The Joy of Linux Desktop Environments

I feel the same way; although I've spent some time with both Gnome and KDE, I never developed an attachment to either of them, mostly because I felt that there was a good likelihood that mastering the Gnome of today might be a pointless exercise because if you sat me down in front of the Gnome of one year from now, it'd be unrecognizable to me.

Around the advent of Gnome 3/KDE 4 I also realized that I didn't really use any of the Gnome or KDE apps. If I want to burn a cd, I know wodim well. If I want to listen to music, I probably use my phone. The browser is the only desktop app that I use regularly, and that's fairly agnostic.

I've spent years tweaking rxvt Xresources, for example, such that I can drop it on a brand new machine and everything behaves as I expect. I'm well past the point in my career where I'd be looking for, say, a better terminal emulator, or shell, or chat app or any of that stuff; the stuff I've got is working as well as I could hope, and when I need something new I can compose it from the abilities that the shell and the window manager expose.

The last big change I made was after I tried a tiling WM (Xmonad) for a couple of days and realized right away I'd never go back; that's been 7 or 8 years ago. Occasionally stuff changes underneath me in ways that seem somewhat capricious (Pulse Audio, Systemd) but I usually give that stuff a chance and try to adapt to it unless its absolutely unbearable.

I enjoy checking out the new stuff on machines I use at home for fun, but at work I treat the workstation as an instrument; I know what I want and almost everything has a reason.

Most importantly, a stable API which can be concurrently used by multiple processes.

Getting/setting single values in a plain text config file is cumbersome and error-prone, and even if there's a library which is able to read that particular format, it often clobbers comments and formatting. For systems administration, you usually solve this by generating the entire config file from a template since nothing on the server should change your config files anyway.

However, on the desktop, many different application want to read and write keys. Tray applets, the system config panel, even your media player... They would inevitably conflict and you'd have to implement file-based locking.

Another topic: real-time notifications. If you modify the text size in the Gnome Control Panel, what happens is that the panel modifies the value in dconf and dconf sends a notification to all running Gnome applications. You could implement this using inotify, but you'd need code in each of your applications to open the config file, parse it and figure out which setting actually changed.

Single dconf lookups are really fast since everything is zero-copy and doesn't involve any syscalls. This is much faster than opening, reading and parsing config files.

dconf doesn't aim to replace all plain text config files. Storing the i3 or SSH configuration in dconf would be stupid (or even using dconf on a server to begin with).

Unity tip: Use the windows key + number to start or switch between programs. Then when you've learned the keys you can hide the menu bar.

> Network Manager

What's wrong with Network Manager? Show me any other network manager which handles split DNS, WWAN modems and automatically connecting VPNs out of the box with zero configuration.

Works fine nowadays, Skylake + 4k MST screen.

I was an early adopter and it was a bumpy start for sure, but you expect that. Just wait half a year or so after a new processor generation and it'll be fine. Zero issues on my Haswell laptop for the past years.

Intel has full-time people working on the Linux graphics stack. I've contributed bug reports and stack traces and they have been super friendly and responsive.