What's the peaceful path to configuring 11.10's desktop ?

[trikster_x]

I think I know what he means by it being a struggle to resize windows. I often find it hard to get the cursor in the exact place to resize them. There doesn't seem to be many pixels given to this task. Its hit or miss a couple of times before you get it right. At least for me anyway. I'd like if there was a bigger area to grab on to.

I have found that the bottom right corner of the window has a larger area dedicated to this task.

[frogo]

I think to be fair, gnome2 had this too.

(i may be unfair, but I'm not trying to measure up one against the other.)

I've got two, three-ish issues with window sizes.

i) by default many apps open with a full screen window. Ok, I can go on the application bar and hit the little square because I can't seem to be able do otherwise (yet?)...

ii) even when not in full screen and i need to resize a window I occasionally get stuck with what Shizz describes. Maybe it's not with everything, I'm not sure. But I can tell you that it can be extremely painful to try resizing a terminal window, especially if there is a window behind it... true it was occasionally the case before, but it seems to be a bit more dramatic now (honestly, I do swear each time, but I like swearing)...

iii) (ish) I'm not sure about this one because I'm not entirely sure I understand what happens. Sometimes dragging a window around will bring it full screen (i guess I'm dragging it to the upper bar or something like that. It's worst when dragging a window across spaces. Sometimes I can drag it to another space, sometimes I can't and teh window is downsized to the border between spaces.

Now these can be seen as very minor annoyances, but I have a 13'' screen and have to switch between 4/5 apps whenever i do anything with this machine. Sometimes that's 3 times such set up at the same time... so window mis- or weird behavior can be a real nerve breaker.

@OP-you say making your way to an app is difficult via the dash. I'm not trying to patronise you here (I didn't realise myself), but you HAVE realised you can just type 'appearance' and it will appear?

No offense taken, that's a fair point. I sorta intuit that it's one way of doing it, I think. But I'm not trained yet into finding apps this way (afraid I'm just backward.. I like to see what's there and where it is rather than trust to shoot for it). Also, I have to admit, I just don't care to remember the names of apps.

12.04 is a lot more (easily) customisable than previous releases.

Not there yet Have had a lot of troubles over the past 2 years to get a stable install on this machine but paradoxically I can't afford spending more than a day setting up the machine to a working condition... so even when it's less than pleasant, provided it does the job, I stick to it. I'll be with 11.10 for a while ... In fact the greatest thing in terms of upgrade this time around has been that I have been able to seamlessly access most of the data on the 10.10 partition after installing 11.10 alongside to it. First time ever this works so well, I don't know if it's a + of 11.10 or a - to me in my previous experiences..

cheers

[frogo]

I have found that the bottom right corner of the window has a larger area dedicated to this task.

Seems to work pretty well when the window has white space at the bottom. But it can be a bit tricky otherwise, as with the terminal where this area is not always grabbed easily and not well demarcated from the sliding bar. Also, it's not always the case that it's natural to resize by pointing at the bottom right corner...

Admittedly, this is, overall, not very significant stuff. But that's more or less the point, one should not have to think of this and never have to spend several seconds trying to place a pointer to do window resizing. This aside, I might be a bit of a grump...

[MG&TL]

1. I never said you were; just avoiding the possibility. About the maximised ones; this is quite hard to describe, but easy enough once you get the hang of it. For a maximised window, click the top bar, then drag downward. After a while, it will 'snap' out of maximised. Same with windows horizontally maximised (aero-snap style.)

2. I think you'll get there eventually. GNOME3 is even more type-driven.

3. Oh, oops. I didn't mean "you should try this right now" - that's pretty dumb on a production machine, we seem to be at breakage point in the alphas. I meant "wait three months, and you should be a little better off"

[trikster_x]

Seems to work pretty well when the window has white space at the bottom. But it can be a bit tricky otherwise, as with the terminal where this area is not always grabbed easily and not well demarcated from the sliding bar. Also, it's not always the case that it's natural to resize by pointing at the bottom right corner...

Admittedly, this is, overall, not very significant stuff. But that's more or less the point, one should not have to think of this and never have to spend several seconds trying to place a pointer to do window resizing. This aside, I might be a bit of a grump...

There is actually a plugin in the stock compiz package that allows a keybind for resizing windows. Default is set to alt+f8, but that is a bit unwieldy if you are using a mouse. You can get to all the settings for compiz by installing CCSM(compiz config settings manager), then edit the keybinds as you see fit. That should help with a couple things I think. I really wish Canonical would make that one of the default applications, since compiz is so heavily integrated now.