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> far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.). Have you tried something else than xfce or unity? You're missing the point, GP is talking a
by lloeki 10y ago
> far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.). Have you tried something else than xfce or unity?
You're missing the point, GP is talking about a level below the DEs, namely the graphics stack, which if unavailable or inefficient makes any discussion about the DEs moot since the GUI may very well be unusable at all in practice.
In that regard the "Windows desktop" has plenty of favorable points and "macOS desktop" is just stellar because it has had a comparatively perfect track record of driver support including a compositor since forever.
With a VESA/OPenGL/Quartz software render fallback many people on the Hackintosh crowd have been using OS X on unsupported cards via software fallback and not even notice they weren't getting the full Quartz QE/CI, which is nothing short of astonishing.
This is the signature attitude that points to the point being missed, what good is conky or awesomewm or ratpoison or xmonad or openbox if I can't make tearing and rendering artifacts disappear nor get proper colour management or sane HiDPI support? (PS: Xinerama, I hate you)
As for the DE experience on other platforms, Windows has had a kinda-tiling WM that regular people do use in the form of AeroSnap, while macOS is now getting tabs-in-the-window-manager, and Exposé+Spaces that evolved into Mission Control has been a positively brilliant experience for years.
Meanwhile on Linux, the very fact that you have to massage it into something useful ever so slightly at every level is, to me, a telltale sign of its deficiencies. Things are getting better (wayland, drm2), but they're getting better on the other platforms too. The best part is that nobody's standing still and things are moving forward (hopefully, as from the outside it looks like Linux people are running in circles these days around, so I hope reinvented wheels are getting rounder).
- pimeys 10y ago> As for the DE experience on other platforms, Windows has had a kinda-tiling WM that regular people do use in the form of AeroSnap, while macOS is now getting tabs-in-the-window-manager, and Exposé+Spaces that evolved into Mission Control has been a positively brilliant experience for years. > Meanwhile on Linux, the very fact that you have to massage it into something useful ever so slightly at every level is, to me, a telltale sign of its deficiencies. Things are getting better (wayland, drm2), but they're getting better on the other platforms too. The best part is that nobody's standing still and things are moving forward (hopefully, as from the outside it looks like Linux people are running in circles these days around, so I hope reinvented wheels are getting rounder). And then again, after using almost 10 years xmonad at work and at home for everything, using Windows or OS X is definitely not a nice experience. I don't really care about GUI tricks or clutter on my desktop. I just want my terminal, my editor and my browser to appear when I press the key combinations and I want my desktop to manage the windows so that they're always in the right place. The other thing I don't miss from the Windows and OS X world are the updates. I don't want to spend one work day to update my system to the next version and possibly fixing things because something changed in the xcode and I need to reinstall it to get my toolchain to work, or something changed in the Windows Linux subsystem and again I'm spending time fixing stuff. I like things to be simple and a very basic Linux installation with a good wm which you know by heart is miles ahead of everything else. And it doesn't change so you can focus on your work.
- vertex-four 10y agoMost people, otoh, enjoy playing games, watching videos, that sort of thing. Some people even do work that's dependent on the graphics card. Just because you use your computer for a very minimal amount of tasks doesn't mean everyone else does.
- xkarga00 10y agoEver heard of Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman?
- Klover 10y agoI think you are referring to the critique on television? Perhaps you can pay more attention to the last sentence of vertex-four's comment. That being "Just because you use your computer for a very minimal amount of tasks doesn't mean everyone else does." There are a million and one ways to use your graphics. Be it watching videos or gaming, which while you might have a problem with that, is actually done by people. It can also be used to smoothly decode and render a training video, or to make spreadsheets more pleasant to crawl through without the screen tearing and making everything look like a mess. There are even more minuscule applications you can do with graphics hardware and the software to drive it: transparency to subconsciously still remember what you're returning to when you click on another window, for example. As nice of you as it is to warn the parent about their information-action ratio, you could use this opportunity to appreciate people's freedom of choice as well as understand there is more to Windows and Mac than Netflix and Call of Duty.