Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 172 posts

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#161

Post by rektide »

notriddle wrote: post #119
mrj wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's like saying if only Firefox had gotten rid of extensions so the UX was unified they could have taken over IE.

There is only one extension that ever really mattered: Firebug. A lot of developers wound up using Firefox to develop web apps even when the web app was intended to be used in IE. That's important because it broke the vicious cycle where nobody used Firefox because nobody developed for Firefox and nobody developed for Firefox because nobody used it. You might use other extensions, as do I, but this is such a deal-bre…

There used to be an idea of "follow the alpha geeks", that while mass market adoption was a goal, a huge amount ofake or break came down to what the very good, very involved users were up to.

The relevance of extensions has somewhat faded, aside from ad blocking, byt back the day extensions were imo quite important for many, made the web a popular & more lively place. I'd have a number of extensuons telling me other related sites people were enjoying. I could annotate the page, chat about the page. I could easily save the page into my various bookmark services. Extensions made the web social, & helped it interconnect. Extensions interwove the web & drove cool at a critical time of adoption.

Whatever the state today, to ignore the historical relevance of how important extensions were for generating an active, enthusiastic user base, for differentiating: these are not to be ignored or casually cynically written off.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#162

Post by rektide »

There's a radio station around (one of the 93.9 the rivers):

> Without deviation from the norm, progress is impossible.

Dont get me wrong; Im glad there are enclaves of stability. GNOME changes paradigm every couple decades, kde less so, & they target the kind of easily knowable fixed world this article espouses. They wrap so much. OSDh->alsa->pulseaudio->pipewire, and plenty of users never notice. X->Wayland, same. Great. Most of the churn & chaos isnt visible.

It's wild to me the suggestion that open source should be so focused on winning that it adopts conservative software ideologies. The idea of a static, fixed world, where we normalize all our experiences, for... what... end user convenience, is against the Hacker spirit. Is an anethema.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#163

Post by robonerd »

hajimuz wrote: post #3

the hope is ChromeOS…

If that's what you want, then use it. There's nothing stopping you. Other people choosing to use something different should be no skin off your back, unless what you really want is some sort of suicide-pact.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#164

Post by sushisource »

usrn wrote: post #137
sushisource wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm aware it's in the kernel, but it's only useful for PCs. So effectively it's a "desktop" problem in terms of people deciding to dedicate resources to it. And... hence why it breaks all the damn time.

I can't understand what on earth your comment is supposed to mean. Are you saying most people working on the kernel don't expect it to run on PCs? And so there are no resources dedicated to the suspend states? Also of all the different suspend states suspend to disk definitely breaks the least. Most importantly I really can't understand why you think any of this has to do with desktop environments.

Well it's not _that_ confusing of a comment...

My point is suspend states aren't important to big commercial users who are running linux servers. They have no reason to contribute to making it work well. Hence, it likely doesn't get much attention compared to many other parts of the kernel.

It doesn't have to do with "Desktop environments", but it very much is part of the "linux desktop" experience.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#165

Post by _2paq »

samtheDamned wrote: post #156
_2paq wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just that the defaults should be stronger Agreed. > GNOME has made great advancements in this regard, which has been awesome to see. I wasn't joking or being hyperbolic in my previous post. GNOME may have good defaults in certain cases but it ends there. User choice and customization are seen as design defects and anti-features. They really do believe that there is a One True Font and One True Theme out there and a…

Some people don't want to configure everything about their desktop. Most people don't. They just want something that looks nice and feels good to use. Apple's ecosystem is expensive and locked in while gnome/linux is open and works with as much hardware and software as possible, on top of that it's free. Also the software experience is different too, while on Mac software that involves any personalization or enhances…

> Some people don't want to configure everything about their desktop. Most people don't. They just want something that looks nice and feels good to use.

And that would be completely fine were it not for parent posts which imply that GNOME should be the default and the only experience on the Linux desktop and everything else is irrelevant fragmentation. I respect users choice to use GNOME but I don't appreciate when people call everything else besides GNOME (or anything really) as fragmentation.

For example, here's one of the parent posts

> There is no reason there can’t be one agreed upon blessed way of doing things in Linux while still enabling users like you to have choice.

This is pretty oxymoronic.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#166

Post by _2paq »

thereisnospork wrote: post #118
vladvasiliu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really an issue? You want to use Gnome? Use Gnome. You want to use KDE? Use KDE. I3? ditto. Etc. Oh, some random GTK app will look weird on KDE? Tough. Every Windows app looks different, and even MS's apps always felt out of place on their own OS. And with the proliferation of Electron apps, nothing ever looks "native" anymore. > while I don't know if anything that has been built 2 Ubuntu LTS releases ago sti…

>You want to use Gnome? Use Gnome. You want to use KDE? Use KDE. I3? ditto. Etc. To play devil's advocate: What do those even mean and why should I care? I want to view my files and folders and click a shortcut to run a program and install steam. And I want that process to be stable and smooth and be both logically transparent and consistent. There's too much I have to critically compare and understand in my life to…

> What do those even mean and why should I care?

If you don't like configuration, you shouldn't care. Just pick any popular distro and use whatever's shipped by default.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#167

Post by notriddle »

rektide wrote: post #161
notriddle wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is only one extension that ever really mattered: Firebug. A lot of developers wound up using Firefox to develop web apps even when the web app was intended to be used in IE. That's important because it broke the vicious cycle where nobody used Firefox because nobody developed for Firefox and nobody developed for Firefox because nobody used it. You might use other extensions, as do I, but this is such a deal-bre…

There used to be an idea of "follow the alpha geeks", that while mass market adoption was a goal, a huge amount ofake or break came down to what the very good, very involved users were up to. The relevance of extensions has somewhat faded, aside from ad blocking, byt back the day extensions were imo quite important for many, made the web a popular & more lively place. I'd have a number of extensuons telling me other…

The question isn't really whether people use extensions. Obviously they use and enjoy them when they're there.

The question I'm asking is how Firefox manage to take 25% of Microsoft's market share, but Ubuntu didn't? Ubuntu has always been much more customizable than Windows, just like Firefox was much more customizable than IE. LibreOffice allows you to continue using the "classic" UI, just like how everyone on HN complains that Microsoft's Ribbon was a mistake, yet somehow LibreOffice remains at a partly 200 million to Microsoft Office's 1.2 billion. Why were customizable libpurple IM clients never as popular as the official ones?

This is why I think Firebug breaking the compatibility/market-share death spiral and inducing developers to make their webapps work in Firefox irrespective of Firefox's market share is so important. It's the biggest factor I know of that's actually different between Firefox's situation and the situation with so many other FOSS products.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#168

Post by Klonoar »

_2paq wrote: post #165
samtheDamned wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people don't want to configure everything about their desktop. Most people don't. They just want something that looks nice and feels good to use. Apple's ecosystem is expensive and locked in while gnome/linux is open and works with as much hardware and software as possible, on top of that it's free. Also the software experience is different too, while on Mac software that involves any personalization or enhances…

> Some people don't want to configure everything about their desktop. Most people don't. They just want something that looks nice and feels good to use. And that would be completely fine were it not for parent posts which imply that GNOME should be the default and the only experience on the Linux desktop and everything else is irrelevant fragmentation. I respect users choice to use GNOME but I don't appreciate when p…

>And that would be completely fine were it not for parent posts which imply that GNOME should be the default and the only experience on the Linux desktop and everything else is irrelevant fragmentation.

To be ultra clear here: I'm not saying it has to be GNOME. I legitimately only said GNOME to toss you a bone when you responded with a needlessly sarcastic comment. ;P

It could be any DE, even a newly created one.

No part of your posts feels productive, and to be honest they feel like emotional backlash.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#169

Post by _2paq »

Klonoar wrote: post #168
_2paq wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people don't want to configure everything about their desktop. Most people don't. They just want something that looks nice and feels good to use. And that would be completely fine were it not for parent posts which imply that GNOME should be the default and the only experience on the Linux desktop and everything else is irrelevant fragmentation. I respect users choice to use GNOME but I don't appreciate when p…

>And that would be completely fine were it not for parent posts which imply that GNOME should be the default and the only experience on the Linux desktop and everything else is irrelevant fragmentation. To be ultra clear here: I'm not saying it has to be GNOME. I legitimately only said GNOME to toss you a bone when you responded with a needlessly sarcastic comment. ;P It could be any DE, even a newly created one. No…

> It could be any DE, even a newly created one.

Like I said earlier,

> but I don't appreciate when people call everything else besides GNOME (or *anything really*) as fragmentation.

The idea of "one agreed upon blessed way of doing things" implies that a DE can be made to work for everyone, which is a false assumption. Just because Windows and Mac follow this philosophy, doesn't mean that it's right. Diversity and independence of thought isn't irrelevant fragmentation.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#170

Post by shrimp_emoji »

demux wrote: post #29
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #27

KDE is the most fully featured Linux DE, and it's leaps and bounds above Windows's (WAY better file manager, better launcher, more features, and even less bugs somehow). The other day, my Windows 10's explorer.exe crashed when the file manager tried to load a directory, which is something that used to happen in Vista and hasn't happened in KDE for years IME.

Also shout out to KDE connect!

My favorite feature is KRunner -- a tiny on-screen program launcher, calculator, and dictionary (and more) all in one! :D
Post reply on HN