An afternoon with Xubuntu. I feel like I've been cheating, but I kinda like it...
A couple of months ago, I tried to update my 2007 Toshiba Satellite Pro P300-1AY laptop from Ubuntu 12.04 to 13.04. It failed, badly -- my AMD RV620 GPU is no longer supported by fglrx, the proprietary AMD/ATI graphics driver. But Ubuntu used it anyway, resulting in a broken GUI.
I reverted to 12.04, a clean install from a freshly-downloaded 12.04-2 DVD. This worked fine, but I noticed something odd... Previously, screen mode-changes were smooth; after the reinstall, there is a quick but ugly blink and flash as the desktop is redrawn.
Investigating this, I noticed that 12.04-2 isn't using fglrx. I had spotted that it came with the newer kernel from 12.10 by default, but it's also updated the whole X.org X.11 subsystem -- including the no-longer-functional fglrx driver. So it had fallen back to the FOSS "radeon" driver, which works, but gives that ugly flash changing screen-mode. But what the hell -- it works well enough for Unity's compositing desktop. So I left it.
More recently, having acquired a spare hard disk -- it's a big laptop, with 2 drive bays -- and having found a Raring Ringtail DVD I forgot I had, I decided to give it a go.
Booted from the LiveDVD, Unity worked fine, but on installing it on my 2nd drive, it no longer does. It boots, I can log in, but then I get a completely blank desktop -- no panel, no launcher, no menus, nothing except my wallpaper. The `radeon` driver is installed and working, but apparently not well enough for Unity.
Ctrl-Alt-T got me a terminal, and happily it had remembered my wifi settings, but neither Compiz nor Unity would launch.
Rather than fiddle around trying to fix it, I decided, on a whim, to install Xfce and see if that worked. And it did, perfectly. It took a few minutes of fiddling to rearrange its two panels into a single, vertical taskbar, the way I prefer on Windows. Xfce 4.10, it emerges, has 3 orientation options for panels: Horizontal (the normal way), Vertical (which works fine but draws everything sideways -- clever, very frugal with screen estate, but not terribly readable) and "Deskbar". Google revealed the latter to be a vertical panel but with horizontal controls on it. This, it emerges, is what I was after.
Many of Xfce's settings are... not obvious. For instance, making the panel wider got me HUUUUUGE icons; apparently, I needed to leave it on the default 24 pixels wide, but ask for 4 rows. Rows of what, exactly, isn't clear, but what you get is a wide panel with vertically-listed window-buttons in the switcher, just like Windows 95 through to Vista with a vertical taskbar. "Launcher" icons can have up to 4 or so icons in each, but the way the bottom dock-style panel does it is lots of separate launchers with one icon each. I don't know why, but it does seem more flexible that way. The workspace switcher has 2 separate control dialogs: a "preferences" and a "properties" box. One lets you set the number of workspaces, the other in how many rows they're displayed. But with lots of fiddling and jumping between them, it works. The thumbnails are a bit bigger than I'd like, but they do show draggable miniature windows, which is more than Unity does. (Indeed, only in 13.04's version of Unity has it gained the ability to move the little fake window to show which desktop you're actually on. The one feature of GNOME Shell that I actually liked was the sidebar with a floating number of virtual desktops, always one more than you're currently using.)
So I downloaded Xubuntu, nuked the partition and reinstalled a clean copy of Xubuntu 13.04.
A few minutes later, I was in business. It's remembered all my settings, picked up my app settings from 12.04, so all I had to do was reinstall my various non-default apps (Chrome, Skype, Virtualbox, WINE, Oracle Java, LibreOffice) and I'm back in business.
I'm not sure I am going to stay with it -- I do actually like Unity's Mac OS X-like feel and I have to say that Xfce does feel clunky and old-fashioned by comparison. But on the other hand, Xfce does actually work properly with my hardware, and it's certainly quick and responsive. It's even enabled compositing, by default, to my surprise, so windows have drop shadows and so on. It's much more customisable than Unity: I've been able to reproduce my familiar, preferred desktop layout from Windows without too much work. I confess I've not tried in Maté, but GNOME 2 was very poor at handling vertical panels, so I don't expect a fork thereof to be much better. Mint's Cinnamon doesn't do it at all; nor, AFAIK, do GNOME 3's Fallback or Classic modes.
Oh, and Xubuntu's default theme is a bit plain and dull, while also making it hard to distinguish active from inactive windows, but that's easily sorted. I'd rather a dull theme than a garish, overly-colourful one, which is what KDE inflicts on you.
After berating many people online for Unity-bashing, I feel like a total traitor, though. I also feel like it's a bit of a retrograde move. But it works, well.
I reverted to 12.04, a clean install from a freshly-downloaded 12.04-2 DVD. This worked fine, but I noticed something odd... Previously, screen mode-changes were smooth; after the reinstall, there is a quick but ugly blink and flash as the desktop is redrawn.
Investigating this, I noticed that 12.04-2 isn't using fglrx. I had spotted that it came with the newer kernel from 12.10 by default, but it's also updated the whole X.org X.11 subsystem -- including the no-longer-functional fglrx driver. So it had fallen back to the FOSS "radeon" driver, which works, but gives that ugly flash changing screen-mode. But what the hell -- it works well enough for Unity's compositing desktop. So I left it.
More recently, having acquired a spare hard disk -- it's a big laptop, with 2 drive bays -- and having found a Raring Ringtail DVD I forgot I had, I decided to give it a go.
Booted from the LiveDVD, Unity worked fine, but on installing it on my 2nd drive, it no longer does. It boots, I can log in, but then I get a completely blank desktop -- no panel, no launcher, no menus, nothing except my wallpaper. The `radeon` driver is installed and working, but apparently not well enough for Unity.
Ctrl-Alt-T got me a terminal, and happily it had remembered my wifi settings, but neither Compiz nor Unity would launch.
Rather than fiddle around trying to fix it, I decided, on a whim, to install Xfce and see if that worked. And it did, perfectly. It took a few minutes of fiddling to rearrange its two panels into a single, vertical taskbar, the way I prefer on Windows. Xfce 4.10, it emerges, has 3 orientation options for panels: Horizontal (the normal way), Vertical (which works fine but draws everything sideways -- clever, very frugal with screen estate, but not terribly readable) and "Deskbar". Google revealed the latter to be a vertical panel but with horizontal controls on it. This, it emerges, is what I was after.
Many of Xfce's settings are... not obvious. For instance, making the panel wider got me HUUUUUGE icons; apparently, I needed to leave it on the default 24 pixels wide, but ask for 4 rows. Rows of what, exactly, isn't clear, but what you get is a wide panel with vertically-listed window-buttons in the switcher, just like Windows 95 through to Vista with a vertical taskbar. "Launcher" icons can have up to 4 or so icons in each, but the way the bottom dock-style panel does it is lots of separate launchers with one icon each. I don't know why, but it does seem more flexible that way. The workspace switcher has 2 separate control dialogs: a "preferences" and a "properties" box. One lets you set the number of workspaces, the other in how many rows they're displayed. But with lots of fiddling and jumping between them, it works. The thumbnails are a bit bigger than I'd like, but they do show draggable miniature windows, which is more than Unity does. (Indeed, only in 13.04's version of Unity has it gained the ability to move the little fake window to show which desktop you're actually on. The one feature of GNOME Shell that I actually liked was the sidebar with a floating number of virtual desktops, always one more than you're currently using.)
So I downloaded Xubuntu, nuked the partition and reinstalled a clean copy of Xubuntu 13.04.
A few minutes later, I was in business. It's remembered all my settings, picked up my app settings from 12.04, so all I had to do was reinstall my various non-default apps (Chrome, Skype, Virtualbox, WINE, Oracle Java, LibreOffice) and I'm back in business.
I'm not sure I am going to stay with it -- I do actually like Unity's Mac OS X-like feel and I have to say that Xfce does feel clunky and old-fashioned by comparison. But on the other hand, Xfce does actually work properly with my hardware, and it's certainly quick and responsive. It's even enabled compositing, by default, to my surprise, so windows have drop shadows and so on. It's much more customisable than Unity: I've been able to reproduce my familiar, preferred desktop layout from Windows without too much work. I confess I've not tried in Maté, but GNOME 2 was very poor at handling vertical panels, so I don't expect a fork thereof to be much better. Mint's Cinnamon doesn't do it at all; nor, AFAIK, do GNOME 3's Fallback or Classic modes.
Oh, and Xubuntu's default theme is a bit plain and dull, while also making it hard to distinguish active from inactive windows, but that's easily sorted. I'd rather a dull theme than a garish, overly-colourful one, which is what KDE inflicts on you.
After berating many people online for Unity-bashing, I feel like a total traitor, though. I also feel like it's a bit of a retrograde move. But it works, well.