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Canonical Finally Lets Users Move The Unity Launcher To Bottom In Ubuntu 16.04 (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes from an article on Softpedia: It is official, the packages needed to move the Unity Launcher of Ubuntu Linux to the bottom of the screen have finally landed in the main repositories of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, due for release on April 21, 2016. Softpedia reported that Ubuntu users might be able to move the Unity7 Launcher at the bottom edge as a rumor in February -- but now they confirm it finally landed for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. It is not known if Canonical will implement a visual setting in the Apperance/Behaviour panel for users to easily switch between having the Unity Launcher on the left of at the bottom of the screen for the final release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but you can do it by running a simple command.
stuff that matters.
of why I don't use Ubuntu.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
What is so unique about the launcher that it cannot simply be repositioned like any other GUI element? I understand keeping it snapped to an edge of the screen but I'm at a loss to why updates should even be necessary in the first place.
I don't use ubunto so what am I missing?
I can't' drag my non-maximized windows all the way to the top, that is ridiculous!
FRA: STFU GTFO
I quite like ubuntu when used as a base system via a minimal install... doing xorg yourself and choosing your own UI is not painful at all these days as xorg.conf is automatic for pretty much everything... dual GPU can require a few manual lines to point the display server in the right direction but that's way better than it used to be.
dmenu instead of unity launcher, then pick your window manager e.g i3wm... done.
I cannot believe this has been a feature. Unable to arrange my desktop how I want?...
Why do people tolerate been told what to do?
Because they are not. If you like Unity the way it is, use it. If not, use Ubuntu with a different DE. Not rocket science.
From a UI design POV there certainly are advantages to lock down some things. Whether it is worth the trade-off must be carefully considered of course.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
If you mean the setting about including results from Amazon when you're searching for things in the launcher: the option is still there, but it does default to off and you have to manually go and turn it on if you want those results.
dmenu instead of unity launcher, then pick your window manager e.g i3wm... done.
Personally, I like Cinnamon as my desktop-environment when using Linux. It's clean and tasteful, without being too dumbed-down or anything. Too bad the version in 16.04's repos is, at least for now, still quite broken -- every time I install removable media something goes wonky with the desktop and the icons I have there. Still, even as-is, Cinnamon sure beats Unity in usability IMHO.
It all makes perfect sense when you think about who has been responsible for most software UIs developed over the past 5 to 10 years: hipsters.
Let's clear up a few misconceptions to begin with. Firstly, "hipster" isn't just some vague scapegoat. It's a well-defined culture that places emphasis on design, on style, on trendiness, on being different just for the sake of being different, of putting appearance over usability, and of the practitioner having an unhealthily large ego. Secondly, as it's a culture, hipsters can be of any age. Thirdly, normal people find hipsters extremely distasteful, and normal people will go out of their way not to deal with hipsters, even if this means changing careers.
So the situation is this: from the advent of computing up until the mid 2000s, user interfaces were designed and developed by professionals. They had the best interests of their user in mind. Then around 2005 we started to see hipsters flood into the software UI field. This was initially due to the failing of the print media industry, where they had mainly been isolated before. As they collectively moved to web design and software UI design, they quickly drowned out and drove out the professionals who had given us practical, usable UIs.
These hipsters believe that the always know what's best for the user. It's not a matter of asking the user what they want, or getting feedback, or performing studies about how users use the UIs. When it comes to hipster-designed UIs, they always know exactly what's right, even when it's totally wrong in practice. If a UI doesn't work well for a user, it's not the broken UI that's at fault, it's the user, at least according to hipsters. This is why we've seen numerous UI disasters from hipsters, including Firefox, GNOME 3, Chrome, Windows 8 and 10, Unity, and Slashdot Beta.
A lot of the UI problems we encounter today would have been inconceivable in 2000, back when professionals ran the show and did the work. But that's because, at the time, we didn't realize just how backward things would get with hipsters involved. We didn't realize that there were some people (hipsters) who were so sure of themselves that they would essentially tell users to "fuck off and die" when these users brought legitimate complaints about the UIs to the table. As professionals the thought of putting the user second to ourselves never even crossed our mind. While we worked for the users, the hipsters work for themselves and the satisfaction of their own "creative needs" at the expense of the user.
Until the hipsters either leave the industry (because it has become "untrendy"), or until are driven out for the way they've treated users and professional UI designers so awfully, we will be continually subjected to terrible UIs that fail in the most basic of ways.
While I fully agree that all gui elements should be movable, I really don't get why anyone still thinks that menu/task bars should be on the bottom. Every laptop or desktop monitor since like forever has a cinema aspect ratio, so vertical pixels are at a premium. Why waste them on stuff outside the active window? I cringe every time someone decides to present a document in some meeting, leaving the taskbar at the bottom (and the app's ribbon visible at the top), with room for maybe a paragraph at a time visible.
Just because teh first time you saw a Windows taskbar it was on the bottom is no reason to think it makes any sense to leave it there.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Do they? Gnome has lost popularity, Ubuntu has lost popularity, Microsoft has lost popularity, Mint and Apple have gained popularity. Idiots decide they know what the world needs, and dumb down the world because they think they know best, and the world votes with it's choices.
Now if someone would just shoot Jony Ive so that I don't have to buy a $3k computer with 5k resolution and billions of colors to stare at flat monochrome graphics because Jony thinks it is beautiful simplicity, or some such nonsense.
in the free software community they don't tolerate it.
if a given distribution or OS decides to go in a direction that the users disagree with, the users are free to switch to another.
this is why having 20 to 30 distributions isn't a bad thing.
there will always be a hand full that sit at the top of the food chain with the strongest user base.
if one of these fucks up and really pisses on it's users, those same users will start looking for alternatives.
because distributions can be based off of other distributions like Redhat or Debian the distribution developers don't have to start from scratch.
and the users don't have to relearn an entire OS.
Yes, it's still a lot of work, but no one is starting from zero and the world moves on.
Unity sucks donkey wang. I download Ubuntu Gnome then install gnome-flashback to get back a traditional desktop.
Yes this is really news for geeks and nerds. If you choose not to like the articles on this site then please go somewhere else. The internet is an incredible place to explore. But please don't post silly comments because you don't like the article, others may be interested in the latest information. This is just as silly as making a comment in an Windows article about how you had a come Jesus moment and migrated all your home computers to a Linux based distro. You are not adding anything to the discussion except to try and ruin things for others.
-imprezza86
I have been a computer guru for 40 years, and the problem with this is ... I don't even know how to do this anymore. Sure I have been messing with Linux since it came on disks in PC Magazine, and downloaded distributions from BBS sites. Have compiled kernels and configured X. I have even written X based software. Sure, I could figure out how to do it.
But I don't care!
I installed Mint Cinnamon, and I'm done. I don't want a minimal install, because then I have to spend hours in apt-get or Synaptic or something looking for everything that should be there and isn't. Hard disk space is cheap. I install about everything and just turn off what I don't want to use. If I want it later, it's there and already partially configured.
All of this stuff was fun once. I would spend DAYS getting it just the way I wanted it, and then some new release would come out I wanted, which wouldn't install because I had changed stuff so that the installer got confused, or some bug was uncovered and something I needed didn't work. After you get used to something and then stuff doesn't work anymore because some patch you needed put stuff back to the default settings, or broke a dependency.
So for me, Ubuntu is broken and I don't want to fix it. I use Mint as a desktop, Ubuntu as a development server because it always has current stuff, and Cent OS for Enterprise reliability because it's bulletproof.
FYI: 16.04 will be the first LTS for Ubuntu MATE.
I've been using Ubuntu Mate 15.10. It's more polished than XFCE and Mint MATE, and it looks better than Unity or anything GNOME3-based.
I suspect that a large percentage of Ubuntu/Gubuntu/Xubuntu/Mint users will switch to Ubuntu MATE when they find out it exists.
--
If you accidentally downloaded the vanilla ISO with Unity:
# apt-get install -y mate-desktop
Then logout, choose MATE at the login menu, enter your password, and enjoy a better desktop environment. Once you're sure you can get rid of Unity with:
# apt-get purge -y unity*
Isn't Unity just a compiz plugin?
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
Is KDE as good as it was back in the 3.5 days? I used to be a big KDE fan, but I jumped ship for XFCE when KDE 4 was coming out. I've always felt that KDE was doing a lot of things "the right way." Pretty much any component from any KDE application could be seamlessly embedded in any other KDE application. Everything got crashy when 4 came out, like worse than KDE 2 was.
One thing I really hate doing is mixing QT and GTK applications on the same desktop, so I've never really given KDE another try since pretty much everything I use is GTK.
Enlightenment is another interesting window manager, but it seems like there's always something small that always irritatingly broken.
Is KDE as good as it was back in the 3.5 days?
Parent AC that you're replying to here.
IMHO, not quite. 4.0 eventually got pretty stable and feature-full, but then 5.0 shipped and it's still got a little ways to go. For example 4.0 was able to theme gtk (gnome) apps so they had a seamless look and feel running on the same desktop with KDE apps, but I haven't gotten that working in KDE5 yet. Similar for some other things.
I'm sure they'll iron them out, but it's not as solid as 3.5, or as 4.x was near the end of its lifespan, at least in my experience so far.
That being said, it still is one of the less sucky desktops. Even with warts, I find it a massive improvement on Unity.
Can you show me a single operating system that has not been exploited? Banks get exploited, experian gets exploited. Users of Mint have had a good product for years. Now because of a single asshat hat you're throwing out an entire distro? They are getting help and working at fixing things. You're being obtusely unfair and their repos weren't hacked it was their website and a bad link was injected. FFS you make it sound like it couldn't happen to anyone.
"...the packages needed to move the Unity Launcher of Ubuntu Linux to the bottom of the screen have finally landed in the main repositories"
Wow, such innovation, being able to move the launcher to the bottom of the screen. OMFG we're living in the FUTURE!!!!
Where will all this forward-thinking and amazing creativity end? Who knows what amazing ideas they'll come up with next- maybe being able to change the color of the desktop background, or making the background a picture??
The mind boggles at all these incredible new features. I mean, being able to put the launcher at the bottom...will wonders never cease??
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The fact that such a trivial customization is newsworthy tells you just how bad Unity is. There is nothing special about having a user defined layout of the desktop. Many other distros have provided such user freedom and Ubuntu did too in the past. But now the default desktop is Unity which goes out of it's way to take away user choice in the name of "unifying" the desktop between laptops and phones. Yes, you will have the same desktop and it will be crippled everywhere.
I like Ubuntu as an operating system. It's stable (if you use the LTS version), has the best and fastest security updates and is the Linux OS with the best hardware compatibility. But I can't tolerate Unity. So when I install Ubuntu, the first change I make is to go to the Ubuntu Software Center and search for xfce4 (the current xfce desktop) and install "Meta-package for the Xfce Lightweight Desktop Environment". This will let you choose which desktop you want each time you log on. You can use Unity where that is your preference and switch to Xfce when you want.
Xfce lets you define the exact size and positions of all panels. You can have docking panels on the sides, top, bottom.... wherever you want. But the best thing about Xfce is that it lets you create desktop launchers of your own. Just right click on the desktop, choose application launcher, url link, or file manager folder. And these launchers can be dragged to the panels you have created and docked there. Gnome used to let you do that, but no more. As far as I can determine, Xfce is the only desktop that empowers the user in such a useful way.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
WTF? Seriously, with any decent X11 window manager (I use fvwm), this is a configuration setting where you specify the position. Have they implemented a non-conforming X11 application for this "launcher" and crippled it thereby?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Personally, I like Cinnamon as my desktop-environment when using Linux. It's clean and tasteful, without being too dumbed-down or anything.
Same here....I like Mint's look and I agree, it's clean and tasteful. It's also a straightforward and uncluttered design, looks very nice.
I've not seen the issue you mention with removable media but then I don't do a lot of that, mostly USB drives.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
All of this stuff was fun once. I would spend DAYS getting it just the way I wanted it
Yeah, I was like that too, way back when. :) I loved configuring and tweaking everything, getting it just the way I wanted it....
But it gets old and tedious after a while, and these days I have stuff I have to get done. No more time or interest in fiddling with all that shit just to get it the way I want.
I put Mint on my laptop and everything worked right out of the box, no problem whatsoever. Everything worked and the desktop is just about perfect for me. The only thing I did was resize the icons to be a bit smaller and install Docky for a launcher, and I was done.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
For my media boxes I went with the Cairo dock. It's good for a situation with a small number of apps but can also scale up nicely.
Personally though I still prefer to use it with KDE (you can just remove the main dock) as opposed to Gnome though.
I have been a computer guru for 40 years, and the problem with this is ... I don't even know how to do this anymore
Feel free to not burden with it, really. But on debian/ubuntu it's very easy : you apt-get install xorg, alsa (alsa-base and alsa-utils), a bare desktop such as lxde or xfce4 - bare enough to not come with a pdf reader and a CD-R burner, but still with the configuration GUIs, perhaps a basic selection of themes and in lxde's case a text editor and image viewer etc.
It all sets up automatically and if you install a login manager (either at the same time or after), to not have to run 'startx', that sets up itself too.
Then you get to do petty choices about pdf reader, media players etc. (for example why have totem player installed in the first place if you'll close it every time it gets launched).
The work and how to replicate it mostly consists in the list of packages you want to apt-get install.
That said I use Mint too and that needs really few changes.
I used or tested tha "manual" method above (with quotes, because how automatized it is) with debian squeeze, Ubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu 12.04, debian wheezy. Mostly good on old or very weak hardware although would have I a need for straight Ubuntu (non-LTS, need to install from network) I would do that.
That Mint that was hacked and distributed malware in it's distribution?
I was under the impression that Mint is SystemD-free; was I mistaken?
The command to move it for the bottom works in the live environment, in case you want to try it.
In any WM/desktop I've use I've always had the launcher at the bottom. The fact that Unity now has it makes me very happy.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
You are very much mistaken.
Mint is simply a skin over ubuntu (or debian). They don't have much say in these matters. All of their eggs are mostly in the gui side of things and what package management they do is usually not of the quality that you would want from a distro ripping out the entire kitchen plumbing.
The current mint is based on ubuntu 14.04 which doesn't have systemd yet but mint 18 will.
What Canonical needs to focus on is fixing their upgrade process and broken packages. Buggy packages in LTS releases don’t get bug fixes, so we’re forced to upgrade servers to non-LTS releases just to get things working properly. And basically everyone who upgraded to 15.10 got a broken system until they realized that the upgrade did not install a new kernel, instead leaving you with one that caused all kinds of crashes due to a mismatch between kernel and userspace libraries and services.
In their case, it seems it happened because they don't care enough for security. Most of us don't, at least until something bad happens, but the odds are reduced and the consequences are often alleviated because someone else did care and implemented security measures that we depend on, possibly without even noticing. It appears that Mint doesn't have enough resources (if any) devoted to security, at least not like Ubuntu, Apple, Google and even MS do.
So yes, it could happen to anyone, but from what I read it looks like they had it coming.
Now if they would only deign to once again allow us mere users (and actual owners of the hardware) to decide where we want the window buttons (i.e. on the right like pretty much every other frikin GUI in the world).
Stick with Xfce.
Thanks for clarifying that. In my mind crazy customizations aren't really needed (if it e.g. amounts to a configuration file for the window manager in $HOME, I can't see how that would go wrong). /etc. I can see that sort of thing opening such can of worms (small or not I don't know), I never had to do that in the bad old days and can cheat around that by using pcmanfm (totally DE-independant file manager that mounts the drives on its own). CUPS may be fine.
Like custom versions of software, or adding stuff like Pulseaudio or NetworkManager to your dekstop session - here I would use the PC with Alsa only and install wicd instead. Setting up a daemon to automount USB drives?, with some custom config in
Yea those considerations above are mostly irrelevant. But I believe it can be easy if you have fewer features rather than more, and you can enable/disable features or daemons the idiot way by using apt-get install and apt-get remove.
New OS version? which is when software is changed. Start over or baby-sit the dist-upgrade.
Maybe next time they will allow me to move the window buttons to the right.
Whoa, there are still people using the Unity environment? Poor sods... "Wha, our product does not look lik an Apple product. We must change it, so that it looks more like an Apple product..." *barf*
Good question. First you should ask yourself why there is a whole separate distribution just to support a different desktop. Xubuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu and is identical in most ways. But after copying most of Ubuntu, it's developers make a big deal out of changing the desktop. If they put all their effort into just perfecting that Xfce desktop on Ubuntu instead of being diverted by supporting the management of a separate distribution, they might have the time and resources to do a better job.
We have had a recent lesson in this fallacy in the case of Mint. Mint is also a copy of Ubuntu and it exists primarily as a platform for the Cinnamon desktop. But because they were slow to handle security problems, Mint was hacked and code compromised. I don't trust Mint to this day. So I suggest starting with a secure and solid Ubuntu base and just perfect your desktop on that distro.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Because Xubuntu users want to have only the Xfce desktop, without having to install the Unity desktop first, which, if you're never going to use it, means you're just wasting hard disk space.
What an odd point of view. Linux Mint got hacked through Wordpress running on its web site. They weren't "slow to handle security problems"; they dealt with it as soon as they found out about it, which was almost immediately. And If you had checked the MD5 checksum of the hacked ISO, you would have seen that there was a problem with it.
As its leader, Clement Lefebvre, wrote in response to a comment on his blog, "...we’ll probably also contract a security firm to look into the bottom of this for us, we’re software developers not intrusion experts."
Take your idea to its logical extreme, and we would just have one Linux distro with a number of different desktop environments. Nobody wants that, except you, maybe.
Good reason... Changing the user interface engenders no less upheaval than changing the programming interfaces. Canonical realizes this, so they insist the name of the OS should provide at least a clue to the user. The UI is part of the identity of the OS in the eyes of users and app developers.
Why should Canonical "perfect" Xfce in their distro? Its not their vision for how their OS should look and behave, and standalone "DE" projects do not get that level of vertical integration (in fact, they form out of resistance to it).
KDE 4.x got decent. I think that KDE SC 5 series still has some time to go before it gets good. With that said, TDE is a perfectly good option for those of us that loved KDE 3.x (I use TDE on Fedora and Ubuntu). There again, I've also been playing around with MaXX desktop (Linux port of SGI's 4DWM) on some lightweight systems (read Pentium II (IBM Thinkpad 600e) and III (Dell Latitude C400, Inspiron 8100) era) that I mainly use as remote/serial terminals.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
... All of this stuff was fun once. I would spend DAYS getting it just the way I wanted it, and then some new release would come out I wanted, which wouldn't install because I had changed stuff so that the installer got confused...
I know what you mean, and i'm definitely not a fan of having to spend hours configuring things, i'm not one of those people who wants to "get everything just how i want it" sacrificing hours or days in the process... however i am a fan of being minimal, not because of hard disk space or anything... i'm happy to install away loads of space, my problem is i don't want to crowd my workspace... i'm perfectly happy running a usable tiling window manager and dmenu and that's it... i get fed up of big desktop UIs full of crap that usually annoys me... and if I need to install a new system pretty much all i need to worry about for my UI is to install two packages, maybe copy one config but the defaults are pretty good for i3... i like well thought out defaults, makes deployment quick.
>>> ..... just have one Linux distro with a number of different desktop environments.
Maybe that would mean that people were actually working on productive products and variants, instead of expending effort reinventing the wheel? Maybe that would prove, beyond any doubt, just how much better the Linux concept of interchangeable layers can be (as opposed to the monolithic Windows model)?
Because Xubuntu users want to have only the Xfce desktop, without having to install the Unity desktop first, which, if you're never going to use it, means you're just wasting hard disk space.
Well, it can just be uninstalled. Or you can do it like other distros do and ask which one you want to have installed during the installation.
Unfortunately this kind of crap hasn't lost enough popularity. Where I work, it's a pretty even distribution between Win, Mac, and Linux. Unfortunately, all the Linux users other than me run Ubuntu, and all but the two that I installed Xfce for are running Unity. I think one thing that might behoove Xfce would be to have additional starting configs (instead of just "one empty panel" and "default"), for example a "Gnome 2 Layout" and a "Windows-like Layout". A properly configured Win7 taskbar is actually a very good UI, shame the defaults are so awful.
I keep hearing about this happening, where systemd will apparently take your OS right off a cliff and end in a twisted flaming wreck at the bottom. However, I've been running over a hundred Linux servers where it hasn't happened even once.
Yeah, I know, small sample size, etc. However, if you listen to the systemd hate around, here, it sounds like this is happening every other day. Is this just groupthink and 'haters be hatin', a case of people not bothering to learn the new way because INIT must be superior simply because it's been around for 800 years?
I'm genuinely curious.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I use the mouse a lot to switch between applications. Having the launcher locked at the left side of the screen means it's either inconveniently far away from my mouse pointer when it's on the opposite screen or I have to waste space duplicating it on both monitors. It also wouldn't work well with auto-hiding in a vertical orientation cause there's no left screen edge on the right monitor for me to brush the mouse up against to show the menu. Allowing the launcher to be on the bottom solves all of these problems and it doesn't take up any of that precious vertical real-estate. I use OSX the exact same way (at the bottom and with auto-hide). If you want to argue that no sane person should be primarily using the mouse to switch applications and state that I should be using the keyboard to overcome any issues this causes me, you are clearly alienating the "linux anyone can use" vibe that ubuntu has going for it.