The author wants to remove JavaScript from their desktop and does this by disabling all extensions in the hope that it will also disable Gnomes JavaScript engine. What the author does not appear to understand is that extensions are written in JavaScript because Gnome shell is written in JavaScript.
Gnome works very well for my workflow, and I find much of the "bloat" to be quite useful in day to day usage, but can understand the desire to remove things like maps and Tracker if you don't use them. My single biggest issue with Gnome stems from the performance of Gnome-shell which lags and stutters its way through animations leading to a desktop which often feels like it's struggling even on powerful hardware.
I don't think Gnome is bloated from a feature sense (they keep removing features in fact) its just horrifically bloated from an efficiency sense, it could be orders of magnitude faster than it currently is. It chugs and judders on a first gen i5!
This is not my experience at all. I am using it on my first gneration i3 media center PC and it runs reasonably well. I don't use it for any heavy lifting -I am just starting browsers, running media players and watching videos, but for me it works fine - so well that I don't have any need to check out more lightweight options.
It has more problems with the spotify app than with any of the things I am doing with Gnome (btw I am using Arch on it - so I am still using the latest version).
I suspect it is mostly RAM related, not CPU related. My laptop is an older i5 with Intel graphics and 4GB of RAM, and Gnome Shell (on Wayland) uses about 1GB more memory than Sway (a tiling Wayland compositor) does, which makes a big difference with the same applications. But when it's not under RAM pressure, Gnome is perfectly smooth.
I see lots of comments like this. What I want to know is: if you have this kind of complaint about Gnome, why do you keep using it? There's a bunch of different desktop environments for Linux. KDE works pretty well, and if that doesn't suit you, I've been finding Xfce is quite speedy for me on my work machine.
This isn't like Windows where you're stuck with it if you need that OS for its applications.
Because Gnome is in a league of its own in the UI tastefulness and general UX department.
I like that they are a little opinionated regarding how you use it, in practise that leaves you with a visually tidy and tight desktop environment.
KDE just does not look nice (in my opinion at least), the proportions are weird, menus are too cluttered, it feels like somebody has been throwing widgets at the wall to see what sticks.
I like KDE, but I like Ubuntu more. I've tried Kubuntu, but it's too unstable to be my daily desktop. Gnome is too limiting, but at least it is stable enough.
You can partially improve it by disabling all of the search integrations and just leave application lookup running. Its not perfect, but it fixes the 10 second wait time after you hammer a search term in.
Then you've surely hit the memory reclaim problem. I checked just now and my GNOME Shell started this morning is using 153 MB memory (resident).
There are some latency issues after moving to Wayland, though. Don't have a good link, but AFAIK it has something to do with Mutter or the Shell which were never specifically optimized for latency ending up being responsible for input handling.
It's not just Gnome Shell. I mean, I do hit the memory reclaim issue, but Gnome Shell is still not using that whole extra 1GB. The rest is evolution-data-server and so on.
I use XMonad but used to have lots of Gnome based services running in the background, in order to have sensible "modern" plug-and-play and easy configurability (e.g. printers, monitor layout, network, etc.) Sadly, as they move more and more things to the Shell, this is becoming a harder task. gnome-control-center which used to be very useful even in my custom setup, is now useless if you don't run a full gnome-session or gnome-shell. My setup has become a Frankenstein of pieces of, xmonad, taffybar, suckless, Xfce4 and Gnome.
But I don't blame them, since I understand that their goal is to provide a sensible and consistent user interface for general users and that I am a total exception :-)
Similarly I run StumpWM as my main WM. I just run a full gnome session on a separate x server and when I want to setup a printer or whatever I just switch to gnome with ctrl-alt-F2.
I don't know why this never occurred to me. Thanks for the idea. I've always exited i3 when I have the rare need for something from gnome I don't know how to do without the UI.
I don't think the author fails to understand that, They know that Gnome Shell is written in JavaScript and are not trying to eliminate JS from their desktop -- they are trying to _minimize_ the amount of JS running and thereby limit the scope of the memory leaks.
Actually, it does seem the author is unaware of the extent of JS usage in Gnome Shell:
> User extensions are a mechanism that allow users to write GNOME extensions in Javascript, similar to how Chrome and Firefox extensions work. In my opinion this idea has dubious merit, and my personal feeling is the less Javascript in my life the better. I felt somewhat vindicated about this decision during recent coverage of a memory leak in GNOME Shell. The underlying issue was related to the Javascript garbage collector in GNOME Shell not collecting object references in a timely manner. I’m not sure that disabling user extensions actually disables the Javascript engine completely, but it definitely minimizes it to the least possible scope.
"... I’m not sure that disabling user extensions actually disables the Javascript engine completely, but it definitely minimizes it to the least possible scope."
It's not so different from writing a Qt app in python. The C code does all the heavy lifting with JS doing the UI bits. That setup is way faster than the DOM because the JS is manipulating native widgets. While that's not as efficient as writing everything in C, it is much faster to write and bugfix and results in more stable and secure code.
I've no problem with javascript being available for desktop development. More power to javascript devs! What I find mind-boggling is that a mostly unstructured, dynamically typed and unsafe language is pushed as the MAIN language for desktop development.
Most servers run on millions of lines of perl, python, or bash. The same things said about JS can be said there, but most of those things are at least as bad with the added problem that they probably run with sudo privileges. JS is at least as good as these languages while being much, much faster.
True dynamically typed code does type checks at runtime which means that performance may suffer, but you are guaranteed to never have critical type failures (the type errors will occur and throw before something actually unsafe happens). This is a huge step up from C which is weakly typed and even untyped via void pointers.
Dynamically typed code is still typed. JS is not an unsafe language from a type perspective and from a security perspective, it may actually have the safest language implementations ever created.
If we're leaving the dynamic scripting language zone, options are very few without becoming tightly bound to Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc. There are other great open alternatives (for example, SML would be faster with a great type system), but most of those have small communities (which can mean death to open-source projects).
However, do note I wouldn't advocate developing most desktop apps using bash or perl, and even python is doubtful. Yes, I know this can and has been done, but I don't consider it a good idea.
Re: dynamically typed code, that's a rabbit hole I don't want to go down now. It's the stuff of flamewars usually. Let it be said I consider dynamically typed languages ill-suited for large or complex apps, for a variety of reasons. Javascript is probably the worst of them all.
What I'm asking is this: javascript and its ecosystem are NOT the most suitable tools for developing desktop apps. Why is it then being pushed as the MAIN language for this? Not as an alternative, not as an option for web developers who don't know other languages, but as the MAIN language for everyone coding Gnome apps?
Likely. I find it sad that we disregard lots of advances in programming languages that would help us construct faster and more reliable software just because it's not the path of least resistance :/
One or two years ago someone posted on HN a command line tool (let that sink in) for shredding hard disk data written in javascript. It required lots of dependencies to build (!), it was redundant because native tools for this task already exist (!!) and more importantly, it didn't work because the author didn't understand how modern hard disks work (!!!). To me this symbolizes everything that's wrong with javascript: using the wrong tool for a job which is already solved, and solving it wrong.
AFAIK the window manager/shell is javascript. You can bring up a JS console and inspect/move windows around, or extend the shell UI - sort of like you would create a browser extension.
I suspect they made that choice because... well.. javascript is everywhere and there are lots of developers that know it.
And he sets /org/gnome/shell/disable-user-extensions to false which means he enables extensions. I think these kind of options should be called something like /org/gnome/shell/ENable-user-extensions to avoid mistakes like this.
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, since I last tried it.
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.
The "problem" with Mate is that it just works. I interact with Windows and OSX daily, and I have yet to find a feature that makes me thing "I wish my desktop environment could do this". Mate gets out of my way and lets me work.
In other words, it's boring. There's nothing new and shiny to be excited about, because it's as good as it gets. I left Gnome 3 because I was tired of visual effects getting on my way, but those visual effects were what attracted me to Gnome 3 to begin with. I think Mate lacks that "wow!" factor and, as grateful as I am for that, I think this might stop it from being more popular.
I have no experience with Mate, but the feature I miss the most in the traditional desktops is starting programs by hitting the super (Windows) key and typing the programs.
I know that you can use Alt+F2 for this, but using super is much more ingrained for me since I've seen Windows Vista (I am using Linux at home and Windows systems at work)
The windows key is a modifier like shift, alt or ctrl and hence at first it seems like a really, really bad idea to use it a shortcut by itself. The above programs hence implement the same behind-the-scences workarounds other desktop environments and windows use: treat pressing and releasing win alone as special.
You can of course also use this for other keys, for example
caps alone-> Esc
caps+c -> ctrl+c
Alternatively, I win+space instead of just win also is quite natural shortcut.
KDE works that way on my Arch install without any additional tweaking. And I'm pretty sure you could configure the launcher in any DE to work that way if you looked at its hotkey settings (they're usually re-definable in my experience)
The last time I've really tried out KDE (many years ago, in the KDE4 era) it didn't work and I had to install an extension (that didn't quite work for me) to get that to work. But I've heard that they've changed it later. After some configuration I've installed XFCE on this PC and was much happier. I even found a menu and a configuration for XFCE that worked like I wanted it to work.
I specifically remember that the input handling code in KDE was adjusted a few years ago to handle single-key shortcuts where the single key is a modifier, esp. the Windows key.
Yes but it has to replace your desktop with a checkerboard of launchers, which might be a thing whose effect ranges from unnecessary but harmless to annoying and confusing, especially when it lags.
Exactly, so I'm puzzled why the OP said it missed that behaviour (and I suppose others miss that too as someone downvoted you ^__^;).
I'm not familiar with recent Windos but pressing the "Super" key on Gnome opens the "overview" screen (or what's called) with a big "Type to search..." text box that can be used to search files to open or programs to launch.
P.S. I prefer to use shortcuts to launch the common programs, using an extension that mimics Ubuntu Unity style Super + number_key, according to the order in the "Favorites".
I had more or less the same situation with my last remaining Windows machine (mainly for games).
I thought Windows reboots were supposed to get less over the years but it has only gotten worse and I've got less autonomy over them with Windows 10. Go away from your computer for a little while and come back to a reboot (a little hyperbole).
Now my gaming PC run Void Linux and with native Steam and Wine (PlayOnLinux, Lutris) I've got access to most of my game library. It's easier to just ignore the few games that do not work on Linux nowadays.
Diablo 3 runs pretty well on it.
(Still, I prefer to avoid Window'isms on Linux so no Gnome, Pulseaudio and other complications (which Void Linux makes easy to avoid).)
> I thought Windows reboots were supposed to get less over the years
It's funny, I can't remember last time I had a forced reboot, either at work or at home, both on Windows 10. On the other hand, I'm shutting down my PC regularly
Perhaps you're right and you just have to keep shutting your laptop down and booting up from cold to prevent Windows problems.. sorry, updates from happening at the wrong time.
I watched a three hour stream of a professional chess player and youtuber and at the start he's saying "...oh, and I just updated my Windows laptop a few days ago so hopefully it won't start to slow down or apply an update while I'm playing". Amazing - he's playing bullet chess where you typically make each move in a second or so, and hundreds of games like that in a row so even a hint of lag is going to result in him moving the piece to the wrong place, or timing out and losing the tournament and he has to "hope" that his own computer won't decide it knows when to update and/or reboot.
I have no idea how people put up with this shit. It's like an abusive relationship.
Yeah I think you're sort of missing the point if you think it's acceptable to have to keep up with this season's registry hacks or hex edit a DLL or whatever so you can play a game or do your job.
The thing is, beyond the wi-fi blocking update on my personal PC, I've never had to do anything else and I can't remember a forced reboot in Windows 10.
Anecdotal, but I, on the other hand, have had quite a few forced reboot.
I close the lid of my laptop and Windows goes to sleep, but during the night it somehow decides to do its thing and reboots. The thing is, I have BIOS password and a dual boot.
It will then just hangs indefinitely on the BIOS password prompt. Fans spinning, CPU unthrottled for hours. And then lose network drivers inside Windows. Reinstalling drivers in the morning is not fun.
> Now my gaming PC run Void Linux and with native Steam and Wine (PlayOnLinux, Lutris) I've got access to most of my game library. It's easier to just ignore the few games that do not work on Linux nowadays.
Do you have this setup online somewhere, like a blog post or a git repo?
It's just a plain Void Linux[1] install without any desktop environment flavors. NVIDIA drivers, Steam, Wine, PlayOnLinux and Lutris are all available as a package.
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.
I used MATE for about a year and then switched to Cinnamon because of some issues I've had with MATE. I find Cinnamon the best DE for Linux. It has the best UI, shortcuts and the best file manager.
As for GNOME, it's way too dumbed-down. You have to find and install dozens of extensions to have a decent desktop.
Same here. Debian netinstall + MATE Desktop is simply put the best desktop experience I've had. I have Windows 10 in a VM, and it seems it needs updates + reboot every time I turn it on, although that might be because I only boot it once a month or so.
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.
I've always liked the way debian/Debian based systems do updates. Older versions of windows were maybe a little too subtle (many users just ignored the small icon in the tray) vs. the large dialog box that pops up. It's also very easy to just hit accept and let it run in the background. I switched my father's laptop over several years ago (he only surfs the internet/email/scans/prints) and haven't had a tech support call for two years. I'm stuck on windows until there's a decent mechanical CAD avaliable, but good lord am I wishing I stayed with 7. This is the first time I've ever had to change the default in GRUB to windows in ~10 years of dual-boot, since otherwise I have to babysit the thing every update. Sad part is, I actually prefer the UX of 10 more than even MacOS, but for anything 'power-user' orientated it's just such a pain to administer.
Side note: has anyone else had problems with system settings reverting to default after updates? I've turned off the suggestion notifications several times, as well as neutering cortana.
We are so happy, you experienced our fantastic continously integrated customer epxerience that we release carefully untested to our selected users.
To be honest, that windows could degrade that much, without the people running en mass to chrombooks or linux, shows just how far these are away from what people expect from a desktop experience.
They dont want to relearn gui concepts, they do not want to miss theire programs, they do not want to study computer sciences to use theire machines, and they suffer in silence through all this for that. Im sure this is supossed a statement to show how bad windows is, but it truely reveals how pitiful the competition beyond niche-groups is.
That's my feeling. If you can't even win over users from a system who's vendor seems to be intentionally trying to kill it off, your system must be really awful.
Not that evangelists will see it that way. Their way of doing things is right, everyone else's is wrong and stupid.
It is not Linux DE that has improved but rather the applications that we use commonly are web based and available via the browser. This makes netbooks the logical next step IMO
I can say for certain that I have never had a package update interrupting me in the middle of an extremely important moment, and for a very simply reason. I do not update my packages during extremely important moments. I have never had the itch in the middle of a presentation to say "Wait everyone, a update came so lets have you all sit and wait and look while the machine do a 45 minutes update".
Even applications you'd expect to be native (apt packages) like `gnome-system-monitor` are included as snaps by default in the desktop version of ubuntu 18.04. All it takes is a someone with sufficient authority to make disabling snaps very difficult.[1]
Unfortunately, there are plenty of lunatics on both sides of the fence who think they should have the final say in what you can do with your computer and when you can do it.
[1] E.g gnome developers decided to change the default behavior of the power button, then decided that users shouldn't be allowed to change this behavior: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=755953
Has come to Ubuntu flavors of Linux* and it seems, especially, just GNOME? I don't have this problem with Arch and pacman -Syu at my leisure. I refuse to use autoupdating software out of principle and am saddened so many people choose convenience over security.
Not only, but Debian wouldn't do this ever too. It's just as easy to run a Debian desktop spin, and it does not have any of the scandals or idiotic decisions Ubuntu has.
This is what's nice with the distro ecosystem. Someone messes their thing up and gives you the middle finger? Say bye and switch to a saner thing. Your apps will work on almost all of the Linux distros (GNU/ or not) and *BSD w/o any effort, and getting them to work otherwise is not only possible, but usually easy.
The complaint is centered around Ubuntu 18.04 moving to Snaps-by-default and that users are losing control over when they update their applications. Yes, that is easily remedied by moving off of Ubuntu. But avoiding Systemd was also as easy as not using Fedora - for a very short time. Time will tell how popular Snaps becomes for the major distros.
There's a pretty spectacular performance boost too. Microsoft stealing my electricity and computing power to run bloatware and analytics on data they steal from me is just too much.
In the past I thought the idea of "really controlling what's going on with your computer" was just purist mambo jumbo, but windows 10 came to prove me wrong.
There was a little bit of pain but it was nowhere near as bad as some make out. I migrated all my arch boxes at the time just fine and the main work was writing unit files -- which compared to writing init scripts was mainly trivial.
Is systemd the best init system? No. But to some of us it was an improvement over what came before it and it really hasn't given us the trouble that others claim it has given them.
I remember a colleague who ran Linux From Scratch on his laptop who was abhorred by the changes. We spent an afternoon trying to remove the stuff from an Ubuntu VM image he didn't consider necessary and a lot of it was really alien to him. As an fvwm user he really couldn't understand why almost everything needed dbus and pulseaudio. I couldn't understand a lot of the strange packaging dependencies either. And yet these are things that to me have improved real pain-points in linux distros.
Really? I've used Linux for ten years or so have never had a problem like this. When I started using it I was really, really worried because I suspected this be standard behaviour really. ”Surely this 'package management' thing will break things all the time?”. But nope, runs like clockwork. (I've always used Debian based distros, if that's a factor.)
Windows significant issues with the update process. Every now and then microsoft releases their broken updates that cause your PC to enter a bootloop and then you have to reinstall windows. So far this has happened on almost every version of windows that I've used.
You will run into problems like that on any platform. Want to do a "quick" Windows Update? OK, let's just schedule in 2 hours of downtime. What about OS X packages that aren't in the app store - sure lots of solutions exist but none are without their occasional problems.
While package management is a solved problem (well, on all platforms outside of Windows that is), that doesn't mean that occasional issues will not arise. Though for what it's worth: I run Arch which is about as hands on as it gets without compiling your own packages and it's been 10 years since the last time a package update cost me 45 minutes or longer of my time.
Add to that that you can work while the update is being downloaded and applied; and in the very few occasions where reboot is absolutely inevitable (I have never had such a situation since many years; even the new kernel can wait until I'm done with my things and ready to reboot to bring it online), it's just a reboot, nothing more. With Windows 10, it just blocks you with a screen that has a message telling "I'm doing my things now" and a progress report. Your work is inevitably interrupted.
For example, I sometimes play some games on my brother's Win 10 PC (I don't use Windows on my laptop, and don't want to bother with setting up Wine and the games on it). A couple days ago it wanted to update, and I told it to postpone. Then I left for 15 minutes and came back, there was an update going on. It blocked us out of the computer for the entire afternoon and most of the evening doing black magic behind a soft blue screen.
While I don't love Window Update's behavior, that particular major update was released about a month ago. Your brother has been postponing it for weeks.
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 worst part is those are the machines I use for work ;(
Okay. I assumed you were talking about a simple update itself. Not a system upgrade to 17.10. I know one guy who bragged that he never restarted an Ubuntu laptop in years, just letting it update, suspend and resume, never restarting it. I have had package upgrade issues with Debian Testing and Manjaro (Arch), but never Ubuntu.
Did you disable Wayland? You can easily select X.org on the log in. Or just use 18.04 which went back to X by default.
Also, I think you are being unfair, upgrades on Windows are bad too. You are always recommended to a do a fresh install.
You need to work on describing your actual issues instead of being so vague if you actually want help with things. Like with this:
> 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).
I do not know if your wifi gave out on 17.10 or Arch. Arch is it's own bag of worms-for all I know you are running a prerelease kernel on that new Intel NUC that runs poorly on Windows right now due to bad drivers.
Arch breaks a lot on it's own. You shouldn't be using it if you don't intend to fix it. If you want a more user friendly with Arch, try Manjaro.
I LOVE *BSDs, but this statement is just false. The linux sphere is full of very nice experiences. Projects like Void and Alpine are out there, and then there are the gems like NixOS and GuixSD.
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 are more grating because of the knowledge that alternatives exist.
On Windows or Mac OS, you are stuck with the desktop you have, with little ability to do anything other than basic customizations. But people soldier on and get used to it because they have no choice.
I wonder whose users are truly more satisfied in the end.
I am pretty happy with my KDE desktop. The strength of KDE/Plasma is it extreme ability to be customized to the users needs.
Nevertheless, KDE itself comes with a set of background services too, which some users might find bloated.
I think nowadays its just a matter using what fits your needs. The only thing that nobody is perfect at is 'settings' as they mostly focus on desktop specific settings and many users don't know where to find more advanced settings (e.g. /etc).
> Open-source desktops are never perfect for anyone, but everyone expects them to be
Oppositely, if I haven't paid anything I am happy to put up with quite some grief. Just knowing you could fix it if you wanted to spend the time has value for me too.
However using MacOS makes me very sad: paying $1000 for the privilege of bugs and user interface flaws galls me.
I have quite low expectations of Windows too, but that is (a) historical expectations and (b) I don't expect much from a now advertising-based OS. [Aside: I just wish Microsoft would charge me a subscription for a professional version that didn't have crapware and adverts].
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.
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.
But then try to get the shoulder buttons of a Logitech MX518 to work in the web browser on Mac OS X. That's a task that might take hours. Or try to let the Home and End keys of an external keyboard behave the same way in the terminal and in any other UI text box. There's a lot of configuration required.
It's interesting how different people can have completely opposite experience. I've modified my Microsoft keyboard that zoom slider works as Spotify control buttons play/stop/next. I doubt I would be able to achieve something like this in macOS or Windows. It works all the time, super reliably.
You can probably use Autohotkey to achieve the same thing on Windows. It's a great tool to be aware of should you ever have to use Windows for any reason – you can also use it to push windows to virtual desktops and others, approaching a more Linux-y experience. Someone even wrote a tiling WM in AHK: https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n
AHK is the kind of thing that should have been built into desktop environments since '95. Why go through the trouble of adding all these workflow features that may or may not align with what actually makes the user's workflow better when you could add a scripting environment that allows the user to do that for themselves and a few pre-configured defaults.
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.
The problem with Gnome is not that it's too bloated or spartan -although it does use twice as much memory as KDE and four times as much as LXDE- but that many parts of the UX are plain stupid.
> For everyone who says they are too bloated, someone else says they are too spartan.
Sometimes it can even be the same person depending on their needs.
On my coding laptop I swear by i3, it's fast, simple and powerful. Everything is just a keystroke away. On my entertainment machine though (TV, music and games) I find gnome much better because friends can use it and these tasks are better handled with a mouse.
This is the fundamental problem with convergence as well, different devices have different use cases and you can't make one person happy all the time.
For an entertainment machine, I'd suggest installing Steam and auto-launching to big picture. Very easy to navigate from a couch w/ a controller, and you can use it for nearly any media task you want. It does take some time to configure your media directories, but not having to deal w/ a mouse on a media machine is so much easier. Plus, since your base OS can be something like Debian, remoting into the machine for administration is eminintely doable.
Ditto. Linux Desktop user since 9x (Red Hat, Conectiva, Mandrake, Debian). I've used IceWM, KDEv1, Gnome2, XFCE, KDEv3, Gnome3, KDEv4, Mate, LXDE, LXQT, usually switched yearly. Started using Cinnamon on Debian since 2017 and -so far- never looked back [1].
> 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, etc.), sign NDAs if they want to see/fix any of the implementation details, and so on.
With FOSS they could just post to a mailing list or something, which I would imagine is more welcoming. Maybe the difficulty is social: FOSS projects certainly suffer from toxicity, but their transparent processes also make it more visible. Companies are better able to hide toxicity using firewalls and private/internal communication channels.
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 bashed and something like xmonad is considered the epitome of GUI experience.
A similar conference will be about filesystems, network protocols, graphics drivers, kernel modules and very seldom about anything UI/UX related.
So the designers that still try to contribute to GNOME and KDE apps do so in spite of community, because they believe that they can still make a difference.
Everyone else just moves into places where they feel welcome.
I am still wondering how long elementary OS is going to be around.
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.
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 actually had so much trouble with this on F26 or so that I gave up. Seriously, apps have to get dumb again in order to work. It's like IDEs for software - a folder structure with .c .h and make files should define a software project, but so many IDEs want to "manage" things in a proprietary project file of some sort and it tends to make things less portable or functional outside that paradigm. I get that there are advantages to all of these things if you do things the way the developers intended, but it ends up feeling like Apples attitude of "we know what's best for you" and iTunes wanting to take over your system.
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.
Did this guys just completely ignore Plasma (KDE)?? I'd say they are the ones ahead on high DPI and Wayland... Seriously, install it, even on old hardware. Plasma is really fast and stable these days. Also, Mate has no problems with High DPI and given the right theme look beautiful with rounded corners all over the place.
Edit: Ok, I may have misread the piece as a critique at first but it's just his way of getting Gnome more functional. Anyway, his assumptions regarding "Gnome being ahead" are outdated and it seems like one is ready for DE switch, if one must lobotomize her/his DE after every install.
Not the author, but I just tried KDE for two weeks, and coming from Gnome, I couldn't acclimate. I found the Plasma experience unpolished, inconsistent, and prone to error. I also ran into quite a few bugs (at one point, Plasma just stopped giving me window previews when alt-tabbing, and not a single alternative alt-tab style from the built-in installer worked for me).
Two examples of things I missed coming from Gnome:
- I really appreciate the gnome-shell's unified "Activities" overview: I tap Super and I get a single experience that combines Plasma's Quick Launch Bar, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid features. I find that to be a faster, more fluid experience than the Plasma equivalents.
- KWin expected me to resize windows by, somehow, hitting a border that's exactly 1 pixel wide. I evidently don't have the motor control to do that quickly or reliably. Gnome adds a ~10 pixel wide invisible border to each window which is quick and easy to hit regardless of input device.
That's not to say everything is all roses in Gnome land, either, but what's there just seems more reliable, consistent, and intentionally designed. Still, there's no panacea. I wish Gnome's screen zoom was half as fast and fluid as Plasma's. I wish Gnome still supported desktop icons. And AppIndicators. And a 2D grid of virtual desktops. I wish Gnome felt as responsive as Plasma.
I'm planning a switch from Fedora to OpenSUSE later this year, at which point I'll give Plasma another shot and be more diligent about recording and reporting bugs I run across.
I have the same small issues indeed, Kwin always opens windows super small at first, no client side decorations irks me for some apps. I am slowly falling in love with Mate though, I'm using it on Solus where it has the Ark darker theme by default (the default look on Ubuntu is truly your grandma's desktop, I really don't understand that move) and it's really snappy and functional. I work in it all day (VM on Windows because company requires Windows...)
IIRC on kde you can also resize windows with alt + right click, without needing to hit exactly the border. (Or maybe its middle click I don't remember. ) this is similar to alt + left click to drag a window without clicking the title bar.
On gnome you can use Super + middle click to resize things and super + left click to drag them
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.
What is going on as of late, and it is led by Gnome/freedesktop/RH devs, to split fully working software into two parts. A UI frontend, and a deamon backend. And between them sit dbus and polkit, so that someone, somewhere, may write some "fine grained policies" about who can and when they can do anything.
What i am observing is that what used to be a "clean" system once you got used to the unix thinking, is being torn to shreds trying to placate two sub-groups.
The first is the military-industrial complex that wants to make damned sure the grunts can't read how crap the "police action" is going.
The second the the cloud-heads that wants everything to be able to scale from 1 to 1 million running units with the push of a button.
not sure if it's still a thing but akonadi / baloo on kde manages to even saturate slower sata-ssd random io and fills a mysql database. Lot's of fun if you have several kernel tree / buildroots laying around in your home. baloo also really likes to segfault when parsing content and is not sandboxed afaik.
I really like KDE but this part is sadly a good in theory but pure pita in practice.
OP's experience is based on Fedora. If you're on Ubuntu, a couple of cautions:
1. A fair amount of the OP advice is Wayland-specific -- but Wayland has been disabled by default in Ubuntu 18.04.
2. Ubuntu layers its own tweaks on top of GNOME's. See /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/com.{ubuntu,canonical}*
Those caveats noted, the author's approach to GNOME desktop parallels my own current working solution for Ubuntu, arrived after at after way too many hours in tedious experiment with KDE, XFCE, LXDE, OpenBox, gnome-look.org themes, gconf-editor, dconf-editor, and even gnome-tweak-tool. These approaches all proved to suffer from one or more critical failings:
1. Not easily archive/documented, for repetition with later Linux reinstalls.
2. Not easily reviewable/reversible, in case of trouble later.
3. Monolithic or coarse-grained, and introduce infelicities of their own. So then you try to tweak the tweak ... oy vey.
4. Weak documentation, version skew risk, and doubtful developer commitment.
5. Interact badly with other tweaks.
6. Incomplete, as judged by my needs. Tweaks from other sources required, each coming with other variations of [1-5].
To remedy failings (1) and (2), with customizations expressible in text, Ansible is a solution for people invested or ready to invest in learning Ansible. Similarly Git, or Quilt.
A lot of the comments here are arguing for or against the author's specific choices, but I would like to point out how great it is that Linux desktop environments are this customizable in the first place.
I recently switched back to Linux after using a Mac for a couple of years, and was blown away with how far Gnome has gotten in terms of customizability -- even if most of it is done through extensions. Moreover, if you can't tweak it to your liking, perhaps xfce or i3 or KDE will prove more accommodating...
Meanwhile on KDE I can change all my configuration to my personal tastes without needing to edit a single text file or doing obscure and magic things with third party tools.
That's not always a good thing, everytime I've tried a post-plasma KDE version I've always ended up spending too much time regularly tweaking the whole setup.
> 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?
I've tried to use Gnome a lot, it's IMO a great desktop but it also has problems. Personally, I've simply been sitting on XFCE, despite wanting to switch to Wayland a long time ago merely because XFCE has been proven less resource intensive on both laptop and desktop...
I do hope there will be a wayland-based XFCE-like Desktop for Linux at some point...
First time I heard about the user.js feature. That should save me some time going through umpteen about:config preferences every time I install Firefox (and it seems I do more and more stuff there, whenever they add a new useless feature).
I recently came back to running Linux on the desktop after using Mac OS for a decade or so, and while the article is interesting from a technical point of view, it seems like a lot of work with little reward considering that the needed apps are a command prompt, a text editor and a browser.
I'll just stick with my standard Debian Gnome desktop. It works well, doesn't get in my way, and i can spare the ~0.5GB RAM for running evolution, tracker, plugins etc.
I think one of the major points is that this configuration is easily reusable/replayable on another machine, as it also sets up the wanted/unwanted packages.
For folks who don't like the idea of a javascript-based DE, ElementaryOS is worth a look. An Ubuntu variant with a DE built with Vala which is similar to C# but compiles to C.
If I was actively using Linux on the desktop still -as I was for well over a decade- this would have been extremely useful. I always shied away from Gnome as far too heavy for my tastes, and used a custom built FVWM config. Since my workflow also consisted of mainly a web browsers, a mail client (now subsumed by the web browser), and many, many terminals, I really just wanted a single click to start a terminal, and Ctrl-Alt-{direction} to move virtual desktops which I devoted to a single task at a time.
For the last few years I've been using Windows 8/10. It started as a work software requirement, but as of Windows 10, Microsoft has figured out how to make Windows feel fairly minimal most of the time. As long as I have a browser and PuTTY, I'm pretty content. I'm doing my best to ignore what I assume are some privacy concerns I'll have to deal with at some point in the near future, but for the time being I'm able to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
Hmm, author doesn't seem to know about dconf-editor to explore available settings.
That reminds me of why I despise much of what gnome3 has produced however. Instead of improving the applets and file manager and adding to their anemic feature set, they are constantly fucking around with the title bars and removing menus and things. For the same reason I hated 'skinz' in the 90's I dislike that every app is now a custom snowflake that has to be handled differently. For example, look at what dconf-editor has become, like the Disks program---an abomination.
Gnome (all the desktops really) is still not as consistent and integrated as the Windows 2000 shell was, and is harder to use. IMHO, the only useful innovation to come out since then has been the "Super-key search," the rest has been downhill.
As someone who heavily uses the super key in Emacs, I disagree with you.
It's getting pretty difficult to turn off that feature (is it even possible in recent versions of Gnome?).
Also, the Super-o shortcut to lock screen rotation (on a compute, really?) is hardcoded in the window manager and can't be disabled at all. That's really great when you have APL symbols mapped to it.
I use Mate, though gnome3 has infected many of the apps, such as the two mentioned above. Think you have to enable super-search by opting in to one of the advance start menus under it.
> … my personal feeling is the less Javascript in my life the better.
I couldn't agree more. But I also feel much the same way about GNOME; that's why I use StumpWM[0]. It doesn't do everything out of the box which GNOME does, but it's extensible in a dynamic language, which means that it's easy enough to add most everything.
Read again. He said he likes the workflow GNOME provides, he just wants to reduce a bit of the bloat. Maybe, unlike you, he does not want to use a more traditional desktop …
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.
While there is a lot of bloat in gnome, it personally doesn't really bother me as it doesn't get in my way.
Although I agree it should probably be easier, it's great that it is possible to cut a lot of unwanted bloat from Gnome. Try that with Windows or MacOS.
PSA: GNOME Software is a frontend to flatpak repositories. It's not a frontend for your package manager.
Since flatpak provides security benefits, instead of removing Gnome software, he should have been removing duplicate packages from his package manager.
The registry on Windows gets tonnes of hate, and mostly rightly so, but I kinda like dconf. I wish more programs would use it, just one format, and really easy to programatically change without individual pipelines per config file format.
On Arch Linux installing GNOME does not install all of the GNOME apps, just the shell. The rest I only install if I want it. What I like most is their calendar and their address book.
Switching to Arch was revelatory, and I've been using some form of Linux at work or home since 2001.
It's hard for me to describe, or quantify. But it's almost like, with a distro that embraces the Linux-ness of Linux, one that's not trying to be like Mac OS or Windows, you're able to cut to the heart of your user experience and make it your own.
Plus, rolling release, bro. I don't need monolithic version releases, I just have Arch now.
Arch is insanely stable given it uses rolling updates. I'm not quite sure how they pull it off. I've had far worse problems with Fedora and Ubuntu, which sometimes are not even fixable because you can't easily update to the latest upstream releases (most noticeably with the kernel). On Arch, I run `pacman -Syu` every month and my system stays up to date with basically no downtime.
Does Arch have anything similar to Ubuntu/Debian's Alternatives System [1][2]? This is very useful for managing different versions of the same package/s and I tend to rely on it for a number of things.
You can freeze package versions, and there are also archives of older packages. But generally most of the repos only have the latest released packages.
Alternatively, Bitwig runs natively, though costs. It's about the only native software that does the clip launching style of production/performance well.
Might be just me but I always do dpi settings directly in x11 config. I can see this being a problem when connecting to different monitors.
For my home workstation where everything is static I havent had to touch anything after set it up.
I'm using i3. I still keep Gnome around, because from time to time I need to hold presentations, and randomly appearing and disappearing monitors (=beamers) is not something i3 deals with gracefully.
I use i3 on my laptop, where I routinely connect and disconnect external displays. I wrote a small program to deal with that: http://github.com/mortie/dedaemon
That tool also handles input stuff (like setting the keyboard layout when a keyboard is connected, or setting the mouse speed when a mouse is connected), and setting the wallpaper (because the wallpaper has to be re-applied when a display is connected). Here's the config file I personally use: https://github.com/mortie/nixConf/blob/master/.dedaemon.hcnf
If you do end up trying it out, feel free to pm me (mort@irc.freenode.net) or open a github issue if you have any questions or problems.
I use i3, and when I plug in a monitor, I just figured out the command i need with xrandr and save it as an alias or command.
Or I also found out accidentally, I had to install gnome for some stupid test. But, using gdm as the login manager made automatic monitor detection work under i3? I literally changed nothing. But using gdm to login to my i3 and it works flawlessly. Even turning off monitors moved everything to one automatically.
(Dis)connecting extra monitors has been automagic without any scripting/xrandr/3rd-party programs. KDE can handle that perfectly, and i3 obeys, so far.
It's pretty neat. And I say this as an i3 lover, not a KDE lover.
Can you be more specific about “not handling it gracefully”? i3 is purely reactive to changes in your monitor configuration. As long as you use xrandr (or arandr, or https://github.com/fd0/grobi, or…) to enable/disable monitors, i3 should move your workspaces around or create workspaces as needed.
I started with i3 but moved to bspwm. There is not much difference between the two and it is all about configuration and what is easier to setup. Multiple monitors is something that is always a problem in my experience. It is great that gnome deals properly with this issue for you.
Oh sweet. I was an xmonad user for years and just recently switched to bspwm. Defining the entire control interface on a socket feels very much in the aesthetic of Plan 9---expose control that interops well with coreutils and friends. My preferred browser, uzbl[1], does very much the same.
Switching from xmonad did also get me to switch from xmobar to lemonbar. I really like how lemonbar is again "just a pipe," though it did pull me down a bit of a configuration rabbit hole. I now have about 500 lines of shell that asyncronously show various bits of system and bspm state.
Anyway, I don't have much of a point, other than sharing my enthusiasm with a fellow user.
I do this with my computers (laptops, desktops, and servers) and while it does have some drawbacks on the desktop I feel the reproducibility far outweighs them. Whenever a new version of OS X comes out, I just clean install it on my machine, run ansible and then have a working environment back up in under an hour.
> I want my laptop to work correctly when connecting it to external displays or projectors without a lot of futzing around. I want vsync to work with my monitor out of the box, I want to be able to watch video without tearing, and I want a desktop that has first class support for high-DPI displays.
Buy a Mac :) Honestly. The Gnome and systemd became entangled mess with no chances of getting better, yet they made it into all major distros. Linux kernel size increased exponentially in last few years, without visible added value.
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 :-/
I've been using dnf to continuously upgrade my Fedora installation between 24 and 28, and it's worked pretty much flawlessly.
It's gotten to the point that system upgrades are as boring as the regular stream of updates that you receive daily, the only difference being that every 6 months you get more updates than usual being pushed.
Remember when the first real tool you had to perform system upgrades on Fedora was called FedUp? It was quite amazing, not to mention unexpected, seeing Fedora go from being one of the worst distros to upgrade to one of the best.
Gnome works very well for my workflow, and I find much of the "bloat" to be quite useful in day to day usage, but can understand the desire to remove things like maps and Tracker if you don't use them. My single biggest issue with Gnome stems from the performance of Gnome-shell which lags and stutters its way through animations leading to a desktop which often feels like it's struggling even on powerful hardware.