Gnome replaces Unity

Paul Smith paul at mad-scientist.net
Sat Oct 14 18:20:43 UTC 2017


On Sat, 2017-10-14 at 17:44 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Oct 2017 16:22:24 +0100, R Kimber wrote:
> > would people advise moving back from Ubuntu-mate to the main
> > Gnome-based distribution?
> 
> Hi,
> 
> don't do it!
> Don't do it!
> Don't do it!
> Don't do it!
> 
> After using both Live-DVDs several times, the Ubuntu Mate 16.10 x86_64
> as well as the Tails 3.1 x86_64, I strongly recommend against
> using GNOME.

Disagree.  I've been using GNU/Linux since 1993, and X for years before
that.  I've used so many window managers: TWM, CDE, FVWM for a long time
(I was a developer on FVWM2 for a while), GNOME 1, GNOME 2, Unity, GNOME
3.  I've tried even more for a few weeks here and there.  They all have
good points and bad points.

Unity was a bad direction right from the start.  I couldn't use it for
long before I had to dump it completely.

GNOME 3 is fine; it's currently the best of the available crop of
"standard" window managers (as opposed to specialized options like
tiling WMs or similar).  I use Tweak Tool to set things like sloppy
focus mode and make CAPSLOCK into a CTRL key, and I add a few extensions
(Frippery Panel Favourites and system-monitor mainly), and that's it.

Yes there are annoying things about GNOME 3 but they are easily
solvable: Tweak Tool should be a standard part of the configuration
rather than a separate tool.  There is a wretched amount of whitespace
taken up by the title bars in the default theme due to the ridiculous
border size settings (but this can be fixed with a small CSS override in
your home directory, or using a different theme).

It's still better than Unity, and as good as or better than GNOME 2.

I'm looking forward to having GNOME be the default Ubuntu desktop (like
it was back when I started using Ubuntu: that's why I switched from
Debian to Ubuntu, to get timely GNOME-based releases!)  I just hope they
don't do too much tweaking and just leave it the way it should be.  The
Ubuntu GNOME folks have been doing a great job.


The above is all, obviously, MHO.  Try them for yourself, it's easy to
do with VMs etc.  I just can't let all this hate for GNOME 3 to go
unchallenged: there are real users out there, who are not involved with
GNOME 3 development, who think it's the best option.




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