On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 03:39:29PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:

No idea what Beaver is. Did Ubuntu wrap the alphabet or something?

Files in /etc/init.d don't really do anything unless there is a link to them from /etc/rc#.d for the runlevel, assuming the system is using runlevels. If it uses systemd then it might do it based on other conditions, or use a .service file instead.

If Ubuntu switched to systemd, then something like this might solve the problem: sudo systemctl enable mediatomb sudo systemctl start mediatomb -- Len Sorensen

On Wed, 2 May 2018 at 15:40, Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

No idea what Beaver is. Did Ubuntu wrap the alphabet or something?

​Yes. The current revision as of last week is 18.04 Bionic Beaver -- a major (LTS) release​ -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch or @el56

There's always the path I took ... avoiding the GNOME / MATE / Unity soap opera altogether. Kubuntu 18.04 works just fine. On Thu, 3 May 2018 at 12:35, Val Kulkov via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

On 3 May 2018 at 09:57, Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

...

On Wed, 2 May 2018 at 15:40, Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org>

wrote:

...

...

No idea what Beaver is. Did Ubuntu wrap the alphabet or something?

Yes. The current revision as of last week is 18.04 Bionic Beaver -- a

major (LTS) release

...

Not intending to open up the discussion of Gnome vs Unity, simply expressing my own personal opinion about 18.04 Bionic Beaver choice of Gnome.

Gnome 3.28 feels like a significant downgrade to me, coming from 16.04 Unity interface. I played with it for a few days in an honest attempt to get used to it and make the most use of it. No, I am missing too many time-savers from Unity. I am missing my Thunderbird icon in the system tray. Finally, I gave up and switched back to Unity + compiz and now I am happy again.

The good thing though is that, once Unity is installed on 18.04, you get to choose to login to Unity or to Gnome/X or even to Gnome/Wayland in case you want to continue playing around with Gnome. --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

-- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch or @el56

On 2018-05-04 12:54 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:

Glad to hear that you are happy. The future of Unity appears a bit challenging.

Understatement. My understanding is that all active development has been stopped. It was a bit of a pain for me to switch from Unity to Gnome when Ubuntu changed over. I kind of like it now, though. I manually made the switch early, switching to Ubuntu-Gnome 17.04 before the ‘hard’ switch was made for me at 17.10. Apart from learning about the new features, the major pain points were: * Gnome Shell runs system-ish UI tasks using your browser's javascript installation. Until Firefox 57+ got stable and happy, there were hard lockups every couple of days. The browser is much of the UI with Gnome now. * Wayland's X11 compatibility is limited. If you're used to slinging around tools that play with window contents (even something as simple as ImageMagick's import to take screenshots, or ssh -x) they can't read window contents. Until I set the session to Gnome-X11, I'd had to resort to using xwd(1) to take screenshots under Wayland. Last time I *had* to use xwd was on a Sun 3 to feed an HP PaintJet, circa 1989. * The Gnome Files browser (aka Nautilus) continues to be stripped down to now being almost useless. Very shortly, icons on the desktop will be deprecated (so bye-bye desktop metaphor). Opening files with alternative applications is now an extra couple of clicks away. All filing of bugs gets shut down on Launchpad, as Gnome's desktop vision is seen as the way forward. (Or is it that Canonical is tired of paying for Unity development and will only use vanilla Gnome from now on?) * Program menus are seemingly dead (since everyone's supposed to be using 16:9 displays), so menus are either gone or hidden under hamburger icons of varying design up in the “dead” top right of a window. I liked Gnome's earlier attempt to force all menus into a Mac-style ribbon, and was sad to see it go. But otherwise, it's just fine for me. Tracker file indexing now works *really* well … unfortunately, Gnome Documents (a seemingly pointless program) always pops up 5-6 'Untitled Documents' at the top of any search result, and these open blank windows with no close icons in Documents. Also, not sure if it's in 18.04, but Gimp 2.10 is really nice. Stewart

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Well to me Gnome 3 is simply unusable (Ranks about the same as Windows | 8 to me). Nothing is where it should be, things are too hard to find, | take too many clicks. Like what? I don't use menus much. I type the windows key and the first few letters of the program I want. Like "f" gets me to Firefox. | Just bad overall UI design. Too many things were | missing in the first releases with promises of "Oh we will add that back | later" for stuff that was essential base functionality that should never | have been left out of the first alpha release. The "we know better than | the users" attitude of the developers certainly did nothing to encourage | giving it any more looks ever again. I seem to be able to live without lots of things. I listed the ones that I remember missing. Here's one I missed: if I ask GNOME for a terminal, and there already is one, it just moves focus to the old one. I have to type Ctrl-Shift-N to ask Gnome Terminal to give me a new one. That work-around is easy enough. Can you be specific about what you miss? I admit that I'm compliant and not too demanding of desktop environments. I have seen so many come and go that I never invest much in any.

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Problem is I don't remember anymore. I understand that well. It is muscle memory and it is hard to recall to reason about. | I learned long ago that the gnome terminal is too buggy to use so I | don't use it. It had terminal emulation bugs which I can't accept from | a terminal. What bugs are you thinking of? Things that iritate me are few -- I'm a stoic. Currently, it can show emojis but they take two character spaces so they screw up programs that try to manage the screen (like Alpine). xterm lets the program control things to do with mouse interaction. Few programs used some of those features and not all were implemented in Gnome Terminal. I know, because Jove does use them (optionally). I switched to gnome terminal for font scaling. I understand xterm can do it now but I haven't cared enough to switch back and figure out the scaling. | I don't expect much from my desktop: | | - alt+f2 must give me a run box to start a program of my choice I'm a touch typist so no function key is in my vocabulary. If a function key thing were useful enough (ctrl-alt-del), and I knew of it, I would learn it. I'm just ignorant and lazy. | - There must be minimize, maximize/restore and close buttons on the | windows. Double click title bar for maximize/restore is a bonus. Those are optional (gnome-tweak-tool). I only use close and the double-click-on-title-bar thing. So the loss of buttons on the title bar is fine with me. | Supporting alt+space shortcuts are appreciated too. I don't know what those are. On KDE (what I'm using this instant, it gives me some kind of search bar. It seems to search for something amongst the windows. | - I must be able to resize the window by the border of the window Sure. | - alt+tab must cycle through the windows in order of use Addressed by Stewart's fine message. | - There must be a place for programs to show their status (like pidgin, | wifi, etc). That exists in Gnome (top right corner). | I currently use xfce which does the job well. Out of the box? Or with configuration? Extensive configuration? Gnome seems to want to minimize configuration options. To that I say: as simple as possible but no simpler. Many feel they've gone to far.

On 4 May 2018 at 12:54, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

| From: Val Kulkov via talk <talk@gtalug.org>

| Gnome 3.28 feels like a significant downgrade to me, coming from 16.04 | Unity interface.

Why?

(This isn't a challenge -- I'm hoping to learn something that I can adopt from the answer.)

| I played with it for a few days in an honest attempt | to get used to it and make the most use of it. No, I am missing too | many time-savers from Unity.

Like what?

1. Useless workspaces in Gnome. Avoiding the use of mouse saves me a lot of time. I use Alt-Tab to switch between windows, and I try to limit the number of open windows to three, maximum four on a given workspace. This way I can avoid using mouse and avoid using Super-W to "spread windows" which do not always appear in a predictable order. Where I need to have more than three or four windows open at the same time, I distribute open windows between workspaces. In Unity + compiz, switching workspaces is done with Alt-Ctrl-<arrow> by default. Then in another workspace I can, for example, open and edit two documents and switch painlessly and accurately between them with a single Alt-Tab while having tons of open windows in other workspaces. This is a _huge_ time saver for me. Where I must concurrently keep three or four documents open at the same time with the same application like LibreOffice Writer, it becomes a little difficult to know which document I am switching to with Alt-Tab, especially where Alt-Tab icon bar collapses all open files into the same app icon. In such case I use "Shift Switcher" (a compiz plugin) with Super-Tab. It gives me the same functionality as Alt-Tab, but with a preview of contents of other windows, by the way all of them appearing in a predictable order. Gnome 3.28 supports workspaces, but Alt-Tab works across all workspaces in Gnome -- basically, across all open windows no matter what workspace they are placed into. I could not find a way to tell Gnome to limit the list of windows for window switching with Alt-Tab to a current workspace. The loss of the ability to limit Alt-Tab to only windows in a current workspace was perhaps the most painful loss for me. I should also mention that some eight years ago I got diagnosed with tendonitis in my right elbow. Holding computer mouse in your right hand for decades is what gives you tendonitis (eventually). With some therapy, my tendonitis now appears to be mostly gone. I have now learned to use mouse by both hands and I now hold mouse interchangeably in my left or right hand, but most importantly -- I have learned to avoid using mouse whenever possible. On a side note, when a Windows user observes me switch between workspaces (I use desktop cube with cube rotation), quite often I get amusing questions like "whoa, how did you do that?" I like that. It's fun, and it's an opportunity to show off the power of Linux to those poor souls. 2. The loss of HUD. HUD may have been the most mis-understood and under-utilized Unity feature. There are people who hate it. I totally love it. It saves me time. It saves me the necessity to remember where exactly in menus or toolbars a less-often-used function is, or even remember the name of the function. If I need to save a document as a PDF in LibreOffice, I simply hit "Alt" then type "PDF" and here we go, the desired function is right in front of me. I simply need to hit enter. No mouse interaction involved. If I cannot even recall the name of a rarely-used function, I can start typing what I think its name should be and most often I get the desired function in a list that appears. Awesome. 3. Gnome 3.28 removed desktop support from Files. It's not that I often put icons on my desktop -- I rarely do that -- but I do not like being told what to do and what not to do with my desktop. Making decisions for me is very much the Microsoft Windows way, something that in my opinion contradicts the core Linux principles. Yes, Ubuntu 18.04 ships with Nautilus 3.26 to allow desktop support for the time being, but for how long is this going to continue before the desktop support is removed completely? 4. I agree with Stewart Russell that Nautilus, with the stripped functionality, is quite useless. One of the first things I did after installing Ubuntu 16.04, and now Ubuntu 18.04, is to install Nemo as the main Files application.

| I am missing my Thunderbird icon in the | system tray.

It's trivial to add those in the Gnome Desktop or Shell or whatever the proper name is.

While running Thunderbird, the icon will be there. Just right-click on the icon and ask to pin it. While you are there, unpin all the cruft you don't intend to use much.

I do not want Thunderbird to occupy an open window. I do not want an extra window on my workspace at all -- see my comments above about the workspaces and limiting the number of open windows. I want Thunderbird to "minimize to tray" and stay there. The MinTrayR (MinimizeToTray revived) add-on for Thunderbird, after application of the appropriate pull request for MinTrayR, works to, as the name suggests, minimize Thunderbird to the system tray. When I get new mail, Thunderbird systray icon turns blue. Then I can review how many new messages I have per account, can activate Thunderbird window that shows me exactly the screen I minimized, can invoke "compose message" without opening the main Thunderbird window, etc. This is convenient and useful and saves me time. In Gnome 3.28, Thunderbird cannot be minimized to system tray. It appears that the system tray functionality has been severely reduced in Gnome 3.* to the point of being quite useless.

| Finally, I gave up and switched back to Unity + compiz | and now I am happy again.

Glad to hear that you are happy. The future of Unity appears a bit challenging.

I am well aware that there is most likely no future for Unity and definitely no future for Compiz as we know it. This is sad. For as long as I possibly can, I am going to stick with what I have right now, Unity + Compiz, because they are damn convenient and useful and save me a lot of time. At least, I will stick with them until I can find something that is somewhat comparable in convenience and usefulness.

On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 12:54 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

- I wish more tabletty gestures worked on touchscreens. Does any normal Linux desktop do better? I actually have a few devices with Fedora that have detachable keyboards; Fedora feels somewhat crippled without a keyboard.

I have an ASUS T100TA that I use in lieu of a laptop on occasion because of its size. I never use the touchscreen (I tried and failed with Linux on a Nexus 7). I use the detachable keyboard as a stand, preferring my ThinkPad compact bluetooth keyboard (my eyes need the extra space between keyboard and screen). I run Fedora Rawhide on my work laptop to be able to use a relatively recent version of GNOME. Before Ubuntu was introduced, I would run Debian Unstable with bits of Experimental for the same reason. For a couple of years I ran KDE (the default) on SLES at work before new ownership outlawed Linux in my server room. I began seven years as an Ubuntu user excited about what was happening on the desktop, and finished it not caring a bit. When GNOME 3.0 came out, I got excited all over again. I switched to openSUSE, then Fedora. My work is done in FreeCAD and a number of CAD programs that run on Win7 in GNOME Boxes. I had to switch to the X session for a couple of weeks this year because of a Wayland issue recognizing right-click events in FreeCAD. I have Fedora Atomic Workstation parallel-installed ("inside" my existing workstation) where I run git and emacs -nw in buildah in GNOME Terminal for documentation editing. Mike