Re: [Hampshire] Unity on Ubuntu 12.04 v. old Gnome/KDE on 10…

Hi Sean,

On Tue, Jul 03, 2012 at 07:30:23AM +0100, Sean Gibbins wrote:
> On 02/07/12 17:42, Andy Smith wrote:
> >If you look at Gnome 3, it's all different to Gnome 2 also. I would
> >say that this is a dramatic change forced upon almost all Linux
> >desktop users.
>
> Change isn't the problem Andy, on the contrary I welcome it, it's the
> pace of change and the accompanying lack of choice in this particular
> instance.

Unity first came to my attention in October 2010. I didn't like the
idea or look of it, and felt sure I was going to hate it. At this
time my desktop and laptop were both running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (so
Gnome 2).

I watched with dismay as everything else changed to Gnome 3. I felt
sure I would not get along with that.

As 2010 became 2011 became 2012 I started feeling a little bit of
pressure to upgrade. Some of the apps I used could really do with an
update by this time and they weren't going to get it on 10.04 LTS. I
still hadn't tried out either Unity or Gnome 3 personally, just read
other people's rants about them.

Ubuntu 12.04 was released and I decided that I really should at
least give Unity an honest try. I thought, "I'm probably going to
hate this, and if I do then I'll just have to give Debian / Gnome 3
a try. Then if I hate that I'll look at Debian and another
environment."

I had 18 months to make that decision and if I was willing to stick
with 10.04 LTS I could have stretched it out several more years. I
really can't see this as being a swift change.

Things were a little difficult at first with Unity. It really isn't
suited to having many different windows of the same application
open.

A big way of working for me previously was to have many (40+)
terminal windows open. I'd have a separate .desktop file for each
one and then a menu of them on the top menu bar. I'd have the title
bar of each terminal (I prefer rxvt-unicode rather than
gnome-terminal) show the host name and path, so by clicking on the
application in the bottom task bar I'd see a pop up of all the
current terminal windows, sorted alphabetically.

The first hurdle was that after launching one gnome-terminal,
clicking it again would just bring that to the foreground. There
didn't really seem to be a way to add a menu or extra launchers with
different properties. There's a long-standing Launchpad bug about
this:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/705007

Perhaps you recognise some of the names within it.

I imagine that this bug will never get "fixed" since it conflicts
entirely with how Ubuntu want to do things.

This was actually such a deal-breaker for me that I didn't even try
to install 12.04 until I thought there was a workaround. The SSH
search lens:

http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2012/05/05/ssh-launchers-for-ubuntu-unity/

So, okay, now I hit <super> and type part of the name of whatever I
want to connect to and the icon appears; it works. Still a few rough
edges as mentioned, but I have adapted to this way of working and
actually find it faster than my menu arrangement. I can usually do
it without taking my hands off the keyboard.

Next issue, still in this area: how to handle these masses of
terminal windows?

See, <alt>+<tab> cycles through the windows like you'd expect, but
it's coalesced every terminal into one terminal entry on this list.
Once on one you can <alt>+` to cycle through each of those, or leave
it where it is for a second and it will start doing that. But if you
have 40 of them then it's *really* tedious to find the one you want.
Also the thumbnail image is next to useless because every single one
is an unreadable shrunken black square.

I tried working that way for about a day but then gave up. It was
driving me nuts. It would have been easy at this point to get
exasperated with certain individuals within the Ubuntu community who
were happy to tell me that I was "doing it wrong" and that I should
be running just one terminal with tmux or screen to multiplex out
all the other connections. Or one gnome-terminal with tabs for each
host.

I didn't want either of those things; I wanted one window per host,
and to run screen in each one. I wanted to be able to put two
windows next to each other, without having to faff with detaching
tabs. I wanted to use rxvt-unicode, not gnome-terminal.

Luckily the compiz "scale text filter plugin" came to the rescue.
As regular compiz users will know, hitting <super>+w will sort of
zoom out and show all your windows at once on the screen. You get to
click on one to bring it to the foreground, the same as if you had
done <alt>+<tab> to select it. That's the scale plugin.

On the face of it, this wasn't much better because I still got 40
black squares that were largely indistinguishable from each other.

However, with the "scale text filter plugin" enabled you can start
typing after you've done <super>+w and it will only show you windows
which match what you've typed.

So, by using that I've replaced some mouse movements (moving the
mouse down to the task bar, clicking on the terminal tab, moving the
mouse up to the correct terminal window in the list and clicking on
it) with some key presses. After a while it became quite natural and
a bit faster than what I had been previously doing.

I haven't really had to change anything else about the way that I
work. My use of Firefox, Banshee, Gwibber, OpenOffice, XSane
(scanning my snail mail), F-Spot all remain the same as they used to
be on 10.04. Despite the hassle I was put to in finding a new way of
working with terminals, the amount of change I am actually put to
seems quite modest.

So.. lack of choice. I'm pretty confident that if Unity didn't
exist, Ubuntu would be using Gnome 3. So your choice would be Gnome
3 or.. Gnome 3. Just how many desktop environments do you think
Ubuntu should be actively supporting? This is the most complicated
part of any operating system.

The fact is that everyone has had *years* to make a choice and there
is a bewildering amount of choice if you are willing to go outside
of Ubuntu. I believe I can replicate my first Linux desktop from
1995 if I go and install FVWM now. I do not want to do this!

Gnome 2 is a dead end. People who are wishing it back to life cannot
be satisfied - all the complaining in the world can't re-start its
development upstream. Maybe some of the forks of it have some life
left in them or maybe not. The best way for a non-developer to help
them out would be to actually get on with using them.

My biggest criticism of Ubuntu is the lack of transparency in its
decision-making process. I doubt that there is even the tiniest iota
of malice involved in that; I'm sure its down to lack of manpower
and incompetence.

By lack of transparency I don't mean that they should get on IRC and
let world+dog vote on where a window close button should go. I mean
that they are making big decisions and it is sometimes hard for the
user base to understand why or how they are meant to react to them.
They need to be *more* forceful if anything, instead of this
wishy-washy middle ground.

As a concrete example of what I'm talking about, take the launcher
properties bug linked above. As I say, I believe this bug will never
be fixed because it embodies a way of working that
the-powers-that-be within Ubuntu do not want to see continued.

One way to react to that is to get incredibly enraged about it and
ask how dare they do this to you. Really how dare they do this to
ME? How very dare the space tourist son of a gun with one crazy
dream forever alter a way of working that I held dear?

It's especially easy to get this annoyed if, say, you have spent a
considerable amount of time filing bug report updates and trying
stuff out and investigating other ways to achieve the launcher
properties thing because you're working under the impression that if
only we can find the best way to do it then Ubuntu will relent and
allow it.

That bug should IMHO be closed with a clear statement that it's never
going to happen and everyone needs to get over it.

Instead you have a bunch of stuff quietly appearing elsewhere, which
is the real stuff that Ubuntu is working on in this space. Probably?
Stuff like the Launcher API:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/LauncherAPI

This seems to be how things should really work. But mere users are
not clearly told this, so we waste our time and get frustrated.

There are more examples of bugs filed in Launchpad that have
histories as long as your arm of users crying out for attention and
they aren't going anywhere I suspect because of some decision within
Ubuntu that no one has communicated to the user base.

Too often you have to know the right person to ask about it to even
understand why it's not making any progress. They could really do
with working on that.

But, I don't actually believe this is much better in any
distribution or operating system. I've got a soft spot for Debian
and use it on all my servers, but if you disagree with a Debian
package maintainer then that is pretty much it. Some shockingly
crazy stuff has been done to certain packages in the past and it's
very very hard to overrule. Pretty much the "best" outcome you would
get from a years-long battle to get the Debian Technical Committee
to overrule a maintainer is that the maintainer quits and orphans
the package. It might get picked up by a more sane maintainer/team
after that, but the disruption in the mean time can be rather
unfortunate.

Over in Fedora-land they have quite a big say in Gnome 3. They don't
seem to have avoided a lot of similar upset about things changing.
It's also interesting that a fairly small number of Red Hat
employees are owners of some major bits of internal Linux plumbing.
They are making huge decisions that every Linux user will have to
live with. You don't really get to choose an alternative to
pulseaudio or D-Bus or udev. Soon SysV init will be a relic (many
would say it already is; dead upstream).

Most of these things are do-ocracies rather than democracies, mainly
because it does not matter how many users want something, only the
people who are willing to develop it can make it happen.

When the next major update of Windows or Mac that you have paid for
drops onto your machine, if you don't like how it works, who do you
complain to? Which alternate desktop environment do you turn to?

If Unity can't be made to work for you, I honestly think that there
are so many other more productive things to do about it than just
complain that it happened too fast and there is no choice.

Cheers,
Andy

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