Gnome replaces Unity

[Liam Proven]

On 16 October 2017 at 15:39, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I did not necessarily agree with your conclusion, as you said she must
> not be a demanding or intensive user, without defining what that
> meant.  I can assure you she can be most demanding (particularly if it
> is not doing what she wants) and often uses it intensively, but I get
> what you mean.  OK, so am I right in thinking that you agree that for
> a user who just uses basic desktop apps, browser, office etc. that
> Gnome (with ubuntu-dock extension) is operates and looks very similar
> to Unity?  If so then that's fine and we can put our duelling pistols
> away again.

I never wanted a fight!

On the surface, at casual inspection, yes, GNOME Shell and Unity are
similar. When "Xen" considers Mac OS X and Windows to be similar, then
yes, at that level, they're twins.

But significant differences that bother me:

* Virtual desktops.

The virtual desktop mechanism is totally different.

Actually, here I prefer GNOME Shell, with a dynamic number of desktops
access via a toolbar on the right. But it is, to pick an example of
something I _hate_, not possible on a dual-screen machine to have the
dock thing on the left and the virtual-desktop toolbar on the right.
They must be on the same screen, which to me is brain-damaged. No
extension can work around this.

* File manager

GNOME is progressively crippling Nautilus by removing features. I'm
with Jim Byrnes here. On Unity it is easy enough to put Cinnamon's
Nemo in instead.

* Title bars

GNOME has merged title bars, toolbars and menu bars. Menus are
deprecated (!) and the remnant stub is in the top panel.

This is bizarre to me. Desktops aren't phones. That was my primary UI.

* Menu bars

GNOME is getting rid of them; GNOME 3 apps don't have them. Unity put
them in the top panel. As a long-time Mac user, that's fine with me,
although it infuriated many people. In more recent versions it is at
least an option.

* GNOME apps and accessories

The GNOME project is progressively castrating all its apps, removing
features and UI, in the pursuit of extreme simplicity. This drives me
mad. The merged toolbar/titlebar is particularly irritating. I spend
time hunting for where the "do your main function" button is because
it's been moved or hidden.

I have been going through my work machine, identifying GNOME apps that
come bundled, and ripping them out, marking them as "taboo" to prevent
re-installation, and replacing them with Xfce or Maté or Cinnamon
apps.

E.g. Gedit is now crippled.

It's intentional:

https://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2014/01/15/gedit-has-a-new-face/

"This made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad
move." (With apologies to Douglas Adams)

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/06/install-gedit-3-10-ubuntu-16-04-lts

I've switched to Xed instead:

https://www.fossmint.com/xed-text-editor-replacement-of-gedit-and-pluma/

* Panels

Dash-to-Dock makes the G3 launcher thing usable, but it shouldn't need
such a major rework.

But the top panel. G3 users praise this. I use widescreens. Vertical
space is precious. The most precious kind of space on a widescreen. G3
squanders it.

At least in Unity the top panel is well-used -- it contains the menu
bar, it contains multiple status icons and so on, so it's useful. And
when you maximise an app, the titlebar merges with the panel, which
intelligently gets the window-control buttons in it.

The G3 one is almost decorative. It contains a weirdly-named textual
button I must click to show the dock thing. (Why this is called
"Activities" eludes me.) It contains the rump of a castrated menu bar.
It contains an intrusive clock in the middle. And they are trying to
minimise the icons, so there was a random auto-hiding thing at bottom
left and the main options are collapsed into meaninglessly-grouped
submenus.

Most of its space is wasted. It's a horror. I dislike it intensely.

Yes, with extensions, I can restore the icons, separate the merged
menus, merge maximised title bars, etc., but the result is very
fragile.

And yet this is one of the most _praised_ parts of the UI. Bizarre, IMHO.

* The Dock/Launcher/Dashboard

Unity's is quite versatile. It has drives, virtual desktops, folders
as well as app buttons. And those app buttons show status info like
indicator lights for how many windows you have, progress bars for
copies and downloads, etc.

The G3 one is so vestigial, it was only when I read that it shadowed
the icons of active apps that I fiddled with my screen settings and
found this. It's almost invisible.

It's integral but it's so limited it's almost useless.

And that last line is my overall summary of G3.

It makes many things I do needlessly hard, it's poorly customisable
without fragile extensions, and many of the changes seem to be for the
point of change.

Much of its focus is on design, on brand, on a coherent identifiable
appearance.

That is rather against the Linux way, but it's a thing, yes. Unity
made Ubuntu very characteristic and readily identifiable, and I liked
that. Before, in the GNOME 2 days, the only way to ID Ubuntu was the
earth-tone colour scheme, which I liked. Many did not. Now it's all
purple and orange. I don't mind that but I preferred it the way it was
before.

The GNOME 3 devs want it to be instantly recognisable and don't want
people to customise it much. Well, I understand and I sympathise, but
that's not what I want. It doesn't work the way I do, I want to make
it work the way I do, and they won't let me.

Unity isn't very customisable either, it's true, but it worked the way
I do on my Mac, so I was fine with it.

Now I'm on Xfce. It's not as pretty -- G3 is very pretty, I'll give it
that -- and it feels a little clunky, but it works. It's highly
customisable and can be made to look and work very like the way I like
Windows -- with a vertical taskbar. No panel wasting space. Textual
labels for window buttons. All my indicators -- clock, volume,
network, weather, virtual desktops, etc. -- all in one place, taking
no vertical space only cheap plentiful horizontal space. Autohiding
when I need it.

It feels old-fashioned. It's _still_ not as good or as flexible as the
Windows taskbar: e.g. I can't pin apps to it, I need separate
launchers, duplicating functionality and wasting space.

But it works, it's fast, it doesn't need 3D and works fine in VMs or
over remote sessions. It'll do.

GNOME 3 is one of the most resource-intensive desktops there is, and
it does the least with it.

-- 
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