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Re: [LUG] Unity

 

On 05/01/12 16:12, Stephen Harris wrote:
Lol its one of the main reasons i switched to arch on my desktop and
crunchbang on my laptop :-)
On Jan 5, 2012 4:10 PM, "Tom Brough" <tombrough@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Is it just me or is everybody else who uses Ubuntu 11.10 driven to
distraction by unity. I installed the gnome legacy packages (now that
unity is default)  but  it still didn't look and feel the same..... I'm
beginning to wish I had stuck with debian.....

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Ah, Arch linux, the new Gentoo... The new home of the elite snobs - never post on the Arch forums without asbestos pants on as all the lovely "RTFM or GTFO" crowd seem to have migrated there. I was tracing a bug in the testing stream the other day and found a thread with a professional AIX engineer politely asking for guidance on the issue and they flamed the hell out of him: quite unfairly too, because he was right (stupid badly documented change to pacman.conf forcing you to edit a setting to automatically accept packagers GPG keys... *rolls eyes*). Just a few days ago Arch trotted out this gem:

"It is strongly advised to avoid the --force or -f switch as it is not safe. However, in this particular case it is needed as deleting /etc/mtab manually would break pacman."

Brilliant work geniuses. Whilst people like I might actually read release notes before installing and have VM snapshots to rollback to, many don't, even if they're "leet" enough to be running Arch in the first place. Nothing like breaking the entire package manager subsystem with a random update. And then there's all the unmanaged AUR stuff which you have to use to get half of the useful packages... what a pain in the arse.

I don't mean to flame - I use both Arch and Gentoo unfortunately. Gentoo is another story - it's currently failing to emerge kernel 3.2 as I type because the ebuild is incorrectly pointed at the wrong link to download the kernel tar.bz2, which I'll have to fix manually. I do a lot of OpenBSD work routinely rebuilding the entire system from source and it's so much less painful than Arch or Gentoo which I think speaks volumes: if your fancy ebuild/pacman/whatever linux packaging system is less reliable and polished than OpenBSD's raw sourcecode based procedure you are seriously doing something wrong. DON'T REINVENT THE WHEEL!

Anyway, I seem to have gone off on a massive tangent there, I only meant to chime in and say that I completely agree that Unity is probably the worst desktop environment ever made, and this is coming from a man who has used CDE heavily (and windows, come to think of it). Switching distros just to change your WM/DE does also seem to be a massive fail though: as someone else pointed out, Debian testing and unstable have both already switched to gnome3 and even stable will make the change soon. For old gnome2 fans, just switch to fallback mode, install compiz and fusionicon with the advanced settings manager and change all the defaults: it takes a fair amount of messing about but you can essentially reproduce 99% of the old experience that way, it's not hard. Or just install XFCE. There's no point in us all continuing to complain about it because A: that ship has sailed and B: linux is supposed to be a living, breathing, evolving thing - the day it turns into a monolithic, boring hegemony would be a sad one.

Apologies for rambling,

Mat
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