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The state of the desktop art
Jun. 10th, 2020 05:50 pm(Repurposing a couple of Reddit comments from a chap considering switching to Linux because of design and look-and-feel considerations.)
I would say that you need to bear in mind that Linux is not a single piece of software by a single company. Someone once made the comparison something like this: "FreeBSD is a single operating system. Linux is not. Linux is 3,000 OS components flying in close formation."
The point is that every different piece was made by a different person, group of people, organisation or company, working to their own agenda, with their own separate plans and designs. All these components don't look the same or work the same because they're all separately designed and written.
If you install, say, a GTK-based desktop and GTK-based components, then there's a good chance there will be a single theme and they'll all look similar, but they might not work similarly. If you then install a KDE app it will suck in a whole ton of KDE libraries and they might look similar but they might also look totally different -- it depends on how much effort the distro designers put in.
If you want a nice polished look and feel, then your best bet is to pick a mainstream distro and its default desktop, because the big distro vendors have teams of people trying to make it look nice.
That means Ubuntu or Fedora with GNOME, or openSUSE with KDE.
(Disclaimer: I work for SUSE. I run openSUSE for work. I do not use KDE, or GNOME, as I do not personally like either.)
If you pick an OS that is a side-project of a small hardware vendor, then you are probably not going to get the same level of fit and finish, simply because the big distros are assembled by teams of tens to hundreds of people as their day job, whereas the smaller distros are a handful of volunteers, or people working on a side-job, and the niche distros are mostly one person in their spare time, maybe with a friend helping out sometimes.
Windows is far more consistent in this regard, and macOS is more consistent than Windows. None of them are as consistent as either Windows or Classic MacOS were before the WWW blew the entire concept of unified design and functionality out of the water and vapourised it into its component atoms, never to be reassembled.
Don't judge a book by its cover -- everyone knows that. Well, don't judge a distro by a couple of screenshots.
As for my expertise -- well, "expertise" is very subjective! :-D You would easily find people who disagree with me -- there are an awful lot of strong biases and preconceptions in the Linux world.
For one thing, it is so very customisable that people have their own workflows that they love and they won't even consider anything else.
For another, there is 51 years of UNIX™ cultural baggage. For example in the simple matter of text editors. There are two big old text editors in the UNIX world, both dating from the 1970s. Both are incredibly powerful and capable, but both date from an era before PCs, before screens could display colours or formatting or move blocks of characters around "live" in real time, before keyboards had cursor keys or keys for insert, delete, home, end, and so on.
So both are horrible. They are abominations from ancient times, with their own weird names for everyday stuff like "files" and "windows" -- because they are so old they predate words like "files" and "windows"! They don't use the normal keyboard keys and they have their own weird names for keyboard keys, names from entire companies that went broke and disappeared 30 or 40 years ago.
But people still use these horrible old lumps of legacy cruft. People who were not yet born when these things were already obsolete will fight over them and argue that they are the best editors ever written.
Both GNOME and KDE are very customisable. Unfortunately, you have to customise them in the ways that their authors thought of and permitted.
KDE has a million options to twiddle, but I happen to like to work in ways that the KDE people never thought of, so I don't get on with it. (For example, on a widescreen monitor, I put my taskbar vertically on the left side. This does not work well with KDE, or with MATE, or with Cinnamon, or most other desktops, because they never thought of it or tried it, even though it's been a standard feature of Windows since 1995.)
GNOME has almost no options, and its developers are constantly looking for things they don't use and removing them. (Unfortunately, some of these are things I use a dozen times a day. Sucks to be me, I guess.) If you want to customise GNOME, you have to write your own add-on extensions in JavaScript. JavaScript is very trendy and popular, which is a pity, as it is probably the worst programming language in the world. After PHP, anyway.
So if you want to customise GNOME, you'd better hope that someone somewhere has programmed the customisation you want, and that their extension still works, because there's a new version of GNOME every 6 months and it usually breaks everything. If you have a broken extension, your entire desktop might crash and not let you log in, or log out, or do anything. This is considered perfectly normal in GNOME-land.
Despite this, these two desktops are the most popular ones around. Go figure.
There was one that was a ripoff of Mac OS X, and I really liked it. It was discontinued a few years ago. Go figure.
Rather than ripping off other desktops, the trend these days is to remove most of the functions, and a lot of people like super-minimal setups with what are called "tiling window managers". These basically try to turn your fancy true-colour hardware-3D-accelerated high-definition flat-panel monitor into a really big glass text terminal from 1972. Go figure.
There used to be ripoffs of other OSes, including from dead companies who definitely won't sue. There were pretty good ripoffs of AmigaOS, classic MacOS, Windows XP, Acorn RISC OS, SGI Irix, NeXTstep, Sun OpenLook, The Open Group's CDE and others. Most are either long dead, or almost completely ignored.
Instead today, 7 out of the 8 leading Linux desktops are just ripoffs of Windows 95, of varying quality. Go figure.
[Repurposed mailing list reply]
I mentioned that I still don't use GNOME even though there are extensions to fix a lof of the things I don't like. (My latest attempted ended in failure just yesterday.) Someone asked what functionality was still missing. It's a reasonable question, so I tried to answer.
It is not (only) a case of missing functionality, it is a case of badly-implemented or non-working functionality.
I can go into a lot of depth on this, if you like, but it is not very relevant to this list and it is probably not a good place.
A better place, if you have an OpenID of some form, might be over on my blog.
This post lays out some of my objections:
"Why I don't use GNOME Shell"
& is followed up here:
"On GNOME 3 and design simplicity"
Here's what I found using the extensions was like:
A quick re-assessment of Ubuntu GNOME now it's got its 2nd release
For me, Ubuntu Unity worked very well as a Mac OS X-like desktop, with actual improvements over Mac OS X (which I use daily.) I used it from the version when it was first released -- 11.04 I think? -- and still do. In fact I just installed it on 19.04 this weekend after my latest efforts to tame GNOME 3 failed.
I don't particularly like Win95-style desktops -- I'm old, I predate them -- but I'm perfectly comfortable using them. I have some tests I apply to see if they are good enough imitations of the real thing to satisfy me. Notable elements of these tests: does it handle a vertical taskbar? Is it broadly keystroke-compatible with Win9x?
Windows-like desktops which pass to some degree, in order of success: Xfce; LXDE; LXQt
Windows-like desktops which fail: MATE; Cinnamon; KDE 5
If I was pressed to summarise, I guess I'd say that some key factors are:
• Do the elements integrate together?
• Does it make efficient use of screen space, or does it gratuitously waste it?
(Failed badly by GNOME Shell and Elementary)
• Does it offer anything unique or is it something readily achieved by reconfiguring an existing desktop?
(Failed badly by Budgie & arguably Elementary)
• Do standard keystrokes work by default?
(Failed badly by KDE)
• Can it be customised in fairly standard, discoverable ways?
• Is the result robust?
E.g. will it survive an OS upgrade (e.g. Unity), or degrade gracefully so you can fix it (Unity with Nemo desktop/file manager), or will it break badly enough to prevent login (GNOME 3 + multiple extensions)?
If, say, you find that Arc Menu gives GNOME 3 an menu and what more can you want, or if you are happy with something as minimal as Fluxbox, then my objections to many existing desktops are probably things that have never even occurred to you and will probably seem trivial, frivolous, and totally unimportant. It may be very hard to discuss them, unless you're willing to accept that, as an opening position, stuff that you don't even notice is critically, crucially important to other people.
Elementary is quite a good example, because it seems to me that the team trying to copy the look and feel of Mac OS X in Elementary OS do not actually understand how Mac OS X works.
Elementary presents a cosmetic imitation of Mac OS X, but it is skin-deep. Its developers seem not to understand how Mac OS X works and how the elements of the desktop function. So, they have implemented things that look quite Mac-like, but don't work. Not "don't work in a Mac-like way". I mean, don't work at all.
It is what I call "cargo cult" software: when you see something, think it looks good, so you make something that looks like it and then you take it very seriously and go through the motions of using it and say it's great.
Actually, your aeroplane is made of grass and rope. It doesn't roll let alone fly. Your radio is a wooden fruit box. Your headphones are woven from reeds. They don't do anything. They're a hat.
You're wearing a hat but you think you're a radio operator.
I mentioned that I still don't use GNOME even though there are extensions to fix a lof of the things I don't like. (My latest attempted ended in failure just yesterday.) Someone asked what functionality was still missing. It's a reasonable question, so I tried to answer.
It is not (only) a case of missing functionality, it is a case of badly-implemented or non-working functionality.
I can go into a lot of depth on this, if you like, but it is not very relevant to this list and it is probably not a good place.
A better place, if you have an OpenID of some form, might be over on my blog.
This post lays out some of my objections:
"Why I don't use GNOME Shell"
& is followed up here:
"On GNOME 3 and design simplicity"
Here's what I found using the extensions was like:
A quick re-assessment of Ubuntu GNOME now it's got its 2nd release
For me, Ubuntu Unity worked very well as a Mac OS X-like desktop, with actual improvements over Mac OS X (which I use daily.) I used it from the version when it was first released -- 11.04 I think? -- and still do. In fact I just installed it on 19.04 this weekend after my latest efforts to tame GNOME 3 failed.
I don't particularly like Win95-style desktops -- I'm old, I predate them -- but I'm perfectly comfortable using them. I have some tests I apply to see if they are good enough imitations of the real thing to satisfy me. Notable elements of these tests: does it handle a vertical taskbar? Is it broadly keystroke-compatible with Win9x?
Windows-like desktops which pass to some degree, in order of success: Xfce; LXDE; LXQt
Windows-like desktops which fail: MATE; Cinnamon; KDE 5
If I was pressed to summarise, I guess I'd say that some key factors are:
• Do the elements integrate together?
• Does it make efficient use of screen space, or does it gratuitously waste it?
(Failed badly by GNOME Shell and Elementary)
• Does it offer anything unique or is it something readily achieved by reconfiguring an existing desktop?
(Failed badly by Budgie & arguably Elementary)
• Do standard keystrokes work by default?
(Failed badly by KDE)
• Can it be customised in fairly standard, discoverable ways?
• Is the result robust?
E.g. will it survive an OS upgrade (e.g. Unity), or degrade gracefully so you can fix it (Unity with Nemo desktop/file manager), or will it break badly enough to prevent login (GNOME 3 + multiple extensions)?
If, say, you find that Arc Menu gives GNOME 3 an menu and what more can you want, or if you are happy with something as minimal as Fluxbox, then my objections to many existing desktops are probably things that have never even occurred to you and will probably seem trivial, frivolous, and totally unimportant. It may be very hard to discuss them, unless you're willing to accept that, as an opening position, stuff that you don't even notice is critically, crucially important to other people.
Elementary is quite a good example, because it seems to me that the team trying to copy the look and feel of Mac OS X in Elementary OS do not actually understand how Mac OS X works.
Elementary presents a cosmetic imitation of Mac OS X, but it is skin-deep. Its developers seem not to understand how Mac OS X works and how the elements of the desktop function. So, they have implemented things that look quite Mac-like, but don't work. Not "don't work in a Mac-like way". I mean, don't work at all.
It is what I call "cargo cult" software: when you see something, think it looks good, so you make something that looks like it and then you take it very seriously and go through the motions of using it and say it's great.
Actually, your aeroplane is made of grass and rope. It doesn't roll let alone fly. Your radio is a wooden fruit box. Your headphones are woven from reeds. They don't do anything. They're a hat.
You're wearing a hat but you think you're a radio operator.
As an example: Mac OS X is based on a design that predates Windows 3. Programs do not have a menu bar in their windows. Menus are elsewhere on the screen. On the Mac, they're always in a bar at the top. On NeXTstep, which is what Mac OS X is based on, they're vertically stacked at the top left of the screen.
If you don't know that, and you hear that these OSes were very simple to use, and you look at screenshots, then you might think "look at those apps! They have no menu bars! No menus at all! Wow, what a simple, clean design! Right, I will write apps with no menus!"
That is a laudable goal in its way -- but it can mean that the result is a rather broken, braindead app, with no advanced options, no customisation, no real power. Or you have to stick a hamburger menu in the title bar with a dozen unrelated options that you couldn't fit anywhere else.
What's worse is that you didn't realise that that's the purpose of that panel across the top of the desktop in all the screenshots. You don't know that that's where the menus go. All you see is that it has a clock in it.
You don't know your history, so you think that it's there for the clock. You don't know that 5 or 6 years after the OS was launched with that bar for the menus, someone wrote an add-on that put a clock on the end, and the vendor went "that's a good idea" and built it in.
But you don't care about history, you never knew and you don't want to... So you put in a big panel that doesn't do anything, with a clock in it, and waste a ton of valuable space...
Cargo cult desktops.
Big dock thing because the Mac has a dock but they don't know that the Dock has about 4 different roles (app launcher and app switcher and holds minimised windows and is a shortcut for useful folders and is a place for status monitors. But they didn't know that so their docks can't do all this.
Menu bar with no menus because the Mac has a menu bar and it looks nice and people like Macs so we'll copy it but we didn't know about the menus, but we listened to Windows users who tried Macs and didn't like the menu bar.
Copying without understanding is a waste. A waste of programmer time and effort, a waste of user time and effort, a waste of screen space, and a waste of code.
You must understand first and only then copy.
If you do not have time or desire to understand, then do not try to copy. Do something else while you learn.
Did Ubuntu switch to GNOME prematurely?
Feb. 10th, 2019 11:48 amA response to a Reddit question.
I can only agree with you. I have blogged and commented enough about this that I fear I am rather unpopular with the GNOME developer team these days. :-(
The direct reason for the sale is that in founder Mark Shuttleworth's view, Ubuntu's bug #0 has been closed. Windows is no longer the dominant OS. There are many more Linux server instances, and while macOS dominates the high-end laptop segment, in terms of user-facing OSes, Android is now dominant and it is based on the Linux kernel.
His job is done. He has helped to make Linux far more popular and mainstream than it was. Due to Ubuntu being (fairly inarguably, I'd say) the best desktop distro for quite a few years, all the other Linux vendors [disclaimer: including my employer] switched away from desktop distros and over to server distros, which is where the money is. The leading desktop is arguably now Mint, then the various Ubuntu flavours. Linux is now mainstream and high-quality desktop Linuxes are far more popular than ever and they're all freeware.
Shuttleworth used an all-FOSS stack to build Thawte. When he sold it to Verisign in 1999, he made enough that he'd never need to work again. Ubuntu was a way for Shuttleworth to do something for the Linux and FOSS world in return.
It's done.
Thus, Shuttleworth is preparing Ubuntu for an IPO and floatation on the public stock market. As part of this, the company asked the biggest techie community what they'd like to see happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821
The results were resounding. Drop all the Ubuntu-only projects and switch back to upstream ones. Sadly, this mostly means Red Hat-backed projects, as it is the upstream developer of systemd, PulseAudio, GNOME 3, Flatpak and much more.
Personally I am interested in non-Windows-like desktops. I think the fragmentation in the Linux desktop market has been immensely harmful, has destroyed the fragile unity (pun intended) that there was in the free Unix world, and the finger of blame can be firmly pointed at Microsoft, which did this intentionally. I wrote about this here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/
The Unity desktop came out of that, and that was a good thing. I never like GNOME 2 much and I don't use Maté. But Unity was a bit of a lash-up behind the scenes, apparently, based on a series of Compiz plugins. It was not super stable and it was hard to maintain. The unsuccessful Unity-2D fork was killed prematurely (IMHO), whereas Unity 8 (the merged touchscreen/desktop version) was badly late.
There were undeniably problems with the development approach. Ubuntu has always faced problems with Red Hat, the 800lb gorilla of FOSS. The only way to work with a RH-based project is to take it and do as your told. Shuttleworth has written about this.
https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/654
(See the links in that post too.)
Also, some contemporary analysis: https://www.osnews.com/story/24510/shuttleworth-seigo-gnomes-not-collaborating/
I am definitely not claiming that Ubuntu always does everything right! Even with the problems of working with GNOME, I suspect that Mir was a big mistake and that Ubuntu should have gone with Wayland.
Cinnamon seems to be sticking rather closer to the upstream GNOME base for its different desktop. Perhaps Unity should have been more closely based on GNOME 3 tech, in the same way.
But IMHO, Ubuntu was doing terrifically important work with Unity 8, and all that has come to nothing. Now the only real convergence efforts are the rather half-hearted KDE touchscreen work and the ChromeOS-on-tablet work from Google, which isn't all-FOSS anyway TTBOMK.
I am terribly disappointed they surrendered. They were so close.
I entirely agree with you: Unity was _the_ best Linux desktop, bar none. A lot of the hate was from people that never learned to use it properly. I have seen it castigated for lacking stuff that is basic built-in functionality that people never found how to use.
In one way, Unity reminded me of OS/2 2: "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows." And it *was*! Unity was a better Mac OS X desktop than Mac OS X. I'm typing on a Mac now and there's plenty of things it can't do that Unity could. Better mouse actions. *Far* better keyboard controls.
I hope that the FOSS forks do eventually deliver.
Meantime, I reluctantly switched to Xfce. It's fine, it works, it's fast and simple, but it lacks functionality I really want.
I can only agree with you. I have blogged and commented enough about this that I fear I am rather unpopular with the GNOME developer team these days. :-(
The direct reason for the sale is that in founder Mark Shuttleworth's view, Ubuntu's bug #0 has been closed. Windows is no longer the dominant OS. There are many more Linux server instances, and while macOS dominates the high-end laptop segment, in terms of user-facing OSes, Android is now dominant and it is based on the Linux kernel.
His job is done. He has helped to make Linux far more popular and mainstream than it was. Due to Ubuntu being (fairly inarguably, I'd say) the best desktop distro for quite a few years, all the other Linux vendors [disclaimer: including my employer] switched away from desktop distros and over to server distros, which is where the money is. The leading desktop is arguably now Mint, then the various Ubuntu flavours. Linux is now mainstream and high-quality desktop Linuxes are far more popular than ever and they're all freeware.
Shuttleworth used an all-FOSS stack to build Thawte. When he sold it to Verisign in 1999, he made enough that he'd never need to work again. Ubuntu was a way for Shuttleworth to do something for the Linux and FOSS world in return.
It's done.
Thus, Shuttleworth is preparing Ubuntu for an IPO and floatation on the public stock market. As part of this, the company asked the biggest techie community what they'd like to see happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821
The results were resounding. Drop all the Ubuntu-only projects and switch back to upstream ones. Sadly, this mostly means Red Hat-backed projects, as it is the upstream developer of systemd, PulseAudio, GNOME 3, Flatpak and much more.
Personally I am interested in non-Windows-like desktops. I think the fragmentation in the Linux desktop market has been immensely harmful, has destroyed the fragile unity (pun intended) that there was in the free Unix world, and the finger of blame can be firmly pointed at Microsoft, which did this intentionally. I wrote about this here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/
The Unity desktop came out of that, and that was a good thing. I never like GNOME 2 much and I don't use Maté. But Unity was a bit of a lash-up behind the scenes, apparently, based on a series of Compiz plugins. It was not super stable and it was hard to maintain. The unsuccessful Unity-2D fork was killed prematurely (IMHO), whereas Unity 8 (the merged touchscreen/desktop version) was badly late.
There were undeniably problems with the development approach. Ubuntu has always faced problems with Red Hat, the 800lb gorilla of FOSS. The only way to work with a RH-based project is to take it and do as your told. Shuttleworth has written about this.
https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/654
(See the links in that post too.)
Also, some contemporary analysis: https://www.osnews.com/story/24510/shuttleworth-seigo-gnomes-not-collaborating/
I am definitely not claiming that Ubuntu always does everything right! Even with the problems of working with GNOME, I suspect that Mir was a big mistake and that Ubuntu should have gone with Wayland.
Cinnamon seems to be sticking rather closer to the upstream GNOME base for its different desktop. Perhaps Unity should have been more closely based on GNOME 3 tech, in the same way.
But IMHO, Ubuntu was doing terrifically important work with Unity 8, and all that has come to nothing. Now the only real convergence efforts are the rather half-hearted KDE touchscreen work and the ChromeOS-on-tablet work from Google, which isn't all-FOSS anyway TTBOMK.
I am terribly disappointed they surrendered. They were so close.
I entirely agree with you: Unity was _the_ best Linux desktop, bar none. A lot of the hate was from people that never learned to use it properly. I have seen it castigated for lacking stuff that is basic built-in functionality that people never found how to use.
In one way, Unity reminded me of OS/2 2: "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows." And it *was*! Unity was a better Mac OS X desktop than Mac OS X. I'm typing on a Mac now and there's plenty of things it can't do that Unity could. Better mouse actions. *Far* better keyboard controls.
I hope that the FOSS forks do eventually deliver.
Meantime, I reluctantly switched to Xfce. It's fine, it works, it's fast and simple, but it lacks functionality I really want.
I've been playing a bit with the new LTS edition of Ubuntu in VMs. As of the last version, Ubuntu abandoned its homegrown Unity desktop -- a pragmatic business decision, but one that personally dismayed me as it was by far my favourite Linux desktop environment.
The last release of Ubuntu, 17.10, featured GNOME 3 as the default desktop, and I didn't like it at all. I even made it onto Hacker News!
But now, the rough edges have been smoothed off a little -- as they should, as this is a long-term support release and will be the current Ubuntu for 2 years for many people.
It's improved. I don't like it, but it's better. OMGUbuntu has done its usual things to do after you install piece and makes some good points. The only thing I'd question is the themes one -- all right, and maybe the need for Snap/Flatpak, but fair enough.
But here are my suggestions for a few tweaks that I find really useful, though...
"Extend Panel Menu" -- https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1201/extend-panel-menu/
UPDATE: now replaced by "Panel Indicators" -- https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2416/panel-indicators/
Splits the combined system menu back into separate options, and moves the clock over to the right where it belongs.
"Pixel Saver" -- https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/723/pixel-saver/
Merges the title bar of maximised windows with the top panel. Not as elegant as the Unity way (there's no menu so the panel remains mostly wasted space; the window controls get mixed in with your status indicators) but it works.
"Dash to Dock" -- https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/
The full version of the tool Ubuntu uses to make the "launcher" into a dock.
"Topicons Plus" -- https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1031/topicons/
This puts app indicators in the panel where they belong.
I personally also add "Hide activities button" and "no topleft hot corner" but they might be more controversial. :-)
I also install the un-castrated Cinnamon file manager, Nemo, and make it manage the desktop: https://askubuntu.com/questions/294421/how-do-i-install-nemo-file-manager
Saying all that, I still don't like GNOME 3 much. I am currently pondering upgrading my personal travel laptop to the new edition, or waiting for a while and reinstalling with a Unity remix.
The last release of Ubuntu, 17.10, featured GNOME 3 as the default desktop, and I didn't like it at all. I even made it onto Hacker News!
But now, the rough edges have been smoothed off a little -- as they should, as this is a long-term support release and will be the current Ubuntu for 2 years for many people.
It's improved. I don't like it, but it's better. OMGUbuntu has done its usual things to do after you install piece and makes some good points. The only thing I'd question is the themes one -- all right, and maybe the need for Snap/Flatpak, but fair enough.
But here are my suggestions for a few tweaks that I find really useful, though...
"Extend Panel Menu" -- https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1201/extend-panel-menu/
UPDATE: now replaced by "Panel Indicators" -- https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2416/panel-indicators/
Splits the combined system menu back into separate options, and moves the clock over to the right where it belongs.
"Pixel Saver" -- https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/723/pixel-saver/
Merges the title bar of maximised windows with the top panel. Not as elegant as the Unity way (there's no menu so the panel remains mostly wasted space; the window controls get mixed in with your status indicators) but it works.
"Dash to Dock" -- https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/
The full version of the tool Ubuntu uses to make the "launcher" into a dock.
"Topicons Plus" -- https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1031/topicons/
This puts app indicators in the panel where they belong.
I personally also add "Hide activities button" and "no topleft hot corner" but they might be more controversial. :-)
I also install the un-castrated Cinnamon file manager, Nemo, and make it manage the desktop: https://askubuntu.com/questions/294421/how-do-i-install-nemo-file-manager
Saying all that, I still don't like GNOME 3 much. I am currently pondering upgrading my personal travel laptop to the new edition, or waiting for a while and reinstalling with a Unity remix.
Why I don't use GNOME Shell
Nov. 11th, 2016 03:54 pmAlthough the launch of GNOME 3 was a bumpy ride and it got a lot of criticism, it's coming back. It's the default desktop of multiple distros again now. Allegedly even Linus Torvalds himself uses it. People tell me that it gets out of the way.
I find this curious, because I find it a little clunky and obstructive. It looks great, but for me, it doesn’t work all that well. It’s OK — far better than it was 2-3 years ago. But while some say it gets out of the way and lets them work undistracted, it gets in my way, because I have to adapt to its weird little quirks. It will not adapt to mine. It is dogmatic: it says, you must work this way, because we are the experts and we have decided that this is the best way.
So, on OS X or Ubuntu, I have my dock/launcher thing on the left, because that keeps it out of the way of the scrollbars. On Windows or XFCE, I put the task bar there. For all 4 of these environments, on a big screen, it’s not too much space and gives useful info about minimised windows, handy access to disk drives, stuff like that. On a small screen, it autohides.
But not on GNOME, no. No, the gods of GNOME have decreed that I don’t need it, so it’s always hidden. I can’t reveal it by just putting my mouse over there. No, I have to click a strange word in the menu bar. “Activities”. What activities? These aren’t my activities. They’re my apps, folders, files, windows. Don’t tell me what to call them. Don’t direct me to click in a certain place to get them; I want them just there if there’s room, and if there isn’t, on a quick flick of the wrist to a whole screen edge, not a particular place followed by a click. It wastes a bit of precious menu-bar real-estate with a word that’s conceptually irrelevant to me. It’s something I have to remember to do.
That’s not saving me time or effort, it’s making me learn a new trick and do extra work.
The menu bar. Time-honoured UI structure. Shared by all post-Mac GUIs. Sometimes it contains a menu, efficiently spread out over a nice big easily-mousable spatial range. Sometimes that’s in the window; whatever. The whole width of the screen in Mac and Unity. A range of commands spread out.
On Windows, the centre of the title bar is important info — what program this window belongs to.
On the Mac, that’s the first word of the title bar. I read from left to right, because I use a Latinate alphabet. So that’s a good place too.
On GNOME 3, there’s some random word I don’t associate with anything in particular as the first word, then a deformed fragment of an icon that’s hard to recognise, then a word, then a big waste of space, then the blasted clock! Why the clock? Are they that obsessive, such clock-watchers? Mac and Windows and Unity all banish the clock to a corner. Not GNOME, no. No, it’s front and centre, one of the most important things in one of the most important places.
Why?
I don’t know, but I’m not allowed to move it.
Apple put its all-important logo there in early versions of Mac OS X. They quickly were told not to be so egomaniac. GNOME 3, though, enforces it.
On Mac, Unity, and Windows, in one corner, there’s a little bunch of notification icons. Different corners unless I put the task bar at the top, but whatever, I can adapt.
On GNOME 3, no, those are rationed. There are things hidden under sub options. In the pursuit of cleanliness and tidiness, things like my network status are hidden away.
That’s my choice, surely? I want them in view. I add extra ones. I like to see some status info. I find it handy.
GNOME says no, you don’t need this, so we’ve hidden it. You don’t need to see a whole menu. What are you gonna do, read it?
It reminds me of the classic Bill Hicks joke:
"You know I've noticed a certain anti-intellectualism going around this country ever since around 1980, coincidentally enough. I was in Nashville, Tennessee last weekend and after the show I went to a waffle house and I'm sitting there and I'm eating and reading a book. I don't know anybody, I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book. This waitress comes over to me (mocks chewing gum) 'what you readin' for?'...wow, I've never been asked that; not 'What am I reading', 'What am I reading for?’ Well, goddamnit, you stumped me... I guess I read for a lot of reasons — the main one is so I don't end up being a f**kin' waffle waitress. Yeah, that would be pretty high on the list. Then this trucker in the booth next to me gets up, stands over me and says [mocks Southern drawl] 'Well, looks like we got ourselves a readah'... aahh, what the fuck's goin' on? It's like I walked into a Klan rally in a Boy George costume or something. Am I stepping out of some intellectual closet here? I read, there I said it. I feel better."
Yeah, I read. I like reading. It’s useful. A bar of words is something I can scan in a fraction of a second. Then I can click on one and get… more words! Like some member of the damned intellectual elite. Sue me. I read.
But Microsoft says no, thou shalt have ribbons instead. Thou shalt click through tabs of little pictures and try and guess what they mean, and we don’t care if you’ve spent 20 years learning where all the options were — because we’ve taken them away! Haw!
And GNOME Shell says, nope, you don’t need that, so I’m gonna collapse it all down to one menu with a few buried options. That leaves us more room for the all-holy clock. Then you can easily see how much time you’ve wasted looking for menu options we’ve removed.
You don’t need all those confusing toolbar buttons neither, nossir, we gonna take most of them away too. We’ll leave you the most important ones. It’s cleaner. It’s smarter. It’s more elegant.
Well, yes it is, it’s true, but you know what, I want my software to rank usefulness and usability above cleanliness and elegance. I ride a bike with gears, because gears help. Yes, I could have a fixie with none, it’s simpler, lighter, cleaner. I could even get rid of brakes in that case. Fewer of those annoying levers on the handlebars.
But those brake and gear levers are useful. They help me. So I want them, because they make it easier to go up hills and easier to go fast on the flat, and if it looks less elegant, well I don’t really give a damn, because utility is more important. Function over form. Ideally, a balance of both, but if offered the choice, favour utility over aesthetics.
Now, to be fair, yes, I know, I can install all kinds of GNOME Shell extensions — from Firefox, which freaks me out a bit. I don’t want my browser to be able to control my desktop, because that’s a possible vector for malware. A webpage that can add and remove elements to my desktop horrifies me at a deep level.
But at least I can do it, and that makes GNOME Shell a lot more usable for me. I can customise it a bit. I can add elements and I could make my favourites bar be permanent, but honestly, for me, this is core functionality and I don’t think it should be an add-on. The favourites bar still won’t easily let me see how many instances of an app are running like the Unity one. It doesn’t also hold minimised windows and easy shortcuts like the Mac one. It’s less flexible than either.
There are things I like. I love the virtual-desktop switcher. It’s the best on any OS. I wish GNOME Shell were more modular, because I want that virtual-desktop switcher on Unity and XFCE, please. It’s superb, a triumph.
But it’s not modular, so I can’t. And it’s only customisable to a narrow, limited degree. And that means not to the extent that I want.
I accept that some of this is because I’m old and somewhat stuck in my ways and I don’t want to change things that work for me. That’s why I use Linux, because it’s customisable, because I can bend it to my will.
I also use Mac OS X — I haven’t upgraded to Sierra yet, so I won’t call it macOS — and anyway, I still own computers that run MacOS, as in MacOS 6, 7, 8, 9 — so I continue to call it Mac OS X. What this tells you is that I’ve been using Macs for a long time — since the late 1980s — and whereas they’re not so customisable, I am deeply familiar and comfortable with how they work.
And Macs inspired the Windows desktop and Windows inspired the Linux desktops, so there is continuity. Unity works in ways I’ve been using for nearly 30 years.
GNOME 3 doesn’t. GNOME 3 changes things. Some in good ways, some in bad. But they’re not my ways, and they do not seem to offer me any improvement over the ways I’m used to. OS X and Unity and Windows Vista/7/8/10 all give me app searching as a primary launch mechanism; it’s not a selling point of GNOME 3. The favourites bar thing isn’t an improvement on the OS X Dock or Unity Launcher or Windows Taskbar — it only delivers a small fraction of the functionality of those. The menu bar is if anything less customisable than the Mac or Unity ones, and even then, I have to use extensions to do it. If I move to someone else’s computer, all that stuff will be gone.
So whereas I do appreciate what it does and how and why it does so, I don’t feel like it’s for me. It wants me to change to work its way. The other OSes I use — OS X daily, Ubuntu Unity daily, Windows occasionally when someone pays me — don’t.
So I don’t use it.
Does that make sense?
I find this curious, because I find it a little clunky and obstructive. It looks great, but for me, it doesn’t work all that well. It’s OK — far better than it was 2-3 years ago. But while some say it gets out of the way and lets them work undistracted, it gets in my way, because I have to adapt to its weird little quirks. It will not adapt to mine. It is dogmatic: it says, you must work this way, because we are the experts and we have decided that this is the best way.
So, on OS X or Ubuntu, I have my dock/launcher thing on the left, because that keeps it out of the way of the scrollbars. On Windows or XFCE, I put the task bar there. For all 4 of these environments, on a big screen, it’s not too much space and gives useful info about minimised windows, handy access to disk drives, stuff like that. On a small screen, it autohides.
But not on GNOME, no. No, the gods of GNOME have decreed that I don’t need it, so it’s always hidden. I can’t reveal it by just putting my mouse over there. No, I have to click a strange word in the menu bar. “Activities”. What activities? These aren’t my activities. They’re my apps, folders, files, windows. Don’t tell me what to call them. Don’t direct me to click in a certain place to get them; I want them just there if there’s room, and if there isn’t, on a quick flick of the wrist to a whole screen edge, not a particular place followed by a click. It wastes a bit of precious menu-bar real-estate with a word that’s conceptually irrelevant to me. It’s something I have to remember to do.
That’s not saving me time or effort, it’s making me learn a new trick and do extra work.
The menu bar. Time-honoured UI structure. Shared by all post-Mac GUIs. Sometimes it contains a menu, efficiently spread out over a nice big easily-mousable spatial range. Sometimes that’s in the window; whatever. The whole width of the screen in Mac and Unity. A range of commands spread out.
On Windows, the centre of the title bar is important info — what program this window belongs to.
On the Mac, that’s the first word of the title bar. I read from left to right, because I use a Latinate alphabet. So that’s a good place too.
On GNOME 3, there’s some random word I don’t associate with anything in particular as the first word, then a deformed fragment of an icon that’s hard to recognise, then a word, then a big waste of space, then the blasted clock! Why the clock? Are they that obsessive, such clock-watchers? Mac and Windows and Unity all banish the clock to a corner. Not GNOME, no. No, it’s front and centre, one of the most important things in one of the most important places.
Why?
I don’t know, but I’m not allowed to move it.
Apple put its all-important logo there in early versions of Mac OS X. They quickly were told not to be so egomaniac. GNOME 3, though, enforces it.
On Mac, Unity, and Windows, in one corner, there’s a little bunch of notification icons. Different corners unless I put the task bar at the top, but whatever, I can adapt.
On GNOME 3, no, those are rationed. There are things hidden under sub options. In the pursuit of cleanliness and tidiness, things like my network status are hidden away.
That’s my choice, surely? I want them in view. I add extra ones. I like to see some status info. I find it handy.
GNOME says no, you don’t need this, so we’ve hidden it. You don’t need to see a whole menu. What are you gonna do, read it?
It reminds me of the classic Bill Hicks joke:
"You know I've noticed a certain anti-intellectualism going around this country ever since around 1980, coincidentally enough. I was in Nashville, Tennessee last weekend and after the show I went to a waffle house and I'm sitting there and I'm eating and reading a book. I don't know anybody, I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book. This waitress comes over to me (mocks chewing gum) 'what you readin' for?'...wow, I've never been asked that; not 'What am I reading', 'What am I reading for?’ Well, goddamnit, you stumped me... I guess I read for a lot of reasons — the main one is so I don't end up being a f**kin' waffle waitress. Yeah, that would be pretty high on the list. Then this trucker in the booth next to me gets up, stands over me and says [mocks Southern drawl] 'Well, looks like we got ourselves a readah'... aahh, what the fuck's goin' on? It's like I walked into a Klan rally in a Boy George costume or something. Am I stepping out of some intellectual closet here? I read, there I said it. I feel better."
Yeah, I read. I like reading. It’s useful. A bar of words is something I can scan in a fraction of a second. Then I can click on one and get… more words! Like some member of the damned intellectual elite. Sue me. I read.
But Microsoft says no, thou shalt have ribbons instead. Thou shalt click through tabs of little pictures and try and guess what they mean, and we don’t care if you’ve spent 20 years learning where all the options were — because we’ve taken them away! Haw!
And GNOME Shell says, nope, you don’t need that, so I’m gonna collapse it all down to one menu with a few buried options. That leaves us more room for the all-holy clock. Then you can easily see how much time you’ve wasted looking for menu options we’ve removed.
You don’t need all those confusing toolbar buttons neither, nossir, we gonna take most of them away too. We’ll leave you the most important ones. It’s cleaner. It’s smarter. It’s more elegant.
Well, yes it is, it’s true, but you know what, I want my software to rank usefulness and usability above cleanliness and elegance. I ride a bike with gears, because gears help. Yes, I could have a fixie with none, it’s simpler, lighter, cleaner. I could even get rid of brakes in that case. Fewer of those annoying levers on the handlebars.
But those brake and gear levers are useful. They help me. So I want them, because they make it easier to go up hills and easier to go fast on the flat, and if it looks less elegant, well I don’t really give a damn, because utility is more important. Function over form. Ideally, a balance of both, but if offered the choice, favour utility over aesthetics.
Now, to be fair, yes, I know, I can install all kinds of GNOME Shell extensions — from Firefox, which freaks me out a bit. I don’t want my browser to be able to control my desktop, because that’s a possible vector for malware. A webpage that can add and remove elements to my desktop horrifies me at a deep level.
But at least I can do it, and that makes GNOME Shell a lot more usable for me. I can customise it a bit. I can add elements and I could make my favourites bar be permanent, but honestly, for me, this is core functionality and I don’t think it should be an add-on. The favourites bar still won’t easily let me see how many instances of an app are running like the Unity one. It doesn’t also hold minimised windows and easy shortcuts like the Mac one. It’s less flexible than either.
There are things I like. I love the virtual-desktop switcher. It’s the best on any OS. I wish GNOME Shell were more modular, because I want that virtual-desktop switcher on Unity and XFCE, please. It’s superb, a triumph.
But it’s not modular, so I can’t. And it’s only customisable to a narrow, limited degree. And that means not to the extent that I want.
I accept that some of this is because I’m old and somewhat stuck in my ways and I don’t want to change things that work for me. That’s why I use Linux, because it’s customisable, because I can bend it to my will.
I also use Mac OS X — I haven’t upgraded to Sierra yet, so I won’t call it macOS — and anyway, I still own computers that run MacOS, as in MacOS 6, 7, 8, 9 — so I continue to call it Mac OS X. What this tells you is that I’ve been using Macs for a long time — since the late 1980s — and whereas they’re not so customisable, I am deeply familiar and comfortable with how they work.
And Macs inspired the Windows desktop and Windows inspired the Linux desktops, so there is continuity. Unity works in ways I’ve been using for nearly 30 years.
GNOME 3 doesn’t. GNOME 3 changes things. Some in good ways, some in bad. But they’re not my ways, and they do not seem to offer me any improvement over the ways I’m used to. OS X and Unity and Windows Vista/7/8/10 all give me app searching as a primary launch mechanism; it’s not a selling point of GNOME 3. The favourites bar thing isn’t an improvement on the OS X Dock or Unity Launcher or Windows Taskbar — it only delivers a small fraction of the functionality of those. The menu bar is if anything less customisable than the Mac or Unity ones, and even then, I have to use extensions to do it. If I move to someone else’s computer, all that stuff will be gone.
So whereas I do appreciate what it does and how and why it does so, I don’t feel like it’s for me. It wants me to change to work its way. The other OSes I use — OS X daily, Ubuntu Unity daily, Windows occasionally when someone pays me — don’t.
So I don’t use it.
Does that make sense?
I think the more significant long-term question is to ask which of the various Gtk2-based desktops are going to successfully transition to other toolkits.
Apparently, LXDE is switching to Qt:
http://blog.lxde.org/?p=1013
Which leaves the question of how easy it would be for Xfce and Maté to move.
( Read more... )
Apparently, LXDE is switching to Qt:
http://blog.lxde.org/?p=1013
Which leaves the question of how easy it would be for Xfce and Maté to move.
( Read more... )
I recently saw a mailing list post condemning Maté (the GNOME 2 fork)
as something to be deprecated and avoided because it uses Gtk2 and
that is now superseded code.
I think that's a bit sweeping to denigrate all Gtk2 desktops like that.
Yes, GNOME Classic and Cinnamon both offer Windows-like desktops
now with taskbars and start menus. If you don't like Unity or GNOME
Shell, then there are "traditional" alternatives.
But the un-Windows-like nature of Unity and GNOME Shell are not the
only reasons that people use them. There are other issues than the
cosmetics to consider.
( Read more... )
as something to be deprecated and avoided because it uses Gtk2 and
that is now superseded code.
I think that's a bit sweeping to denigrate all Gtk2 desktops like that.
Yes, GNOME Classic and Cinnamon both offer Windows-like desktops
now with taskbars and start menus. If you don't like Unity or GNOME
Shell, then there are "traditional" alternatives.
But the un-Windows-like nature of Unity and GNOME Shell are not the
only reasons that people use them. There are other issues than the
cosmetics to consider.
( Read more... )
A couple of months ago, I tried to update my 2007 Toshiba Satellite Pro P300-1AY laptop from Ubuntu 12.04 to 13.04. It failed, badly -- my AMD RV620 GPU is no longer supported by fglrx, the proprietary AMD/ATI graphics driver. But Ubuntu used it anyway, resulting in a broken GUI.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
I had problems with this a few years back, but the fix has changed now. Merely installing the Virtualbox Additions does not seem to be enough to get hardware OpenGL working. Also, the instructions I've found only mention Fedora.
To see if you are running with hardware or software rendering, use the command ``glxinfo''. You'll need to install the ``mesa-utils'' package; the info you're after is on the first page of output from glxinfo, so pipe it through ``less'' like so:
glxinfo | less
( Read more... )
To see if you are running with hardware or software rendering, use the command ``glxinfo''. You'll need to install the ``mesa-utils'' package; the info you're after is on the first page of output from glxinfo, so pipe it through ``less'' like so:
glxinfo | less
( Read more... )
Since none of my spare or test machines have hardware 3D, I was unable to try it until recently. Then I was testing an MSI Wind Top all-in-one touchscreen Atom PC as part of the Simplicity Computers project. (We've decided against it now.)
(The Wind Top works OK with *buntu, but for one entertaining bug: the axes on the touchscreen are reversed. Move your finger left, the pointer goes right; move finger up, pointer goes down. Install the drivers and config to fix this (which depends on HAL, and so doesn't work right on modern *buntu) and the screen image moves offcentre and goes all blurry, so though the touchscreen now works, you can barely read anything, it's all ugly, and the picture is offset about 5mm vertical & 1cm horizontal from where it should be and thus where the pointer is. As it's an all-in-one, there are no screen geometry controls, hardware or software. At which point, we gave up and sent it back.)
Anyway, I got Natty alpha 3 or so working on it.
Compiz crashes more times than Aeroflot in volcano season, taking the "desktop" - not that that word is accurate any more - with it.
The autohiding menu bar is insane, combining the worst of MacOS (menus randomly changing depending which window is active and having no spacial association with whichever window they control - if they control any visible window) and the worst of the Amiga (on which menus are hidden unless you whack the mouse up to the top of the screen and then right-click.) It's about as discoverable as Minoan Linear A.
The NotADockHonest™ is weird and feels raw and unfinished, not like something that shipped as part of Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 Netbook Remix. I don't like it as much as the Mac OS X Dock - and I don't like that much - but I am prepared to give the Unity Dock time. Maybe I'll adapt to it.
I mean, I don't like GNOME panels much, either, after all. They're much more customisable than Windows ones, except not in the ways I want (e.g. vertical orientation (b0rked), e.g. large panels but small icons; (no, you can't have that. And you can't have any pudding, either. Bad user, no biccie.))
(Incidentally again, if you like vertical docks and panels, Docky and GLX-Dock and AWM are all broken, too. If you want a nice, attractive dock that actually works quite well in a vertical orientation, try ADeskBar. It's good. Best I've found for Linux yet. Homepage seems to be down, though.)
Mind you, after a little playing, I like the WindowMaker docks much less than OS X ones. (I mean, no labels or tooltips? You are taking the mickey, right?)
But so far, the new Ubuntu 11.04 layout, from a play with a flaky, unstable implementation, just felt like it wasn't something powerful and capable enough to run a PC with. Not yet.
I have no choice but to stick with GNOME 2 on my laptop. It's seven years old, but rock-solid and nicely fast & responsive with Maverick. Much much better than Windows XP on the same hardware. But its ATI Radeon Mobility - actually a 16MB Rage II or III, roughly - doesn't work with Compiz and to give good performance (and to be able to drive a 1280×1024 external monitor) it has to be dropped to 65K colours.
Which Ubuntu provides no UI at all to do, of course.
So you have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Only *buntu >10.x doesn't have an xorg.conf file any more. So you have to write one of your own. (I found a blank one that can be adapted, which is very handy.)
Once you've done that and got the graphics working, then you might, perhaps, want suspend/wake and hibernate/resume to work. That means adding "nomodeswitch" to the kernel boot parameters.
That means you lose the graphical boot sequence (which has the colours corrupted on this machine, anyway.)
So you might want to add "vga=791" to the kernel boot params too, to get a graphical boot back, in the same resolution as your desktop.
After doing all this, it works like a dream and is really nice, but forget any hardware 3D, so forget the Netbook interface - or the new Unity one. And also, I think, that means forget GNOME 3, as well.
The obscure and poorly-supported make of this weirdly non-standard machine?
IBM.
Not Lenovo, actual IBM. It's from 2004. A Thinkpad X31.
Saying all that, I still prefer *buntu to the alternatives.
But I think that as of or after Natty, I might be going over to Linux Mint full-time...
Mint, of course, is based on GNOME 2 and has no truck with any of this netbook or unity or GNOME 3 business.
But what is going to happen when GNOME 2 is no longer supported or updated, I wonder?
I mean (*shudder*) I might have to go over to KDE. But the ugly, it burnsssssss... I don't want 23,452,356 options to tweak, I want it to work, and it really helps if it looks vaguely professional and smart while it's at it, not like a red/green colourblind 13 year old's LSD nightmare.
(The Wind Top works OK with *buntu, but for one entertaining bug: the axes on the touchscreen are reversed. Move your finger left, the pointer goes right; move finger up, pointer goes down. Install the drivers and config to fix this (which depends on HAL, and so doesn't work right on modern *buntu) and the screen image moves offcentre and goes all blurry, so though the touchscreen now works, you can barely read anything, it's all ugly, and the picture is offset about 5mm vertical & 1cm horizontal from where it should be and thus where the pointer is. As it's an all-in-one, there are no screen geometry controls, hardware or software. At which point, we gave up and sent it back.)
Anyway, I got Natty alpha 3 or so working on it.
Compiz crashes more times than Aeroflot in volcano season, taking the "desktop" - not that that word is accurate any more - with it.
The autohiding menu bar is insane, combining the worst of MacOS (menus randomly changing depending which window is active and having no spacial association with whichever window they control - if they control any visible window) and the worst of the Amiga (on which menus are hidden unless you whack the mouse up to the top of the screen and then right-click.) It's about as discoverable as Minoan Linear A.
The NotADockHonest™ is weird and feels raw and unfinished, not like something that shipped as part of Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 Netbook Remix. I don't like it as much as the Mac OS X Dock - and I don't like that much - but I am prepared to give the Unity Dock time. Maybe I'll adapt to it.
I mean, I don't like GNOME panels much, either, after all. They're much more customisable than Windows ones, except not in the ways I want (e.g. vertical orientation (b0rked), e.g. large panels but small icons; (no, you can't have that. And you can't have any pudding, either. Bad user, no biccie.))
(Incidentally again, if you like vertical docks and panels, Docky and GLX-Dock and AWM are all broken, too. If you want a nice, attractive dock that actually works quite well in a vertical orientation, try ADeskBar. It's good. Best I've found for Linux yet. Homepage seems to be down, though.)
Mind you, after a little playing, I like the WindowMaker docks much less than OS X ones. (I mean, no labels or tooltips? You are taking the mickey, right?)
But so far, the new Ubuntu 11.04 layout, from a play with a flaky, unstable implementation, just felt like it wasn't something powerful and capable enough to run a PC with. Not yet.
I have no choice but to stick with GNOME 2 on my laptop. It's seven years old, but rock-solid and nicely fast & responsive with Maverick. Much much better than Windows XP on the same hardware. But its ATI Radeon Mobility - actually a 16MB Rage II or III, roughly - doesn't work with Compiz and to give good performance (and to be able to drive a 1280×1024 external monitor) it has to be dropped to 65K colours.
Which Ubuntu provides no UI at all to do, of course.
So you have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Only *buntu >10.x doesn't have an xorg.conf file any more. So you have to write one of your own. (I found a blank one that can be adapted, which is very handy.)
Once you've done that and got the graphics working, then you might, perhaps, want suspend/wake and hibernate/resume to work. That means adding "nomodeswitch" to the kernel boot parameters.
That means you lose the graphical boot sequence (which has the colours corrupted on this machine, anyway.)
So you might want to add "vga=791" to the kernel boot params too, to get a graphical boot back, in the same resolution as your desktop.
After doing all this, it works like a dream and is really nice, but forget any hardware 3D, so forget the Netbook interface - or the new Unity one. And also, I think, that means forget GNOME 3, as well.
The obscure and poorly-supported make of this weirdly non-standard machine?
IBM.
Not Lenovo, actual IBM. It's from 2004. A Thinkpad X31.
Saying all that, I still prefer *buntu to the alternatives.
But I think that as of or after Natty, I might be going over to Linux Mint full-time...
Mint, of course, is based on GNOME 2 and has no truck with any of this netbook or unity or GNOME 3 business.
But what is going to happen when GNOME 2 is no longer supported or updated, I wonder?
I mean (*shudder*) I might have to go over to KDE. But the ugly, it burnsssssss... I don't want 23,452,356 options to tweak, I want it to work, and it really helps if it looks vaguely professional and smart while it's at it, not like a red/green colourblind 13 year old's LSD nightmare.
Oh, so GNOME is Reinventing tabs.
Oh yay! Another reason not to use GNOME! Thanks, guys! I had enough already, but every additional one makes the decision easier and easier!
• Titlebars. I liked title bars. You merged them with toolbars. I don’t want that. No thank you. But it’s not a choice, it’s mandatory! Well, thanks folks, but your desktop isn’t mandatory, either!
• Menu bars. Menu bars are fast and efficient. You got rid of them & patronise me like I’m on some crippled smartphone app, where a tiny, hard-to-find hamburger menu is enough for the paltry selection of choices in a crippled mobile app. GNOME brings this to the desktop, so now, my decisions are easier! Not only do I not want to run GNOME, I don’t want to run any GNOME app, either!
• You got rid of all the menus, but for some weird reason, you kept the menu bar. That’s a centimetre of my widescreen gone forever. Gee, thanks! Oh, and the clock is front and centre. Why? Do you want me to stamp in and out of my desktop with a card clock, as well? At least I can have app indicators for Skype and Dropbox and stuff ins– oh, you’re taking those away too? But they were useful! Not to you? But isn’t the customer always right? I’m not paying for it so I’m not a customer? Well if I am not paying, why do you want a gig of RAM? I’m paying for that! Can I have it back, please? No? Oh. Guess I will go use Xfce then.
• Hey, where are my desktop icons? What do you mean they’re a legacy feature? They were useful!
• At least the virtual desktops down the right were handy. Shame they are always on the right of my primary screen, not of the whole desktop, but I get that you don’t want me to use multiple screens. I don’t know why, but– oh, you’ve moved them? Where to? To the bottom? But I have a 16:9 monitor! I have nearly twice as much width as depth! Can I move it where I want? No? Why not? Whaddya mean you know what I want better than me? Hey, I got news for you, buddy… Meet my friends Mr
rm -rfand Mrfdisk. They got a message for you.