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

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2018-05-04 12:54 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> 
> Glad to hear that you are happy.  The future of Unity appears a bit
> challenging.

Understatement. My understanding is that all active development has been
stopped.

It was a bit of a pain for me to switch from Unity to Gnome when Ubuntu
changed over. I kind of like it now, though. I manually made the switch
early, switching to Ubuntu-Gnome 17.04 before the ‘hard’ switch was made
for me at 17.10. Apart from learning about the new features, the major
pain points were:

* Gnome Shell runs system-ish UI tasks using your browser's javascript
installation. Until Firefox 57+ got stable and happy, there were hard
lockups every couple of days. The browser is much of the UI with Gnome now.

* Wayland's X11 compatibility is limited. If you're used to slinging
around tools that play with window contents (even something as simple as
ImageMagick's import to take screenshots, or ssh -x) they can't read
window contents. Until I set the session to Gnome-X11, I'd had to resort
to using xwd(1) to take screenshots under Wayland. Last time I *had* to
use xwd was on a Sun 3 to feed an HP PaintJet, circa 1989.

* The Gnome Files browser (aka Nautilus) continues to be stripped down
to now being almost useless. Very shortly, icons on the desktop will be
deprecated (so bye-bye desktop metaphor). Opening files with alternative
applications is now an extra couple of clicks away. All filing of bugs
gets shut down on Launchpad, as Gnome's desktop vision is seen as the
way forward. (Or is it that Canonical is tired of paying for Unity
development and will only use vanilla Gnome from now on?)

* Program menus are seemingly dead (since everyone's supposed to be
using 16:9 displays), so menus are either gone or hidden under hamburger
icons of varying design up in the “dead” top right of a window. I liked
Gnome's earlier attempt to force all menus into a Mac-style ribbon, and
was sad to see it go.

But otherwise, it's just fine for me. Tracker file indexing now works
*really* well … unfortunately, Gnome Documents (a seemingly pointless
program) always pops up 5-6 'Untitled Documents' at the top of any
search result, and these open blank windows with no close icons in
Documents.

Also, not sure if it's in 18.04, but Gimp 2.10 is really nice.

 Stewart