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cimoreneThe great thing about Linux is that you can pick and choose and customize anything you want to, as long as you're willing to work at it. The problem is, sometimes the cost-benefit analysis doesn't work out once you know enough to understand how much work would be required. Another problem is that once you get attached to (and adapted to) a feature, it's sometimes a really big deal when it's taken away.
This has led, at least for me, to a kind of Goldilocks experience in the world of Linux, trying out different desktops, giving them time to start to sink in, and each time there's something wrong - sometimes an actual bug, sometimes just a feature from another desktop environment that I can't duplicate.
When Gnome 3 was first introduced I was fascinated by a lot of things about it. There were a lot of things that I liked, but at the end of the 11.04 cycle my install was crashing way too frequently, even after a clean install, so I decided to give Unity another go as the blogs were saying it had become much more stable since Natty, when Compiz was essentially non-functional on my machine.
I installed Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. It was still ugly, the top bar was still black, but it was possible to render the top panel transparent and the launcher now respected the system icon theme, which, yes, was non-negotiable for me. As far as I remember, it contained no major bugs, but I wanted to upgrade when Quantal came out because the new features sounded cool.
And then the problems began.
Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzel: VLC was broken by an update shortly after install and it never worked again. The bug was reported at various spots online, so it was a common one, but it was never fixed. I tried several other media players and all were way less convient for screencapping. I got tired of it and had been increasingly fed up with Ubuntu's ongoing campaign to remove features from the install in order to 'streamline' everything so it can be identical to the eventual user experience on the future phone OS.
At this point 13.04 was not yet out, so to get a working VLC I had to go backwards. I installed Kubuntu 12.04. I was happy with the new KDE for the most part, but when I installed Caffeine - a popular applet that automatically keeps the monitor from going to sleep whenever a media player is open or a flash video is playing - it failed to work. It installed all right; it just wouldn't launch. I crawled all over the internet, but there was no replacement app for KDE. Various users more leet than me had put various hacks in place to replace Caffeine, but this was a disappointing lack.
I upgraded to Kubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail thinking it might fix that problem, but it didn't. I was quite happy with KDE otherwise - its customizability suited what I wanted almost exactly.1 There's also an icon-only task manager - another of my OS requirements - similar to Dockbar X that can be installed to the main panel straight from the repositories. The functionality, though, is less robust than in Dockbar X, Unity launcher, or Cairo/AWN.
The main problem with 13.04, though, was Peer Guardian Linux. It had started crashing every time I booted the computer, requiring a manual restart. This only took thirty seconds or so, but it was quite irritating, especially since Google seemed to indicate it was a years-old bug that had been gotten rid of several cycles ago. I even reinstalled the same OS from scratch just in case, but the problem remained.
So I downloaded an image of PCLinuxOS on a whim, on the basis of a really positive review. Now, the reviewer was right, it DID work right out of the box. The problem was that I had completely failed to notice in my airheaded rush that it was not an Ubuntu-based system, and when I decided to install it to a smaller partition to play around with in the long-term, I didn't know that that would be a problem. Not knowing what the hell I was doing, or that there was anything I needed to check out first, I accidentally destroyed my previous grub entries in the install process and was unable to boot to my previous KDE install. I wasn't even able to back up my bookmarks and I wasn't able to recover them from the other OS or the liveCD I then tried. My need to have my bookmarks back was growing urgent and I didn't have the time to teach myself to install Opera manually in PCLinuxOS just to get at them, but the native format can't be read by other browsers. I tried to install Opera, then open it for the purpose of exporting the files, on the liveCD, but that didn't work either, so I had to install a new OS to the harddrive anyway to get my bookmarks. Therefore I decided to make it one that did not so far as I know suffer from any major problems, hence my choosing Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.
I did that on... Tuesday I think. Yesterday afternoon I finally had (almost) everything set up to my liking.
By default Nautilus, the filebrowser, has lost tons of functionality. Not only is the split pane button missing, a pretty trivial feature but one I use a lot, several way more important things are missing, like ANY ACCESS WHATSOEVER TO THE TOOLBAR OR MENU ITEMS, or the ability to in any way alter the display in the sidebar. Like, I couldn't bookmark my own folders. There's a fix for that, though. I installed a patch found on Webupd8.
With Unity Tweak Tool alone you can change the icons and gtk theme as well as the panel, launcher, and desktop behavior. If you want to set the greeter screen to display your own wallpaper, you need Ubuntu Tweak Tool. And for a brand-new bug in 13.04 that prevented the panel from becoming all the way transparent (when you tap it down to 0, it's filled with a solid shade of the desktop background color), you have to actually install Compiz Config Settings Manager and set the background color opacity to 0 using the slider in the Unity plugin.
There's also a regionalization bug in the clock, where it displays the date in the official language of the country you're in. This is controlled by the regionalization setting, so I had to choose whether it was going to display time, money, etc in the Finnish format (i.e. Day Month Year, 24-hour time, commas for decimals) or in English. To get English I had to set it to use the settings from an English-speaking country.
There used to be a panel applet for Google calendars that just displayed scheduled events, but it's broken in this version. It wasn't capable of editing or of opening the calendar for editing though, so it's inferior to KDE there. I think it was also possible to open the calendar (though not to view Google calendar events) from the panel clock in gnome shell last time I used it. And there used to be a workaround for Unity that involved a Mozilla Thunderbird hack, so I guess I'll see if I can get that working soon.
On the plus side, you can now control your status in multiple messaging apps and also open the apps from the messaging menu, and control Quod Libet (my media player of choice, but not a very popular one) from the volume applet.
Caffeine works, though! As does VLC! I haven't gotten around to installing PGL yet. If it doesn't work, I want a whole weekend in front of me to recover in.
I am still contemplating whether to install a gnome-shell-based system alongside this one to try it out again - maybe Pear Linux, which is reputed to work well out of box and, more importantly, comes already jiggered not to display the 'Activities' text in the panel, which always pissed me off. See, in gnome shell, when you get a new chat message notification, you can click in the notification bubble and type your response right in it, without bringing up the chat window. I really do miss that, even though I haven't had the feature since Precise came along.
1. The behavior of the KDE system tray was especially nice, with the intuitive and easily-customizable auto-hiding function. I also loved the integration of the actual full Kontakt program with the panel clock and also with Google calendar - it meant I could open and edit my calendar with a click and see the changes on my phone. KDE is also truly dedicated to customizability, unlike the other 'heavyweight' new user-friendly desktops. Unity and Gnome go out of their way to prevent the end user making simple changes to appearance and are making theme developors' work hard by making constant incremental releases that are incompatible with the last one. The microflora in the world of gnome theming, even shortly after the advent of Unity and Gnome 3, used to be numerous, a vibrant ecosystem. Now there are a few strong (highly similar) themes that everybody seems to know for recent GTK apps, and those, too, will be rendered obsolete when Unity eventually makes the planned switch to QT. The changes are actually founded on standardizing theming and ultimately making it easier - GTK 3.6, for example, now uses CSS. But the intermediate upheaval has definitely had a slimming effect on the volunteer herd, though.
This has led, at least for me, to a kind of Goldilocks experience in the world of Linux, trying out different desktops, giving them time to start to sink in, and each time there's something wrong - sometimes an actual bug, sometimes just a feature from another desktop environment that I can't duplicate.
When Gnome 3 was first introduced I was fascinated by a lot of things about it. There were a lot of things that I liked, but at the end of the 11.04 cycle my install was crashing way too frequently, even after a clean install, so I decided to give Unity another go as the blogs were saying it had become much more stable since Natty, when Compiz was essentially non-functional on my machine.
I installed Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. It was still ugly, the top bar was still black, but it was possible to render the top panel transparent and the launcher now respected the system icon theme, which, yes, was non-negotiable for me. As far as I remember, it contained no major bugs, but I wanted to upgrade when Quantal came out because the new features sounded cool.
And then the problems began.
Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzel: VLC was broken by an update shortly after install and it never worked again. The bug was reported at various spots online, so it was a common one, but it was never fixed. I tried several other media players and all were way less convient for screencapping. I got tired of it and had been increasingly fed up with Ubuntu's ongoing campaign to remove features from the install in order to 'streamline' everything so it can be identical to the eventual user experience on the future phone OS.
At this point 13.04 was not yet out, so to get a working VLC I had to go backwards. I installed Kubuntu 12.04. I was happy with the new KDE for the most part, but when I installed Caffeine - a popular applet that automatically keeps the monitor from going to sleep whenever a media player is open or a flash video is playing - it failed to work. It installed all right; it just wouldn't launch. I crawled all over the internet, but there was no replacement app for KDE. Various users more leet than me had put various hacks in place to replace Caffeine, but this was a disappointing lack.
I upgraded to Kubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail thinking it might fix that problem, but it didn't. I was quite happy with KDE otherwise - its customizability suited what I wanted almost exactly.1 There's also an icon-only task manager - another of my OS requirements - similar to Dockbar X that can be installed to the main panel straight from the repositories. The functionality, though, is less robust than in Dockbar X, Unity launcher, or Cairo/AWN.
The main problem with 13.04, though, was Peer Guardian Linux. It had started crashing every time I booted the computer, requiring a manual restart. This only took thirty seconds or so, but it was quite irritating, especially since Google seemed to indicate it was a years-old bug that had been gotten rid of several cycles ago. I even reinstalled the same OS from scratch just in case, but the problem remained.
So I downloaded an image of PCLinuxOS on a whim, on the basis of a really positive review. Now, the reviewer was right, it DID work right out of the box. The problem was that I had completely failed to notice in my airheaded rush that it was not an Ubuntu-based system, and when I decided to install it to a smaller partition to play around with in the long-term, I didn't know that that would be a problem. Not knowing what the hell I was doing, or that there was anything I needed to check out first, I accidentally destroyed my previous grub entries in the install process and was unable to boot to my previous KDE install. I wasn't even able to back up my bookmarks and I wasn't able to recover them from the other OS or the liveCD I then tried. My need to have my bookmarks back was growing urgent and I didn't have the time to teach myself to install Opera manually in PCLinuxOS just to get at them, but the native format can't be read by other browsers. I tried to install Opera, then open it for the purpose of exporting the files, on the liveCD, but that didn't work either, so I had to install a new OS to the harddrive anyway to get my bookmarks. Therefore I decided to make it one that did not so far as I know suffer from any major problems, hence my choosing Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.
I did that on... Tuesday I think. Yesterday afternoon I finally had (almost) everything set up to my liking.
By default Nautilus, the filebrowser, has lost tons of functionality. Not only is the split pane button missing, a pretty trivial feature but one I use a lot, several way more important things are missing, like ANY ACCESS WHATSOEVER TO THE TOOLBAR OR MENU ITEMS, or the ability to in any way alter the display in the sidebar. Like, I couldn't bookmark my own folders. There's a fix for that, though. I installed a patch found on Webupd8.
With Unity Tweak Tool alone you can change the icons and gtk theme as well as the panel, launcher, and desktop behavior. If you want to set the greeter screen to display your own wallpaper, you need Ubuntu Tweak Tool. And for a brand-new bug in 13.04 that prevented the panel from becoming all the way transparent (when you tap it down to 0, it's filled with a solid shade of the desktop background color), you have to actually install Compiz Config Settings Manager and set the background color opacity to 0 using the slider in the Unity plugin.
There's also a regionalization bug in the clock, where it displays the date in the official language of the country you're in. This is controlled by the regionalization setting, so I had to choose whether it was going to display time, money, etc in the Finnish format (i.e. Day Month Year, 24-hour time, commas for decimals) or in English. To get English I had to set it to use the settings from an English-speaking country.
There used to be a panel applet for Google calendars that just displayed scheduled events, but it's broken in this version. It wasn't capable of editing or of opening the calendar for editing though, so it's inferior to KDE there. I think it was also possible to open the calendar (though not to view Google calendar events) from the panel clock in gnome shell last time I used it. And there used to be a workaround for Unity that involved a Mozilla Thunderbird hack, so I guess I'll see if I can get that working soon.
On the plus side, you can now control your status in multiple messaging apps and also open the apps from the messaging menu, and control Quod Libet (my media player of choice, but not a very popular one) from the volume applet.
Caffeine works, though! As does VLC! I haven't gotten around to installing PGL yet. If it doesn't work, I want a whole weekend in front of me to recover in.
I am still contemplating whether to install a gnome-shell-based system alongside this one to try it out again - maybe Pear Linux, which is reputed to work well out of box and, more importantly, comes already jiggered not to display the 'Activities' text in the panel, which always pissed me off. See, in gnome shell, when you get a new chat message notification, you can click in the notification bubble and type your response right in it, without bringing up the chat window. I really do miss that, even though I haven't had the feature since Precise came along.
1. The behavior of the KDE system tray was especially nice, with the intuitive and easily-customizable auto-hiding function. I also loved the integration of the actual full Kontakt program with the panel clock and also with Google calendar - it meant I could open and edit my calendar with a click and see the changes on my phone. KDE is also truly dedicated to customizability, unlike the other 'heavyweight' new user-friendly desktops. Unity and Gnome go out of their way to prevent the end user making simple changes to appearance and are making theme developors' work hard by making constant incremental releases that are incompatible with the last one. The microflora in the world of gnome theming, even shortly after the advent of Unity and Gnome 3, used to be numerous, a vibrant ecosystem. Now there are a few strong (highly similar) themes that everybody seems to know for recent GTK apps, and those, too, will be rendered obsolete when Unity eventually makes the planned switch to QT. The changes are actually founded on standardizing theming and ultimately making it easier - GTK 3.6, for example, now uses CSS. But the intermediate upheaval has definitely had a slimming effect on the volunteer herd, though.
(no subject)
Date: 9 Sep 2013 11:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Sep 2013 06:17 am (UTC)Currently using Debian/KDE, and have finally gotten it how I like it.
(no subject)
Date: 10 Sep 2013 03:47 pm (UTC)And does Peer Guardian work?
... Although I guess I still am not quite ready to go back to KDE. Caffeine gets too much weight for me cause I need to be free to watch hours of tv or movie without touching the mouse or keyboard while I knit, but without individually fiddling with settings each time. Caffeine is just so useful.
(no subject)
Date: 10 Sep 2013 04:01 pm (UTC)I haven't used Peer Guardian, but I assume it'd work if it works on Ubuntu.
Debian has GNOME and Xfce and all the other desktop environments, so it doesn't have to be KDE, I just like KDE better because (in its current form) it's less tabletty and I don't want my laptop to act like a tablet.
(no subject)
Date: 10 Sep 2013 04:24 pm (UTC)However, maybe I'll try Debian out when I migrate back to Gnome or KDE, anyway. I really liked the install process in PCLinuxOS way better, which has me wistful for something not Ubuntu-based.