Posts by linuxhaterbob

Oracle creates new form of free Solaris

Re: OpenIndiana

Oracle buying Sun had a lot more to do with Java than with Solaris or SPARC. That's for certain.

NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems

1. http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/

2. It's all 100% open source software. You can do whatever you want with it. This is about solving problems and improving operating system design, not restricting freedom.

3. As a user you can still change it. Commands and documentation are provided. The point is you don't want to.

Creating a strong separation between "OS" and "Applications" is the end goal here.

With traditional Linux distribution tools and approaches if you want to downgrade your version of Libreoffice or get compatibility with a different version of Blender3d the only way to end up with a supported configuration is to re-install your operating system.

That is a complete shit design. Nix helps solve this. OSTree and Flatpak helps solve this, so does OCI containers. There are a variety of different approaches with their different merits, but apt-get and rpm and dnf definitely do not solve this.

Fedora 35 is out: GNOME 41 desktop, polished UI, easier-to-install closed-source apps

Re: Slow mutation

> It seems like with each release it is more tuned to running on the personal laptops of the respective dev team members.

It probably seems like that because you haven't realized yet that Server is a separate product from Workstation.

Fedora Workstation is specifically designed for development and administrative workstations. And the news for Servers are boring as hell. It's a lot more interesting to talk about Wayland remote desktop support versus minor changes between systemd releases.

Re: Gnome 40/41

As a person who has been using Linux as my exclusive OS for about 20 years now... Gnome is f-ing awesome.

Traditional Linux desktop has always suffered the "nine click to crap". Meaning that, yes, you can beautify it and spend a lot of time tweaking it and get it all very cool looking and put nice screenshots on Reddit to impress imaginary people.....

However as soon as you hand it over to an actual user then they are going to find a broken something within about nine clicks of screwing around. They are going to find ugliness.

Stuff like your "awesome" dark theme destroying the ability to see radio buttons. Broken bluetooth crap that worked just fine before your "tweaks" and "fixes" to pulseaudio. Text that ends up being unreadable because the font you choose broke developers assumptions. That fancy custom WM with your special bindings completely breaks the ability to manage floating windows sanely.

The list of embarrassing nonsense is virtually unending.

And this traditional linux desktop "experience" is exactly what you'll get with XFCE or Mate or KDE or pretty much any number of DEs out there.

What I need in a desktop environment is very simple. I need to have my browsers, a decent PDF reader, a decent terminal emulator, a working podman install, easy ability to run virtual machines in the background, and a very modern version of Emacs. That's it.

The rest of it... when it comes to notifications, setting time, installing printers, connecting my bluetooth headsets, connecting to wifi access points with a captive portal or any number of mundane nonsense like that. I need that to "just work". I don't want to bother with it. I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to configure it. I don't want to hunt down drivers or read wikis on how to do it.

These are all solved problems.

If I have have to be prompted to use sudo or, especially, some application running as root on X11 to do any of these things I will instantly hate everything to do with that software and distribution. That is beyond unacceptable. It is not 1997 anymore, FFS.

The closest to a sane desktop I have ever found on Linux is Fedora Workstation running Gnome. Sure as hell not going to get this running something like XFCE on Arch.