Configuration Linux desktops ................
Join the terminally bewildered Jonni Bidwell as he shows you how to do desktop Linux, without the baggage of 20th century GUI thinking
Join the terminally bewildered Jonni Bidwell as he shows you how to do desktop Linux.
By now most sane people have stopped talking about “the year of the Linux desktop”. There was a time, right around when Windows Vista was released, where there might have been hope that the Windows and Mac goliaths would be slain. But OS inertia is hard to overcome, people get locked into nasty proprietary habits and now that kant is the stuff of fairy tales.
Not that it matters − the Linux desktop ecosystem has never been healthier, it’s just an area of special interest rather than a major player. As casual computing becomes more and more rebased to the realms of smartphones and tablets, however, the whole desktop paradigm is changing. Yes, office peons will still need their Windows and Mac desktops to fill in TPS reports and play Solitaire, but the traditional idea of the family home computer and all those boring OSes it used to run, is at its end.
From the late 90s through to around 2010 there were two major Linux desktop environments: Gnome and KDE. A flurry of readers will be reaching for their quills and ravens on reading that remark. What about Enlightenment? DWM? CDE? Yes, those existed too, and still exist today, but they did and do so very much in a minority. Gnome and KDE still exist today, and it’s almost fair to say that they are still the largest DEs, but the competition is thicker and fiercer than ever. Many of the newer, beginner-friendly distros are (rightly or wrongly) to some extent defined by their DE.
Ubuntu (on the desktop) and Unity became inextricably linked because beginners see much more of that purpleorange sidebar than they do of the underlying filesystem layout. Mint sprang up offering the more traditional Cinnamon, Bodhi with its enlightening Moksha, elementaryOS with its macOS-esque Pantheon, Solus with its Budgie… quite frankly, the list goes on. The UbuntuUnity linkage was unique since the latter is nigh-on impossible to install on other distros (due to heavy patching of Gnome libraries by Ubuntu), although demand for that was generally low.
Picking ‘n’ mixing
The other DEs mentioned are more or less decouple-able from their parent distros, so that people willing to try them need not resort to installing a whole new Linux. For example, if you want to try out Cinnamon and its array of desktop spices on Ubuntu, it is just a matter of: $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon $ sudo apt update && sudo apt install cinnamon
Of course, Gnome, KDE Plasma, Xfce and so many other DEs have been distro-agnostic since day zero, although distros still tailor their experiences according to their needs. So the Gnome you get on Ubuntu by doing (and only do this if
you don’t mind some messing up of your Unity settings) $ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop is different to the more minimal experience you’d get by doing the following on Arch: # pacman -S gnome
Just because people are used to having some kind of cascading applications menu in the bottom left, an invention from Windows 95, doesn’t mean it’s the best way a desktop should be. Indeed much desktop criticism is more testament to people’s refusal to try a new way of working than an indictment of new desktop technologies. This is odd, because most Linux users ought to remember the initial struggle of switching from Windows and having to shake off old habits.
Rethink your desktop
There are common criticisms that are levelled at many of the modern desktop environments (DE). Users are disgruntled that putting documents and shortcuts on the desktop (another Windows 95 invention) is now frowned upon. It doesn’t really provide easy access to those items, since those items are just going to end up covered by applications.
Be that as it may, most DEs can be coerced into allowing a desktop population now, so if you really want that functionality, it’s there for the taking. Then there is the perception that one has to learn arcane series of keystrokes in order to do things optimally. There certainly are keyboard shortcuts, but there’s absolutely no obligation to learn ones that don’t help you, and most of them aren’t particularly arcane. Indeed, many of them (Alt-Tab, Alt-F4) are the same as in that nameless OS that the curmudgeons seem to want their Linux desktop to emulate.
By rewriting some of ye olde desktop rules, new desktop environments can provide new ways of working more productively. A trailblazer here is the Pantheon desktop that ships with elementary OS. To give you an example, native Pantheon apps save their state on close, so you can confidently click the close button and watch your work disappear, safe in the knowledge that all (documents, layouts, everything) will be restored next time. In this way, closing an application and opening it again becomes much more akin to minimising and maximising it. This provides some justification for Pantheon’s banishing of the minimise button. This is also ousted in Gnome, but for entirely different reasons. And speaking of Gnome...
Gnome on the range
In the matter of unpopular technologies that have inveigled their way into the Linux ecosystem, and have done so seemingly without invitation, few (with the obvious exception of systemd) are more oft’ spoken of than Gnome 3. The desktop that did away with such fripperies as application menus, minimise buttons, system trays and taskbars.
Yet the masses didn’t welcome its appearance back in 2010. The MATE desktop was forked from the remains of its predecessor, and has since amassed a sizable userbase. It wasn’t ready for Ubuntu 11.04, and even when it was ready, Ubuntu, citing disagreements with the Gnome team, stuck with their own Unity desktop.
Depending on who you ask, this was roughly as unpopular as Gnome 3 at launch (both were criticised for being mobilefirst and desktop-second interfaces, even though mobile Linux wasn’t, and still isn’t really a thing), but slowly gained a loyal following. And last April its demise was announced: the
next Ubuntu will once again use Gnome (it’s now the default on the 17.10 daily builds), and things will have gone full circle.
Gnome 3 uses the Mutter (a portmanteau of Metacity (the former Gnome window manager) and Clutter) window manager and Wayland compositor. The user-facing parts of the DE, Gnome Shell, is implemented as a plugin for Mutter. Mutter isn’t strictly a Gnome component and can be used in other DEs. Muffin, a fork of Mutter, is used in Cinnamon.
What we Gnome
A desktop environment consists of many layers and components, and it’s sometimes not clear where the DE ends and the application stack (going up the way) or the display/ system stack (descending) begins. One major criticism of Gnome is its alleged dependency on systemd, specifically the systemd-logind component. Functionally, this shouldn’t bother most desktop users, because most major distros have drunk the systemd Kool Aid already.
Gentoo Linux’s attempts to bundle a systemd-free Gnome ended in a lot of bugs, so systemd is now a dependency of Gnome there. You don’t have to use it as your init system, but it does need to be there if you want to Gnome on Gentoo without using third-party overlays (see https://wiki.gentoo. org/wiki/GNOME/GNOME_Without_systemd). PCLinuxOS doesn’t offer Gnome 3, while Devuan (the systemd-free Debian fork, https://dev-1.org) offers a Gnome package but admits there are some glitches. Devuan only just reached version 1.0.0, and these glitches will hopefully be worked around soon. In fairness, their KDE and Cinnamon packages also have some bugs too.
But we think people should give Gnome a chance. Maybe it was terrible when it was introduced, but it’s had years to mature and if its critics put aside their prejudices about how a desktop should be, then maybe they would enjoy it too.
The first complaint most people have is that the journey to the top-left corner to summon the Activities overview is long and arduous. The second is that one has to make this journey not just when one wants to open a program, but also when one wants to switch applications. But the Activities view can be raised by tapping the Super (Windows) key, and instead of hunting in the Show Applications menu to find a particular program, just type the first few letters of its name.
Switching between applications is best done using Alt+Tab. If you use applications that use multiple windows, Alt+` (usually the key above Tab) will switch through these. By just getting used to involving the keyboard in this way, we reckon a lot of people and Gnome would get on much better. Some people prefer Alt-Tabbing to be done differently, and those people should look at an extension such as AlternateTab, which doesn’t group windows by application.
Workspaces (formerly virtual desktops) in Gnome are handled differently to before. Rather than having a fixed number of them, they’re dynamically allocated so that there’s always an empty one, ready to be filled with applications. This will upset people who like to populate a particular workspace with particular applications as they’re opened, but the Gnome TweakTool can restore the traditional layout here. Like with applications, switching workspaces is most effectively done by keyboard: Ctrl+Alt+Up/Down are your friends here.
Gnome is where the heart is
When it was launched, there was much criticism of Gnome’s lack of customisability. There was no way to change the default theme, not even the default font. The idea was that vanilla Gnome should be suitable for all users, and that offering these sorts of customisations would serve only as a distraction. But now this can all be done from the handy GnomeTweakTool ( sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool).
Gnome 3 has supported extensions from the outset. These, and in fact a good chunk of the Gnome Shell interface, are written in Gnome JavaScript (gjs), so it’s in some ways fitting that the official way to install them is via the https:// extensions.gnome.org website. For this to work on a browser other than that provided by Gnome itself, a browser add-on and connector application need to be installed. Your web browser will prompt you to install the former, while the latter