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Life is too short to depend on unstable software

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Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#161

Post by smoldesu »

md8z wrote: post #160
doubleunplussed wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still see GNOME as the most practical DE to run - but it's telling that absolutely nobody uses it as shipped: at minimum they install dash to dock or dash to panel, re-enable minimise buttons, and install a system tray extension. The project seems to usually come around in the end, and it reminds me of some quote critical of the US's foreign policy I think, that "You can always count on the Americans to do the righ…

"I've also infuriatingly gotten a 'patches welcome' response before, and then simply faced the 'that's not in our vision' response upon providing a patch." That has been my experience on quite a few FOSS projects. I had to learn that the hard way (on other projects, not GNOME). Some are more conservative than others, some may delay making a decision until after they get a patch, etc. Ultimately, since it's your time,…

I doubt stability was their intentions. They completely destroyed 3.38 compatibility, and all the poor bastards like me who decided to update their distro got a completely broken desktop. And I mean completely broken, too: my wallpaper was gone, every single extension broke, apps would no longer appear system-native when I defined a stylesheet and GNOME apps themselves looked inconsistent and glued-together.

I really recommend reading Tobias Bernard and other GNOME representative's blogs. Not because they're insightful, but because the self-righteousness that they use to talk about fairly personal and benign things completely clouds their view of the community. People complain about inconsistent apps: his solution is to destroy the theming ecosystem instead of fixing the shit that's wrong in Adwaita. People complain about broken extentions: his solution is to tell people that extentions are dumb, and you shouldn't be using them anyways. People complain about a toxic working environment: his response is to draft an even more exclusive CoC with vaguer rules and no precedent for enforcement. There are so many of these little anecdotes that it blows my mind they even have a desktop left at this point.

Like you say, it's free software so I can't complain too much. Nevertheless, it's wild to see how a perfectly functional desktop has lost the majority of it's beloved features with nothing more than a few philosophy adjustments.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#162

Post by Mikeb85 »

torginus wrote: post #157
Mikeb85 wrote: post #74

Honestly, I've had better luck on the bleeding edge. Newer Linux kernels almost always are better (and when they're not, it gets fixed quickly). Wayland is definitely better than X. Newer Gnome is better than old Gnome. Ruby 3 and 3.1 is definitely better than 2.7. Rails 7 is way better than 6, even in alpha state. Deno is nicer than Node (although the ecosystem needs to catch up). Hell, V8 and then Node led to a boo…

Tbh, this dichotomy is kind of Linux's fault. Consider the issues Linux of today is facing, or were just were recently resolved. With no attempt at being exhaustive (as I'm not a huge Linux user nowadays): - Wayland is just becoming production ready, imo, it's still years away from being trouble-free - Gnome is still a resource hog, Gtk is not in a good place, KDE is still prone to crashes - Installing software/Depen…

> Wayland is just becoming production ready, imo, it's still years away from being trouble-free

Literally have had zero problems with Wayland.

> Gnome is still a resource hog, Gtk is not in a good place, KDE is still prone to crashes

Resource hog? Chrome with a single tab open is roughly equivalent in resources taken to everything Gnome related on my laptop. Steam takes almost as much memory just idling (window is closed). Gnome shell (the most resource intensive Gnome thing) itself is just 134 MB which is nothing when an entry level laptop has 8 gigs of memory.

I have a pretty basic laptop (Acer Swift 3 with Ryzen 2700u). Only 8 gigs of memory. Fedora with Gnome, with Chrome open, Steam running in the background, some other random stuff, still only takes like 30% of that memory.

Compare that to my old work laptop where random Windows crap consumed so much memory I'd have to restart just to be able to open up MS Teams SMH... (I don't work there anymore thank god)

As for KDE, I personally don't like KDE so no idea if it crashes or not. And what do you think is wrong with GTK?

> Installing software/Dependency management is still a headache - the distro agnostic package management solutions (Snap/Flatpak/AppImage) are ironically anything but - apt and it's ilk have known issues as well - the final solution in this domain is still unclear

Versus Windows or Mac where you have a store but everyone just ships random EXEs or whatever? All that matters to the user is that there's a distro-packaged app for nearly everything and Chrome provides .deb and .rpm packages for all major distros. It seems like a mess to developers but it's actually not that big a problem and still better than Windows or Mac where you have the store but most software is random installers you download from the internet.

Take Fedora for example. If you're a normal, non-dev user, you can download a Chrome .rpm. Install it by double clicking and following prompts. Almost every other piece of software is in the app called 'Software'. Hell, Steam is there.

> Imo it was proven that PulseAudio won't work - it's replacement, PipeWire is still just becoming mainstream

PulseAudio works fine but for some reason some Linux 'users' mess around and break it. It's literally always worked perfectly for me.

If you use a sane distro (Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu) and don't fuck around Linux works great.

On Fedora 35, everything you mentioned works. All my function keys work. Fingerprint sensor works. Suspend/Resume works. My USB-C headphones work and switching sound output is automatic. There's nothing that doesn't work perfectly. Gnome is light and snappy (as I said, roughly equivalent to Chrome with 1 tab, this page, open). Every piece of consumer software I installed, I did so through the GUI. The only time I touch the terminal is for dev shit.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#163

Post by intrasight »

mattarm wrote: post #107
intrasight wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have the Mac. It's now over 35 years old! Remember that the computer only had 128K of memory. There were like three applications. MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw. MacDraw was the most crash-prone. What else might you like to know? I'll have to dust off some old neurons.

I had the same Mac. It crashed sometimes -- enough that "save often" was a habit, but I don't remember it being a productivity problem for me. My grade in English went up from B to A because I have always had trouble spelling and MacWrite had spell check. If the machine had a negative impact on my grades at all it was the distraction it caused by me learning Turbo Pascal on the thing. :-)

Okay, you're probably right that the grade impact was due as much from the distractions as the instability.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#164

Post by Mikeb85 »

torginus wrote: post #158
torginus wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh, this dichotomy is kind of Linux's fault. Consider the issues Linux of today is facing, or were just were recently resolved. With no attempt at being exhaustive (as I'm not a huge Linux user nowadays): - Wayland is just becoming production ready, imo, it's still years away from being trouble-free - Gnome is still a resource hog, Gtk is not in a good place, KDE is still prone to crashes - Installing software/Depen…

I wish someone would try to refute what I wrote instead of just downvoting it.

Why? The onus of proof is on the one making assertions. You seem to feel you're asserting something that's common knowledge, but it isn't, and the downvotes prove it. I responded to your comment anyway.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#165

Post by Mikeb85 »

lobocinza wrote: post #152
Mikeb85 wrote: post #74

Honestly, I've had better luck on the bleeding edge. Newer Linux kernels almost always are better (and when they're not, it gets fixed quickly). Wayland is definitely better than X. Newer Gnome is better than old Gnome. Ruby 3 and 3.1 is definitely better than 2.7. Rails 7 is way better than 6, even in alpha state. Deno is nicer than Node (although the ecosystem needs to catch up). Hell, V8 and then Node led to a boo…

While I agree with you I sincerely see no real advantage in Wayland over X. Steam does not work properly with Wayland, client side decorations are stupid and broke the decorations of Kitty and Alacritty (requiring me to workaround it).

> Steam does not work properly with Wayland

How so? I'm running Wayland and running Steam. Everything works perfectly.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#166

Post by Mikeb85 »

doubleunplussed wrote: post #142
smoldesu wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this mostly, but the new GNOME releases are almost universally a design regression IMO. Pretty much everything that they added was doable with extensions in 3.38 (most of which are now broken with GNOME 40), and the only substantial changes that I can discern is the shift to libadwaita and forcing people away from things like custom stylesheets and shell extentions, which were the only things that made G…

I still see GNOME as the most practical DE to run - but it's telling that absolutely nobody uses it as shipped: at minimum they install dash to dock or dash to panel, re-enable minimise buttons, and install a system tray extension. The project seems to usually come around in the end, and it reminds me of some quote critical of the US's foreign policy I think, that "You can always count on the Americans to do the righ…

> I still see GNOME as the most practical DE to run - but it's telling that absolutely nobody uses it as shipped: at minimum they install dash to dock or dash to panel, re-enable minimise buttons, and install a system tray extension.

And all those things can be done easily, intuitively, through a GUI. Kind of a testament to Gnome if you ask me. I don't mind the default behaviour though. Minimalist and nice.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#167

Post by md8z »

smoldesu wrote: post #161
md8z wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I've also infuriatingly gotten a 'patches welcome' response before, and then simply faced the 'that's not in our vision' response upon providing a patch." That has been my experience on quite a few FOSS projects. I had to learn that the hard way (on other projects, not GNOME). Some are more conservative than others, some may delay making a decision until after they get a patch, etc. Ultimately, since it's your time,…

I doubt stability was their intentions. They completely destroyed 3.38 compatibility, and all the poor bastards like me who decided to update their distro got a completely broken desktop. And I mean completely broken, too: my wallpaper was gone, every single extension broke, apps would no longer appear system-native when I defined a stylesheet and GNOME apps themselves looked inconsistent and glued-together. I really…

Sorry that was your experience but you should probably know, stylesheets and extensions have never actually been considered stable. I don't know what distribution you were using but if you were using those things, it would probably make sense to wait until they're fully tested before upgrading. If all the extensions/stylesheets you're using are complex then it seems it would take a lot more time to update those, sadly. Yes I know this thread is trying to make a comment about unstable software, there are plenty of "stable" desktops you could use but in my experience those have a lot less feature velocity than the big "umbrella" projects. So it's a really trade-off, it seems that at some point you will have to sacrifice some of those beloved features if you want to prioritize something else, such as stability or portability or design choices or anything else really.

I've read the blogs and I don't really agree with any of your comments in the second paragraph, especially the part about destroying themes. I'm currently developing against libadwaita and one of the benefits that it (already) brings is much better theming support. I also have never actually seen the code of conduct enforced on anybody, most people I interact with are very respectful. Although if you have something you want to ask to Tobias then you might consider asking him directly, I can't speak for him. Just please remember to be kind.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#168

Post by Mikeb85 »

roenxi wrote: post #146
Mikeb85 wrote: post #74

Honestly, I've had better luck on the bleeding edge. Newer Linux kernels almost always are better (and when they're not, it gets fixed quickly). Wayland is definitely better than X. Newer Gnome is better than old Gnome. Ruby 3 and 3.1 is definitely better than 2.7. Rails 7 is way better than 6, even in alpha state. Deno is nicer than Node (although the ecosystem needs to catch up). Hell, V8 and then Node led to a boo…

However keeping up with the bleeding edge is expensive, it requires continuous maintenance and a lot of effort to sift out fads. Python is a great example of where the beeling edge is stable, and Python projects decay really quickly. I've seen 2-year-old python projects in machine learning fields environment that just can't be run any more as a practical matter because the dependencies have changed too much.

That sounds like a Python specific problem...

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#169

Post by lobocinza »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #165
lobocinza wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you I sincerely see no real advantage in Wayland over X. Steam does not work properly with Wayland, client side decorations are stupid and broke the decorations of Kitty and Alacritty (requiring me to workaround it).

> Steam does not work properly with Wayland How so? I'm running Wayland and running Steam. Everything works perfectly.

I can open a game but the interface freezes after a few seconds. I'm using the beta.

Re: Life is too short to depend on unstable software

#170

Post by hsn915 »

exyi wrote: post #128
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other projects besides (La)TeX and METAFONT have noticeably converged on bug-free over time? Perhaps the Linux & BSD kernels.

LaTeX specifically might be bug free, but it's so incomprehensible to a not very experienced user (like me) that it exactly matches the notion of "software where you need support". the only good thing is that you can often get the support for free on the internet. Even though it might be stable and bug free, I'm just avoiding it for "shinier" things like HTML and Ctrl+P in a browser...

Is it incomprehensible because it can be configured in different ways, or is just because the notation language it uses is not familiar to you?

The distinction is cruicial.

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