Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tung 5403 days ago
Forgive me for being dense, but why not choose the 'classic desktop' option at login, or 'sudo apt-get install gnome-panel' if it stops coming by default?

Is it a clash of ideology that caused you to jump ship? Because I find it hard to believe somebody smart enough to find, download and partition their disks to install Ubuntu would balk at the effort of customising their desktop to suit their needs.

2 comments

Nearly every problem with Ubuntu (or any other Linux distribution) can easily be solved by some sufficiently convoluted workaround. The combination of fifty separate fixes to make it behave how I expect it to isn't a solution.

In some cases, these fixes are more hassle than they're worth. I started digging through Nautilus to find where the "smart" sorting is, intending to rebuild, but then I'd have to do it on each machine I use, recompile every update, and so on. This is an acknowledged "closed, intended behavior" that I think is stupid and utterly contrary to Unix standards.

I don't balk at customizing it. You seem to be assuming I'm a newbie fleeing back to windows or something. I liked the days when configuration was in a text file (not XML) because at least then it was consistent and documented. The death of desktop linux is the gaping chasm between linux on the server and these crappy customized desktop distributions apparently trying to compete as "good enough for grandma, and cheaper than windows".

It is a forward looking decision. If the Ubuntu team is committed to making Ubuntu more confusing to use and introducing new bugs and breaking existing features and ignoring old bugs, it is better to jump over to a platform that issue heading in a better direction. It is sad that no major dev team is working on building a usable powerful system. It is a necessary consequence o the mainstreamization of computing, though. Every year power users are a smaller fraction of the user base and therefore more relatively expensive to support.
"_If_ the Ubuntu team is committed to making Ubuntu more confusing to use and introducing new bugs and breaking existing features and ignoring old bugs."

Sad thing is they aren't so your argument doesn't hold.