[LUAU] A reflection on the state of the Linux desktop

[Jason Axelson]

Hey Jeff,

I've been using Ubuntu 12.04 for the last 6 months or something and I
like it. Although I also don't run unity and instead run "Awesome
Window Manager" which is a cool tiling window manager.

Jason

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Jeff Mings <jeffm at lava.net> wrote:
> A reflection on the state of the Linux desktop, written to hopefully spare
> others a lot of wasted time:
>
>     It was time to upgrade my primary desktop.  I prefer Centos for servers
> and Ubuntu for desktops, and Ubuntu 12.04.1 was just released, suggesting a
> more refined bundle of Ubuntu.  I've already deployed 12.04 on a number of
> other machines, but my main personal desktop was still using the last
> Long-Term-Service release, 10.04, with the Gnome 2 desktop.
>
>     Many of you have seen the newer Unity desktop that is now the default
> for Ubuntu.  It's very pretty and impressive as a potential interface for
> unifying tablets, phones and PCs, but much of the desktop workflow just
> isn't suited to getting things done quickly. You can fix Unity's biggest
> issue, the baffling omission of a regular menu, by using the Gnome Classic
> Menu Indicator.  However, there are a number of other issues with getting
> work done quickly with Unity, so I decided to try Gnome 3 again.
>
>     Gnome 3 is remarkably beautiful, fluid and elegant.  After a bit of
> tweaking and familiarization, I decided I could move to the newest version
> of Gnome.  When I last tried it, several months ago on a different distro,
> it didn't seem as polished.  My cautious approval was short-lived.  When
> Remmina, a VNC/RDP client that generally works very well, decided to die, I
> lost every bit of control of Gnome 3.  Remmina is built on GTK (probably the
> Gnome Tool Kit libraries for Gnome 2) and shouldn't have stopped in such a
> debilitating fashion.  I couldn't reach other desktops, menus or the Gnome 3
> dock using the mouse or the keyboard shortcuts.  The only graceful exit was
> to jump to shell (Ctrl-Alt-F4) and kill the user I was logged in as.  I
> tried this twice more, trying to see if I was missing something, but the
> same thing happened.  Gnome 3 is not really ready for prime time.
>
>     I had previously tried "regressing" to Gnome 2 under other Ubuntu 12.04
> and found that the Mate Desktop, a fork of Gnome 2, is the best way to do
> it.  You can install Gnome 2 via the Ubuntu repositories, but certain bits
> are missing, or just don't work correctly, probably because of conflicts
> with Unity and its LDM desktop manager.  At http://mate-desktop.org/ you'll
> see that the project has reached version 1.4.  It works very well, as you
> would expect Gnome 2 to behave, and installation is trivial.
>
>     Gnome 2 is a great mature desktop environment that fosters productivity
> - RedHat Enterprise Linux comes with it by default with good reason.  If
> you're using Ubuntu 12.04 and don't like Unity, go straight to Mate Desktop
> and don't waste your time playing with the others.
>
> -Jeff Mings
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