Linux General Questions

Yeah, the one and only difference between Ubuntu variants is default packages. Any one can become any other by installing the packages that the other defaults with. It's just a question of convenience - if you like KDE, it's convenient to install the variant that installs KDE by default.

Miashara wrote:

Anyone got any particular experience with kubuntu vs regular ubuntu?

I've used Lubuntu on older machines and my netbook. The lightweight window manager really makes a difference on low power machines, but it's still got all the familiar tools I'm used to from regular ubuntu.

The lack of capitalization in the thread title drives me mad!

I'm very glad to see that Ubuntu is taking the opportunity presented by Steam very seriously. They are targeting a lot of media and desktop-related fixes and improvements that, if accomplished, will make the Linux desktop a much nicer place.

I updated to Ubuntu 12.10 and found that my Avant Windows Manager dock no longer works. Not through any fault of Ubuntu's, but that the project hasn't been touched in years and its dependencies have evolved and AWN would need updating to continue to use them. As a result, I've switched to Docky, which is doing the job so far.

I'm using Xfce + Compiz as I said earlier that I might switch to. Synapse is still my launcher pride and joy, and Compiz Grid window tiling is one of my must-have features (and is primarily what keeps me on Compiz, as I've yet to find a satisfactory alternative outside of Compiz).

I've settled on Xubuntu 12.04 at work and I'm pretty happy. It leaves plenty of memory free for Eclipse to waste.

I am straight up Ubuntu 12.04 with Synapse. It's stable, supported, pretty, and effective.

I will always be indebted to Arch for actually teaching me Linux, but I'm tired of putting that much effort into a machine that I just need to work.

I just loathe Unity with such utter hatred -- it's not consistent. The controls move around kind of randomly on windows, and half the time you have to hunt for them. I don't especially care where the window controls are, as long as they stay in the same place, but Unity fails utterly in that area. I despise it, and because of that, I've come to dislike Ubuntu, as a whole, very much, when the 10.10 version was my favorite non-Windows operating system.

I've tried several other UIs, but all of them suck in various ways.

Why did all the Linux desktop environments have to go insane at the same time?

And I'm just furious at the GNOME team for deliberately breaking 2.X, for making it impossible to have 2.X and 3.X on the same system at the same time. If I could, I would piss in their breakfast cereal, because they pissed in mine.

Lex Cayman wrote:

I am straight up Ubuntu 12.04 with Synapse. It's stable, supported, pretty, and effective.

I will always be indebted to Arch for actually teaching me Linux, but I'm tired of putting that much effort into a machine that I just need to work.

That's sort of how I felt when I used Arch. Granted, I would go a month or two without booting into Linux, since I have to work in Windows or OS X, but whenever I booted into it, it seemed like there was a problem with an update, or an update broke something, or I had to do something extra to be able to update... Or something was just broken for no reason.

I do really enjoy Linux OS's, and I have fun trying out new ones, but I find that I can't stick with one, and even when I do, I can't use it for all that much. It's too bad I have to use Photoshop and a bunch of other programs that aren't available for work. That, and games. Even though Wine is pretty decent these days.

After reading this article, I think I may give XFCE a try.

I know I've said it before, but I continue to be mostly pretty damn happy with GNOME 3 -- I use it day in, day out, and it does the job for me. It's not a "power-user" desktop in the way that GNOME 2 was, and I think it's better suited to laptops than desktops (though I use it most on my dual-head desktop, FWIW), but it's slick, it's smooth, and it keeps out of my way.

I understand the disappointment/hatred/whatever, I just don't share it.

*Legion* wrote:

The lack of capitalization in the thread title drives me mad!

This is a Linux thread, you should be more angry at having to backslash-escape all the spaces in the name.

I propose a change to linux-general-questions-thread, or, failing that "man 7 linux".

Spoiler:

I'm kidding, of course.

Spoiler:

I'd never use man instead of info.

You can't change the freaking font size in GNOME 3. Font size! Or, if you can, you have to cast a command-line spell to make it happen. There's no GUI option for font size. In a window manager.

Morons. Just morons.

Okay, I'll give that a try, next time I spin up a Linux desktop. But I suspect the fit-and-finish will be lacking. It was quite good in 10.10.

Malor wrote:

I've tried several other UIs, but all of them suck in various ways.

Why did all the Linux desktop environments have to go insane at the same time?

And I'm just furious at the GNOME team for deliberately breaking 2.X, for making it impossible to have 2.X and 3.X on the same system at the same time. If I could, I would piss in their breakfast cereal, because they pissed in mine.

Anything GNOME 2.x provided is pretty much waiting to be had in Xfce.

Set Xfce to be two-panel like GNOME (window selector on bottom panel, menu & systray on top) and flip on Compiz, and you've basically got the GNOME 2 desktop of old Ubuntus.

That's basically what i'm doing, except I'm using Docky instead of a traditional window selector bottom panel.

Of course, if you want GNOME 2 so badly, install MATE. It won't last forever, but it should hold you over until some badly needed improvements come to the other desktops.

I think it's reasonably close when all set up. That's the main thing, though - Ubuntu had GNOME and Compiz very nicely preconfigured. Much nicer than vanilla GNOME came by default.

Installing Xubuntu might possibly give you a closer starting point, I'm not sure. I installed Xfce on an existing Ubuntu install.

I liked Cinnamon quite a bit. However, it seems with Synapse, 80% of the desktop environment becomes irrelevant.

Malor wrote:

You can't change the freaking font size in GNOME 3. Font size! Or, if you can, you have to cast a command-line spell to make it happen. There's no GUI option for font size. In a window manager.

Or you could just install gnome-tweak-tool and do it there -- a lot of the "missing settings" are in that tool. I do think it's silly that you have to install a third-party tool to change those settings -- some of the gnome-tweak-tool settings are fine to keep in a little third-party power-user tool, but others really should be configurable without having to go to that effort -- but at least it can be done, and I'd be surprised if the situation doesn't improve in the future.

GNOME 2 went through the same thing, shedding a crapload of options that power-users cried foul over, but the important ones slowly made their way back in, and I'm confident that the same will happen with GNOME 3. Hell, in GNOME 3.6, the default shutdown option in the user menu is Power Off, rather than Suspend, just as people have been calling for for months!

Lex Cayman wrote:

I liked Cinnamon quite a bit. However, it seems with Synapse, 80% of the desktop environment becomes irrelevant.

My big issue with desktop environments right now is how they behave in multi-monitor setups.

If not for that, I could pretty comfortably use any of them.

That and the grid tiling. As soon as someone does decent keyboard-driven grid tiling in a GNOME 3 environment, I could consider using Cinnamon.

Or you could just install gnome-tweak-tool and do it there

That's ludicrous. This is a window manager. That's like saying that I should have to download a separate utility to change fonts in a word processor.

and I'm confident that the same will happen with GNOME 3

You be confident all you like. I think you're going to be confident for a long time.

Malor wrote:
Or you could just install gnome-tweak-tool and do it there

That's ludicrous. This is a window manager. That's like saying that I should have to download a separate utility to change fonts in a word processor.

I understand that for you it seems to be absolutely vital that you have the option to change your desktop fonts, but for most people, it's not that big a deal. Mac OS X doesn't have options to change the default fonts or their sizes either, and the third-party tools that let you do it aren't as effective as gnome-tweak-tool is on GNOME 3, but you don't see nearly so many people shout about how ludicrous that is.

Malor wrote:
and I'm confident that the same will happen with GNOME 3

You be confident all you like. I think you're going to be confident for a long time.

What's with the snark? Don't make me explain to you what a window manager actually is (hint: GNOME has one, but it isn't one).

Like I said before, I'm really quite happy with GNOME 3 as it stands. I'm not using it grudgingly while I hope in vain that they'll fix major problems in it -- I use it because I like it, it keeps out of my way, and it lets me get my work done. That's not to say it couldn't be improved of course, but IMO it's far from the unusable mess that some people make it out to be.

Right click desktop > Screen Resolution > Make text and other items larger or smaller
Or desktop > Personalize > Display (in bottom left hand corner)

It's not actual font size, but it changes the "dpi" of the fonts. 125% or 150%

Just for reference

Citizen86 wrote:

Right click desktop > Screen Resolution > Make text and other items larger or smaller
Or desktop > Personalize > Display (in bottom left hand corner)

It's not actual font size, but it changes the "dpi" of the fonts. 125% or 150%

Just for reference ;)

Oh crap, I missed it was just font size. Yeah I found that. Thanks.

Malor wrote:
Or you could just install gnome-tweak-tool and do it there

That's ludicrous. This is a window manager. That's like saying that I should have to download a separate utility to change fonts in a word processor.

Is it? Fonts are integral to word processing..not so much to window management.

On a related note, I can't find where to change the fonts on the Windows desktop.

Edit: Oh you said font size. Never mind, that's fair.

Another thing I've been relying on with Compiz that I forgot about is sane window placement.

The GNOME 3 DEs love to place all new windows on my left monitor. Even with my center monitor defined as the primary in xrandr (which I have to do to make the DE's menus and stuff appear there and not, again, on the left-most monitor).

With Compiz, the Place Windows plugin is my lifesaver. I can't tell it to place new windows on a certain monitor, but I have the options of telling it to place windows on the device my mouse pointer is on, or the one that has the currently focused window, both of which generally do what I want - put the window where I'm looking, not off at the edge of my peripheral vision. Plus, the Place Windows plugin has options to help force certain windows into a certain spot, which is helpful because the Chrome window wants to open on my left monitor regardless of what I do otherwise. Only Place Windows seems to be able to force it into opening on my center display.

One thing I love about Xfce is that it doesn't try and "helpfully" force the desktop panels to be tied to whatever xrandr says my primary monitor is. If I set up panels on Monitor 2, that's where they'll be and that's where they'll stay. (Unity does OK by having the top panel be replicated on all monitors, although it still has an issue where certain systray icons only appear on the leftmost monitor, even if it's not the xrandr primary - there is absolutely nothing I can do to make that "special" systray appear on any other monitor).

Multi-monitor in most Linux DEs is bad and they should feel bad. Xfce is the only one I've used that gets it mostly right. I wonder what it's like in KDE-land...

For what it's worth, you can adjust global font size in GNOME in a way that sounds very similar to what you guys have described in Windows -- it's under the accessibility settings:

http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome...

This was added in GNOME 3.4 -- it's a good example of the devs adding functionality back in to the desktop incrementally. GNOME 3.0 removed a lot of functionality, and the developers did that deliberately, but a deliberate removal doesn't necessarily imply a permanent removal -- sometimes it just means that the developers have decided to exclude a feature until it can be implemented properly.

*Legion* wrote:

Multi-monitor in most Linux DEs is bad and they should feel bad. Xfce is the only one I've used that gets it mostly right. I wonder what it's like in KDE-land...

Agreed -- that's something that did regress in GNOME 3, and which hasn't really been addressed yet. It works well enough for me on a dual-head setup, but I can imagine it being much worse on 3 or more monitors.

*Legion* wrote:
Lex Cayman wrote:

I liked Cinnamon quite a bit. However, it seems with Synapse, 80% of the desktop environment becomes irrelevant.

My big issue with desktop environments right now is how they behave in multi-monitor setups.

If not for that, I could pretty comfortably use any of them.

That and the grid tiling. As soon as someone does decent keyboard-driven grid tiling in a GNOME 3 environment, I could consider using Cinnamon.

Yeah, my Arch/Cinnamon setup had piss-poor multi monitor support. I'm sure I could have done more tweaking, but I'm trying to simplify damnit.

I haven't really tested Unity's. Right now I run my Win 7 desktop on the right monitor, and Ubuntu on the left. I use synergy to move between them.

I've also never messed with grid tiling. Maybe I should just try it for funsies.

By the way, it's absolutely criminal that I have never tossed any money to the synergy guys. It might be the single most useful piece of software I've ever found. I has officially become ubiquitous in my world.

Lex Cayman wrote:

By the way, it's absolutely criminal that I have never tossed any money to the synergy guys. It might be the single most useful piece of software I've ever found. I has officially become ubiquitous in my world.

I should try that. I have tried setting up a KVM to hook my laptop up to my desktop setup, and it has always been a big fat failure for one reason or another.

This was added in GNOME 3.4 -- it's a good example of the devs adding functionality back in to the desktop incrementally. GNOME 3.0 removed a lot of functionality, and the developers did that deliberately

In a world where they also deliberately broke GNOME 2.0, so that you couldn't have both on the same machine at the same time, this is absolutely unacceptable. Utterly, absolutely unacceptable.

Some of us out here are trying to do work with our machines.

*Legion* wrote:
Lex Cayman wrote:

By the way, it's absolutely criminal that I have never tossed any money to the synergy guys. It might be the single most useful piece of software I've ever found. I has officially become ubiquitous in my world.

I should try that. I have tried setting up a KVM to hook my laptop up to my desktop setup, and it has always been a big fat failure for one reason or another.

What's the big sell of Synergy, as opposed to, say, x2vnc (which I haven't used in years, but did the job fine back then)?

pgroce wrote:
*Legion* wrote:
Lex Cayman wrote:

By the way, it's absolutely criminal that I have never tossed any money to the synergy guys. It might be the single most useful piece of software I've ever found. I has officially become ubiquitous in my world.

I should try that. I have tried setting up a KVM to hook my laptop up to my desktop setup, and it has always been a big fat failure for one reason or another.

What's the big sell of Synergy, as opposed to, say, x2vnc (which I haven't used in years, but did the job fine back then)?

It avoids all the overhead of VNC

It works on Mac's.

Handling more than two systems is quite easy. If you have from left to right, A B C and B is not actually there, it will handle this fine and swap between A and C easily.

There was quite awhile when it was not under development, but has been under development again for the past couple of years.

I confess that my foray into x2vnc didn't last long, and it was back in 2004 or so I think ... just long enough to find that synergy appeared to be much simpler to use.

I have four machines set up with Synergy. My Linux laptop and Windows desktop are set up so I can just move back and forth between monitors.

I also have a CentOS server setup that I can switch to with a hotkey combination of alt+F6. I programmed that to one of the big macro buttons on my gaming keyboard. I have another less-frequently-used Mac laptop that is setup similarly.

Also, shared clipboard. Awesome.