12 ms·

Lobotomizing Gnome

225 points by deafcalculus 8y ago

twblalock 8y ago
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.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  And UI/UX designers work happily and feel welcome on Windows and Mac OS systems, which are what everyone non-technical buys anyway.
  - chriswarbo 8y ago
    > 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.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      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.
      - ahartmetz 8y ago
        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.
        pjmlp 8y ago
        True, I was speaking about the desktop users, not GNOME and KDE developers.
      - chriswarbo 8y ago
        As a happy XMonad user I can certainly appreciate that it's not for everyone ;)
    - magduf 8y ago
      If a project is too toxic, there's nothing stopping you from forking it and making your own version. Just look at Cinnamon and MATE. Can't do that with commercial software.
- forkerenok 8y ago
  I think you are spot on with your later point about availability of choice making people less happy/productive. I myself do jump from one DE to another every other year. But that's more out of curiosity.
- Brometheus 8y ago
  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.
  - foepys 8y ago
    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.
  - finchisko 8y ago
    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. https://gist.github.com/mauron85/5f4b640aa4e5e968e0496ac5a0878715 https://gist.github.com/mauron85/5f4b640aa4e5e968e0496ac5a08...
    - Shoue 8y ago
      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 https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        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.
- MikkoFinell 8y ago
  I'm satisfied with Cinnamon. If any dev happens to read this: thank you and keep up the good work, it's appreciated.
  - maurom 8y ago
    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]. Cinnamon devs: Thank you! [1] https://maurom.com/blog/2017/07/04/ https://maurom.com/blog/2017/07/04/
- flukus 8y ago
  > 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.
  - gcthomas 8y ago
    Yes, spartan and effective I3 for work, and shiny Gnome for the family machine. There is never only going to be one best solution, as that depends critically on the problem you are trying to solve.
  - zrobotics 8y ago
    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.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  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.
- stinos 8y ago
  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?
- JepZ 8y ago
  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).
- yAnonymous 8y ago
  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.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    I share this opinion. It's "trying to be Mac OSX simple" (but failing)
- robocat 8y ago
  > 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].
keyle 8y ago
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, since I last tried it.
- ISL 8y ago
  Welcome back!
- tumdum_ 8y ago
  Wait ~6 months, and you will encounter a case where simple package update will cost you more than that 45 minutes ;)
  - taneq 8y ago
    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.
    - John_KZ 8y ago
      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.
    - tumdum_ 8y ago
      Migration of many distros to systemd forced many people to do exactly that ;)
      - Accacin 8y ago
        Did it? I must have missed that.
dajonker 8y ago
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.
yani 8y ago
It is a bit of controversal article. There is need for 2 applications a terminal and a browser. Why do you need gnome for that?
- DocTomoe 8y ago
  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.
  - yani 8y ago
    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.
    - xelxebar 8y ago
      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. [1]: https://uzbl.org https://uzbl.org
      - yani 8y ago
        uzbl looks interesting. Thanks for sharing
  - mseidl 8y ago
    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.
reshie 8y ago
it's simplified to a fault. it is also too complex to a fault. basically when you want to do something it does get in the way.
kbenson 8y ago
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.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
...or you can just use Mate and save yourself a lot of these troubles.
- sampo 8y ago
  How does Mate do with: Connecting and disconnecting projectors and external displays on the fly? HiDPI displays?
  - alxlaz 8y ago
    > 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.
beguiledfoil 8y ago
If you want something this simple just use sway...
- lsh 8y ago
  this Sway? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sway https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sway
8fingerlouie 8y ago
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.
- kchr 8y ago
  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.
zaarn 8y ago
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...
JamesMcMinn 8y ago
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.
- amiga-workbench 8y ago
  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!
  - brusch64 8y ago
    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).
    - NoGravitas 8y ago
      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.
partycoder 8y ago
An easier way: try XFCE or another GTK based desktop environment.
JepZ 8y ago
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 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade
- onosendai 8y ago
  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.
rullopat 8y ago
I don't understand what's the need to go on with this (probably unstable) path. I would rather try XFCE or LXQt before trying this.
- matthiasv 8y ago
  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 …
lucabs 8y ago
Budgie Desktop is GNOME as it should be
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mhd 8y ago
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).
locusm 8y ago
I'm very happy on a new T480S running Pop_OS - if any System76 devs pass by here - thanks!
jeena 8y ago
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.
- bittermang 8y ago
  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.
  - nvarsj 8y ago
    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.
    - SkyMarshal 8y ago
      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. [1]:https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives [2]:http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man8/update-alternatives.8.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man8/update-alte...
      - nvarsj 8y ago
        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.
synack 8y ago
Evan I love you
conatus 8y ago
Perhaps tangential but does anyone know if you can run Ableton Live on Linux using some emulation layer? This is maybe the one piece of software keeping me from ditching Mac OS X.
- milkmiruku 8y ago
  Here's a current thread regarding Ableton Live registration via Wine - https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=18590 https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=18590 - apparently it's not the easiest. Alternatively, Bitwig runs natively, though costs. It's about the only native software that does the clip launching style of production/performance well.
teekert 8y ago
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.
- callahad 8y ago
  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.
  - teekert 8y ago
    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...)
Zardoz84 8y ago
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.
- c3833174 8y ago
  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.
  - Zardoz84 8y ago
    I find that the GNOME way of doing this, need a lot more of work that simply doing : Preferences -> "Change stuff here"
phkahler 8y ago
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.
- peatmoss 8y ago
  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.
hawski 8y ago
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.
FrozenVoid 8y ago
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.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  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.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  If such a daemon does not use cycles unless called out to, then the only problem is that it's one more attack vector. Oh wait.
  - nisa 8y ago
    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.
sverige 8y ago
> 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?
catern 8y ago
There's an easier way than using dconf dump twice and looking at the diff: You can use dconf watch. http://catern.com/2014/12/21/plain-text-configuration-gnome.html http://catern.com/2014/12/21/plain-text-configuration-gnome....
alex_duf 8y ago
If anyone uses gnome and github, and happens to follow their github notifications I made that: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1125/github-notifications/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1125/github-notificat... source code: https://github.com/alexduf/gnome-github-notifications https://github.com/alexduf/gnome-github-notifications
johnchristopher 8y ago
I refuse to believe this is not satirical. "I have few new needs. Gnome is cool. I store my config in ansible.".
luord 8y ago
I agree on a lot of things, but not on the extensions, I have about a dozen installed that make my desktop much more organized and snappier to use. Also don't understand the uninstalling totem part, then again I watch a lot of movies.
celerity 8y ago
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...
dsr_ 8y ago
That was an awful lot of work compared with "install XFCE".
zeveb 8y ago
> … 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. 0: https://stumpwm.github.io/ https://stumpwm.github.io/
mixmastamyk 8y ago
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.
- lokedhs 8y ago
  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.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Thought emacs used Ctrl? 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.
    - lokedhs 8y ago
      Emacs uses Control and Meta. That makes Super a very useful key to map custom functions to.
      - mixmastamyk 8y ago
        Mine still works, just the bare key press that opens the start menu.
brightball 8y ago
Article gave me a strong desire to start managing my desktop with Ansible...
- bbeck 8y ago
  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.
Aelius 8y ago
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.
- Spivak 8y ago
  GNOME Software is a frontend to a lot of things: flatpak repos, your system package manager, GNOME extensions, firmware updates.
ulises314 8y ago
100% on the same boat as the opening statment, but he lost me at "systemd".
auslander 8y ago
> 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. But article is real good!
everybodyknows 8y ago
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. To expose the actions of `dconf`: $ strace -f -e trace=network,ipc,process,write dconf ... $ file $HOME/.config/dconf/user To begin to understand some of the dynamics that have shaped GNOME: https://www.gnome.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/GAR2016-web.pdf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945871 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/
amaccuish 8y ago
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.
SkyMarshal 8y ago
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. https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/ https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala

225 points by deafcalculus 8y ago

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.

pjmlp 8y ago
And UI/UX designers work happily and feel welcome on Windows and Mac OS systems, which are what everyone non-technical buys anyway.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  > 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.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    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.
    - ahartmetz 8y ago
      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.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        True, I was speaking about the desktop users, not GNOME and KDE developers.
    - chriswarbo 8y ago
      As a happy XMonad user I can certainly appreciate that it's not for everyone ;)
  - magduf 8y ago
    If a project is too toxic, there's nothing stopping you from forking it and making your own version. Just look at Cinnamon and MATE. Can't do that with commercial software.
forkerenok 8y ago
I think you are spot on with your later point about availability of choice making people less happy/productive. I myself do jump from one DE to another every other year. But that's more out of curiosity.
Brometheus 8y ago
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.
- foepys 8y ago
  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.
- finchisko 8y ago
  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. https://gist.github.com/mauron85/5f4b640aa4e5e968e0496ac5a0878715 https://gist.github.com/mauron85/5f4b640aa4e5e968e0496ac5a08...
  - Shoue 8y ago
    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 https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      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.
MikkoFinell 8y ago
I'm satisfied with Cinnamon. If any dev happens to read this: thank you and keep up the good work, it's appreciated.
- maurom 8y ago
  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]. Cinnamon devs: Thank you! [1] https://maurom.com/blog/2017/07/04/ https://maurom.com/blog/2017/07/04/
flukus 8y ago
> 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.
- gcthomas 8y ago
  Yes, spartan and effective I3 for work, and shiny Gnome for the family machine. There is never only going to be one best solution, as that depends critically on the problem you are trying to solve.
- zrobotics 8y ago
  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.
chriswarbo 8y ago
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.
stinos 8y ago
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?
JepZ 8y ago
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).
yAnonymous 8y ago
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.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  I share this opinion. It's "trying to be Mac OSX simple" (but failing)
robocat 8y ago
> 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].

keyle 8y ago

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, since I last tried it.

ISL 8y ago
Welcome back!
tumdum_ 8y ago
Wait ~6 months, and you will encounter a case where simple package update will cost you more than that 45 minutes ;)
- taneq 8y ago
  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.
  - John_KZ 8y ago
    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.
  - tumdum_ 8y ago
    Migration of many distros to systemd forced many people to do exactly that ;)
    - Accacin 8y ago
      Did it? I must have missed that.

dajonker 8y ago

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.

yani 8y ago

It is a bit of controversal article. There is need for 2 applications a terminal and a browser. Why do you need gnome for that?

DocTomoe 8y ago
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.
- yani 8y ago
  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.
  - xelxebar 8y ago
    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. [1]: https://uzbl.org https://uzbl.org
    - yani 8y ago
      uzbl looks interesting. Thanks for sharing
- mseidl 8y ago
  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.

reshie 8y ago

it's simplified to a fault. it is also too complex to a fault. basically when you want to do something it does get in the way.

kbenson 8y ago

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.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

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

sampo 8y ago
How does Mate do with: Connecting and disconnecting projectors and external displays on the fly? HiDPI displays?
- alxlaz 8y ago
  > 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.

beguiledfoil 8y ago

If you want something this simple just use sway...

lsh 8y ago
this Sway? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sway https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sway

8fingerlouie 8y ago

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.

kchr 8y ago
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.

zaarn 8y ago

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...

JamesMcMinn 8y ago

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.

amiga-workbench 8y ago
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!
- brusch64 8y ago
  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).
  - NoGravitas 8y ago
    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.

partycoder 8y ago

An easier way: try XFCE or another GTK based desktop environment.

JepZ 8y ago

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 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade

onosendai 8y ago
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.

rullopat 8y ago

I don't understand what's the need to go on with this (probably unstable) path. I would rather try XFCE or LXQt before trying this.

matthiasv 8y ago
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 …

lucabs 8y ago

Budgie Desktop is GNOME as it should be

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mhd 8y ago

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).

locusm 8y ago

I'm very happy on a new T480S running Pop_OS - if any System76 devs pass by here - thanks!

jeena 8y ago

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.

bittermang 8y ago
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.
- nvarsj 8y ago
  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.
  - SkyMarshal 8y ago
    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. [1]:https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives [2]:http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man8/update-alternatives.8.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man8/update-alte...
    - nvarsj 8y ago
      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.

synack 8y ago

Evan I love you

conatus 8y ago

Perhaps tangential but does anyone know if you can run Ableton Live on Linux using some emulation layer? This is maybe the one piece of software keeping me from ditching Mac OS X.

milkmiruku 8y ago
Here's a current thread regarding Ableton Live registration via Wine - https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=18590 https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=18590 - apparently it's not the easiest. Alternatively, Bitwig runs natively, though costs. It's about the only native software that does the clip launching style of production/performance well.

teekert 8y ago

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.

callahad 8y ago
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.
- teekert 8y ago
  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...)

Zardoz84 8y ago

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.

c3833174 8y ago
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.
- Zardoz84 8y ago
  I find that the GNOME way of doing this, need a lot more of work that simply doing : Preferences -> "Change stuff here"

phkahler 8y ago

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.

peatmoss 8y ago
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.

hawski 8y ago

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.

FrozenVoid 8y ago

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.

digi_owl 8y ago
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.
cryptonector 8y ago
If such a daemon does not use cycles unless called out to, then the only problem is that it's one more attack vector. Oh wait.
- nisa 8y ago
  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.

sverige 8y ago

> 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?

catern 8y ago

There's an easier way than using dconf dump twice and looking at the diff: You can use dconf watch. http://catern.com/2014/12/21/plain-text-configuration-gnome.html http://catern.com/2014/12/21/plain-text-configuration-gnome....

alex_duf 8y ago

If anyone uses gnome and github, and happens to follow their github notifications I made that: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1125/github-notifications/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1125/github-notificat... source code: https://github.com/alexduf/gnome-github-notifications https://github.com/alexduf/gnome-github-notifications

johnchristopher 8y ago

I refuse to believe this is not satirical. "I have few new needs. Gnome is cool. I store my config in ansible.".

luord 8y ago

I agree on a lot of things, but not on the extensions, I have about a dozen installed that make my desktop much more organized and snappier to use. Also don't understand the uninstalling totem part, then again I watch a lot of movies.

celerity 8y ago

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...

dsr_ 8y ago

That was an awful lot of work compared with "install XFCE".

zeveb 8y ago

> … 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. 0: https://stumpwm.github.io/ https://stumpwm.github.io/

mixmastamyk 8y ago

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.

lokedhs 8y ago
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.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Thought emacs used Ctrl? 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.
  - lokedhs 8y ago
    Emacs uses Control and Meta. That makes Super a very useful key to map custom functions to.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Mine still works, just the bare key press that opens the start menu.

brightball 8y ago

Article gave me a strong desire to start managing my desktop with Ansible...

bbeck 8y ago
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.

Aelius 8y ago

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.

Spivak 8y ago
GNOME Software is a frontend to a lot of things: flatpak repos, your system package manager, GNOME extensions, firmware updates.

ulises314 8y ago

100% on the same boat as the opening statment, but he lost me at "systemd".

auslander 8y ago

> 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. But article is real good!

everybodyknows 8y ago

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. To expose the actions of `dconf`: $ strace -f -e trace=network,ipc,process,write dconf ... $ file $HOME/.config/dconf/user To begin to understand some of the dynamics that have shaped GNOME: https://www.gnome.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/GAR2016-web.pdf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945871 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/

amaccuish 8y ago

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.

SkyMarshal 8y ago

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. https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/ https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala