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Lubuntu is taking a new direction

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Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#201

Post by woolvalley »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #60
woolvalley wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a ~33% decrease in power usage. So a i7-8700 which also has a similar score now has 65W TDP vs a 95W TDP. Since moores law is leveling off, programming skill & quality will become more important to extract more performance out of computers. I forsee less javascript and python and more golang, java & rust and other %100 statically typed languages in the future.

A language's documentation, ease of use, and community are all far more important than CPU performance. Point me to one java project on Github with >1000 stars and I'll give you a hundred Python and JS projects.

Swift, Kotlin, Rust, Objective-C, C++ and Java have huge communities and code behind them too :)

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#202

Post by Klover »

axaxs wrote: post #196
michaelmrose wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its mean but its like they had one job... If it doesn't work start over and make it work.

I don't take offense to it personally as I no longer work on the project, but...did you bother to open bug reports and share logs...or do you just throw a fit on public forums? I still run the geo server used in installation, and can assure you the vast majority (>99%) of folks do not have installation troubles. If they do, they aren't reporting it. Comments like these, which are common, are what pushed me away from…

It's understandable if you still take it somewhat personally. You worked on it, just like an author who wrote an article in a magazine once would still likely care about that.

In my case (not the person you replied to) the Antergos website and IRC (sorry, I know reporting on IRC is not as useful as a proper bug report) people gave me the impression it was all good and it worked for everyone. I spent 2 hours hacking the installer to try to make it work, until eventually giving up and using the Arch iso to install in 10 minutes.

The entitled behaviour one might see is therefore sometimes not just entitlement, but could also be frustration from "feeling misled". We all know it's free, and I'm grateful for that, but I'm not grateful for feeling promised something to work and then spending 2 hours too much on that promise.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#203

Post by iforgotpassword »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #153
asadjb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never used Lubuntu other than trying it out a few times, so this is just going off of the content in the article. > This phrasing is a PR blunder in my opinion because the old focus is a lot clearer than the new focus To me, it seems that they ran the numbers (kudos to them for taking an empirical approach) and figured out that their original USP was now no longer unique enough, and they need to do something d…

That's Linux Desktop distributions in a nutshell though isn't it? None of them are really different enough from Ubuntu to be noteworthy. Personally, I think the fact that so many minor-variant distros exist is all the evidence you need that Linux is a terrible platform for customization, because if it were simple to customize everyone would just use Ubuntu and make their own changes, but instead you get all these dis…

Apart from a few philosophical design decisions (e.g. packet manager, update cycles) the main point of distros is how they are preconfigured, which default tools are installed for what job, etc. Sure I can just deinstall a couple dozen apps and then reinstall new ones doing the same job, but why should I do that when another distro directly ships what I want?

Same about being up to date. always want bleeding edge stuff that might be unstable at times, or change its GUI ever so slightly all the time? Go for arch Linux. Don't mind running a somewhat older version of most tools for some time but have it more stable? Pick Debian. Etc ..

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#204

Post by sireat »

I am a bit shocked because until now Lubuntu was awesome at serving the older devices.

Lubuntu was working great on one of the first netbooks from 2007 where other distributions out of the box were not.

If people want modular or super configurable then Arch Linux has that use case pretty well covered does it not?

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#205

Post by badsectoracula »

copperx wrote: post #117
peatmoss wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I felt like there was just too much of a mismatch with the rest of the FOSS GUI ecosystem. Definitely. It probably has the largest mismatch outside of exotic options like, I don’t know, a Smalltalk image. I think that’s why the Free *nix desktop struggles to this day. We never built the core infrastructure that allowed useful inter-application messaging. We never built the application frameworks to enable a really…

I remember that I was a kid when I read the news on Slashdot that the Linux desktop experience was going to be basically a competition between Gnome and KDE. At that moment I knew that Linux would never win on the desktop. All those wasted developer hours. I am still heartbroken to the day. In capitalism, competition benefits the user, even if the products are virtually identical, because then they compete on price.…

The thing is, however, that GNOME and KDE are not indistinguishable - they each have very different goals, ideas on how the desktop should be, how to design applications and UI, what sort of technologies to use and develop, etc and all these end up making two very different desktop environments. As a result, they (and other DEs and WMs, of course) cater to different users and while there are some users that can use both (and all, or at least most of the other DEs/WMs) this sort of "competition" helps the users who align more with what each DE (and WM) provides. In other words, they provide options.

There are people who prefer GNOME over KDE, would you force those people to use KDE? There are people who prefer KDE over GNOME, would you force those people to use GNOME? There are people who prefer Window Maker over any desktop environment, would you force them to use KDE or GNOME? There are people who prefer i3 over any DE or WM that uses an overlapping window UI paradigm, would you force them to use KDE or GNOME or Window Maker?

If you did so, you'd be making their experience with their computers worse - you'd be acting against their choices. If people didn't value having options, they'd flock to a single desktop environment (or WM) and the rest would be a mere curiosity at most. But this doesn't happen.

And of course what Slashdot predicted didn't happen either: in addition to GNOME and KDE we also have MATE, XFCE, Budgie, Pantheon, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, LXDE/LXQt and a TON of standalone window managers to choose from - we even got the rising popularity of tiled window managers, which was certainly not a thing back when KDE and GNOME were new.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#206

Post by badsectoracula »

peatmoss wrote: post #46

As an exercise, I threw OpenBSD and GNUStep on a machine the other day. I wouldn’t say GNUStep provides the best Free/Open desktop, but I want to believe that it could. The thing is, many of the modern Linux desktops seem to be heavily wedded to a lot of dconf and systemd infrastructure. OpenBSD has managed to build analogs for enough of the heavily Linux-centric infrastructure that Gnome 3 depends on, but man it’s c…

There is this guy making a DE he calls NEXTSPACE[1] by combining Window Maker, GNUstep and a bunch of custom applications and modifications to existing stuff for them to work better together. I haven't tried it, but i've seen it be mentioned a few times the last couple of years.

[1] https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#207

Post by badsectoracula »

vanderZwan wrote: post #102
manaskarekar wrote: post #31

I don't want to come across as ungrateful but I'm not very happy about this. I haven't looked into the reasons for this change but I'm sure there are some compelling ones to make such a big change. LXDE based Lubuntu struck the perfect balance (for me) between: - Being minimal and lightweight - but works out of the box with enough batteries included - tons of community resources due to being a ~buntu - very, very cus…

> Maybe LXQt will be great, may be not, but at this point it reminds me of Ubuntu 10.10 which, IMHO, was as refined as Ubuntu (or any linux distro at the time) could be, and then they just decided to throw all that maturity and refinement away and start from scratch. I don't know if you know this, but LXDE is GTK2 based, so the decision to "throw all that maturity away" isn't quite the same here. Ubuntu bet on conver…

I hoped for a very VERY long time that someone would fork Gtk2 - mainly looking towards the MATE devs. Sadly it never happened, Gtk2 had a ton of warts, but it also was for the longest time the most stable toolkit API, the closest to Windows' win32 in terms of stability and something you could target and expect it to be there in basically any desktop environment :-(

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#208

Post by michaelmrose »

axaxs wrote: post #196
michaelmrose wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its mean but its like they had one job... If it doesn't work start over and make it work.

I don't take offense to it personally as I no longer work on the project, but...did you bother to open bug reports and share logs...or do you just throw a fit on public forums? I still run the geo server used in installation, and can assure you the vast majority (>99%) of folks do not have installation troubles. If they do, they aren't reporting it. Comments like these, which are common, are what pushed me away from…

I believe you brought up antergos. The exact statement was.

"I worked with the Antergos team, a team of 4 people, to write a distro that let you pick and choose everything, from DE to browsers. While I've mainly faded away they are still hard at it. In short, if we can support nearly every DE with 4 volunteers, what are these *buntus spending their resources on?"

You compared flavors of Ubuntu unfavorably with flavors of antergos and it's neither throwing a fit nor entitled to point out that their resources presumably are spent on making things that work.

Regarding antergos, I consulted their bug tracker my issue had been reported already and wasn't fixed within the month I was interested in the matter and it was impossible to use the older version without the bug because once online it helpfully updated itself to the broken version. Further as far as I could tell the bug was generic enough that it would have effected most users. It simply crashed most of the way through a generic Ext4 install to bog standard desktop hardware.

People throw around entitled as if giving away something for free exempts your work from all critism. Sure you owe me nothing but if your work over promises and under delivers I'm apt to say something so others don't waste their time.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#209

Post by peatmoss »

badsectoracula wrote: post #206
peatmoss wrote: post #46

As an exercise, I threw OpenBSD and GNUStep on a machine the other day. I wouldn’t say GNUStep provides the best Free/Open desktop, but I want to believe that it could. The thing is, many of the modern Linux desktops seem to be heavily wedded to a lot of dconf and systemd infrastructure. OpenBSD has managed to build analogs for enough of the heavily Linux-centric infrastructure that Gnome 3 depends on, but man it’s c…

There is this guy making a DE he calls NEXTSPACE[1] by combining Window Maker, GNUstep and a bunch of custom applications and modifications to existing stuff for them to work better together. I haven't tried it, but i've seen it be mentioned a few times the last couple of years. [1] https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

Looks like there are active commits too! Thanks for the link; I’d not seen this before.

It looks like he’s done some custom work to the Preferences app. Impressive!

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#210

Post by tssva »

roblabla wrote: post #162
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Linux Desktop distributions in a nutshell though isn't it? None of them are really different enough from Ubuntu to be noteworthy. Personally, I think the fact that so many minor-variant distros exist is all the evidence you need that Linux is a terrible platform for customization, because if it were simple to customize everyone would just use Ubuntu and make their own changes, but instead you get all these dis…

It's proof that Ubuntu is a terrible platform for customization. Most other distros don't have that split - whether it is ArchLinux, Fedora, CentOS, NixOS, and what have you.

Fedora has spins which are distributions of Fedora with differing desktop environments. The Fedora Spins website currently lists spins for 7 alternative desktop environments.
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