torn and kinda disgruntled

I have Ubuntu 12.04 (and Kubuntu 12.04) installed here; I'm thinking that I might put off installing the next LTS release, 14.04, until the first point release comes out, but I've said that before and then I didn't wait.

12.04 didn't have the online search stuff. Take a look here at what folks are saying about turning all that stuff off:

Go to Settings, security and privacy, and then turn that stuff off. You should turn off “include online seach results” and you may want to turn off the thingie that shows your recently open documents. All this clutters up the dashboard, but if you want this information there, by all means leave it.

Get rid of the shopping suggestions with this code at the console:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Lenses disabled-scopes “[‘more_suggestions-amazon.scope’, ‘more_suggestions-u1ms.scope’, ‘more_suggestions-populartracks.scope’, ‘music-musicstore.scope’, ‘more_suggestions-ebay.scope’, ‘more_suggestions-ubuntushop.scope’, ‘more_suggestions-skimlinks.scope’]”

Disable online searches from dash with
wget -q -O – https://fixubuntu.com/fixubuntu.sh | bash

Looks easy enough to do, and it would be probably take only a few minutes, but seeing all that kinda irritates me. If I was new to Linux, those things would not be easy to do. I have to admit, it does make me have second thoughts about continuing to run Ubuntu...

I could just stay with 12.04; support for that doesn't end 2017. I could go with Kubuntu 14.04 or Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 or another derivative and avoid all the Unity search stuff. I could just say, "Oh, well," turn the stuff off as noted above, and be done with it (that's probably what I'll end up doing). Or, I could just forget the whole thing and dump Ubuntu for good.

I haven't decided.

One other thing that's bugging me is that some people have reported not being able to log into their GNOME Shell sessions when after they've added GNOME Shell to Ubuntu 14.04 (http://ubuntuforums....d.php?t=2219373). I have GNOME Shell added to Ubuntu 12.04; I figure that there'll eventually be a fix for this.

Well, I have had a nice run with the Ubuntu LTS releases, going back to 6.06 from several years ago. But... drat, why couldn't they have made this Unity online search an opt-in thing? I'm definitely feeling torn...

14.04

I have yet to install either Ubuntu 14.04 or Kubuntu 14.04 -- I might even wait for the first point release -- but as always, Mr. Sen comes to the rescue with a couple of detailed reviews:

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" Review: Solid, stable but no radical element this time

Kubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" Review: Solid, stable KDE spin with KDE 4.13.0

portland 122, houston 120 (ot)

That loss led Yahoo! Sports writer Adrian Wojnarowski to rip Dwight Howard in this article, but there was lots of blame to go around. James Harden, for example, bricking 20 shots (8 for 28 from the field, 3 for 14 on 3-point shots). "Brick... House! Mighty mighty, and lettin' it all hang out!" Clang!

Howard went for 27 points and 15 rebounds, but barely over 50% (9 of 17) from the free throw line. "Hack-a-Shaq" was in effect.

Credit to the Blazers, though. LaMarcus Aldridge, monster game, 46 points, 18 rebounds, 17-31 FGs. Damian Lillard, 31 points, 9 rebounds, 5 assists.

Houston's good, but so are the Blazers. Tough match-up. Should be a great series. One of these teams is gonna go home very disappointed, but both of these teams are very close to Western Conference Championship contention.

How about Atlanta taking Game 1 over the Pacers??? Yikes! The Hawks finished with the worst regular season record of any team in this year's playoffs, and Indiana had the best record in the Eastern Conference! Can we get a upset? Please?

trying window maker

I've read about the Window Maker X11 window manager, and I've looked at screenshots, but I didn't think it was something I'd like. Besides, I've been very happy using Openbox and Fluxbox, and I've enjoyed using other WMs as well. But I had nothing better to do yesterday (or, nothing else that I really felt like doing!), so... I installed Window Maker in Bridge Linux, from the Arch repos.

Out of the box, Window Maker looked something like this, except for the icon down at the bottom-left, which is for a running instance of xfce4-screenshooter:

It's very important to read the Window Maker documentation over at windowmaker.org if you want to understand how to use this thing. Not surprisingly, the Arch Wiki also has good info about it (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Window_Maker); and, there's lots of other info out there on the internet, as well.

Window Maker comes with nice GUI tools for configuring everything -- the menu, themes, styles, and so forth -- and there are tons of dock apps that you can choose from to add.

I'm finding that I like Window Maker much more than I was expecting to. Here's how my desktop and menu looked after I set things up a bit:

Very nice WM -- definitely worth taking the time to learn to use.

omg! arch!

Article at omgubuntu.co.uk, of all places: Arch: Shangri-La for Ubuntu Power Users?

Author Sam Tran writes:

"Ubuntu 14.04 is here and many of you will opt to wipe and reinstall Ubuntu for that fresh, new LTS smell. But I’m here to say: not so fast!

"Though the name of the site has Ubuntu in it, another distribution stole my heart many years ago: Arch Linux."

Nice article. Interesting comments following the article, too!

sort nitrogen's image list

CrunchBang comes with Nitrogen, which is pretty nice for setting desktop backgrounds, but I found it kinda frustrating that Nitrogen's image list (in the menu, go to Settings > Choose Wallpaper) was not sorted, making it difficult to find a particular image in a long list of images. Found a helpful article: "Getting nitrogen to sort the image listing alphabetically"

That blog post explains things nicely. To sum things up, the command for sorting Nitrogen's image list, as found in man nitrogen, is nitrogen --sort=alpha. You simply have to edit the ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml file, find the line nitrogen ~/images/wallpapers/, and change it to nitrogen --sort=alpha ~/images/wallpapers/.

Then reconfigure Nitrogen: Settings > Openbox > Reconfigure. Done.

another spin on mx-14

Dedoimedo reviews MX-14 in AntiX MX-14 review - Antics and tantrums

He didn't like it very much, but I'm not surprised. Still, he provides lots of useful information about the release, as always. Many readers might find enough there to make them want to take MX-14 for a spin.

sen looks at mx-14

A review of MX-14, done by Arindam Sen: http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.com/2014/04/antix-mx-14-symbiosis-review-truly.html