Category: Ubuntu

I will freely admit that I’ve been putting off upgrading my Ubuntu 14.04LTS boxes to 16.04LTS. In a previous post, I wrote about my battle with getting the Ubuntu desktop to be usable in the way I wanted it. Having tried this out on 16.04LTS, I realised that I’d have to change the way I work.
I am two weeks in to running the new upgraded system and I wish I’d gone through the pain earlier. Making the Unity Launcher smaller, getting used to the menu bar in the top row of windows, and the close, minimise and maximise buttons landing in the top left of the screen when maximised – none of those took particularly long to get past.
On previous installs, I’ve wanted shortcuts to the common applications at the top of the screen by the clock, but I’ve locked these in to the Unity Launcher – and there’s more space for them.
The only irritation that’s still there is resizing terminal windows. It takes a while to re-learn that I don’t have to be precise with the cursor positioning to change the window size. And that’s it.
Ubuntu 16.04LTS, you are forgiven – I thought you were going to be a nightmare, but you’re lovely. And when I unplug one of my monitors from the graphics card, you put everything back on the screen still plugged in. That’s awesome!

I’m documenting this in public because I am likely not alone in disliking Ubuntu 16.04’s network interface naming scheme.
All I had to do was pass these kernel parameters when installing to end up with my network interface named ‘eth0’:
biosdevname=0 net.ifnames=0
Simple!

Way back in 2011, I blogged about Ubuntu 11.10 for Productive People, which took the form of a mini tutorial on how to wrestle some of Ubuntu’s UI candy away and replace it with something better suited to being productive.
I’m still standing by my assertation that Ubuntu is too ‘pretty’ on the desktop now, and lacks a ‘power user’ mode, but I won’t argue with anyone who says it’s great. It’s not a false dichotomy – you can have a power mode and a pretty mode in a desktop operating system.
Updated for the current beta of Ubuntu 14.04LTS, here are the instructions on how to get the latest release of Ubuntu in to shape:

• Install Ubuntu 14.04
• Install Gnome using apt-get install gnome – use lightdm as the display manager
• Remove the slightly obstructive overlay scrollbar with apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar
• Log out, then log back in again but click the Ubuntu logo by your username and select ‘GNOME Flashback (Metacity)’
• Run gnome-tweak-tool, select Fonts and set the text scaling factor to 0.9, then under Appearance, set the Icon theme to Gnome and Cursor theme to Adwaita. Under Top Bar, check ‘Show date’ and ‘Show seconds’

Refreshingly easy, isn’t it? I’m going to be updating to 14.04LTS when it’s released!

Whilst I am in full support of making computers accessible to everyone, I don’t believe that everyone should have to use them in the same way.
I’ve been an Ubuntu user for, I reckon, three years, and Debian for years before that. In that time, it’s been great to use – install, get on with doing what I do, minimal fuss. But like Windows, the people behind Ubuntu just had to make the user interface ‘easier’ and ‘better’, but they’ve done it at the expense of power-user functionality.
I am a power-user, I know what I’m doing. I don’t think it’s elitist to want to have a UI that lets me get on with my work, one that doesn’t have graphical elements fading on and off the page gently whilst you’re trying to work. One where you can grab the bottom left or right hand corners of a window to resize it, or even one where the close, minimise and maximise windows are in the same place all the time. Ubuntu is no longer that.
I can’t quite put my finger on what’s changed, but it no longer feels efficient. One of the bigger gripes I have is the ‘thingy’ on the left with the large icons. I don’t know the name of it, but it has a set of hideously large icons which come on-screen when I hover near them, and disappear after. I don’t want that – I want to be able to throw a handful of icons in the bar at the top of the screen, and access anything else via a drop-down menu.
I want decent scrollbars back, like in Chrome – not a control that appears outside the window when I hover my mouse in a specific place. My Terminal window is easy to re-size using the top left and top right corners, but next to impossible to resize at the bottom left and right – that’s the way I want to re-size my windows.
Apparently, I can Install the ‘Classic’ desktop in Ubuntu 11.10, but with plenty of caveats. Having done that, my desktop looks even less usable.
Sorry, Ubuntu – I think I’ll revert back to Debian, at least until you’ve sorted yourself out.