In my quest for an operating system I can tolerate, I turned my attention back to GNOME Shell. There has to be an Ubuntu OS that uses GNOME3, and that works correctly!
To begin, let me explain all the issues I’ve had running GNOME3 in Ubuntu. When I first booted 12.04, I remembered learning that GNOME3.4 had just been released, however the package included in the Ubuntu repositories was considered incomplete and unsafe/unstable. It was included in the repositories because it was the latest GNOME3 image available before the 12.04 LTS package freeze.
I looked on ubuntuupdates.org and it said there were extra repositories (ppa:ricotz/testing and ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3) you could add to get the latest GNOME3 images. I added those and proceeded to log in and try to customize my GNOME3 experience.
My first issue with GNOME3.4 was that none of the extensions I had grown accustomed to using worked! I could install them, and they showed up as being installed… but the modifications they were supposed to make never appeared! I tried restarting the shell and the computer many times, but with no luck. I later discovered that this was not a problem unique to me. Many people had the same problem, but no one seemed to be able to provide a satisfactory answer as to why GNOME3.4 on Ubuntu isn’t 100% stable. Some people claimed that having Compiz on the system conflicted with Mutter. Some claimed that Unity modifications made GNOME3 unstable.
Whatever the reason, the fact was that my unfortunate first preview of GNOME3 was of it crashing.
Last night, however, I turned my attention back to GNOME3. I downloaded a new distro called
Ubuntu-GS Remix. As it says, it’s a remix distro. The designers of this distro started with Ubuntu 12.04 and proceeded to remove everything Unity from Ubuntu, leaving only GNOME Shell behind.
My hope was that this would finally give me a good taste of GNOME3.4!
I tested it first from a USB-key. I booted into Live Mode and began installing it to the hard drive from there. While it was installing, I had the initial worry that extensions were going to have problems. So (while installing in Live Mode) I opened Firefox and went to extensions.gnome.org
I checked the first page of extensions, installing them to the Live Preview to see if they would work correctly. They did! All of them worked!!
So, finally finished installing…
My impressions on Ubuntu-GS?
It’s amazing how few programs show up in the Applications menu! I hadn’t realized before how many programs are Unity dependant, or install Unity elements as dependants. All of those are gone. The main Applications menu seems a little empty.
The Overlay Scrollbars are also gone. This was a Unity invention, and they aren’t included with standard GNOME3 distros, and they aren’t included with Ubuntu-GS. It’s nice! I didn’t realize how much I had missed the old scrollbars.
For those of you who hadn’t realized it, GNOME3 doesn’t use indicators either. Indicators are a Unity thing. There is a notification bar on the bottom of the GNOME3 window that can share some information, but there are no indicators in GNOME3.
Also not included in this remix are the Unity-inspired globalmenu that every program had to conform to. I really didn’t like globalmenu in the first place. I found it annoying. All globalmenu did was eliminate the menubar in every program and hide it all in the top window bar.
I had expected the gnome-tweak-tool to be installed by default on this remix, but it wasn’t. I found this odd, since to tweak GNOME3 settings, you need the gnome-tweak-tool. In the case of enabling/disabling GNOME3 extensions this is especially apparent since there is no native GNOME3 interface to tweak extensions or install themes.
gnome-tweak-tool was however in the repository that Ubuntu-GS uses. I installed it. It appeared to be an older version of the gnome-tweak-tool (the version we used to use in GNOME3.1-3.2 that had a theme selector but didn’t have the button to install themes). I thought this was odd but I went with it.
The gnome-tweak-tool worked fine until I started installing extensions from extensions.gnome.org. Then, for some reason, it wouldn’t open (couldn’t figure out why)! I tried opening it from the Terminal. Apport opened instead, and after analyzing the crash, it clearly said in the report, “You are using packages that are out-of-date. It is reccomended that you update before submitting an bug report”.
I knew that gnome-tweak-tool was out-of-date but there was no up-to-date version in the Ubuntu-GS repository. I downloaded the .deb package of the gnome-tweak-tool from the Ricotz repository. I didn’t want to enable the entire repository on chance that it might break Ubuntu-GS, but I needed a working copy of the gnome-tweak-tool and the Ricotz repository has the only current version. After I updated the gnome-tweak-tool, it worked fine!
All the extensions that I installed online work fine, and so do the extensions I added from the gnome3team PPA. The extensions that I installed from extensions.gnome.org worked perfectly without my needing to restart the shell. Oddly though, the extensions from the gnome3team PPA did not work or even show up in the gnome-tweak-tool menus until I had restarted the shell (then showed up and they worked perfectly).
Are there downsides to using Ubuntu-GS? There is perhaps one negative… but I knew about it in advance from reading the release notes on the Ubuntu-GS site.
This is an unofficial remix. Despite the fact that it makes GNOME3.4 absolutely shine, this is a negative. What this means that upgrading to a newer distribution release is impossible without doing a full install. This can’t be fixed as long as this remix is unofficial, because the distribution upgrade process requires having installed one of the desktop metapackages from the official Ubuntu repositories.
So, this means that theoretically I should be okay using Ubuntu-GS until the next LTS comes out (14.04), but considering how the GNOME3 repositories get continuous updates some programs might get a little weird by 12.10. But in order to fix it, you’ll have to wait for the next Ubuntu-GS remix to be released and reformat to update.
Everything Unity is gone. Everything GNOME3 is here…
It feels good! My rating of Ubuntu-GS is 8 out of 10.