Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"...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.
I don't doubt that Mate may be "more polished" than Xfce. I tried Cinnamon and it was much prettier. Xfce is sort of "no frills" in the appearance department. But when it comes to functionality, Xfce is the best I've found. Like Gnome2 in the old days, it lets you define panels, size them and put them where you want. And then you can create launchers for applications, urls, or files and drag those you your panels. This is a most useful feature that I've only found in Xfce. Can Mate do that?
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
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.
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.