Proxy Glider

At the outset, I feel I should explain the title. I am using GNOME-Shell 3.4 again, having shucked Unity in favor of it.

But… but… you say. Didn’t you say that Unity was amazing? I did. And I don’t think I’m going to go back on anything I said in my previous posts. Remember, I won’t use a UI if I don’t like it. And I chose to use Unity for the past several weeks, and that means I liked it.

Ubuntu 12.04 has been described as the best release of Ubuntu yet, and I don’t fault that. Most of the hurrah’s Ubuntu has gotten on this release are for the improvements to Unity, the addition of HUD, and the many other minor fixes and tweaks along the way.

It’s been 2 years since the fall of GNOME 2. GNOME 2 had lots of minor bugs, but instead of fixing them, GNOME developers decided to scrap the whole project and move into GNOME 3 (a project which had been developed for 6-7 years and which had it’s own unique bugs).

For whatever reason, Ubuntu decided to not run with popular opinion, and quickly cobbled together it’s own GUI, which they called Unity. Unlike GNOME3 which had almost half a decade of slow developments under it’s belt at that point, Unity was kind of a flash project. It had bugs, some of them serious. And it would take entire distribution cycles for some of those bugs to be removed or even addressed.

And, looking back at the events which led to Linux User Interface Battle (Unity vs GNOME3 Shell), I find it almost ironic the bugs that have been tolerated on both sides all this time, because other problems are considered bigger.

And it’s still ironic what both of those UI’s CAN’T do correctly.

For example, both GNOME 3 and Unity have issues with mouse cursors. In case you hadn’t realized it yet, there are only 5 cursor themes installed on Unity (and only one of them works 100%).

So let’s say you download a mouse cursor theme and install it to the correct location on your drive. Remember GNOME 2 where you could bring up Appearance properties and change the pointer and preview it immediately? That is history… Now, in order to change your cursor theme you have to be a Linux wizard! First, to change your mouse cursor theme, you have to install gnome-tweak-tool and change the theme there. But that doesn’t work completely (it might only change the cursor for 40% of the programs you use, or for none at all). So then, you have to open the Terminal and type “sudo update-alternative —config x-cursor-theme” and select the x-cursor-theme you just opted to use in gnome-tweak-tool again to make it a systemwide change! But that still doesn’t work completely… Finally, you have to Alt-F2 and type “compiz —replace” and (theoretically) your mouse cursor should change after all that. But usually, one more step is required. You must restart your computer to make the change stick everywhere.

How retarded is that?

Another thing Unity can’t do is themes! You can’t theme Unity AT ALL! It is what it is. The only things you can tweak on Unity are whether the dock hides or not, and the size of the icons in the dock. And since Intellihide was removed as an option recently, hiding the Unity dock sometimes causes more problems than you bargained for (I believe the “My dock disappeared and won’t come back” bug is classified as a low-priority bug; the solution suggested is “Don’t hide it”)

But it’s these minor inconveniences that really tweak some people off!

Which leads to my initial statement. I have decided to start using GNOME Shell again. You’re probably wondering why.

Here’s the thing, when you dig into one particular operating system enough, you’ll eventually find all it’s flaws. And I still have some issues with Unity. Ironically, changing the mouse cursors is a problem shared by GNOME-Shell, so I found no immediate resolution there, but when I went to check out GNOME-Shell it captivated me faster than Unity did… so I stayed.

In parting, I will admit there were a few things I truly liked about Unity. And there were some things I didn’t realize could be improved about Unity until I looked at GNOME Shell

The Ubuntu Software Center. I rarely used it since I favor other hardcore solutions like Synaptic. But I did like the graphical whoosh that USC did when you installed a program thru it. The program would fly from your USC to the Dash bar and stick there. It was cool!

HUD was another thing I liked. However, I rarely used HUD. It was much easier on my mind to explore a menu.

12.04 didn’t cause my laptop to overheat. The overheating bug is something that I refer to as a superbug, because it was a bunch of micro problems inside and outside the kernal that caused observable macro problems (HEAT!!). It took Ubuntu about a year and two distribution cycles to solve it.

When I first tested Unity on 12.04 I was impressed by the speed of the Dash menu. It wasn’t laggy like it had been in previous distribution cycles. I’ll touch on this later though.

There was one issue I mentioned in my previous article that I still stick to. It’s hard to multitask on Unity. Multitasking for me is a big deal! On a normal day, I usually have Chromium, Skype, the FatRat download manager, Synaptic, and 2-3 Terminals open all at once. When I have that many programs open, and I’m flipping back and forth between them, Unity can’t keep up! This is where Unity fails horribly and ends up slowing me down! The Unity taskbar shows that a particular program is open. I click on that icon to raise the program, but it will only raise the last used window in that program. What if I want a different window? Click again. It will spread the active windows of that program eventually. Then click on the window you want and it pops to the top. But if you click on a different program and then try clicking back again that window is what will display. Want a different window? Repeat the directions above… see, how Unity complicates multitasking?

So, after updating the repositories with ricotz’s PPA and GNOME3’s PPA and updating gnome-shell to the highest version, I switched to see what things looked like on the other side.

When I checked out GNOME Shell I discovered that as fast as Unity was (mentioned above), the Activities Overview in GNOME 3 was about 20x-50x faster. It found results as I typed individual keys, no matter how many programs I had installed and no matter how fast I typed. Unity always lagged slightly, sometimes by a fraction of a second, sometimes more. There was no lag finding the program I wanted on GNOME 3. Unity gets props for increasing it’s speed, but for me, GNOME 3 gets the vote because it’s still faster!

Despite the fact that the overheating problem (mentioned above) appeared solved, I have noticed that my laptop is running even cooler while using GNOME Shell. Unity deserved some props. Not overheating in the first place is good; but cooler is ALWAYS better, so GNOME 3 wins my vote.

GNOME 3 does themes! You can change how the desktop looks easily by writing up a CSS stylesheet and loading it into theme package. You can select the theme package using the gnome-tweak-tool. Unity I don’t think should even get a vote here because the Unity UI is locked and cannot be themed, except in very minor ways (mentioned above)

GNOME 3 has one issue in common with Unity. Mouse cursors. Neither UI does mice spectacularly. And GNOME 3 has serious complications with “compiz —replace” because GNOME 3 doesn’t use Compiz as a display manager. So both fail in this regard.

Multitasking is amazing on GNOME 3! Push your mouse into the left-hand corner and it spreads all the windows. Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out of certain windows, or click on a window to select it. There are certain shell extensions which refine the process even better (select windows using Alt+#, native window placement, etc.) Multitasking has never been easier or more efficient. Unity approaches the UI in a different way than GNOME 3 does, so it’s hard to compare them on this area. For me, I’m torn between both… they both have individual facets I like.

Long blog summed up? TL,DR?

I’m using GNOME Shell now. My reasons are my own.

I recently converted a friend of mine to Ubuntu 12.04 after she began having serious issues running Windows 7 on her laptop.

Since she lived about a thousand miles away at the time, I walked her through the Ubuntu install over Skype. She got on one computer with Skype installed and I talked her through an Ubuntu install. It was fairly boring… the hardest part of the install was having to reconfigure BIOS to boot from the CD before booting from the hard drive. After that, Ubuntu presented her with a human-readable user-friendly install and she completed it entirely by herself.

To begin with, let me describe what we did for the install itself. Ubuntu says the optimum install is a computer that is connected to the internet at the time, and is plugged in (wouldn’t it be horrible if your battery died halfway through an install!). So to meet both of those guidelines we hardwired her laptop into the router with an ethernet cord, and had the laptop physically plugged into the wall.

I reason this way… Just in case that the laptop WLAN needs some special settings or configuration, let’s not trust it during the operating system installation. Let’s bypass it for the time and use a good old-fashioned ethernet cable. So, at least for the install, the laptop was tethered to a physical location a couldn’t move very far. I assured her that after the install her wireless drivers would be installed automatically, and she would be able to immediately untether and use her laptop like… a laptop.

But there was this very interesting problem that cropped up afterwards…

As soon as the install was done, everything was working… until she unplugged the ethernet cable from the wall. Then the Ubuntu desktop froze, and it wouldn’t boot until it was hard-wired into the router again. How odd!

Several things occured to me, and I directed my friend how to do them over Skype. But nothing seemed to work. We reinstalled the wireless packages on Ubuntu, reconfigured the router… nada. Every time she unplugged the laptop from the router it would crash.

Finally, I decided to bump the problem up to other nerds. I directed her to install the program “xchat”. I told her that XChat would auto-connect to the #ubuntu chatroom on FreeNode, and that she could describe the problem to the users in that room and perhaps they could suggest a fix I hadn’t thought of. One of the users did think of something… he suggested that if the software was current then it was probably a hardware issue.

But the wireless had worked before! Why not now? I got the model of the Toshiba laptop from my friend and went to Google to ask…

Turns out on several models of Toshiba laptops (which came preinstalled with Windows 7) the WLAN and LAN share the same hardware ID!! This is just plain bad engineering! Her Toshiba C655 laptop was one of those models.

Anyway, the fix was to go into BIOS and find the setting to disable the PCI LAN card. LAN still works, but it’s only triggered now when you plug in an ethernet cable. So now it won’t try to occupy the same ID as WLAN while it’s not being used!

Okay, give it another shot! We restarted the computer… and unplugged the ethernet cable. Everything was beautiful; no lags or crashes.

In this previous post I blogged about how “Ubuntu needed implants to stay attractive.” And in this post, I explained the implants I used in Oneiric to make Ubuntu feel good.

Precise, I am discovering, needs a slightly different set of implants.

I almost exclusively use the CLI (Command Line Interface) of the Terminal to install packages and mods. Also, I have simplified the CLI commands to be basic. For these commands, I always install both dependencies and suggested packages.

Gnome Tweak Tool for Advanced Settings

“sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool”

CompizConfig

Make sure this installs, or you could have issues later on. I personally believe that GNOME Shell should make compizconfig-settings-manager a requirement.

“sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager”

Must Have Synaptic

I prefer using Synaptic over the Ubuntu Software Center.

“sudo apt-get install synaptic”

Additional PPA’s

I found all these PPA’s by searching the PPA list on Ubuntu Updates, or through web searches on Google.

“sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8”

“sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp”

“sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa”

“sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tualatrix/ppa”

“sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alecive/antigone”

“wget -q -O - http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -“

“sudo sh -c ‘echo “deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu oneiric-getdeb apps” » /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list’”

“sudo sh -c ‘echo “deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu oneiric-getdeb games” » /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list’”

“sudo apt-get update”

“sudo apt-get install gimp wine umplayer ubuntu-tweak awoken-icon-theme luminance crawl-tiles rolldice”

Codecs

“sudo apt-get install libdvdread4 libdvdcss2 ubuntu-restricted-extras ubuntu-restricted-addons”

In Closing

Don’t forget that with all these new sources being added, there will be newer versions of programs available in the repository.

“sudo apt-get upgrade”

For those of you who were wondering, I thought about that blog title for about 24 hours. I wanted something that worked well with either Precise or Pangolin and implied the thought of a thesis or article.

Precis means “a concise summary of essential points, statements, or facts”.

This is my precis on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin.

I have been using the new update for exactly 1 hour and 42 minutes. I am quite impressed!

As is my custom, I back up all my files and do a fresh install whenever a new release of Ubuntu comes out. This is so that I stay up-to-date on new features. And usually after 6 months of modding and programming, I need a fresh install just to clean out all the detritus on my hard drive. The downside of this is that it takes me around 1 day to back up my files and reload them on the flip side.

I knew of several features of Precise Pangolin long before I tried them. Now, I’ve tried them. Perhaps I should include some before and after observations here.

I used to harshly bash Unity for being so bad. I blogged about Unity being a memory hog (It was in Natty, and Oneiric). I blogged about Unity being absolutely horrible for multitasking (Definitely true in Natty and somewhat true in Oneiric). I blogged about Unity not supporting older computers the way GNOME did on previous Ubuntu versions (definitely true in Natty).

Unity got some huge updates in 12.04!

The huge icons in the Home Lens are gone!

When you press and hold the Dash key, an overlay showing Unity shortcuts will display after a few seconds. This is a huge improvement over older versions of Unity! In order to remember all the Unity shortcuts on older versions, I actually had to make them into a wallpaper and change my background to my infographic! No more! Now I can see all the shortcuts displayed when I need them!

Software suggestions in the Dash can be disabled. And, to make it even more efficient, you can disable them directly from the Dash. No need to install other programs to adjust Unity.

It is more memory efficient and much less laggy than any previous Unity version.

Unity has finally managed to impress me! Unity on 10.10 and 11.04 used to lag so bad that for those Ubuntu releases I sought out different desktop interfaces just so I wouldn’t have to use Unity. Unity has changed for the better, and I am happy.

The HUD feature on the Dash is one feature that I blogged about in the past. In the past, I harshly criticized Unity for adding HUD because I thought it was just a flashy feature that would needlessly slow down a computer, and would make programs more confusing since menus (which people have been using forever) would be replaced by a command prompt.

Now that I’ve used HUD? It is definitely flashy! It can be confusing, and it takes a lot of getting used to! For menu commands that are commonly used and easy to remember, HUD is a timesaver! But for figuring out the commands to use with a program, HUD does not save time at all, and makes programs much harder to learn. I would definitely reccomend learning the program via the menu method first before switching to HUD. On a good note, I was wrong, HUD doesn’t seem to slow down Unity or Dash, although HUD lags occasionally when you first invoke it.

The Ubuntu Software Center got a few nice improvements. I’m still not entirely convinced I like it though. One cool feature is that when you install a program from USC the icon of the new program will fly from the USC to the Dash bar. I suppose this will make finding the new program much easier for new users.

However, I have fears that this is too much like Microsoft Windows installing shortcuts to every program on the Desktop. And what became of that? Millions of users who could only find programs that were stuck to their desktop. In recent years, no one knew how to use the Start menu to find programs, even with Vista’s search feature. I fear this Ubuntu Software Center feature will lead to millions of inefficient users trying to use overloaded and crowded Dash bars because every program they’ve installed got auto-stuck to their Dash, and now they can’t find anything!

What would I suggest to improve this? My normal response to things like this is to advocate education. Teach the user how to use the Dash! Instead of making the program fly to the Dash bar, I would make an overlay message pop-up on the screen educating the user. If the user wants the program in the Dash bar, teach them how to find it and put it there. That’s just my opinion… I don’t know, maybe I’m being unreasonable. For example, if you install the program FileZilla, the overlay would say:

“Your program is installed. To find it, hit the Dash key and type in FileZilla. Your program will appear in the menu within a few keystrokes. You can drag this program to your Dash bar to make it even easier to access later.”

My one concern which I blogged about in the past was that Unity is not easy to multitask on. In the past when I was actively trying to avoid Unity, I tried GNOME Shell. GNOME Shell has near perfect multitasking capabilities. Once you’ve gotten used to multitasking in GNOME, it’s near impossible not to compare it to other things, like Unity. Needless to say, multitasking is still an issue for Precise, though it’s gotten much better now that the memory and lag issues plaguing earlier versions of Unity are gone.

So, all in all, what would I rate 12.04 Precise Pangolin? On a scale of 1-10, I give Precise a rating of 8

tumblrbot asked: WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER WHEN YOU ARE IN A BAD MOOD?

Coffee. And taking time off to relax and watch movies I’ve collected.

I like tabletop/paper gaming. In the past I’ve played over 10 types of tabletop games, with dozens of flavors in each game. For the better part of a year I was playing a Star Wars Saga Edition RPG game with a bunch of friends. It’s a fun game.

I am a good storyteller, and I like fairness in all things. I don’t make rules specifically to exploit players or aggravate them to no end. During a game I treat the Star Wars Saga Core Rulebook with the same respect I give the Bible. The Core Rulebook is the bible of the game. I tell players that if they find a rule that we’ve been playing wrong, they are welcome to bring it to my attention, and if it turns out that I was wrong we will begin playing by the rules immediately even if it destroys my story. When I GM games, few players ever have problems with my style of GM’ing because I keep it close to the rulebook. I am considered a fair GM.

Our current GM (who I’ve ranted about on many occasions) is not fair. The only reason Kenny is the GM it’s the only game in town (so he has a monopoly on the game) and because he established the web site we play on (which just furthers the monopoly idea).

Kenny’s style of playing is radically different from mine. On the first game, he showed us his rules. They basically said “I am the God of the Game, and if you have a problem with my twisted rules, that’s too bad, because I don’t care. And if you persist in fighting about the rules, I will smite your character as only a GM can.”

Kenny tends to make rules that exploit characters, and are unreasonably harsh. For instance, the core rulebook says on a certain check that a DC30 is the most unreasonable check a GM could ask for in a particular circumstance. Kenny makes the check a DC60.

The bad guys that the GM plays don’t use fair dice. We roll d20’s for our checks, which is the dice the core rulebook says we should use. Kenny rolls d30’s, or d50’s, or higher! And when Kenny wants to kill players he sends enemies with ridiculously unfair advantages that he makes up on the fly. We’re all level 3, and he sends us up against an invisible, regenerating, armored and shielded level 20 super monster!

One of the things I like about the Star Wars: Saga Edition game is that the game allows for different players to play differently. Usually by the end of a game, we are all tanking our characters in different skills and abilities. One of us will be a Mechanics tank (able to fix anything), one person a Pilot tank (he can fly anything!), one person tanks out in melee attacks, and another in ranged attacks, and another in Force attacks. Tanking a character in a single skill is especially useful in a team play because everyone has their useful skills they are amazing in.

My issue started out with the rules on the site. At first, Kenny played by the book. And then he started having issues with minor book rules, and he started inventing ridiculous negatives to make his story work. And I started butting heads with the GM about the rules. Finally, after making hundreds of small changes to the “way we play” he finally decided to take the book out of the picture completely. He transferred all the rules to the website and edits them as he sees fit.

That was my primary issue from the beginning. I believe that changing the rules in the middle of the game just to frustrate a player is cheating. It’s the worst kind of cheating! I like playing by the rules. And, when I am a GM, I play by the rules. Even if the players obliterate a character I am GM’ing, as long as they do it fairly, I am satisfied.

I started butting heads with Kenny on just about every occasion about the rules found in the rulebook versus the rules he used in his game.

I created a character who is from the planet De’Fel. De’Fel have fur that blends in with their surroundings, making them basically invisible. Basically invisible means I get +15 to Stealth, and enemies take -10 (in addition to any other negatives) to hit me unless they pass a skill check to see me.

Kenny decided that for this campaign we were all going to be kids, so we take lots of negatives to abilities for that. Thus my De’Fel character was nice to start out with! You don’t get hit or killed very often, and this allows you to slowly gain XP.

I got to play my character with my full bonuses for 2 missions, and then Kenny told me, “Your character is too strong in Stealth. From now on, every enemy can see you and attack you.” That was the first argument we had. Didn’t matter what the rulebook said, Kenny pointed to his God Rule and established that if I wanted to keep playing I would lose my Stealth, and that was all there was to it.

At first I played along. I leveled up. In the campaign Kenny has us playing, we’re training to be Jedi. I’m a Youngling Padawan, and in order to make things difficult Kenny tells me I can’t take any skill or talent that involves the Force, lightsabers, or Jedi abilities. (“These skills have to be taught, and you haven’t learned them yet, Youngling.”) NOTE: As a Jedi at level 2, there are no abilities, feats, or talents that don’t involve those things in some way. So Kenny tells me, I can’t take any bonuses on my level up. This is the second argument I had from the rulebook. Kenny pointed to his God Rule again, and I voluntarily stopped playing.

I sent him a long message that basically said when he was willing to be fair I would resume playing. He came looking for me a month later, asking me when I was going to start playing again.

Kenny’s corner on the market is that he forces the website on people. If you want to play the live game where we use paper character sheets and dice, you must have a character on the website. No one can be invited to his game unless they have an active online character that plays by his twisted rules.

So I resumed playing online, mostly just cause I wanted to play the live game. On the last level, I advanced in both age and level this last game. Now that my character is no longer a pre-teen, I don’t have to take as many negatives as before, and between that and the levelling up my stats improved dramatically! Kenny sent me a long message on the forum that says essentially, “Your character is too strong. You need to change ALL your ability scores to negatives.” This was our next fight! “Do you think my character hasn’t suffered enough!? I’m a level 4 Jedi who CAN’T use the Force, and CAN’T use lightsabers, CAN’T use my natural stealth and abilities, and CAN’T hit enemies cause I’m already taking ridiculous negatives. And now you want me to take MORE NEGATIVES!?”

Kenny pointed to his God rule, and he changed my character profile online without even asking me. Needless to say, I got on the site and suddenly my character was a whole lot weaker!

I continued playing regardless of the sudden character change. One live game however was unfair to the extreme, and I finally flipped! We were searching for survivors in a city undergoing active seismic events. Basically this involved running up and down stairs in the building, convincing survivors to follow me, and running back for more. Every survivor equaled a certain amount of XP. So it was easy XP, so long as I didn’t get caught in the building during a quake.

Now here was the interesting part. One player went off by himself on one side of the map, and got attacked by an a strike force of unknown enemies. The other players in the game, listening to all this outside the game info, decided to abandon their current mission and go help their comrade (who they only knew was in trouble from outside the game info). As part of playing fairly, I evaluated what I knew inside the game, and made my choices accordingly. My character did not know that the other player was in trouble, so I continued on the original mission of rescuing survivors. While all the other players were battling this unknown strike force and having difficulty, I continued on the original mission and was making huge of amounts of XP by myself! I levelled up 3 times during the game, making it from Level 4 to Level 7.

Kenny got angry with me because I wasn’t helping my comrades in the pitched battle they were in, and I was taking all the easy XP. I told him, “My character doesn’t know they are in trouble. Outside the game I know, because as a player i am hearing all their moves. But inside the game they haven’t sent me a message telling me that they need help, and they aren’t even where I could see them because they are on the other side of the map from me. Using only the information my character knows inside the game, I would continue trying to complete the mission, because I see no reason to stop just to see how the other players are doing. The mission originally said “Rescue all the survivors”, which is what I’m doing. I’m playing by the rules, and I’m not using out-of-game info.”

Kenny decided to penalize me anyway. He came up with a new rule, which he insists was not designed only to spite me, although it was the only time this rule was ever used. His rule was, “If you have survivors following you, you have to divide your speed by 10 for each survivor.”

Now let me show you the math. The base speed for my character was 6 squares. I had 10 survivors following me. That’s 6 divided by 10000000000! That made my new base speed with people following me .0000000006 squares. Or in other words, the action which was only supposed to take me 5 more rounds I wouldn’t finish for another 50 BILLION more rounds! At the end of the game, I still had not been able to finish the current action, and we had at that time been playing for around 8 hours! Then Kenny told me he was not going to give me any of the XP for that game (even though I had earned it) because he didn’t feel I had participated in the game enough. And this after making a rule specifically designed to take me out of the game.

That was where I finally decided enough was enough. I left the site and I have not gone back.

I feel stupid continuously going back to the game. I don’t like arguing about the rules that are established in the game play rulebooks. And even though I am trying to prove the point that fairness is synonymous with playing by the rules, I hate how I continue being the group pariah. I keep joining the game just to prove that it is possible to play by the rules… and this happens to me.

What I find truly ironic is that the other group members feel the same way I do, and they come commiserate with me and complain to me about the new rules. I tell them the same I thing every time, “If you don’t like the game, don’t play it.”

Here it comes… the inevitable question…

“How are you going to play today without a game profile online?”

My voice dripped with sarcasm, “I’ll manage. I think I’ll play by the rules today.”

Then Kenny asked, “Are you going to play with us online?”

I said, voice alternating sarcasm with outright shock, “Absolutely not.”

And Kenny said, “Wow! You really must hate me.”

I have not yet addressed that last comment.

Although you might not have guessed it from this post, Kenny is one of my best friends. I don’t hate Kenny at all. I enjoy being around Kenny, and I count him among my closest confidants. I just don’t like his game…

I wish he didn’t take it so personally.

I don’t hate the player; I hate the game.