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> or poorly designed desktops made by people who obviously don't use them. Do you mean the design part or the coding part? From my limited experience desktops
by simion314 7y ago
> or poorly designed desktops made by people who obviously don't use them.
Do you mean the design part or the coding part? From my limited experience desktops are made by contributors and volunteers work on whatever affects them the most or some might work on cool stuff. It is what it is, without someone with money hiring a large dev team and foucssing on user tickets it will never change. As a developer I prefer something customizable like KDE where I can fix a crash in an app if I hit it over a Windows like experience where important apps like the screen magnifier had hard coded shortcuts and you could not customize them.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoBeing able to recompile from source to change hardcoded values isn't actually any better in my opinion. Especially given how much of a pain it can be to get a build environment set up for many projects.
- cycloptic 7y agoYou might want to look at something like GNOME Builder, which is designed to make it easy to contribute to existing projects and will clone the project and setup the build environment for you.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoI'd rather just use software that isn't so inept or controlling as to hardcode values in the first place. Probably why I don't use GNOME.
- cycloptic 7y agoAll software has to hardcode something at some point, this is unavoidable. I don't use GNOME either, but they do make it very easy for newcomers to contribute and to change anything they want. It's open source after all, the control is in the hands of the user.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago> It's open source after all, the control is in the hands of the user. That's true of proprietary software to roughly the same extent: if I don't like how things are I am free to make my own or just not use it.
- cycloptic 7y agoI don't follow. In my experience setting up a build environment and changing a couple lines of code provides a lot more control (and is a lot easier) than rewriting the whole thing from scratch or ditching it entirely for something else. If your distro's package manager supports source builds then you probably don't even need to use tools like GNOME Builder to make quick modifications.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoIf you find setting up a build environment to change a few lines of code more reasonable than switching to software that wasn't so boneheaded as to hardcode the value in the first place, then good for you I guess. I personally don't have much patience for it.
- cycloptic 7y agoThere is no need to set up a build environment. GNOME Builder does it for you, for GNOME packages. For other packages, on my distro (Debian) the package manager does it for you. It's 4-5 commands to download dependencies, download source, rebuild and reinstall ANY package. Comparatively, the cost of switching can vary wildly depending on the software and available alternatives.
- simion314 7y agoI know, but for me accessibility tools are a must, if needed I will compile, use wine or write my own because i need them. But from my experience (with KDE at least) you can customize every keyboard shortcut with a GUI and I could submit patches for issues I found and fixed. If you use a distribution like Debian or ubuntu then installing the required development libraries and rebuilding a package is simple enough in most cases. I understand why compiling sucks though and this is why I am considering to use Python for a program I want to make and open source despite the fact I dislike it's syntax.
- MisterTea 7y agoBoth. glibc... No. And without boring you with anecdote I can sum it up by saying: Linux DE's feel like cheap Windows XP or OSX knockoffs. What's worse is every DE and their forks have their own duplicate DE companion programs such as explorer and notepad clones. I liken them to a Potemkin village; well polished but once you start looking behind things...
- cycloptic 7y agoIf your complaint is that you dislike clones of Windows and Mac, then the combination of tiling window manager, shell, tmux, and vim/emacs is usable and provides an experience that is completely different from those other operating systems. That didn't go away on Linux. There is also plan9port too.
- spease 7y agoNo, the problem is that people keep reinventing the wheel over and over again, instead of picking one app and improving it so that their efforts are cumulative.