3 ms·
I remember after a few iterations (06.10, Edgy Eft) it offered a really great minimal experience. Everything worked well, defaults were reasonable and it was un
by nextos 11y ago
I remember after a few iterations (06.10, Edgy Eft) it offered a really great minimal experience. Everything worked well, defaults were reasonable and it was uncluttered. Besides, old Gnome was quite nice and cozy.
With time, Ubuntu has tried to be all things to all people and it became a big crufty thing. Now if you want something minimal you need to use Arch, Slackware or similar.
OS X suffers from the same problem, I think. Tiger-Snow Leopard were simple and beautiful. Now, iOS-ification is taking them through a path I dislike.
I have great hopes about Nix-like systems (NixOS, GuixSD) as they allow simple and complex setups while keeping clutter under control.
- digi_owl 11y agoI think the cruft coincided with a shift in mentality in the Linux world in general. Quite a number of under the hood changes i see today seem to have originated with developers working directly or indirectly on Nokia's Maemo devices. In November 2009 the N900 shipped, a clear break with the 770, N800 and N810. early 2010 Canonical release a new theme for Gnome2, and a year later Unity. And the same year as Ubuntu gets Unity, Gnome goes 3.0. And further down the stack you have systemd (2010) that may well be better at home on a phone or similar usage device than a traditional server or desktop. And then there is Wayland, that one of the principle developers i seem to recall was directly involved with Maemo development. Never mind going from APM to ACPI (Torvalds have some choice words about the latter) and more recently from BIOS to UEFI. There is also a changing of the guard going on somewhat. The old hats are hitting 50 and 60, and the people in their 20s and 30s taking over are bringing in experience from the web way of doing things.