[GTALUG] desktop comfort [was Re: Upgraded to Beaver and Command Line Says 'command not found']

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Val Kulkov via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| Gnome 3.28 feels like a significant downgrade to me, coming from 16.04
| Unity interface.

Why?

(This isn't a challenge -- I'm hoping to learn something that I can
adopt from the answer.)

| I played with it for a few days in an honest attempt
| to get used to it and make the most use of it. No, I am missing too
| many time-savers from Unity.

Like what?

|  I am missing my Thunderbird icon in the
| system tray.

It's trivial to add those in the Gnome Desktop or Shell or whatever
the proper name is.

While running Thunderbird, the icon will be there.  Just right-click
on the icon and ask to pin it.  While you are there, unpin all the
cruft you don't intend to use much.

(This is from memory because I'm currently running KDE because of an
nVidia problem.  After more than a decade of using the GNOME desktop.
I personally don't seem to care much about what desktop I use.  Even
Win 10's desktop is mostly OK (unlike the rest of Win 10).)

| Finally, I gave up and switched back to Unity + compiz
| and now I am happy again.

Glad to hear that you are happy.  The future of Unity appears a bit
challenging.

| The good thing though is that, once Unity is installed on 18.04, you
| get to choose to login to Unity or to Gnome/X or even to Gnome/Wayland
| in case you want to continue playing around with Gnome.

Fedora's GDM lets you switch at login between any of the supported and
installed desktop environments.  That can include interesting oddballs
like Sugar.

I tend to default to GNOME on fedora because
(a) I don't care much,
(b) it is the most debugged choice on Fedora,
(c) it sometimes seems to get along better with systemd or pulse or
    network manager or who knows what arcane plumbing

On Ubuntu (in the past), I would always use Unity for roughly the same
reasons.

Summary: all the desktops I've been "encouraged" to use by a distro
seem to be roughly as useful and convenient.  This may well reflect a
low level of investment that I've made in perfecting a desktop for my
use and in learning the time-saving tricks.  I do find that old desktops 
seem clunky now (Atari ST GEM, Windows 3.1, SunView, ...).

Some minor pain points that I perceive with GNOME:

- I don't really understand the order of windows presented to me by
  gnome when I hit the windows key.  So that display isn't too useful
  when I have a lot of windows.

- At the top of the screen, the time display does not by default show
  the month and day.  I fix that with the gnome tweak tool.
  It would be nice if this were simple and discoverable.

- I want to use emacs-style keystrokes for editing things like
  filenames.
        gconftool-2 --set --type=string /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme Emacs
  I think that this works with Unity too, but I'm not sure.
  It would be nice if this were simple and discoverable.
  I don't know how to do this with KDE.

- I used to be able to maximize a window vertically by middle-clicking
  the title bar.  That's long gone.

- I wish more tabletty gestures worked on touchscreens.  Does any
  normal Linux desktop do better?  I actually have a few devices with
  Fedora that have detachable keyboards; Fedora feels somewhat crippled
  without a keyboard.