Weirdly enough I loved Gnome 2 but for whatever odd reason I prefer some of the other DE's out there. I use Budgie (on Ubuntu) at work though it has quirks, otherwise Gnome 3 is ok or I just go for KDE. It definitely felt like Gnome went from all these amazing customizations to being so limited though.
After Gnome 3 and the abomination of wasted screen real estate that was Unity released I switched to using XFCE on Linux environments and haven't really found anything better since. It's so snappy even on crappy hardware and is customizable enough.
I agree - taskbar on the side is the best layout. It's very common on Macs and you can do it in Windows 10 now too.
The problem with Unity was that it was buggy as hell, and the launcher was really badly styled. Huge gaps between icons, the search filter was unusable, etc.
I was always a KDE 3 kinda guy. I tried TDE, which is to KDE 3 as Mate is to GNOME 2, and … boy, you really appreciate how the Mate project managed to keep everything good about GNOME 2 but modernise at the same time.
Really grateful that Mate exists. To this day, gnome3 has not reached parity with gnome2 on flexibility of configuration. I don't even make a lot of customizations to my desktop, but having the option when I need it is really key.
> Can we declare that GNOME Shell doesn't have themes, and prevent people from posting screenshots of GNOME Shell with a modified theme or with a modified top panel?
Maybe if Gnome's default theme didn't make window title bars half the size of the screen, people wouldn't be so eager to theme. Seriously, I have a huge, hi res monitor and the default theme makes it feel like some child or elderly specific thing. Nobody uses Gnome on a tablet, give it up!
This subject is endlessly amusing (and sad at the same time). The first app icon they present belongs to an app, Transmission, whom a GNOME developer had an argument with, because he suggested to the app developer to remove the status icon from the program (!!):
> Transmission has an option in the Desktop tab of the preferences to “Show Transmission icon in the notification area”. This should probably be removed.
It's hard for me to be "super happy" with a DE. But GNOME 3 does mean that I don't notice it all that often, and that's pretty good. It's predictable, it doesn't look ugly, and applications act about as predictably as they ever have in the Linux universe.
I grew out of theming and tweaking the look of a desktop before I got to high school. These days the only tweaking I do on any OS is keyboard shortcuts. The baseline has gotten good enough to just not care, and my guess is that that's most users' position regardless of OS.
Agreed, my only pet-peeve has been the default behavior of attaching modal dialogues to the parent window (thus preventing dragging capability, without resizing the text). This can be fixed with gnome-tweaks.
Mate is easily the best Linux DE available; I love that they're focusing on fixing bugs and incremental improvements to keep pace with hardware improvements, rather than chasing unneeded software features.
XFCE is designed from the get go to be very light weight. On my laptop I average ~300 MB Ram usage idling with XFCE.
MATE is the spiritual successor to Gnome 2, which isn't as light weight (but they haven't tried to add things to make it bloated, and gnome 2 was never too resource intensive). It is taking ~700 MB idling on that same laptop.
I use mate desktop with i3 for the windows management. This means everything just works. Volume keys, brightness, usb storage auto-mounting, complex audio configuration, printers configuration, lock screen, battery management, mouse settings, external displays settings, screenshots and so on and so forth. I get the best of both world. Without Mate, I would have to hack everything together and spend days configuring everything by hand.
If you want to replicate this setup: Start with Ubuntu Mate. Install i3 via apt. Select i3 on the login screen. In your i3 configuration add the following:
I've tried tiling WMs a few times, maybe 4 years ago last and liked them (inclduing i3) but at least at the time there were too many problems.
If everything works now, Id be willing to try i3 when I install ubuntu 20.04.
Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar with a nice battery/volume/wifi etc. indicator? That work both when I click on them and via keys and with the icons visibly changing based on the current state?
Do all Windows open normally? Do they all fullscreen normally? Which don't?
Do you get any crashes?
Are there any WM-specific settings/fixes you have to tweak more often than once every 6 months?
I highly recommend to use i3-save-tree to dump the json into a file (e.g. workspace_[number].json) to get your terminals (or any other applications) set up when logging in exactly the way you want.
sometimes the json needs editing (here is what it would look like in my setup):
Homestly, nothing changed. It's just (imo) hard to figure out yourself if nobody tells you that it's possible.
The other way around is also possible btw (starting gnome/mate/xfce and starting i3 right at login. I personally preferred the parents way as well though (using xfce though)
You won't be using Wayland with i3 however, and weren't they going to prefer that with Ubuntu 20 and onwards?
I have been using this setup since around 2014. At the time I used Gnome 2. And switched to Ubuntu Mate whenever Ubuntu switched to Unity/Gnome 3 (I am not even sure which one it is now). It has always been rock solid. i3 never crashed on me. And you can hot-reload it anyway. I last rebooted my work laptop 103 days ago. It goes to sleep few times per day. And the battery last about 10h (down from 15h when it was brand new).
For starting application I use a launcher called rofi via a shortcut. For status indicators and so on, I have configured the i3 status bar (i3bar) to give me battery status, cpu usage, different timezones of interest etc. The only fancy thing I did, was to use cute unicode glyph to indicate charging status ().
i3bar has a "system tray" section. Where nm-applet will dock its wifi indicator/control icon. And other chat and conference applications will dock theirs little icons.
I have no problem with any windows. You can customize everything either statically in the config or on the fly. For example, my chats applications are always moved to the scratch space area when running. I can summon them with a shortcut at any time from any desktop. I also have a shortcut to mark any floating window as sticky across any virtual desktop. This is useful for video conferencing, to keep the video visible at all time. Etc.
I just started diving into i3 a few weeks ago. This is using a VMWare Fusion VM and Fedora 31. So I'm not fully evaluating things like volume, brightness, but battery/charging indicators work. Most of the instructions I followed were ~4 years old and worked almost out of the box. A few minor things have changed, like most people have switched from Compton to Picom, but the old packages are still there and work (unless you need newer features/bugfixes).
Windows seem to work as expected. Dialogs/pop ups show up as floating windows, but everything else worked well as a tiled window. Fullscreen worked fine. I haven't used a wide variety of apps. Mostly a few browsers and terminals, but I was doing some Qt dev in it, so I was playing a bit with windowing.
> Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar...That work both when I click on them and via keys...
From what I've seen of i3, all of the status bars are text printed from a separate program that gets executed periodically. This makes it very flexible and with things like font-awesome you can have emoji and icons, but afaik you can't click or have pop ups. Other tiling WMs, like AwesomeWM, will do this.
If windows don’t behave, I put them in floating mode with Super-f or Super-shift-f to toggle. As you say, full screen when they shouldn’t be, or vice versa. In practice, the only app I have issues with is Zoom.
The i3bar implementation, includes battery charge, network info, etc. a click takes you to gnome-settings, where you can make changes. One of the few changes I make to i3.conf is to move the bar to the top. Personal preference.
If you tried it and liked tiling before, regolith is worth a shot. It’s pretty well done.
I did what your article explained on Ubuntu 18.04 and fresh working mate (i3 also worked fine when I booted into it). At first, it looked good - it looked like MATE but the Windows were opening in a WM way! But then I pressed the Super key and it broke - it opened it as a whole new application but one that doesn't work - I couldn't search on click on the broken menu.
Maybe it works if you remove and replace a bunch of settings and applets and whatever? I don't know but given that the second thing I did was already broken I didn't invest more time.
Ubuntu 18.04. Would not recommend to those thinking it will just work as expected.
Interesting. I wrote the article a long time ago, but I still use the approach it describes to this day. I have this setup on Ubuntu MATE 18.04 without issue, running MATE 1.20.1.
When you say super key, do you mean the windows key? And hitting it opens up the main MATE menu? For me, it opens up as expected: https://i.imgur.com/dZzQt1t.png and choosing an item from it does the expected thing.
For the i3 mod key I use alt. Is it possible you have both MATE and i3 set to the same super/mod key?
Thanks, I used your article with MATE 19.10 and it worked nicely.
I didn't try your applet but instead heavily customised the i3wm and i3bar configs to my liking, wouldn't go back to a non tiling window manager now.
I love tiling WMs but I do have one gripe (and it's not the fault of the WMs): Every "about" window for every program should have the name of the binary in it so we can call it from the command line. Text editor? You have to know it's gedit. Document Viewer? Evince (say, what?) Want to use a gui for file management on a one-off basis (it happens)? Nautilus wait Nemo no that's not it shit fire up firefox and DDG...
I'll have to give this a try. I do something similar but with gnome[0]. However, I have run into some weird issues when opening the gnome control center which results in it crashing.
I just tried doing exactly that, with a fully working out of the box mate and i3 and it just made things slower, and somehow most shortkeys stopped working in Sublime Text (I didn't even expect for that to get broken). And yes, all 4 of those are accessible via my terminal so it's not like I didn't have them.
Literally didn't add anything or make it remotely MATE-like. I did not investigate further. Ubuntu 18.04. Would not reccomend if anyone else thinks it works out of the box after reading this comment.
Gnome 2 was a very shiny and polished desktop environment. Its death (in favor of Gnome 3) meant a lot of people who contributed to it (e.g., me) got fragmented into Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce and others. I wonder what would have happened if Gnome was still a usable thing and this massive migration out of it was not necessary. Would we have fought over some other problem and forked regardless? Would we all have worked together to make it even more awersome?
It also saddens me that Red Hat insists on dumping its money in Gnome 3. I would love if they were putting their resources in improving something I actually use :).
I still hold that they should’ve renamed GNOME 3 something other than GNOME and let each develop as their own things. I feel like that method would’ve hemorrhaged fewer developers. Clearly there was some sort of closed meeting at Redhat with the few people that inherited leadership of GNOME deciding on the complete overhaul; it wasn’t a democratic process.
GNOME 3 is performing well enough now that I have moved over to it. At its introduction, though, it forced compositing, and drivers were not ready. That coupled with the massive UI changes gave users good reasons to complain.
It cannot run on most ARM SBCs; I can't run it with any reasonable consistent responsiveness on any but my newest PC. Gnome 3 is _still_ a pig; and utterly useless to most of the world which still operates on half decade or decade old PCs.
It's a prime example of privileged western developers overlooking the needs of their users.
In my world, extensions are required (at the very least, dash-to-dock). But extensions are a second class citizen and often stop working after an apt-get update.
And Gnome forces my machine into heavy swapping. Cinnamon (which is almost the same thing, but usable) doesn't cause swapping.
I don't find dash to dock necessary at all. I just hit super key and type, or use the 3 finger pinch touchpad gesture to open the overview.
In any case, in my experience extensions aren't as brittle as you're implying, they generally only stop working after a major gnome version update (e.g. 3.32 > 3.34) which you wouldn't get through an apt-get update.
I haven't had any swapping issues at all, but I suppose this could be hardware dependent (e.g. nvidia drivers are known to cause serious memory leaks with mutter)
Wayland is "the future", but I don't bother with it. It has too many warts and lack of support. Screen sharing support is a hack that kinda works, except for Electron apps. X 'just works'.
I switched to XFCE away from Gnome 3 after becoming frustrated with Nautilus’s lack of type-ahead-find. I am perfectly happy with XFCE now. I’d be interested to hear from users with experience of both XFCE and MATE how they compare, as they seem to have similar design goals.
As a fellow xfce user, it's hard to get convinced by other alternatives because why they may have more polished on some things, the things they do worse will be really worse. You only need to fight one or two time with your wifi or Taskbar after an update to realize you just don't want to waste your time doing that.
With that said, for the part that work well Mate definitely feels like a cleaner nicer xfce.
I really really wish Ubuntu had decided to ship MATE as their default desktop at the time of the GNOME 2 to 3 transition, instead of trying to create their own DE, abandon it 4 years later, and then reverting on GNOME3 ...
I like XFCE and MATE but I decided to use Gnome 3 only because with XFCE and MATE I had some problems connecting a TV with HDMI to the computer. With some tweaking it works, but with Gnome 3 it works out of the box, as it does in Windows.
Yeah, I was just thinking of switching away from Mate on my laptop yesterday because of the external monitor experience. It was struggle to get it working, and once it does it is nowhere near seamless.
They're dropping python2 support for caja (nautilus) plugins so watch out if you have any python based caja (nautilus) scripts. Not that that's unreasonable. Just beware.
I'm still rocking MATE+Compiz on Arch and it's a pleasure to work with (as much as it was back in 2008). Really appreciate the work of all the devs who keep maintaining both of these to date.
It's funny to think about, I first used Gnome 2 in 2006 and I remember having to install XFCE on my laptop. My laptop only had 256 MB of RAM, so GNOME at the time was too resource intensive. My Desktop had 2 GB of ram (so it couldn't really run Vista when that came out), but it could run Gnome + Compiz extremely well.
I don't have that laptop anymore, but I now have a Thinkpad X200, which has 8 GB of RAM. So now Gnome 2 is "lightweight" since it can consume under 1 GB idling, and it is sitting at 1.7 GB with normal usage. I'm glad to see that some software hasn't been bloated up simply because the processing power exists.
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[ 244 ms ] story [ 2506 ms ] threadThe HUD(?) was a great concept allowing easy Dutch within an apps menus.
That's hardly innovation though since most DEs over the past 2+ decades that I can think of would let you move the taskbar (if they had one) anyway.
The problem with Unity was that it was buggy as hell, and the launcher was really badly styled. Huge gaps between icons, the search filter was unusable, etc.
There is an extensive post on the subject: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti.... It's tragicomic to read ("And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.")
I'd say that the GNOME devs have Jobs' ego and intention, but none of his talent(s). But at least they have branding™! /s
> Can we declare that GNOME Shell doesn't have themes, and prevent people from posting screenshots of GNOME Shell with a modified theme or with a modified top panel?
o_O
> Transmission has an option in the Desktop tab of the preferences to “Show Transmission icon in the notification area”. This should probably be removed.
I grew out of theming and tweaking the look of a desktop before I got to high school. These days the only tweaking I do on any OS is keyboard shortcuts. The baseline has gotten good enough to just not care, and my guess is that that's most users' position regardless of OS.
MATE is the spiritual successor to Gnome 2, which isn't as light weight (but they haven't tried to add things to make it bloated, and gnome 2 was never too resource intensive). It is taking ~700 MB idling on that same laptop.
If you want to replicate this setup: Start with Ubuntu Mate. Install i3 via apt. Select i3 on the login screen. In your i3 configuration add the following:
Welcome to the year of Desktop on Linux.If everything works now, Id be willing to try i3 when I install ubuntu 20.04.
Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar with a nice battery/volume/wifi etc. indicator? That work both when I click on them and via keys and with the icons visibly changing based on the current state?
Do all Windows open normally? Do they all fullscreen normally? Which don't?
Do you get any crashes?
Are there any WM-specific settings/fixes you have to tweak more often than once every 6 months?
> Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar with a nice battery/volume/wifi etc. indicator?
I've been using bumblebee-status for that and it works like a charm. It's very modular too: https://github.com/tobi-wan-kenobi/bumblebee-status
here are a couple of dotfiles:
.config/i3/config: https://pastebin.com/n9rAWNhf
.config/i3/scripts/i3exit https://pastebin.com/CxETEW9H
I highly recommend to use i3-save-tree to dump the json into a file (e.g. workspace_[number].json) to get your terminals (or any other applications) set up when logging in exactly the way you want.
sometimes the json needs editing (here is what it would look like in my setup):
.config/i3/workspace-1.json https://pastebin.com/7VGbQShy
The other way around is also possible btw (starting gnome/mate/xfce and starting i3 right at login. I personally preferred the parents way as well though (using xfce though)
You won't be using Wayland with i3 however, and weren't they going to prefer that with Ubuntu 20 and onwards?
On Ubuntu Mate, when you install i3, the login manager let you select it. There is nothing special to do.
i3 doesn't work on wayland. I have heard sway is a great alternative. I will have to try it one day!
For starting application I use a launcher called rofi via a shortcut. For status indicators and so on, I have configured the i3 status bar (i3bar) to give me battery status, cpu usage, different timezones of interest etc. The only fancy thing I did, was to use cute unicode glyph to indicate charging status ().
i3bar has a "system tray" section. Where nm-applet will dock its wifi indicator/control icon. And other chat and conference applications will dock theirs little icons.
I have no problem with any windows. You can customize everything either statically in the config or on the fly. For example, my chats applications are always moved to the scratch space area when running. I can summon them with a shortcut at any time from any desktop. I also have a shortcut to mark any floating window as sticky across any virtual desktop. This is useful for video conferencing, to keep the video visible at all time. Etc.
Windows seem to work as expected. Dialogs/pop ups show up as floating windows, but everything else worked well as a tiled window. Fullscreen worked fine. I haven't used a wide variety of apps. Mostly a few browsers and terminals, but I was doing some Qt dev in it, so I was playing a bit with windowing.
> Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar...That work both when I click on them and via keys...
From what I've seen of i3, all of the status bars are text printed from a separate program that gets executed periodically. This makes it very flexible and with things like font-awesome you can have emoji and icons, but afaik you can't click or have pop ups. Other tiling WMs, like AwesomeWM, will do this.
If windows don’t behave, I put them in floating mode with Super-f or Super-shift-f to toggle. As you say, full screen when they shouldn’t be, or vice versa. In practice, the only app I have issues with is Zoom.
The i3bar implementation, includes battery charge, network info, etc. a click takes you to gnome-settings, where you can make changes. One of the few changes I make to i3.conf is to move the bar to the top. Personal preference.
If you tried it and liked tiling before, regolith is worth a shot. It’s pretty well done.
Here is a blog post I wrote on how to do it: https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/mate-and-i3/
I also created a MATE panel applet so you don't need to have an i3bar.
Maybe it works if you remove and replace a bunch of settings and applets and whatever? I don't know but given that the second thing I did was already broken I didn't invest more time.
Ubuntu 18.04. Would not recommend to those thinking it will just work as expected.
When you say super key, do you mean the windows key? And hitting it opens up the main MATE menu? For me, it opens up as expected: https://i.imgur.com/dZzQt1t.png and choosing an item from it does the expected thing.
For the i3 mod key I use alt. Is it possible you have both MATE and i3 set to the same super/mod key?
[0] https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome
Literally didn't add anything or make it remotely MATE-like. I did not investigate further. Ubuntu 18.04. Would not reccomend if anyone else thinks it works out of the box after reading this comment.
It also saddens me that Red Hat insists on dumping its money in Gnome 3. I would love if they were putting their resources in improving something I actually use :).
I liken it to the total failure of the Flickr rewrite. Flickr could have been Facebook!
So... How did that happen? Who was responsible for setting Gnome dev back by half a decade?
GNOME 3 is performing well enough now that I have moved over to it. At its introduction, though, it forced compositing, and drivers were not ready. That coupled with the massive UI changes gave users good reasons to complain.
It's a prime example of privileged western developers overlooking the needs of their users.
The initial release was pretty bad, but it's gotten much better over the years.
In my world, extensions are required (at the very least, dash-to-dock). But extensions are a second class citizen and often stop working after an apt-get update.
And Gnome forces my machine into heavy swapping. Cinnamon (which is almost the same thing, but usable) doesn't cause swapping.
In any case, in my experience extensions aren't as brittle as you're implying, they generally only stop working after a major gnome version update (e.g. 3.32 > 3.34) which you wouldn't get through an apt-get update.
I haven't had any swapping issues at all, but I suppose this could be hardware dependent (e.g. nvidia drivers are known to cause serious memory leaks with mutter)
With that said, for the part that work well Mate definitely feels like a cleaner nicer xfce.
Maybe it's the age talking, but to me it feels like Gnome2/MATE is the peak of the desktop paradigm. Also Windows XP/7, in terms of UI/X.
People took the desktop for what it was and tried to make the most of it.
Nowadays most DEs, including Windows feel like they are made for a phone or a tablet.
I don't have that laptop anymore, but I now have a Thinkpad X200, which has 8 GB of RAM. So now Gnome 2 is "lightweight" since it can consume under 1 GB idling, and it is sitting at 1.7 GB with normal usage. I'm glad to see that some software hasn't been bloated up simply because the processing power exists.
Nowadays is either Fluxbox+rox+udiskie on Slackware/+hotplug-diskmount under OpenBSD.
Now we need these old icons adapted to the new XDG standards and I'm done.