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Lobotomizing Gnome

eklitzke.org

171–180 of 224 posts

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#171
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it is mostly RAM related, not CPU related. My laptop is an older i5 with Intel graphics and 4GB of RAM, and Gnome Shell (on Wayland) uses about 1GB more memory than Sway (a tiling Wayland compositor) does, which makes a big difference with the same applications. But when it's not under RAM pressure, Gnome is perfectly smooth.

I have a brand new i5 laptop with 12GB RAM and the stupid application list opening animation looks like it runs at 10FPS.

I see lots of comments like this. What I want to know is: if you have this kind of complaint about Gnome, why do you keep using it? There's a bunch of different desktop environments for Linux. KDE works pretty well, and if that doesn't suit you, I've been finding Xfce is quite speedy for me on my work machine.

This isn't like Windows where you're stuck with it if you need that OS for its applications.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#172
Hmm, author doesn't seem to know about dconf-editor to explore available settings.

That reminds me of why I despise much of what gnome3 has produced however. Instead of improving the applets and file manager and adding to their anemic feature set, they are constantly fucking around with the title bars and removing menus and things. For the same reason I hated 'skinz' in the 90's I dislike that every app is now a custom snowflake that has to be handled differently. For example, look at what dconf-editor has become, like the Disks program---an abomination.

Gnome (all the desktops really) is still not as consistent and integrated as the Windows 2000 shell was, and is harder to use. IMHO, the only useful innovation to come out since then has been the "Super-key search," the rest has been downhill.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#173
post #86
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 ;)

You will run into problems like that on any platform. Want to do a "quick" Windows Update? OK, let's just schedule in 2 hours of downtime. What about OS X packages that aren't in the app store - sure lots of solutions exist but none are without their occasional problems. While package management is a solved problem (well, on all platforms outside of Windows that is), that doesn't mean that occasional issues will not…

Add to that that you can work while the update is being downloaded and applied; and in the very few occasions where reboot is absolutely inevitable (I have never had such a situation since many years; even the new kernel can wait until I'm done with my things and ready to reboot to bring it online), it's just a reboot, nothing more. With Windows 10, it just blocks you with a screen that has a message telling "I'm doing my things now" and a progress report. Your work is inevitably interrupted.

For example, I sometimes play some games on my brother's Win 10 PC (I don't use Windows on my laptop, and don't want to bother with setting up Wine and the games on it). A couple days ago it wanted to update, and I told it to postpone. Then I left for 15 minutes and came back, there was an update going on. It blocked us out of the computer for the entire afternoon and most of the evening doing black magic behind a soft blue screen.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My desktop has been in perpetual update hell for months. Every reboot update hangs immediately on the restart. I have to hard shutdown and then restart. It boots normally, complains the update failed, and re-downloads the giant update files again in the background. Then lets me put it off another 4 days. Thanks MS!

We are so happy, you experienced our fantastic continously integrated customer epxerience that we release carefully untested to our selected users. To be honest, that windows could degrade that much, without the people running en mass to chrombooks or linux, shows just how far these are away from what people expect from a desktop experience. They dont want to relearn gui concepts, they do not want to miss theire prog…

That's my feeling. If you can't even win over users from a system who's vendor seems to be intentionally trying to kill it off, your system must be really awful.

Not that evangelists will see it that way. Their way of doing things is right, everyone else's is wrong and stupid.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#175
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As a happy XMonad user I can certainly appreciate that it's not for everyone ;)

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#176
post #36
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 ;)

Yep. If you want the "Linux experience" these days you have to move to BSD.

I LOVE *BSDs, but this statement is just false. The linux sphere is full of very nice experiences. Projects like Void and Alpine are out there, and then there are the gems like NixOS and GuixSD.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#178
post #171
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a brand new i5 laptop with 12GB RAM and the stupid application list opening animation looks like it runs at 10FPS.

I see lots of comments like this. What I want to know is: if you have this kind of complaint about Gnome, why do you keep using it? There's a bunch of different desktop environments for Linux. KDE works pretty well, and if that doesn't suit you, I've been finding Xfce is quite speedy for me on my work machine. This isn't like Windows where you're stuck with it if you need that OS for its applications.

I like KDE, but I like Ubuntu more. I've tried Kubuntu, but it's too unstable to be my daily desktop. Gnome is too limiting, but at least it is stable enough.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#179
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how different people can have completely opposite experience. I've modified my Microsoft keyboard that zoom slider works as Spotify control buttons play/stop/next. I doubt I would be able to achieve something like this in macOS or Windows. It works all the time, super reliably. https://gist.github.com/mauron85/5f4b640aa4e5e968e0496ac5a08...

You can probably use Autohotkey to achieve the same thing on Windows. It's a great tool to be aware of should you ever have to use Windows for any reason – you can also use it to push windows to virtual desktops and others, approaching a more Linux-y experience. Someone even wrote a tiling WM in AHK: https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n

AHK is the kind of thing that should have been built into desktop environments since '95. Why go through the trouble of adding all these workflow features that may or may not align with what actually makes the user's workflow better when you could add a scripting environment that allows the user to do that for themselves and a few pre-configured defaults.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#180

Hmm, author doesn't seem to know about dconf-editor to explore available settings. That reminds me of why I despise much of what gnome3 has produced however. Instead of improving the applets and file manager and adding to their anemic feature set, they are constantly fucking around with the title bars and removing menus and things. For the same reason I hated 'skinz' in the 90's I dislike that every app is now a cust…

As someone who heavily uses the super key in Emacs, I disagree with you.

It's getting pretty difficult to turn off that feature (is it even possible in recent versions of Gnome?).

Also, the Super-o shortcut to lock screen rotation (on a compute, really?) is hardcoded in the window manager and can't be disabled at all. That's really great when you have APL symbols mapped to it.

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