5 ms·

Having a modular desktop environment kind of loses its purpose if a module (theme, extension) can bring the entire user session down. Just this week, me upgrad

by r3bl 8y ago

Having a modular desktop environment kind of loses its purpose if a module (theme, extension) can bring the entire user session down. Just this week, me upgrading a GNOME extension resulted in the user session completely crashing, getting me back to the login screen, and making me lose about half an hour of work. Now, of course, I could put the blame on the sole developer that developed that specific extension (one of the preinstalled ones in Ubuntu now), but I don't. I blame GNOME that a botched extension update lead to the entire session crashing, instead of doing something normal (like reverting to the previous version and showing "update failed").

zzzcpan 8y ago
This fragility is architectural though and possibly even cultural now. People who promote gnome and make decisions adopting it for mainstream distros somehow believe that such poor level of quality is acceptable. It's how systemd got into mainstream too.
- jchw 8y ago
  Redhat has killed the Linux desktop with this kind of mentality. No matter what I do, things are broken nowadays. Wayland was broken promises; most of the same issues exist in Wayland still, except now sometimes pasting crashes my desktop, and I can't take screenshots without the compositor's permission. Systemd actually delivered on some of its promises, but not without some brutal side-effects. Same for PulseAudio really. I don't like using Linux anymore as I did before all of this stuff became basically mandatory. We did all of this refactoring, rebuilding, and yet... Where's heterogeneous graphics card support? Where's heterogeneous DPI support? Why does multiple desktops still suck? Even using all open source drivers, Linux feels dated and immature at the same time :( I miss feeling like it was ahead of Windows.
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    RH management basically do not care, because most of this happens in Fedora. With RHEL, RH basically snapshots whatever churn that is happening in the larger Linux ecosystem, and maintains said snapshot for a decade or more.
    - keithpeter 8y ago
      RHEL 7 is seeing changes in the DE version (Gnome 3.8 to 3.22) and other library changes within the 10 year support period so not frozen as much as RHEL 6. Swings and roundabouts.
  - bonzini 8y ago
    Heterogenous DPI is years ahead in Wayland than it is in Windows.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      Can you explain the architectural details behind why this is?
  - hedora 8y ago
    > I don't like using Linux anymore as I did before all of this stuff became basically mandatory. Consider switching to BSD or Devuan (and donating time/money/bug-reports).
  - qplex 8y ago
    I haven't used RedHat since they started to charge for it. Fedora 27 was ok. I think Linux generally works on the desktop. It's true that GNOME 3 is still buggy. I've had Nautilus crash on me while copying files and other horrible things. Wayland hardly has any apps with native support, it crashes a lot and the hardware support sucks too. Also (afaik) applications such as Wine can never be ported to Wayland. However GNOME and Wayland are just one bleeding edge. If you run X with some stable WM or DE, things work so well it's almost boring.
    - jchw 8y ago
      Sure. If you run at 96 DPI, with a static monitor configuration, with a single GPU, no expansion cards, with English language only. However: - with multiple GPU configurations, all bets are off. - Thunderbolt docks and even the Thinkpad dock can be buggy and cause crashes. I've had a few instances of Xorg crashing on dock. - HiDPI sucks. Linux took the wrong approach from the get go. Now each Xorg client has to be DPI aware, but if it isn't, there is no graceful fallback. There's also no easy way to determine what the DPI should be, and any hopes that you can have monitors with differing DPIs is right out. Wayland tries to fix this, but in my experience so far things look blurry and horrible. - IME sucks really badly. It almost was good for a bit, with IBus. But now I don't even know what the standard is or how to configure it. How do I even get Japanese IME in KDE? I can get it working in GNOME but good luck getting that to work with apps that don't use GTK. - Sleep is still complicated. There are multiple DBus APIs for power management, and they're not compatible. GNOME does OK here. KDE does worse, and I find myself needing custom code to inhibit sleep in some circumstances. Not user friendly, though workable for me. - Resume is more complicated. - It feels like boot splashes have only gotten worse since the old days. Entering in LUKS keys is still weirdly unfriendly, especially if your boot splash misbehaves. - X11 has security issues. No shock there, but it makes application isolation like Snap and Flatpak pointless. - Audio can be tricky. I was a PulseAudio early adopter and like it better than raw ALSA since it covers more use cases like Bluetooth and provides some extra features. That being said I've found it can be problematic on a lot of hardware, sometimes I lose audio until I kill pulse and it's hard to debug. Worse, lately some apps are having difficulty selecting their own input/output devices, making conference calls a nightmare. This is really just the beginning. Windows sucks too, don't get me wrong, but Linux is definitely not "so stable it hurts"
  - dsign 8y ago
    Ubuntu works well enough, with a lower number of desktop crashes of what I had in 2004. Fancy? No. Stable and robust? hardly, for other desktop standards anyway, but sort of, by Linux standards.... if you can dismiss the graphics card not registering after hibernation, and that will be for at least one decade now. I relinquished hope a long time ago... Still, Ubuntu beats the user-experience I get in other operating systems, which all seem to include a perfectly working driver for a well hidden pheromone sensor that triggers OS updates at the worst possible moment, sometimes after showing annoying pop-ups that can't be tucked away without going through an agonizing martyrdom of clicks and dialogs.
  - billfruit 8y ago
    In general though driver support may be a tad better in linux than windows for sometime now, because of the huge gamut of drivers now part of the kernel, so most devices are supported by default, whereas in windows it is quite common still to have to download drivers for ethernet cards, printers etc.
  - renox 8y ago
    Funny I agree that Wayland has issues but not for the same reason as you: if you allow any application to take a screenshot if any application is compromised, so this restriction by default is normal, Wayland devs focus on CSD isn't normal though especially as it's a security issue: it prevents distribution such as Qubes OS to sow graphical security level
- greenhouse_gas 8y ago
  Why is gnome still the de-facto default DM? Is it just that gnome 2 was great, so gnome 3 (despite practically a new project with a new goal) inherited that position? And not just RedHat. I would expect Debian to ship with Cinnamon or xfce as the default.
  - spiritcat 8y ago
    na everyone uses mate now
  - Avshalom 8y ago
    Gtk became "the default" because Qt had some dual licensing weirdness until qt3/qt4 (I didn't pay that much attention so don't quote me) and by that time several fundamental projects like Firefox, gimp(of course) and OpenOffice (koffice took until like ~09 to get production ready) had established gtk as the primary Linux toolkit Gnome just follows on because the gtk team is a very purple Venn diagram with the gnome team (at least for paid developers)
vetinari 8y ago
You see, the entire theme engine rework was to increase the stability of the framework. Injecting random theme code, as it done with Gtk2, does wonders to application stability. Not in a positive way, though.
johnchristopher 8y ago
Per curiosity, is the guilty extension a pomodoro app ?

by r3bl 8y ago

zzzcpan 8y ago

This fragility is architectural though and possibly even cultural now. People who promote gnome and make decisions adopting it for mainstream distros somehow believe that such poor level of quality is acceptable. It's how systemd got into mainstream too.

jchw 8y ago
Redhat has killed the Linux desktop with this kind of mentality. No matter what I do, things are broken nowadays. Wayland was broken promises; most of the same issues exist in Wayland still, except now sometimes pasting crashes my desktop, and I can't take screenshots without the compositor's permission. Systemd actually delivered on some of its promises, but not without some brutal side-effects. Same for PulseAudio really. I don't like using Linux anymore as I did before all of this stuff became basically mandatory. We did all of this refactoring, rebuilding, and yet... Where's heterogeneous graphics card support? Where's heterogeneous DPI support? Why does multiple desktops still suck? Even using all open source drivers, Linux feels dated and immature at the same time :( I miss feeling like it was ahead of Windows.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  RH management basically do not care, because most of this happens in Fedora. With RHEL, RH basically snapshots whatever churn that is happening in the larger Linux ecosystem, and maintains said snapshot for a decade or more.
  - keithpeter 8y ago
    RHEL 7 is seeing changes in the DE version (Gnome 3.8 to 3.22) and other library changes within the 10 year support period so not frozen as much as RHEL 6. Swings and roundabouts.
- bonzini 8y ago
  Heterogenous DPI is years ahead in Wayland than it is in Windows.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    Can you explain the architectural details behind why this is?
- hedora 8y ago
  > I don't like using Linux anymore as I did before all of this stuff became basically mandatory. Consider switching to BSD or Devuan (and donating time/money/bug-reports).
- qplex 8y ago
  I haven't used RedHat since they started to charge for it. Fedora 27 was ok. I think Linux generally works on the desktop. It's true that GNOME 3 is still buggy. I've had Nautilus crash on me while copying files and other horrible things. Wayland hardly has any apps with native support, it crashes a lot and the hardware support sucks too. Also (afaik) applications such as Wine can never be ported to Wayland. However GNOME and Wayland are just one bleeding edge. If you run X with some stable WM or DE, things work so well it's almost boring.
  - jchw 8y ago
    Sure. If you run at 96 DPI, with a static monitor configuration, with a single GPU, no expansion cards, with English language only. However: - with multiple GPU configurations, all bets are off. - Thunderbolt docks and even the Thinkpad dock can be buggy and cause crashes. I've had a few instances of Xorg crashing on dock. - HiDPI sucks. Linux took the wrong approach from the get go. Now each Xorg client has to be DPI aware, but if it isn't, there is no graceful fallback. There's also no easy way to determine what the DPI should be, and any hopes that you can have monitors with differing DPIs is right out. Wayland tries to fix this, but in my experience so far things look blurry and horrible. - IME sucks really badly. It almost was good for a bit, with IBus. But now I don't even know what the standard is or how to configure it. How do I even get Japanese IME in KDE? I can get it working in GNOME but good luck getting that to work with apps that don't use GTK. - Sleep is still complicated. There are multiple DBus APIs for power management, and they're not compatible. GNOME does OK here. KDE does worse, and I find myself needing custom code to inhibit sleep in some circumstances. Not user friendly, though workable for me. - Resume is more complicated. - It feels like boot splashes have only gotten worse since the old days. Entering in LUKS keys is still weirdly unfriendly, especially if your boot splash misbehaves. - X11 has security issues. No shock there, but it makes application isolation like Snap and Flatpak pointless. - Audio can be tricky. I was a PulseAudio early adopter and like it better than raw ALSA since it covers more use cases like Bluetooth and provides some extra features. That being said I've found it can be problematic on a lot of hardware, sometimes I lose audio until I kill pulse and it's hard to debug. Worse, lately some apps are having difficulty selecting their own input/output devices, making conference calls a nightmare. This is really just the beginning. Windows sucks too, don't get me wrong, but Linux is definitely not "so stable it hurts"
- dsign 8y ago
  Ubuntu works well enough, with a lower number of desktop crashes of what I had in 2004. Fancy? No. Stable and robust? hardly, for other desktop standards anyway, but sort of, by Linux standards.... if you can dismiss the graphics card not registering after hibernation, and that will be for at least one decade now. I relinquished hope a long time ago... Still, Ubuntu beats the user-experience I get in other operating systems, which all seem to include a perfectly working driver for a well hidden pheromone sensor that triggers OS updates at the worst possible moment, sometimes after showing annoying pop-ups that can't be tucked away without going through an agonizing martyrdom of clicks and dialogs.
- billfruit 8y ago
  In general though driver support may be a tad better in linux than windows for sometime now, because of the huge gamut of drivers now part of the kernel, so most devices are supported by default, whereas in windows it is quite common still to have to download drivers for ethernet cards, printers etc.
- renox 8y ago
  Funny I agree that Wayland has issues but not for the same reason as you: if you allow any application to take a screenshot if any application is compromised, so this restriction by default is normal, Wayland devs focus on CSD isn't normal though especially as it's a security issue: it prevents distribution such as Qubes OS to sow graphical security level
greenhouse_gas 8y ago
Why is gnome still the de-facto default DM? Is it just that gnome 2 was great, so gnome 3 (despite practically a new project with a new goal) inherited that position? And not just RedHat. I would expect Debian to ship with Cinnamon or xfce as the default.
- spiritcat 8y ago
  na everyone uses mate now
- Avshalom 8y ago
  Gtk became "the default" because Qt had some dual licensing weirdness until qt3/qt4 (I didn't pay that much attention so don't quote me) and by that time several fundamental projects like Firefox, gimp(of course) and OpenOffice (koffice took until like ~09 to get production ready) had established gtk as the primary Linux toolkit Gnome just follows on because the gtk team is a very purple Venn diagram with the gnome team (at least for paid developers)

vetinari 8y ago

You see, the entire theme engine rework was to increase the stability of the framework. Injecting random theme code, as it done with Gtk2, does wonders to application stability. Not in a positive way, though.

johnchristopher 8y ago

Per curiosity, is the guilty extension a pomodoro app ?