It's nice as always, but I have some issues.
* Select - Middle-click paste does not seem to work
* When something requires a password (ie just tried a bitlocker volume) the whole screen is blocked, so no password manager for you (unless you copy it before, or cancel - unplug drive-copy password - replug drive - paste.)
* The default tiling does not jive with me, sometimes I don't even know what it wants (it always tries to force you to also set a left windows if you tile right and vice versa) so I disabled it `gnome-extensions disable tiling-assistant@ubuntu.com`. Default Gnome tiling is ok (but missing quarter tiling (and 1/8th would be nice on my ultra-wide) imho so I use [0]
* I've been trying to use Nix home-manager for packages but I have GPU errors, need workarounds, icons that just remain generic. But I guess that is not Ubuntu's fault.
Ubuntu remains my nr. 2 choice, after NixOS (but I didn't get the latter to install on this Nuc, perhaps a bios update will help).
The installer offered (under experimental) to run root on zfs, I didn't end up selecting it because only on the forth try (and by that time you're clicking at a fast rate just taking defaults) I understood that it would only download packages via wifi, not the cable (same for NixOS installer, so must be my network).
Select middle click not working is a stupid decision from GNOME to disable in 50. You can turn it back on with the tweak tool.
I just use KDE on arch, though for a little while it was glitching out on me frequently, idk if I've been too busy to notice it recently or if they finally patched it up.
I miss KDE 3.5 it felt drastically more stable than KDE today.
I've tried other DE's but they get weird if your Distro is not built for them.
Why do we still put up with GNOME?
I've spent the last 10 years off and on from Linux. Had I used something other than GNOME, I believe my experience would have been better.
I've been on KDE for the last 3-4 years and things work so well I could never imagine going back to GNOME.
I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu.
I have put my parents on Ubuntu (gnome) in 2013 to replace windows XP. My mother is 88 now. I think it is the perfect fit for her (dad is dead years ago).
I use ubuntu gnome because tweaking my computer is not where I want to spend my time. YOLO. Using a "mainstream" desktop that can be explained to "non specialist" has its benefits. I accept to suffer some annoyances and there is always a way to fix the most annoying ones by sacrificing time.
>I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu. Then who is? Normies buy iPads and casuals stay on Windows. Is this why Linux can't gain any market share?
IMHO, Ubuntu is trying to gain market share by targeting non-experts — making Linux simple enough for normies and casual users. Casual users are generally less likely to mess things up on Ubuntu than on Windows.
Every time I run Ubuntu on a computer it always ends up in a state where it does not boot after a few months. This has happened on multiple computers, none with nVidia GPUs, over a period of a bit over 15 years. I don't do anything funny with my computers. No custom kernel, no weird kernel modules, no trying to shoehorn in 3rd party repos intended for Debian, etc. The last time I tried was last year, when I got a new job and my work laptop came with Ubuntu 24.04. Sure enough, after a few months an update made it unable to boot. I have not had this problem with any other distro. I switched the laptop to Fedora and it's worked perfectly fine. This makes me question the logic of trying to give Ubuntu to novice computer users.
Yup. And this is no bad thing.
This isn't true any more, and hasn't been for some years, you know.
It was true but times change.
Microsoft chose to kill off Windows 10, which it once promised would be the last desktop Windows ever. Its replacement is bigger, slower, stuffed with adverts and upselling attempts, and has an artificial demand for TPM 2.
That's driven thousands of people to check out Linux, and if you don't know anything about Linux, then Ubuntu is the number one best-known distro. Many techies dislike Snap (to the extent of spreading lies like "it's not FOSS"), but it makes version upgrades safer, which matters more to non-techies.
(I say thousands so the pedants don't shout at me, but I suspect the reality is at least hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.)
Linux Mint is friendlier, yes, and so is Zorin OS, but both are based on Ubuntu.
Valve has sold millions of Steam Decks, which demonstrate that it's now possible to run premier new Windows games on Linux with performance at least as good as on Windows. All Linux users know their hardware runs faster and cooler with Linux than Windows anyway.
Chromebooks (which are as cheap as laptops get) outsold Macs (which are expensive) by revenue in 2017 in the USA and within 3 years in the rest of the world. ChromeOS is a desktop Linux, based on Gentoo. It has hundreds of millions of users who have never heard the word "Linux".
Companies with cloud-based IT are deploying ChromeOS Flex as a response to ransomware attach. (E.g. Nordic Choice hotels.)
Many of us see Ubuntu's characteristic desktop in shops, bars, travel stations and things regularly now. I hear its startup sound on trains. I have totally non-techie friends running Ubuntu at home. I've given Mint to lots of mildly technophobic friends and they get on just fine.
It's not over, but the year of Linux on the Desktop came about a decade ago, and the penguin taleban were too busy in-fighting to notice.
Snap is TERRIBLE for non-technical people. Imagine installing an image editor via Snap, and then the default sandboxing making it unable to access the images on your media drive. No errors, it just silently fails.
This has been a problem I’ve dealt with on nearly every single Snap I’ve installed. If you’re a file editor, you must let me edit my damn files!
I often hear things like this, but I never encounter them myself.
I've run every single version of Ubuntu ever released. Work machines stay on LTSes, testbeds run interim versions.
After the 22.04 release, I carefully de-snapped my work laptop, using `deb-get` to install native packages of everything. Worked a treat, took less disk space, things started a tiny bit faster.
Then I enabled Ubuntu Pro and it force-reinstalled snapd. It's fair enough to have it as a dependency: it's a standard component. I was very annoyed, though.
But when I upgraded to 24.04, a lot of things broke. I had to spend ages re-enabling repositories, getting new keys, changing version strings in stuff under `/etc/apt/sources.list.d` and so on. It's a PITA.
So I have performed a volte face. I removed all my `deb-get` packages, and reinstalled the snap versions. All my comms and messaging apps, music and media players, and so on.
It's much easier. No extra repos. I experimentally took one laptop from 24.04 to 24.10 to 25.04 to 25.10 and yesterday to 26.04. All my apps stay in place. Nothing broke. No custom repos. No changes needed to any config file. It just works.
I've been using Linux for 30 years, starting on Slackware and moving to Red Hat and Caldera and SUSE via lots of others. But I'm old and grumpy and I want stuff to work without fiddling. I want low maintenance. Snap is low maintenance. My messaging apps can download stuff into my Downloads folder, open attachments from Documents, and so on.
I run native packages of my own browsers (Waterfox and Chrome) and AppImages of Panwriter and Logseq, and I have none of these difficulties.
Life is easier if you don't fight the OS and the vendor.
And Ubuntu is still easier and less hassle than Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, or any of the other big names.
I find it hilarious how much religion is put into Gnome vs. KDE in this case. I did use both. I honestly have no strong favourite. After that many years of Linux desktop environment DE hopping I came to the conslusion that the DE should get out of your way and allow you to focus on your work.
Both Gnome and KDE support that. Actually Gnome a tad better as it gives you less knobs to turn an waste your time. Accept the defaults and if defaults are bad move somewhere else.
I pick the software best for my uses and then look at which desktop supports that software and workflows around them the best. Not always clear/clean selections possible in my situation - I've a jumble of GUI designs and frameworks used, so I favour a more agnostic desktop.
> Why do we still put up with GNOME?
Because maybe not all people have the same preferences as you?
Preferences don't form in a vacuum though. There's a perception that GNOME is the "good environment" which means its decisions get treated as more important than other DEs' when things change: and that's somewhat self-reinforcing.
Distro: "The most used DE needs first class support, we should probably bend to it" → Distro: "We should probably make this DE the default since it's so widely used and supported" → User: "I choose the default" → Distro: "The most used DE…"
So yes, people have different preferences; but if your preference is GNOME today, it might not be GNOME tomorrow, and "I picked the default" isn't quite the neutral signal it looks like.
There's much more to the story. GNOME is a sort of authoritarian organization known for their antisocial behavior: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... (and there's much, much more).
Since GNOME is the default Ubuntu DE, they have a certain responsibily to listen to the users/devs and leave the system open (to an extent). But their direction is the opposite:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210901171117/https://twitter.c...
They've been doing massive reduction in functionalities, really insane like limiting copy/past of terminals just to the current screen (which hurts any sysadmin), generally without any way to enable them back.
I haven't heard of any other OSS organization trying so hard to limit freedom of their users/devs, and this is an explicit goal - they don't want to weaken their brand.
GNOME is nothing short of the Oracle of open source.
A distro making your project the default doesn't give you any responsibility.
I fundamentally agree with you. I don't think responsibility is quite the right word. But if they don't seem to care about a massive portion of their users, why are they building gnome at all?
I agree that responsibility is the wrong word, but I've also noticed there's certainly some form of expectation, social responsibility, or care that other projects have and gnome has always lacked. When I started using Linux it was the desktop I liked the most, but some of the choices seem almost hostile or intentionally designed to drive current users away, and unlike most other projects I've used, I've never seen them listen or make improvements based on any feedback from users.
Who is "we"? I find GNOME great.
On the other hand, I'm not a fan of people disparaging free open source software that they've never contributed anything to, either money or code.
I agree. GNOME used to be perfect, now it looks and feels like it's been designed by someone who's never used a computer.
I wish Ubuntu would just give up with GNOME and switch to something more sensible.
Been a long time i3 user. Usually works well if you put in the initial time. But of late been very happy with Xubuntu (xfce)
Why not both? XFCE + i3 make a great pair.
I use XFCE too, simple and doesn’t get in the way.
I had to migrate away from Xubuntu (xfce) due to the poor HiDPI support. Kubuntu (KDE/Plasma) is now my current desktop of choice.
Because Cinnamon exists and has a delightful commitment to functional minimalism.
UI designers got it right with a taskbar on the bottom and widgets to let you know what you have open at a glance without having to move the mouse across the screen or press buttons. For a multi-application PC desktop thats the right model. Not for phones ofc, they need a different model. Trying to force the phone model on the desktop PC model just doesnt make sense, not now, not then, not ever.
edit: grammar, also Cinnamon fixes these issues thankfully.
Glad you like yours. I like (Vanilla) Gnome + PaperWM.
But seriously why would they disabled the middle mouse copy paste buffer by default? Anyways, gnome tweaks to the rescue I guess
[dead]
It is a preference - and not everyones. I always hated middle click paste, middle click is amongst the first thing I remap on my systems to do the macOS "exposé"-style of window rearrangements. Other people will have other preferences.
I suppose you use Super+Middle Click? Not a bad idea, I dislike hot corners, and the "exposé" feature of niri is quite good. I might actually remap it to Super+Middle Click.
(I use Super+side mouse buttons to move between workspaces, I hate the keyboard-centric workflow when one hand is always on the mouse)
I don't use Super. Middle click (Button 3) = expose, Button 4 = workspace to the left, Button 5 = workspace to the right. Requires a good mouse with accessible button 4/5 of course. No key modifier.
What about software that uses those buttons? I.e. web browser? (middle click = open link in a tab, side buttons = forward/back history)
No software I use, uses these buttons for anything integral by default, neither on Linux nor Mac. And if they do, the OS has precedence. On macOS I use BetterTouchTool for those mapping, you can define exceptions for individual apps.
I hate that its somehow different from ctrl v paste, that's what makes me angry more.
Probably changed to work the same as macos. Not sure if windows does middle click paste.
> Not sure if windows does middle click paste.
It doesn't. X was the only place I know of where that was a thing.
...and it's a great thing. Turning it off is another one of those GNOME decisions that are only made because the same feature does not exist in MacOS.
To you it is, plenty of people -including myself- don’t find it so. And considering the ratio of MacOS+Windows desktop users to those of ‘nix (an increasing number of which are new converts), middle clickers are a minority here.
But hey! At least they are only flipping defaults, not removing the feature outright, like they did type-ahead search. [Insert angry rant here]
That is gnome's standard play: move a feature to a preference (“you can just turn it back on”), remove the preference from the control panel (“you can still turn it back on using ‹whatever conf backend they're using this year›”), and then finally remove the feature (“you could only turn it on by using an unsupported mechanism, and ‹conf backend they used last year› is deprecated anyway”).
I agree with the point about this being configurable.
About your first point, however, keep in mind that "middle click insert" has been the default behavior in X since the 1980s, long before Windows or current generation MacOS's were around. To me, this is such a basic functionality, I would compare it something as fundamental as CTRL-X/C/V for cut/copy/paste on Windows.
As a trackpoint user, I am glad it's off by default.
Because of scrolling on Thinkpad keyboards (using the middle click), I had to turn that feature of every time, especially while working on longer documents I would otherwise accidentally paste stuff at random places.
(It's not just macOS.)
No way, José.
From where I sit I have 5 Thinkpads set up within reach, and I have a few more in other rooms. They are by far my preferred laptop.
Most run Ubuntu as their default OS, most have the trackpad disabled because I usually use the trackpoint for everything, and on all of them I use middle-click to paste extensively.
Glad you're less clumsy than I am. :-)
The accidental pasting definitely kept happening to me, likely due to my bad habit of highlighting sections while to focus on them.
I’ve used a thinkpad for 26 years, 18 with Ubuntu. I’ve always had middle click enabled.
I like middle click copy/paste but I really don't mind the change as long as I can still configure it with gnome-tweaks.
I was never a fan of it. I always turned it off. And now it also freed up middle click for auto scrolling which is actually great, especially when the scrollwheel is somewhat broken.
As someone that habitually highlights what they are reading it was generally beyond useless for me. It was actively making me mad when I accidenatally pasted some non-sense because I just highlighted a paragraph before and accidentally inserted it into something.
> only made because the same feature does not exist in MacOS.
Or in anything that's not X?
Speaking personally for me only, I don't think it's a great thing. The <however many> clipboards on Linux is... not really a great thing. I for one never know which of the buffers contain what. And this is compounded by the fact that selection may or may not overwrite what's in one of the buffers, and middle click may or may not paste whatever was in that buffer. Additionally compounded by how inconsistent the behavior is across apps.
Sure, de gustibus non est disputandum.
I, for one, use the different clipboards concurrently all the time, with "highlight & middle-click" probably being the one I use most often. It's the most convenient for me most of the time:
- only two interactions (one drag & one click)
- completely mouse-based (no keyboard interaction necessary)
- hence only requires one hand (look, ma!)
> Sure, de gustibus non est disputandum.
Bo! Let's fight! And both get banned from HN :)
Did they publish some rationale somewhere? It’s a useful feature.
Neither Windows nor macOS have it, so it's surprising to new users. If your target market (as in support contracts) is EU public servants, it's sort of understandable.
it's surprising to new users (in a good way, i was happy when i found it) let's remove it.
THANX! I don't know how people live on platforms that don't have this :)
As for the negative Gnome feedback (not from you but others) I do like Gnome, it's just enough window manager for me, I like the defaults and I like the touchpad gestures etc. Generally looks and works well for all I do. I always feel swamped by KDE.
Jesus, do the people who work on GNOME even like Linux?
In Icaza's case I think he just always wanted to work for Microsoft. I don't know about the less famous developers though.
Well he did, in the end until he quit Microsoft (and Linux) and moved to macOS/iOS and Swift development.
icaza hasn't dev or used gnome for like decades.... and i am not sure why you assume the intent of miguel like that.
For Nix Home-Manager on non-nixos you need to fix the driver integration. https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.xhtml#sec...
Nowadays it is quite easy https://github.com/AntonFriberg/dotfiles/blob/master/modules...
Note that the way this works is that after you activate your home manager generation it outputs a script path that you need to run manually as root which installs a Systemd service which ensures that the drivers are linked correctly.
> * Select - Middle-click paste does not seem to work
They did it on purpose for some reason. If I were you I'd give Plasma a try.
If you want an experience that's similar to GNOME-when-it-was-good, I'd suggest Cinnamon, the desktop environment of Linux Mint.
What's the state of Cinnamon maintenance? Keeping up with underlying platform changes being the perpetual challenge...
Cinnamon is an independent project, it's not based on GNOME. Or what else are you referring to?
Plasma, meaning KDE.
I've been using the Kubuntu 26.04 prereleases for a few weeks. No surprises from KDE, but Wayland has broken a few things. Autotype in Keepass does not work, keynav and even the Wayland keynav forks don't work, and Wayland does not support priority keyboard layouts for switching between two specific layouts.
It's called plasma now :) KDE is the association, the desktop is plasma.
I still mostly use Xorg though, I only have wayland on a tablet.
It seems that KDE is fairly consistent in calling this “Plasma” and specifically, “Plasma Desktop”, but English Wikipedia insists on prefixing the names of their products with “KDE”. Especially Plasma 4, 5, and 6.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma
https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/
Is this, like, a “GNU/Linux controversy” thing?
"KDE Plasma" can be interpreted as "The KDE organization's Plasma" and probably saves on some article title consistency while avoiding the need to disambiguate the main Plasma article title with (Desktop Environment) or the like. Likely more trouble to try to change than it helps anything as a result.
It's really only calling it "KDE" in isolation that is a bit off. On the GNOME side, such a reference makes sense because the desktop environment is named GNOME and it's run by the GNOME Project/GNOME Foundation. I.e. a bit reversed which word in the order refers to the org's vs DE's name.
Most of the time people will probably figure it out at the end of the day via context either way though.
> Select - Middle-click paste does not seem to work
Good. It shouldn't be on by default. It's surprising behavior, too easy to fat-finger, and too disruptive when it accidentally triggers.
What???? That's the most expected feature of any *nix user since the dawn of X Window!