First impression of a new user 17.04

Thoughts & Feedback
#1

I am a new user (not of linux) and here is my review after a weeks use. Sorry if I mostly address problems. I like the distro and intend to keep on using it.

Installing went smooth. When I had to choose how to partition, automatically or customarily I was unsure to choose automatically. Because It read all my data will be wiped. Because I have multiple disks it gave me the scares a bit (lol). But then I just thought it would be just the stupidest thing to wipe all my disks and was sure there would be a choice which disk to install on.

While installing I could choose the keyboard layout. The preview-bar didn’t preview any change though.
The first boot was unsuccessful. No grub! I had to reinstall that with help from a post on omgubuntu.
Then the real first boot. Really nice theming! This is a good welcome. Also the welcome screen is handy. I installed and removed some software. Its a bit weird that on the main boutique window you can click on the colorful icons but nothing happens. Also it is unintuitive when you click the back icon “<” you arrive at the starting point and not go back one step in the menus.

I have a dual-screen setup and they are physically in the wrong order. So I changed them in the control center. I didn’t stick the next boot and I had to do it again. But after that all good.

I switched to the pantheon panel to see what the new menu is all about. It looks good and fast though not everything shows up in the search. The search only uses the activated menu items. I expected it to search in all installed software. Also it is a bit buggy. That is probably why it is not the default yet. The panel shows up in plank and it crashed while dragging around some icons. No problem, I’ll just wait for the fix. :slight_smile:

The window manager could use some improvement in my opinion. I don’t like that I can’t resize a maximized window. I often maximize a window and then open a sliver on the side to see the window behind. Also, I can’t find a hot-key for switching a window from one screen to the other. And the window switcher does not show any content while switching. Only a gray overlay. Seeing the actual window to switch to is just really handy.

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#2

That doesn’t sound so bad :smiley:

Personally I have tried Ubuntu MATE several times in the past really wanting to enjoy it but have been repelled by more minor things than you described. Back then I was always in the habit of trying the latest releases. When I changed to LTS-only my experience has been much, much better, whichever *buntu I tried.

#3

I tried it once briefly in a vm but i didn’t see the pros of mate over xfce.
I was running arch for a long time but it doesnt have the binary packages I need. And building from source takes so long. So I wanted to switch to Ubuntu.
And Mate has matured enough to run on my work pc. I havent run into bugs that stop my workflow yet.

Setting up my network printer was really easy btw. I forgot to mention that. I think I even have a better driver now. Happy about that.

Alif Dal Mim [email protected] schreef op 30 mei 2017 18:32:32 CEST:

#4

Hmm, yes, I think I do agree to this one. Does anyone know if this has already been requested as a feature enhancement?

#5

There is now: https://github.com/mate-desktop/marco/issues/323 :slight_smile:

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#6

Well i hope that if it gets implemented they make it an option, no point wasting processor to show the whole screen. Moving windows around in debian-jessie/lxde is a major pain because there are too many pixels in a 3200x1800 screen.

#7

Yes, like showing content when moving around a window is an option now.

A quick test on xfwm4 wich shows content while switching shows ~6% for xorg and xfwm4 for switching and ~9% (i5-cpu) for moving a window.

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#8

Dunno what that means. What i do know is that for each of those pixels it takes so many bytes to store color information for that pixel. So if it takes 4 bytes to store one RGB value for example, you end up moving 432001800 bytes of data from one place in the screen-buffer to another, and unless you have a fast processor or a decent graphics card it’ll cost some time just to move bytes when you’re talking about 23,673,600 byte-move operations, which in assembler is at least 3 instructions per, move/compare/branch.

IOW if you’re running an old procssor with little memory and a not-real-fast CPU, you might want to just show a window-border-outline since if you do that, all you have to do is change border-bits in one place then put’em back and do it in another place, and sometimes you can get away with doing that via XOR.

Sorry, i’m babbling, and i’ve probably dropped my spoon, but there is no spoon…

Here’s the bottom line as i see it: do it however you please, the computer will tell you if that’s wrong.

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#9

Hah, I changed to Mutter and it has everything I need!
The window menu doesn’t work but I never use it anyway. Funny thing is that the window switcher only switches between the last 2 windows. You have to use the backway window switcher to cycle all the windows. Maybe I like this bug. :smile:
It is filed here

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