Usually I'm the construction guy. I don't have all the gear to dress as the biker.
I love Ubuntu Linux, there are many like it but this one is mine.
Yet I have a filthy little secret, which doesn’t concern dressing up as a member of the Village People and going barhopping on Friday nights. That behaviour is well documented both in my medical records and in the archives of the Phoenix Police Department. No, my filthy little secret is that I love Ubuntu…
But I really don’t like the Unity desktop.
It’s not bad, mind you, but lord it sure isn’t good either. I don’t like how the damn sidebar keeps popping up every time I mouse over the back button on a web browser and, given that I live on line, that gets old really quick. I know, I could shrink the browser a bit so it’s not full screen, but that’s not right either. I want the browser to be full screen because I’m using it. In that instance the desktop environment needs to stay the hell out of my way, not keep popping up because I went just a little too far.
On Windows, I have my taskbar set to auto hide and it’s never (or rarely) a problem because most everything you do in an app resides on the upper part of the screen. Look at your web browser. Where are the controls? At the top. Where are your menus? At the top. Where’s your bookmark bar? At the top. So having an auto-hiding taskbar in Windows works really well. If my mouse in on the bottom of the screen, it because I need it to be there to do something. Meanwhile, if my mouse is on the top left of the screen, it’s because I’m hitting a back button, or accessing something in the File menu or clicking on a bookmark folder on my browser, or something like that.
It’s not there because I want to access some other app.
Now, the other kicker. In Windows, you can move your taskbar to any side of the screen. Want it on top? Fine. On the left or right? Sure. No problem. You can move it around and put it where it works best for you. Not so easy to do that with Unity. Sure, you can download a small app that will help you do that, but should I really have to download an app to move a freakin’ taskbar to another part of my screen? Really?
Thanks, no.
There were other problems too. Weird system freezes, which would eventually unlock, but things would just hang for a while. Some apps behaved oddly. Chrome would sometimes just crash right out in the middle of something banal. I mean, say what you want about hardcore websites, Reddit is mostly text. If a browser is choking on Reddit, them something went sideways.
After six dozen times of doing something I didn’t want to do simply because I had the audacity to have my mouse on the left side of the screen, or watching an app fade to that sickly grey to let you know that it’s hanging up on god knows what, I decided to do something about it. I went back to my roots and downloaded Gnome 3. Once again, this is the beauty of Linux. I don’t like my desktop environment. I think it sucks.
So I’ll download a new one, dammit.
I love Gnome, always have, and the Gnome 3 desktop environment is a brand new version of my favourite. So a few clicks, maybe fifteen minutes of wait time while it downloaded and installed everything and then I logged out of Unity for the last time. I made a selection on the login screen and brought myself back into Gnome.
Holy crap, now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.
I gotcher Unity right here, ya bastard!
Now, I grant you. Gnome has an Activities “button” up in the upper left hand corner which basically functions like a Start Menu in Windows. But it’s in the far upper left corner. It’s removed from the desktop environment both by that little bit of distance and also by a black bar which is an obvious divider between your desktop real estate and your task bar. The Unity task bar isn’t removed from your desktop environment at all, it’s always there, and it’s always on and, for me at least, it’s always in the way.
The hang ups and freezing disappeared. I’ve had one since then and I know it was the app doing it. I can be a tab whore sometimes and I think I may have had a wee too many tabs open in Chrome. If it’s not the app’s fault, it’s mine. Even then, Chrome thawed out and I was able to finish up and close down some tabs. I like Gnome’s launcher better too. It’s clean and it’s not in the way.
It’s hard to explain. The difference between Unity and Gnome 3 on the same distribution of Linux is much like the difference between plush felt and padded leather seats in a really killer sports car. Really, you’re more interested in the sports car and, while the seats are important, they’re seats in a sports car. It all comes down to whether or not you prefer felt or leather because everything else is fairly awesome. Some people really like Unity and I don’t begrudge them that, but Linux users have choices.
And I choose you, Pikachu! Gnome!
