Making Ubuntu 12.04 useable
I recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my laptop. I gave Unity a chance for a few days just in case it had improved since I last used it but still found it unusable. The following tweaks made Ubuntu usable again (for me at least).
- Install Bumblebee – I have an NVIDIA Graphics card that makes use of Optimus technology. I learned that NVIDIA do not support Optimus laptops on Linux the hard way but, thankfully, this open source project makes everything work.
- Install Cinnamon – Unity is an awful desktop interface in my opinion. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is very nice indeed
- Fix the scroll bars – Even after switching to Cinnamon, many applications in Ubuntu still use some truly awful window scrollbars. This link shows you how to make them go away.
That was pretty much it and I’m very happy with the result. Do you use Ubuntu? If so, are there any tweaks that you simply must make to the default setup before you feel that it’s usable for you?
If you don’t leave your computer running more than 2 days cinnamon is a good choice (memory leak +++), if not xfce IS stable.
Howdy,
I had been installing Cinnamon, but I just found a better option. Install the gnome-panel package from the normal repository. This gives you a Gnome Classic desktop and everything still has 5 years of guaranteed support from Canonical. I also suggest removing appmenu-gtk, appmenu-gtk3, and indicator-appmenu to get rid of the awful global menu.
Good luck
I always install the brightside-properties package from the standard repos. It lets you mouse over to the next virtual desktops, XFCE-style.
It can also let you configure hot corners for some annoying mystery-moves, which I never do.
I don’t use Ubuntu anymore but instead just went with Mint. Mint is pretty much a better and more optimized version of Ubuntu and it also comes with Cinnamon as a default (since they did wrote Cinnamon). However as Cinnamon is still pretty new, there are some problems here and there but other than that, it’s pretty good. Also because Mint is based on Ubuntu, you should be able to do almost anything you do with Ubuntu anyways.
I used to use Ubuntu, but also strained away from it when Unity was introduced. I gave Kubuntu a try (a distribution compatible with ubuntu, only with KDE interface), I must say I was very positively surprised, since then I use Kubuntu on all my computers, KDE4 was maybe once unusable but that’s no longer the case, now it’s by far the best desktop interface I’ve used.