Thursday, June 14, 2012

Gnome Shell more stable than Unity on Ubuntu 12.04

Regularly, the unity dock made some applications inaccessible: clicking on the app icon did not show or start the app anymore, a very annoying bug. This is quite incredible given that this version of Ubuntu is supposed to be long term support. So I decided to give one more chance to Gnome Shell. Installing it on Ubuntu 12.04 is simple with this guide.

To my surprise it is very stable so far. Earlier Gnome Shell versions were not as stable. After installing various extensions (dock especially) it is as usable as Unity for my needs. It seems more responsive as well. I am not really into the Unity new features like HUD. It sounds to me like Ubuntu is making a mistake with Unity compared to Gnome Shell.

To make an old extension support latest Gnome Shell version, it is sometimes necessary  to update  the extension metadata with what's given by gnome-shell --version. For the weather extension you can just edit using gedit:

sudo gedit /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/weather@gnome-shell-extensions.gnome.org/metadata.json

1 comment :

  1. I beg to disagree. I tried gnome-shell for some time when I noticed that Audacity was extremely slow. I tried unity and the problem was solved. Behind the surface (launching an app) gnome-shell had severe problems.

    After using unity (12.04-12.10) for over a year, I got it to do most of what g-s has to offer, sometimes better, and with complete stablility.
    I tried g-s remix (12.10) and was surprised at the lack of tools for theme customization. I reinstalled unity 12.10 ans gnome-shell. I tried to edit panel.ccs to get transparency: it broke g-s! Igot rid of it. I have to admit that ATI is partly to blame because their driver for HD4200 does not support 12.10 !!!
    But Unity works fine under 12.10 (without proprietary driver).

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