4 ms·

The Linux kernel is as good as it gets, in my opinion. Desktop Linux is another story though. On one end, you have GNOME devs who try to imitate macOS without

by jbirer 4y ago

The Linux kernel is as good as it gets, in my opinion. Desktop Linux is another story though. On one end, you have GNOME devs who try to imitate macOS without the UX design knowledge and taste, and KDE that is buggy and crashes a lot. If these teams merged they could create something that will rival Windows. I guess fragmentation and lack of good desktops it is.

sallystarace 4y ago
I don't like that GNOME seems to force itself into situations as something more than a desktop environment. I mean all the extra libraries that somehow end up being dependencies in my non-GNOME system. And gconf, i.e. the Linux Registry, or whatever it has been rebranded to. Similarly, GNU Info pages when well-written man pages suffice. Split by topic - there's already a mechanism for this. I don't want to compile a basic utility like `curl` or something and then discover that somebody decided it has hard dependencies on graphical libraries and applications (even if once- or twice-removed). KDE is superb these days, after the slump that was KDE 4. However even KDE developers seem think that a tic-tac-toe game needs to have its board abstracted as libtiktaktoe in case anybody else ever needs to use it. I had thought that Wayland might be an improvement. It seems to be a regression. I recently learned that the trade-off for avoiding tearing in Wayland is increased latency compared to X11/Xorg. I don't want to care about my graphical display manager. X is not perfect, but it is tried-and-true, and it does not leave me struggling to share my screen in Zoom, or have legible fonts in my creative applications. Systemd: Binary log files. I should be able to configure my system with `sed` and `awk` scripts that easily modify text configuration files. On this note, applications should use plain text files for their data more often. For example, web browsers could use a hierarchy of text files, each representing a web page in history, or a bookmarked site. Sqlite is good, but a database is simply unnecessary in many cases, because filesystems are very optimized and perfectly useable for many cases. This encourages hacking and interoperation. I could comfortably browse through my bookmarks in a mature native file system explorer of my preference, instead of struggling with a tricky scrolling menu within a browser. If I want to change browsers or computers, there is no more export/import of links and then they get messed up anyway. DBus: I'm not sure why the same functions could not be implemented robustly as a standard structure of named pipes. SELinux: A tremendous gift so often squandered by being disabled with the global flag. Pulseaudio, Pipewire, Wireplumber.
- jraph 4y ago
  > Sqlite is good, but a database is simply unnecessary in many cases, because filesystems are very optimized and perfectly useable for many cases. This encourages hacking and interoperation. I could comfortably browse through my bookmarks in a mature native file system explorer of my preference, instead of struggling with a tricky scrolling menu within a browser SQLite is very good indeed. It's fast and offers a nice querying API. You can use SQLitebrowser if you want to browse this data outside the browser UI, and we could always have a FUSE filesystem for sqlite database if we really wanted to be able to browse this data with a file manager. Since SQLite is used everywhere, the effort would be shared. One of the many good things about SQLite is that it is (de-facto) standard, way more than regular configuration files. > Systemd: Binary log files. I should be able to configure my system with `sed` and `awk` scripts that easily modify text configuration files. Configuration files are still regular text files, and are way easier / simpler than before systemd / upstart. You are also a command away from having a text representation of the logs, and that's journalctl, which can be piped into the regular unix tools, so I have not found an actual situation where it matters.

by jbirer 4y ago

sallystarace 4y ago

I don't like that GNOME seems to force itself into situations as something more than a desktop environment. I mean all the extra libraries that somehow end up being dependencies in my non-GNOME system. And gconf, i.e. the Linux Registry, or whatever it has been rebranded to. Similarly, GNU Info pages when well-written man pages suffice. Split by topic - there's already a mechanism for this. I don't want to compile a basic utility like `curl` or something and then discover that somebody decided it has hard dependencies on graphical libraries and applications (even if once- or twice-removed). KDE is superb these days, after the slump that was KDE 4. However even KDE developers seem think that a tic-tac-toe game needs to have its board abstracted as libtiktaktoe in case anybody else ever needs to use it. I had thought that Wayland might be an improvement. It seems to be a regression. I recently learned that the trade-off for avoiding tearing in Wayland is increased latency compared to X11/Xorg. I don't want to care about my graphical display manager. X is not perfect, but it is tried-and-true, and it does not leave me struggling to share my screen in Zoom, or have legible fonts in my creative applications. Systemd: Binary log files. I should be able to configure my system with `sed` and `awk` scripts that easily modify text configuration files. On this note, applications should use plain text files for their data more often. For example, web browsers could use a hierarchy of text files, each representing a web page in history, or a bookmarked site. Sqlite is good, but a database is simply unnecessary in many cases, because filesystems are very optimized and perfectly useable for many cases. This encourages hacking and interoperation. I could comfortably browse through my bookmarks in a mature native file system explorer of my preference, instead of struggling with a tricky scrolling menu within a browser. If I want to change browsers or computers, there is no more export/import of links and then they get messed up anyway. DBus: I'm not sure why the same functions could not be implemented robustly as a standard structure of named pipes. SELinux: A tremendous gift so often squandered by being disabled with the global flag. Pulseaudio, Pipewire, Wireplumber.

jraph 4y ago
> Sqlite is good, but a database is simply unnecessary in many cases, because filesystems are very optimized and perfectly useable for many cases. This encourages hacking and interoperation. I could comfortably browse through my bookmarks in a mature native file system explorer of my preference, instead of struggling with a tricky scrolling menu within a browser SQLite is very good indeed. It's fast and offers a nice querying API. You can use SQLitebrowser if you want to browse this data outside the browser UI, and we could always have a FUSE filesystem for sqlite database if we really wanted to be able to browse this data with a file manager. Since SQLite is used everywhere, the effort would be shared. One of the many good things about SQLite is that it is (de-facto) standard, way more than regular configuration files. > Systemd: Binary log files. I should be able to configure my system with `sed` and `awk` scripts that easily modify text configuration files. Configuration files are still regular text files, and are way easier / simpler than before systemd / upstart. You are also a command away from having a text representation of the logs, and that's journalctl, which can be piped into the regular unix tools, so I have not found an actual situation where it matters.