Ubuntu 17.10: Return of the Gnome

This certainly brings back some memories. This is what I wrote in HN when I first encountered Unity.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2504972" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2504972</a><p>HN tells me this was 2402 days ago. Oh how quickly the kilodays fly by. But I am glad that after a mere twenty four hundred days Canonical finally listened to my advice.<p>I have been using mostly Xubuntu during the unity years so this thing did not affect me much. So I can look at the unity mistake not with anger but with interest and curiosity.<p>And when you look at the whole thing dispassionately and with perspective, you have to admit that this was not a mistake that Canonical made exclusively. It was a mistake the entire computing and software industry made. It was one of those strange turns into dead ends that happen to industries sometimes.<p>After the first ipad came out, the entire industry was absolutely certain that the future was tablets. Everyone started changing their user interfaces for tablets. And they did not care how much their customers complained, they just forced it down their throats because that was the future darn it.<p>But it turned out that the tablet future never happened. Even now I had to pay extra for a touch screen laptop because there was no other choice, when I &quot;use&quot; the touchscreen option only inadvertently.<p>The good thing about linux is that they can never railroad you into anything. So I switched to Xubuntu and that was that.

Absolutely not for me. When Gnome and Canonical both went crazy (Gnome 2 -&gt; 3 and Unity even existing, respectively) I stayed with Gnome 2 for a while, switched to Mate for a bit, and eventually found that KDE 4 had settled down and was just as customizable as KDE 3 was (for my purposes, at least), and have been using Kubuntu ever since.<p>I don&#x27;t mind them experimenting with new ways of doing things at all, I just really don&#x27;t understand why this needs to be done in a way that <i>prevents</i> people from doing things the way they&#x27;ve done it before if they decide they don&#x27;t like the way you&#x27;re doing things.<p>I switched from Konqueror to Dolphin after it handled what I needed. I switched from Virtual Desktops to &quot;Activities&quot; after it was also good enough for my needs. I never used widgets in their original usage (placed seemingly at random on the desktop) but use them inside of the task bar. I use sloppy focus follow mouse and mouse raise only on titlebar click so I can use windowed applications in actual nontrivial ways.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter if you glossed over that run-on paragraph above. tl;dr: KDE can have opinions, so can I. At least KDE respects that.

For the past, oh, 10 years or so, it feels like every time I try a new release of one of the prominent Linux DEs, I keep going back to Xfce after a short while, because it &quot;just works&quot;, can be customized exactly how I want it to be, and doesn&#x27;t try to break my flow with every major release, because someone in UX has a new Grand Unifying Theory of What Users Really Want (Even if They Don&#x27;t Know It).

I upgraded to 17.10. I use an old small screen Thinkpad and Gnome 3 used the top third of the screen for menus! I tried all of the plugins to no avail. I switched back to Unity because I like to see my screen. I hope to see a gnome 3 extension to mimic the unified top bar thing

What I find really useful in (default?) Unity:<p>* Ctrl + Alt + left&#x2F;right&#x2F;up&#x2F;down to switch workspaces<p>* Ctrl + Alt + Shift + left&#x2F;right&#x2F;up&#x2F;down to move the current window to a different workspace<p>* Alt + Left mouse button to drag windows<p>* Alt + Middle mouse button to resize windows<p>* Drag a window to the left or right edge to resize it to that half of the screen.<p>No idea how much of this is Gnome&#x2F;remains in 17.10. Or how easy it is to set up. I guess I need to give it a try.

I really like Ubuntu 17.10 sans Ubuntu. I&#x27;m running the default gnome-session. Its fast and Wayland has made Gnome feel really ... fluid? It doesn&#x27;t _feel_ like a Linux machine anymore. Compositing _feels_ better than a Windows or OSX machine.<p>Highly recommended.

I&#x27;m holding out hope for an Ubuntu 18.04 Unity Remix. Unity 7 just handles so many things expertly when you compare it side by side with Gnome.

FTA : &quot;The last few Ubuntu desktop releases have been about as exciting as OpenSSH releases&quot;<p>I felt the same with the last Debian stable. But I was kinda happy about that. Because it means it&#x27;s reaching maturity.

I was hesitant to switch from Gnome to Unity. Interestingly, I&#x27;m now nervous to switch back. I guess one grows accustomed to and fond of what one uses.

&quot;Stagnation had turned Ubuntu into just another distro; now it&#x27;s interesting all over again.&quot;<p>Jesus, wtf. I hate popular tech press like this and wired so much

I don&#x27;t understand why everyone seems to think Gnome 3 is a tablet UI. I had a touchscreen laptop for a couple of years and my experience is that it really isn&#x27;t.<p>It&#x27;s actually not bad as a keyboard-driven UI, though: it&#x27;s a rare event that I&#x27;ll trigger the overlay with the mouse, or even interact with it at all with the mouse beyond dragging windows into different workspaces or dragging workspaces around (the latter being the one thing I don&#x27;t think you can do with the keyboard).

I use Ubuntu daily, so I ended up stepping onto this land mine. Overall, I don&#x27;t think Gnome is completely unusable, but some little things made me jump back to Unity (which can be chosen when logging in).

Gnome3 is much worse than Unity ever was.<p>The difference is that Unity was getting better while Gnome is getting worse. The people at Gnome are lacking even the most basic knowledge when it comes to UX. The whole DE is a clusterfuck.

Can someone explain to me what HUD means in this context? They say HUD is gone, and GNOME developers are strongly against ever having one. The screenshots show something looking like an overlay with global search. To me, that&#x27;s what a HUD is.

I switched to Gnome for 17.10 (Gnome proper, not Ubuntu Gnome) and it&#x27;s been amazing.

I gave a chance to GNOME 3 times in last couple of years with Fedora 24, 25 and 26 and it was equally bad everytime. Memory Leaks reduced it to a crawling mess in a few hours of uptime, the desktop would freeze up permanently while doing even most basic task like switching windows or bringing up their <i>Expose-thing</i>, mouse will start jittering and lagging anytime icons&#x2F;textures were being loaded, extensions and themes broke again and again. Who would have though putting a Javascript interpreter in the critical pipeline of (what was supposed to be) a reponsive animation-guided GUI would be a bad idea?<p>Gave KDE a shot and beside all the bloat ans slowness, the damn thing kept crashing on my lock screen. Seriously?<p>I have switched to Sway now which itself is far from perfect (GTK3 apps keep breaking now and again, visible tooltips in XWayland windows prevent workspace switching) but at least it doesn&#x27;t hang up my machine every couple of hours or prevent me from unlocking it.<p>How the hell did we got here? What exactly are the priorities of people working on this stuff? Here&#x27;s hoping that XFCE gets ported to Wayland soon enough.

I love it. I&#x27;m back on vanilla Ubuntu.

Last time I&#x27;ve used Ubuntu was about 5 years ago. And it seems to look the same now. I wonder if anything meaningful was achieved during that time in terms of UI&#x2F;UX besides switching desktop environments back and forth.

I upgraded from 17.04 to 17.10. The widget in my Gnome Terminal window that shows me how many columns and rows the terminal has (if I change them) disappeared. I posted this to the Ubuntu forums, they said Wayland kills this feature, but if I fall back to Gnome over Xorg it would work. Which it does. I hope they don&#x27;t deprecate Xorg because I&#x27;m sure there are a lot of things like this which work in X but don&#x27;t work yet automagically with Wayland.

&quot;It&#x27;s worth noting that in my testing, GNOME uses slightly more RAM and CPU than Unity on the same hardware doing the same things. The increase is only about 10 percent more on the RAM, and, let&#x27;s face it, neither of them are lightweight desktops. If you want something light, try i3.&quot;<p>Best advice in the article ;) I did try i3 and like it a lot. I have it running on a Chromebook now as my main machine.

I just wish Gnome 2 was left as is and Gnome 3 would named Gnome Tablet Edition with those big useless buttons on a 27&quot; screen where I click them with my mouse instead of my big fingers. When Unity was introduced, I learnt to use AwesomeWM (similar to i3) and even manually configuring it was a better experience then both Unity and Gnome 3. Alternatively, I used LXDE, which is simple enough for me.

One I never understood why people complained of Gnome changing their UI until 3.26 where they removed support for tray icons. Apps like deluge and megasync became a mess(megasync refuses to work) because there&#x27;s no tray icon. Unfortunately I have been unable to find any DE that has the same navigation style

The article says that Ubuntu 17.10 is exciting again.<p>I don&#x27;t want exciting.<p>Particularly when they drop nice features like the HUD and the integrated global menu and title bar.<p>And that&#x27;s coming from a MATE user who never got on with Unity. I will hang on to my useful places menu, my functioning file explorer and refined taskbar thank you very much!

Ubuntu won&#x27;t succeed on the desktop until it starts shipping with cinnamon as a default

All distros &quot;look&quot; the same to me, because I use a tiling window manager. I don&#x27;t see a desktop, I just see what I&#x27;m working on. The gnome2&#x2F;gnome3&#x2F;unity silliness was partly why.

I&#x27;ve tried Gnome in the past, didn&#x27;t get it, and moved back to either Mate or Unity. Then I heard that Ubuntu would move to Gnome, and I decided to make an effort. It turned out that the default settings make Gnome into something I really don&#x27;t like, while it&#x27;s really customizable into something that resembles Mate close enough. I haven&#x27;t gone back since.<p>The Gnome project should add two shortcuts on the desktop with scripts to set Gnome to mimick Mate or Unity, so users get their old desktop back with a few clicks.

I accidentally my whole Fedora-installation yesterday, so I guess this is a good a chance as any to try out how Ubuntu feels on the desktop these days.<p>I guess that&#x27;s life :)

I have read most of the comments. I find myself chuckling at the memory of people telling me that using cwm with X is too...whatever. I haven&#x27;t had to change my workflow for something like eight years and it&#x27;s still being developed with incremental improvements. I don&#x27;t understand the desire to constantly mess with the dashboard when all I want to do is drive the car.

This must be the ugliest OS of the three main user-focused ones.<p>I mean even the colors are ugly, why put dark orange colors, who thought it is a good idea?

&quot;Ubuntu&#x27;s developers have put considerable effort into making GNOME cosmetically similar to Unity&quot;. I am a &quot;ubuntu gnome&quot; user since the start of unity (I have used it 2 weeks, it was unusable for me). Do you mean that I will have to accept the defects of gnome plus the ugly misbehaving unity dock combined ? Should I leave for fedora ?

After ubuntu announced the return of gnome as it primary DE I started looking for another distro&#x2F;ubuntu variant with a good DE. So far ubuntu MATE and ubuntu budgie have been the better ones. So if you are in the market for a new ubuntu flavor you should try both.

Kde3 was the best environment ever.

Anyone tried it recently? How stable is it? Particularly, does it support multiple external displays with different scaling properly on Intel with Wayland?<p>Unfortunately the live USB allows to test only on Xorg, Wayland is not available.

I hope feature parity with the Unity Ubuntu is a priority. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;gdX606Hjt04?t=5m24s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;gdX606Hjt04?t=5m24s</a>

I tried do-release-upgrade on 17.04, and it failed. Maybe they should work on that first?<p>(The reason it failed was that I have the arm64 architecture installed to get cross tools, and those repos somehow return 404.)

Can we still use 32-bit Ubuntu? Is it just 32-bit <i>iso</i> that has been discontinued?<p>I find it dodgy to discontinue 32-bit Ubuntu, as I remember it has been promised to exist until 18.04.

Can&#x27;t one just get a paid version without the amazon search? I know it can be uninstalled, but still, feels better that no such thing exists in the first place.

it is worth of note that gnome 3 only now is getting to 90% of what it was during gnome 2. what was that? six years too? I have no idea. I am a KDE user now.

I can&#x27;t get why mate&#x2F;kde is more usable&#x2F;user friendly that Gnome. While Gnome have have Redhat &amp; GNU behind them

&quot;sudo apt-get install xfce4&quot; has worked awesomely so far.

Yay!!! I have always hated Unity (No offence to the devs behind it) but it was always a PITA. I am glad that Gnome is back!<p>But that being said, Gnome3 has a lot of chrome space.

I just want to say that the music in the video is _horrible_. I cannot believe they went with it. It sounds like a scammy kickstarter page!