Moving from Ubuntu

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Moving from Ubuntu

Postby Donovan Ready » Wed Apr 23, 2014 4:16 pm

Hi, all. I've stayed with 10.04.3 LTS for too long because I can't (absolutely can't) stand the clumsy Mac-like Unity desktop.

I've searched. Gnome 3 has the same issues as Unity, so I'm trying out Linux Mint 16 64-bit. So far, so good. It's on a test platform with an old Radeon 9250 video...

I'll let you know how it goes. Image
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Re: Moving from Ubuntu

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Apr 24, 2014 9:11 pm

Well, my most stable production machines still do run 10.04 - no problems (mostly 32 bit). I really liked gnome 2, autohide toolbars, separate menu and task bars. The ability to put the tic-tack-tow buttons on the upper right, and the menu on the bottom was nice for someone who used windows for way too many years. At least I got paid to do it.

The fact that even in auto-hide, unity's "tool bar" crap shows up on all 4 monitors of a quad monitor system when it reveals tells all. This fascination with I have to either pin everything to that bar (making it unusable - hierarchy and discover-ability are good, not bad) or recall the abbreviated name for everything to "search my own computer" is baloney better suited for tiny phone screens - that can't hold much worth searching for anyway. I really don't understand where this "search for everything" mentality jives with the original linux command line short names that until you've memorized them all, you can't even start searching for. Who besides us knows that mv is used to rename things as well as move them? apropos?

For earlier versions of 12.04 than 12.04.4 - you could add mint's mate desktop - gnome2 done right - and have those luscious ubuntu repositories and it all just plain worked. Avoid the latest (12.04.1 was OK), it's pure poison and not stable! For an LTS right before it's about to be replaced, well this shows you how far Cannonical has fallen. Uptimes of minutes and hours, not months. Sick.

Well, mint has evolved and changed too. 15 was just too flaky. Mint 16, the mate with codecs version is on this machine (soon to be the always-on house server - it's a maxed-out Intel NUC and I'm loving it) and my other main coding machine. It's "acceptable" but losing some important functions in the calculator (and who knows what else) is really annoying - I may try and steal one from an older version of ubuntu to get things like, duh, pi back - or stored functions. Or even square roots rather than Xy which takes a lot more keystrokes/clicks. Crap, what's out there all sucks for what I do in EE design, I may just write a calculator in perl and be done with it for all time. It'd be nice to have a few extra edit boxes to cut paste intermediate results rather than have to plan a complex calculation to be all on one line, more or less. I mean, memory 0-9 is barely acceptable - what did I put in each again? No idea, and calling one up puts it into the calculation - even if it's wrong. How can programmers be so ignorant? Why does everyone write a new version - they're going backwards, not forwards with usability there. Ego? Something to give that intern?

The mate you could add to older ubuntus no longer exists in the ppa, which is a bear as at least the menu bar and task bar were separate, and you could make the task bar a tear-off and put it out of the way. But putting it all on one bar, autohide, well, I can live with that as long as there's room for the 10 or so shortcuts to things I use a lot. The trouble with just one bar - have 10 or more apps open and you get about 1 letter of the title per app due to the reduced space on just the one bar. I have no idea how cinnamon handles all that - haven't tried it since the disaster that was mint 15.

So far, other than a few nagging details, I'm liking mint-mate 16 on both single and multi-monitor machines. It doesn't crash, but it has it's little niggly problems - like try adding a network printer (its own host) without the printer add thing locking up.
So, I can't print on this version (seems to have changed a little since the first machine I put it on). At all. Pretty much would be a show stopper if this machine wasn't for "always on database and web server" use, where it really doesn't need a monitor, much less a printer. I can RDP into it from anywhere as is, and suck out its brains via nginx-audotindex to print from somewhere else. The current Mint 16 fixes the EFI problem earlier versions had (which matters on the NUC). It just works. I used Unetbootin to make a stick to boot the NUC off to install it. Boy is that ever quicker than a DVD.

FWIW, I tried the LMDE version of Mint 16 too - and it sucks hard. Crashes at any excuse, or what you want isn't there at all. They don't have that working yet. not really. It works till you try to actually do something, then boom. It would be nice, but I guess it's just too much for them to live on top of Debian testing - which is about to become a new version and a lot flakier anyway.

The only think I don't like about the NUC is it's all SSD, and no easy way to really back it up. At least on the big machines, I can use an SSD for just the / partition, but then mount a spinner over home, which kills off most writing to the SSD other than logs (which are a major PITA to get moved from /var). I found in mixed disk machines you can't put /var on the spinner because they boot so fast off the SSD that the spinner isn't up to mount by the time they want to write boot logs to it.

Thing is, I'm not really a sysadmin by nature, I'm a programmer. So this pain is not fun for me. I just want to get my scope-grab and other data acq going into this machine so I can move the fusor ahead quicker and have better records, darnit.

To top it off, my off-limits telco router gets bent if I assign this machine a fixed IP in my netmask range so little junk (think wifi on arduino for example) can find it easy (instead of DHCP). Someone read me the riot act on the raspberry pi forums for my "DNS for LAN" code, but try running bind/named on an arduino! At least it works and it's simple. It just gets flakey and some websites get upset and lock if I have a fixed IP, and no, I cannot touch that router. I could shoulder surf (or wireshark) the next time I file a repair call and get the pword...one reason they don't want us messing with it is that they always transmit max speed from fiber junction to copper to house - but throttle in the router according to the speed you pay for, I've watched the guy set it up! Security by obscurity...as dumb as it ever was.

I could never get shortcuts onto the gnome 3 bar, but I've had people tell me it's possible in hangouts - they just don't remember how.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Moving from Ubuntu

Postby Donovan Ready » Fri Jun 20, 2014 10:58 am

I ran into that when I tried using the gnome-fallback in 14.04 (which absolutely sucks, whether it's Mint or Ubuntu). The way to do it is with the 'windows' key + Alt, then right click the panel for the context menu.

Do you or anyone else here know what distro/desktop manager to use that doesn't blacklist the Intel 945G chipset? I really miss the ability to change workspaces without moving the mouse to the panel pager and clicking... That's really the only thing I use Compiz for. Image
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Re: Moving from Ubuntu

Postby Doug Coulter » Mon Sep 15, 2014 8:52 pm

This seems to also work in mint 17 mate, it's a little clumsy, but it does work.
http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2014/08 ... -cinnamon/
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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