After the upgrate to Ubuntu 11.04 I was directly on Unity. Having a dock on the left side is nice, but unfortunately, it has various bugs which makes it sometimes annoying. Also the menu on top like Mac Os X is not a bad idea, but it breaks many apps (for example Picasa). Then there is the scrollbar insanity, it's almost impossible to click on to scroll, and again breaks in some apps (for example Eclipse). Fortunately one can disable all of that and go back to the old Gnome 2.
Then I decided to try Gnome 3 the past 2 weeks. I was curious that Linus found it so bad. At first it looked nice, probably because it's different. But very quickly, it becomes annoying: the full screen changed just to switch window with the mouse is a stupid idea. And then installing Gnome 3 in Ubuntu is not such a great idea: Rhythmbox does not work well anymore with it, all my "file open" mapping was gone and replaced with garbage: why does it propose GIMP to open a PDF is beyond me.
Gnome 2 + a nice standard dock + widgets (or the nice unity indicators) + an indexer would have been perfect. Now I am back to KDE 4 which provides all of that, even if it feels a bit bloated.
Gnome 3 and unity are the same useless crap. Ubuntu 11.04 can be tuned to use gnome 2 as "classic" option at login. Ubuntu 11.10 does not. So I said "bye, bye Ubuntu". Our only hope is called "MATE desktop environment - GNOME 2 fork". And Linux Mint; but they are currently under development.
ReplyDelete- Gnome 3 and Unity are systems for some future society as described in movie "IDIOCRACY (2006)", and whenever I see comments of people who likes gnome 3 / unity I'm sure we are heading right into that society.
Yes it's incredible how far we have regressed in the Desktop Linux world. On my Laptop I started to have some strange behavior with KDE bloatedness, so I had to move to XFCE, apparently like everybody else these days. It feels like 1999 again. I had to tweak keyboard shortcuts, there is nothing really fancy about XFCE. But for now it works, and feels much faster as a bonus.
ReplyDeleteIn 1999 I was using WindowMaker, it was quite nice. Later KDE3 was quite good too, and Gnome 2. But KDE4 and Gnome Shell are a disaster. Similarly Amarok 1.4 was excellent, Amarok 2.x is still far from being there. This is very annoying how some developers can break a very nice application and make the new thing much worse than the old thing.
I would not be surprised if Gnome shell disappeared completely in a couple a years, replaced by a usable Gnome 3 front end (or just XFCE). It looks like Linux Mint is moving towards that.
I am as of right now going back and installing Mint Isadora. I love the concept of Mate, but it is just too buggy right now - I broke it in about 5 min after a fresh install trying to do things what used to be called 'the Gnome Way'. It kind of is like 1999 because at least if I install a distro from then I know it will work the way I want it. I look forward to mate being usable in the future but for now I am going to be a stubborn old man and use the software that 'just works' like linux is supposed to.
ReplyDelete