Look at unity, look at gnome 3, look at windows 8, look at osx. Why do they all look the same? When I think back to when I first met GNOME, I liked it because it was easy to customize and it was smart.
I'm getting tired of all my programs and menus just being thrown in the bin and left to the simple method of windows button + search box, there is no meaningful organization.
Where does a person get the support and out-of-box functionality of ubuntu with good old gnome (gnome b4 they made it suck). I really would like to stick with ubuntu, because I don't want to spend a lot of time troubleshooting problems but I want one of those antique window list that we used to know and love, one of those gnome panels that can actually be customized.
This is 1 part question and 5 parts rant. I know I should iron out gnome-session-fallback, but sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback presented me with a session option that gave me just a mouse after login, not something I want to deal with really. After trying out a few window managers my homefolder starts to get cluttered, and apt-get has bombarded my pc with god knows what.
Is there anybody that has ubuntu with gnome that isnt unity or gnome 3?
Rant over, thanks for reading. Now after sifting through activity overview search results I can get back to work.
I agree with your rant. Since Gnome 3 has become an almost exclusive RedHat project, it's been going from bad to worse. I've used Gnome 3 for a long time, but am now on KDE. KDE Plasma is quite nice now in my opinion, it's getting better again. I wish Hawaii development would accelerate, I would really love to switch to Hawaii Desktop as soon as it is usable.
I haven't seen recent releases of KDE, i'll have to check it out again. The maui project looks interesting. I'll look into that some more when the time comes.
I'll probably reinstall my operating system this spring break when I can dig into things more, I'll try gnome session fallback first on a fresh ubuntu, and then try some of the other Desktop Environments. Thanks for the suggestions.
+1 im getting tired of devs, trying to tell me how i have to use my system!
i install my desktop environment, maybe with a example setup, and then change it until i like it, if i cant get it to my liking. i try out another one until i get what i want. gnome, unity.... only thing you can change are the shortcut bar on your left.
i tried gnome 3 once. it managed to make me feel like my 24" 1080p screen is way too small, and that on 2 screens.
back when i used ubuntu 10.04, you could install the "gnome-shell" package to test the new gnome "concept" and back then i already thought is was the biggest S*** i ever used. and i still cant believe they actually used that concept. even the Metro gui of windows 8 is more usable.
also back then, there was the "ubuntu netbook remix" wich was basically unity with the app names on the sidebar.
i guess the problem is that there is no other alternative yet.
what i mean is, we already have kubuntu,xubuntu,lubuntu.... so what other desktop should ubuntu use?
if they used gnome3 it would still suck. and gnome 2 is outdated now.
lol yeah, gnome 3... grr. I remember last year while i was setting up arch from scratch on my ultrabook i thought "alright! got the internet working, now its time to get gnome up and running!" when I got it installed I was like, wtf is this? why can't I do anything creative to my panels and windows? who killed the gnome? lol
I know ubuntu has derivatives, i'll probably get around to testing the kde or xfce version sooner or later.
Not too long ago it seemed to me that the three big hitters for operating systems were all filling a specific niche. You had linux for people who are.... different. You had windows for average mr. joe. You had apple for people who liked sleek expensive computers.
Then mobile operating systems boomed and now everybody wants to make sure you can still use your operating system even if you insist on smashing your thumb against a 90 inch touch screen super tablet (they support bitch slapping, and also face plants) :) well, anyways.
I hear ya on the controlling issue man.... If the devs really knew what I wanted they would send a free mail order wife from russia with my OS, no strings attatched :)!
If you want customization, you'll have to move to other WMs. I like tiling WMs because they offer me the most customziation, so that I can make them work exactly how I need and want. Bspwm is my favorite, but since it doesn't support Wayland yet, I've been playing with Weston (still keep an X server installed for "work"). Other tiling WMs worth checking out are Herbstluftwm, Dwm, 2bwm, Xmonad, and such. Stay away from Awesome and i3 if you really want customization.
I think I know what you are talking about. I've seen some really creative, impressive desktops.
http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2013/245/7/8/vintage_notebook_by_earspl1t-d6kt9qb.png <--- just wow.
I just installed xfce, which in comparison to the environments previously criticized, is pretty good. I always wanted something cool looking like bspwm :) i'll add that to the top of my list of things to check out when 13.10 reaches End Of Life
I would choose Unity and Gnome 3 over Gnome 2, MATE, KDE, LXDE and all the other Windows-like window managers.
If you want to do something instead of moving windows around use a good window manager like awesome wm. It's perfect as a floating wm and also really good as a tiling wm.
I would suggest installing Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. I really like the Cinnamon interface, especially more than Unity or Gnome 3 or Windows 8. As for the organization, when you go to the start menu, all the apps are organized into categories. :3
why is everybody hating on the gnomes man? its great because when you press the super key you get a view of all your open programs, its probably the main reason i switched to linux, i was a hater like you guys until i used to for 2 days and now i cant go back! before i got my second monitor working on debian i didnt even really miss it because gnome takes out all the clutter
GNOME has the best workflow for me, simple yet it works and the Geolocation can be disabled in the next version as I read so that's not really an issue.
I'm now on KDE because I tried to install experimental GNOME on my arch and failed miserably, I also don't have time to fix it much because I have deadlines for my thesis, what I did with KDE though was put everything on top and setup the left top corner to show all running windows, still no option to press super and run a program, or no dynamic workspace management but close enough that it doesn't disturb my workflow much, just makes things a bit slower than I would like.. Another minus is that display and sound configurations on KDE are absolute crap on the plus side KDE connect is awesome