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Lobotomizing Gnome

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Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#71

Post by pjmlp »

chriswarbo wrote: post #51
pjmlp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And UI/UX designers work happily and feel welcome on Windows and Mac OS systems, which are what everyone non-technical buys anyway.

> UI/UX designers work happily and feel welcome on Windows and Mac OS systems Could you elaborate on what you mean by "feel welcome"? AFAIK neither of those systems is open to contributors: if a UI/UX designer wanted to improve some aspect of the design, they're either limited to whatever config/theming the company decided to allow, or they must go and convince the company of their idea (especially sales, marketing,…

Toxicity, tooling and commercial ideas regarding IP.

In Windows and macOS systems, and even on Google platforms, you go to a conference, there is a wealthy set of talks and discussion forums about UI/UX ideas.

We just get to use Sketch, XD, Photoshop, whatever gets the job done to transmit the ideas and how users interact with the platforms.

On UNIX world, or what is left of it BSD/Linux, GNOME and KDE designers get bashed and something like xmonad is considered the epitome of GUI experience.

A similar conference will be about filesystems, network protocols, graphics drivers, kernel modules and very seldom about anything UI/UX related.

So the designers that still try to contribute to GNOME and KDE apps do so in spite of community, because they believe that they can still make a difference.

Everyone else just moves into places where they feel welcome.

I am still wondering how long elementary OS is going to be around.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#72

Post by raverbashing »

yAnonymous wrote: post #63
twblalock wrote: post #2

Open-source desktops are never perfect for anyone, but everyone expects them to be. For everyone who says they are too bloated, someone else says they are too spartan. That's probably why there are so many of them. I would expect working on Gnome (or KDE or Cinnamon or Mate or XFCE or LXDE, the list goes on) to be a thankless task. You try to please everybody and yet please nobody. The imperfections of Linux desktops…

The problem with Gnome is not that it's too bloated or spartan -although it does use twice as much memory as KDE and four times as much as LXDE- but that many parts of the UX are plain stupid.

I share this opinion. It's "trying to be Mac OSX simple" (but failing)

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#73

Post by dpwm »

s3m4j wrote: post #62
baud147258 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought Windows reboots were supposed to get less over the years It's funny, I can't remember last time I had a forced reboot, either at work or at home, both on Windows 10. On the other hand, I'm shutting down my PC regularly

Anecdotal, but I, on the other hand, have had quite a few forced reboot. I close the lid of my laptop and Windows goes to sleep, but during the night it somehow decides to do its thing and reboots. The thing is, I have BIOS password and a dual boot. It will then just hangs indefinitely on the BIOS password prompt. Fans spinning, CPU unthrottled for hours. And then lose network drivers inside Windows. Reinstalling dri…

That sounds like it's setting an RTC timer to wake up. You may be able to disable that. It may be called wake on timer or wake on RTC.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#74

Post by jeena »

On Arch Linux installing GNOME does not install all of the GNOME apps, just the shell. The rest I only install if I want it. What I like most is their calendar and their address book.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#75

Post by pjmlp »

JepZ wrote: post #50
keyle wrote: post #3

I recently switched to Linux (from Windows 10 - forced upgrade took 45' in the middle of an extremely important moment) Debian netinstall + Mate desktop (Gnome 2/3 extension?) I expected to switch back within a week. Surprisingly, I love it. After a few tweaks and Nvidia drivers installed, it's way better than I expected. Super fast, minimal, and no annoyances. Linux desktop really has improved in the last 20 years,…

Btw. modern AMD graphics cards are much easier to use and mostly 'just work' out of the box as AMD is actively supporting the development of the open source driver. Intel graphics are fine too, but as we all know, their performance isn't that good.

Kind of, since they rebooted their driver, the experience is not that good in older cards.

I lost video hardware acceleration on my EEE PC with the AMD APU.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#76

Post by probably_wrong »

keyle wrote: post #3

I recently switched to Linux (from Windows 10 - forced upgrade took 45' in the middle of an extremely important moment) Debian netinstall + Mate desktop (Gnome 2/3 extension?) I expected to switch back within a week. Surprisingly, I love it. After a few tweaks and Nvidia drivers installed, it's way better than I expected. Super fast, minimal, and no annoyances. Linux desktop really has improved in the last 20 years,…

Long time Mate user here.

The "problem" with Mate is that it just works. I interact with Windows and OSX daily, and I have yet to find a feature that makes me thing "I wish my desktop environment could do this". Mate gets out of my way and lets me work.

In other words, it's boring. There's nothing new and shiny to be excited about, because it's as good as it gets. I left Gnome 3 because I was tired of visual effects getting on my way, but those visual effects were what attracted me to Gnome 3 to begin with. I think Mate lacks that "wow!" factor and, as grateful as I am for that, I think this might stop it from being more popular.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#77

Post by pjmlp »

sandebert wrote: post #58
tumdum_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait ~6 months, and you will encounter a case where simple package update will cost you more than that 45 minutes ;)

Really? I've used Linux for ten years or so have never had a problem like this. When I started using it I was really, really worried because I suspected this be standard behaviour really. ”Surely this 'package management' thing will break things all the time?”. But nope, runs like clockwork. (I've always used Debian based distros, if that's a factor.)

On Ubuntu it occurs a few times that I needed to clean up the dpkg locks.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#78

Post by xelxebar »

yani wrote: post #21
DocTomoe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using i3. I still keep Gnome around, because from time to time I need to hold presentations, and randomly appearing and disappearing monitors (=beamers) is not something i3 deals with gracefully.

I started with i3 but moved to bspwm. There is not much difference between the two and it is all about configuration and what is easier to setup. Multiple monitors is something that is always a problem in my experience. It is great that gnome deals properly with this issue for you.

Oh sweet. I was an xmonad user for years and just recently switched to bspwm. Defining the entire control interface on a socket feels very much in the aesthetic of Plan 9---expose control that interops well with coreutils and friends. My preferred browser, uzbl[1], does very much the same.

Switching from xmonad did also get me to switch from xmobar to lemonbar. I really like how lemonbar is again "just a pipe," though it did pull me down a bit of a configuration rabbit hole. I now have about 500 lines of shell that asyncronously show various bits of system and bspm state.

Anyway, I don't have much of a point, other than sharing my enthusiasm with a fellow user.

[1]: https://uzbl.org

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#79

Post by brusch64 »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #40
JamesMcMinn wrote: post #26

The author wants to remove JavaScript from their desktop and does this by disabling all extensions in the hope that it will also disable Gnomes JavaScript engine. What the author does not appear to understand is that extensions are written in JavaScript because Gnome shell is written in JavaScript. Gnome works very well for my workflow, and I find much of the "bloat" to be quite useful in day to day usage, but can un…

I don't think Gnome is bloated from a feature sense (they keep removing features in fact) its just horrifically bloated from an efficiency sense, it could be orders of magnitude faster than it currently is. It chugs and judders on a first gen i5!

This is not my experience at all. I am using it on my first gneration i3 media center PC and it runs reasonably well. I don't use it for any heavy lifting -I am just starting browsers, running media players and watching videos, but for me it works fine - so well that I don't have any need to check out more lightweight options.

It has more problems with the spotify app than with any of the things I am doing with Gnome (btw I am using Arch on it - so I am still using the latest version).

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#80

Post by brusch64 »

probably_wrong wrote: post #76
keyle wrote: post #3

I recently switched to Linux (from Windows 10 - forced upgrade took 45' in the middle of an extremely important moment) Debian netinstall + Mate desktop (Gnome 2/3 extension?) I expected to switch back within a week. Surprisingly, I love it. After a few tweaks and Nvidia drivers installed, it's way better than I expected. Super fast, minimal, and no annoyances. Linux desktop really has improved in the last 20 years,…

Long time Mate user here. The "problem" with Mate is that it just works. I interact with Windows and OSX daily, and I have yet to find a feature that makes me thing "I wish my desktop environment could do this". Mate gets out of my way and lets me work. In other words, it's boring. There's nothing new and shiny to be excited about, because it's as good as it gets. I left Gnome 3 because I was tired of visual effects…

I have no experience with Mate, but the feature I miss the most in the traditional desktops is starting programs by hitting the super (Windows) key and typing the programs.

I know that you can use Alt+F2 for this, but using super is much more ingrained for me since I've seen Windows Vista (I am using Linux at home and Windows systems at work)

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