I gave up on the Gnome idea

[Spadge]

And here I am, back on Kubuntu.

CLI install with Gnome added was just too broken. It was horrible.

[pauly]

Yeh Gnome Shell sucks. I tried to like it. There are some pretty nice themes but the usability just sucks. It actually becomes aggravating to use. KDE dominates imho. At least on the desktop. I also find it funny how much better KWin is than Compiz. I still see people trying to use compiz on KDE.

[SteveRiley]

Hm, I wonder why it didn't work for you. On my ThinkPad X1, which is constantly in a state of experimentation, I'm currently running 12.10 built from CLI with GNOME3/GNOME Shell from the GNOME PPA and KDE Standard from Ubuntu's "universe" repository. Since the display manager boots before the DE I chose the "non-aligned" LightDM with the Unity greeter. It's all actually working very well, but sheesh, GNOME Shell is weird.

Oh, and we knew you'd be back

[Snowhog]

Oh, and we knew you'd be back

The 'Prodigal' Spadge returneth.

[K-Project]

I also find it funny how much better KWin is than Compiz. I still see people trying to use compiz on KDE.

I will never, never understand this. KWin to me seems to be very much ahead of Compiz in terms of ease of use, functionality, and stability, and yet you still see these requests about how to install Compiz all the time. I was never a big fan of it in the first place, circa 2008/9. Just always seemed glitchy and unstable. Nowadays it seems nothing has changed, where KWin has gotten better and better.

[SteveRiley]

The 'Prodigal' Spadge returneth.

Quick! Bring the best wallpaper and put it on him. Put a live CD on his finger and some anti-static wrappers on his feet. Bring the fatted GNOALF and kill it. For we shall have a feast and celebrate!

[Spadge]

Well, for starters ... the add apt repository thing wouldn't work, even after installing the python tools thingy, so adding PPAs was done by editing the sources list and manually adding keys and ... yeah, already too much like work. I battled through for a while and just thought "sod this, Kubuntu works".

I'm liking how fast it is on the SSD a lot.

[Spadge]

Oh, and the real deal breaker is synaptic. Man, that's fugly.

[SteveRiley]

Well, for starters ... the add apt repository thing wouldn't work, even after installing the python tools thingy

The correct thingy is software-properties-common -- this is the package that provides add-apt-repository. Too bad you don't have some logs, I'd be interested in taking a look at the failures.

I'm liking how fast it is on the SSD a lot.

It's like heroin. You'll never go back to spinning drives now.

Oh, and the real deal breaker is synaptic. Man, that's fugly.

Hah! I think you're the first person here to criticize Synaptic.

[Spadge]

Funny, everywhere I looked on google pointed to some python thingy. Weird, huh?

Oh, and gtkperf now ... Total time: 6.73 - I'm calling that fast.

[SteveRiley]

Ah, yes, the tool used to be in the package python-software-properties. But that changed in Quantal, when the tool was rewritten in Python 3. The tool moved to software-properties-common, which depends on the newer python3-software-properties for abstracting APT.

My Gtkperf (default settings of 100 rounds) is 14.46. T520, nVidia 4200M, Nouveau drivers. It would probably do better with the Intel GPU, but I can't drive two digital monitors with this laptop if I use the integrated graphics. And since it's Optimus, nVidia's binary blob still won't work yet.

[Spadge]

That explains that not working then

[SteveRiley]

apt-file is a useful utility for locating which package contains which file. When something appears to be not where you think it is, apt-file can help you find it. First, install the thing without dependencies, because normally it'll bring in many unnecesssary recommended packages:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends apt-file

Now update the index:

sudo apt-file update

Then you can search for the file in question:

steve@t520:~$ [B]apt-file find add-apt-repository[/B]
software-properties-common: /usr/bin/add-apt-repository
software-properties-common: /usr/share/man/man1/add-apt-repository.1.gz

Ah hah! Now we learn which package we need: software-properties-common.

[Spadge]

Ah hah! Now we learn which package we need: software-properties-common.

See, if I'd known that then, I wouldn't be looking at a lovely KDE screen right now

[SteveRiley]

Welcome $HOME.