OSDev.org

Griwes wrote:Or makes you just use KDE ;D

I've been using KDE while being a Gentoo user, and actually like the environment very much. But have you ever tried Linux Mint KDE? It crawls. No, really, it is noticeably slower in reacting to user input than any of the Gnome environments - on a C2D E6550 @ 2.3 GHz, I estimated a factor of 2-3. Actually, it made said E6550 feel more sluggish than my T1600 @ 1.6 GHz. I don't know what the reason was, and I don't feel like spending time in finding out.

KDE, DOA.

Solar wrote:Uh yeah, Gnome 3 / Unity... what a can of worms.

Solar wrote:As a Linux user, the thing I hate about my current OS is the inconsistency in user interface. That starts with very simple things on the command line (-h? --help? -v? --version?), touches things like .deb vs. .rpm vs. ./configure && make install, and doesn't end at stuff like the Gnome 3 update ( ). Masses might be able to program, but they sure can't design to save their lives.

For those who didn't follow that particular thread... the Gnome / Ubuntu dudes basically changed everything. Just for example, you no longer have that menu / taskbar in the bottom, you have one in the bottom (holding the app menu) and one at the top (holding the taskbar, plugins, and the logout / power down options). I haven't quite figured out what the rest of the bottom bar is actually for, but on a wide but small screen (like on most laptops), the two-bar design hurts ergonomics massively. And the worst thing is that you just cannot configure the interface. Not even the "favourite" apps in the app menu can be changed in any apparent way.

I usually make do with defaults, because I am frequently switching between machines and can't be bothered to keep configs in sync (or cope with different configs on each machine). But this time I made an exception and switched all my boxes to MATE (somewhat like a Gnome 2 look-and-feel emulation on the Gnome 3 backend).

The worst thing is, virtually everybody is complaining about Gnome 3 / Unity, and the maintainers just shrug and either say "you'll get used to it" or "it will become better, eventually". Makes you want to choke somebody...

i've always just stuck with debian if i'm installing linux on a machine, and now with the unity/gnome 3 crap in ubuntu that's just one more reason to keep doing so. unforunately, debian can't keep using gnome 2 forever. eventually it'll just be too old. my hope is that gnome 3 becomes better by then. (not holding my breath about that one)

actually, i recently installed debian on a very very old (pentium 1! not even MMX) system because i wanted to see how fake86 performed on such a dinosaur, and decided to go with xfce4 on there since it is very lightweight. i've gotta say that after using it, i am really starting to like it. plus it REALLY is quite lightweight it seems, as it's fairly responsive at a meager 166 MHz with only 96 MB of RAM.

i totally recommend it to anybody that is getting frustrated with the amount of bloat in most modern desktop environments.

Solar wrote:

Griwes wrote:Or makes you just use KDE ;D

I've been using KDE while being a Gentoo user, and actually like the environment very much. But have you ever tried Linux Mint KDE? It crawls. No, really, it is noticeably slower in reacting to user input than any of the Gnome environments - on a C2D E6550 @ 2.3 GHz, I estimated a factor of 2-3. Actually, it made said E6550 feel more sluggish than my T1600 @ 1.6 GHz. I don't know what the reason was, and I don't feel like spending time in finding out.

KDE, DOA.

Well, I'm currently using Linux Mint KDE and I can't notice any significant performance difference between Gnome and KDE. But maybe that's only because my PC is only half-year old; that four-core i7 with HT and GT540M can make difference... probably.

Knowing that I dropped to gnome 2 at KDE4's release, yes. It is a hog that relies on sufficient computational slave labour so that it may appear like a well-oiled machine on the outside.

Over here, XGL+Beryl works better despite some 4 years of technological age difference. Not that that setup doesn't come with problems...

GNOME 3 does not even work properly with my NVidia graphics card . I really wish people understood the need to reduce animations or use some library like EFL which does not hog your GPU/CPU. (LONG LIVE IMAGE BASED GRAPHICS, screw vector graphics)

ACcurrent wrote: I really wish people understood the need to reduce animations or use some library like EFL which does not hog your GPU/CPU. (LONG LIVE IMAGE BASED GRAPHICS, screw vector graphics)

IMHO, everything since Magic Workbench was a step in the wrong direction , and that includes Amiga's own NewIcons look.

Going to add some counterweight: I actually dispise KDE, plainly because it's IMHO very ugly (out-of-the-box of course). It appears as if it's immitating the Windows glass look, but fails miserably and looks even more ugly. To add more insult to injury, I actually like gnome-shell very much, it works very smoothly and pleasantly for me. Unity is "meh", it's not bad, but certainly not very good either (last time I tried it the terminal kept crashing). I'm also fond of XFCE and MATE/Gnome 2, which are also pleasant to work with. LXDE was a nice initiative, but it's still pretty buggy.

But back on topic: Windows has pretty much annoys me with the previously mentioned things: updates, cancelling the copy file dialog which hangs, and so on. What I dislike about Linux, which I also use, is that the open source graphics drivers aren't decent enough. Of course, that's not directly Linux' fault or any of the distro's. I hope they get a boost in development so they can get on par with the proprietary drivers (which in most cases, aren't very good either, but they try I guess).

@ACcurrent: I also had a lot of problems with Nvidia and gnome-shell, but also with ATI. I think it has more to do with drivers than gnome-shell, however. It's like you have the following choice: proprietary drivers and decent graphics performance but slow gnome-shell OR open-source drivers and crappy graphics performance but smooth gnome-shell.

Going to add some counterweight: I actually dispise KDE, plainly because it's IMHO very ugly (out-of-the-box of course). It appears as if it's immitating the Windows glass look, but fails miserably and looks even more ugly.

Oxygen with Obsidian Coast color scheme is actually pretty superior to most other "standard" looks I've seen.

This prove that most users(include myself) concern how many desktop themes available than how fast the IPC work(perspectively fairly quick is enough, but not necessary lightening fast)

berkus, this is actually what added to parallels and vmware, they "instantly resume the machine" by putting up a screenshot while loading.

bluemoon wrote:berkus, this is actually what added to parallels and vmware, they "instantly resume the machine" by putting up a screenshot while loading.

VirtualBox has a pretty good pause and resume button that works instantly. VMware (with about 2GB of memory allocated to it) takes about 5 minutes to pause and another 5 to resume - but it dumps the memory to the hard drive so you can quit and reboot the host.

I'm tri-booting Win7 HE, Ubuntu 12.04, and OpenSUSE.

What I hate about Win7:
- Windows explorer has a tendency to crash for no apparent reason
- There's not much you can do to customize it aside from changing
the window color and desktop background (unless you download
3rd party software like uxtheme patcher, which is daring because
it messes with your drivers)
- They removed some very useful things that came with WinXP,
such as the windows movie-maker and being able to edit
recorded sounds in the sound recorder
- It's design makes application-specific themes, desktop 3d-rendering,
inter-process communication, and cross-platform development
difficult for developers
- (Microsoft flaming begins) I hate they try to push people away from
third party software and unfairly provide their applications with
better resources to give them the upper hand
- I hate how they steal people's software and ideas and shuts their
mouths with their deep wallets. (eg. The all of the original icons from
IBM, the taskbar and aeropeek from Apple's GUI interface, Internet
Explorer stolen from Spyglass Mosaic, Juku from Plurk, smartphone
tech from Sendo, compression used in MS-DOS 6 from Stac, high-speed
sound and video web-tech from burst, etc.)
- I hate how Microsoft has killed off all of its competitors by buying
huge amounts of Intel stocks, making it impossible for competitors
to ship their operating system pre-installed on devices out of Intel's
fear of Microsoft drawing out. (how I loath the days when you could
actually buy a mac or linux pc in a store ._.)

What I hate about Ubuntu:
- There's no way to disable UAC, so pretty much every time I want to do something
I have to figure out what the real path of the application is and sudo it
- I have to type in a password every time I want to install something or do anything
as admin
- I'm using an intel hd graphics card and have to use software rendering. In windows
I can play Skyrim with normal graphics settings at full speed with no lag, yet I can't
render a few crappy low-poly non-textured planes in a homebrew game in Ubuntu
- Even with Java installed, you can't run java applications. You have to go through
the terminal every time, which is very very annoying
- The most useful applications such as Skype and Java don't distribute .deb packages
- The menubars for the applications are put in the bar at the top of the screen and
aren't even visible unless you hover your mouse above it. This is just very annoying

What I hate about OpenSUSE:
- 1, 2, 3, and 4 from the Ubuntu hates
- A lot of the .rpm packages are broken
- When first installed, the system will lock up every time you try to execute a .rpm
package. It took me forever to figure out how to change the settings to fix it
- There a problem with OpenSUSE's depth buffering for OGL applications. Eg. When
playing Minecraft, the gui components flicker on the screen
- It's WINE distro forces all dll's a program uses to be in the same folder as the
program, otherwise it crashes (found this out when I was testing my N64 mods
in PJ64)

However, there are some things I like about my linux distro's:

- The Ubuntu Software Center. It's simple and easy to use. I don't need to know
dependencies, statistics, and all that other crap, I'M NOT WRITING THE DAMN
APPLICATIONS, and I like how the USC respects that
- Ubuntu allows you to goof around while it installs so you're not just staring at
a loading bar for a 2 hours
- Unlike windows, both Ubuntu and OpenSUSE were able to pick up my wireless
device out-of-the-box. In windows, I had to manually install drivers from a cd
- Java is faster on both Ubuntu and OpenSUSE
- I like OpenSUSE's widget-based desktop. It's easy to use and is great for
people who are used to using windows
- I like how Ubuntu's live icons display the contents of your text files

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The whole reason I entered the field of os-development was that I hate Microsoft however
there just aren't any good alternatives. No matter what you do, there's always something
you gotta do in Windows.

What I hate about Ubuntu:
- There's no way to disable UAC, so pretty much every time I want to do something
I have to figure out what the real path of the application is and sudo it
- I have to type in a password every time I want to install something or do anything
as admin
- I'm using an intel hd graphics card and have to use software rendering. In windows
I can play Skyrim with normal graphics settings at full speed with no lag, yet I can't
render a few crappy low-poly non-textured planes in a homebrew game in Ubuntu
- Even with Java installed, you can't run java applications. You have to go through
the terminal every time, which is very very annoying
- The most useful applications such as Skype and Java don't distribute .deb packages
- The menubars for the applications are put in the bar at the top of the screen and
aren't even visible unless you hover your mouse above it. This is just very annoying

Those are actually all false. UAC is disablable (It's not enabled on the ubuntu 11.04 I'm typing this on). Add a NOPASSWD option in your sudoers file to avoid having to type your password. Troubleshoot why your graphics card isn't media accelerated. It should be. You can run java applications from nautilus, of course. Skype *does* distribute a .deb.

The top of screen menubars are based on sound UX principles.

JamesM wrote:

What I hate about Ubuntu:
- There's no way to disable UAC, so pretty much every time I want to do something
I have to figure out what the real path of the application is and sudo it
- I have to type in a password every time I want to install something or do anything
as admin
- I'm using an intel hd graphics card and have to use software rendering. In windows
I can play Skyrim with normal graphics settings at full speed with no lag, yet I can't
render a few crappy low-poly non-textured planes in a homebrew game in Ubuntu
- Even with Java installed, you can't run java applications. You have to go through
the terminal every time, which is very very annoying
- The most useful applications such as Skype and Java don't distribute .deb packages
- The menubars for the applications are put in the bar at the top of the screen and
aren't even visible unless you hover your mouse above it. This is just very annoying

Those are actually all false. UAC is disablable (It's not enabled on the ubuntu 11.04 I'm typing this on). Add a NOPASSWD option in your sudoers file to avoid having to type your password. Troubleshoot why your graphics card isn't media accelerated. It should be. You can run java applications from nautilus, of course. Skype *does* distribute a .deb.

The top of screen menubars are based on sound UX principles.

Thanks for the UAC tip, I searched everywhere and couldn't figure out how to disable that

I know why my graphics card isn't supported yet, it's new and they haven't written a driver for it yet. Its not Radeon or NVidia, so I don't expect them to do so... You can't associate the JVM with .jar files, and skype has dropped support for .deb packages.

Keep in mind you're using 11.04 and I'm using 12.04

That's the reason why you should be using Linux Mint, not Ubuntu. On Mint, you have much more packages available - including Skype, on Ubuntu 12.04-based Linux Mint 13. I even installed it just to check which repository will Skype be installed from; t'was Mint's maya/imports.