What's your flava? Ooo, tell me what's your flava... of Ubuntu The Canonical project is gearing up for one of its biggest releases yet. Ubuntu 17.10, due to arrive October 19, will be the company's first release since it abandoned its Unity desktop, Mir display server and the dream of "convergence". Instead Ubuntu users will get the GNOME desktop with a few tweaks that promise to make it a …
"That means KDE users can now litter their desktops with icons and files named "newfile", "newerfile", "newestfile" just like everyone else."
I'm pretty sure this has been possible since Slackware (at least) started using KDE; certainly it works with 2001's Slack 8.0 and KDE 2.1, the oldest version I have handy at the moment ... Perhaps it wasn't enabled in Kubuntu?
A few years ago, with version 4, the KDE developers decided that they way we had been using our desktop was primitive and went on to create something better. A desktop that wouldn't let you have documents or icons in it.
Pretty much nobody liked the idea, so they allowed you to configure the desktop as being a 'folder view' and it would work as expected.
I guess Kubuntu is now using that setting as the default one.
You mean that whole Plasma thing? It's one reason why, even to date, I still use KDE3 and substitute "plasmoids" for Screenlets. Like that lot over at GNOME, my thought was that KDE were concentrating a little too hard on self indulgence and not enough on what users were actually asking for and while KDE3 isn't perfect, KDE4 wasn't the answer IMHO. Plasma 5 isn't as bad but it still doesn't quite come up to the mark either.
Yet again, it seemed that certain types within the Linux community were trying to reinvent the wheel for no other reason than that they could. The only difference with KDE4 and GNOME3 was that they had a lock-in that Unity didn't have, though while the backlash against GNOME3 brought forth such projects as MATE and Cinnamon, I've come to conclude that Trinity isn't KDE3 in every respect and certainly doesn't have the push of the two GNOME offshoots.
If KDE are finally coming to their senses with Plasma 5 then all power to them, but I'll keep my KDE3 install going for as long as I need to until I'm happy with what they have done. Mind you, moving to Ubuntu of any stripe is unlikely for me...
For me it was KDE 3.5 or thereabouts that hit perfection. Everything was so easy to use. Even Kontact email / calendaring worked great. It's just about getting back to somewhere near now in KDE 5 but the devs seem still to be antagonistic to the idea of a good user experience.
I missed very much KDE 3.5, then finally accepted KDE 4, as it became more mature. Now I find KDE Plasma 5 too experimental (last time I tried: 10 months ago maybe) and I absolutely despise how it drank the FLAT Kool-Aid. It's about time to let KDE4 go (lxde-qt not quite ready), so I might as well return to KDE3 through Trinity.
Unity was originally why I gave up on Linux as a desktop OS. Anyone over 25 and in regular employment, who therefore lacked the time to test or even read about 100 distros, and wanted a stable and sensible desktop with high adoption, just had to bail. That hasn't changed. Choice, bollocks. Look at this mess.
"Anyone over 25 and in regular employment, who therefore lacked the time to test or even read about 100 distros, and wanted a stable and sensible desktop with high adoption, just had to bail."
Yeah well the gang from Redmond was also messing about with the usage-paradigm too but that doesn't seem to have bothered you too much. Win 8 and 10 (Redmond it seems can't count as they skipped 9) both have terrible User Interfaces.
I jumped ship to Gnome 2 when the KDE developers when the went insane and released KDE 4. Then the Gnome devs went round the twist. I stuck to Gnome 2.2 as long as possible, finally moving to Mate. I used to use Fedora, but started using Mint and grew to really like Cinnamon.
"Yeah well the gang from Redmond was also messing about with the usage-paradigm too but that doesn't seem to have bothered you too much. Win 8 and 10 (Redmond it seems can't count as they skipped 9) both have terrible User Interfaces."
There's no doubt the Metro experiment led to an upswing in the Linux curious. What they would have found is, well, 100 distros and about 50 shells to sort through, each with some annoyance or other. In the end it was easier to stay with Redmond, spend the 90 seconds installing Classic Shell, and carry on as if nothing had happened.
Interestingly, there are now far more instances of Ubuntu Server out there than Desktop. How may flavours of that are there? Two.
Problem with MS was they wanted windows on the phone also and pushed that vision onto the desktop users with 8. Major fuckup in their leadership with that flub and Unity just looking at the screenshots made me decide not to try linux for years after. I now have cinnamon mint and I don't even use win10 anymore on my dual boot. Mint is so good and so fast.
So far in the last decade or so, every KDE installation I've seen over various hardware devices and various software versions, from SuSE to Kubuntu had severe display problems. This starts with rounded borders of windows having messed up backgrounds and goes on to actual crashes.
Has this been fixed now?
"So far in the last decade or so, every KDE installation I've seen over various hardware devices and various software versions, from SuSE to Kubuntu had severe display problems."
Well all I can say is I've been using SUSE and then OpenSUSE since ~~1995 - it's on all my regular laptops/desktops and I've never had these sort of problems. What can I say ? Have you researched it or reported it ? . Anyone with experience of KDE care to comment ?
I have just bought ( for general use ) a new cheap laptop which came with Kubuntu (17.04) pre-loaded and I've not had any problems with that either ( other than this dreadful trend to flat UI with kindergarten icons)
vanilla KDE on fedora since F18 for work. Indexing gets shot in the head when I set it up and other than the plasma "taskbar" occasionally not hiding correctly, and the fact that dnf doesn't do categories causing apper to complain, I've had no issues with kde. Mind you it wasn't till 4.8 or so that KDE 4 was really usable in my view. My home gentoo desktop run blackbox while kde was sorting its act out.
Since the firewall is now bsd instead of slack, and I've not needed any gui there it doesn't have one.
KDE has worked for me since it got to Slackware (Slack 3.9, KDE 1.1, 1999). It's not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but it gets the job done without getting in the way, or indeed without me even noticing it day to day. Can't ask for much more than that in a GUI.
Alistair, why do you think you need to run a GUI with Slackware? I use BSD on firewalls for larger installations, but I use Slack for smaller offices when the desktops are also Slack (makes for a smaller learning curve for whoever is doing maintenance). No GUI needed. In fact, most of my firewalls are headless beyond an ASCII terminal. No need for the overhead of a graphics subsystem ...
I've been using the Kubuntu LTS versions since Windows XP went out of support, and had no problems with it, apart from very occasionally it forgets my dual monitor layout and reverts back to cloning the display to both screens. That could be a hardware problem though, one of the monitors is old and a bit temperamental. Never had any problems of the nature that you described.
Another SuSE user here who is a little puzzled. I've been using SuSE since I switched from RedHat at the end of the 1990s and have used KDE on most of these. Don't believe I have ever seen this fault on any version of KDE. Even the time I flirted with TDE on Mint this didn't happen. I'm using KDE3 on openSUSE Leap 42.2 at this present moment and haven't noticed any messed up backgrounds or crashes. Not even on my ancient openSUSE 11.4 netbook.
You sound like you got very unlucky.
Well would you really want to depend on GNOME developers' GTK not becoming more stupid in the future (useful features removed, deeper integration with systemd)?
Heresay and rumour. I'm far more concerned over Gnomes increasing NIH syndrome - Not getting involved with Ubuntu and KDE in Notifications discussions, then complaining they weren't consulted on the solution, cobbling together Flatpacks when news of Snaps reached them....
Ubuntus decision to go it's own way with Mir and further subdividing it's resources when it already had a new desktop to create.
I honestly think Gnome and Ubuntu deserve eachother.
I'm running Xubuntu 17.04 on an old HP Mini 2.10 so I can have something to do in the car while waiting for the daughters to finish surfing club/netball club etc when its not worth driving home and back again and I must say so far I'm impressed with it. Its only got a gig of ram but there's more than enough free to do some serious coding!
Do any come with a choice of systemd or not ?
Unfortunately, the various big distros either make it as tricky as possible or simply don't provide for it. It gets worse as some packages rely implicitly on systemd being there. The only distros that come to mind right now would something like Slackware, Devuan or Gentoo.
Poeterring's shitware just seems to get everywhere.
I keep Linux Mint MATE going and updated even though I've happily settled on Debian Stretch MATE now. MATE 1.18.0 in Mint 18.3 has managed to introduce some problems into itself, both cosmetic artefacts and functional shortfalls. Because of the general flexibility, open nature and multi-layer nature of Linux and MATE, I've been able to work around these but it was annoying for a while.
I'll have a look at this latest version of MATE as implemented by Ubuntu to see how it behaves and if it offers any advantages over the Mint implementation. After all, the only cost is some time on a wet weekend and the occasional blood pressure spike when I see how they've changed my favourite feature or theme.
It's a cloudy afternoon so I thought I'd try it. What follows is my personal opinion.
The panel style/layout changes that can be chosen from MATE Tweak are 'interesting' but only to people who pine for Unity or some Mac lookalike. If you're used to standard MATE then they will be of no interest at all to you. Note that you can save the panel style/layout as a named custom setting but this 'saving' does not include the exact contents location and layout and so you will mess up any existing icon layout if you select something different and then try to go back to a saved setting. This is a one-off decision that you should make at an early stage.
MATE 1.18.0 here has exactly the same cosmetic 'glitch' and functionality shortfalls that I've seen in the Linux Mint version.
It has some new themes - woohoo.
I'll wait for the LTS in 18.04 then see if they've fixed the MATE problems.
@Allonymous Coward
We face the real prospect of it not being the Year Of The Desktop again for any platform/system/kernel/ecosystem. I've spent a few days working with colleagues advising people coming into various educational centres. Tablets/phones/phablets being used by just about everyone now to find info &c.
I agree that just about any DE on top of just about any maintained distro on hardware that is not totally bleeding edge/released last week will work and work well.
I have been saying in threads lately that Linux would end up looking all flat and Windows / OSx / Android Material like. Then I saw the kubuntu screenshot. There it is. How long before all Linux distributions look like this and then people will be saying flat is the new bumpy or similar?
Last time I tried kubuntu I just hated it. Had been a KDE fan years ago but it's all the new terrible not-quite-as-nice-as-Windows-3-running-on-EGA flat look that all the idiots in charge of software design departments seem to like these days.
Incidentally, they're trying to ruin iOS even further, I'm awaiting the screaming when 11 finally gets released.
Why is it that whilst the new Mate & Budgie have attractive desktops, the older, (better, solid & much loved) distros look like they fell out of a kids bag on the way to kindergarten ? They are just as capable of displaying nice (advertising) backgrounds as the other two !
I want my security updates from Canonical, not filtered through another distribution. But Unity sucks. XFCE is the most direct and efficient desktop I've found. This page is the easiest way I've found to get real Ubuntu and XFCE at the same time.
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/alternative
I first tried Ubuntu 7 but only loaded and used it seriously with the release of Ubuntu 10.04. I wanted a classic desktop similar to XP. The GNOME desktop did the trick.
I abandoned Ubuntu when they went away from the classic desktop layout and went for flying side panels etc. It didn't take long to find Linux Mint with the Mate desktop. That now meets my needs.
My question is for those like me who have left Ubuntu; why go back?
budgie desktop, but the flavour of ubuntu that I now favour is Debian.
I'm tired of all the various not quite joined up bits I run into on ubuntu, and there is uncertainty on the desktop given the demise of unity. Stretch is pretty up to date, at least for now (and there's always sid for development). Gnome on debian is surprisingly quick. My multi-desktop with an ati grahpics card has never been more stable. I have a gnome desktop, which can be duplicated (in terms of look and feel) on pretty much every distribution.
So I'm finding I use centos for supportable non-bleeding edge applications, and debian for development, and everything I do has never worked better.
So for me it's Gnome first (as a desktop), and whatever platform suits the application. The ubiquity of gnome helps when it comes to moving platform.
Most every distro defaults to gnome these days, and despite it's reputation it's not a bad choice.
...when they release a Linux desktop with some usable graphics software [and, no, The Gimp isn't within a million miles of being a 'Photoshop competitor']
...and when one of the Linux file managers approaches a similar distance of being as useful as OSX's Finder.
And I say that as someone who thinks OSX Finder is mediocre in the extreme and who would run Linux full-time at the drop of a hat, if I could get some serious [graphic design] work done with it.
But, in its infinite wisdom, the Linux community has decided that; unending internecine warfare over shite that no-one outside of a few geeks cares a jot about [SystemD, GTK, etc] and providing "choice" in the form of 57 crap versions of any application [in order to massage 57 egos] rather than cooperating together to produce one or two quality applications —is the way to win converts.
"would run Linux full-time at the drop of a hat, if I could get some serious [graphic design] work done with it"
I use Inkscape, GIMP, and Scribus now instead of CC, "get some serious [graphic design] work done", and get paid for it. Have had no downtime or issues once learning my way around all the apps. I'm still in Win7, but all 3 apps are available in Linux.
Actually prefer the 3 to CC, especially Scribus, which is a lot better at PDF form creation than InD was.
Not sure what you're doing that you consider GIMP a non-worthwhile Photoshop alternative... then again, I'm mainly in the vector art business in AI & Inkscape. GIMP still does exactly what I need it to do, same as PS before it. No complaints.
To be honest, Ubuntu 17.10 this time round is great, it's not 'all' complete yet, but it's quick and smooth, I reinstalled it this morning and I had my PC up and running, and configured, within an hour, congratulations team UBUNTU, I'm coming back from Mint, not that Mint is not so good, it's just different and there's a 'gentler' feel to Ubuntu, use it, take it, install it !!!!
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