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Lobotomizing Gnome

eklitzke.org

41–50 of 224 posts

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#41
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.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#42

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 think the problem is that being installed by default on a popular distro is a double-edged sword: on one hand there are more users, which means more bug reports, potentially more contributions and maintainers, etc. but on the other hand there will be more complaints from people who don't actually want to use it.

As long as something is an "alternative" rather than common/default, its users will mostly be self-selected because they specifically went out of their way to use it.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#43

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…

Open-source desktops are never perfect for anyone, but everyone expects them to be

Isn't the same true for closed-source desktops? I mean, how on earth could any software be perfect for everyone?

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#44
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,…

2018 is, after all, the year of the Linux desktop.

I was surprised to find that Ubuntu 16.04 worked better on my Thinkpad T450s than the stock Windows 10 install (which came with a lot of crapware). I had sound stutters and mult-monitor issues on Windows, and everything worked out of the box on Ubuntu.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#45
First I thought 'Fedora?!? seriously???'. Last time I used Fedora (several years ago) I was pissed off when I had to learn that they didn't support system upgrades. So with every major release you had to reinstall the whole system, which is not that much fun.

But it seems they support system upgrades since a few releases now [1]. So maybe I should try it one day again, but as I fell in love with (stable) rolling releases, that might still be an issue :-/

[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#46
post #35

...or you can just use Mate and save yourself a lot of these troubles.

How does Mate do with: Connecting and disconnecting projectors and external displays on the fly? HiDPI displays?

> Connecting and disconnecting projectors and external displays on the fly?

It's been doing this fine since back when it was Gnome 2.

> HiDPI displays?

AFAIK, basically, just as well as Gnome 3. They use the same UI toolkit.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#49
post #38
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but it's never going to force you to reboot to install some shovelware that you don't want and can't opt out of.

Migration of many distros to systemd forced many people to do exactly that ;)

Did it? I must have missed that.

Re: Lobotomizing Gnome

#50
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,…

Btw. modern AMD graphics cards are much easier to use and mostly 'just work' out of the box as AMD is actively supporting the development of the open source driver.

Intel graphics are fine too, but as we all know, their performance isn't that good.

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