold your hand too much. I'm running Gentoo everywhere because I only want to deal with 1 distro at a time and Gentoo does what I need on the server side. It's easy to be bleeding edge on anything necessary and easy to get PostgreSQL support on everything. I hear Arch is a nice alternative to Gentoo but I haven't dug any deeper.
I used fluxbox for a while... Don't even remember why I switched, it was probably some incompatibility w something esoteric I use. I'm back on fvwm but still looking for something more.
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I used fluxbox for a while... Don't even remember why I switched, it was probably some incompatibility w something esoteric I use. I'm back on fvwm but still looking for something more.
I ran into some occasional weirdness like that with fluxbox. I just patched a fix. :D
Fluxbox will have to be ripped off my computers over my dead body.
Also, Gentoo users should give Sabayon a shot. ;)
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Pretty happy with MATE right now. A few quirks, but I'm at 99% productivity on my main workstation. I'm using Cinnamon on my Macbook Pro. It's got approximately the work flow of GNOME2 with the bugginess of GNOME Shell. :) Not quite ready for production, IMO.
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I happy with XFCE. It's a fairly lightweight, easy to use desktop, with the right amount of features and plugins. Plays well with compiz too if you want zoom desktop, rotating cube, etc.
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Xfce 4.8 almost meets my needs/wants. I make fairly heavy use of panels and find some of the missing features annoying. It doesn't sound like they added much in the way of features to 4.10, but they did improve Thunar (which is kind of buggy). It will ultimately fill the hole left by GNOME2, IMO, while LXDE fills the super-lightweight desktop gap that Xfce is leaving behind it.
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Xfce 4.8 almost meets my needs/wants. I make fairly heavy use of panels and find some of the missing features annoying.
Care to elaborate on the missing features you are referring to?
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I've used XFCE and Fluxbox (old school) to moderate success but Gnome 2 was always the best for me. I hate Gnome 3 and Unity so much that I made the jump to KDE in my VM.
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I know! I always hunted for modems with rockwell UART, that's why I said Multitech is a brand whose modems always worked with Linux. It's an exceptional brand, they never made winmodems. Apart form their old ISA modems, even their PCI and later PCI-E and now USB modems work with Linux. Small but awesome company for modems and VOIP devices.
Gotta say, working for a company that has deployed hundreds of Multitechs (routefinders, etc), I hate, HATE, HATE them as a router when their soldered on battery fails and they dump the entire router configuration, and DHCP stops working. They're fine if the people managing them are intelligent enough to troubleshoot, but horrible when you're reselling them, and expecting them to work for 3-10 years without fail and monitor/repair them remotely. In the last year we had a flood of Multitech Deaths, we have since been replacing them all with standard Cisco RV042 Small Business (aka Linksys) boxes (which also run Linux), much faster/easier to replace. With the exception that their web-admin interface usually only works with IE in the newest firmware on Windows, (Works fine on iPad/Safari, and Mozilla on Redhat).
I skipped to the end of this thread after reading the first two pages.
As far as the OP, and every other *nix contributor. I'm with the opinion, if you like Ubuntu, use it, just remove Unity and install whatever DE/Window Manager you prefer. For my Unix-Derived OS, I prefer FreeBSD w/ Fluxbox, and obviously OS X (I'm one of the few people I know that use Terminal on a daily basis. :D ). I also run a multi-user VM with 50 RedHat Servers, as well as install RedHat on many IBMs. That's the beauty of any *nix OS. There's a flavor for everyone, it just requires finding a solution that works well, and implementing it. It's been 6 years since I've installed Ubuntu (helped the Distro/Flubuntu put their distro together), but you should still be able to install it how you want at boot.
(As I write this, I'm installing FreeBSD 9 via Boot-only/Netinstall on my Work PC (my company "forces" use of Windows 7, when the majority of your "Phone Support" is 60+ Women, simple is best.)
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when the majority of your "Phone Support" is 60+ Women, simple is best
Get the **** outta here with that.
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Get the **** outta here with that.
Sorry, I meant to say, "60+ year old women". We actually have 4 over 60, 1 at 48. The rest are guys. It's a niche company. But everyone can use SCO/Red Hat in some form or another.
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Many Linux/distro discussions are actually about Desktop Environments and Window Managers. There is an interesting comparison of Window Managers at the Crunchbang Forum:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/18273/30-window-managers-in-30-days/