6 ms·

Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. It's explicitly designed to be boring and not very customizable so that delicate users

Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. It's explicitly designed to be boring and not very customizable so that delicate users don't get scared. I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind. You don't need to go scary tiling WM, Xfce probably works well, it's been years since I last used it. If apt is out of date that's probably because you're using a stable rather than rolling release distro. All of this requires some research and tinkering. If you're me, you prefer research to being told what to do.

taurath 7y ago
I tend to feel like there’s already enough roadblocks in the way to get things done. I used to tinker around with my OSs but now I want them out of the way to a large extent.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Unfortunately no-one provides what I consider to be a sane default. I'm fairly happy with what I have. I add the odd alias to my dotfiles and a few things I pick up but for the most part I've had my config for half a decade or so now. By contrast I could never figure out how to like, get Windows to fuck off with the telemetry ads bullshit. It always felt like I would disable it and then behind my back some randoservice would enable it again or install an update that brings back OneDrive or some madness. The best bit about my Linux setup is that it's all just files. Home folder, few flat text files with the odd bit of json, we're home.
  - furst 7y ago
    For what it's worth, I've had a lot of success with the Tron script[1] for getting rid of Windows Bloat. It disables a ton of garbage via Registry Keys which windows is much less likely to overwrite. It can be a little aggressive on some stuff like blocking your microphone from working in any app (easily fixable) but I'd rather have it that way than having to uninstall Candy Crush once a week. [1]https://github.com/bmrf/tron https://github.com/bmrf/tron
- snagglegaggle 7y ago
  Stating it that way makes it seem like you're opposed to learning something new. That's fine, but a lot of people including GP just looked once and never did anything else.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    Frankly, yes, I'm opposed to learning new tools when the old tools I used for the same task did the task just as well. Knowledge is power, so learning should increase your power. If learning is necessary to just keep being able to do the same things you were doing, you're not increasing your power, you're struggling to stay where you are.
  - taurath 7y ago
    I’m not. However, I can’t keep going back to square one. I need problems I’ve solved to remain solved, not have to jump into X configs in Vim because my monitor layout won’t stay between sessions (random example from many years ago). I have 5 hours of work to do today, I’d like to not spend 2 of them in man files “learning” about an abstraction I can’t afford to be digging into right now.
- tomxor 7y ago
  > I used to tinker around with my OSs but now I want them out of the way to a large extent. This might seem counter intuitive, but configuring your own desktop kinda achieves "out of the way" on Linux... it gives you something persistent and reliable, it's a worthwhile investment. Like the parent, I use i3wm, it might seem a bit too spartan at first, but that's part of the beauty... less to configure, less gui in the way, less opinions, config a single text file, defaults are sane! I have hardly changed anything beyond my initial dot file setup about 5 years ago, yet have taken them through many desktop installs without any messing around. Also configuring your desktop is not the same as Linux in 2000, you don't need to sift through thousands of lines of x11 config. Just pick the bits of desktop you like and stick it in a shell script, copy some config files here and there that you deem worthwhile configuring (smaller DEs or WM make this a far more minimal tasks than the big all signing all dancing KDEs and Gnomes). ... it's a small investment in time to pay for sanity and persistent experience over many years, the macOS days I could not bear the random changes pushed on users which became more and more heavy handed towards later versions. TL:DR I like my custom configured linux desktop... because of how it prevents me from having to continually configure my desktop.
edoceo 7y ago
Xfce still works well, I just upgraded from 4.12 to 4.14. The only thing that broke on upgrade was the desktop background - I had to reset it to black
- sdenton4 7y ago
  Agree! I've been using XFCE for many years, after deciding that Gnome wasn't actually pretty enough to justify all the extra pain. For me, window managers are mostly just a convenient way to arrange a baroque collection of web browsers and terminals... Occasionally, I use file organization/navigation or a couple other programs that are helpful in my job. But ultimately, I just need a minimal window manager that gets the hell out of the way. (in fact, after setting up awesome rotating Moebius wallpapers, I mostly don't see them, as they're almost entirely buried under the web browsers and terminals.)
woah 7y ago
Most people have far better things to do than getting into a tinkering rabbit hole to enable basic desktop functionality.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Right. So use Mac, and go for a nice walk outside whenever something pisses you off that is unmodifiable. You have the free time since you're not tinkering, right? :P
  - drclau 7y ago
    You assume that everyone wants to modify everything (or the unmodifiable, as you put it). After going through many years of FreeBSD and Linux, I now just want things to work. Mac gives me that. Should have switched sooner.
    - rbanffy 7y ago
      There was a time I fine tuned every aspect of every desktop environment I had. I had custom widgets on Windows 3 by replacing bitmap resources in Windows 3.1's SVGA.DRV. Did the same up until Gnome 2. Then I stopped. These days rarely go beyond setting terminal font (I built mine, so it's only fair I play lab rat with it) and some Emacs settings. The effort spent in customizing every detail of every app is very rarely, if ever, recovered. I feel a bit embarrassed I recently added overline support to tmux because I wanted proper overlined status lines on my terminals. In my defense, I did it for fun, not to improve my performance.
    - thedaemon 7y ago
      Everyone here saying that they used to tweak everything and now doesn't has just aged. You no longer feel the joy of your youth of computing in the same way. This is natural.
    - esotericn 7y ago
      It works for you, yes. This entire page and thread of comments exists because for someone it didn't.
rjzzleep 7y ago
I still maintain that the problem is the UI toolkits. The mac ecosystem now has _multiple_ viable indesign and photoshop alternatives. AppKit, Cocoa, UIKit and all those frameworks gradually added all the features third party app developers hacked into their own UI libraries. GTK is something developers frequently curse about and theme developers frequently abandon because the gnome team keeps breaking their themes. QT while great is nowhere near the ease of use of the cocoa frameworks and for every 20 cocoa books you find one QT book. Bottom line is, as much as you may hate Xcode it's exponentially easier to make a good looking application on a mac compared to any linux counterpart. At the end of the day, people want to use (for example) photoshop or something similar without dual booting.
- boudewijnrempt 7y ago
  And if you use the Apple toolkits, you lose around 95% of your potential market. For my project, Krita, made with Qt (not QT, Qt...), 90% of downloads are Windows, 7% Linux, 3% macOS. And since Apple seems hell-bent on making people share-croppers in their walled garden with asinine things like Metal, and notarizing and all that, well, in a year or two, it might be 0%, and I'll be fine with that.
  - klliao 7y ago
    That’s not because you have 3% macOS downloads that you can say that everyone loses around 95% potential downloads. It may simply be because your app is not marketed towards Mac users and alternatives exists.
  - dlivingston 7y ago
    Krita is great (and I happen to be one of your 3%!). Given that macOS has a reputation, deserved or not, of being the de facto OS for graphic designers, why do you think you have so relatively few Mac users?
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      90% Windows users is basically what you would expect based on its desktop market share. The interesting thing is having more than twice as many Linux users as Mac. This could be one of those places where the efficient market hypothesis is wrong because of incomplete information. The reputation of macOS for graphic designers is well known, but if the result of that is that everyone makes graphics design programs for macOS and not Linux then the macOS market gets saturated with supply and each supplier has to share the market with many competitors. Meanwhile the opposite on Linux, less competition so more volume per supplier. It implies that Linux may be a good market for graphic design software because there is currently less supply there than demand. At least until more of the suppliers figure that out and release their software for it. (But that may itself cause more graphic designers to switch to Linux, which would then still justify the porting effort even as other suppliers move there too.)
Crinus 7y ago
> Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. Windows is way WAY more customizable than Gnome 3. As an example all the issues the GP mentions are things Windows support out of the box (among many other stuff). Gnome 3 is the result of arrogant programmers pretending to be "UX designers" and act as if they were Steve Jobs without having an ounce of his skills/taste while ignoring that even Steve Jobs took advice from others.
- hanselot 7y ago
  Could you tell me the process for switching the Windows default WM to something else? Oh, there isn't one? Okay, how about switching the default file system? No? Okay, how about switching kernels? No? Come on, they must do something well. What about automating things, certainly Windows would be better at that? Serving adverts? Oh, snap, I guess Windows does do something better.
- ernst_klim 7y ago
  > Windows is way WAY more customizable than Gnome 3. What? Last time I've tried it I couldn't even set CAPSLOCK for layout switching. Even Gnome is WAY more customizable than that nonsense.
mmcnl 7y ago
Windows as a DE is quite excellent. Better than macOS even.
- rbanffy 7y ago
  Don't do that. People may spit out their coffee. ;-)
- thedaemon 7y ago
  Honestly, Windows 7 is superior in use vs MacOS.
msbarnett 7y ago
> I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind. This is the kind of hyperbole that Linux advocates like to throw around a lot, and it’s unfortunate, because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what people are asking for when they say things like “I wish there was a decent replacement for Karabiner”. i3’s config files let you bind i3’s config. That’s not the same thing at all. With Karabiner, in 3 seconds, I can have ^w bound to “delete word backwards” functionality in every single application globally. You can’t even remotely accomplish that in i3’s config by itself — you need to venture into X config files, and special gtk config files for gtk/gnome apps, and some other set of config for KDE stuff, and then after that you still have to deal with the occasional one-off app like Firefox closing a window when you went to delete a word out of force of habit, and so you get to spend time discovering yet another way to tell it to respect a key binding. And then at some point during some random update some random set of apps will break all over again. It’s a far fucking cry from Karibiner.
- CountSessine 7y ago
  I don't think that there's a general appreciation for the depth and configurability of the cocoa/nextstep text and keyboard engine among linux and windows users. Almost all macos applications use it everywhere, so globally modifying keyboard bindings in all applications in all circumstances is easy. If I want to bind Meta-f to jump a word forward, I can have that behavior in every single text box or editing region in every single application. Url bars, forms, everything! Accomplishing the same thing in linux typically means descending into the hoary netherworld of xkb mappings. <shiver/>
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    I have a tickling suspicion that if any free-software OS has any chance at replicating that sort of global unification/consistency across apps, it's Haiku. Sure, there are plenty of apps that are just straight ports from the Linux ecosystem, but there are also lots of apps written first and foremost for BeOS/Haiku (or ported to Haiku exceptionally well) and consequently feel like they "belong" just as nicely as the ones that come preinstalled.
iroeo0nd 7y ago
Surprise surprise not everyone is you. Go ahead and tinker but leave some space for others to do the same their way. It’s not “crap” it’s “not my preference” “Delicate users”. The bravado of someone getting good at organizing text really well. You’re such a mans man.
- esotericn 7y ago
  > You’re such a mans man. /flex
paulddraper 7y ago
i3 is the best thing to happen my computing in years. You'll need to copy some config if you want your volume buttons, brightness buttons, etc to work. But as far as I am concerned it is the only good Linux display manager.

taurath 7y ago

I tend to feel like there’s already enough roadblocks in the way to get things done. I used to tinker around with my OSs but now I want them out of the way to a large extent.

esotericn 7y ago
Unfortunately no-one provides what I consider to be a sane default. I'm fairly happy with what I have. I add the odd alias to my dotfiles and a few things I pick up but for the most part I've had my config for half a decade or so now. By contrast I could never figure out how to like, get Windows to fuck off with the telemetry ads bullshit. It always felt like I would disable it and then behind my back some randoservice would enable it again or install an update that brings back OneDrive or some madness. The best bit about my Linux setup is that it's all just files. Home folder, few flat text files with the odd bit of json, we're home.
- furst 7y ago
  For what it's worth, I've had a lot of success with the Tron script[1] for getting rid of Windows Bloat. It disables a ton of garbage via Registry Keys which windows is much less likely to overwrite. It can be a little aggressive on some stuff like blocking your microphone from working in any app (easily fixable) but I'd rather have it that way than having to uninstall Candy Crush once a week. [1]https://github.com/bmrf/tron https://github.com/bmrf/tron
snagglegaggle 7y ago
Stating it that way makes it seem like you're opposed to learning something new. That's fine, but a lot of people including GP just looked once and never did anything else.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  Frankly, yes, I'm opposed to learning new tools when the old tools I used for the same task did the task just as well. Knowledge is power, so learning should increase your power. If learning is necessary to just keep being able to do the same things you were doing, you're not increasing your power, you're struggling to stay where you are.
- taurath 7y ago
  I’m not. However, I can’t keep going back to square one. I need problems I’ve solved to remain solved, not have to jump into X configs in Vim because my monitor layout won’t stay between sessions (random example from many years ago). I have 5 hours of work to do today, I’d like to not spend 2 of them in man files “learning” about an abstraction I can’t afford to be digging into right now.
tomxor 7y ago
> I used to tinker around with my OSs but now I want them out of the way to a large extent. This might seem counter intuitive, but configuring your own desktop kinda achieves "out of the way" on Linux... it gives you something persistent and reliable, it's a worthwhile investment. Like the parent, I use i3wm, it might seem a bit too spartan at first, but that's part of the beauty... less to configure, less gui in the way, less opinions, config a single text file, defaults are sane! I have hardly changed anything beyond my initial dot file setup about 5 years ago, yet have taken them through many desktop installs without any messing around. Also configuring your desktop is not the same as Linux in 2000, you don't need to sift through thousands of lines of x11 config. Just pick the bits of desktop you like and stick it in a shell script, copy some config files here and there that you deem worthwhile configuring (smaller DEs or WM make this a far more minimal tasks than the big all signing all dancing KDEs and Gnomes). ... it's a small investment in time to pay for sanity and persistent experience over many years, the macOS days I could not bear the random changes pushed on users which became more and more heavy handed towards later versions. TL:DR I like my custom configured linux desktop... because of how it prevents me from having to continually configure my desktop.

edoceo 7y ago

Xfce still works well, I just upgraded from 4.12 to 4.14. The only thing that broke on upgrade was the desktop background - I had to reset it to black

sdenton4 7y ago
Agree! I've been using XFCE for many years, after deciding that Gnome wasn't actually pretty enough to justify all the extra pain. For me, window managers are mostly just a convenient way to arrange a baroque collection of web browsers and terminals... Occasionally, I use file organization/navigation or a couple other programs that are helpful in my job. But ultimately, I just need a minimal window manager that gets the hell out of the way. (in fact, after setting up awesome rotating Moebius wallpapers, I mostly don't see them, as they're almost entirely buried under the web browsers and terminals.)

woah 7y ago

Most people have far better things to do than getting into a tinkering rabbit hole to enable basic desktop functionality.

esotericn 7y ago
Right. So use Mac, and go for a nice walk outside whenever something pisses you off that is unmodifiable. You have the free time since you're not tinkering, right? :P
- drclau 7y ago
  You assume that everyone wants to modify everything (or the unmodifiable, as you put it). After going through many years of FreeBSD and Linux, I now just want things to work. Mac gives me that. Should have switched sooner.
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    There was a time I fine tuned every aspect of every desktop environment I had. I had custom widgets on Windows 3 by replacing bitmap resources in Windows 3.1's SVGA.DRV. Did the same up until Gnome 2. Then I stopped. These days rarely go beyond setting terminal font (I built mine, so it's only fair I play lab rat with it) and some Emacs settings. The effort spent in customizing every detail of every app is very rarely, if ever, recovered. I feel a bit embarrassed I recently added overline support to tmux because I wanted proper overlined status lines on my terminals. In my defense, I did it for fun, not to improve my performance.
  - thedaemon 7y ago
    Everyone here saying that they used to tweak everything and now doesn't has just aged. You no longer feel the joy of your youth of computing in the same way. This is natural.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    It works for you, yes. This entire page and thread of comments exists because for someone it didn't.

rjzzleep 7y ago

I still maintain that the problem is the UI toolkits. The mac ecosystem now has _multiple_ viable indesign and photoshop alternatives. AppKit, Cocoa, UIKit and all those frameworks gradually added all the features third party app developers hacked into their own UI libraries. GTK is something developers frequently curse about and theme developers frequently abandon because the gnome team keeps breaking their themes. QT while great is nowhere near the ease of use of the cocoa frameworks and for every 20 cocoa books you find one QT book. Bottom line is, as much as you may hate Xcode it's exponentially easier to make a good looking application on a mac compared to any linux counterpart. At the end of the day, people want to use (for example) photoshop or something similar without dual booting.

boudewijnrempt 7y ago
And if you use the Apple toolkits, you lose around 95% of your potential market. For my project, Krita, made with Qt (not QT, Qt...), 90% of downloads are Windows, 7% Linux, 3% macOS. And since Apple seems hell-bent on making people share-croppers in their walled garden with asinine things like Metal, and notarizing and all that, well, in a year or two, it might be 0%, and I'll be fine with that.
- klliao 7y ago
  That’s not because you have 3% macOS downloads that you can say that everyone loses around 95% potential downloads. It may simply be because your app is not marketed towards Mac users and alternatives exists.
- dlivingston 7y ago
  Krita is great (and I happen to be one of your 3%!). Given that macOS has a reputation, deserved or not, of being the de facto OS for graphic designers, why do you think you have so relatively few Mac users?
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    90% Windows users is basically what you would expect based on its desktop market share. The interesting thing is having more than twice as many Linux users as Mac. This could be one of those places where the efficient market hypothesis is wrong because of incomplete information. The reputation of macOS for graphic designers is well known, but if the result of that is that everyone makes graphics design programs for macOS and not Linux then the macOS market gets saturated with supply and each supplier has to share the market with many competitors. Meanwhile the opposite on Linux, less competition so more volume per supplier. It implies that Linux may be a good market for graphic design software because there is currently less supply there than demand. At least until more of the suppliers figure that out and release their software for it. (But that may itself cause more graphic designers to switch to Linux, which would then still justify the porting effort even as other suppliers move there too.)

Crinus 7y ago

> Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. Windows is way WAY more customizable than Gnome 3. As an example all the issues the GP mentions are things Windows support out of the box (among many other stuff). Gnome 3 is the result of arrogant programmers pretending to be "UX designers" and act as if they were Steve Jobs without having an ounce of his skills/taste while ignoring that even Steve Jobs took advice from others.

hanselot 7y ago
Could you tell me the process for switching the Windows default WM to something else? Oh, there isn't one? Okay, how about switching the default file system? No? Okay, how about switching kernels? No? Come on, they must do something well. What about automating things, certainly Windows would be better at that? Serving adverts? Oh, snap, I guess Windows does do something better.
ernst_klim 7y ago
> Windows is way WAY more customizable than Gnome 3. What? Last time I've tried it I couldn't even set CAPSLOCK for layout switching. Even Gnome is WAY more customizable than that nonsense.

mmcnl 7y ago

Windows as a DE is quite excellent. Better than macOS even.

rbanffy 7y ago
Don't do that. People may spit out their coffee. ;-)
thedaemon 7y ago
Honestly, Windows 7 is superior in use vs MacOS.

msbarnett 7y ago

> I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind. This is the kind of hyperbole that Linux advocates like to throw around a lot, and it’s unfortunate, because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what people are asking for when they say things like “I wish there was a decent replacement for Karabiner”. i3’s config files let you bind i3’s config. That’s not the same thing at all. With Karabiner, in 3 seconds, I can have ^w bound to “delete word backwards” functionality in every single application globally. You can’t even remotely accomplish that in i3’s config by itself — you need to venture into X config files, and special gtk config files for gtk/gnome apps, and some other set of config for KDE stuff, and then after that you still have to deal with the occasional one-off app like Firefox closing a window when you went to delete a word out of force of habit, and so you get to spend time discovering yet another way to tell it to respect a key binding. And then at some point during some random update some random set of apps will break all over again. It’s a far fucking cry from Karibiner.

CountSessine 7y ago
I don't think that there's a general appreciation for the depth and configurability of the cocoa/nextstep text and keyboard engine among linux and windows users. Almost all macos applications use it everywhere, so globally modifying keyboard bindings in all applications in all circumstances is easy. If I want to bind Meta-f to jump a word forward, I can have that behavior in every single text box or editing region in every single application. Url bars, forms, everything! Accomplishing the same thing in linux typically means descending into the hoary netherworld of xkb mappings. <shiver/>
- yellowapple 7y ago
  I have a tickling suspicion that if any free-software OS has any chance at replicating that sort of global unification/consistency across apps, it's Haiku. Sure, there are plenty of apps that are just straight ports from the Linux ecosystem, but there are also lots of apps written first and foremost for BeOS/Haiku (or ported to Haiku exceptionally well) and consequently feel like they "belong" just as nicely as the ones that come preinstalled.

iroeo0nd 7y ago

Surprise surprise not everyone is you. Go ahead and tinker but leave some space for others to do the same their way. It’s not “crap” it’s “not my preference” “Delicate users”. The bravado of someone getting good at organizing text really well. You’re such a mans man.

esotericn 7y ago
> You’re such a mans man. /flex

paulddraper 7y ago

i3 is the best thing to happen my computing in years. You'll need to copy some config if you want your volume buttons, brightness buttons, etc to work. But as far as I am concerned it is the only good Linux display manager.