How to make an earthquake in the Linux-sphere
April 7, 2017 12:44 AM   Subscribe

In a short post, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of GNU/Linux distribution Ubuntu has announced that the next generation desktop environment, Unity 8, as well as the phone and tablet OS effort (commonly known as Ubuntu Touch) are being binned. Further adding to the magnitude of the announcement, he reveals that the desktop OS will revert to using GNOME as the default desktop environment starting with the 18.04 release next April.

The enormous changes have led to significant job cuts at Canonical, which develops the OS and makes money (but still makes a loss) by selling support. The developments apparently stem from Shuttleworth's search for outside investment, requiring projects and staff counts to be scaled back.

The Red Hat and Fedora teams have reacted by offering a warm welcome (back) for the Ubuntu team. All parties stand to benefit from additional development of GNOME and the next-gen display server software, Wayland. In other news, the independent porting effort for Ubuntu Touch, UBports has vowed to continue work on the mobile OS, and a separate team has announced that they are forking the Unity8 environment.

The news comes after the commercial release of 4 phones and 1 tablet, 6 years after the initial Unity release, 4 years after the mobile OS was announced, and multiple awards, the last of which was barely a month ago.
posted by Juso No Thankyou (93 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
Yes! Now I might be able to use Ubuntu again instead of Mint.
posted by Zarkonnen at 12:49 AM on April 7, 2017 [14 favorites]


I don't care what they do, as long as they stop bloody fiddling with it.

People love stable environments.
A coherent user interface is a good user interface.
A constantly changing user interface is an incoherent user interface.
If you have to think about using the UI, it's a bad user interface.

kennethwilliamsstopmessingabout.mp3
posted by Devonian at 12:56 AM on April 7, 2017 [22 favorites]


How is KDE doing, by the way?
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:10 AM on April 7, 2017 [5 favorites]


Finally! A bit of sanity returns to the world.
posted by JHarris at 1:20 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


I didn't like 'convergence' and all the hullabaloo around it, but I understood it - with Canonical leaving the field, this just leaves KDE Plasma in the mobile-ui world, right?
posted by eclectist at 1:42 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think convergence is inevitable, and think the first company to do it very well will have a big head-start advantage, and though I was really enthusiastic about their indiegogo plan for their Edge device (and very disappointed when it failed), I get the sense that Canonical isn't going to be the company that cracks the code on convergence. Maybe it's the hardware itself that isn't up to the task yet, but it can't be all that far away.
posted by tclark at 1:53 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm not a big graphical desktop user ( Xmonad works for me ), but when Windows 10 came out I thought, "That looks a lot like GNOME3, good.", because GNOME doesn't suck as a window manager. Glad to hear that The System Works, and that they gave their idea a good try, but it's just not offering anything but duplicated work with little payoff.
posted by mikelieman at 2:24 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


this just leaves KDE Plasma in the mobile-ui world, right?
Well, there's Sailfish OS too.
posted by mattamatic at 2:33 AM on April 7, 2017


I didn't hate Unity and it did work okay on a touchscreen sleekbook I have, but neither shall I weep any tears.
posted by Samizdata at 2:38 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


People love stable environments.
A coherent user interface is a good user interface.
A constantly changing user interface is an incoherent user interface.
If you have to think about using the UI, it's a bad user interface.


From your lips to Apple's iTunes design team's ears.

I'll have to ask Linux-friendly Mr hippybear tomorrow morning what he has to say about this.
posted by hippybear at 2:39 AM on April 7, 2017 [9 favorites]


Finally. Unity was weird and slow and a waste of time for Canonical.
posted by octothorpe at 3:00 AM on April 7, 2017 [5 favorites]


I guess that it was a noble effort to try to develop phones not controlled by Google or Apple or Microsoft but it was always doomed to failure and a giant waste of resources. Mozilla did the same thing with pretty much the same outcome.
posted by octothorpe at 3:52 AM on April 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


A personal story:

I first encountered Linux around 1996/1997, when I was studying Comp Sci.

It seemed great - I was always curious about Unix, and could see the limitations of the MS-DOS based OSes of the time.

XWindows was a bit hard to set up, but I had a retail computer running Redhat 5.2 as my desktop.

Android is great - it's literally Linux running on everything, with a whole bunch of stacks and so on but ultimately it's the dream come true, as far as I can see.
posted by chmmr at 3:58 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Unity got a lot of undeserved hate I anyways felt. It seemed perfectly cromulent to be, and I thought unity seven actually used less resource than the latest gnome.

Mir, though, I never understood how they thought that would pay off.

I feel bad for Ubuntu sometimes. The distro scene would be radically different, and much poorer, without them.
posted by smoke at 4:05 AM on April 7, 2017 [9 favorites]


Can they trash systemd while they're at it?
posted by rmd1023 at 4:15 AM on April 7, 2017 [9 favorites]


So from a pointy-haired boss perspective, does this mean that "Linux machine" means "a GNOME machine"? There used to be KDE, but it's gone away? Google Trends suggests it hasn't...
posted by alasdair at 4:37 AM on April 7, 2017


Well there's still Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, LXDE, Xfce, ...
posted by octothorpe at 4:44 AM on April 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


This is where I feel out of step with the future. I'm making this post from a machine where my desktop environment consists solely of jwm, install size 120kB.
posted by clawsoon at 4:58 AM on April 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


Good — potentially very good — news, but Gnome isn't above pointless fiddling. Nautilus (which I think I'm supposed to feel bad for using) has lost a lot of functionality, including the easy ability to open a file with another program. “Open with …” is gone, replaced with “Open with other application” which pops up a clunky window more often than not not containing the program you need.

Unity Dash has slowly lost the ability to be an effective desktop search. This is a shame, as I rely on that feature on any OS I use. I shall switch back to Gnome ASAP, even if my immersion in the world of Raspberry Pi has given me a slight soft spot for LXDE. Please tell me you can still hide the top and bottom bars with the Star Trek door noise … ?
posted by scruss at 5:02 AM on April 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


I credit Unity for finally making me sufficiently tired of over-ambitious desktop environment bloatware to experiment with other options and discover that Enlightenment is still around and now actually good.

Here's hoping there will be some kind of similarly unexpected upside to Wayland.
posted by sfenders at 5:18 AM on April 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


When I built my new Linux box last year, I decided to go back from Ubuntu to Debian. After all, Debian is standard, whereas Ubuntu follows Mark Shuttleworth's cod-Jobsian pipe dreams of dumbing Linux down to something for the masses. Which is why we got the Fisher-Price-style UI of Unity and a search feature that calls up an Amazon page of deals on golf clubs when you search for “drivers”. (Yes, you can disable all those, but they involve googling Stack Overflow pages after each system upgrade.) The downside of Debian is, of course, that packages are on average 18 months out of date, a lot of third-party software (Apple's Swift runtime, for example, or various machine-learning frameworks) will only install on Ubuntu, and that unbreaking your Debian system is often as much part of the experience as setting it up Just The Way You Want It.

Now that Ubuntu is giving up on its dream of a universal easy-to-use UI for everyone, maybe I'll move back to that at some point.
posted by acb at 5:31 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Well there's still Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, LXDE, Xfce, ...

I switched to MATE on my Debian box, as the level of GNOME 2 (“OK, you can have the top and bottom of my screen for a menu and task bar; just don't touch anything else”) I can just about abide.
posted by acb at 5:33 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


...desktop environment consists solely of jwm, install size 120kB.

Recently added Arch linux to a dual boot thinkpad and after minimal poking around went with OpenBox which seems pretty lightweight footprint. But the only thing I use the menu system for is to launch an xterm (although I'd welcome suggestions on a lightweight shell where cut&paste isn't annoying :-)

I had an image on the background of a windowing system once years ago and noticed that I'd never see it other than during an occasional reboot. So why is it so important to waste resources with transparent shading graduated glitz? I guess I'm a crotchety olde skool dude but computers are to do stuff not swish and swirl.
posted by sammyo at 5:36 AM on April 7, 2017


Unity Dash has slowly lost the ability to be an effective desktop search. This is a shame, as I rely on that feature on any OS I use.

Cinnamon plus Albert is infinitely better than Unity ever was for that.
posted by fifthrider at 5:49 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


i3 represent!
posted by PenDevil at 5:51 AM on April 7, 2017 [9 favorites]


I was surprised how much the commenters at Hacker News cared about this. It's been really easy the whole time install alternative desktops on Ubuntu. I'm by no means a hacker but I've been using dwm since (I think) before the made Unity the default.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 5:56 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


  Cinnamon plus Albert is infinitely better than Unity ever was for that.

Doesn't seem to have the full text indexing that I'm needing, like Spotlight or Windows Search (or even Unity used to). Jef Raskin's leap keys 4 lyfe!

  I'd welcome suggestions on a lightweight shell where cut&paste isn't annoying

lxterm is pretty nice. xterm hurts to use these days.
posted by scruss at 5:58 AM on April 7, 2017


Thank. Fucking. God.

Always hated Unity. It's just so ... Fisher-Price.

Gnome was a plain-Jane Windows 7 lookalike that just fucking worked. And I was fine with that. Perfectly fine.

(still bitter that Unity wouldn't let you add new programs to its "open with this application" dialog without a totally unreasonable amount of finagling)
posted by panama joe at 6:18 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Mir needed a production release a few years ago to be relevant.

For me, Ubuntu has two things going for it:

1) Support by Steam and GOG, since I do want to complete Pillars of Eternity before I need to decide on the sequel.
2) The installer plays nice with my Frankenstein and unfortunately convoluted legacy disk partition scheme.

But currently my daily driver has been KDE Neon (based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) so I don't have a lot of skin in the Unity vs. Gnome debate.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:22 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


I kinda liked what Unity had become on the rare occasions I popped the desktop version in a VM. But broadly, Linux Desktop development looks too much like Twitch plays Developer for my taste.
posted by wotsac at 6:27 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Everything about how I feel about how Canonical has been handling the GUI is summed up by the fact that I was just fiddling the other day with Ubuntu in a VM and realized--I don't think I've done a fresh install with Unity in awhile and probably wasn't paying much attention the last time--that Unity in 16.10 defaults to having a link to Amazon on your taskbar, just permanently, but does not by default give you a link to your terminal there. I don't know what kind of user Unity is intended for, but it's not me.
posted by Sequence at 6:34 AM on April 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


I'll be the odd one out and say that Unity is my favorite DE and I will absolutely miss it. I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years at this point and have distro- and desktop-shopped as much as anyone. Once it got past the early clunky release and got some polish, Unity did the best job at keeping out of my way and giving me only what I needed. And it's easily the most keyboard-friendly environment I've used (without getting into the i3wm or ratpoison-style "anyone who uses a mouse should be disdained" sorts of things).

It's clean and tasteful, reasonably organized, has *usable* virtual desktops, and doesn't send things flying around in all directions if I brush my mouse the wrong way (I'm looking at you, GNOME Shell, on those last two) -- it's something that gets out of my way for daily work rather than looking pretty in screenshots but being a huge pain to use. I'm really not looking forward to the effort of finding something else and retooling it to be usable like that, so I'm hoping those principles will get carried over to the default setup for 18.04.
posted by fader at 7:00 AM on April 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


I've been using Fluxbox on Ubuntu since before the original change to Unity.

I still found the switch frustrating, because I felt that I needed to include a page of caveats every time I recommended Ubuntu to someone ("it has this weird interface, which some people seem to like, but if you don't like it, you can install a new one, or maybe you should just try one of these flavours to start with...").

I also strongly feel that Canonical tried to do too much at once with limited resources, and that the normal desktop use case suffered as a result.

I didn't see the point of Unity, and it felt like it was driven 95% by not-invented-hereism, but there's room for all kinds of desktop environments in the Linux tent (leaving aside the integration issues outside of Ubuntu, which may be eliminated if Unity is decoupled from Canonical and becomes a community project), so Unity in itself wasn't that big a deal.

I think trying to break into the phone market was the first major mistake -- hardware is hard, and it's quite a departure from providing software-only products. Trying to do both at the same time is risky.

(Unity feels very much like a phone OS in search of a phone, which was one of the reasons I dislike it on the desktop -- and the actual phone never materialised, which made this design constraint pointless.)

The second major mistake was Mir -- deciding to create a new low-level infrastructure layer in-house, instead of finding a way to work with Wayland, was inexplicable.

I don't doubt that the people at Canonical who have driven these projects had what they felt were excellent reasons, and on a personal level I feel bad that something they've clearly put so much work into has been canned.

But as a long-time desktop user, I am frustrated that the company spent years spreading itself too thin and pouring resources into controversial and risky projects which ultimately didn't pan out, when they could have spent all that time and effort on improving the stability of the distro and fixing bugs.

Ubuntu has emerged as the default distribution choice for beginners and the default Linux platform targeted by software creators outside the ecosystem because of its reputation for ease of use and stability and its existing large community (which translates into more support, good documentation and better package availability). I think maintaining this level of trust is crucial for the distro's continued survival.

Maybe just integrating existing components and fixing bugs doesn't translate into enough money for a business? I don't know. :/

In the short term, I am interested to see how the community reacts once the switch back to GNOME actually happens.
posted by confluency at 7:03 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Hello, fellow fluxbox user! There are dozens of us! Dozens!

Yeah, my os rec for a long time was Xubuntu, which does the work of installing the nice lightweight window manager for you. Saved a few of the word caveats, and reduced the time spent helping people install alternate window managers...
posted by kaibutsu at 7:27 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's worth noting the "What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?" Hacker News thread was created by Dustin Kirkland, who leads Product Management, on the day before Mark Shuttleworth's announcement. Dustin's written a follow up post thanking the community for the size of the response, as well as some analysis about the responses.
posted by fragmede at 7:31 AM on April 7, 2017


Archlinux + XMonad, represent!

I guess I'm not the target audience for this kind of stuff anyway. Though I'm sad to hear how these open source smartphone efforts keep failing. I don't think I could stomach getting a smartphone until one of those actually takes off. I guess I might be waiting a long time.
posted by Alex404 at 7:47 AM on April 7, 2017 [5 favorites]


I put off getting a new phone for quite a while waiting for one that could run this convergence thing, but it never happened. As far as I know there was never a single phone available that ran unity and that you could plug into a keyboard and monitor and use like a computer when you wanted - basically the whole use case for unity was never realized. Sad that they didn't even make 1.0.

+1 for xmonad, although I run mine on ubuntu and not arch.
posted by Ansible at 7:58 AM on April 7, 2017


My increasing frustration with "desktop" environments seemingly designed for phones was the final straw that made me give up Ubuntu and go (back) to Debian, then give up on Gnome 3 and go with Mate.

I thought maybe I was just being a stick in the mud about it, so I gave both Unity and Gnome 3 good long test runs and never got over the frustration, so if I'm a stick in the mud, at least I made a conscious choice about which mud.
posted by ernielundquist at 8:03 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


*Tear slowly rolls down quivering cheek, lower lip trembles for year of Linux Desktop*
posted by benzenedream at 8:45 AM on April 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


I don't especially care about the default desktop environment a distro ships, but dumping Mir sounds like great news. When it became clear that a replacement for X was inevitable, I jumped ship to Windows. Say what you will about how old & crufty X is, but "we're going to tear out and replace this complex core system component" always means "things are going to be broken for a good while." (And for what, so they could chase the smartphone market? That was never going to happen.) Hopefully having all development focused on a single successor means they can get it functional sooner.
posted by skymt at 8:47 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Hear hear, fader.

I too like Unity, and I too like its keyboard shortcuts. I expected to hate it when it first appeared, but it won me by being useful and mostly getting out of the way.
posted by kandinski at 8:47 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Finally. Unity was weird and slow and a waste of time for Canonical.

Unlike LXD, Snapd, and Juju?
posted by pwnguin at 9:07 AM on April 7, 2017


When it became clear that a replacement for X was inevitable, I jumped ship to Windows.

That makes sense. Just like all those people who left the Internet for SURFnet ten years ago when they heard IPv6 was coming.
posted by sfenders at 9:08 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


I've never used Unity much so no comments there, except that I could imagine liking it.

I run GNOME daily because I work for a GNU project, and I like the design of the GNOME desktop overall, perhaps more than any others I've tried, except..

(1) Cut & paste being different in applications (ctrl-C/V) and the terminal (shift-ctrl-C/V) is an abomination worth abandoning free software over and using proprietary software from a fruit company. Just use the damn Apple (command-C/V) key when running on Apple hardware already!

(2) GNOME is simply not that stable: It flakes out on mouse focus all the time, halting typing until you press ctrl-M or such to shock it back. And something similar frequently breaks login after sleep. Some extension crash it when running on Tor or another SOCKS proxy. Evolution has nasty memory leaks and needs resetting periodically.

(3) GNOME has questionable security priorities. As does Debian overall. And Empathy should be booted from Debian for refusing to support OtR.

Also, GTK is a crap archaic tool kit that should be replaced. I'm no fan of convergence on HTML and Javascript, but Qt has really tried to evolve. It's sad that KDE, the user interface based on Qt, remained suck in the 80s, while the evolving Linux under interface GNOME was built on top of an ancient sewer.

Now X11 must be replaced too, but really we need a new windowing system and graphical tool kits built from the ground up in Rust with a capability inspired security model. At first, it'd run on top of X11 because that's where the display drivers live, and it'd need an X11 comparability layer. but at least it could prevent X11 applications from ever interacting with one another directly.

As an aside, I think desktops like GNOME that seek convergence with mobile devices do take some inspiration from tiling window managers like Xmonad because tiling is exactly what you want for convergence with small laptops and tablets. There are seemingly not enough developers working on tiling window manager environments to copy good ideas from GNOME, phones, etc. to modernize the experience of Xmonad, etc. though.

Anyways I suspect folks who like Unity will like GNOME because they both attempted to modernize and took user experience more seriously than say KDE.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:10 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


One thing I've never seen people talk about is what specific features they consider to be essential for a usable desktop UI.

Here are mine: a desktop view of a folder for keeping files temporarily or for quick access (desktop folder), an easy way to list and start whatever GUI software is on the system (launcher), a task management applet of some kind like a taskbar or dock (taskbar), and a way to comprehensively browse all the user-accessible GUI settings (control panel).

Of those four, Unity is missing the desktop folder, and I found the launcher to be pretty much unusable. That is why I dislike Unity.
posted by JHarris at 9:13 AM on April 7, 2017


Of those four, Unity is missing the desktop folder, and I found the launcher to be pretty much unusable. That is why I dislike Unity.

I'm not sure what you mean by desktop folder. I have a smattering of PDF files on top of a wallpaper that show up on login because they're in ~/Desktop. Do you mean something else?
posted by pwnguin at 9:19 AM on April 7, 2017


That makes sense. Just like all those people who left the Internet for SURFnet ten years ago when they heard IPv6 was coming.

If the IETF had a long history of pushing out protocol changes before they were ready and breaking working systems as a result, then that might be a useful analogy.
posted by skymt at 9:25 AM on April 7, 2017


Now X11 must be replaced too, but really we need a new windowing system and graphical tool kits built from the ground up in Rust with a capability inspired security model. At first, it'd run on top of X11 because that's where the display drivers live, and it'd need an X11 comparability layer. but at least it could prevent X11 applications from ever interacting with one another directly.

A priority should be ripping the X11 Protocol out of the server and making it a separate user-space layer on top of a fast, GPU-backed system. (X was designed in the 80s, when it was taken for granted that clients would be thin, anaemic devices consisting of a screen, a keyboard, a framebuffer and just enough RAM and CPU power to do the UI, and the real computation would be taking place on big, expensive multi-user UNIX hosts; hence, the very core of the system consists of sending events and drawing instructions across a network. Cue Moore's Law, and there's more than enough RAM and CPU locally to dispense with this, except for niche cases like remote administration, which can be handled easily enough with VNC or similar services. Also, did I mention that when X was designed, the internet was a small, friendly academic/scientific environment, and the sort of security that's de rigeur these days on anything internet connected was an afterthought.

So yes, let's have a window server that runs entirely within the machine, has no concept of the network, and uses the GPU whenever possible (sort of like the one in macOS), and just presents windows/screen regions. Then on top of that, we can have drawing libraries, video playback libraries (with acceleration/DRM/whatever), and so on. One of these can be an X server which runs entirely on the client side (or even in a different hypervisor instance if you're paranoid), owns a few windows given to it by the window server, and translates between those and X Protocol traffic on the network (or to legacy X11 apps locally). Modern X apps which just use the X Protocol to grab shared memory with the local machine and then bypass it can be ported at the library level to eschew X altogether.
posted by acb at 9:40 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


GNOME Shell has a classic mode which is a set of configuration changes and extensions that mimic the traditional menu/taskbar desktop. If you use that then everything works as expected except for that blasted hot corner/activities button in the top left that switches to the fullscreen overview mode. If someone adds another extension to classic mode that disables that then I think it will all go uneventfully well.
posted by The arrows are too fast at 9:43 AM on April 7, 2017


Can they trash systemd while they're at it?

magic 8-ball says: snowball's chance. :-/

Does this mean that "Linux machine" means "a GNOME machine"?

Not a bit... 'Linux machine' might well refer to a server without a display attached or any support for anything but text on the console. And if you look at this summary of current major distros you'll see that most of them offer multiple desktop environments, with GNOME being a secondary choice in several cases.

(And of course there are cranks like me and several people who've chimed in above who don't use desktop environments at all.)
posted by Zed at 9:59 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Poor Linux. The idea of "year of Linux on the desktop" is now an old joke, but it really does feel like it keeps receding just out of grasp. I don't understand what Canonical thought they'd ever accomplish going their own way with Unity, but it sure feels like a lot of wasted time and effort now doesn't it?

I do all my real work in Linux shells, but the computer I sit in front of runs a mainstream consumer OS. I just upended everything and switched back from MacOS to Windows 10. It's gone mostly fine, but boy Windows 10 is still a shitshow. The font rendering is appallingly bad. But the main point is that with so much computing being subsumed into web browsers (or Electron apps) the importance of your desktop OS gets smaller and smaller. I think there's a real opportunity for Linux to succeed as a mainstream desktop OS, as it sort of has been doing with Chromebooks already. But then again, it's always just out of reach.

(To the derail; systemd is a fait accompli and represents a case of Ubuntu merging with the Linux consensus rather than against it. You may not like it but it's pissing in the wind to complain about it now.)
posted by Nelson at 10:10 AM on April 7, 2017


In my work it seems like more and more when i see Linux anywhere it's as a VM and it's running on a Windows or (more likely) Mac box, and they folks trying to stick it out as a desktop environment to work in have largely gone over to the second camp there. Where I do see it it's because someone didn't manage to score a Mac and so are limping along with Mint or whatever. Haven't seen Ubuntu in the wild for ages.
posted by Artw at 10:14 AM on April 7, 2017


I ran Ubuntu (on the desktop) at my last job.

It was great (except for when it wasn't). For whatever reason, I find myself to be considerably more productive on a lightly-customized Linux system than anyplace else.

However, laptop driver support can be shockingly terrible, although part of this may be related to the generally low-quality of Wintel laptops.

After struggling with the changes made by Unity and GNOME, I switched to KDE (which has significantly improved over the past few years, and now feels like a better-supported MATE or Cinnamon) for a while, and finally landed on i3, which I miss dearly. i3 is so, so, so great.

i3 is definitely a "power user" thing, but it's also a really good example of how to build an approachable system for power-users. It's conceptually simple, ships with a sensible set of defaults, and provides an exceedingly straightforward system for customizations (with the ability to quickly reload configurations on the fly, which makes experimentation easy and fun)

If you like the idea of xmonad, but find it unapproachable/overwhelming, give i3 a spin. [You'll probably want to read the tutorial and print out the keyboard shortcuts, but don't let that intimidate you!]

These days, I begrudgingly use a Macbook because nothing else can even come close to matching Apple's performance/weight/battery combination. Sigh.
posted by schmod at 10:46 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


This thread is giving me some serious flashbacks and deja vu. I was a heavy Linux user (and our workhorse servers are all still Linux machines) but I moved to OS X on the desktop before I really tried Ubuntu. But this list from jeffburdges:

(1) Cut & paste being different in applications (ctrl-C/V) and the terminal (shift-ctrl-C/V) is an abomination ...

(2) GNOME is simply not that stable ... flakes out on mouse focus all the time ... breaks login after sleep ... Evolution has nasty memory leaks and needs resetting periodically.

(3) GNOME has questionable security priorities. As does Debian overall ...


Wow. Is that really still the state of the art for Linux on the desktop? Because that's my lifeboat for if/when Apple decides to push iOS on the desktop (hopefully never), and it's not looking like a great lifeboat.
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:48 AM on April 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


Unity's arrival was what motivated me to try Lubuntu. LXDE was familiar. Then I replaced LXDE with XMonad. Now I'm using Archlinux + XMonad for personal stuff, Lubuntu + Xmonad at work. The coolest Linux guy I've met was running Archlinux + dwm on a MacBook, with a custom built external keyboard. I have decided that perhaps I am not quite willing to be that cool.

I guess the weirdness of Unity sent me into the weirdness of tiled window managers.

Thanks Unity. Thunity.
posted by Mister Cheese at 10:57 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


i3 is definitely a "power user" thing, but it's also a really good example of how to build an approachable system for power-users.

Honestly, Unity + terminator gets you virtually the same feature set, and doesn't require the reading of a manual to get started.
posted by pwnguin at 11:04 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm not sure what you mean by desktop folder. I have a smattering of PDF files on top of a wallpaper that show up on login because they're in ~/Desktop. Do you mean something else?

If Unity turns out to allow you to put files on the desktop after all this time I'm going to be rather irate. I haven't decided at who yet, might be myself.
posted by JHarris at 11:12 AM on April 7, 2017


Yes, those annoyances are real things that impact my Debian machine daily or weekly, RedOrGreen. I'll switch over to Subgraph OS in the near future because it fixes much Debian security idiocy.

As a Mac user, you'll find GNOME waaay nicer than the 80s interface provided by KDE, Mint's defaults, etc. Don't let me scare you. GNOME is nice. It's just buggy and messy due to technical debt, like most GUIs on Linux.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:13 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Gnome, KDE, i3, and Enlightenment are already moving to Wayland. Fedora now ships with Gnome/Wayland as the default DE. Ubuntu 18.04 Gnome will probably offer Wayland as an option, if not default. Of course, X11 will likely stick around for another 20 years.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:20 AM on April 7, 2017


JHarris: Just a random screenshot demonstrating files / icons on desktop. I guess since by default it doesn't include a "my computer" icon on the desktop, a new user might conclude that there is no desktop, but a simple right click lets you make new folders, etc.
posted by pwnguin at 12:00 PM on April 7, 2017


Yes! Now I might be able to use Ubuntu again instead of Mint.

You don't need to switch to a flavor to use a different desktop on Ubuntu. Just add the packages. I have a PXE installed version of Ubuntu here at the office and it has cinnamon, gnome, mate, xfce, kde, and unity all part of the initial install. When you do this, you can choose what desktop manager you want to use when you login and it will stick on reboot.
posted by pashdown at 1:15 PM on April 7, 2017


I have been running XMonad on Ubuntu for years without incident, originally with Gnome Do, then as that became abandoned, Kupfer. I don't mind Unity, but it doesn't suit me.

The prospect of the mainstream Linux world uniting on Wayland is good news.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:41 PM on April 7, 2017


RedOrGreen: Wow. Is that really still the state of the art for Linux on the desktop? Because that's my lifeboat for if/when Apple decides to push iOS on the desktop (hopefully never), and it's not looking like a great lifeboat.

Not... really? I mean, I don't want to invalidate anyone else's experience, but mine has been that if you buy well-supported hardware, the experience is far more stable than with Windows or OSX. The caveat is that "well-supported" here means "shipping with Linux", so things like System76 or the Dell XPS Developer Edition. (I guess the "control-shift-C" thing for copy in the terminal specifically is true, but that's mostly because "control-C" has been "kill this process" in Unix since long before copy/paste was a thing you could do on computers, so there's a solid reason for that.)

My current Dell XPS had exactly one awful issue, which was that because there is a key on the keyboard with the Windows logo on it, Microsoft made Dell disable that key completely in any other OS. Which was a terrible experience because that's the key that opens the dash to launch applications. (I mentioned before I love the keyboard shortcuts in Unity and don't like to use the mouse for most operations.) I swore loudly for about 5 minutes, Googled how to turn that key back on, and have had zero problems since, including with a USB-C dock providing power, multiple monitors, etc. through a single connection. My previous System76 machine had an Ubuntu logo key on the keyboard so didn't suffer from that issue (though it turned out to not like the glass of water I accidentally poured into it :( ).

My partner got a Macbook Air when she enrolled in school and had to update to a beta version of OSX just to get multiple displays to work on it, so her machine crashes about once per week and takes something like 3 minutes to boot every time. She's dealt with it for two years and walks around the house loudly complaining about how she's going back to Ubuntu as soon as she graduates.

So I guess the moral of the story is your mileage may vary, but a supported experience is a good experience.
posted by fader at 1:54 PM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Wow, there is, I believe, a higher than normal % of XMonad users in this group.
posted by mikelieman at 2:22 PM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


(I guess the "control-shift-C" thing for copy in the terminal specifically is true, but that's mostly because "control-C" has been "kill this process" in Unix since long before copy/paste was a thing you could do on computers, so there's a solid reason for that.)

Yeah, it's totally reasonable not to use C-c for copy in the terminal, and no one would reasonably suggest unifying on that. Not unifying copy/paste on something else though, is pretty awful, but I think it's a symptom of the way a lot of desktop linux conventions derive from Windows conventions. It should have never been C-c on linux to start with, and the only reason I can imagine it was is because that's the windows shortcut.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 3:48 PM on April 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


I use Ubuntu (mostly 14.04, but I have one 16.04 running as well) for personal use. Was using it at work but my team lead kept bitching about how nothing worked on Ubuntu, so I should use a Mac. And it was true, my Ubuntu system was an older Dell on a Dell docking station and taking it out of the docking station made everything cranky. And I had to run a Windows VM that froze the system frequently as it wanted all of the memory (I only had 8Gb and windows wanted 6Gb of that).

I switched to a recent Mac Book Pro (not the most recent one with the silly bar), it only had two external (usb-c?) ports and couldn't support two external monitors (for some weird reason). So I downgraded to a slightly older one with more ports (and more memory - the notion that devs should be running two or three VMS - including a Windows VM - on 8Gb of memory is just bonkers).

I don't much care for the Mac UI stuff, can't easily tile windows. Then the first thing I had to do was install a VM so I could run CentOS for our applications stuff - he said "Don't even try to run things on MacOS". Stuff I was running natively in my Ubuntu machine now breaks badly in native MacOS.

But even in Ubuntu I rarely ran Unity or Gnome. My WM preference is Awesome and every time in MacOS that I have to move windows with a mouse (and I am using Spectacles which makes it somewhat easier), I get cranky again.

I'm not a purist and use a mouse for most pointing and cursor movements, but use the keyboard for resizing windows and moving them around and I'll be happy if I never have to resize or move a window with the mouse again. I'm just kind of afraid that nice tiling systems like Awesome will get left behind in the Wayland move and I'll have to use yet another dumb Desktop Environment that Does Everything (and does nothing the way I want it to).
posted by Death and Gravity at 4:02 PM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


And of course, Microsoft and Apple CUA both conflict with emacs, nano, and a half dozen other editor keyboard shortcuts. All of that is zealously argued by home-row advocates who can't quite figure out how everyone from J.S. Bach to Victor Wooten managed to let their hands float across much larger input devices. (This digression brought to you by your inner typing teacher, a nun who should be smacking your wrists with a ruler any time you use a pinky in a key-chord. Unless you have the pinky fingers of The Rock, who could probably lift an entire Smith Corona with his mighty eyebrow, much less physically shift a typewriter paten with a pinky.)
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 4:05 PM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


(I guess the "control-shift-C" thing for copy in the terminal specifically is true, but that's mostly because "control-C" has been "kill this process" in Unix since long before copy/paste was a thing you could do on computers, so there's a solid reason for that.)

You highlight something with the mouse to copy, and middle click pastes. Or am I doing it wrong?
posted by mikelieman at 5:33 PM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


You highlight something with the mouse to copy, and middle click pastes. Or am I doing it wrong?

Ah, good old Snarf & Barf.
posted by fings at 6:00 PM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Unity was weirdly restrictive and weirdly colored, but it did large fonts well on the tv. That's all I can say for it really.

SystemD continues to annoy though, this evening even. Did you realize fstab ntfs mounts will not auto-mount under systemD without a directive in the comment field.

The Comment Field.
posted by pan at 8:59 PM on April 7, 2017 [6 favorites]


Back when the switch to Unity was announced, I was running the default GNOME 2 on my main laptop, and XFCE on various distros on my netbook. So at the time, with GNOME 3 looking like it would be a mess for a few years at least, I went over to XFCE full-time, everywhere. And I'm still with it now. There are two main reasons for this. One, I like having a reasonably modern DE, just without all the new and shiny bells and whistles that come along and break my workflow. And second, I want to maximise my vertical screen real estate. On multiple occasions, I've tried setting up a single vertical panel at the right side of the screen, in multiple DEs, and the results have ranged from perfect, to quite a lot wonky (think, the clock is oriented the wrong way) to, you can't even have a single vertical panel. I think you know which category Unity falls into here.

Manufacturers have been producing screens and monitors with widescreen dimensions for years and years now. For the life of me, I cannot understand why both Unity and GNOME (and others) insist on taking away that real estate at the top of the screen and not giving you an easy way, or a way at all, of changing it. I don't know about you, but when I load up any web article, I'd really like to see a little more than the advertising and headline before I have to scroll down the page. This is perhaps also an issue with 11" or 12" laptops, but still.

I won't miss Unity on the desktop, but it's been my daily driver on my phone for the past 20 months. I've had it on my tablet too, and while in both cases there have been a lot of rough edges to work through, it's allowed me to be productive without having Android. Especially on the phone, the gesture-based navigation is IMHO far superior to what you get elsewhere, and having used the convergence feature for actual I am at work, working, work, I think it's a tragedy that it's being flushed down the toilet.

It's easy to point out the glaring mistakes that got us here. If choosing to develop Unity wasn't a mistake, Mir certainly was. Already too much overstretching. For a small company, the phone and tablet project has certainly been exciting and to a degree, innovative. But to ship a decent product in the FOSS world would require a much wider community effort, well beyond Ubuntu devs. The trouble is, Ubuntu's "not invented here" mentality tends to alienate people, and more often than not leads to them talking down the product. Just look at how much coverage the phone got over on the Linux Action Show.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 9:28 PM on April 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


This. We're long past the point where Linux on the Desktop actually mattered. It's all re-heated '90s tech with various levels of window-dressing (or pointed lack thereof).

This does not mean Ubuntu will get better. This means FOSS for the average user gets left further behind, pretty much to the point where I can't see how they catch up anymore. There's no path forward. There's only a path to a prettier 1999 desktop experience.

Keeping your data and executables coherent between phone, tablet, desktop, television and cloud is an essential challenge, and a space where Free Software cannot be absent in if we want to keep having Free Software and control over our own computing environments.

Google, Amazon (with it's interfaceless platform Alexa) and Apple are so far ahead of where Linux and the Beasties are strategically, they might as well admit Linux for the end-user is useless for anyone but developers and network technicians.

Disappointing.
posted by Slap*Happy at 2:08 AM on April 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


WindowMaker 4 ever!
posted by jferg at 6:54 AM on April 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


Keeping your data and executables coherent between phone, tablet, desktop, television and cloud is an essential challenge, and a space where Free Software cannot be absent in if we want to keep having Free Software and control over our own computing environments.

One place where open-source can compete in this environment is in zero-knowledge, self-managed synchronisation. With surveillance-capitalist companies like Google, Facebook and Dropbox providing a free service monetised by increasingly aggressively data-mining the users' activities, and retaining the capability to decrypt and mine the user's content, and pressures from both shrinking revenues/needs to pay off investors and the expansion of war-on-terror mass-surveillance programmes into general fishing expeditions, systems where whoever owns the servers can't access your private stuff even if compelled to will have a competitive advantage. If you can verify the source code, deploy your own server, and know the full cycle of custody of the data (rather than just relying on trusting a company to abide by the letter and spirit of its terms of service and not change them opaquely once you're dependent on them). Of course, your typical Granddad Using His Computer To Catalogue His Stamp Collection (or whatever the canonical example) is won't want to care about the details of such a system, but others can package it up, adding interfaces and service contracts. And given that such a service would be openly documented, it can become an interoperable standard.

I suspect that being careless with personal data and privacy will be this generation's equivalent of smoking: something everybody does and regards as perfectly normal (and, indeed, not doing so as weird and uptight), and then discovers, far too late, that it was a bad idea.
posted by acb at 7:13 AM on April 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


WindowMaker 4 ever!

olvwm for the win! (Yes, OpenLook was a janky old technology, coded in vanilla C with hand-rolled object-oriented abstractions that are painful to look at (see also: the Athena Widgets, OSF/Motif, and most UIs coded before workable C++ compilers became common), but the visual design has an elegance that has yet to be matched.)
posted by acb at 7:16 AM on April 8, 2017


Oh, I loved WindowMaker back in the day. Such a clean look.
posted by octothorpe at 7:31 AM on April 8, 2017


Keeping your data and executables coherent between phone, tablet, desktop, television and cloud is an essential challenge, and a space where Free Software cannot be absent in if we want to keep having Free Software and control over our own computing environments.

I think that's a space where FOSS really can be helpful. I also disagree that Google, Apple, or Microsoft have been terribly innovative in their GUI designs. Possibly the largest innovation, the integration of search into the UI, isn't all that new and has been implemented on Linux.

I've been trying to wean myself off "the cloud" (or at least the big-data aspects) for a few months. Part of it is driven by two truths, "if you're not a paying customer, you're the product" and "there is no 'cloud' only someone else's computer." Also, I have a growing ethical concern that big-data capitalism is a research experiment biased to reinforce the status quo, or push it in ways that reinforce dependency and and cultural biases. I'm someone with some skin in the game of researching online sociability, and I'm a bit reluctant to participate in big-data's design experiments.

Nextcloud and Seafile work as dropbox replacements. Nextcloud has plug-ins for shared calendars and tasks as well. Syncthing is a peer-to-peer synchronization that works whenever your devices are in wifi range. KeeWeb provides many of the core features as Lastpass. The falling prices of both VPS services and network appliances might be helpful here.

It's also worth noting that big-data services are mostly built on FOSS foundations.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:59 AM on April 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


  You don't need to switch to a flavor to use a different desktop on Ubuntu

In theory, yes. In practice, you might hit a package versioning discrepancy. Last night I tried to install ubuntu-gnome-desktop, and my Ubuntu system would hang on reboot after it couldn't mount the “lernstick exchange partition”. apt-cache, apropos and Google couldn't turn up what it was and why I'd have it, so I ended up going back to plain old ubuntu-desktop.
posted by scruss at 11:04 AM on April 8, 2017


I think all of the major desktop environments are perfectly cromulent, with it just coming down to a matter of taste and personal preferences.

To me, Unity 7 is fine as it currently is. There were a few annoyances when it debuted, but those were ultimately fixed and I feel like it does a good job of getting out of your way. I do think it would have become a lot better if not for the effort expended on Mir/Unity 8. I miss the HUD a lot when using other environments.

KDE is also solid, and I have it running on Arch on my venerable T60 ThinkPad, where the combination performs astonishingly well on a nearly 10 year old laptop, though I don't use it very often any more.

I've only recently started giving Gnome 3 a fair shake again after I noped out of it when it first came out. Positive word of mouth about Gnome with Wayland on Fedora 25 piqued my interest enough that I've been trying out that combination for the last 3 months on the desktop I use about 60% of the time. I've now come around on it, and I actually like its workspace handling a lot, particularly in a multiple monitor environment.
posted by Pryde at 9:27 PM on April 8, 2017


Hmm. I standardized on Ubuntu a few years ago, in part so i could use it as a media box, and have more up-to-date user apps, like vlc and XBMC. Before that I used Redhat, then RHEL at work, and fedora at home. I switched jobs and all dev and prod was done on an old CentOS, 5, i think. I got most of the other devs around me working on ubuntu since its a little less daunting for java folks, and mostly it stays there. I never used unity. Hated it from the minute I used it. Slow, clunky, couldn't figure out if it wanted to be windows or OSX so there were too many stupid options for just dragging windows around. They had a package called gnome-session-fallback that you could just use the "old style". Until they renamed the stupid package to gnome-session-flashback.

So, lets see, I've used gnome, kde, blackbox, fluxbox, MATE, twm, xfce and LDXE. Right now I have 2 VM's on this computer (one work and one personal) running, lubuntu and gnome-ubuntu. I re-install a few times a year, or will spin up VM's for specific projects, but none of those systems were ever as awful as just using unity.

I do like 99% of my computer stuff in terminals with a couple browsers and eclipse if I'm doing java work, so there isn't really a huge difference in workflow between those, as long as I can turn off the menubar on my terminals so alt+f etc work the way I expect them. Anyway, unity still used too much real-estate with the stupid dock-side bar, and usually came loaded down with more crap than I ever wanted (like libre office, if I really need the damn thing I'll just install it, but I don't need it).

I hadn't heard Shuttleworths term "convergence" before, but it really stinks of the MS/Metro/Win8 fiasco. Just because a new platform is popular doesn't mean you should try to make every interaction like using a damn phone, its kind of missing the forest for the trees. Its like that stupid "hamburger" icon, that got popular on mobile web sites, and next thing you know everything in the G-suite has them, and some places have 2 or 3.

I don't think I would go back to gnome either at this point, but I haven't found quite the sweet-spot that using fluxbox back in the day was, but haven't quite gotten that to age gracefully. Lubuntu is working, and feels lightweight, but there is a tyranny of choice in just selecting a windowing system for my day job. Also, I occasionally need to actually open a file view to drag folders around and stuff, and can never keep it straight how to do that in different spots, so I end up just running nautilus or metacity or whatever its called just to get a single folder. Good times.
posted by lkc at 11:13 PM on April 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


We have hardware compatibility troubles with Dell XPS hardware, fader, not all Developer Editions, but always with wifi cards replaced, which afaik is the major change. I think the issue might be kernel updates that break support for older hardware, maybe because that older hardware worked, but never got proper tests, etc.

Apple hardware almost works under Debian with GNOME 3 and various proprietary drivers. I think the single biggest annoyance is that you cannot control the screen brightness, buttons work fine, but either the screen is on or its off, and writing to /proc/whatever has the same issues. I forget what other platforms I've encountered this on too. Also, I think the wifi works okay with vanilla consumer wifi routers, but crashes every few minutes with many enterprise wifi routers, including many eduroam configurations. It improves, but does not go away, if you find the sweet spot among the proprietary driver configuration options. Also, Linux power management sucks compared with Mac OS X, partially because Apple can more authoritatively shut down applications, but Apple hardware has big batteries.

I do believe OS X users will find GNOME 3 to be a fine user experience. It's definitely a "thinner" overlay than OS X in that you must manually install stuff more frequently. In particular, Apple has roughly two layers of options available from the GUI, the ones they advertise because they expect you want them, and the ones they hide behind the command key.

I think Linux still win on package management. Apple's vendored approach with /Applications reduces complexity but wastes memory. I've repeatedly shot myself in the foot with apt-get, dpkg, etc., but mostly that's due to running Debian stable with bits from testing. I think users should run Debian testing, not stable. If you do run stable, then plan for clean reinstalls. Interestingly, I think MacPorts never once dug itself into such a deep whole as to require a clean reinstall, but it gains some insulation by not managing the whole system. And MacPorts is must closer to Debian testing than to Debian stable with pinning rules to allow some testing.

I cannot fathom why nobody fixed the shift-ctrl-C idiocy on Linux. Ain't like you must remove ctrl-C/V to add key combinations that do the same thing. I love X11's mouse based cut & paste on a desktop, but it does not work on a track pad.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:46 AM on April 9, 2017


I love X11's mouse based cut & paste on a desktop, but it does not work on a track pad.

That's why I use a Microsoft Mouse with my Macbook when I'm running Linux on it. If I'm at my desk I have an MS keyboard too so that I have a right-side Control button for vimming.
posted by octothorpe at 6:30 AM on April 9, 2017


SystemD continues to annoy though, this evening even. Did you realize fstab ntfs mounts will not auto-mount under systemD without a directive in the comment field.

I spent 5 hours last night fighting with a centos 7 container. In the dockerfile, you install httpd, and httpd creates a /var/log/httpd directory symlinked from /etc/httpd/logs

But then journald does some crazy shit where it creates a persistent /var/log/journal , but before mounting /var/log/journal/hashvalue it, remounts a tmpfs over /var/log hiding /var/log/httpd.

So, you know, systemd's docs say link the /usr/lib/tempfs.d/var.conf file to /dev/null

Nope.

and then a few more hours of finding some post pointing me in some direction, building a image, restarting the container, shelling into the container, not seeing /var/log/httpd over and over again.

Eventually I gave up, and changed the symlink in /etc/httpd/logs to point to a newly created /storage/logs.

What Lennert needs to do is learn to produce Andrew Tridgell/SAMBA quality documentation.

systemd/logind/journald all work, but man, we shouldn't have to "Read The Source, Luke" to figure out how to get it to work.
posted by mikelieman at 7:02 AM on April 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


There do seem to be quite a few XMonad people here (makes sense, believe MeFi was where I first heard of it).

I dislike Unity. But I'm lazy, so I tend to just install xubuntu on a new machine, then install flux and xmonad since I tend to switch around a little depending on what I'm doing.

Never was a huge fan of Gnome either, come to think of it, although I remember being impressed by KDE back in the Mandrake days.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:41 PM on April 9, 2017


I used to use WindowMaker for a long time. Unfortunately, while it was included in the packaging system, it tended to not mesh with the rest of the system. Default server configuration changes would break it, for example.

So I finally gave up and switched to the Fedora default, which was GNOME 2. This was enough like Windows (which I'd had to use for work) that it wasn't really a problem adapting to it.

Of course, that was when Fedora switched to GNOME 3, which had a completely different UI model.

That was what finally prompted me to pull the trigger and switch to Ubuntu, which still used GNOME2. Of course, not long afterward, Ubuntu switched to Unity and I ended up jumping to XFCE via Xubuntu, which is what I've been using ever since.

My point here (beyond "Hear ye all my tale of woe") is that as someone who just wants to get stuff done, switching to a different set of fundamental UI principles will seriously disrupt my life and I'll make a serious effort to avoid that.

I ended up switching to XFCE because it was stable, supported and sticks to the Windows-style UI. New stuff may be better in the same way that Dvorak is (allegedly) better than QWERTY, but I'm trained on the existing system and I don't want to be forced to switch.
posted by suetanvil at 2:18 PM on April 9, 2017


Meh. Amazon has a new personal computing platform that doesn't use a GUI with a mouse/trackpad. Or a keyboard. Or a monitor.

Getting doctrinaire about window managers is shuffling deck chairs on the titanic.
posted by Slap*Happy at 11:43 AM on April 10, 2017


Getting doctrinaire about window managers is shuffling deck chairs on the titanic.

When Alexa programmers start programming Alexa using Alexa, keyboards and monitors and mice and window managers won't matter anymore.

Might be a while yet, though. "Let me read you back the for loop you just asked me to construct. For open-parentheses eye equals zero semicolon..."
posted by clawsoon at 12:00 PM on April 10, 2017 [5 favorites]


Apple hardware almost works under Debian with GNOME 3 [except for the
screen, wifi, battery and keyboard].


Is there a word for feeling PTSD for other people?
posted by jjwiseman at 2:46 PM on April 11, 2017 [4 favorites]


When Alexa programmers start programming Alexa using Alexa, keyboards and monitors and mice and window managers won't matter anymore.

Might be a while yet, though. "Let me read you back the for loop you just asked me to construct. For open-parentheses eye equals zero semicolon..."


Oh, you're going to trot out those ableist tropes... again?

Well, for one, let me own you utterly. In emacs, no less. For another, as a programmer into tools, watching that, you are undoubtedly seeing how unoptimal almost every language is for the unsighted, as well as those who cannot master the keyboard. Right down to bad syntax dependencies - line noise as grammar sucks.

Expand that empathy to just people in general. Line noise as syntax, based on '60's era typewriters may not be a good place to begin to empower them. No, whitespace is not better. It's just '60s typewriting tech by another name.

Your adherence to ancient keyboard technology and windowing tech devoted to it is admirable. It's religion, not good coding practice.

If you really want to get into it, let's get into the entirety of "Unix In A Nutshell" etymology. It's all so stupid...
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:51 PM on April 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


Fascinating, Slap*Happy - that's something I hadn't thought about, though I should've. My intuition is that if I were blind, I'd prefer a touch interface, but that shows my limited imagination - especially considering that my one personal datapoint was a legally blind friend from school who used large fonts with high-contrast colours, eyes an inch from the screen, and owned thuswise.

What's a good alternative to line noise and/or whitespace as syntax? I don't know many programming languages, but all of the ones I know use one of those two, and I'm not good at imagining other options.
posted by clawsoon at 6:01 AM on April 14, 2017


LISP and APL are interesting, as they approach it from opposite ends.

While you do get some syntactic prosctiptivism in LISP (the bang and the whack most typically), you're basically only using one separator, the parentheses, to generate s-expressions. These can be built and re-arranged very quickly, so long as you remember you're not dealing with open and close parentheses, but you are including and separating items from a collection (A list, that you are parsing, if you will.)

Modern LISP editors are mostly terrible and generally EMACSian, but they do some interesting things; check our this intro to Paredit, and skip down to the section on Slurping and Barfing, and follow along from there.

You can see how it turns "endless brackets" into individual items that can be considered, combined or separated. They don't need to be brackets - it can be literally any delimiter you can think of, from a colored bubble to a buzz on a haptic-enabled display. Navigating and modifying them require a single key combination easily replaced with a single word command, and there aren't a lot of them needed to whizz around and modify your code.

On the other hand, there is APL which is almost entirely special characters. Each one is designed to reflect the properties of a mathematical symbol into the language. Each symbol has a name, and will be used for two different operations, depending on whether it appears by itself (monad) or in conjunction with another symbol or data (dyad).

There is very little re-use of symbols, and very little time spent on structure and format of the code. Each line is insanely expressive, and will require some adjustment in how you look at iteration (again, completely opposite of the way LISP does it.) While there is a lot of punctuation, it's very specific in its purpose, and not there to make a short-hand for an unrelated programming concept or an attempt to visualize modality within the language (most C-derived languages spend a lot of effort putting you in different modes to do different things, and waste most of the punctuation on cuing the programmer what mode they're in now.)

APL-like languages that don't use the APL symbols, like K, have a problem opposite of the one we're considering - it's all nonsense typewriter keystrokes that each have a name that makes sense when combined in the proper formula. It would be easier to convert K to work with a voice interface than to learn the key combinations! (Drop 2, the down arrow symbol in APL, is easier to say and remember the meaning of than _2 in K. You're concentrating on what the program is doing, not how it's interpreting typewriterese.)

While APL and its even more weirdly expressive progeny may be niche enough to be a non-starter, LISP is still thriving in the underground, and modern LISP tools offer ways to conceptualize code that isn't dependent on punctuation or even ASCII.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:19 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


You can get an idea of APL and how it works in this regard with this Conway's Game of Life implemented in a single line. When he starts narrating the line, addressing each item in order, you can see how this slots into a non-text editing environment.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:30 AM on April 14, 2017


I don't think there's ever going to be a single interface for all people or use cases, and I say this as someone who spent half a year trying to edit English via speech recognition.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:53 AM on April 14, 2017


« Older Honk   |   Park/Life Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments