I wonder what the ratio of code to comments is.
depends on what section of the code it is in. most of these kind of frustrated outbursts seems to have come from the driver part of the code.
I tried the new Ubuntu interface in VirtualBox last week, and it was sadly an veritable mountain of fail. The fallback for grpahics cards which don’t support Unity is a bland GTK2 interface with a horrible theme. After installing VirtualBox Guest Additions, turning on 3D acceleration, upping the virtual video RAM to 128MB, and rebooting, Unity actually managed to come up, but still carried the ugly theme from the fallback image. I spent about 20 mins trying to fix this but didn’t get anywhere and just gave up.
Unity is an absolutely horrid UI, even if you ignore the bad GTK2 theme.
From what I’ve seen, Mint is the way to go for Debian-derived distributions.
I’ve actually eschewed traditional window managers lately, in favor of a tiling WM called Xmonad. I am loving its performance thus far. I can run the window manager itself, with a tmux session containing a few urxvt terminals and editing a couple files in vim, with a grand total of around 175MB of RAM used. I love it.
I didn’t like Unity or Gnome 3. Never been a fan of KDE 4 and I can’t stand xmonad either.
It’s like there is no middle ground anymore. The DEs either has to be super graphics heavy, like KDE, Gnome 3 or Unity that requires heavy graphic acceleration to run smoothly. Or it has to be over the top simplistic like Xmonad or Awesome.
XFCE and LXDE doesn’t feel right either…
I don’t know, is there something wrong with wanting a visually pleasing DE that allows efficient utilization of both mouse and keyboard instead of just one? I am just using Ubuntu Classic option at login with 11.04… I am praying this doesn’t go away in 11.10, or maybe that Unity will improve.
by the way though, Unity seems like a mouse heavy environment, but the way it’ setup it’s actually a keyboard heavy environment. That is if you know all the keyboard shortcuts. It is way easier to use Unity with the keyboards than moving the mouse all over the screen to find your open applications.
I totally agree with the ugly default look of Ubuntu since they’ve gone purplish. But it has nothing to do with the theme, it’s just the awful wallpaper. I replace the wallpaper with Summer Glau fron TSCC, then it looks great. I prefer darker themes.
That’s just it though. XFCE/LXDE are the middle ground.
Highly keyboard driven, huh? In other words, it’s a lot like the way I currently work in Xmonad. Only I actually have control over the UI.
No, that’s not what I was talking about. The fallback UI was grey with some ugly dark blue as the highlight color. I think it was actually the GNOME 2 default theme (which is ugly). No excuse for not changing that to something else.
I love xfce, but I’ve been using it for years and am very used to it.
I tried Ubuntu and Xubuntu 11.04 and was very unhappy with them. I’m not going to spend hours trying to configure these behemoths to my liking. If I wanted to do that, I’d just do everything myself from the start. The whole REASON for Ubuntu (at least for me) is because I don’t HAVE to configure it.
So I’m camping on Xubuntu 10.04 (which I also had to tweak a bit more than I cared to) with no plans on upgrading.
I’ve heard of Mint before. Maybe it’s time to re-expand my horizons.
A lot of Ubuntu users I know have made the switch to Mint. I prefer a rolling release distro, myself.
that’s not even the fall back UI then, that sounds like rescue mode UI.
I also didn’t want to upgrade from 10.10. In my opinion for Gnome 2 lovers, Ubuntu 10.10 was just right. It wasn’t just the DE though, since there are two power management regressions in the new linux kernels, all recent distros are effected by them. There’s just no good reason to update to any new distros right now in my opinion.
But unfortunately when I tried to install ATI’s 11.04 driver, the totally hosed my driver. I thought about just going back and fix it, but then I thought what the hell, why not just do a fresh install and see this Unity thing.
Like I said, I am glad they have the Ubuntu Classic login option. Because I can’t survive Unity, neither could i survive in Gnome 3. But one thing Archtaku said about Unity that if it is keyboard heavy, he could have just used xmonad. But even though Unity isn’t very mouse friendly, it’s light years more friendly when it comes to touch UI than xmonad.
I can see why there is a place for DE UI paradigms for Unity and Gnome 3. But at the same time… what’s wrong with having the Gnome brand stay true being a great Desktop UI, and name the product of new paradigm with something else?
It’s like if back in 2008 Apple decides to continue naming their new phone iPod, and hence there will be no new iPod without cellphone capability. That’s what this whole Gnome 3/Unity touch UI paradigm shift felt like to me.
The one good thing for me as a linux desktop user is that at least with Unity, it follows freedesktop.org specs, and allows KDE apps to run seamlessly without having to write anything in the gnome toolkit for notifications or appearances. So, hopefully like KDE 4, all the things old users can’t get used to will be resolved later.
As for Gnome 3, the one thing I like is that it’s UI are all written with java-script, so it’s highly customizable, and it can look pretty awesome. The one thing I really don’t like about Gnome 3 is that it’s UI are written with darn java-script…
No reason for that theme to persist once I got Unity up and running, then. I even removed all the dotfiles/dirs in my home directory, figuring that the theme was saved there. Nope.
That’s a ridiculous statement. It’s like saying, “This bicycle is nice, but it’s not really good for Formula 1 racing.” You don’t use a tiling window manager if you want a touch interface, and you don’t race F1 with a damned bicycle.
very odd. I read somewhere that there’s a new version of VirtualBox that works with Gnome 3 and Unity’s graphic acceleration out of the box.
I wonder if that would have fixed things.
i am just pointing out the fact that Unity and Gnome 3 aren’t aiming to just be a good keyboard oriented DE. So saying that xnomad has pretty much the same thing with more user control over the UI is also a bit like “This bicycle is nice, but it’s not really good for Formula 1 racing.”
I was making a statement about my specific use case. I think it’s pretty well-known by anyone using Linux that Unity and Gnome 3 aren’t primarily geared towards people that like to live in the keyboard.
by the way, why did you pick Xmonad instead of Dwm or Awesome. Those two look very very similar.
since Dwm is the original and all written in C, unlike Xmonad that uses Haskell and Awesome that uses Lua and Ruby, i’d thought for people wanting a lean DE it’d be Dwm that becomes wide-spread.
But despite the fact that I’ve heard about Awesome and Dwm first, Xmonad seems to have exploded after people looked for alternatives to gnome3 and unity.
To be honest, the only reason I started with xmonad when it came to tiling WMs is that xmonad’s website has a nice “guided tour” on the default keybindings, launching windows, resizing windows, changing tiling strategy, etc. I’m not really tied to xmonad though and may very well move on to AwesomeWM or dwm eventually. There are some things I’d like to do with xmonad that I haven’t been able to yet, that are kinda annoying. For example, I sync a lot of my config files using Dropbox, so that I can use them on my work computer, my desktop, and my laptop. However, I use conky to feed my statusbar at the top of the screen and the configuration varies between all three boxes due to differences in number of CPU cores, whether or not wireless is used, etc. I’ve been trying to work out how to set a variable based on the hostname of the computer, using a case statement. Then, I’d just launch my statusbar using the value from the variable (which would contain the path to the host-specific conky config file, among other things), and bingo-- single xmonad config file for all three boxes. But, thus far this has eluded me. I must admit I am not that big a fan of Haskell.
EDIT: So I tried out dwm for a while. I like the idea of the window manager being configured in C, but there’s one MAJOR feature of xmonad that I can’t give up, and that’s the ability to have floating windows while in tiled mode, something that dwm doesn’t seem to support. I like having mplayer playing a video in a floating window rather than a tiled window, as tiling will distort the aspect ratio.
I have recently fallen in love with NBC’s Community… the main characters are Greendale Human Beings. and it just so happens when I created this thread, i named it Ubuntu Community… so… i thought this is fitting.
Been kicking around an idea for a linux/geek blog for a while, and finally set one up last week, thanks in part to a recent ep of Modern Geek. I write a lot of code to simplify things on the command line, and I’ve gotten a lot of ideas and a lot of help from other people’s blogs, so this is partly to pay it forward, and also to serve as a hive brain for myself if I ever lose any of my code.
http://terminalmage.net/ (RSS here)
that is awesome. i guess i would have copy the e-mail to a pdf editor, but you, sir, are a command line guru.
Thanks! I’m still messing with the theme to find one that looks good on different computers/OSes. But I plan on trying to update it weekly at least. I’ve written a lot of code over the last 10 years or so.
Nice idea, and explained well.
Still, it makes me glad for GUIs.
Thanks for the feedback. I get impatient with GUIs, and don’t like using a mouse when I can avoid doing so. I can get things done much quicker on the command line or in an ncurses interface.