5 ms·

I've only been using desktop Linux for 15 years, but it is vastly easier to use it as a daily driver than it used to be. It still has its problems--just yesterd

I've only been using desktop Linux for 15 years, but it is vastly easier to use it as a daily driver than it used to be. It still has its problems--just yesterday I sunk an hour into an elusive bug. But when I was doing that, I remembered that such things used to be nearly constant and aren't any longer.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
iforgotpassword 5y ago
As an i3 user, basically going without a DE, I recently tried to breathe new life into an old core 2 duo laptop that was in very good shape and basically just used to browse the web and play spider solitaire. It was on Windows 7, and I don't think upgrading to 10 would have been worth it with that CPU and 2gb of RAM. I picked Debian, and put the different DEs through its paces. I started with those that should have been more lightweight, but ultimately found that only kde of all things gave an acceptable user experience while not feeling overly slow. I don't remember which was which, I tried mate, cinnamon, lxqt And maybe something else I'm forgetting now. One of them was really slow to react to the multimedia keys, and then would appear to buffer the keystrokes from the key repeat like it's the MS-DOS days, ie you press brightness up, nothing happens, so you hold the key, and when it finally starts adjusting the brightness you immediately let go of the key but it still goes on and on to maximum brightness. Then another one couldn't be convinced to behave in a consistent way when it comes to screen brightness wrt (un)plugging mains power and using the brightness keys. It was something like: unplug, screen goes brighter as I manually adjusted it way down before on mains power (sitting in dark room), and the default setting for battery happened to be higher. Annoying but ok, but then if you touch the brightness controls again it first goes up again and then very low and whatnot. Like, there might be some very clever intentions behind this that I didn't catch right there, but then I doubt the non-tech-savby person this was intended for would get what kind of 4D chess magic was going on there. It just felt like it was spazzing around. Then the third one installed and had all its icons missing and the font rendered way too large. That's just the three most blatant issues I ran into. Installed KDE last and everything was sane and usable, to my surprise. Granted, some of the issues, especially the icon/font one are probably just packaging mistakes on debians side; I don't know how often people really install multiple DEs in parallel, so this might be untested territory, but still, showed me once again that as much as I like Linux, I'm never gonna claim it's the year of the Linux desktop for probably another decade, and only would encourage curious tinkery friends to actually try Linux as a daily driver if they do more than just browse the web, and then probably never use anything besides KDE or Gnome 3 at least for a start.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  KDE is amazing, as in I am constantly amazed by how good it is. Don't forget to donate to free software projects that make your life better!
- fsflover 5y ago
  You should try xfce.
  - iforgotpassword 5y ago
    I think that was among them now that you mention it.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  I agree. I've used Mint since Daryna and since version 19 it has not worked on my older, but still quite good laptops. A similar issue with having to choose between dual monitors or having brightness buttons working. It's a shame, since it has always "just worked" for me, unless I was doing something complicated. And this is for a very beginner friendly distro.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
SyzygistSix 5y ago
I find it harder to understand internally though. Maybe I just have not kept up, but it seems that since SystemD was added, the additional complexity is significant.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

iforgotpassword 5y ago

As an i3 user, basically going without a DE, I recently tried to breathe new life into an old core 2 duo laptop that was in very good shape and basically just used to browse the web and play spider solitaire. It was on Windows 7, and I don't think upgrading to 10 would have been worth it with that CPU and 2gb of RAM. I picked Debian, and put the different DEs through its paces. I started with those that should have been more lightweight, but ultimately found that only kde of all things gave an acceptable user experience while not feeling overly slow. I don't remember which was which, I tried mate, cinnamon, lxqt And maybe something else I'm forgetting now. One of them was really slow to react to the multimedia keys, and then would appear to buffer the keystrokes from the key repeat like it's the MS-DOS days, ie you press brightness up, nothing happens, so you hold the key, and when it finally starts adjusting the brightness you immediately let go of the key but it still goes on and on to maximum brightness. Then another one couldn't be convinced to behave in a consistent way when it comes to screen brightness wrt (un)plugging mains power and using the brightness keys. It was something like: unplug, screen goes brighter as I manually adjusted it way down before on mains power (sitting in dark room), and the default setting for battery happened to be higher. Annoying but ok, but then if you touch the brightness controls again it first goes up again and then very low and whatnot. Like, there might be some very clever intentions behind this that I didn't catch right there, but then I doubt the non-tech-savby person this was intended for would get what kind of 4D chess magic was going on there. It just felt like it was spazzing around. Then the third one installed and had all its icons missing and the font rendered way too large. That's just the three most blatant issues I ran into. Installed KDE last and everything was sane and usable, to my surprise. Granted, some of the issues, especially the icon/font one are probably just packaging mistakes on debians side; I don't know how often people really install multiple DEs in parallel, so this might be untested territory, but still, showed me once again that as much as I like Linux, I'm never gonna claim it's the year of the Linux desktop for probably another decade, and only would encourage curious tinkery friends to actually try Linux as a daily driver if they do more than just browse the web, and then probably never use anything besides KDE or Gnome 3 at least for a start.

nerdponx 5y ago
KDE is amazing, as in I am constantly amazed by how good it is. Don't forget to donate to free software projects that make your life better!
fsflover 5y ago
You should try xfce.
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  I think that was among them now that you mention it.
SyzygistSix 5y ago
I agree. I've used Mint since Daryna and since version 19 it has not worked on my older, but still quite good laptops. A similar issue with having to choose between dual monitors or having brightness buttons working. It's a shame, since it has always "just worked" for me, unless I was doing something complicated. And this is for a very beginner friendly distro.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

SyzygistSix 5y ago

I find it harder to understand internally though. Maybe I just have not kept up, but it seems that since SystemD was added, the additional complexity is significant.