Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste The "Lunar Lobster" release of Ubuntu has welcomed two new official remixes, as well as the first updated Ubuntu Kylin in a year or so. The 38th release of Ubuntu debuted late last month, and while this is an interim release which goes end-of-life next January, there are some significant changes to make it notable. The most …
Although as screens get ever wider, having a vertical menu bar on the left or right would increase the amount of vertical space :-)
Too many programs and especially web pages, have large banner bars and menu bars forcing us to scroll to see stuff while there are acres of spae "wasted" down the sides.
Google news recently re-did their home page. With 80 pixels of blank dead space on the left side. No reason for that. It never contains anything but dead space.
I look at that and wonder - which of several negative conclusions about Google am I supposed to imagine?
I can only assume the Hamburger Menu thing is a product of very young engineers entering the workplace having spent their formative years using phones instead of computers. What I wish they understood was that the Hamburger Menu is not in fact the pinnacle of user interface design, but a lousy compromise introduced because phone manufacturers were too cheap to put actual menu buttons on their phones like they did until about a decade ago.
To be fair it works reasonably well for some types of software - but I cringe when I see it crowbarred inappropriately into software like GEdit or GtkWave.
On a phone it might even make sense if the icon is at the bottom right of the screen (or bottom left if you're left-handed). For desktops it's a terrible idea - the icon is usually at the right of the window so there's no horizontal space for it and many screens are 16:9 so vertical space is limited too. It's like someone at the Guild of UXers had a bet on choosing the worst way of doing things and put it in everybody's desktop software.
Unfortunately, the inept hamburger is more a limitation of the current Gtk toolkit and poor design decisions made in the troubled "improvement" from Gtk+2 to Gtk4. The ability to actually program with toolbars, icons and menus was removed in Gtk+3 in favor of buildable xml type lists (which brought with it the icon spacing nighmare and everything taking 2X the space it did in Gtk+2).
Gtk4 has gotten worse, with much of its look and feel provided in the now coupled libadwaita which has all the visual appeal of "milk toast". The hamburger is the result of dumbing down the toolkit in a frenzied race to make it a one-size-fits-all UI that would run on a desktop, tablet or hand-held. What you see now is the result. Not all barbs are reserved for Gtk, Qt isn't free from compromise decisions and KDE auto-sizing hell is nearly as bad.
Unfortunately, what you get now is the lowest-featured, plainest looking, common-denominator of a CSS styled desktop (which comes served with a hamburger).
[Author here]
> Can anybody recommend a distro which comes with a nice Xfce theme and the software is written with Xfce in mind?
100% agree. Xfce is the only WM that isn't wasting time and effort on useless bling these days. Including LXQt IMHO.
Don't mind systemd? Want max compatibility?
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/13/zinc_ubuntu_remix/
Don't want systemd either?
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/31/mx_linux_212/
Or FreeBSD. Choose your own desktop.
pkg install xfce4
job done[*]
*, well, there may be a few{**] prior steps to getting a working desktop and drivers for more esoteric hardware is still a bit behind the curve compared to Linux.
** OK, OK, a lot of prior steps, not for beginners :-)
"...and the software is written with Xfce in mind"
That is going to be the tricky bit.
The distros others have posted will give ideas as to lighter applications but the inexorable march of time / turn of the wheel will mean more and more software will be written against huge widget libraries. Those libraries will do all the wayland / client side decorations stuff.
I'm using Seamonkey and OpenOffice(*) on an old single core M series Thinkpad with a lovely keyboard and crisp large screen. Just for typing stuff. Seamonkey has issues with a few modern sites and the legacy ublock origin is very advisable.
Best of luck.
(*) Yes, I know, don't reply about how I really should be using LibreOffice. On a dual core upwards machine and for new installs I would always recommend whatever version of LibreOffice is provided by the distro.
Does the desktop installer support RAID yet?
You know like the old "alternate" installer used to until they dropped it a few years back, or the server version does?
Yes, you can install server on RAID and then pull in the desktop, etc, but that is a significant increase in effort if you just wanted to have more size or reliability in your storage, and the server version has other stuff that you don't need/want if running a desktop.
Ubuntu installer has been off the rails and out in the weeds for years now. Starting with marginalizing and then outright dropping the alternate/server version.
I'm no great fan of Red Hat these days, but I do still appreciate the 'anaconda' underpinnings of the installer, and more importantly for my purposes: the ability to automate the install and script additional actions during post-install before final reboot. Aka "Kickstart".
Debian's "pre-seed" seems fine, and I need to spend more time with automated installs to get a better handle on the possibilities. But so far it seems a bit short of where Kickstart has got to.
Earlier Ubuntu seemed to be embracing "Kickstart" -style auto-install, but that has apparently gone by the wayside too.
I realize that the graphical interactive installer is what scores points in OS reviews, so developers tend to focus on making it slick and pretty. Seems like the real power -- automated and scripted installs -- tends to get neglected.
The ubuntu auto-installer for the server edition (and I'm given to believe it actually _does_ also work for the desktop edition, they just don't tell anyone) has, as of 22.04 at least, the best ease of use vs feature set I have ever encountered.
It's basically a big YAML file parsed by subiquity and a variation on cloud-init but it also copies itself into memory at install time and is re-read at several steps through the process, so you can use the "early-commands" and "late-commands" sections to modify it by just running bash code in the installer env and then injecting the output back into the file with sed or whatever. It's really slick, and I wish they'd lean more heavily on it in their documentation because it's actually capable of a ton of things they've not made at all clear.
I ended up using the afore-mentioned "early-commands" a few months back to stick some interactive user stuff into the installer that's not an option in their standard installer, and then automate all the rest of it that the users don't need to care about.
I suspect we've ended up where we are out of the growing trend for "hiding anything that 90% of people don't want to see", which then devolves into "remove anything that 90% of people don't use" and things get taken out not because they're not useful, but because no one uses them because they don't know they're even there.
"early-commands" and "late-commands" sections sounds a bit like %pre and %post sections in Kickstart. Maybe Ubuntu has come full circle now?
Though I'm not particularly enamored of cloud-init, hopefully its influence is minor.
Seems like the incarnation of Ubuntu installer might be worth a look, anyway, at least for as long as it lasts this time. Thanks for the note....
> things get taken out not because they're not useful, but because no one uses them because they don't know they're even there.
I suspect there's a lot of accuracy in that analysis.
I also think the cycle of evolve, devolve, remove, repeat is driving some people off. That is, when you've just got your infrastructure dialed in the way you want it, and the devs yank away some feature you rely on, or toss it aside and stop supporting it in the next release, it tends to diminish your enthusiasm for upgrading and using the thing.
Not entirely sure there's enough user overlap: manual installation without the desktop installer* isn't that difficult for the sort of people who are configuring RAID. For instance, I like ZFS, and I like Ubuntu, but I want a lot more flexibility in my set up than a checkbox "use ZFS" on the installer.
*the other option is to edit the script that the installer users to meet your own requirements, this seems to work quite well.
My only significant gripe with MX Linux is the installer. It doesn’t support RAID or LVM. And, strangely, it’s a compiled binary. So don’t think you’ll do some minor adjustments on the fly!
Luckily, there are ways to placate the beast, and I learned more than I ever wanted about DevFS in the process.
Still not enough for me to go to another distro, though! I’ve already pulled the installer’s code from the repo to take a look at some direly needed improvements.
How a given DE looks out of the box is not a big concern of mine. I am not going to leave it like that, so while it would be nice to reduce the configuration burden on me by having sensible defaults, the main concern is still whether I can use the given UI options to get the UI into a configuration I like at all (without having to open up a text editor). Only KDE has gotten me close to that point.
I don't care about "bling," and I have all that stuff turned off. I like my UI rather plain, but in a very specific way. I am one of those who consider Windows 2k to be pretty much the ideal UI, and as such it is my basic blueprint when configuring a new Linux install. It's not about eye candy, but about the way information and UI elements are laid out and positioned. One very topical example would be a complete lack of hamburger menus. The horizontal menu bar has yet to be bested in terms of usability and information scent, and I insist upon it. The hamburger is not good enough, and neither is the Microsoftian Ribbon.
KDE gets me closer to being able to achieve my desired setup without opening a text editor than any other DE I tried. There are no transparency effects, wobbly windows, or any other "wacky" effects.
In the world of DEs, to me, there are two: KDE, and everything else. Windows is included in the latter.
[Author here]
> I like my UI rather plain, but in a very specific way. I am one of those who consider Windows 2k to be pretty much the ideal UI, and as such it is my basic blueprint when configuring a new Linux install.
I agree.
But you should try Xfce. It does this, in less disk and less RAM than KDE, it has less bling and is more stable. And it has more of the important customisations and less cosmetic junk.
As even a KDE dev found, although he missed more points than a blind man at a hedgehog-judging competition:
https://blog.nicco.love/kde-dev-tries-xfce/
[Author here]
> Potato, Potato.
[?]
Were you getting at the UK-versus-US to-MAR-to/to-MAY-to thing? Because we both say "potato" the same.
But that's an aside. This is the meat:
> KDE is a beautiful,
In my very humble opinion it is the ugliest mainstream desktop and has been since KDE 2.0, 23 years ago. (FWIW I wrote an article on how to build and install KDE 2.0 on Red Hat Linux at that time. I was already using it then.)
KDE 1.x was fine. Plain, unappealing, but it worked and did more than any other FOSS desktop.
KDE 2.x was a bloated mess and ugly too. Garish themes, far too complex. Corel LinuxOS and later Xandros tamed it and made it work.
KDE 3.x was just a huge pile of everyone adding their favourite features that *nobody* made work well.
The *only* company that ever made it look good was Red Hat, before RHEL or Fedora, in RHL 7/8/9 with its Bluecurve theme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluecurve
KDE 4 took that and destroyed what little usability it had left with ridiculous "widgets" and "plasmoids" and more wastes of time copied from, of all bloody things, Windows Vista.
That is of course why Trinity happened.
KDE 5 also leaps aboard the nearest passing fashion train by adopting a flat theme. That at least tamed the fugly (not just ugly but "effing" + ugly) themes, taking it from "oh my gods I would rather use braille than look at this" to "my eyes hurt".
It is *horrible* and it's got worse over the last 25 years.
GNOME is poorly functional, poorly implemented, & wastes screen space, but the _graphic design_ is immaculate, the best in the industry.
> configurable desktop
Only if you don't know how to use a Windows-95-stylke desktop. It is terrible at vertical taskbars, poor at window controls, poor at useful innovative features.
I want a vertical panel with horizontal contents. Instead I get a GIANT START BUTTON whose size I can't control.
I want tabbed title bars, like BeOS. Or better still, ones on the side, like wm2 and dwm. I do not want anything rendered as HTML outside my web browsers. I want proper desktop folders and zero plasmoids or widgets. I want to completely disable Javascript everywhere and have my desktop 100% functional.
If I must have a horizontal taskbar, I want it to span both screens. KDE up to 4 did that.
KDE 5 removed it. Too hard to implement.
What do we get instead? A floating panel taskbar. FFS.
IT IS YOUR *JOB* PEOPLE. IT WAS ALREADY THERE. DO NOT REMOVE USEFUL FUNCTIONALITY AND ADD USELESS CHROME.
(P.S. Anyone who wants to start arguing about "well actually plasma is the desktop" can die in a fire right along with the "actually it is gnu + linux" folks.)
I want seamless integration with Gtk 1, 2, 3, 4, EFL, FLTK and every other toolkit and I don't want to know what a toolkit is. Make it all look the same or die in a fire.
It is not configurable unless you want the same config as some KDE dev who doesn't know how to use Windows properly.
For a desktop that is a ripoff of Windows 98 "Active Desktop" -- the worst desktop version ever -- this is inexcusable.
> with a great selection of default apps.
They are a messy inconsistent collection of half implemented nonsense. Some have version numbers, some have release dates. Some have two -- *TWO** -- help/about panels, *neither* with a version number. Some have menu bars, some have hamburger menus. Is there a global option to disable that? Of course there isn't.
None are best of breed. All the best of breed Linux apps are Gtk based: Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, Skype, LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is StarOffice. That was German. KDE was originally German too. SUSE is German.
SLE no longer includes KDE. StarOffice did not integrate with KDE. StarOffice originally implemented its own Start menu and file explorer.
These things should tell you something.
Apparently it did not, because what followed were divorces between the desktop and the accessories, and the desktop and the office suite.
> Cinnamon has a collection of Apps that look like a Fisher-Price My First Computer from the 90s.
Wrong. It doesn't have apps at all.
On Ubuntu it uses GNOME apps. That's fair: they are the distro's defaults. It *ought* to use the MATE accessories but the remixes are all unofficial and do not cooperate much. The developer of Ubuntu Cinnamon is so young he is still at school. In full time education, he only has so much time. I cut him some slack on that basis.
On most distros Cinnamon uses distro defaults.
Mint uses their own X-Apps, which are shared by 3 desktops: Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. This is smart.
The X-apps have traditional UIs with menu bars. If someone wants a traditional desktop they probably want that. It is smart. Do other distros learn? They do not.
KDE's devs even fell out with their own office suite team and Calligra has gone its own way. The Gear apps suite has its own different release schedule. This is an indication of the total lack of coherency across the KDE ecosystem.
The existence of Trinity and LXQt (and formerly the Katana fork of KDE 4) also demonstrate and illustrate perfectly this incoherence.
No. I do not merely disagree with every line of your comment, I disagree with every individual noun phrase and every adjective.
KDE and its apps is an ugly, poorly-functional, clunky, incoherent, inconsistent mess, and every version gets worse.
I have not even mentioned the keyboard controls or the accessibility or the poor mismatched functionality between X.org and Wayland. This was the short version.
"Were you getting at the UK-versus-US to-MAR-to/to-MAY-to thing? Because we both say "potato" the same."
I've forwarded your complaints to (Americans) George and Ira Gershwin, authors of the original song.
If I'm reading Wikipedia correctly, at the time the song was written (1934) posh Americans pronounced things in a more British way, and it may be they didn't realise we pronounce potato as we do and assumed it would be pronounced as we pronounce tomato. Maybe our pronunciation has shifted - things from even 50 years ago sound a lot more clipped and posher. ("gels" rather than "girls") Or maybe they're just idly following a pattern set in the first verse with tomato.
Anyway, as I'm sure you know, that line of Let's Call the Whole Thing Off has become idiomatic.
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