7 ms·

Opinions on Flatpaks/snaps notwithstanding, it's encouraging to see KDE and GNOME collaborating on projects like this. IMO desktop GNU/Linux has benefited great

by Liquix 4y ago

Opinions on Flatpaks/snaps notwithstanding, it's encouraging to see KDE and GNOME collaborating on projects like this. IMO desktop GNU/Linux has benefited greatly from moving away from offering LXDE/LXQT/Mate/Enlightenment/Cinammon flavors and towards a more digestible subset (GNOME only, GNOME/KDE/XFCE, etc) of polished desktop environments. Pipe dream, but it would be incredible to see all of the passionate, talented folks working together on one definitive GNU/Linux DE.

themodelplumber 4y ago
I'd prefer to see more easily-communicated DE standards and published levels of adherence, rather than moving to the uni-desktop. Like if you want to select a desktop and are kind of new to desktop environments, maybe aim for the (imaginary example here) DE-5 level of standards-adherence. DE-4 and lower might suck in various ways even though they could have cool new features. There are way too many benefits from the huge variety of DE approaches, including the benefit that Linux-critics often hide behind critique of a single desktop experience, which is lazy and attempts to steal focus from exactly this open, creative, diverse approach that is the jewel in the Linux ecosystem's metaphorical crown. It's definitely great to see the groups working together on these projects that benefit everybody.
- jacooper 4y ago
  I think that's what Freedesktop does, and why Flatpak heavily relies on XDG variables.
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    Where is this chart for levels in Freedesktop? I'm only vaguely familiar with the project.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacooper 4y ago
      I think its some kind of standards body for the Linux desktop.
- derefr 4y ago
  > I'd prefer to see more easily-communicated DE standards and published levels of adherence, rather than moving to the uni-desktop. What's the difference? If everything works perfectly with everything else, and the standards adherence is so high that you can't tell the difference which apps are from which organization, then how is that not a "unified DE"?
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    This depends: Do you care about details, or not? If not, a hand wave in the direction of "everything's the same" will suffice and the discussion's over. OTOH, if you think there are good, detailed reasons why XFCE is not KDE is not Gnome is not LXDE, then you can probably see why standards are helpful, insofar as they can be designed to be reachable without compromising unique leverage points.
  - traverseda 4y ago
    Because I might want to developer a new DE/toolkit/whatever and having one checklist I can refer to would really help.
  - jimbo9991 4y ago
    The difference is that one of those sets of standards is actually more of a file system hierarchy and API standardization thing, whereas the uni-desktop would presumably force a particular set of gui widgets along with the filesystem hierarchy and APIs that those widgets are built on. We of course already have something like this (POSIX, Freedesktop, etc). However neither is abided by very well and neither of them go far enough up the stack to deal with certain very visible issues of desktop application incompatibility. What I think could be done to fix some of the compatibility issues (like when running QT on gnome or GTK on KDE or applications that eschew them both and have janky window decorations) would be some more serious standardization onto something like Wayland. We would of course need something more than a reference implementation for that, but fundamentally I don't see why that would be too restrictive for projects that still want to make their own widgets.
    - derefr 4y ago
- reilly3000 4y ago
  I really think you are into something here. Some simple rating and standard icon would help users differentiate quickly. I know and love distrowatch and the rest, but it’s definitely inaccessible for most beginners and hard to discover what the best fit is for me.
- worksonmine 4y ago
  The FHS[1] and XDG[2] sets the standards for the file system, and EWMH[3] communication between windows and window managers. They are all simple enough that implementing a subset doesn't make much sense. Many desktop environments tend to only list support for stuff that usually are a common problem like screen-sharing or driver support. I'm using a very minimal system without a lot of the easy to implement features on purpose, but absolutely can not live without some of the more difficult ones. So for me the adherence would be cherry-picked parts from 3, 4 and 5 and impossible to place on a chart. I don't think it would be a good fit for the modular unix philosophy. [1] https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html [2] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-... [3] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest/ https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest/
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    I see what you mean. I suppose these particular existing standards come from inner-views on technicals. As opposed to, say, standards that are based on general user experience aspects. Does the control panel offer printer settings yet, for example.
    - worksonmine 4y ago
      Yeah, but the problem and beauty of unix is the modularity and much of those features are out of the desktop environments hands. Control panel for what printer? Which settings? What version of the drivers? At the lowest level you have the kernels (KDE and Gnome both run on Linux AND BSD) which may or may not have drivers built in. Then comes the distributions which are opinionated in the kernel versions, packages and patches they add. Some of those packages are desktop environments or window managers and they are opinionated in how they run other packages and their lifecycle. Some full featured others are tiling. Some of them run on both Xorg and Wayland. Last we have the actual packages, and they need to work in all these different environments, sizes and lately different protocols. They need to support different drivers, permissions and file system hierarchies. They do this by relying on each other, a package handling video focuses on supporting video and sound drivers so other packages can import that package. KDE might have a very polished and up to date settings panel, checking for all drivers and their features. But in reality it works as intended on Ubuntu, but Debian is behind and doesn't want to patch the drivers because stability, on Arch there was a regression and most of the BSDs don't even support the driver. And one time Linus came along and didn't listen to the warnings and fucked it all with one line. Nobody controls all of these pieces and they're so spread apart that what might seem as simple as a panel for printer settings quickly gets very complicated. But I wouldn't have it any other way. For those who want the one size fits all there are already options.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  This has existed for a long time from freedesktop.org, XDG specs, window manager extended hints, and so on. And it's gotten better too - did you know KDE3 had it's own sound mixer daemon? It was called ArtsD. Now we have pulseaudio, or whatever, which is great and cross desktop DBUS made it everywhere as well - I believe initially KDE3 as well did not have DBUS but had something called, DCOP. so - yeah things have improved a lot and many things - even command line tools 'playerctl' interop well based on this. More fun is also like libreoffice is compiled with many different file pickers, so on KDE you can use the native Qt extended KDE file picker, and on Gnome you get the GTK one.
  - vasvir 4y ago
    and now pipewire...
    - majewsky 4y ago
      Which is completely backwards-compatible with PulseAudio. Even in a Pipewire-only world, applications will for the most part be linked against libpulse like they used to, but the PulseAudio server socket is provided by Pipewire.
      - calvinmorrison 4y ago
        I mean, that's what they always say right? OSS replaced Alsa replaced arts replaced pulseaudio replaced pipewire or did I get that backwards?
- yathaid 4y ago
  > I'd prefer to see more easily-communicated DE standards and published levels of adherence, rather than moving to the uni-desktop. I used to be on this hill. All this leads to is inoperable software where each integration point is liable to break. I want to get away from the spyware that is Windows, the walled garden that is MacOS. If a uni-desktop is the price we pay, so be it.
sureste 4y ago
> LXDE/LXQT/Mate/Enlightenment/Cinammon Of these, I would say that Cinnamon is one that could be comparable to XFCE or even GNOME and KDE. Seriously, it's good. The system settings menu has all of the options one could need and the look and feel of the dektop is very customizable. I'm a KDE user, but if it ever stopped working/disappeared I would use Cinnamon. In fact I plan to use it whenever KDE Plasma 6 releases to wait out until the it becomes more stable.
- doubled112 4y ago
  To me recently, Cinnamon feels like they took GNOME technologies and built the default Plasma desktop in them.
- jraph 4y ago
  > KDE Plasma 6 releases to wait out until the it becomes more stable. IIRC KDE committed to never break users again like they did with the first releases of KDE 4. It's expect the first releases of Plasma 6 that the distros will actually ship to be stable, and to be mostly a Qt5 → Qt 6 upgrade. You should be able to run a stable version of Plasma (5 or 6) in any case during this period. KDE 3 to 4 was a disaster; last versions of KDE 4 were rock solid. First versions of Plasma 5 were a bit lacking but rapidly became very stable and usable, and you could actually keep using KDE 4 in the meantime. I expect the Plasma 6 transition to be even smoother. I hope I'm not wrong. But otherwise I agree, Cinnamon seems very good and I tend to recommend it and pick it for people who I install Linux for.
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    Sorry, but as an early adopter of Plasma 5 (granted, maybe a bit too early), it was terribly broken for a couple of months. I took refuge in Awesome until things stabilized.
    - jraph 4y ago
      I indeed waited several months before adopting Plasma 5
    - 4y ago
24t 4y ago
>...working together on one definitive GNU/Linux DE No thanks. GNOME dev hubris is the reason I use KDE
- LambdaComplex 4y ago
  Agreed, GNOME is so user-hostile that I'm actually a little impressed. Personal example from trying GNOME out recently: I have an external webcam, which means I need to move the GNOME panel clock since it's in the top middle of the screen (and thus blocked by the base of the webcam). You would _think_ that would be easy, but you have to get an extension just to move the clock! Apparently each panel "widget" (this may or may not be the official term) defines its own position on the panel. So, to move something, you need to either find an extension that does it (Frippery Move Clock[0] in this case) or edit the widget code yourself. Maybe someone can chime in with a technical explanation, but my cynical take is that the GNOME devs don't even trust users to be smart enough to customize their own panel without breaking things. </vent> 0. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2/move-clock/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2/move-clock/
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    They're not really user-hostile, they just have limited development resources and making a polished interface for editing the positioning of top bar widgets would be way too much work. If you want to try things on your own, that's what unofficial extensions and tweaking tools are for.
    - sprash 4y ago
      There are several full time paid developers working on it which is plenty of resources (AFAIK more than KDE). They are not only actively user-hostile but also community-hostile. Every library or project they have under their umbrella receives updates all the time that only serve GNOME and potentially break all software dependent on it that are not part of GNOME (e.g [1]). 1.: https://github.com/thestinger/termite https://github.com/thestinger/termite
zozbot234 4y ago
There's nothing wrong with Mate, Cinnamon or even LXDE. Especially since desktop environments these days are mostly different frontends built on a fairly unified infrastructure, largely provided by freedesktop.org. We still see divergence between Qt-based and GTK+ based desktops, and other minor differences exist, but the "one definitive" user environment is basically here.
jlarocco 4y ago
As a long time Linux user I have mixed feelings about that. I'm not really against it, but I don't use KDE or Gnome (or any of the others in your list) and it concerns me that people might start thinking of those as "being Linux". I'd hate to see a future where "We support Linux" means KDE or Gnome. On the other hand, I have to admit I'm not really sure what that would mean. I guess only having "Flatpak" as an option would be a bummer, but I don't see that happening with the distros I use.
wkat4242 4y ago
> but it would be incredible to see all of the passionate, talented folks working together on one definitive GNU/Linux DE. This would be terrible. Gnome and KDE have pretty conflicting ideologies. Gnome is super opinionated and Mac-like minimalist. KDE is all about user choice. If they'd collaborate it would end up something in the middle which would suit nobody.
- gowld 4y ago
  > Gnome is super opinionated and Mac-like minimalist. The problem with this is that Mac, unlike Gnome, actually works. Gnome just has weird holes where old functionality was removed (like application menus!) and never replaced.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    afaik applications menus still do exist and are available out of the box.
  - ris58h 4y ago
    > actually works Yeah. Without proper window management, middle click and other things I need 3rd party apps for.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Well, GNOME actually exceeds macOS minimalism… at least in macOS I have the ability to hide the top bar, several ways to launch apps, a systray, graphical configuration for most things, the ability to change keymappings, and so on. In GNOME, I need 3rd party tools for all of that.
  - exyi 4y ago
    At least in GNOME, I can turn off the laptop screen without closing the lid ...you can't compare minimalism/configurability in this way
    - e12e 4y ago
uonpopular_th 4y ago
All my dealing with GNOME have made me dread the day that happens. We need a polyculture because we will never beat $mega_corp on a polished monoculture.

by Liquix 4y ago

themodelplumber 4y ago

I'd prefer to see more easily-communicated DE standards and published levels of adherence, rather than moving to the uni-desktop. Like if you want to select a desktop and are kind of new to desktop environments, maybe aim for the (imaginary example here) DE-5 level of standards-adherence. DE-4 and lower might suck in various ways even though they could have cool new features. There are way too many benefits from the huge variety of DE approaches, including the benefit that Linux-critics often hide behind critique of a single desktop experience, which is lazy and attempts to steal focus from exactly this open, creative, diverse approach that is the jewel in the Linux ecosystem's metaphorical crown. It's definitely great to see the groups working together on these projects that benefit everybody.

jacooper 4y ago
I think that's what Freedesktop does, and why Flatpak heavily relies on XDG variables.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Where is this chart for levels in Freedesktop? I'm only vaguely familiar with the project.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacooper 4y ago
    I think its some kind of standards body for the Linux desktop.
derefr 4y ago
> I'd prefer to see more easily-communicated DE standards and published levels of adherence, rather than moving to the uni-desktop. What's the difference? If everything works perfectly with everything else, and the standards adherence is so high that you can't tell the difference which apps are from which organization, then how is that not a "unified DE"?
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  This depends: Do you care about details, or not? If not, a hand wave in the direction of "everything's the same" will suffice and the discussion's over. OTOH, if you think there are good, detailed reasons why XFCE is not KDE is not Gnome is not LXDE, then you can probably see why standards are helpful, insofar as they can be designed to be reachable without compromising unique leverage points.
- traverseda 4y ago
  Because I might want to developer a new DE/toolkit/whatever and having one checklist I can refer to would really help.
- jimbo9991 4y ago
  The difference is that one of those sets of standards is actually more of a file system hierarchy and API standardization thing, whereas the uni-desktop would presumably force a particular set of gui widgets along with the filesystem hierarchy and APIs that those widgets are built on. We of course already have something like this (POSIX, Freedesktop, etc). However neither is abided by very well and neither of them go far enough up the stack to deal with certain very visible issues of desktop application incompatibility. What I think could be done to fix some of the compatibility issues (like when running QT on gnome or GTK on KDE or applications that eschew them both and have janky window decorations) would be some more serious standardization onto something like Wayland. We would of course need something more than a reference implementation for that, but fundamentally I don't see why that would be too restrictive for projects that still want to make their own widgets.
  - derefr 4y ago
reilly3000 4y ago
I really think you are into something here. Some simple rating and standard icon would help users differentiate quickly. I know and love distrowatch and the rest, but it’s definitely inaccessible for most beginners and hard to discover what the best fit is for me.
worksonmine 4y ago
The FHS[1] and XDG[2] sets the standards for the file system, and EWMH[3] communication between windows and window managers. They are all simple enough that implementing a subset doesn't make much sense. Many desktop environments tend to only list support for stuff that usually are a common problem like screen-sharing or driver support. I'm using a very minimal system without a lot of the easy to implement features on purpose, but absolutely can not live without some of the more difficult ones. So for me the adherence would be cherry-picked parts from 3, 4 and 5 and impossible to place on a chart. I don't think it would be a good fit for the modular unix philosophy. [1] https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html [2] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-... [3] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest/ https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest/
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  I see what you mean. I suppose these particular existing standards come from inner-views on technicals. As opposed to, say, standards that are based on general user experience aspects. Does the control panel offer printer settings yet, for example.
  - worksonmine 4y ago
    Yeah, but the problem and beauty of unix is the modularity and much of those features are out of the desktop environments hands. Control panel for what printer? Which settings? What version of the drivers? At the lowest level you have the kernels (KDE and Gnome both run on Linux AND BSD) which may or may not have drivers built in. Then comes the distributions which are opinionated in the kernel versions, packages and patches they add. Some of those packages are desktop environments or window managers and they are opinionated in how they run other packages and their lifecycle. Some full featured others are tiling. Some of them run on both Xorg and Wayland. Last we have the actual packages, and they need to work in all these different environments, sizes and lately different protocols. They need to support different drivers, permissions and file system hierarchies. They do this by relying on each other, a package handling video focuses on supporting video and sound drivers so other packages can import that package. KDE might have a very polished and up to date settings panel, checking for all drivers and their features. But in reality it works as intended on Ubuntu, but Debian is behind and doesn't want to patch the drivers because stability, on Arch there was a regression and most of the BSDs don't even support the driver. And one time Linus came along and didn't listen to the warnings and fucked it all with one line. Nobody controls all of these pieces and they're so spread apart that what might seem as simple as a panel for printer settings quickly gets very complicated. But I wouldn't have it any other way. For those who want the one size fits all there are already options.
calvinmorrison 4y ago
This has existed for a long time from freedesktop.org, XDG specs, window manager extended hints, and so on. And it's gotten better too - did you know KDE3 had it's own sound mixer daemon? It was called ArtsD. Now we have pulseaudio, or whatever, which is great and cross desktop DBUS made it everywhere as well - I believe initially KDE3 as well did not have DBUS but had something called, DCOP. so - yeah things have improved a lot and many things - even command line tools 'playerctl' interop well based on this. More fun is also like libreoffice is compiled with many different file pickers, so on KDE you can use the native Qt extended KDE file picker, and on Gnome you get the GTK one.
- vasvir 4y ago
  and now pipewire...
  - majewsky 4y ago
    Which is completely backwards-compatible with PulseAudio. Even in a Pipewire-only world, applications will for the most part be linked against libpulse like they used to, but the PulseAudio server socket is provided by Pipewire.
    - calvinmorrison 4y ago
      I mean, that's what they always say right? OSS replaced Alsa replaced arts replaced pulseaudio replaced pipewire or did I get that backwards?
yathaid 4y ago
> I'd prefer to see more easily-communicated DE standards and published levels of adherence, rather than moving to the uni-desktop. I used to be on this hill. All this leads to is inoperable software where each integration point is liable to break. I want to get away from the spyware that is Windows, the walled garden that is MacOS. If a uni-desktop is the price we pay, so be it.

sureste 4y ago

> LXDE/LXQT/Mate/Enlightenment/Cinammon Of these, I would say that Cinnamon is one that could be comparable to XFCE or even GNOME and KDE. Seriously, it's good. The system settings menu has all of the options one could need and the look and feel of the dektop is very customizable. I'm a KDE user, but if it ever stopped working/disappeared I would use Cinnamon. In fact I plan to use it whenever KDE Plasma 6 releases to wait out until the it becomes more stable.

doubled112 4y ago
To me recently, Cinnamon feels like they took GNOME technologies and built the default Plasma desktop in them.
jraph 4y ago
> KDE Plasma 6 releases to wait out until the it becomes more stable. IIRC KDE committed to never break users again like they did with the first releases of KDE 4. It's expect the first releases of Plasma 6 that the distros will actually ship to be stable, and to be mostly a Qt5 → Qt 6 upgrade. You should be able to run a stable version of Plasma (5 or 6) in any case during this period. KDE 3 to 4 was a disaster; last versions of KDE 4 were rock solid. First versions of Plasma 5 were a bit lacking but rapidly became very stable and usable, and you could actually keep using KDE 4 in the meantime. I expect the Plasma 6 transition to be even smoother. I hope I'm not wrong. But otherwise I agree, Cinnamon seems very good and I tend to recommend it and pick it for people who I install Linux for.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  Sorry, but as an early adopter of Plasma 5 (granted, maybe a bit too early), it was terribly broken for a couple of months. I took refuge in Awesome until things stabilized.
  - jraph 4y ago
    I indeed waited several months before adopting Plasma 5
  - 4y ago

24t 4y ago

>...working together on one definitive GNU/Linux DE No thanks. GNOME dev hubris is the reason I use KDE

LambdaComplex 4y ago
Agreed, GNOME is so user-hostile that I'm actually a little impressed. Personal example from trying GNOME out recently: I have an external webcam, which means I need to move the GNOME panel clock since it's in the top middle of the screen (and thus blocked by the base of the webcam). You would _think_ that would be easy, but you have to get an extension just to move the clock! Apparently each panel "widget" (this may or may not be the official term) defines its own position on the panel. So, to move something, you need to either find an extension that does it (Frippery Move Clock[0] in this case) or edit the widget code yourself. Maybe someone can chime in with a technical explanation, but my cynical take is that the GNOME devs don't even trust users to be smart enough to customize their own panel without breaking things. </vent> 0. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2/move-clock/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2/move-clock/
- zozbot234 4y ago
  They're not really user-hostile, they just have limited development resources and making a polished interface for editing the positioning of top bar widgets would be way too much work. If you want to try things on your own, that's what unofficial extensions and tweaking tools are for.
  - sprash 4y ago
    There are several full time paid developers working on it which is plenty of resources (AFAIK more than KDE). They are not only actively user-hostile but also community-hostile. Every library or project they have under their umbrella receives updates all the time that only serve GNOME and potentially break all software dependent on it that are not part of GNOME (e.g [1]). 1.: https://github.com/thestinger/termite https://github.com/thestinger/termite

zozbot234 4y ago

There's nothing wrong with Mate, Cinnamon or even LXDE. Especially since desktop environments these days are mostly different frontends built on a fairly unified infrastructure, largely provided by freedesktop.org. We still see divergence between Qt-based and GTK+ based desktops, and other minor differences exist, but the "one definitive" user environment is basically here.

jlarocco 4y ago

As a long time Linux user I have mixed feelings about that. I'm not really against it, but I don't use KDE or Gnome (or any of the others in your list) and it concerns me that people might start thinking of those as "being Linux". I'd hate to see a future where "We support Linux" means KDE or Gnome. On the other hand, I have to admit I'm not really sure what that would mean. I guess only having "Flatpak" as an option would be a bummer, but I don't see that happening with the distros I use.

wkat4242 4y ago

> but it would be incredible to see all of the passionate, talented folks working together on one definitive GNU/Linux DE. This would be terrible. Gnome and KDE have pretty conflicting ideologies. Gnome is super opinionated and Mac-like minimalist. KDE is all about user choice. If they'd collaborate it would end up something in the middle which would suit nobody.

gowld 4y ago
> Gnome is super opinionated and Mac-like minimalist. The problem with this is that Mac, unlike Gnome, actually works. Gnome just has weird holes where old functionality was removed (like application menus!) and never replaced.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  afaik applications menus still do exist and are available out of the box.
- ris58h 4y ago
  > actually works Yeah. Without proper window management, middle click and other things I need 3rd party apps for.
BirAdam 4y ago
Well, GNOME actually exceeds macOS minimalism… at least in macOS I have the ability to hide the top bar, several ways to launch apps, a systray, graphical configuration for most things, the ability to change keymappings, and so on. In GNOME, I need 3rd party tools for all of that.
- exyi 4y ago
  At least in GNOME, I can turn off the laptop screen without closing the lid ...you can't compare minimalism/configurability in this way
  - e12e 4y ago

uonpopular_th 4y ago

All my dealing with GNOME have made me dread the day that happens. We need a polyculture because we will never beat $mega_corp on a polished monoculture.