Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding gone live

Today, July 22nd 2013, Canonical announced their new phone, which they are calling the Ubuntu Edge.

Canonical changed their website for the announcement in an attempt to get viewers on their indiegogo page, which has a goal so high that it will double the previously highest crowdfunding goal every achieved; they want 32 million dollars in donations before they will roll the phone out. If Canonical cannot receive this funding, they will not make the Ubuntu Edge, but their phone Operating System (Ubuntu Touch) will still be released for existing compatible phones. Because of the open nature of Ubuntu Touch's development, many Android phones will have the operating system ported to it before and after the release of the finished product.

Features
The Ubuntu Phone features:

1. 128 GB Storage
2. 4     GB RAM
3. Saphire-glass screen / camera, very hard to break and very resistant to scratching.
4. 2 LTE Antennae
5. Docking, which allows the phone to run Desktop Ubuntu.
6. Silicon-Anode battery.
7. Android Dual-Boot with their "Ubuntu for Android".
8. Buttonless experience from Ubuntu Touch. Everything is done with gestures.
9. Full Gnu/Linux system on the phone. Coreutils, terminal emulators, ssh tunnels, programming apps for the phone in Lisp / Haskell / Rust / Whatever the heck you want. It's all there.
10. Access to Ubuntu ArmV7's repositories for tens of thousands of applications off the bat.

Speculation
Will they reach their goal of $42 million? Well, roughly an hour after the launch, at the time of me writing this news post, they have reached half a million dollars. If, on the 21st of August, it appears that they will not reach their goal, Shuttleworth could very easily cap off however much they need. Shuttleworth has shelled out $500 million dollars in the past to go to space, and his net worth is currently worth just as much as the trip to space. If IndieGoGo can get Canonical close to the goal, Shuttleworth will likely save the project from oblivion. So will the edge make it? Most definitely so.

How to install Google Chrome in Ubuntu (13.04)

There is a problem with Ubuntu 13.04 that disallows Google's Chrome web browser from being installed without making a fuss. In short, the problem is that google needs libudev0 (>= version 147), but that package is not available in the repositories.

The Solution
libudev0 may not be in the Ubuntu repositories, but it IS in the parent-distribution (Debian)'s repositories. We can go there and download libudev0, and then install the program.

1) Go to http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/u/udev/libudev0_175-7.1_amd64.deb and download the .deb

2) Install the file like you normally would (double click it in Files or use dpkg -i).

3) Download the Google Chrome package from https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/thankyou.html?brand=CHMB

4) Install the Chrome .deb file however you comfortably do so.

Extra
If you messed up beforehand, you will want to run "sudo apt-get install -f" from the Terminal to clean any broken packages that apt tried to get.

Ubuntu 13.04 Beta Review ** April 12th, 2012

I am the average Joe Linux user. Ubuntu helped to ease me into the world of Linux gently before plunging into the world of commands and ttys. I have this nostalgic love for Ubuntu, and even if I don't agree with some of their latest goals (let me go on record by saying I do like their direction of mobile) I have always considered it a very friendly distribution. This was before I used 13.04 beta.

What's the ruckus?

Well, Ubuntu is that gateway Linux distribution that the newcomers will use to make the transition easy, right? Well, the latest Ubuntu is going to give them the idea that Linux is inheritly buggy, slow, and crash-prone which is not the case at all. Canonical has been working so hard on its mobile operating system, display server, startup manager, and all of its other pet projects that they forgot to make a good distribution. Whoops!

What is even worse is that this is a long term release. We will be stuck like this for a long time. Imagine if Windows Vista had become the de facto Windows computing environment  of the world. We'd all be on Linux if that were the case, and 13.04 makes me want to move to Windows.

The Problems

One of my biggest problems was the lack of improvement over 12.10, and even 12.04. 12.10 was a copy+paste of 12.04 with some features like shopping and web lenses with previews (which are very helpful, in my opinion) and some optimizations of both user experience and resource consumption. 13.04 is exactly that distribution with one or two minor features and some new icons. There was going to be a VERY desirable feature for lenses included, but they were dropped at the last minute like Wubi.

At one point I had the gnome-settings-manager crash, which also brought down compiz and gtk-window-decorator. This left my desktop in an unusable state where windows did not even reply to keyboard commands. I had to switch to a TTY and pkill lightdm to solve the trouble.

I have also had countless popups telling me there are "problems with the system", and a few of those notifications crash themselves and become unclosable, even after a pkill. I call them the kamikaze windows.

Another big problem is the lack of workspaces. Yes, they aren't included at all by default, folks. They can be enabled through compiz, but that's an unneccessary step, especially considering the option for workspace keyboard combinations are included in the settings manager. While we're talking about the settings manager, let me just warn you that every now and then keyboard shortcuts will decide not to work, so be ready for that.

The Verdict

Now that the venting is over, it is fair to say that this IS A BETA. It most certainly will get better with the final release, but for now it is in an almost unusable state. "Do not use on production machines" is a warning that Canonical gives that I would actually advise following.

Ubuntu Phone release date, info, and Speculation

After much recent community speculation over the identity of the Ubuntu mystery device, the Ubuntu phone was officially announced. This is the second mobile operating system Ubuntu has developed, the first being their plug-and-play Android application that gets an Ubuntu session running on a docked phone with an attached keyboard and monitor. The Ubuntu phone will be the completion of Unity's goal, to Unify the computing experience across all platforms. An Ubuntu phone can dock as a desktop operating system, double as a TV, and still be a phone when you want it, all while providing a familiar (and dare I say sleek) interface across every device.

Canonical works on software. That's it. They will not be the OEM for this device, but rather provide the software for vendors to brandish in their products (like what Google does with Android).

The Speculation Begins
1% of consumer desktop and laptop computers run Linux (Wikipedia statistics). Linux is gaining more users daily than any other Operating System family out there, and Ubuntu is the distribution that most people are flocking to. That said, it's still in the very back of the OS foodchain and you almost never hear about it in common society. It made a big splash in the Linux world, but I can't be the only one thinking that vendors could care less about it. Canonical is a large company, but not big enough to run advertisements for Ubuntu (or even OEM the hardware for the phone), so relying on a vendor is both risky and unlikely to work. I hope I'm wrong, though. People said the same thing about Android when it came out. The thing is, unlike Android the Ubuntu mobile OS does not break upstream compatibility. The community as a whole could benefit from its success in mobile.

Developer Information
Like Firefox mobile OS the Ubuntu phone supports HTML5 web apps from the get-go, increasing the availability of popular web applications on the phone. In addition to that, you have access to a full arm Linux system with core utilities, meaning that you could make an app in any language that natively runs on Arm Linux. Imagine an app running Qt and Lisp on the Ubuntu phone; it would've never been considered possible.

A smart decision was to use QML for the UI, so developers that already have experience with Qt (Qt5 specifically) can hit the ground running with this phone. 

Ubuntu 12.10 final beta REVIEW

This is a review on a beta package as of October 4th, 2012. This information will be deprecated quickly as updates are released in a fast manor as the 12.10 deadline approaches.

11.10 blew Ubuntu users away when compared to 11.04, with the immature version of Unity in a long-term support release that drove many of its users away. Hoping that 12.10 would bring further maturity to what Unity has already evolved into I installed it, and have had mixed emotions since then. Here are some of my discoveries, complaints, and criticisms on the new Ubuntu operating system.


Upgrade Process

The update process couldn't have been easier. A matter of running update-manager -d from the terminal and a few hours of installing updates later, the reboot prompt appeared and 12.10 was booted. Note that if you are using the openssh-server package there will be a boot-time error message regarding an incorrect compilation flag, as well as a mandatory filesystem check since upgrading an operating system is such a dramatic overhaul.

The boot process will take longer than usual if you upgraded from 12.04. This is why it is commonly recommended that the Operating system be installed over the existing one, rather than throwing patches on top of an existing framework.

On first boot

  Unity hasn't changed much. Aside from the controversial shopping lens, unnecessary glossy buttons on the launcher, and file previews it is just like a faster version of what came before. Which isn't much to complain about. In fact, it's nice having a snappy interface. Of course, snappiness only applies to those with a higher-end internet connection (> 256 KiB/s) since file indexing and Amazon searches are the norm within Unity now. Of course, this can be opted-out of with sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping.

Little Differences
There were seemingly small but interesting design choices in this release. The full name of the user is no longer displayed on the top right of the screen, and a new printer applet is the default. Also, "Software Updater" is the new Update Manager, and it updates upon boot. So there will be no more tiered updating.

Also, in Unity's Expo-like workspace switcher, clicking on a window will move you to that workspace rather than highlighting it within the interface.

A weird design choice was to include two applications that are pinned to the launcher that open in the firefox web browser. It seemed pretty out-of-character for Ubuntu.

Possible bugs
The only bug I have noticed is the inability to minimize a window using the Unity launcher, which is a pretty big deal. Aside from this inconvenience the Beta release is seemingly stable. However, little issues seem to crop up in Beta releases, so I could never recommend this for a production machine.

Although not a serious functionality issue, sometimes Unity previews mix their text together, creating an unreadable mess. Also, as shown in the picture, the previews for Albums are supposed to play individual tracks. This does not work, but I am not sure if it is implied to. The sideways triangle IS the Universal sign for "Start", though.

Other Goodies
Ubuntu 12.10 comes with a signed bootloader, meaning that it can run with UEFI secure-boot that Windows 8 OEM computers will be coming with. This caused quite a big stir in the open source world, and Ubuntu was about to employ questionable tactics to get around it, but with a signed version of Grub  everything remains the same.

All of the outdated packages are updated and a most up-to-date repository is out there. Gimp 2.8 is among the collection. No more third party repos!

Here is a little demo video showing some of the features discussed in this article:

Set Keyboard Shortcuts in Gnome 3.*

After a lot of use of Awesome WM, I tried Gnome 3.4 for the first time since a much earlier version of Gnome. I noticed many improvements, especially extensions. However, coming from Awesome I wanted to make it fully usable from the keyboard. Going into the gnome control center did not work, and neither did modifying them from ccsm and using compiz as the window manager. After a bit of searching, I found the answer.

Why it doesn't work:
It turns out that Unity no longer uses the same method of keyboard shortcut definitions that Gnome does. That means that Gnome Control Center sets the shortcuts for Unity, but no longer for Gnome

How to make them work:

Use a program called "Dconf-Editor". Then, go to org > gnome > desktop> wm > keybindings. This is where you can edit the keybindings. The keybindings go inside of the [' s and end with a ']. For instance, closing a window with alt+f4 would look like this: ['<Alt>F4']. Notice that the F is capitalized here. If you use an F1-F12 command, the F is capitalized. More about the semantics in the next section.

Semantics
F1-F12: Capital 'F' followed by number.
Special keys: <Key>, like <Alt> and <Control>. <Control> is spelled out. <Ctrl> will not work.
shift keys: If you use shift in the key combination, the letter with it should be capital.
The Super (Windows logo) button on keyboards is called <Mod4>

Extra
I was worried that binding <Mod4> to anything would invoke the sea of windows. It does not as long as you do not use it by itself. However, whenever all of the windows on a workspace are closed the sea will activate itself.

Comparison of Media Players - Gnu/Linux

Media players are applications that handle the playing of audio and/or video. (In this comparison the listening of music will be the only factor, not how well/if these applications can play video.)
There is wide debate over which media player is superior, and this will list some of the pros and cons of each media player. Of course a lot of information is left out and of course there are a lot more than are listed, but this article will point a media player-hopper in the correct direction.

1. Clementine

 First off, I will state that Clementine is the application that I have used as of late for playing music. Playing music is what its specialty is. However, using Clementine to play a sound file would be overkill. It does a great job of saving your playlists for later listening and includes utilities for mass file renaming and organization.

Clementine can stream music from the internet and sync with devices. Common media player characteristics are included, such as shuffling and looping.

One of the selling points of Clementine is the ability to destroy the main window and have it reduce to the notification icon. From there you can control the volume, pause, play, move to next track, move to previous track, mute, love, ban, quit, or show the main window again. Clementine also integrates into the Ubuntu sound menu.

2. Amarok

  Amarok, the music player commonly paired with KDE due to the use of Qt, is the media player I had used before switching to Clementine. A very unique feature to Amarok that I had never seen before was the automatic fetching of information from wikipedia about the song and the fetching of lyrics. Of course, once the information was fetched it was cached and it does not rely on fetching to function properly. Amarok also integrates with your portable devices and will ask you before it begins to unlock them if they are locked, which can be troublesome if it misidentifies something to be a device.

Amarok is also capable of working without the existence of the main window. It will fall back to a notification icon with previous, pause, play, and next options as well as the option to show the main window.

3. VLC Media Player

VLC is a popular music player that is very good at what it does. It specializes in streaming but can also be used as a general purpose music player. If I have files that I do not want in my common playlist I use VLC since it does not save playlist information through usages. VLC does not excel with audio playback, but is rather used a video streaming/viewing application.

VLC, like Amarok and Clementine, has a notification icon but it cannot live without the main window. VLC has a very good equalizer

4. mplayer

 Mplayer has arguably the largest learning curve out of any of the media players. It does not come with a graphical frontend, so it must be run from the command line. It cannot remember playlists, you must make a playlist and start the application with the playlist as one of the arguments.

Mplayer has frontends available for it, like SMPlayer. Mplayer by itself does not work with the mouse, so you must memorize the keyboard commands to use it. Some find mplayer to be the best way to listen to audio since you can run it without a window or notification icon at all if you so please.

Interestingly enough, mplayer can play videos very well and is my video player of choice.

5. Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is the default music player in Ubuntu 12.04. Banshee's absence has given Rhythmbox the opportunity to expand. Rhythmbox is now the official applications for the Ubuntu music store. Like Amarok and Clementine, Rhythmbox syncs to devices with arguably the most accuracy of the bunch. Rhythmbox does not have a notification icon and cannot live without keeping the main window open, so controlling the window may seem a bit bulky at first who are used to being able to kill the main window or control the flow of music through a notification icon.

6. DeadBeef

No, this media player is not built of mutilated cow. What it IS built with is C and GTK (I assume it is C, anyway.) The GTK dependency makes it lighter than a media player like Clementine that has Qt bindings. If you use a Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, *box, or Unity desktop environment; the download will only be about 5 MiB.

The Media player does not offer much in the way of customization or organization like Clementine, but it does get the job done like a media player should. It can import / export playlists, list statistics about the current playlist, and most importantly live without the main window and run as a daemon from the system tray. If you want to use Clementine without the elevated RAM usage and superfluous features, DeadBeef is the media player for you.
Honorable mentions
I did not include the following popular media players:

Banshee: Rhythmbox does nearly the same thing as Banshee.

XBMC: "VIM is a text editor; Emacs is an Operating System" is my favorite quote regarding text editors. XBMC is the Emacs of text editors. It is its very own ecosystem and would not be practical to use for multitasking. This is definitely the choice for a user wanting a heavily media-centric computing experience.

Conclusion (opinion)
I cannot call the conclusion fact since all of these media players do exactly what they are supposed to: play media. I just feel that Clementine has the best functionality. It can run in the background or have the main window; it doesn't matter to Clementine. It also does everything that Amarok can do like sync devices, fetch data, and live without a main window, so the presence of those features somewhat invalidates Amarok.

Bear in mind this opinion is only based in audio, and for video mplayer is my choice. I have no justification for this and VLC does just a good as job as mplayer.

Ubuntu 12.04 review

A year after the release of Ubuntu 11.04, Natty Narwhal,  the LTS release of Ubuntu, Precise Pangolin, was released. The new version featured Unity 5 with features such as the HUD and lenses. Also on the list of additions was the inclusion of classic gnome and the replacement of banshee with good-old rhythmbox.

A page out of Debian's book
Debian, the father distribution of hundreds of derivatives, uses Gnome 2 in their stable version. After all the gripe over Gnome 3 and Unity the ubuntu development team decided to include a full blown gnome-classic DE in the release. The inclusion was aimed to move people away from outdated versions of Ubuntu that are still clinging to gnome 2.

Rhythmbox, Debian's media player of choice, is also included over banshee in this distribution. After dropping rhythmbox to include Banshee for 11.04 they have gone back to their roots, leaving banshee in the dust. This was because of community preference, bugs in banshee, and stability in Rhythmbox.

Despite the reasons for these changes, Debian users will be in a more comfortable default environment than before when switching to Ubuntu.

Unity 5
In contrast to the original Unity from 12.04 Unity 5 is a vast, vast improvement. With one fell swoop the Ubuntu team has turned Unity into a tool of timesaving and productivity, and it's called the HUD. The HUD, activated with the alt key, allows access to the menu bar of any application. It also caches results so it can learn your preferences, making quick judgments about what you want to do and what you want to do quickest. The Unity interface can now be customized in a ton of ways, from myunity to the ccsm to even the appearance menu.

Small improvements define the latest version of Unity, however. The simplest features like leaving old queries in the Dash really make using the interface a much more productive experience than before. Unity is no longer the clown car of the desktop interface world.

Conclusion
12.04 is the first distribution after a year of volatility over some of Canonical's decisions to get things right. They dropped unstable software in favor of old, stable software and pushed enough bug patches to make Unity look like a family quilt. Where 11.04 had a cutting-edge, unstable feeling to it 12.04 is a noticeably stable experience that is easy for newcomers and power users alike.

How to package a .deb

          On Debian-based systems, the package manager uses .deb containers to handle the installation of packages. Many people make a connection between .deb and .exe since both are easy formats that usually lead to the installation of a program, but this is not the case. Deb files are more like an advanced .tar, and they don't even need to be used for installing programs. In this tutorial I will show you how to make and build a debian package. Make a new directory, let's say for instance, mydeb. Then, in the mydeb directory make a folder named DEBIAN. Now we can begin.

There are a few essential things to put into DEBIAN. You need to have a control file called control, a pre-installation script called preinst, and a pre-removal file called prerm. The control file uses a special syntax to define dependencies, make a description, and note the authors. Here is a sample control file:

Package: mydeb
Version: 1.0.0-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Maintainer: You <You@email>
Installed-Size: 154
Depends:
Section: accessories
Priority: optional
Description: A sample debian package.

Package is the name of the package, in this case it's mydeb. The version is the version of the file with any special revision names included. Architecture is what type of CPU it can run on. Depends is the most important, which lists dependencies. The operations > < and >= <= can be used to specify higher or lower version numbers for dependencies. The section is what type of application it is. Priority is whether or not the package is a necessity. In this case it's not. Description is a long description of what the package can do. This can be multiple lines.

Now that the control file is out of the way, make two scripts called preinst and postinst. These are bash scripts (text files with #!/bin/bash at the top) that list the commands to install and remove the parts of the program that were included on install. ldconfig should be called in either file.

The fun part
The fun and arguably the most important step is specifying the directories where files will be installed. Leave the DEBIAN folder and make one called home. Then, make one that is exactly equal to your home folder. Make a sample text file here. When the .deb is installed that text file will be placed in your home folder. This is used to spread resources across the files system, for instance the icon goes in /usr/share/pixmaps. You actually have to create those directories inside of the parent directory.

Now you should have two directories in the parent directory, DEBIAN and home. Now we can package these with the dpkg command. Enter the terminal and use the command
dpkg -b 'PATH_TO_PARENT_FOLDER' myDeb.deb


This should create a file in your home folder called myDeb.deb. Now you can install the package with gdebi, the software center, or dpkg.

A note for application developers: ldd lists the dependencies of an executable file for the Depends: part of a command file.

External: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/Linux-For-Devices-Articles/How-to-make-deb-packages/

Comparison of three Linux Operating Systems

A while back I wrote Comparison of Operating Systems, but it turned into more of a tutorial than anything. It only compared Windows and Ubuntu Linux, my current OS. So now I am going to compare Fedora 15, Opensuse 11.4, and Ubuntu 11.4. Let's start with Fedora.

Fedora is a free Linux OS sponsored by Red Hat, the creators of Red Hat enterprise Linux. The fifteenth release (the most recent at the time of writing) includes the Gnome 3 desktop environment in it's fullest form. It has some Gnome features that you can't get from the unstable repository currently available on Ubuntu. It starts off with just a close button, but that can be easily fixed using the Gnome tweak tool. As an Operating System it didn't seem to vary much than how Ubuntu acted when I had Gnome 3 on it. It did have one serious graphical issue. I was doing some 3D graphics at the time using Google Sketchup 8 through Wine and it wouldn't boot in fedora. I did some Googling and sifting through the forums and found that Fedora had some unofficial Nvidia drivers instead of the ones found through Administration>Additional Drivers in Ubuntu. After manually installing these drivers all hell broke loose on the Operating System. It simply wouldn't boot after installing the drivers. This is a known problem and it wasn't something that I had messed up installing them. If you do 3D art or anything else that requires good graphics (Heavy desktop effects, gaming, and 3D just to name a few) then Fedora isn't for any Nvidia user. Otherwise it was a very nice and friendly operating system.

The next Operating System is Arch linux. Looks pretty similar to an OS X and Windows mixtogether, right? Incredibly wrong. When, (and if you are able to) install Arch Linux you have no GUI whatsoever. You need to manually download and configure an X11 Window manager and a desktop environment to get a GUI. However, this makes Arch an extremely lightweight OS when you first download it. Arch is a platform on which you can build upon whatever software you wish. Arch Linux comes with a package manager called Pacman, which many people find to be a step up from apt and it is. Pacman can even give suggestions to what packages you may be looking for if you make a spelling mistake in your query.
Arch can be seen as a canvas where the artist can paint whatever they wish.

The last Operating System in our comparison today is Ubuntu 11.04. Ubuntu started off as a fork from Debian, the Universal Operating System. At first all it aimed to do was improve on Debian's slow update times, but it turned into something else. Now Ubuntu is the distribution of choice for newcomers to the Linux kernel. It is where users aspiring to move beyond it come to learn, and it is where people who want a highly customizable OS come to stay. Because of Debian's popularity, and now Ubuntu's, anything available to Linux is usually available to Ubuntu in the form of a .deb file, which requires 0 source building. I could start complaining about Unity again, but I have already done that and it isn't what this post is about. The installation is made easy with the Live CD, so there is virutally no command line to have to worry about during installation.

The decision...
Even though Ubuntu, Fedora, and Opensuse are great Operating Systems I have to make Arch the winner of this comparison. Arch just gives you the very basics and lets you decide what part of an Operating System you need. Do I use arch? No. Do I think it is a great idea of a Linux enthusiast to use Arch? Yes.

Comparison of Desktop environments

This article is ever-so-slightly deprecated. Please see: http://profectium.blogspot.com/2012/08/comparison-of-window-managers-and.html
As you saw in my post below I do not use Unity. I use the currently unstable version of Gnome 3 on my Ubuntu operating system. Today's post is about comparing some popular desktop environments for Linux. XFCE / tiling fans, I'm sorry, but I am not included you in this debate. I do not have any experience with XFCE or many tiling window managers and I wouldn't be able to give a fair report on them.


What desktop environment you choose is a matter of preferences. From the four I have used they all did the same thing in a different, sometimes prettier way.


Unity

The Ubuntu development team dropped Gnome as their default desktop environment on their release of version 11.04 - Natty Narwhal. They swapped it out with a more modern looking desktop environment called Unity. The key features of Unity are a taskbar (With a very intelligent window-dodge system) and header-window integration. For instance, when you open Libreoffice the options file, edit, view, all go to the top panel. As with most Linux desktop environments they can be customized heavily through themes. Unity suffers from a lack of customizability. No matter what color scheme you use or what desktop effects you want you will still always have the taskbar and integration panel hanging around. It is also hard to use for beginners. Icons from the launcher can't be removed and placed on the desktop as you might think. You need to make a whole new launcher to get desktop icons.

Some good points to make about this desktop environment is the familiarity Windows 7 users will have with be able to keep launchers for their favorite apps. This is something that old Gnome versions couldn't do prettily. It also reduces the amount of distraction and increases the screen size for maximum viewing convenience.

Gnome 3

I have used Gnome 3 longer than any other desktop environment. It retained it's ability to be highly customized but also had a very appealing user interface. It can be confusing to start off with because of the lack of minimize and maximize buttons, a dock, or the lack of a file-managing desktop. (All of which can be changed with software like gnome-tweak-tool and docky). The most powerful part of Gnome 3 is something that I called the Sea of Windows (Shown to the left in the picture). It is activated by moving your mouse cursor to the top left corner of the screen (Similar to how the Unity launcher is summoned). There will be a ripple effect and it will show all of your open windows and processes(like Dropbox or Screenlets). This is also where the favorites bar is kept and where Launchers can be stored. Everything in the Sea of Windows is customizable through gtk 3.x themes and gnome-shell themes. (Gnome shell themes being the one that changes this part of the DE).

This paragraph used to be about the instability of gnome when trying to install it on Ubuntu 11.04, and yes, that is a very bad idea if you do not want to kill Unity. It may even make both desktop environments flawed if something goes terribly wrong. However, Ubuntu 11.10 is out and it has fixed the compatibility issues of having Gnome and Unity installed at the same time. In addition to fixing the problem, Gnome 3 has been added to the Ubuntu repositories, so installing it is as simple as using the software center.

Enlightenment 17

 I will admit right off the bat that I have little good to say about E17. It's selling point is the lightweight beauty that it has. It is true that for someone willing to make their DE a hobby that E17 is the best out their for only 4 Megabytes. Some things I noticed was the bottom bar was confusing to use at times and was terrible at hiding itself. It would always overlap any window that entered it's territory. Maximizing and minimizing buttons were included but completely broken. Right click doesn't work on the desktop because left-click takes it's place. It comes with no detection of previously edited global shortcuts, which I didn't really expect it too.

  The only good parts about E17 is that is has the potential to be great AND it is incredibly lightweight (4MB). It comes as sort of a template. But for people not willing to spend days tuning it to their liking it is just not for them.
    Kde 4.6 - Plasma Workspace

I haven't used KDE for quite some time (since about 4.6) the reason being after about two weeks of using it on Ubuntu 11.04 it decided to not boot for me anymore. Also, at every boot I would need to sudo remove kde-window manager, sudo install kde-winder-manager just to get it working.

The release of KDE 4  attempted to change the style of the DE into a prettified masterpiece. One of the first things I discovered was the built-in desktop settings manager. Straight out of the box I was able to activate my wobbly windows, change my color schemes around, and add widgets without having to leave my desktop. Windows users would find it easy to use as well because of the K menu, which resembles the start globe from Windows Vista and Windows 7. There are little things thrown into this desktop environment that make it what it is. Things so small most of the time they go unnoticed. For instance, when a window closes it doesn't abruptly shut down. It sinks into a center point and fades away. Or when a popup from the side of the screen comes out it will glide back to where it came from.

KDE's desktop effects can be turned off with the command alt+shift+f12 if you have a bad/old graphics card. Upon installation it checks to see if your settings allow you to run the Plasma workspace, so it may already be off by default.

The only bad things to say about this desktop environment are that it is not lightweight and that Gnome applications (If you install it over Gnome) keep themes. The download of Kubuntu(Ubuntu with KDE instead of Unity by default) is around 140MB if you already have the kernel and Libreoffice(It tries to install the Libreoffice suite on installation).

Kubuntu will also install KDE-related software if you don't deselect it. (Don't unless you know what you are doing. The Window manager is NOT enough to run KDE). This could lead to jumbled app lists like a System Settings Clone or Kate and Gedit. Two programs that do the same thing but each designed for another DE. Any program from Gnome works on KDE and vice versa, though. Like I mentioned earlier only KDE applications retain themes in KDE.

Extra: KDE can be installed on Windows and Mac too.
KDE also features a Sea of Windows, but it needs work.


The Verdict
  Originally this paragraph hailed KDE as the winner of my competition, but now I feel that Gnome 3.2 has blown it out of the water. This is just opinion, since all of them are very usable desktop. There are the occasional crashes with Gnome, but it's simple, efficient when you start learning the ins and outs of the system (like wikipedia querys from the application search bar), and customizable through CSS. The height of the interference to the user is the occasional popup of the process dock and the always-present activities bar.


To download Gnome 3 your distribution probably has it in the repositories. If not and you would like to try it, there are other versions of Linux that were built with Gnome 3 in mind, like Fedora 16.

Installing Gnome 3 on Ubuntu 11.04.

If you've been following some of my older posts you should have gathered that I am a Linux fan. My distribution of choice is Ubuntu, but I dabbled with some Fedora recently on my new Hard Drive and fell in love with Gnome 3. Fedora 15, however, did not keep my interest because of the lack of Nvidia graphics driver support (3D graphics were impossible to create).

     Gnome 3 is a desktop environment, and if you are using Windows chances are this term is new to you. This is because of the integration of Windows explorer desktop environment with the operating system itself. In Linux the two exist as separate entities that work in conjunction with one another. Desktop environments are everything graphical that you interact with. The Windows 7 taskbar, icons, launchers, and anything that isn't command line is provided by your desktop environment.

     Ubuntu 11.04  was different than past versions of Ubuntu because it abandoned the Gnome DE and traded it for Unity. Many Ubuntu fans were outraged by this because of the lack of polish that Unity had upon release. The looks of Unity were better than gnome 2, but at the cost of a LOT of productivity. Unity revolves around a launcher that is buggy, obstructive, and sometimes confusing to use. This is why some people, like myself, are trading it in for Gnome 3. Gnome 3 is sleek, customizable, and integrates well with Ubuntu.

History spiel is over. Here is where the work gets done.
Your first step: Add the Gnome 3 repository. Without this your OS wouldn't know where to look to download Gnome 3.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3






Step 2: Update AND upgrade the system.
It may seem a bit redundant to update right before trading out Unity, but it helps Gnome integrade with Ubuntu safer. (I updated without upgrading. Now it takes 2 minutes to boot and another 4 to gain full functionality. Not mentioning a few mandatory commands each login. Do BOTH) 


sudo apt-get update
&&
sudo apt-get install dist-upgrade






Step 3: Download Gnome 3
You are about to download Gnome Shell. There is no need to specify what version of Gnome you want. Gnome-shell is always kept up to date with the latest version. When typing the code remember the hyphen.


sudo apt-get install gnome-shell


The heavy lifting is done, but that doesn't mean you are.
There are still more terminal commands to be run. But first, restart your system. Boot into the recovery console and type


sudo apt-get install gnome-session


This makes it possible to log into Gnome 3. Type "exit" in the recovery console and return to the login page. Change from "Ubuntu" to "Gnome" or "Gnome shell". Once you are in you will probably notice a very low FPS rate. You simply need to install your graphics drivers again before you can fully use Gnome 3. At first it may look ugly because it uses GTK 3.x. You need to download a new theme from gnome-look.org if you want your Eyecandy back.


Also, once you're in download the Gnome tweak tool and have File Manager handle the desktop. This will let you put icons on the desktop. A feature that is disabled in Gnome 3 for some reason. You can also feel free to change any other settings inside tweak tool, it won't damage anything. To find tweak tool after you download it move your mouse button over to the activities corner and search for "Tweak Advanced Settings".


Some not-so-necessary applications that will make your Gnome life easier
There are a few applications that are going to make using Gnome a lot easier. They are Gnome do, docky/awn, and (Removed).
Gnome do is an application Launcher that learns as you do. It saves your application preferences. If you typed chr to access Google Chrome 4 times and chr to access Chromosome chart 3 times chr would be saved to Chrome for the time being. Gnome do can be put on a keyboard shortcut for fast summoning. 


Docky (or Avant Window Navigator) are both Docks. They just give a better track of things than the anti-clutter policies of Gnome 3.


(Removed) seems to have been discontinued. Nevermind that.


Vague video that sums up everything I've said without the clutter incoming very soon.

Operating System comparison

As you have seen in some of my pictures I use Windows 7 home premium as my operating system. I had been hearing about an operating system called linux and I thought it was just one system rather than a whole array of them. The first result on a google search revealed Ubuntu 64-bit OS.
The Installation
 I decided to download that and dual boot it with Windows 7. That process was incredibly easy. Just use the windows installer shown on the downloading page of Ubuntu. Once the 4-5GB download is complete (it took several hours for my 690 kb/s connection speed) you will need to finish installing and restart. Now you will see an option as soon as you start your computer to either use Windows or Ubuntu. You might want to use Windows to transfer necessary things over.
Once you're in Ubuntu
The first thing you should do in Ubuntu is set up your internet connection and set up what internet browsers you want to use. I recommend downloading screenlets, because it works just like Rainmeter. Now download all of the updates for Ubuntu and transfer anything you want from Windows over to Linux. You should also download a program called Wine for running Windows Programs of which there is no linux equivalent. Linux cannot run .exes. Because of this it is incredibly secure and hard to catch a virus on.
How to customize Linux
Use your Ubuntu software center in Applications > Software Center to hunt down any software you want. Some are installed already by default and are designated by a green check in the software menu. You can add your messengers and emails to the options in the top right corner of your screen.

Analysis
So far it seems that Ubuntu linux is a very user friendly OS and is very secure, reliable, and customizable. It also offers a wider range of tools for coding / scripting. However many programs highly popularized by Windows can be run in Ubuntu due to its incapability to run executables. If the programs is pretty well known Wine, which I mentioned earlier, should be able to solve the problem. The ability to have workstations in Ubuntu is also an a very big plus. It has really helped with my clutter of windows that I experienced in the Windows OS. So my conclusion would be that Linux is pretty much superior to Windows in every way that I could see possible. I would definitely recommend downloading this free OS instead of paying for a Windows upgrade.