Comment by alxlaz
7 years ago
I've been using FreeBSD, then Linux since 2002 and I'm seriously considering moving to Windows, which I haven't ran on any of my machines since back when Windows XP was fresh. If you think all the stuff you listed is bad, wait 'til you run into Gnome, GTK and KDE, where not only do windows not remember their previous position on multi-screens, but desktop icons don't remember their position on a single one :-).
(Or you can't have them at all without an extension, yeah, that too...)
Windows has progressed by leaps and bounds since 2003. Linux, not so much. We have this fixation on building something, then deciding it's full of legacy code that doesn't allow us to build what we really want, so we throw it out and do it all over again.
The good news is that we've been on the "building" side of this pattern for a while. The bad news is that we've been on the "building" side of this pattern for a while so I expect there's not much time left until the next "revolution"...
> wait 'till you run into Gnome, GTK and KDE, where not only do windows not remember their previous position on multi-screens, but desktop icons don't remember their position on a single one :-).
KDE has explicit settings to remember window position which works well. As for icons, I haven't had icons on my desktop besides a dock for years, so can't tell you.
What surprises me is that around 2010 Ubuntu seemed perfectly fine, and then they started to throw everything that worked away.
I think that happened to all platforms then.
well you're not wrong :(. the "post PC" mania.
Yeah, that was weird. I remember that as the only time I actually felt that Linux had a decent shot at the Desktop. New money had rolled on to the scene with a coherent vision, started fixing a lot of the suck, and quickly became the predominant distribution.
Then something happened and Canonical went crazy with NIH and mobile obsession. Then they tried to monetize in a stupid way.
Let's stop with the NIH blaming, Canonical could not change GNOME direction, so they had no choice, if you remember Canonical wanted to add some fancy scrollbars in GTK but it was rejected, later when GNOME wanted same fancy scrollbars GTK accepted them.
I am a KDE user and I watched this from the side sao I am not invested in any camp, what we see is that when a meinteiner with big ego controls a project (it happened with KDE Plasma too) you can't bring any improvement that the meinteiner does not agree with.
So don't use GNOME? I like XFCE, but there are other desktop environments around that don't try to destroy ("modernize") themselves every few years.
Yeah, after sixteen years of this stuff, I definitely needed someone to tell me that there are other DEs than Gnome :-).
How are things in XFCE land, do you have a sane "Open file" dialog, or do its (so, so few...) applications use the new and improved GTK 3 version? Speaking of which, has it moved to GTK 3 completely, or do only some of its tools work on hi-DPI screens, and only with a few themes?
I am content with the cinnamon, the default in linux mint. It looks great imo, configuration is easy. The Mint developers are listening to their users.