[GTALUG] Heads up: Ubuntu 21.10 kills your desktop icons

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 10:47:30AM -0400, Michael Hill via talk wrote:
| > I prefer the elegant design and centralized vision of the GNOME
| > desktop, but the whininess of the GNOME hatred here never gets old.

Agreed.

Gnome screen (not really a desktop metaphor) UI is mostly simple, which I 
mostly like.

In fact, since I first lived with GUI "desktops" (35 years ago?), I've 
been battered into submission.  Customization is a bit like building a 
sandcastle below the high-tide mark.  I just take the desktop that the 
distro prefers since I expect it to be better supported.

| When a desktop going from version 2 to 3 throws away everything users
| are used to, and the developers simply don't care, then it deserves any
| hate it receives.

The only way to break "technical debt" is to start over.

I actually like the result.

| If they wanted to have a totally new vision (which is perfectly fine to
| do), they should have started a new project, not hijacked an existing one.

Agreed.  But leaving an unmaintained chunk of software is an attractive 
nuisance.  Maintaining two versions is very resource intensive.  Compare 
the Gnome Shell 2->3 transition to the Python 2->3 transition.

| Personally what I want a desktop to do is:
| Let me launch programs (preferably by just typing the name in)

In Gnome Shell: type the Windows key, type as much of the program name as 
you have to, hit return when your choice is the first offered.

| Let me resize windows.

Yes, by conventional mousing.  I don't know of a keyboard-only way because 
I've never wanted one.

| Let me maximize windows.

Yes, by conventional mousing.

| Let me close windows.

Yes, by conventional mousing.

But it is better to get the application to close the Window.

| Let me alt+tab between the windows.

Not exactly.

First: ALT+TAB seems to work like Windows key + TAB.  I 
like using the Windows key because I've conceptualized the Windows key as 
the way of talking to the Gnome Shell whereas the application gets ALT.

Window+TAB gets you a choice of running applications to cycle through.  
All terminal windows, for example, will be represented by a single icon.  
If you wish to select a particular terminal window, you move to the 
universal terminal icon and type Down Arrow to be able to select.

I almost never use the down arrow version.  Possibly because it is a bit 
awkward.  But a flat list of windows would be bad for me: I have at least 
66 windows open right now; most are Firefox windows.

Selecting between apps-with-windows works well for me.

| Anything other than that is just extra.
| 
| Gnome 3 failed at quite a few of those basic things, at least for the
| first while which was inexcusable.

I don't remember such a failure.  It may be so.

| These days I tend to just use xfce.  kde does the job too, but tends to
| be slower and I don't need the extras it adds.

I've rarely used KDE.  It seemed a bit busy the few times I tried it.

I've not used XFCE enough to be comfortable with it.  I seem to remember 
that it requires few resources, which would be welcome on older machines.  
On newer ones, the enormous waste of heavier systems doesn't matter much.

The transition that hammered some of my machines was when compositing the 
desktop started requiring 3-D graphical ops.  Slow on many of my older 
machines.  That seemed gratuitous.

I have too little understanding of the graphics stack (it is so big!  
does it need to be?).  For some reason, my older machines' desktops seem 
to have gotten faster again.  I suspect that the software OpenGL 
implementation has improved.  But my observations are confusing.  For 
example, one of the machines that slowed down actually had an OK iGPU (AMD 
C50); perhaps the driver improved.