171–180 of 215 posts
Back in the day, I used to distro hop, window manager hop and try to find the ever eluding "perfect" setup. This lasted maybe 15 years. There was a sense of vanity in trying to be different yet spectacular. Today I would tell my younger self that use what makes you productive. Even if it is the standard Windows or Mac OS environments. R/unixporn is the nerds equivalent of shirtless beach dudes.
This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…
This is why I picked Fedora GNOME and stopped worrying. It gives me the confidence that it won't break and that I can focus on other things instead of having to tweak the system or environment for me to work. I adapted to GNOME defaults (I don't even use dash-to-dock) and it feels great, it doesn't get in the way when doing stuff. Distro hopping and trying a lot of (minimalistic) tools are fine to learn a thing or tw…
Where do you get the confidence from? Because GNOME frequently broke workflows in the past. They removed status and desktop icons, the window titles in the overview vanished, Evince lost some feature with its latest redesign (which I can't remember right now what it was exactly), Nautilus lost its two pane mode, compact view and type-ahead search, which was replaced with a slower full-blown recursive search, ...
These kind of disturbances caused me to move to a much more personally tailored desktop and I can't remember it breaking once in like 5 years and certainly not to the extend the GNOME desktop breaks in almost every release.
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> R/unixporn is the nerds equivalent of shirtless beach dudes. Wait, what kind of savage goes to the beach in a shirt?
For some of us it's just a public service. If I go to the beach on a sunny day and take my shirt off the glare from my belly could blind people. In low-flying planes. Disrupt migratory patterns of seafowl. Interfere with satellites, etc...
:)
/me giggles
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What's some of the latest and greatest UX research someone might miss out on when they don't use some of the modern desktop systems? I mean I'm not against new and better ways to interact with a computer, I just like to decide on my own if I want to use the new and shiny thing or not. Fuzzy searching is probably the most significant improvement I opted in in the last couple of years, and it's used basically everywher…
I can think of two major, useful new features in desktop GUIs in the last, oh, 20 years? More? And both existed before they went mainstream anyway, I think. Both are basically just search: launching programs by search (replaced program-launch menus all but completely for me) and deep search in deeply-nested menus, guiding you to the item at the current level that contains what you need (as in the macOS settings menu—…
Another related feature that I wish some Linux gui framework would adopt is the concept of global keybindings. Every menu in every app in macOS displays by default the shortcut key next to it - if one exists.
These are the kinds of features that are easy to overlook but contribute hugely to the "cohesive" feeling that macOS advocates so often seem to have trouble describing to Linux desktop users.
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Start with the name. That puts it in opposition immediately. They present a lot of that opposition to projects and people, rarely stated kindly. They could express a positive enthusiasm for simplicity, but that's not the way they go about it.
Accusations of "elitism" being what they may, the name is in fact a slice of humility: they advertise that their software "sucks less", not that it is "without suck".
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The way dwm works, you have a main window and you have a stack. It is normal to have windows you are not using in the stack. The small window is indeed not very useful, but it is still more than the icon used in other places.
Windows has a stack too. Most recently used on top. Older windows are either partially or completely covered, but they always have an icon accessible. Would I dedicate a section of my screen to windows down the stack? No, I don't think I would. I guess I just don't get the zen of dwm.
With windows, once I have a large number of windows, working in several things at the same time, I'm really afraid of losing that setup (for example, leaving my laptop unattended for a while and see that the system had the great idea of rebooting while I was gone). With dwm, I had the layout I wanted with much less effort. It adapts to what I'm doing. It's very fluid.
None is perfect, both have pros and cons. And I understand some people don't like some of the design decisions in dwm like editing source to configure and so on, but dynamic window management is a powerful concept.
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> I actually use a stripped-down hacked-up dwm that I did on a Sunday years ago Aha, so in some sense the software was still not totally suckless to you.
As per their own definition, "suckless" != "does not suck", but rather "software that sucks less".
The author primarily uses an iPad Pro, a dedicated remote server, and most work done with ssh, tmux, and Emacs. That is a simplified work environment!
I'm getting ready to move toward something like that, but with VMs for each sort of work or task I'm doing. My reasons: 1) I'm leaving Mac hardware for "pro"-tier computing because their gear's swung way back into ZOMGWTF overpriced territory, especially if you want higher-than-basic-but-still-not-actually-that-much core counts, memory, or disk, while also getting worse in some ways (mostly the MBP line), and not kee…
This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…
Then at one day I decided to _really_ put a lot of effort on improving and highly customize my workflow.
It took a while to get used to being the fastest around my colleagues. I'll never look back.
We are professionals. The defaults, believe me, are not for us.
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I'm getting ready to move toward something like that, but with VMs for each sort of work or task I'm doing. My reasons: 1) I'm leaving Mac hardware for "pro"-tier computing because their gear's swung way back into ZOMGWTF overpriced territory, especially if you want higher-than-basic-but-still-not-actually-that-much core counts, memory, or disk, while also getting worse in some ways (mostly the MBP line), and not kee…
Using mosh instead of ssh, and tmux named sessions I get something like your different sessions.