

Gnome Shell and Unity - Smotko
http://smotko.si/gnome-shell-and-unity/

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buster
I can understand his question. I've used Gnome Shell the last months, now with
12.04beta i'm running with Unity for the next weeks. They both have very
similar concepts. In the end, i'll probably go with Gnome Shell, because it's
very similar and not some "we'll do our own, screw the rest of the linux
comunity" thing. Never got why Canonical just couldn't build on Gnome, Unity
would certainly be possible to be built on the foundations of gnome 3.x..

edit: Yes, also <https://extensions.gnome.org/> is pretty neat.

~~~
acabal
If I'm remembering right, Shuttleworth decided to go his own way because _at
the time_ Gnome Shell looked radically different than it does now, and he
didn't forsee it--or the political environment around it--improving enough to
bother building upon. However since he made that decision and showed some
Unity prototypes, the Gnome Shell design _did_ change a lot and now it
resembles Unity much more than it did back then.

~~~
macco
Yeah, Canonical wanted to participate in Gnome3, but nobody listened to their
complaints about Gnome3.

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keithpeter
It might be of interest to mention a few things here

1) Gnome Shell when installed along side Unity will have the Unity style
'rollover' scrollbars. These can be disabled, but that setting is desktop
wide, so you lose the rollover scrollbars in your Unity session

2) Gnome Classic is a reasonable facsimile of Gnome 2 UI for end users who do
not require extensive panel customisation or lots of applets. I'm thinking of
the army of people who will upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04.4 to 12.04.x over the
next year or so. I've tested the 'software update' upgrade process from 10.04
to 12.04 and it works really well. When 12.04 is released, the software update
application in all 10.04 installations will provide a 'distribution upgrade'
button. I imagine a lot of people will get a bit of a shock when they upgrade,
go and have coffee and come back to Unity!

3) Unity2d is rather nice in my opinion and avoids the compiz issues that
people sometimes see depending on their hardware. Unity2d now has HUD which is
interesting.

4) If you install 12.04 command line from the netinstall iso, you can just
apt-get gnome-core and get a relatively stock gnome-shell/gnome-classic
desktop. You need to install some sound libraries and then choose your
applications.

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munchor
I use Gnome Shell partially because I don't want compiz. Compiz consumes way
too many resources from my computer. Unity is great. No doubt, but it
shouldn't be a compiz plugin, it should work the same way Gnome Shell does,
not with Compiz.

A lot of people complain about customization on both, so I just say: try
Awesome WM. This window manager is very easy to use and very simple to
customize, it really lives up to its name (awesome).

I use both Gnome Shell and Awesome WM on Arch Linux, I like both of them,
although I've been using more and more Gnome Shell lately, partially because
Gnome 3.4 is almost in the stable repositories, and I am very anxious for it.

~~~
pavanky
Have to ask, what is the appeal of a tiling WM ? Do we have the option to
swtich between apps ? Do you _have to_ use tiles ?

For example, if I am working on a terminal and have firefox open, how much
trouble would it be to switch between them (would alt + tab work ?).

I tried reading wiki-pages about tiling managers in general, but they are
sparse on this kind of information.

~~~
keithpeter
I used dwm/dmenu with an appropriate .desktop file to set up a session, and a
simple script to autostart a few applications (network-manager, feh) as my
desktop environment for some time. See

[http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/linux-dwm-window-manager-on-
de...](http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/linux-dwm-window-manager-on-debian.html)

Windows can be tiled, full screen ('monacle') or floating in dwm. You can
alter the config file to associate a window type with an application, e.g.
GIMP will always be floating.

You have a screen divided into a main pane on the left. I set mine to occupy
about 65% of the width of a 1920by1080 screen. The right hand area is a
'stack' of other windows which appear as you invoke applications using dmenu
(click super, type program name).

You can switch between the active window with the mouse (focus follows
pointer) or using keyboard shortcuts (vi related in the stock version). You
can also swap windows on the 'stack' in the right hand side into the main
tile, so the window that was in the main tile goes onto the stack. You can
also 'cycle' the windows through the tiles like a yank buffer.

The best bit was tags. Basically you have 9 workspaces, but it is possible to
bring the windows in workspace 7 (say) into the _stack_ in workspace 1.

The main problem I had was the issue of popup windows for tiled applications.
Sometimes they were recognised and became floating windows, sometimes they
opened in the main pane with the result that the main application window
became the first on the stack, which was distracting.

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pmr_
Segfaults on proprietary AMD hardware every 10 minutes? Why do people even
bother to release something like that? I understand that AMD drivers are a
pain and I understand that you sometimes want to get a feature out into the
open to gather feedback, but if you break too many people in horrible ways you
lose users and that is the opposite of what we want. We want more users and
especially new users, and those are easily scared by unstable core components.
There is a set of people that are looking for the latest fancy desktop
technology available, but those shouldn't be the primary concern of projects
as huge as Gnome.

~~~
keithpeter
RHEL 6 and the clones, and Debian stable, are fairly solid on most hardware I
believe.

Its worth mentioning that Ubuntu 12.04 is still in testing.

~~~
adambyrtek
Debian doesn't ship with proprietary drivers, so it's not a valid comparison.

~~~
keithpeter
You are correct in stating that Debian does not supply proprietary drivers on
its installation sets. I was, however, able to get the nvidia proprietary
drivers installed in about 10 minutes including download time on our somewhat
slow broadband. I believe but can't confirm that the same is true for AMD
drivers.

So my 'comparison' is valid: if you need stable, use an RHEL clone or Debian
or openSuse.

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rplnt
> We finally have some accessible options to customize the look and feel of
> the Unity desktop

How does it compare to KDE? I used Gnome(2) for some time but it was really
(and I mean really) bad when it comes to customization of basically anything.
I then switched to KDE which I found to be great in this area. I didn't like
the look (and with my limited taste couldn't help it much) but I loved I could
customize virtually anything. Just few clicks in GUI. I've used gnome-shell
briefly and I think you can mess around with the javascript to configure a lot
of things. But there was almost no configuration for the users.

So, my question. How is it now, compared to KDE? Both Gnome and Unity. Are
some 3rd party tools (I'd imagine there would be for the gnome-shell at least)
which could help?

~~~
Smotko
I've tried KDE briefly a few months ago and I didn't like it. The reason was
they were way to many customization options. I spent more than an our going
through all the settings and I got completely overwhelmed.

Gnome Shell has little to no options out of the box, but it has extension that
do just that.

Unity recently added some basic options into the default (new tab in the
appearance dialog). They didn't add a lot of options but just the ones I seem
to need :)

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yason
I would love to use Gnome Shell but that thing comes bundled with a window
manager that you can't change. And for a power user a finely tuned window
manager that makes managing windows easy—if not transparent—both from keyboard
and mouse is a non-negotiable starting point. Ditto for Unity. Both are
actually worse than even Metacity, when it comes to keyboard bindings. Now I'm
with Gnome3 with the Gnome2 emulation mode but I don't know how long that
lasts.

~~~
thristian
That surprises me, since GNOME 3's window-manager is basically Metacity, and
(although it took some wrangling) I got all my custom GNOME 2 keyboard
shortcuts set up on GNOME 3.

Sure, even Metacity isn't going to be as configurable as... oh, Awesome or
XMonad, but I've found it much more reliable than Compiz (I managed to
completely break Unity once by playing with the Compiz configuration tool).

What in particular do you mean by "making managing windows easy"?

~~~
yason
I just tried to refer to the fact that I like to use a window manager separate
from the desktop environment. You can't change the window manager in Gnome 3,
except in the Gnome 2 emulation mode which I'm using[1].

And while Metacity could be used as an emergency replacement with a good
configuration, the Metacity/Mutter in Gnome 3 had serious trouble emulating
all the keypresses I needed. Especially Mod4 (or win key) was very problematic
and unfortunately I've settled on that key for anything window related many,
many years ago.

[1] Now that I think of it, Unity also has Unity 2D which might support a
regular window manager instead of a compositing one.

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dsr_
The beauty of UNIX is that I can choose to use XFCE... and over there is a
hacker who has been using FVWM since 1995 and probably will continue using it
for another fifteen years.

I don't know what graphics protocol we will be using then, but it will still
speak some flavor of X.

~~~
adambyrtek
I really hope that until then we'll manage to migrate to Wayland, or some
other technology more modern than X11.

~~~
thristian
You acknowledge the irony in trying to migrate away from X11 (a thirty-year-
old technology) to "some other technology more modern", while staying with
Unix (a forty-year-ald technology), right?

By which I mean, there are problems with X11, but age is just a correlated
factor, not a cause, so it doesn't help to say we need something newer.
Weyland makes different design decisions, and some of them might turn out to
be better in the long run and some of them might not.

(Personally, I expect Weyland's lack of a "window manager" process will annoy
me vastly more than the protocol quirks of X11, which have mostly been papered
over by GTK+ and Qt by now.)

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portmanteaufu
I used Unity for a little while when 11.04 came out, but ultimately switched
to Gnome Shell. I think the thing that bugged me most was the feeling that
Unity was starting to place Ubuntu/Canonical services front-and-center in a
manner that I couldn't customize away.

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cgb
I found myself preferring Gnome Shell over Unity. extensions.gnome.org and the
nice scriptability with JS and CSS won me over as a hacker. Also Unity had
performance issues on my system.

