Of all the places I expected to fix my issue with Gnome 3 and Linux window environments, Ubuntu and Unity was quite likely the very last one I would have expected. I hadn’t had any experience with Unity in the past as I jumped the ISS Ubuntu a little before Unity’s time. However, I had read about how many people despise Unity compared to the traditional Ubuntu desktop and to be honest I can’t disagree with them more. Unity seems to just work for me, the system is sophisticated and mature and allows me to work very freely and easily with developing. While I do find the Unity dashboard a bit bulky and annoying, I find that I almost never use it. That is a sign of the success of this environment, it can be used in multiple ways by different people and be useful for all of them.

So, currently, my Linux development system is a manually stripped down version of Ubuntu off of a default install of 11.10. It runs Unity and it runs beautifully. I am very pleased that I have ended up at this point and will be sticking with Unity for a while until either Canonical effs it up like Gnome did with Gnome 3 or until Gnome becomes more usable. Linux Mint Cinnamon is also around the corner and Elementary OS is maturing quickly, so only time will tell for them!

The title of this post sounds like something out a christian revival blog…

You know, Gnome 3 is probably going to be just as good as Gnome 2 was. Gnome 2 wasn’t perfect at first either, many people disliked it. Right now however, Gnome 3 is far from perfect. To be honest, I find it unusable. The real problem is that Gnome 2 is already deprecated and losing support from software. The other day I updated and broke my Debian machine because tons of updates were being held back due to Gnome 3 dependencies. So now, I don’t know what to do. With the beautiful desktop environment I used to use bastardized into the idiotic Gnome 3, I’m running out of places to go. KDE is not an option, I can’t stand it. XFCE is alright, but altogether lacking compared to Gnome and what I’m used to and a pain to reconfigure, there aren’t GUIs for almost any settings it seems. I’m going to try Openbox but I can’t believe I’m having to go to that. Openbox is great if you need a lightweight GUI but this is my development machine we’re talking about. I want to use resources and have lots of useful features at my fingertips. I know, ultimately that I’ll just have to go back to Gnome once it gets more configurable but honestly I’m annoyed that I have to deal with this at all. I can understand bringing the codebase into this decade but its sort of expected that you’re not going to break everything and confound your users when doing so. If I was trying desktop linux for the first time right now instead of when I did 4 years ago, I probably would not stick with it. Gnome 3 is pretty and stable but when it comes to getting work done its useless and frustrating. I have almost no doubt I would have written it off not knowing that I could change my desktop environment and taken a long time to use it again.

Ultimately, I’m disappointed more than anything. Panels worked really well and was never complained about. Fixing something that isn’t broken always has backlash like this and I wish that the Gnome team had thought this out from a usability standpoint more before just deprecating Gnome 2. For now, I’m going to have to waste time migrating to another desktop environment and then, maybe one day, I can come back to Gnome and create a desktop environment that I can actually get work done on again.

The worst part is that everyone is thinking what I just typed, very few members of the Gnome community are satisfied with these changes and are having to find other desktop environments. The world of desktop Linux users has literally been sent into a chaotic mess with this blunder by the Gnome project and I truly believe its a big setback for the entire community of desktop Linux users.

This topic has crossed my mind before but after reading this Google Plus post I have decided I would like to pose this question in a public manner. Why are some developers so opposed to using Linux? Complaints are aimed at all different things about Ubuntu or simply Linux in general (that also brings up a secondary question, why are the developers that are using Linux using Ubuntu?) . Some complain about the UI not being simple enough, some even complain about editing a configuration file. You write code for pete’s sake! Why is it so hard to learn about the system you are using? If you can write a line of code, you are smart enough to edit a configuration file. If you are smart enough to write a line of code, you are smart enough to figure out how Gnome works. And then guess what, you actually understand how your system works and how to configure it the way you like, why would you not want a configurable system when you are a programmer? It makes no sense not to.

I know the main argument that you will here in response to this is “I’d rather spend time programming and making money than learning how to configure my system.” There is something called a capital cost people, spend a day or two (yes, it only takes a day or two to learn most things) and you will benefit from it forever. Then you don’t have to pay for your OS anymore, you will become a stronger programmer because you can use the terminal (IMO you’re not even a programmer if you can’t use the terminal, that’s just sad), and you can stop complaining and sounding ignorant on Google Plus posts .

Am I way off here in assuming these are the reasons why some developers hate on Linux? I can understand certain situations such as developing on a mac so you can make iPhone apps (even if it is evil). The issues that I was addressing are clearly different from that however.

When I first started using Linux as a desktop OS I started with Ubuntu like most everyone. This was quite a while ago however. I believe I started with Feisty Fawn in 2007. Back then I had a lot harder time than a beginner Ubuntu user would have today. I remember the first thing I realized was that I didn’t have wifi support and that was quite the experience to fix, but, it made me so much stronger. It was actually a great first experience and it showed me a lot of little bits of information that allowed me to jump in and stick with it. I stuck with Ubuntu for quite a while, I tinkered with a couple other distributions, a little Fedora here, a little openSUSE there, but Ubuntu remained superior…until recently.

When I began running a few VPS’s I experimented with a few different distributions. I started with Ubuntu server and soon realized that this was foolish as Ubuntu runs a lot of stuff by default that I didn’t need. I decided to move to a more minimal OS. I decided on ArchLinux. I still love Arch, I really do, and its a great system, but I missed the familiarity of a Debian based system. The subtle differences were getting annoying. I realized, why don’t I just use Debian? I began researching Debian and realized that I should have been doing this all along. Debian has all the familiarities of Ubuntu without all the bloat. Also, Debian is insanely stable, I’m pretty sure the most stable around. I can trust the updates on the Debian’s stable track not to break my system. I might not have the latest versions of software, but I don’t need it.

This weekend, I moved to Debian on my laptop computer, which is my development machine. I am not looking back. I really love the speed. It’s something that I never knew with Ubuntu. Debian feels no different from Ubuntu, but it preforms so much better. Debian still runs Gnome, uses apt-get, etc. but it does literally everything faster. It boots faster, it runs faster, it shuts down faster.

I still feel Ubuntu is an excellent first step for someone who is new to Linux. Debian certainly requires more command line use, you will get a little lost in Debian if you have not yet become comfortable in the command line, or at the very least you would be uncomfortable, but once you get to the point where you use the command line more in Ubuntu than it’s fancy tools, you’re ready. All in all, Debian is a logical next step for a Linux user who is ready to move on from Ubuntu and I would encourage you to try it, you’ll love it.