echo export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0 > /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80overlayscrollbarsLog out and log back in and you have normal scroll bars again.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Quick Tip: Disable the Overlay Scroll Bars in Ubuntu 11.10
If you want to ditch those annoying overlay scroll bars in Ubuntu 11.10 like me heres how. Run the following command as root:
Log out and log back in and you have normal scroll bars again.
Log out and log back in and you have normal scroll bars again.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Ubuntu Dropped the Ball
As a long time Ubuntu user and a Linux enthusiast I can't stress enough what a mistake Ubuntu made by forcing everyone into using the unity interface. But luckily I don't have to, the community speaking loudly through it's actions. Distrowatch is now reporting that Mint Linux has overtaken Ubuntu.
It's really a shame because Ubuntu had the user base in place and was making strides to be more mainstream as a desktop operating system. It was starting to gain a business presence. I just don't see how they can convince business users to move to Unity. I can see folks moving to Gnome 2, it was proven, stable, reliable and not so different that business folks would revolt. But Unity is none of these things. On top of it Unity is just too buggy to be used. You see my previous post and personally I have given up on Unity and moved to Gnome 3. To be honest I am considering giving up on Ubuntu all together. It is just such a waste of the progress they made with Linux. To the point that it feels like they are alienating the community hat made them popular and business that have adopted them already. Of course this won't affect business users who are using the server release, which I suspect is the majority of business users.
To be clear I understand that Gnome declared Gnome 2 is dead and gave us Gnome 3, which is no small departure from Gnome 2 in itself. If they didn't want to move to Gnome 3 they had other choices than to just create a new UI. Other UI's exist and they could have used (XFCE/KDE/etc), they could have forked and took over Gnome 2. They could have moved to Gnome 3 and customized it (like Mint is now doing in their next release). But I certainly feel like they had better options than Unity.
Maybe they will realize Unity isn't what people want and correct themselves. Maybe this won't be the undoing of Ubuntu, maybe they will revert the Unity manifesto, maybe I am way off base and Unity will catch on, confetti will fall from the skies and users will start to love it. I think Ubuntu as a distribution was heading in the right direction prior to this Unity fiasco, so we will see where they go from here. Maybe it's time for all of the alienated Ubuntu users, like me, to try Mint or go (back) to Debian.
It's really a shame because Ubuntu had the user base in place and was making strides to be more mainstream as a desktop operating system. It was starting to gain a business presence. I just don't see how they can convince business users to move to Unity. I can see folks moving to Gnome 2, it was proven, stable, reliable and not so different that business folks would revolt. But Unity is none of these things. On top of it Unity is just too buggy to be used. You see my previous post and personally I have given up on Unity and moved to Gnome 3. To be honest I am considering giving up on Ubuntu all together. It is just such a waste of the progress they made with Linux. To the point that it feels like they are alienating the community hat made them popular and business that have adopted them already. Of course this won't affect business users who are using the server release, which I suspect is the majority of business users.
To be clear I understand that Gnome declared Gnome 2 is dead and gave us Gnome 3, which is no small departure from Gnome 2 in itself. If they didn't want to move to Gnome 3 they had other choices than to just create a new UI. Other UI's exist and they could have used (XFCE/KDE/etc), they could have forked and took over Gnome 2. They could have moved to Gnome 3 and customized it (like Mint is now doing in their next release). But I certainly feel like they had better options than Unity.
Maybe they will realize Unity isn't what people want and correct themselves. Maybe this won't be the undoing of Ubuntu, maybe they will revert the Unity manifesto, maybe I am way off base and Unity will catch on, confetti will fall from the skies and users will start to love it. I think Ubuntu as a distribution was heading in the right direction prior to this Unity fiasco, so we will see where they go from here. Maybe it's time for all of the alienated Ubuntu users, like me, to try Mint or go (back) to Debian.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
I'm done with Unity
I am a long time Ubuntu user. I have been using Ubuntu exclusively since the 8.04 release, and I have been using it on at least one of my PC's since the 5.04 release. I'll admit when the new Unity interface was released I was intrigued. I wanted to give it a shot. So I eagerly upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04. This was somewhat of a rude awakening, but I kind of expected that knowing Unity was coming.
It was a little buggy and totally lacked any sort of customization. I worked with it, and I really tried hard to give it a shot. I even got used to it enough that I tolerated the things about it I detested. I do not like the how the menus always appear in the top panel. I like how those menus are only visible when you mouse over them even less. I do not like dash, it is clunky, and I do not want to type to use my system application menu. I hate those annoying floating scroll bars. Despite all these issues I used Unity for 6 months during 11.04 release.
Fast forward to the Ubuntu 11.10 release. I was hopeful that Unity would have a bit more polish and customization available. Well, it does not, and it is less stable on top of it all. I am experiencing random crashes and unable to resume from suspend. After a few days dealing with it and installing updates hoping that would fix the stability issues I gave up and started using Unity 2D. Unity 2D is much better than regular Unity, stability-wise. Suspend/resume works without issue, and I don't really miss the effects. But now, what few customizations that were available via the compiz config settings manager Unity plugin are gone because Unity 2D is not running compiz.
This is about the time I got totally fed up. I have used Linux exclusively since 2000 or so and this Unity transition has just disgusted me to the point that I needed to make a change. I really didn't feel like reinstalling my machines to move to another distribution (luckily my other PC's are on the Ubuntu LTS release cycle and I don't have this issue them yet). Despite this I downloaded and burned a Debian install CD. I used Debian for a few years before switching to Ubuntu, I know Debian is great. You just have to do a few extra configurations as a desktop user. But as a last resort before doing a fresh install of Debian I decided to try some other window managers in my Ubuntu 11.10 install.
First, I tried KDE. It's not my first time using KDE. It works, but I feel like I would have to switch to all KDE apps and in general it's just not my favorite environment. This only lasted a day or two, I decided not to stay with KDE.
Next, I tried XFCE. XFCE is pretty good. It does everything I want, and runs GTK apps (to be fair KDE does too, they just don't quite look right in KDE). I felt like XFCE lacked a little polish, for example the lock screen defaults to the old looking X lock screen not some skinned lock screen. This is not a deal breaker, but I really felt the Linux desktop could be much more polished and complete.
The next step was to try Gnome 3 also know as Gnome shell. The first few hours I used this, I did not like it, in fact I hated it. I was looking for my taskbar with my open windows, I wanted to see a menu, I wanted to add launchers to the top bar like in Gnome 2. But after a day or two of forcing myself to use it, it really started to grow on me. I found I didn't miss the taskbar so much. I found I liked how the workspaces were automatically added. I liked the application menu, because all the apps were there with big icons in one big list. I found them easy to find, and if I wanted to drill down based on categories I could (I never use this feature).
At this point I'm about a week into using Gnome 3 and I think I am going to stick with it for while. I am comfortable with it already, and it is just starting to feel slick and modern. I'm pretty frustrated with Ubuntu as a distribution for moving the default UI to Unity, but at least I have a way to use a usable desktop now. So for now I am sticking with my Ubuntu installation and Gnome 3. I will say I am still considering moving back to Debian long term, but I may have to wait until the next stable release now, so I can keep Gnome 3.
It was a little buggy and totally lacked any sort of customization. I worked with it, and I really tried hard to give it a shot. I even got used to it enough that I tolerated the things about it I detested. I do not like the how the menus always appear in the top panel. I like how those menus are only visible when you mouse over them even less. I do not like dash, it is clunky, and I do not want to type to use my system application menu. I hate those annoying floating scroll bars. Despite all these issues I used Unity for 6 months during 11.04 release.
Fast forward to the Ubuntu 11.10 release. I was hopeful that Unity would have a bit more polish and customization available. Well, it does not, and it is less stable on top of it all. I am experiencing random crashes and unable to resume from suspend. After a few days dealing with it and installing updates hoping that would fix the stability issues I gave up and started using Unity 2D. Unity 2D is much better than regular Unity, stability-wise. Suspend/resume works without issue, and I don't really miss the effects. But now, what few customizations that were available via the compiz config settings manager Unity plugin are gone because Unity 2D is not running compiz.
This is about the time I got totally fed up. I have used Linux exclusively since 2000 or so and this Unity transition has just disgusted me to the point that I needed to make a change. I really didn't feel like reinstalling my machines to move to another distribution (luckily my other PC's are on the Ubuntu LTS release cycle and I don't have this issue them yet). Despite this I downloaded and burned a Debian install CD. I used Debian for a few years before switching to Ubuntu, I know Debian is great. You just have to do a few extra configurations as a desktop user. But as a last resort before doing a fresh install of Debian I decided to try some other window managers in my Ubuntu 11.10 install.
First, I tried KDE. It's not my first time using KDE. It works, but I feel like I would have to switch to all KDE apps and in general it's just not my favorite environment. This only lasted a day or two, I decided not to stay with KDE.
Next, I tried XFCE. XFCE is pretty good. It does everything I want, and runs GTK apps (to be fair KDE does too, they just don't quite look right in KDE). I felt like XFCE lacked a little polish, for example the lock screen defaults to the old looking X lock screen not some skinned lock screen. This is not a deal breaker, but I really felt the Linux desktop could be much more polished and complete.
The next step was to try Gnome 3 also know as Gnome shell. The first few hours I used this, I did not like it, in fact I hated it. I was looking for my taskbar with my open windows, I wanted to see a menu, I wanted to add launchers to the top bar like in Gnome 2. But after a day or two of forcing myself to use it, it really started to grow on me. I found I didn't miss the taskbar so much. I found I liked how the workspaces were automatically added. I liked the application menu, because all the apps were there with big icons in one big list. I found them easy to find, and if I wanted to drill down based on categories I could (I never use this feature).
At this point I'm about a week into using Gnome 3 and I think I am going to stick with it for while. I am comfortable with it already, and it is just starting to feel slick and modern. I'm pretty frustrated with Ubuntu as a distribution for moving the default UI to Unity, but at least I have a way to use a usable desktop now. So for now I am sticking with my Ubuntu installation and Gnome 3. I will say I am still considering moving back to Debian long term, but I may have to wait until the next stable release now, so I can keep Gnome 3.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Back in action!
Well after a few years of downtime this blog is back. Maybe this time it will even be useful, we'll see, don't get your hopes up.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
How to Reset Gnome to Default Settings
It is possible to reset Gnome back to default settings (Maybe you just upgraded your distro and want the defaults for that version). To do it run:
rm -r .gnome .gnome2 .gconf .gconfd .metacity
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