Ubuntu 11.10 for Productive People
Following on from my blog post, "Dumbed Down Ubuntu", I’ve spent the past 24 hours trying other distributions with varying levels of success.
From reading Mark Shuttleworth’s blog, I’ve found strong feelings out there on Ubuntu’s default user interface. I agree with some of them – that the new Ubuntu UI is not aimed at a certain demographic of people who are power users. Having installed Ubuntu 11.04 for a friend of mine, she loved the Unity interface, and I left her to it.
I’ve played with Fedora 15 and Linux Mint 11, but neither quite worked the way I wanted them to. A specific show-stopper in Fedora’s case was Spotify’s lack of RPM. For Linux Mint, it felt like a reskinned Ubuntu. One really interesting thing I foudn is thatZalman have really cool SATA enclosure which can act as a CD-ROM drive for ISO files, and that’s on my shopping list.
After trying Ubuntu in VirtualBox, and deciding to persevere with taming the UI, I came across a handful of steps to get the interface back to something that people like me will use. Here’s how:
- Install Ubuntu 11.10
- Install Gnome using apt-get install gnome
- Remove the scrollbar eye-candy using apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar
- Log in, but select Gnome (Classic) from the gear icon next to your username
- Install the Gnome Tweak Tool using apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool, select Fonts and set the text scaling factor to 0.8, and Hinting to ‘slight’, then under Theme, set the GTK+ them to Ambiance, the Icon theme to Gnome and Cursor theme to Adwaita (if they aren’t already)
- Alt-Right Click on the bar at the top of the screen, select Properties, Background, and set a solid colour of opaque #3F3E39
- Alt-Right Click on the bar again, and select New Panel. Alt-Right Click on the bar at the bottom, then add a Workspace Switcher and a Window List in the bottom right and bottom left corners
Ta-da. That’s a user interface that I’m more than happy to use, and importantly, one I think lots of other non-novices will enjoy using.
Something I forgot in my original post is to say how much I value choice. I tried using Windows over a decade ago as a desktop machine, but quickly became irritated with the way it worked. Slackware served me fine, Debian was great, and I started to use Ubuntu several years after that. I’ve tried a beta of Ubuntu 11.10, and I didn’t like it, so went and tried – for free – two other distributions. Neither quite did it for me, so I came back to square one and found out how to mould Ubuntu’s interface to the way I like it.
I hope some of you find my experiences useful, particularly how to tame the UI.
OK, I tried it.
It looks a bit like an uglier, more feature-poor version of a GNOME 2 desktop. I am “not struck,” as they say Oop North.
I have also read that Fallback Mode, which is what this is, is not widely-used among the GNOME 3 devs and there is a possibility that it’ll be dropped in future revisions of GNOME 3.x.
Frankly, if you want something lightweight and like unto GNOME 2, I think you’d be better off with Xubuntu than GNOME 3 in Fallback mode.
Just sayin’.
I honestly don’t get all the fuss over Unity. You are far from alone in your dislike, but I’ve yet to get a coherent picture of what it is that people are not getting on with.
Is it a question of missing features that you need? Or is it behaviours that you particularly dislike? I’m just curious, but I’d like to understand.
I’m a non-novice, having been an Ubuntu user since 4.10 and a Linux user since 1996, although I only moved my desktop to it part-time in 1997 or so when Caldera came out, complete with KDE 1, and full-time around 2001 or so with SUSE.
And yet, I find Unity attractive, easy and convenient, and it doesn’t stop me doing anything I did with GNOME 2. I actively like the Launcher, which I find an elegant replacement for both panels, in my preferred position, viz., down the left hand side, economical with screen real-estate and excellent for widescreen displays. I don’t like the app browser much, but hey, I rarely use it; app launching via the Windows key and the first 2 or 3 letters of the app name is convenient. The multiple-workspace support is improved over GNOME 2, although I prefer GNOME 3′s flexible-number-of-workspaces-in-a-floating-sidebar approach. I’d like thumbnails in the icon, at least.
I find it easy and convenient to run multiple apps and switch between them. I have tried various “docks” for Ubuntu, including Docky, AWM and ADeskBar. The Unity Launcher works better than any of them, even if it’s not as pretty and lacks the snazzy “chrome”. I hope that some of the 3rd-party dock devs offer some of their effects to the Launcher devs and that we end up with them all merged, or at least, feature-equivalent.
Liam – The problem is the conflict between “useful” and “usable”. GNOME has treated these as opposites for many years. That those are set up against each other is a symptom of fundamentally missing the point.
I think the problem with Unity is that it’s just too self-conscious. That is, you are forced to notice it. It’s a bit like having a waiter who insists on juggling your knives and forks in the air before they lay them on the table for you between courses.
Of course it’s noticeable, it’s a shell, a graphical layover to launch your applications. It’s not a modification of the Gnome 3 desktop (aka Gnome shell).
I find Unity very usable. And I am able to tweak it to my liking with CCSM (compiz config settings manager). I put the unity launcher to never hide. And I enable “backlight toggle” so the applications light up if they are active. Also, I make the Unity launcher a bit less wide, 42 points instead of 48. So more icons fit inside the launcher. And I even make the launcher a bit more transparent… just for the nice looks of it.
I think Gnome 3 fallback mode is a perfect solution for Gnome 2 veterans who are not ready to switch.
But at the same time, I like Gnome 3 the more I use it. I tweaked it with the Gnome Tweak tool, but went back to the default settings in the end. The only extensions I really like are the alternative status menu (enabling Power-off instead of hibernate) and the custom themes.
Not everybody is ready to change their workflow. But in a couple of years (when even Debian doesn’t support Gnome 2 anymore) everybody needs to change. Change to Gnome 3. Maybe change to XFCE. In either way you need to learn a new desktop environment. A lot of people dislike change, but it’s going to happen, sooner or later.
@David – er, that sounds good, but I don’t know what it actually means.
The total missing functionality from GNOME 2 that I’ve been able to identify in Unity is this:
* clicking a Launcher icon for multiple program windows brings them /all/ to the front. You cannot just bring one to the front.
* if all a program’s windows are minimised, Unity in 11.10 restores the most recent one. (In 11.04, it restored all of them.) You can’t pick which except by clicking the icon /again./ It might have been better to display the thumbnail picker. However, I find this rarely arises.
There are no hierarchical program menus, you have to search – but this is /really/ efficient, nearly as good as Spotlight on a Mac, and is in line with modern smartphone/slate UIs. E.g. Win+fi, return=Firefox.
(Sucks if you don’t have a Windows key. I don’t.)
Creating buttons is different & maybe a bit less flexible.
Mostly, honestly, AFAICS, things have moved or changed but not *gone*. It’s not simplified into uselessness as many commentators say. It’s just different, and much more Mac OS X-like. I don’t see that as any bad thing, myself.
Saying all this, I’d really welcome exegesis of your comment. I’m afraid I can’t really parse it at all. Sorry. (This may be because it’s gone 5AM & I’ve been reading about Lisp & things for many hours.)
Unity is basically a touch-screen interface, all very well for the development to go in that direction but not all of use currently – or want to – use that sort of interface.
I have been “panel-beating” Gnome legacy for a couple of hours and I have almost got it to the sort of thing that I am used to in my 10.04 LTS system.
When the next Ubuntu LTS comes out I’ll know that I can still have a useful tool rather than a pretty toy for my desktop interface.
Liam, thanks for this solution.
Gijs
Soory, i mean Peter
This rant says it all.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/why-ubuntu-1110-fills-me-with-rage/19103
The dock on the left side of Unity drives me crazy. I want to move it to the bottom like Mac OS X.
Thank you for the helpful post. I am able to reply only after installing lynx at the command line (Unity vs Compiz destroyed the GUI), searching, and following your suggestions.
$0.02: Ubuntu seems to be following a classic distribution pattern for failure…
SUCKLESS
Developers migrate away from suckage. They arrive somewhere, usually the distribution that isn’t overtly hostile to their presence, and that is stable enough for useful things. The growth begins!
IMPRESS
More developers around means more fixage. Stability allows for improved user experience, which brings in more users, which attracts more developers. The golden age for a distribution.
SQUEEZE
Ubuntu seems to be interested in monetizing their userbase. Fine, go ahead. But remember, the moment it sucks for developers, we seek alternatives! Force feeding narrow user experiences, turning development tools into crippleware distribution upsells (so far Ubuntu hasn’t made this classic bad decision, as others have in the past), churning versions for revenue reasons, etc… an easy trap to fall into.
SUCK
Once the suckage begins, there might be panic, which leads to yet more bad decisions. Duct tape is applied, migration plans begin…
Perhaps Ubuntu peaked a few distributions back and is now in nose dive mode? Anyway, thank you for the 11.10 duct tape.
I actually tried the Xubuntu desk again but there was a major conflict with running the latest version of Virtualbox and I could not get it running in Xubuntu, so I ended up reloading Ubuntu 10.10. Couldn’t give up running XP in VBX because I have a film scanner I use for negative scanning and I don’t want a full intall of the Windows I dislike. If I could, I would use Xubuntu, it was much faster. I have always resented these kind of changes because I prefer a minimal, fast desktop. I do respect others desire for all the gadgets though. It’s just not for me. But then, I get on there to work, not play.
I cannot believe what Ubuntu did to itself with unity. I’ve been an Ubuntu user since 6.06 migrated from Windows XP (the last window version i ever touched) and used Ubuntu for scientific work and personal stuff. In those years even my wife started to use Ubuntu (her since 9.04) and i don’t know what to do now. I installed XFCE desktop to have something fairly similar to GNOME 2, but i found 11.10 to be the biggest disaster of Canonical ever. Bluetooth is broken, Public folder sharing is broken, nautilus was broken until 2 weeks ago. Skype crashes (i think maybe due to some buggy qt lib) Google Earth displays wrong fonts. And if you also think about the ridiculous conception of a desktop driven by mutter or unity or whatever-buggy-heavy-crappy desktop developed by some guy with a fetish with a tablet PC, this disaster is even bigger. The PC is not a toy, not a smartphone and not a tablet PC. The tablet PC is designed to be used to quick things and a few apps, not more than 20 min. That amount of time is exactly the time that lasted my unity session before i noticed that it was completely rubbish. It’s nice, it’s pretty, it has nice icons, but for use only 20 mins, not for working. This is the thing, unity turned Ubuntu’s desktop for other thing but working or multitasking. I’m very sad about that because there is no other reliable choice gnome2-like or parallel desktop that mature and serious people would use. There is this kind of joke called gnome-session-fallback give me a break. I’m in a very tense situation with Ubuntu and it’s usability, stability and i’m thinking about migrate after 6 years to other distro that won’t be playing with useres like this. And i’m not saying another desktop, because i tried all, and the stuff that should work (because it works in previous versions) do not work in other desktops. XFCE is not able to eject a USB pendrive without giving confusing feedback or no feedback at all of the usb being unmounted, bluetooth do not work, thunar do not handle network places… this things should be fixed and well supported before introducing unity, because other users have no place to go. And I have Ubuntu pens, t-shirts, went to Ubuntu presentations and give talks in local events about Ubuntu and how good is it. I cannot support Ubuntu this way anymore because i do not see a usable desktop oriented PC operating system. I see a tablet operating system, but i do not have a tablet, i have a PC.
What can I say. I love menus. They work. When you need them they’re there when you don’t you close them. There’s a reason why they’re still around from the times of the first GUI. Docks and (shiver) Microsoft’s ribbon are just the opposite. When you need them what you need isn’t always there and when you don’t you can’t get rid of them.
Liam, we can all see you’re preference. But remember that’s all it is a preference. A fare minority of people disagree strongly with you on how well such schemes work. Frankly if they think that it doesn’t on their box then we should be free to change it. Thank you open source software for allowing us to do so.
Unity was certainly a wrong turn for Canonical. At least it is easy to install gnome-shell, which is clearly less capable than G2′s mature desktop, but potentially has more of a future than Unity.
To the people who are shouting that we must “change” no matter what — I say why? The G2 desktop had been around a long time, and had adapted to the needs of its users quite well. It had basically evolved to the point where it worked as users expected a desktop environment to work. The menu system was well organized, and the applications were easy to find in the menu structure. Beside the menus, a nice row of easily configurable launchers would launch my apps. I like my custom icons, and it was very easy to change the icon for a launcher. There were lots of applets available to be placed on the panels, and each applet had a nice configuration dialog, and the applets could be moved around in the panel so they appeared exactly the way I wanted them to appear. Another panel at the bottom provided space for my application list and virtual desktops, which I use very often. Windows always runs in desktop 3, whether or not there is anything in desktop 2.
I have tried to work with Unity, and each time I have given up in frustration after a very short time. Basically I do not “want” my desktop to look like that, and there is pretty much nothing I can do about it, so the result is unproductive frustration. My OCD makes me refuse to click on an icon until I am able to tweak at least one aspect of the user interface. I just want to get the “dash” to go away and get my real interface back. Finding things now makes me have to type, use the mouse, and basically divert 100% of my attention from whatever productive thing I was doing to to having to scan the entire screen for the huge icon that is the thing I want to launch. And the application menu at the top of the screen – really? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It almost makes me want to go back to Windows. I just do not understand how anybody gets anything done with Unity, at all.
With gnome-shell at least there are some plug-ins to return some of the functionality that has been lost, and thankfully developers are putting in time trying to return some of that functionality. A couple requests high on my list – let me move my icons around in the Activities bar. Let me easily create a launcher and move it between the desktop and the dash or whatever it is called. Let’s have a better weather widget – (one like the G2 weather widget that has a detailed daily report, a 5-day forecast and radar maps). Wish I could write these things!
I think gnome-shell would be great for a smaller platform like a tablet. But for my desktop I want something that I can tweak to make it look and operate the way I want it to. G2 had evolved to that point. I am going to try XFCE for a while, but I will check back, because I am confident that the devs will extend gnome-shell to the point where it will be usable. I just hope they do it soon.
Thanks for this nice post… I am already become a lover of your blog… Nice post and keep going and share some more with us..Thanks..
Thanks for writing that John, you’ve expressed my issues with Unity perfectly. Bottom line is I’m staying on 10.10lts and praying that Unity was just an aberration which will go away if I ignore it.