Instabilities after Gnome Tweaks and Chromium

Chat about Zorin
#1

Oh dear. Zorin ‘broke’ again. It seems to make it two weeks and then POOF.

I define a ‘break’ as something that requires a re-install. Despite all the baloney this Windows 10 user puts up with – I’ve never had to reinstall. And I did have to do that with Macs back in the day.

If I had to guess what was what there are two possibiities –

  1. I’ve been Gnome Tweaking it up – but there’s a sense that Zorin Settings and Gnome Settings aren’t happy to share the same set of toys. Even when I uninstalled Tweaks it didn’t undo all that I changed. Eeek.

  2. All my pinned Chromium apps suddenly left the panel. And they weren’t able to be re-pinned.

The only distro I’m going to stick with is one that doesn’t break every few weeks. And I’m doing so little on this Mini PC it’s shocking. I can’t imagine going daily driver. And I was this close.

Like I said, DANG.

#2

Would you be willing to share the specific steps on how you installed Gnome Tweaks and Chromium (including the uninstalling, pinning, any other details)? It may be useful to others.

#3

I’m not really a fan of Gnome either which is why I go for the Zorin Lite version with XFCE. Though XFCE is not perfect, it is simple and easy to work with. I would give that a shot before completely throwing in the towel. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#4

I installed Chrom and GnomeTweaks via the Software store.

Pinning apps in Chromium kinda stinks. It doesn’t behave the way it’s supposed to, which right there may be the issue. In Windows you go to MORE TOOLS > CREATE SHORTCUT and it drops, say, your Gmail page as a ‘app’ on the desktop, with the Gmail logo. Double click it, it opens in the ‘dock/panel’, keep it there, you’re all set.

In Linux Chromium it leaves a sort of text file thing on the desktop. You then must click it and it asks if I trust this ‘app’. I say yes and must kinda make another web app. So now there’s two on the desktop. You click that one and, get this, it opens two in the ‘dock’. The second one is pinnable. It’s a complete fiasco of a process, not Zorin’s fault cause it does the same Ubuntu Mate.

If you install Chrome itself it works a little better, but as I’ve indicated in a post somewhere around here this should be a native feature to freaky-deeky FireFox. How hard can it be to create an ‘app’ shell for a webpage and make it a ‘fake’ app? Google is barely pulling it off themselves – there’s room for competition from FF.

#5

Thanks. What were the OS problems that led to the need to reinstall it? Seems like you were pointing at Tweaks?

#6

You can install Chrome, I mean literal Windows Chrome in there. And yes, Chromium stinks.

#7

Well Tweaks was allowing me to have a ‘dock’ of sorts and a top bar, with the date centered. Tweaks also gave me some extensions to plug in. But I think between Gnome Tweaks, Gnome extensions, Zorin Appearance, and Settings… lots of toes being stepped on.

When I began to fear GnomeTweaks was causing issues, I figured, hey, I’ll just uninstall it. Naive perhaps. It left the top bar it created, which wasn’t quite possible in Zorin. At that point I started to realize it was broken again.

Sigh.

#8

Gotcha. Sorry to hear about that. Did you use Synaptic for uninstalling? If not, you can consider that for the future and it should mitigate uninstallation issues.

Taskbar moving up on its own after screenlock
#9

Hi JohnnyHart, This is where Zorin have tweaked Gnome - to get the Windows 7 look they disable that top Panel which is an inherent ‘traditional’ Gnome DE. I always leave off the following from Gnome Tweaks:
System, Places, Top Panel. I seem to remember that activating one or other of System/Places can sometimes lead to the top bar appearing. It could well be that there has been a ‘Gnome’ update through the backdoor that screwed the Zorin desktop up. :wink:

I can’t double check that for now as I am in FerenOS.

Taskbar moving up on its own after screenlock
#10

I did not. And get you now.

Carmar – I have a 101 related Linux Question –

Why aren’t Linux installs handled ‘the normal way’?

The more I think about it the more I’m confused at how and why Linux chooses to include apps in their install but adding or subtracting them is a particularly complicated.

I don’t wish to have a debate on whether or not it’s complicated. It just is. I’m asking why is it this way?

Is it because of the various Linux distros? That there isn’t simply a Linux version of Chrome but various versions? So that if you’re in, say Debian you can’t simply update your Firefox because it may not support Debian?

#11

I can compare only to Windows, as Zorin is the only Linux distro I have used.
The “What’s a Package?” section here https://www.howtogeek.com/117579/htg-explains-how-software-installation-package-managers-work-on-linux/ does a good job of summarizing the differences.