[media] Jesse Smith is put off by Ubuntu Gnome's poor performance

[Mike Easter]

- I've been saying lately 'I don't like Gnome'
- maybe it is all Ubuntu's fault
- I find gnome 'bulky', like it is dragging dead-weight
- Jesse Smith has observed good performance in Ub spins, but not Ub
- this week's DW feature he reviewed Pop Ub gnome and compared w/ Ub
gnome and found Ub...

most of the community editions ran faster, smoother, and required less memory than Ubuntu's Desktop edition.
The big difference though during my trial was that Pop!_OS does everything noticeably faster than Ubuntu, even when run on the same hardware with the same filesystem. The two are not even close in performance when opening programs, moving windows around the desktop, opening menus, dragging icons around. Pop consistently ran circles around Ubuntu despite both distributions running the GNOME 3.38 desktop.

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20201207#popos

I have been comparing various KDE distro/s w/ each other, but since I
don't like Gnome, I have avoided comparing Gnome/s. In a very limited
comparison, I found that generally speaking across distro/s, Gnome uses
a lot of ram to the live desktop, while KDE's use usually compares
favorably w/ that of XFCE's. Except in Fedora spin.

[Mike Easter]

 - I've been saying lately 'I don't like Gnome'
 - maybe it is all Ubuntu's fault
 - I find gnome 'bulky', like it is dragging dead-weight
 - Jesse Smith has observed good performance in Ub spins, but not Ub
 - this week's DW feature he reviewed Pop Ub gnome and compared w/ Ub
gnome and found Ub...

OK; now I've looked at Pop's Gnome. It has some 'problems'/features
which I didn't like which JS didn't mention.

I still don't like Gnome. Both KDE (as a Qt Plasma) and Cinnamon (as a
GTK3 Gnome fork) are 'better' desktops. As 'secondaries' XFCE & Mate
DEs are OK; I wouldn't call them light weight. I don't have a problem
w/ LXQT or LXDE, but it seems to me that several WM choices do just as
well as those DEs and the WMs are truly 'lighter weight' and friskier.

[Bobbie Sellers]

 - I've been saying lately 'I don't like Gnome'
 - maybe it is all Ubuntu's fault
 - I find gnome 'bulky', like it is dragging dead-weight
 - Jesse Smith has observed good performance in Ub spins, but not Ub
 - this week's DW feature he reviewed Pop Ub gnome and compared w/ Ub
gnome and found Ub...

most of the community editions ran faster, smoother, and required less
memory than Ubuntu's Desktop edition.
The big difference though during my trial was that Pop!_OS does
everything noticeably faster than Ubuntu, even when run on the same
hardware with the same filesystem. The two are not even close in
performance when opening programs, moving windows around the desktop,
opening menus, dragging icons around. Pop consistently ran circles
around Ubuntu despite both distributions running the GNOME 3.38 desktop.

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20201207#popos
I have been comparing various KDE distro/s w/ each other, but since I
don't like Gnome, I have avoided comparing Gnome/s.  In a very limited
comparison, I found that generally speaking across distro/s, Gnome uses
a lot of ram to the live desktop, while KDE's use usually compares
favorably w/ that of XFCE's.  Except in Fedora spin.

Well also KDE Plasma 5 can be configured to look just like
Gnome as the panels can be rearranges thru the steps of creating and
deletion of unwanted panels. The menu can be altered to present
icons and you can do that from the menu icon. KDE System Settings
are easy to access and configure. Icons can be selected from a
veritable plethora of styles and types. KDE uber alles!

bliss - I have an athletic nose, it runs in all weathers...

[Mike Easter]

Post by Bobbie Sellers
Well also KDE Plasma 5 can be configured to look just like
Gnome as the panels can be rearranges thru the steps of creating and
deletion of unwanted panels.  The menu can be altered to present
icons and you can do that from the menu icon.  KDE System Settings
are easy to access and configure.  Icons can be selected from a
veritable plethora of styles and types. KDE uber alles!

Yes; KDE is both powerful AND efficient. An uncommon combination.

An element that tries to be troublesome to me is 'uncertainty' about how
The Qt Company (aka previously Trolltech) will be 'handling' the dev of
Qt as time goes on.

Digia owns the company. They have said that as Qt is developed, the
'new stuff' will be proprietary 'for a while' (is that a year?) and then
released to the opensource community or somesuch. Probably some
'temporary' non-opensource wouldn't be bad, but if the relationship is
entirely potentially 'one-sided' (ie Digia can do whatever it wants to
about Qt development and the opensource community or not), then that
would seem to be bad to me.

I don't hear much about KDE worrying about that situation.

[Bobbie Sellers]

Post by Mike Easter

Post by Bobbie Sellers
Well also KDE Plasma 5 can be configured to look just like
Gnome as the panels can be rearranges thru the steps of creating and
deletion of unwanted panels. The menu can be altered to present
icons and you can do that from the menu icon. KDE System Settings
are easy to access and configure. Icons can be selected from a
veritable plethora of styles and types. KDE uber alles!

Yes; KDE is both powerful AND efficient. An uncommon combination.
An element that tries to be troublesome to me is 'uncertainty' about how
The Qt Company (aka previously Trolltech) will be 'handling' the dev of
Qt as time goes on.
Digia owns the company. They have said that as Qt is developed, the
'new stuff' will be proprietary 'for a while' (is that a year?) and then
released to the opensource community or somesuch. Probably some
'temporary' non-opensource wouldn't be bad, but if the relationship is
entirely potentially 'one-sided' (ie Digia can do whatever it wants to
about Qt development and the opensource community or not), then that
would seem to be bad to me.
I don't hear much about KDE worrying about that situation.

KDE's Plasma 5 is nearly perfect from my pov and i have ridden out
the changes from 3.5.9 which I found very inconvenient at the time.
Anyway as a result I tried Gnome for a couple of weeks. It was
a revelation and I was so glad to get back to KDE again and
that was the tolerable Gnome 2.4. I can barely figure out how
tp use that current icon menu when I have to help friends.
Guess how I felt about Unity...

KDE could go to shareware or donation support to pay Qt developer's
license fees or the users could buy licenses to use the Qt ip.

Yes that would be a drag but use of KDE Plasma 5 is worth a good bit.

If it permitted a more atomic structure to go to a stripped down
interface it would be nice. I tried to take out one offensive
program that was making endless files, a log of some sort and
the partitions had filled up so that nothing could be deleted
and I had to delete a lot of stuff manually,

Then i fired up my package manager and tried to get rid of the
offending program but it took 98.9% of KDE's utility with it.
So I reinstalled KDE and all its packages,this was back in
4.x.x in which Plasmoids were introduced Mandriva was still
working on my laptop or notebook of the time.

bliss-“Nearly any fool can use a computer. Many do.” After all here I
am...

[Mike Easter]

Post by Bobbie Sellers
So I reinstalled KDE and all its packages,this was back in
4.x.x in which Plasmoids were introduced Mandriva was still
working on my laptop or notebook of the time.

Have you dabbled w/ the Trinity DE? Timothy Pearson is really hanging
in there for the earlier Qt and KDE. He has continued his own
development of Qt which is kinda Qt3-4 and which he calls TrinityQt or
TQt. That is the base/tookit for his DE which is kindofa KDE 3.5 which
is where it started but is now R14.0.9.

He releases a Q4OS v. based on current Plasma or his TDE over Debian
stable, and he also has one for ARM.

Since his TDE is quite light, I should give that a try in my RPi3 which
is only 1G.

[Bobbie Sellers]

Post by Bobbie Sellers
So I reinstalled KDE and all its packages,this was back in
4.x.x in which Plasmoids were introduced Mandriva was still
working on my laptop or notebook of the time.

Have you dabbled w/ the Trinity DE?  Timothy Pearson is really hanging
in there for the earlier Qt and KDE.  He has continued his own
development of Qt which is kinda Qt3-4 and which he calls TrinityQt or
TQt.  That is the base/tookit for his DE which is kindofa KDE 3.5 which
is where it started but is now R14.0.9.
He releases a Q4OS v. based on current Plasma or his TDE over Debian
stable, and he also has one for ARM.
Since his TDE is quite light, I should give that a try in my RPi3 which
is only 1G.

Well I hope that works ok for the RPi3. If so let us hear about
it. At our Virtual Meeting at Jit.si, we had a member order the RP 4000
which puts the basic parts in a keyboard and supplies a mouse as well, I
believe.

I have tried Trinity. I found it offered a few too many solutions
which I found not interesting. In addition the configuration
is stuck in the past IMO. The Brazilians seem to find it very nice
though. I have tried out nearly every DE hung onto the GNU/Linux
OS in the past 15 years. That includes Puppy and Slitaz, 4MLinux
and even Unity when that was the Ubuntu front end. Even Windows 3.1,
XP, Windows 8.1 and 7. I try to avoid looking at any version of 10
but sometimes I have to help folks so I can reduce the Windows
partition and the Page Mode Files so that Linux can have the extra
room. Or so it went until Covid-19 caused lots of changes.
I tried out a lot of stuff over the first years of my interest in
Linux besides Mandriva 2006-2011. I started with the Amiga which
was very slow and memory was measured in Megabytes and Kilobytes,
while the 68000 ran at about 7.14 MHz in those days. The GUI that
ran on top of AmigaDOS 1.2 and finally on Amiga OS 3.9 was light and
very quick and I wanted something I could setup to mimic the Amiga I was
used to. KDE came closest then and still. The Amiga was not as
perfect as GNU/Linux but it was built to a price and did not
include memory protection at all.

When I joined the SF-LUG i tried a different OS several times a month.
When I was asked by a member to host a meeting I started downloading
a lot of GNU/Linux distributions and trying them out to show to the
members. I have quite a distribution library on my portable 2.5
inch terabyte drive... 377.6 GB and some old stuff stashed on
other external drives.

bliss - I have an athletic nose, it runs in all weathers...

[Bud Frede]

Post by Bobbie Sellers

Post by Bobbie Sellers
So I reinstalled KDE and all its packages,this was back in
4.x.x in which Plasmoids were introduced Mandriva was still
working on my laptop or notebook of the time.

Have you dabbled w/ the Trinity DE?  Timothy Pearson is really
hanging in there for the earlier Qt and KDE.  He has continued his
own development of Qt which is kinda Qt3-4 and which he calls
TrinityQt or TQt.  That is the base/tookit for his DE which is
kindofa KDE 3.5 which is where it started but is now R14.0.9.
He releases a Q4OS v. based on current Plasma or his TDE over Debian
stable, and he also has one for ARM.
Since his TDE is quite light, I should give that a try in my RPi3
which is only 1G.

Well I hope that works ok for the RPi3. If so let us hear about
it. At our Virtual Meeting at Jit.si, we had a member order the RP
4000 which puts the basic parts in a keyboard and supplies a mouse as
well, I believe.

I think the mouse is only supplied if you buy the whole kit with an SD
card, etc.

Post by Bobbie Sellers
When I joined the SF-LUG i tried a different OS several times a month.
When I was asked by a member to host a meeting I started downloading
a lot of GNU/Linux distributions and trying them out to show to the
members. I have quite a distribution library on my portable 2.5
inch terabyte drive... 377.6 GB and some old stuff stashed on
other external drives.

I tried a lot of different OSes and Linux distros at first. I gradually
found that Linux was a comfortable place to be and settled on one distro
that I liked. I've moved on to other distros in the "same family" since
then, but not very often. I can't even remember now how long it's been
since I've used anything but what I'm using now as a daily driver. I
suppose it was around the time that Ubuntu switched from Gnome 2.

At that point I tried a few other distros and DEs. I could probably use
LXDE or maybe XFCE, but as soon as MATE was ready I switched back to it
and basically got my Gnome 2 back.

I've gotten rid of much of the old software I had laying around on
various disks and I've also gotten rid of a lot of old hardware. An RPi
running Raspian is such a satisfying little unix machine that I'm not
really tempted to use most older hardware. It's a lot easier to store an
RPi when I'm not using it too. :-)

[Mike Easter]

It's a lot easier to store an RPi when I'm not using it too. :-)

I recently temporarily moved my RPi into the living room to test its
function as a '10' interface' system w/ the big screen being the monitor.

The system in place before that test was to use a chromebook 'on my lap'
(sorta; actually on a board across my lap) if I wanted internet info
while watching TV content from that location.

But, I didn't really care for the 10' interface, so I moved the RPi back
into a station in the computer room. More recently I was using the RPi
as a source of streaming content during a time there was a conflict
between my TV content provider and some of the channels I watch, which
would have cut me off from some NFL games I wanted to watch during the
disagreement which has finally resolved.

Other experiments w/ the RPi in that regard as a media device included
using a smart phone as a remote.

It is definitely a lot easier to move around than other desktops :-)

[Mike Easter]

Post by Mike Easter
An element that tries to be troublesome to me is 'uncertainty' about how
The Qt Company (aka previously Trolltech) will be 'handling' the dev of
Qt as time goes on.
Digia owns the company.  They have said that as Qt is developed, the
'new stuff' will be proprietary 'for a while' (is that a year?) and then
released to the opensource community or somesuch.  Probably some
'temporary' non-opensource wouldn't be bad, but if the relationship is
entirely potentially 'one-sided' (ie Digia can do whatever it wants to
about Qt development and the opensource community or not), then that
would seem to be bad to me.
I don't hear much about KDE worrying about that situation.

Just on the heels of those remarks, I find that Qt6 is released.

Reading those pages led me to more information about Qt commercial vs
open source licensing. It certainly is complicated.

https://www.qt.io/faq/tag/qt-open-source-licensing

Post by Mike Easter
Why do you have an agreement with KDE about your licensing? What KDE is and what’s the history of Qt and KDE?

[philo]

After being a Gnome user for 20 years, I recently switched to Mate.
Final straw was not being able to leave leave anything on my desktop.

T

[Ray]

Post by philo
After being a Gnome user for 20 years, I recently switched to Mate.
Final straw was not being able to leave leave anything on my desktop.
T

Philo
I have items on the desktop in gnome no prob? (Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS Gnome 3.36.8)
RayH

[philo]

Post by Ray

Post by philo
After being a Gnome user for 20 years, I recently switched to Mate.
Final straw was not being able to leave leave anything on my desktop.
T

Philo
I have items on the desktop in gnome no prob? (Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS Gnome 3.36.8)
RayH

I logged back into Gnome just to check.

I can create folders on my desktop but the the "paste" option is grayed out.

I am not going to worry about using Gnome again because I had other
problems as well such as the display momentarily blanking out when I
create a new desktop folder. Mate works so much better.

[Jonathan N. Little]

Post by philo
After being a Gnome user for 20 years, I recently switched to Mate.
Final straw was not being able to leave leave anything on my desktop.

That has been a real issue and have kept me from upgrading from 16.04 at
the library. I see how people work, including myself where the desktop
is a temporary work-space analogous to the physical analog. No solutions
worked for 18.04 but I have been testing DING

<https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2087/desktop-icons-ng-ding/>

and improvement over the original and seems to restore most* of the
desktop functionally.

*You can drag shortcuts to images from Firefox but not the actual image
and unfortunately most library patrons expect the image and not a link.

Some things I like about the GNOME, but miss many features of Unity such
as it's consistency of design, handy hotkeys, and lightdm greeter that
previews user desktop to make it obvious which user login (used
wallpaper to instruct patrons on login password)

[Mike Easter]

Post by Jonathan N. Little
Some things I like about the GNOME, but miss many features of Unity such
as it's consistency of design, handy hotkeys, and lightdm greeter that
previews user desktop to make it obvious which user login (used
wallpaper to instruct patrons on login password)

There's a Unity 8 Lomiri for Ub 18.04; and a Unity 7 remix for Ub 20.04
LTS and also alpha for 20.10 as separate desktop projects from where the
Unity Touch took off to.

But I don't know much about that, since I'm less of a fan of gnome/unity
except for the cousins/forks Mate & Cinnamon.

[philo]

I am using 20.04 with no probmens other than Gnome. Since Mate is working to my liking I'm not going to experiment but if I had been so inclined, I might have removed Gnome and tried to install an older version.

[Mike Easter]

Post by philo
I am using 20.04 with no probmens other than Gnome. Since Mate is
working to my liking I'm not going to experiment but if I had been so
inclined, I might have removed Gnome and tried to install an older version.

Ub 20.04 has a nice Mate, as does Mint.

[philo]

I also have a Mint installation so knew ahead of time what Mate was.

The only thing about my entire installation that bugs me is that no matter which browser I use... Facebook loads *considerably* faster on my phone.

[Mike Easter]

Post by philo
The only thing about my entire installation that bugs me is that no
matter which browser I use... Facebook loads *considerably* faster on my
phone.

Well, I don't know anything specifically about Facebook and phones, but
I do know that there is such a thing as 'mobile optimization' by which
the delivery of the webpage is optimized for the mobile device.

And, there is AMP Accelerated Mobile Pages the description of which is
developed in this wp article and other places
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

As regards specifically Facebook, there's another article about Instant
Articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Instant_Articles

[philo]

Post by Mike Easter

Post by philo
The only thing about my entire installation that bugs me is that no
matter which browser I use... Facebook loads *considerably* faster on
my phone.

Well, I don't know anything specifically about Facebook and phones, but
I do know that there is such a thing as 'mobile optimization' by which
the delivery of the webpage is optimized for the mobile device.
And, there is AMP Accelerated Mobile Pages the description of which is
developed in this wp article and other places
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
As regards specifically Facebook, there's another article about Instant
Articles  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Instant_Articles

Not a big deal as I mainly use FB on my phone

[Mike Easter]

Post by philo
Not a big deal as I mainly use FB on my phone

... as opposed to me, who /almost/ never uses a mobile phone and
*absolutely* never uses FB :-)

[philo]

Although I took FORTRAN-IV back in the punch card days... I was a luddite who used a typewriter until about 1999 or so when my (now) wife gave me her old computer.


Before too long I became immersed in the new technology.


I like FB because I can keep in contact with friends now all over the world. Especially nice now that I'm retired and have no regular hours for sleep or wakefulness.

[Mike Easter]

Post by philo
I was a luddite who used a typewriter until about 1999 or so when my
(now) wife gave me her old computer.

Speaking of typewriters...

... when I was in high school typing class, there were only 2 males in
the otherwise all-female class where we were provided 'manual'
(non-electric) typewriters for class activity. We were also given speed
and accuracy competitions and the 2 top performers then competed against
those from other schools.

Those 2 were 'us' males. :-)

[philo]

I took typing in HS.
The keys were blank in order to force you to actually learn.

I always arrived early so I could get the one normal machine.

I'm a genius for doing dumb things.

[Mike Easter]

Post by philo
I'm a genius for doing dumb things.

Here's a dumb thing; I still have an old manual typewriter as well as an
old electric one. And, I believe there's a dot matrix printer around
here somewhere. And some pin-feed paper.

[jjb]

Post by Mike Easter

Post by philo
I'm a genius for doing dumb things.

Here's a dumb thing; I still have an old manual typewriter as well as an
old electric one.  And, I believe there's a dot matrix printer around
here somewhere.  And some pin-feed paper.

Not so dumb. I too have a 9-pin dot matrix printer with tractor feed
and friction feed for 16.5" maximum width paper, parallel Centronix
port. It is at least 35 years old and still in perfect working order.
I still use it to print on special format paper (wider than A4) used for
our administration. Ribbons are still available. Only minus point:
each new computer I build I have to add a parallel port interface,
because nowadays no motherboard has an integrated one...

[Mike Easter]

Post by jjb
each new computer I build I have to add a parallel port interface,
because nowadays no motherboard has an integrated one...

Hmmm. It looks to me like USB to parallel adapters are cheaper than PCI
parallel cards.

[jjb]

Hmmm.  It looks to me like USB to parallel adapters are cheaper than PCI
parallel cards.

Tried that several years ago. It did not work. Perhaps as I run Linux
instead of Windows and maybe technical progress it would work now. You
are right, the USB to parallel adapter is € 10 cheaper. Then again, on
the total budget for a new machine it is insignificant.

[philo]

Post by Mike Easter

Post by philo
I'm a genius for doing dumb things.

Here's a dumb thing; I still have an old manual typewriter as well as an
old electric one.  And, I believe there's a dot matrix printer around
here somewhere.  And some pin-feed paper.

Not so dumb

I still have two manual typewriters.

One was my daughter's and she's had several books with a major publisher.

[Bud Frede]

Post by Mike Easter

Post by philo
I'm a genius for doing dumb things.

Here's a dumb thing; I still have an old manual typewriter as well as
an old electric one. And, I believe there's a dot matrix printer
around here somewhere. And some pin-feed paper.

I have an old Underwood typewriter from the 1920's. I haven't used it in
a long time, but I'm sure it still works. It might need to be cleaned
and lubricated, but that's about it.

[Mike Easter]

Post by Bud Frede

Post by Mike Easter

Post by philo
I'm a genius for doing dumb things.

Here's a dumb thing; I still have an old manual typewriter as well as
an old electric one.

I have an old Underwood typewriter from the 1920's. I haven't used it in
a long time, but I'm sure it still works. It might need to be cleaned
and lubricated, but that's about it.

Mine was 'ancient' when purchased in the 50s; it had been refurb/ed and
was then in fine shape for an older used typewriter. I should examine
it and see if I can determine its actual vintage.

But, I've been avoiding that particular corner of the garage :-/

[philo]

I even have one IBM's first electtic's from before the Selectric days.
It has a lever 1-10 for number of carbon copies desired.

If I put it on 10 but use only one sheet of paper...a "O" will punch a hole in the paper!

[Jonathan N. Little]

Post by Mike Easter

Post by philo
I was a luddite who used a typewriter until about 1999 or so when my
(now) wife gave me her old computer.

Speaking of typewriters...
... when I was in high school typing class, there were only 2 males in
the otherwise all-female class where we were provided 'manual'
(non-electric) typewriters for class activity.  We were also given speed
and accuracy competitions and the 2 top performers then competed against
those from other schools.
Those 2 were 'us' males.  :-)

Mine limited it to only for business/trade track and for females, for
college bound track it was not available. Who knew? I wish I could type
now instead of the it-must-be-a-sin-whatever-i-am-doing method that I use.

[Bud Frede]

Post by Mike Easter

Post by philo
Not a big deal as I mainly use FB on my phone

... as opposed to me, who /almost/ never uses a mobile phone and
*absolutely* never uses FB :-)

I use a phone all the time, mainly for work. I have to admit that it's
very handy to be able to walk away from my desk to make some coffee,
etc. in the kitchen and still be easily reachable via the phone in my
pocket. A few times I've heard a number of alerts fire off and then I
know that maybe I should get back to my desk and see what I need to
fix. :-)

I don't use Facecrook either.

[chovy]

 - I've been saying lately 'I don't like Gnome'
 - maybe it is all Ubuntu's fault
 - I find gnome 'bulky', like it is dragging dead-weight
 - Jesse Smith has observed good performance in Ub spins, but not Ub
 - this week's DW feature he reviewed Pop Ub gnome and compared w/ Ub
gnome and found Ub...

most of the community editions ran faster, smoother, and required less
memory than Ubuntu's Desktop edition.
The big difference though during my trial was that Pop!_OS does
everything noticeably faster than Ubuntu, even when run on the same
hardware with the same filesystem. The two are not even close in
performance when opening programs, moving windows around the desktop,
opening menus, dragging icons around. Pop consistently ran circles
around Ubuntu despite both distributions running the GNOME 3.38 desktop.

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20201207#popos
I have been comparing various KDE distro/s w/ each other, but since I
don't like Gnome, I have avoided comparing Gnome/s.  In a very limited
comparison, I found that generally speaking across distro/s, Gnome uses
a lot of ram to the live desktop, while KDE's use usually compares
favorably w/ that of XFCE's.  Except in Fedora spin.

I just switched from ubuntu to manjaro with kde. loving it.

[Mike Easter]

Post by chovy
I just switched from ubuntu to manjaro with kde. loving it.

Mjo's KDE is VERY popular w/ mjo people. Tho' XFCE is the mjo
'flagship', its KDE is the more 'popular' (by some metric unknown to me,
maybe dl/s). And of course mjo is high on the DW page hit list, second
only to MX; for whatever that metric is supposed to mean.

I like the Neon KDE better than Kubuntu.