Comment by danans

1 month ago

> By 2035 I wonder if we'll be all running KDE or WindowMaker and the hell with modern OS GUI

I love Linux, but I doubt that will happen. If anything, by then Linux will be a feature of a workstation OS running in a hypervisor, just like it is with Windows and ChromeOS today.

> The hell with "glass" or "flat" design. Desktop OS should be as forgettable as possible, as it's about having long stints of flow, not giving a feeling of "air" or "play".

There's nothing stopping you from running a Linux desktop with a minimalist tiling window manager - I have for years and found it does exactly what you say.

But it sounds like it's more that you don't like that there aren't many product offerings like that. That is true. Even computers with Linux pre installed use "bouncy" desktop environments like Gnome/KDE by default.

My preference - ChromeOS - comes the closest but is still nowhere near as stripped down as i3 tiling window manager (which I also think is great).

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danans

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keyle  1 month ago

This raised my curiosity. Until now I didn't know you could run ChromeOS other than on Chromebooks.

Do you run ChromeOS Flex on some thinkpads or do you work on a Chromebook?

What are the pros/cons vs running a debian if you can elaborate?

  • danans  1 month ago

    > Do you run ChromeOS Flex on some thinkpads or do you work on a Chromebook?

    Chromebook.

    > What are the pros/cons vs running a debian if you can elaborate?

    I like minimalist desktop environments. I like full screen window tiling using keyboard shortcuts, power management, fingerprint readers, accelerated displays, phone tethering, touch screen, passkey support for auth, and verified boot, and preferences synced across devices.

    And I like all that to work out of the box with no fiddling,

    • keyle  1 month ago

      Thanks for opening my mind to this. I actually threw the ChromeOS Flex version onto a Thinkpad I had laying around and I was really surprised by how "ready" the setup is.

      I feel the same about a good setup that works out of the box. Everything works, from sleep, to cameras, Bluetooth, and shutdown actually shuts down, which I can't get with debian, arch or bsd!

      I will trial it further, the Linux WSL type enclosure feels right. I'm trying to understand if Penguin is actually a web rendered terminal or native. I only really know Ghostty which I can't get to run as it's missing some gnome libs I think. I will see if alacrity is better.

      Thanks!