Linux: Ubuntu and the Unity Desktop

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

As many of you may know, I play with operating system decor as a hobby. I moved from Ubuntu 11.10 because I didn't much care for the Unity (Gnome 3) desktop because I want a menu, not a bunch of icons in flash out menus. So I went over to Linux Mint. Unfortunately, the people at Mint have very bright, low contrast themes, and I have rather poor vision. Even the high-contrast theme there was disappointing. So I continued looking and finally went back this week to Ubuntu 11.10, and today I loaded up a package called xfce, which is a rather old-style desktop group.

After installing xfce, the next time you boot, you can have your choice of desktops by clicking on the the gear wheel in the login dialogue box. I chose Gnome Classic. What do you know!? I got exactly the desktop I know and love, and it looks almost like Mint, except this facility has more themes. I am on a theme that gives me the contrast I need.

Now Mint is based mostly on Ubuntu and the difference is basically the desktop. Their gnome3 desktop presents some bad things on my system. For reasons unknown, most dialog panels are presented as parallelograms, very distorted and dual imaged. Clearly something about my graphics system, I am sure. With the gnome classic desktop on Mint, everything is more or less OK.

Somewhere in the development cycle however, the folks controlling desktop development and default software decided to take out a big chunk of the desktop controls. Mint put some of them back in so I knew they existed. So I went hunting on the repository and I found a package called gnome-tweak-tool. This contains all the stuff that was ripped out of Ubuntu 11.04. After installing it, I finally got the control over the desktop I needed. I needed to enlarge my fonts to 14 point because of my lousy vision.

So, if you have found that you don't care to have your Ubuntu Linux system look like some kind of MAC, you can get back to the "classical" menu format by following this writing. I hope this helps people, because I suspect that Unity desktop is here to stay.

[Alejandro24 575]

I really liked Gnome 3, and I don't have any kind of problem with it. Contrary to many people that thinks the opposite. The thing that I really liked of Gnome 3 is the new way for the menu.

This kind of things really depends only of the person.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I really liked Gnome 3, and I don't have any kind of problem with it. Contrary to many people that thinks the opposite. The thing that I really liked of Gnome 3 is the new way for the menu.

This kind of things really depends only of the person.

I agree it would be nice if it would run on my machine. Even after a full reinstall, the fonts were flaky. Must be something between the desktop and my graphics driver. Funny that the Gnome Classic desktop runs fine. Since there is no difference between the two desktops on Mint and Ubuntu, and the Unity desktop runs OK for me too, I am forced to believe that the Mint developers have committed some kind of arcane hiccup. I have similar problems with their Cinnamon desktop as well. This indicates some quality assurance problem on their part, I think. They don't have enough platforms to test on.

None of these operating system decors are perfect, but I like the one that is more perfect. Of course the Windows decor is getting worse and worse as time goes by. One gets sick of pearls cast before us swine.

Eh bien, mon ami. Chacun a son goût. Or "De gustibus non disputandum est".