Liam on Linux

A 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.

Although 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?

Back in early September, Ubuntu announced that the nightly builds of Ubuntu now supported their new Mir display server, the planned replacement for X.org.

So I tried it. My impressions from that time were:

<<
As of last night - very late last night - I have Ubuntu "Saucy Salamander" up & running with the Mir display server. I am really quite excited about this. Glitches everywhere, but it works!

It's what would have been beta 1 if they still did things like alpha & beta releases, which they don't, because the SABDFL knows all and we must trust in his wisdom. Or something.

Also, I was very amused to read its kernel startup messages.

The kernel version is "Linux 3.11 for Workgroups", & it says:

MODSIGN: Loaded cert 'Magrathea: Glacier signing key XXXXX'

... during boot. :-)
>>

Soon after, I was horrified to discover the vconsole bug.

But it's getting there.

A fortnight later, ish, I've had another look at the alpha.

It's improved, significantly. They've fixed the security issue - stuff typed in a vconsole no longer appears in the foreground XMir app.

There is still a fair bit of screen flickering, but substantially less. From a quick play, I'd go so far as to say it's usable now; it's gone from horrible to merely distracting. It's the sort of thing I probably lived with in the era of OS/2 2 and Windows 3. :¬)

It's not there yet, not ready for prime-time, but then, they have about a month to go. I'd say it was approaching beta-ready.

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.