ubuntu 14.04
i upgraded to ubuntu 14.04 not too long ago. after booting up 14.04 for the first time and starting a gnome flashback session, i was immediately perplexed as to why i was seeing the unity launcher. it’s most likely because i use the flashback session with effects enabled (compiz) enabled, but still it was strange that i was looking at the unity launcher right next to the gnome classic launcher.
to disable the unity launcher i installed the compizconfig settings manager and disabled the “Ubuntu Unity Plugin”. this worked immediately however the top portions of each program window disappeared after disabling unity. the solution was to reenable the “Window Decoration” effect in the compizconfig.
source: http://askubuntu.com/questions/134172/window-title-bars-missing-occasionally-in-unity
something very cool that i came across during reading 14.04 articles was pipelight. pipelight is somewhat of an evolution of the netflix-desktop idea. however, instead of relying on a windows browser, pipelight allows you to use a linux web browser along with a windows version of a browser plugin (most notably silverlight). i tried netflix w/ firefox and it seemed to work fine.
summarized steps to install pipelight:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pipelight-multi
sudo pipelight-plugin –enable silverlight
sudo pipelight-plugin –enable widevine
then for firefox i installed the add-on “UAControl” and set the user agent string to:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0
pipelight info source: http://www.webupd8.org/2013/08/pipelight-use-silverlight-in-your-linux.html
more pipelight info: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/easily-enable-silverlight-watch-netflix-linux/
chromium and adobe flash usage seemed kind of messed up in 14.04. i followed the instructions for installing pepper flash and that seems to have resolved the issue.
installation:
sudo apt-get install pepperflashplugin-nonfree
sudo update-pepperflashplugin-nonfree –install
source: http://www.webupd8.org/2014/01/pepper-flash-player-installer-for.html
concluding thoughts…not really much to say. i noticed two longstanding packages have been removed from the repository – abuse (the game) and chmsee. virtualbox continues to be awesome.
regarding the future of ubuntu…i believe if canonical is dead set on using mir instead of wayland (and not including a wayland option) then i’ll probably have to switch to another distro. i see wayland becoming somewhat of an unofficial standard amongst linux distros and it doesn’t make sense for canonical to ignore that and go it alone. the good news is that mir supposedly isn’t debuting until 2016. i’m also concerned on the mobile “convergence” stuff coming in ubuntu 14.10. hopefully, none of that will be disruptive for me.
if i had to change distros again i’d probably take a hard look at mint. i’ve messed around with it before, but i’ve always been bothered by the fact that they don’t officially support/encourage online release upgrades. i’d also consider opensuse…