Ubuntu 18.04: Unity is gone, Gnome is back, and Ubuntu has never been better

Really? I've never heard anything but non-intuitive ramblings from UI design people. None of them seem to ever actually use computers. Rather, they dream up use cases based on contrived scenarios. I want one thing: The icon is where it was yesterday. Gnome, unity all the others have one job: Let me launch the program I need and get the F out of my way. UI stability is why I years ago abandoned the chaos of Ubuntu for the stability of Mint.

Windows XP got it right. Start button->office->word. Start button -> Email. Most everything after that is fluff.

I'd forgotten this! Very frustrating when you're used to using this to switch to a file in that directory. I also missed split-screen functionality, and the inability to right click and fire up a terminal from that location. Oh, and also looks like they've dropped being able to double-click on an executable .sh file to run it.

Luckily none of this bothers me as there is Caja.

It's such a weird decision, as searching recursively something is a rare task, so having a dedicated button would be fine. While going to a file/folder in the current dir is pretty much the basic interaction with a file manager.

I don't get their reasoning there.

If somebody knows of any trick to get the old behavior back (even patching the damn nautilus), I'll take it. I'll probably upgrade in a few month and I'll need it badly.

In both OS X and Windows your desktop is just a folder with a background set to icon grid view. From right clicking to dragging, the UX is and should be identical to the file manager. So it makes sense to have that part of the UI handled by the program that's already a file browser.

Now a developer is going to recreate all of the features provided by Nautilus in a JavaScript and CSS extension. Any differences will make a janky experience for the end user.

And it would fit their design philosophy to permanently remove it, which has been moving away from the concept of files as a whole. Instead, you're supposed to launch the app that does what you're trying to do and then open the file that you want to edit through that.

Another feature removal that has shown this direction, is the removal of the option to create an empty file from the context menu in the file manager.

Again, instead open the app that creates the type of file that you want and then create the new file in there.

Are you suggesting that Ubuntu should follow smartphones, tablets and Chromebooks in not providing the user a way to access the local file system?

Either the setup is too limitating : trying to do anything multi task on a phone OS is excuciating, you can't have your 3D rendering software/IDE/veracrypt/... installed in chrome OS, you don't have enough hard drive space,

Or on the other end of the spectrum, I even got friends who are minimalistic, they have no windows decoration, all is keyboard based, with an arch and dvorak layout, doing everything in VIM. Well in the end, they are slower, because they have to keep so many things in their head to do the most basic thing. Like 70 keyboard shorcut (on 3 different keyboard in case they are not on their perfect seup) layout and the position/index of their windows and names of files to just edit + switch. You can literally see them think before every action that requires context switching, which is brain power that they don't use for fixing the problem. And by the way, they spend a lot of time taking care of that setup, despite the fact they advertise it as rock solid.

As far as I know, Gnome 2 is the last example of a Linux desktop environment that underwent professional usability testing (on regular people and power users) before shipping.

Personally, these days, I prefer minimalist WM’s and CLI administration tools for stuff like WiFi, but all the newer heavy DE’s I’ve tried have obvious (to me) usability regressions vs gnome 2.

It is funny how little usability testing is done on desktop environments these days (I also wonder if Microsoft bothered with Win 8, or if apple is with iOS these days cough podcasts cough).

Does Gnome really have a niche there? I know of three places with large Linux deployments (as in hundreds of stations). None of them use Gnome -- its interaction model is so weird and foreign that getting people who aren't Linux/FOSS enthusiasts to use it difficult, painful and frustrating for everyone, users included.

All three are SuSE shops, actually. All three run KDE; one of them is more relaxed when it comes to software engineers so a couple of folks run Cinnamon, but that's about it.

The unsettling phenomenon is that most non-techie users don't need something super smart and intuitive, they want something like Windows, because that's what they've used so far to get their work done and they see no reason to learn something new.

If it's different, but approachable, they'll adjust (perhaps that's the value in customizable DEs like KDE; you can start with something that everyone's comfortable with, then they can tweak it to make it "better"). But if it's radically different and you need someone to explain them exactly why it's better and how they've been using computers wrong this whole time, that doesn't work in the real world.

• There are the kind that want more "power" exposed through the GUI, with administration happening through the same interface as regular usage. This culminates in things like Windows Server administration via snap-ins. This is traditionally what a "power user" refers to.

• There are the kind that want to treat their PC or mobile device as, effectively, single-node enterprise systems, with administration happening through alternative interfaces that were designed specifically for administration, usually of large clusters of systems. These are the folks who are at home with Windows Group Policy Objects; Linux config files; MDM profiles on mobile; etc. Basically, sysadmins who happen to be administering their home network. These also get called "power users", though maybe "hobbyists" (that hobby being https://reddit.com/r/homelab/ building) might be more apropos.

Most modern OSes seem to be moving away from supporting the first kind of "power user", seemingly because features that support that use-case are also "sharp edges" where less-knowledgeable users can hurt themselves.

But modern OSes are exposing ever-more configuration functionality to the second kind of "power user." Windows now lets you do more things through PowerShell commands than you ever could through the Control Panel. macOS has always left the more arcane functionality to the terminal, creating POSIX-ish tools like diskutil(8), defaults(8), scutil(8), lsregister(8), etc. And Linux, underneath, is still just glued together 99% via editable plaintext files (the newest iteration being systemd unit files.)

As "the second kind of power user", I like using GNOME just fine. (It's actually a little bit "more powerful" for me than macOS is, even, because I'm also the third kind of power user: a developer willing to tweak the GNOME source to get what I want. ;)

However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.

Nautilus has got increasingly shitty. So there's less Gnome now in my Xfce.

I tried Win 10 recently, it was horrible.

In conclusion they all have warts. But Xfce is okay in a Win95 kind of way. It could be better.

Simple UI seems to always elude distros/desktops.

I even brought an old Macbook back to life by throwing Mate on it in place of MacOs.

  Win+R -> Resize
  Win+M -> Move
  Win+A -> All desktops
  Win+Q -> Stay on top
  Win+H -> Hide
  Win+Arrow -> change workspace
  Win+Shift+Arrow -> Carry focused window to workspace

This works so well for me that I completely removed all the buttons from the window manager since I no longer need to access them anymore.

  'm' followed by arrow keys to move the window around, or
  'r' followed by arrow keys to resize the window

Argh. I've seen this problem over and over on a variety of Ubuntu versions over the years, as if they don't want me resizing windows.

Is there any way to tweak this? I'm not at all liking it. My 16.04 installations are much better in this regard.

I've been using i3 for years, and I tried out gaps when it first started popping up in the ricing forums (like https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ [please note, it's not actual porn]).

Do you use gaps so that you can see little bits of your background image? Is it purely aesthetic? I can understand beefing up the borders so that there's some space between tiles, but the gaps seem like unnecessary waste of space.

I need Win10 for low latency music work and for the odd game, all development work happens in Xubuntu VMs.

Windows is essentially a shell where I juggle vms when I need a dev environment for a specific client.

I use VirtualBox as my virtualization solution and what I found was that using Xubuntu made the whole "linux in a vm" experience much more snappier, and since I basically work with 'text' and don't fiddle with music+video inside the vm, I often forget I'm inside a VM when it's fullscreened. With Ubuntu/Unity the whole VM experience gets slowed to a crawl because Unity wants to XDamage/Composite everything and virtualbox's "accelerated drivers" aren't that good to make it perform good.

Also, Alt+PPM works well for resizing the Plasma menus now. It was missing for some time due to architectural changes.

Meaning that it is a fig leaf from the Gnome devs to power users.

Global Menus is unfortunately something that I still miss, although I was able to recover some screen space with an Extension called Pixel Saver, which merges the window control bar with the panel by removing the window decorations and adding the buttons to the panel. Not ideal, but useful.

So, when you have your hand on the keyboard, this can be much more convenient.

I've got the exact same 1440p screen as you on my Thinkpad (which wants to be run at 1.5x or 1.75x) and the best solution I've found is provided by KDE. Try installing Plasma (either by installing Kubuntu or just installing the desktop w/ apt) and setting Display->Scaling to 2X and then go into fonts separately and set "force font DPI" to 168. That's working remarkably well for both GTK and QT apps for me. 2X scaling for windows/icons keeps them from being tiny/blurry and setting the font size to 168 (aka 175%) prevents the fonts from being huge.

Am I the only one who finds it a bit frustrating that any time someone complains about missing/bad functionality in gnome, someone recommends to install an extension, but when a user complains about stability or performance, their number of extensions are blamed?

It's not.

Also, I can't stand the ugliness of GNOME, while Plasma looks mostly neat and clean.

Luckily, the search has gotten a lot better, so it will actually find KCalc when you type in "calculator".

You can also type "1+1" into the search bar and it will tell you the result right there.

And there's also an option to have the menu show applications with their generic names. So, for example "File Manager" instead of "Dolphin". Depending on the distro, this option may be default-on, too.

And now would be a good time to try it again, by the way. The last three years were spent with a major rewrite. Now it has most of the features that you'd expect from a KDE again, is stable and has been stable for long enough that most distros actually have a stable version in their repos (even Kubuntu is decent for once.)

If you're re-installing from scratch each time you're possibly doing that wrong.

An installation from scratch, in any case, should only ask you hostname, domain name, maybe wifi details (probably not for a VM), partitioning preference, and package / function (set of packages) --- none of this stuff benefits from a flashy / GUI installer.

> ... I just need a linux kernel and a reasonable package manager.

That last bit - that's kind of my point.

As someone who frequently hates on Desktop Linux, I agree with the sentiment that the fixation over ease of installing is pretty silly. Only a few distros in recent memory have anything remotely difficult about their installation process, and it's usually that they don't bother with any wizards and just make you do everything by hand from the shell, but those were meant for experts anyway.

Installing Linux used to be a huge problem, and that's why Ubuntu became popular. Other distros caught up, but it was really Ubuntu that pushed it.

For a long time, anyone interested in dipping their toe into GNU/Linux would either use a live CD (Knoppix was huge) or they'd be encouraged by someone that would assist them.

At the risk of sounding dismissive, I'd suggest if someone couldn't summon the patience to follow a fairly straightforward keyboard/location/pick-a-host-name/yeah-use-my-whole-disk sequence of steps, then actually using a GNU/Linux operating system for more than a few days was probably not on the cards. I'm not suggesting it was ever an intentional gating process, but it probably did help to save some people from being even more frustrated.

Given that each release of Ubuntu starts as a fresh fork from Debian's testing branch, this is not a compelling case for Ubuntu over Debian.

> If there were drivers for linux, they were likely tested against ubuntu.

As above, and it doesn't really matter if you meant drivers for Linux (the kernel), or GNU/Linux (a distro).

I've never heard of any drivers that work on Debian but not on Ubuntu, or vice versa.

> Ease of installation is rarely talking about the install screen; it's talking about everything just working without having to dig around the internet, and installation is a good proxy for that.

When people talk about the ease of installation, they are almost definitely talking about the ease of installation.

"Just works" is a useful phrase to describe a range of (other) user experiences, but again it's not clear how Ubuntu has (and arguably had) any significant advantages over Debian.

Configuration Management. The f was often shown as lowercase, as Cf is short for Configuration (don't look for a middle word :) No one knows why.

>> broken dependencies.

Not that it's Synaptic's fault, but some packages will have conflicting dependencies, especially if you're using PPA's to get recent software versions. It's not uncommon to get "foo (latest) requires bar >=3.1 but you have bar 2.8 installed. Baz (installed) requires bar 2.8". Snaps avoid conflicts by having each app contain it's dependencies, which could otherwise conflict.

Once an Ubuntu release has been cut the debs within it can (for the most part) only receive bugfixes, not new features. Which means that as an LTS goes through its lifespan, the software within it slowly gets further and further out of date. Snaps, on the other hand, are as up-to-date as their publishers make them.

    $ nslookup dk.
    Server:		127.0.0.53
    SERVFAIL
    $ nslookup dk. 8.8.8.8
    Server:		8.8.8.8
    Non-authoritative answer:
    Name:	dk
    Address: 193.163.102.58

Of course, setting the following in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf did no good:

  LLMNR=no

So now I have systemd-resolved handling the info from the DHCP ack, but it isn't handling DNS. This works, but good grief.

THIS! This, so many times. Xfce lets you actually use your computer to accomplish tasks without getting in the way and/or forcing you any "intended usage".

It is so good and so light, it's light-years ahead of Gnome.