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Lobotomizing Gnome

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Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#111

Post by peatmoss »

phkahler wrote: post #109

Some of the issues stem from a tendency of Gnome to want to "manage" your stuff for you. Evolution sticking its fingers into other things, something indexing files, apps wanting to manage your photos. I've had trouble with my music collection. You'd think it's possible to copy some folders with .mp3 files into your home directory and point the music app at it. But no, files have to be imported or some crap and I actu…

BeOS. The BeOS filesystem had some nifty metadata features and the company was keen to show those off. Plus, I suspect they had to get creative to seed the OS with apps back in the day.

As a result, many apps ended up feeling like a pretty thin veneer around a file explorer. My memory is a little foggy, but the music player and the email app come to mind.

The opposite model was the iTunes model: a monolithic app that reproduced a bunch of functionality of the file system, but ultimately nerfed the power.

I’m otherwise not too crazy nostalgic about BeOS (NeXT was the better OS in many ways). But man, some things were really great with that system.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#112

Post by simonh »

8bitsrule wrote: post #41
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,…

It's pretty different from the Redhat in the bookstore days. I tried MINT 5 years ago, and never looked back. While the top-rated distros might not be simple enough for grandma to -install-, after that it's cakewalk. (unless she's picked up bad habits using previous OS's). Forced upgrades ... man that's WAY far into the Dominator zone.

No forced upgrades is good, but e.g. from the requirements in the howto on upgrading Mint 17 to 18:

* Good understanding of APT and vast experience in working from the command-line.

Have fun Grandma!

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#113

Post by hawski »

I expected to see custom compiled version with some code removed. Because lobotomizing sounds far more drastic than a pat on the hand.

Now that I'm thinking about this it would be something. Maybe profile it to see unused code after described configuration change. Then remove it and use Profile Guided Optimization to go further.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#114

Post by StavrosK »

Brometheus wrote: post #9
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…

I tried to switch to Linux for philosophical and customization reasons. Found it nearly impossible to configure stuff reliably and such it wont crash in new interesting ways. For example: Create a new keyboard layout and have it appear in KDE keyboard settings. Good luck. Input Manager for macOS: done.

> Input Manager for macOS: done.

Funny you should say that, it literally just took me hours to create a new kb layout (my keyboard has a broken P key that I wanted to substitute). It was a mess of error messages and "keyboard already existing" problems. Ugh.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#115

Post by FrozenVoid »

This mentality "lets add a daemon to run in background 24/7" to provide some service thats sits mostly unused is unacceptable. Its not only gnome developers, its widespread in open-source. The competitive edge of Linux is reduced quite a bit when there is enough bloatware running around by default.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#116

Post by sverige »

> I have pretty basic needs from my desktop. I do 99% of my work using just three programs: a terminal emulator, Emacs, and Firefox. I don’t want a lot of bells and whistles in my desktop, and I really just want it to get out of the way so I can do my work.

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that TFA starts with this, then spends a couple of paragraphs talking about how modern Gnome is, then spends a few pages presenting what looks a lot like a chapter from an old "Removing Windows XP Annoyances" book?

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#118

Post by asfdsfggtfd »

tumdum_ wrote: post #64
csdreamer7 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you elaborate? I have never had that problem with Ubuntu based distros.

I wish I had that experience. For me update to ubuntu 17.10 broke many things - the most annoying was migration to wayland which brought with it crashes when using multiple monitors via docking station. Arch seems to have the same problems, and in addition few days ago I discovered that my wifi stopped working (that laptop was docked and was using wired connection for last few weeks but had wifi working before). The…

> For me update to ubuntu 17.10 broke many things

> The worst part is those are the machines I use for work ;(

Why are you using experimental OSs on work machines? The LTS versions exist for a reason.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#120

Post by ahartmetz »

pjmlp wrote: post #71
chriswarbo wrote: post #51

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…

Not true for KDE. We (the developers) like the UI/UX people. The main criticism from users seems to be that KDE UI isn't polished enough, which is not exactly sending away those who want to improve it.
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