Focus follows mouse is buggy in 14.04 Xubuntu. There's no fast user switch (you can lock the screen and switch as a good-enough workaround). Suspend and restart causes the screen to not restore on occasions. Thunar doesn't have split mode (nautilus's F3). As you say the default theme is not great, I didn't like that focused and unfocused windows looked pretty much the same.
I don't know if it is better than gnome2 was but it pisses all over anything gnome3. The xfce panel is better and easier to tweak than the gnome equivalent (e.g adding a new item does not require finding a gap on the panel to right click), the places panel shortcut is really handy, xfce-terminal seems faster and less resource hungry when scrolling text than gnome-terminal, and I like the whisker menu. I just wish they had gone with the solid Xfce 4.10 for the LTS instead of the beta 4.11.
There is Settings / Appearance / Fonts / Custom DPI setting, which takes care of most of things. Panel width is also set in pixels, so you also need to widen the panels.
Firefox does not obey the above DPI setting, so also set about:config / layout.css.devPixelsPerPx separately. Yet this doesn't seem to affect video controls in YouTube, so they are kind of tiny.
Finally, nothing above scales the window title bars. I kind of like the title bars thinner, because they are wasted space anyway. But if you wanted to increase their height, apparently you'd need to edit the png files in the window theme files, because Xfce does not attempt to scale them, but uses them as pixel graphics.
>It's just that the default settings – only one panel (at the top), ugly blue theme & background image – are not very appealing and feel dated.
I used to run exclusively Linux distros, but then switched to OS X around 2008. Recently, I installed the Xubuntu Desktop and I felt that dated feeling you write about. My thought was, "Wow this hasn't changed" Even if it has changed, I couldn't tell at a glance. That's good in one way, but bad in a lot of others.
I don't think the default Xubuntu theme has ever changed. Which is kind of a shame, but also kind of good. It's very consistent and makes some users who don't care about eye candy and hate change happy, but it scares off some newer users who have a strong association with old-looking meaning poor-functioning.
Given how many awesome XFCE themes there are out there, I'm surprised Xubuntu hasn't moved to something nicer looking.
Really exciting that people still yearn for classic GNOME2 desktop environments! I know quite a few people who jumped ship from Ubuntu when Unity starting being forced on everybody by default.
Lubuntu (LXDE) has always been a bit buggy for me, but still makes for great systems (especially on older laptops).
Though I for one think the "halcyon" days of Ubuntu didn't just include a snappy/stable user interface, it also included as default the warmest colour themes ever, which somehow made even the dreariest night fun: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=ubuntu&biw=1527&bih=779&s...
Hell, I even switched to Windows 7 for a while, back when Fedora came only with Gnome3. It didn't help, that at the time the Linux kernel also had some general problems with power consumption.
By now, Gnome 3 is actually quite good, but still uses more power than MATE.
Cinnamon is slow and buggy as hell. Unity is just slow.
XFCE has become quite good, but still can't handle docking (or un/plugging an external monitor) correctly. KDE neither (plus I don't like the IMHO horrible interface).
So even after many years and years, Gnome2/MATE is still - IMHO - the best desktop in Linuxland (and I also like it more than Windows 7, and a lot more than Mac OS; back in the day I switched from Mac OS 10.4 to Ubuntu). It's not about classic - it's about functionality, stability, performance, configurability. But mostly that it just works and does everything the way you expect.
Interesting that you liked the old Ubuntu colors. I liked them much better than the current ones, but still considered them quite ugly compared to the typical blue desktops of Windows, Mac OS or Fedora.
For those that really prefer Gnome 2 there is always CentOS/Springdale Linux/Scientific Linux/Oracle Linux version 6.x. Most projects providing support until 2020.
Be prepared for the usual Enterprise Linux repository waggle dance (multiple repositories required for a reasonable range of software and media codecs). But it works rather well.
I've just put Linux Lite (XFCE) on an old netbook, and it works great, better than Windows 7 did, with 1/3 RAM usage. Make sure you upgrade after you install or Chrome won't work. I think the upgrade even installs Chrome itself.
I also liked Zorin Lite, which is LXDE based, but 7.1 was very buggy for me. Maybe 8.0 will be better, and should come out this fall. But I'm happy with Linux Lite for now.
I've never liked the default Lubuntu UI and set-up. It looks too much like it was designed in the early 2000.
I agree, LXDE has never looked very sophisticated. I'm curious what the merger brings (LXDE+RazorQt -> LXQt).
If you're not too starved on memory, I found MATE a better alternative compared to XFCE, almost the same performance, but worked a bit better. But YMMV. MATE doesn't seem to have a working window-snap (Winkey+left/right), but XFCE doesn't really work with hot-plugging external monitors.
XUbuntu on a 2008 Dell laptop with ssd here, boots in 10 seconds, login in 15. UI is fast, no stupid eye candy animations (gimmicks imo). Couldn't be happier.
Regarding eye candy animations, I find that enabling Wobbly Windows makes my work feel more "natural". Moving windows on other systems feels stiff and unpleasant now.
LXDE has been doing some fantastic efforts in polishing with LXQt. They recently finished porting everything to Qt 5. You might want to check them out - though most distros don't have packages from git.
I'd really like to switch to a Debian-based system, but ALL Debian-based distros seem to have TERRIBLE battery life, whereas Mint 17 has an excellent one (better than Arch/Manjaro or Fedora and on par with Windows 7). Sigh. And yes, I'm using powertop. Without it, Linux battery life is horrible.
Manjaro (I tried the XFCE flavor) was really nice. It didn't support Bluetooth, but at the time all distros were having some problems with upgrading to BlueZ 5.
Regularly, they have some kind of update packs which they announce on their blog/forums, in case you should get any problems, and the community seems very nic. Definitely try it!
I used linux mint mate for a while - while it's a generally serviceable fork of ubuntu, there are a number of problematic issues which crop up due to it being a fork - especially when doing routine upgrades.
I'm somewhat wary of forks now. Deviating from the standard configs is asking for trouble when it comes to upgrading.
If I preferred MATE, I'd probably use this over mint for this reason.
Gotta love how people just won't let go and move on. Imagine if all the diehard mac users ported OS9 to OSX because "OSX was forced on them".
It's called progress. Gnome2 was a dying project when Unity was announced. Gnome3 was "coming soon", but flailing around. Unity is different, sure, but so was OSX to a degree when it came out. People need to move on. Unity is the present and future of Ubuntu. We've been talking about it for, what, 3 years now? Move on, one way or another.
People complain about Unity and Gnome3 because they don't offer workflows that work well for desktops. The Linux community is open to change and new ideas, but when the majority of users are unhappy with something for such a long time then something is clearly wrong.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion. At my company we use Mint Mate on all desktops. It's clean, simple, works great, and doesn't require training for employees who have never used Linux.
Also, the assertion that GNOME 3 is extendable is funny. It's probably the least so out of the major GNU/Linux DEs, as the developers have been hellbent on pursuing "brand coherency" as of late, and in general dissuading from tampering with defaults.
How much training does it actually take to learn the GNOME 3 interface though? I use to train people at a call center how to use an old terminal based DOS application to fill out orders for sausage in 3 8-hour days. But gnome 3 is a lot more simple. Surely 8 hours is enough to teach about work spaces and how to press the windows key?
It's funny you almost never hear about companies having to train staff to use a company smartphone. I guess all smart phone interfaces are pretty similar though.
Then the names of the programs (and how to find applications in the activity view). Many people navigate by position in menu.
Then the change in Alt-Tab/Alt-` behaviour (could be fun) and the new workspaces (not many use those)
Then just being around when odd combinations of old workflow and new one happen. Minimising a window and forgetting the application is running. Nothing to click on to get windows back &c
I'm not defending anything here, just answering the original question.
Actually, I rather like Unity. However in versions later than 12.04 it breaks LibreOffice mnemonics (Alt-F-A for Save File As... and Alt-I-O-F for Insert Formula) which happens to be 80% of my work-flow.
I gather it is something to do with the way the global menu software works.
If you go back and read early Daring Fireball posts you will find him complaining loudly about various parts of OS X not being as good as OS 9, and it very much was forced on them.
This is the same writer that makes a point of mocking pundits who assail Apple with poor advice that would be catastrophic if followed.
There are tons of people who still bitch and moan about how OSX 10.6 was the pinnacle of OSX, and that's been going on nearly 5 years. I've seen plenty of people try to make Win8 look like XP too. There's a good percentage of people who simply do not like change.
There is a difference between disliking change (ludditism) and not wanting to have one's options removed involuntarily. There's no reason at all to enjoy change for the worse -- if a new DE no longer supports one's highly efficient workflow, and doesn't provide an equally efficient alternative, it is a change for the worse.
Then why don't we start architecting computer systems that respect many peoples aversion to large abrupt change, and allow them to gradually adopt new features? Instead we do these sporadic and massive code-drops that are jarring to a large segment of our users. And then we blame our users for being disgruntled.
As developers we would never accept this from the kernel, and we would complain about how it was forcing us to do massive changes to our code. Yet, we think nothing of doing this to those who have come to rely on our code.
We need a better methodology and economic model. This may well be one of the hidden benefits of SAAS where slow incremental changes fit in more easily.
I absolutely agree with you and, in fact, I'm a user of Unity who doesn't hate it and has moved on from Gnome (which I didn't hate either). Sure there's stuff I don't like about Unity, but no deal breakers.
That said, it's wonderful that Free and Open Source software has a place for conservative diehards, even if I'm not one of them.
PS: disclaimer: I was a user of KDE from the good old days who abandoned ship when KDE 4 got weird :)
That's rediculous. You're recommending that people stick with old versions that are riddled with known vulnerabilities. There are some great lightweight modern OS's, like CrunchBang and Lubuntu that work well on old hardware.
I think you're missing the point. It's common practice to sunset something. Apple, Google, Microsoft do it all the time. The fact is the support for some version of OSX has been deprecated and not supported any more. What are those folk to do?
Ubuntu 12.04, which has a version of Gnome classic, is still supported until 2017 (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases). If someone is running hardware past this date, well, they are going to be on their own. That's life. That's software.
Just to be clear: you think it's preferable that people using old hardware should run old Ubuntu-with-Gnome and accept their known security holes, than that they should use still-supported, modern OSes designed to run on old hardware? Did CrunchBang run over your dog?
Mate seems to be under active development. They're currently adding support for Wayland and GTK3 for the next release [1]. It's not like they're just repackaging GNOME 2.32 for the latest distributions.
I love Gnome 3. I don't like that sometimes virtual machines can't handle Gnome 3 on older machines but it runs pretty well in a virtual machine in my current notebook (y510p).
I don't understand the yearning for Gnome 2. Debian already has a Gnome classic shell for computers that can't handle Gnome 3. It'd be nice if people helped fix whatever they think is wrong with gnome 3 :(
Two different philosophies. MATE is GNOME 2 brought to the modern world, whereas Cinnamon comes from yearning for the new application base, but thinking that the new shell just won't cut it. It was purely a fork of GNOME Shell initially, the applications weren't ported until later. MATE was a full fork from the start.
Besides the hefty minimum requirements, what other objections do you have to gnome 3? Sorry, I don't have a UX or design background so can you please help me understand in simple people language?
I can't speak for others, but here are my objections to Gnome 3:
1. It is application-centric, rather than window-centric.
For instance, alt-tab tabs between applications, not between windows. This doesn't mesh well with how I work: I want to alt-tab between different things I'm working on, and alt-tabbing gets in the way of this. Often, I'll have a bunch of terminal windows that are very much different things, or a bunch of emacs windows that are different things, and I want alt-tab to switch between all of them, regardless of which happen to be the same application.
Application-centricity also drives Gnome 3's behavior when you click on a launcher icon for an already-running program, and the Gnome 3 behavior is less useful to me than the Gnome 2 behavior.
2. Sometimes I just want a window to get the heck out of my face. That's why having a button to close a window is nice. Gnome 3 gets rid of this.
3. ...but eventually I'll probably want to see that window again, and it's nice to be able to see all my current windows at a glance on the bottom bar. Gnome 3 got rid of this, also.
4. I don't like having multiple desktops (I like to be able alt-tab between any and all of my windows at a time). Gnome 3 structures the whole UI around multiple desktops.
5. I like having my pull-down menus attached to each window. When you have a big screen, or multiple big screens, it takes a long time to scroll all the way over to your primary screen to get at a pull-down menu. (Yes, I know about Fitt's Law. But if you're far enough away from an on-the-screen-edge menu, it will still be slower than a not-on-the-screen-edge menu that's nearby. I don't know where that point happens, but it _feels_ like it happens pretty commonly when you have two 30" monitors and your window is on the secondary one.)
6. I like pull-down menus. They're been a central element of GUIs since 1984 at least. Gnome 3 seems to want to get rid of them, or at least add another layer of clicks to get to them. All to get the amount of "chrome" off the screen, because it supposedly distracts people or something. (Or so they say. I think it's more because they're designers, and they perhaps value aesthetics over functionality a bit more than I do.)
7. Gnome 3 wants to support touch devices, and by their own admission many of the design features are driven by this. This seems like a big mistake to me. I think desktops and tablets/phones are different enough that they need different UIs. Apple seems to agree with me (or I with them, really), and MS seems to disagree. Do you hear a lot of good things about Windows 8?
8. Even if you like the menubar to be at the top of the screen, I don't see how anyone can think that Gnome 3 did this well. They've set aside that whole top bar, and rather than putting something useful there (like, I don't know, maybe pull-down menus?), they leave most of it blank and put a clock right in the middle? And relegate the pull-down menus to a single application menu, so you need any extra click to get to anything? The only advantage of the Gnome 3 top panel is that it looks nice. Which I think is a big reason they did it that way.
9. I know that a lot of these things can be configured to be like I'd prefer them, but why would I do this, when Mate exists? It works like I want right out of the box. And honestly, Linux desktops are generally at least slightly janky in their default configurations. Using some super-customized configuration just makes it that much more likely that something won't work right.
10. This whole "just get over it and move on" attitude about Gnome 3 is based on the false assumption that it's a done deal, that Gnome 3 is the future, and we're all stuck with it. We're not. (And we're certainly not stuck with the Gnome 3 Shell.) If enough people say "no" to the Gnome 3 Shell, it will go away. There are signs of this already: RHEL7 ships with Gnome 3 in classic mode (or fallback mode, or whatever they're calling it this week), which is an attempt to mimic many elements of the Gnome 2 interface. (Most of that mimicry is only skin-deep, but that's another story.) Debian is considering shipping with Xfce as the default interface. Mate is picking up momentum as a viable alternative to Gnome 3. So I don't think it's clear that we're stuck with the Gnome 3 shell, at least in its current form. There's still hope...
OK, that went a little far afield. But those are some of my objections to Gnome 3.
I am not related to the Gnome team in any way. These are my uninformed thoughts as a casual user:
1. I've found this confusing as well. It is frustrating. For example, when I have two terminal windows open (one root terminal window and a regular terminal window).
2. Not having a minimize probably helps get rid of complexity like where to put the now minimized window. I can understand where they are coming from with this. I've learned to live with this one.
3. Not applicable. Sorry.
4. I don't use multiple desktops unless I need to minimize a window (which then I stow away to the second desktop).
5. I have a 15" lcd display on my laptop... that's about it. Maybe you can make your mouse move faster or make it cover more ground per distance of physical movement? Just a thought...
6. Pull down menus are going away. Multiple hierarchical menus and sub menus are not good design. I know even though I don't know anything about design.
7. Yes, now that you mention it a lot of what we discussed earlier (including 2: minimize windows) comes from the desire to have a united front when it comes to user experience. Just because the implementation sucks doesn't necessarily mean the ideas are bad. With continuity (that should have been a drinking game at wwdc 14), Apple is dipping its toe in the water. There is a massive risk of failure but the dream of one UI to rule them all is too big to give up. Are we going to say "no, gnome doesn't need to run on touch-enabled devices"?
9. Defaults definitely matter. I think in terms of windows as well, for example. Not applications. However, I can understand where they are going with this in light of your number 7.
10. It will be sad if Debian doesn't ship with Gnome. But at the end of the day, I'll probably use whatever comes default. :) Just not a fan of sub sub menus in pull downs. Reminds me of windows 9x start menu.
Not to beat a dead horse, but I wanted to respond to a couple things:
6. I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. To be more precise, the thing that I like is the menu bar as a central organizing element of the application, with the familiar "File", "Edit", etc. menus. I agree that having even one level of submenus below these is suboptimal, and having two is terrible. I think it remains to be seen whether they're going away. On OS X, for one, they don't seem to be going anywhere, and that seems like a good decision to me.
7. I would prefer if Gnome, Canonical, etc. gave up on the idea that you're going to run the same desktop and applications on a desktop as on a phone. I think they should make a variant interface for touch devices, like Apple has done. Of course "Gnome Desktop" and "Gnome Touch" should share code to the extent possible, but I think the desktop and a phone are just too different to share a common UI.
Honestly, I think Gnome 3 is in many ways the most polished and beautiful of the Linux desktops, but they've made a few fundamental decisions that I just can't get behind.
Since the Ubuntu transition to Mir is imminent, will they wait until Ubuntu comes out with Mir? (probably next version). I think the performance would be even better with Mir on older hardware.
Looking at the recommended hardware specs, I see that it absolutely requires 512MB RAM and recommends at least 2GB, yet it says it has modest hardware requirements. Ubuntu Server has a minimum RAM requirement of 64MB and recommends 256MB; I know an X server takes some memory, but does a reasonable desktop environment have to require 448MB to 1.75GB to run?
Probably memory use is not a high priority, but it still seems like there's a lot of waste.
I'm sure that are DE's that work well with less than 512MB of RAM, but there aren't any modern web browsers that do. They're going to put 512MB as a requirement no matter what the DE itself requires.
My parents old Athlon laptop with 512MB runs Linux Mint Mate and is fine for their needs. When they started to complain about the browser slowing down, I downgraded them to Firefox 13, and they were happy again. It's not ideal, but modern enough for reading the news, emailing, and watching videos.
There are still days when I miss fvwm. Not because it was that great, but because I used it for so long that my fingers still remember the keyboard shortcuts I configured. But I moved to OSX and just had to adapt. I guess moving on isn't always the most important thing, but stay productive. If that mean staying with some old software I'm all for it.
Mate is pretty cool and a lot of people I know jumped ship to it from Unity. Good luck with the project.
I personally use Xubuntu on my netbook, desktop and installed it on my parent's computers as well. Arch+Mate or back to Debian+Mate has been on my radar for a bit though.
I switched to Xubuntu and have grown to love XFCE more than I loved Gnome2. Best features: ability to script and directly hack configuration settings, basic features for window tiling. With scripts I can fully configure a dev box with a single command.
Interesting, I wondered if anyone else was playing with XFCE config this way. I have the important parts of my .config/xfce4 folder under git and replicated across 3 machines, which a branch for dual-screen tweaks on the desktop, etc. etc. I thought it was so cool that you can just figure this stuff out and get on with it!
My old setup had a mix of single-monitor and dual-monitor machines. Now I use single-monitor on all machines and found you can replicate the entire .config/xfce4 directory, even with different screen sizes. Everything syncs perfectly - Hotkeys, Menus, Panels etc. Works with git or rsync - so simple.
I use xfce but I only use xrandr (not depends on xfce) to switch between monitors and don't really know what other scripts are useful or good to have. (or what can I achieve with scripting)
There are a few options for scripting xfce4. You can use xfconf-query from the command line or a script. You can edit the config files in .config/xfce4. You can sync the whole .config/xfce4 directory from machine to machine - that works especially fine if all the machines run a single monitor. You can make everything repeatable using shell scripts or a configuration system like Ansible.
I don't think this qualifies as a separate distro unless you also think Kubuntu and Xubuntu are separate distros. They are just Ubuntu with different packages for the UI preinstalled. You can probably install them side by side and switch to one or the other.
I think it's fair to consider them as different distros, at least in practice, given how much the choice of a desktop environment can affect the user experience. A lot of the software available by default will differ, obviously. Instructions about how to use the system differ, as well. The default capabilities and functionality will differ. The bugs affecting them will differ. All of those differences add up.
"Different defaults" is not really something that differenciates distros. Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu etc have a name: They're remixes of an existing distro.
That's not very good reasoning. You're basically saying that Fedora and Ubuntu are the same distro, because differences in the default package manager and other core software are irrelevant. Clearly that's not the case.
It is the defaults that matter. They're what give a particular distribution its unique characteristics.
Sure, you can go out of your way to install the software necessary to make one distribution comparable to some other distribution, but that doesn't mean they're really the same to begin with, even if their names may be similar.
What makes distributions different are mainly the package manager and the packages in the repositories.
Your example with Fedora and Ubuntu is a bad one because they use different package managers. Fedora uses yum and Ubuntu uses apt. This is one of the biggest differences that two distributions can have. They are different enough people get advice to stick to one and build some experience with it. If a person is using Debian on the servers, then he better stick to Ubuntu or Mint as a desktop (if he uses Linux as a desktop at all). On the other hand CentOS users are better off with Fedora or OpenSUSE.
The difference between Debian, Ubuntu and Mint is more subtle but they are still different. For one they are maintained by different people. One could argue that Xubuntu and Ubuntu are also maintained by different people which is true for the Desktop Environments, but it is also true that the kernel of both is maintained by the same people and they use the same kernel at any given time.
Another one is that Ubuntu and Xubuntu have exactly the same repositories for a given release. Mint is based on the repositories of Ubuntu and many (most) packages are the exactly the same, but then Mint has some extra packages specific to their distro.
As a result most of the time you can follow a 14.04 guide and apply it to Mint 17 and everything will be OK but there is the occasional difference.
"What makes distributions different are mainly the package manager and the packages in the repositories."
...and the packaging/updating philosophy, the packaging/defaults, the configurability. How they handle your hardware (hotplugging printers, monitors, mice). Batteries included or not. Power management.
E.g. Fedora always uses the latest upstream packages and doesn't patch them very much. Debian/Ubuntu/Mint use stable packages and patch them heavily. Many years ago one such patch in the (stable) Ubuntu kernel broke my (officially supported) file system, causing data loss. OTOH, Fedora can be a bit harsh to use for newbies.
It's just that the default settings – only one panel (at the top), ugly blue theme & background image – are not very appealing and feel dated.
But after adding a second panel, reorganizing panel contents, changing icons & windows themes and background image, Xubuntu desktop is very nice.