Skip to main content

Don't Cry For Me, Argentina

Because I seem to have a latent streak of masochism, I installed Ubuntu (that is, canonical - no pun intended - Ubuntu, GNOME desktop and all) tonight.

Canonical (the company) - and the Ubuntu/Debian family of distros in general, have their problems - for some reason, I've never liked the Debian package manager, apt; and Canonical's repeated attempts to foist proprietary software on us: Unity, Ubuntu One and the ever-increasing number of packages which sneak snaps, with its proprietary back-end, in through some door or other - are irritating, at best; but the Ubuntu family is probably the one you want to introduce your Windows- or Mac-loving friend to, if you *really* want to convert them to Linux. There'll be plenty of time for them to discover and use Arch later, btw. 

By mistake, I installed 20.04, the latest LTS, and I'm currently upgrading the distribution all the way to 21.10.

And that's after installing the excellent ubuntu-mate-desktop, because whilst some of its (many and glaring) failings, such as "natural scrolling" by default - which may be the only way to induce vertigo while sat stationary on one's backside - are not exclusive to the platform (here's looking at you, Linux Mint), GNOME (version 3 or 40+) is still a horrendously ugly clusterfuck-cum-dumpsterfire of a butt-ugly exercise in user-hostility. If you want to know how to design a desktop for looks or usability, look at GNOME - and then do everything differently.

(As for the Andrew Lloyd-Webber reference, the chap who gets the credit for saving GNOME2 for civilisation by forking it as MATE happens to be an Argentinian, who named it after a local beverage. Though it has to be said that whilst it is perfectly usable in its default state, Martin Wimpress and the rest of the team behind Ubuntu MATE deserve most of the credit for the beautiful state of this Ubuntu variant, since most of the themes that come with MATE by default make GNOME3 and GNOME40 look attractive by comparison.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Refused Asylum

 Well, I certainly didn't expect to be typing not one, but three blog entries in one week - let alone three on a theme of moving home (or not). No, there's still nothing wrong with the XPS that a binary blob (and a new battery) wouldn't fix, though after a bit of a disaster upgrading from Ubuntu MATE 21.04 to 21.10-beta, I'm currently running openSUSE Tumbleweed, which, although it has its quirks, is certainly an easier thing to get to grips with than  the new Safari . (As an inveterate distro-hopper who nevertheless has never spent much time on openSUSE, I think I'll keep it around for a good while, this time, and see how it strikes me over an extended period of use.) Yes, you can change the new Safari tab bar back so it's separate from the address bar; yes, you can move the address bar from the bottom back to the top. Unfortunately, you're stuck with the new tab bar redesign, since the option to turn them back into the old-style tab bars is gone from Safar...
Post a Comment
Read more