Last night, I decided to upgrade Ubuntu to 11.4. Long story short, that was a mistake. An hour of back-tracking later, I had re-installed 10.4. I plan on sticking with it for the foreseeable future.
11.4 is buggy, to put it mildly. There’s some conflict with the drivers for my Nvidia card, and the system locked hard several times. I once enjoyed hand-configuring Slackware installations by hand, but my zeal for that faded years ago.
The Unity interface is laggy, cluttered, and counter-intuitive. While I can understand why some might find the Gnome interface to be bland and utilitarian, the OSX-looking dock on the left side just eats valuable screen real estate. Frankly, I can’t tell what its exact purpose is. In some ways, it acts like WindowMaker’s dock, but it also serves as a redundant menu.
Speaking of menus, the original Gnome panel is also there, but most of its functionality has been removed. It appears that it’s meant to host the application bars for open windows, an approach that gets very confusing when multiple programs are running. There appears to be no way to drag-and-drop programs to to either panel to be used as quick launchers.
Simple routines (like a “run application” dialogue) are replaced with an awkward search engine, and the whole thing feels pasted together. I can’t imagine this being easy for new users.
To make things worse, I lost my copy of RMMLite at some point during the backup process. As it turns out, it’s no longer supported. That isn’t such a surprise, considering that the Karma hasn’t been manufactured for about six years. Still, I thought it’d be easier to find a replacement copy.
I tracked a backup down on an old hard drive, and if you need it, here it is. It’s self-executing (./rmmlite.jar) under newer Java implementations. On older ones, the syntax would be: java -jar rmmlite.jar.
3 thoughts on “RMMLite”
I’m still dealing with some issues of the upgrade from lts 8.04 to lts 10.04, also, was there so much we gained from gnome, that motif/cde did not give us? it was certainly more spry than most of the current window managers.
I’m happy enough with 10.10, I’ve got it on a laptop, and a couple of desktops, I have to thank you for saving me from 11.04, I was about to try it out. Now I’ll take the time and put it on a VirtualBox instance.
A.G.
I’m not sure about that myself. While I like the GTK toolkit, I still admire WindowMaker’s focus on speed and efficiency. Gnome feels more spry than it used to, but I wonder if that’s just because it’s running on better hardware.
That might be one of my objections to Unity: it’s an utter resource hog, and it’s a mess. Same goes for what KDE has become. Honestly, the new interface doesn’t feel like it’s running any faster than WindowMaker or FVWM did on an old 1st-generation Pentium.
Unity appears to be better suited to smaller devices, with touches like the slippery overlay scrollbar seemingly being designed for touchscreens.
Thank you, thank you!