Posts by thatrandomtechie

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Ironic choice of words...

So to me this has always technically been a thing with Linux and while Zorin OS has been the only project that actually tries to offer a flexible enough experience for the desktop (such that you can get both mentioned "styles"), my personal preference will always be Cinnamon. It is a VERY outrageous claim to make that Windows offers any kind of superior desktop customization or flexibility than Linux. Most of the popular and well maintained desktops mentioned in this article can actually be tailored to look like MacOS or Ubuntu's Unity and usually WITHOUT forking the DE. The author mentions important pieces in the beginning and then derails into the usual longtime argument of "why don't you all just do one project for for DE?"

Let's look at a few lines here.

"There is a lot more to life than the tired old Windows model. What GNOME and Pantheon are doing to reinvent it is great, but at the same time both remove a lot of the customizability and flexibility that some of us rely on… as well as features that were not only crucial to users with some disabilities, but also helped everyone."

What are you trying to argue for here? Should yet another desktop be curtailed to supplement some missing features from a select DE in the Unix desktop landscape? You're literally preaching to the choir there. You even admitted Mate (Gnome 2) did the things you wanted it to. What you didn't seem to acknowledge is that Gnome itself has been the most forked DE in the community due to it abandoning useful and commonplace desktop components. These "reinvent" initiatives by Gnome and Pantheon do not merit praise but instead should be sanctioned. The reason why Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce, and LXDE even exist now is BECAUSE Gnome has failed to actually provide a meaningful/useful/friendly desktop out of the box. If you want to blame any one project for why so many identical desktops exist now, go blame Gnome and their hoity-toity crew of devs. Obviously, there isn't really much more to life than a UI that plainly WORKS. What Unix/Linux and the world needs is greater adoption of usability and accessibility features for the relevant software... what it doesn't need is the wheel to be reinvented. You can claim MacOS as revolutionary and yes it is like comparing apples to oranges but guess what? MacOS still has their taskbar and their panels and context menus BECAUSE they work. It doesn't matter if the majority of desktops use the Windows 95 style arrangement or components... it's what everyone uses whether it's Windows 11 and it's style of MacOS and it's style. You need these graphical components to actually have a GUI. Nobody today uses RiscOS on their main PCs... want to take a wild guess why?

"There are other designs out there. There are more desktops than Windows and macOS, and all offer their own unique benefits. Reimplementing the same old desktop model over and over again doesn't help anyone: it just wastes a huge amount of talent and effort. ®"

How can this be true if Gnome2 (i.e. Mate) offers some of the benefits you claim are important despite Mate itself being a fork of what Gnome was? Obviously then it is quite clearly not a waste of talent or effort since it caters to a cause you apparently care for. Gnome and all the other MacOS knockoff DE in the community do not interest me because they try to stray away from what plainly works. Docks are not miraculously better than having a panel organize the active apps for the sessions... they are alternative. It is also plain preference. Panels actually don't waste space when they are used correctly--and by that I mean not as done in vanilla Gnome. The modern Gnome desktop offers only a specific user experience that has abandoned the traditional (i.e. working i.e. INTUITIVE) user experience in light of "reinventing the wheel".

My advice to the author is quit nagging over what independent projects in the community do with their time and resources... instead, if you actually want the change you so desperately seek, go make your own DE like System76 or better yet, go and pitch your ideas to them and convince them to integrate them into their own totally-not-Gnome fork of a desktop.

This article, aside from being an advertisement for all the different DE we have in the community, has been utterly pointless--more so than the claimed initiative for forking DE due to valid feature integrations which are what make them distinct albeit keeping similar GUI components—is only done likely because of a more inherent problem in the community that actually isn't highlighted here. Go figure.

Pop!_OS 21.10: Radical distro shows potential but does not play nicely with others

osprobe issue not System76 unique...

The os-prober issue is not unique to System76 or Pop!OS. Ubuntu has the same issue as they are disabling it by default for the next LTS release. Apparently there's some "security implications" for disabling it which puts them in the same boat as System76. Yes, I would personally argue it's still better to use grub over systemd for something as this but ultimately, System76 probably didn't have the intention of "being unfriendly". Like Ubuntu, they likely had good intentions but didn't consider the full length of consequences for this change. One could argue that System76 being a hardware vendor--that they would then have a greater incentive to assure a consistent user experience that doesn't complicate the use of GNU/Linux, however, as it's already been mentioned... they cannot be held to different standards "just because". Pop!OS is still based on Ubuntu and Canonical has decided to shoot themselves in the foot with the same problem. Pop!OS has some "unique" innovations that don't make sense to people who clearly already have a preference but BECAUSE Pop!OS is still Linux, you can tailor it to suit your needs. One distro cannot satisfy every stupid person's wishes because they think the world revolves around them. That's why there's a fork for every desktop on almost every major distro now--needful or not, it is the way things are. I'm not justifying what Pop!OS is now but they aren't the only ones doing questionable things.... Canonical is shoving snapd down Ubuntu user's throats, Fedora is shoving a real crappy GNOME experience on their users, etc. Every pain point mentioned in this article likely has a workaround under Pop!OS because it's Linux. The problem is people want things spoon-fed to them despite this still being Linux--c'mon now.

As System76 starts work on its own Linux desktop world, GNOME guy opens blog, engages flame mode

Hear, hear!

Fedora's Chromium maintainer suggests switching to Firefox as Google yanks features in favour of Chrome

Old News

You're kinda late to the party.... Firefox has ALWAYS been the common sense browser to use. Now that it matches Chrome's speed and features superior privacy/security features/add-ons, there's never truly been a reason to use Chrome other than Chrome shipping with a seemingly simple interface. People conflate the appearance of Chrome's UI and assume "oh, must be really simple" except for the fact that they still have to learn how to use it. I've come to find certain things not being as intuitive to enable/disable on Chrome when compared to Firefox simply because Chrome makes it's stupid app child-proof for some stupid reason. It assumes, just like Apple, that we're idiots and can't do advanced things. Firefox's UI is arguably much better and for better or for worse has made itself follow Chrome against the wishes of it's users. Firefox is always going to be the better browser because it actually lets the user do what they need to do without being chained to anti-privacy business practices.