Comment by reitanqild | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reitanqild | Hacker News Reader

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Sorry, I know HN doesn't like negativity, but this "change for the sake of it" stuff is getting really old.

Agree.

I sense I am getting old and grumpy but there is something to learn here: there seems to be an increasing number of people, even in open source, who just want stuff to work.

I just want Ubuntu, dropline gnome, updated drivers, backed by a commercial vendor that I can pay a reasonable amount to to make sure they never let designers, ux people, product managers etc experiment with my desktop. Polishing it like Ubuntu originally did was totally ok though.

I don't want "spatial navigation" in Gnome. I don't want to have to think application or document" when I hit alt-tab, or having to wait for a (IMO, I know some people love this feature, but bear with my rant here) retarded alt-tab to understand that I want to switch to a document under the app I have switched to, then wait again for it to slide out nicely.

No! I want alt tab to switch through my last used windows. If it looks really nice, bonus.

I want my drivers to work. Etc.

And most of all: I don't want Linux to copy Mac! If I want a Mac I can get my boss to get me one!

Bingo. The best "DE" or WM is the one that you virtually forget is there.

The sad part is that the DE boys keep thinking that more eyecandy and bling will bring in the users and thus the third party software (apps? bah!) devs.

But as JWZ put it, Gnome (and most of the XDG related stuff) is beset with CADT. They fail to see that the one thing that has kept Windows where it is right now is that some company can still run their bespoke business code that was written back in the Windows 3.11 days.

Damn it, they can't even manage to do minor updates to glib and related without introducing subtle breakages.

And no, Flatpak and related is not a fix. That will just bring the specter of DLL hell to Linux.

CADT?

"Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers"

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Usual reminder here that jwz throws up porn if you have HN in the referrer. Clear your referrer or open a new tab.

Hehe, I was lucky then, I was just forwarded to stupid imgur images ridiculing hn ;-)

Interesting. I've tended to call it the "ooohhh shiny" approach. Building new stuff and adding shiny graphics is always more enticing than housekeeping work.

JWZ not happy w/ HN?

I think he set that stuff up when this place was limited to ycombinator members, and they kept hitting his server because of his diary entries from the Netscape days.

Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers

> And most of all: I don't want Linux to copy Mac! If I want a Mac I can get my boss to get me one!

Maybe you and I just aren't the target demographic (and the source demographic I guess) any more? Back in the day from what I remember, the Linux Desktop was trying to copy Windows because that's what people knew. Certainly worldwide there were a lot more OSS devs that started using computers with a copy of Windows, than there were devs that started computing on one of the research systems in MIT. Windows was what people knew, Windows was what they grew up with, Windows was what they wanted to recreate. Now Macs are the choice du jour among the young crowd. While you can objectively say that there has been a drop in features and an uptick in useless(?) bling, I'm not sure it's the result of an actual shift in the base paradigm.

>> And most of all: I don't want Linux to copy Mac! If I want a Mac I can get my boss to get me one!

> Maybe you and I just aren't the target demographic (and the source demographic I guess) any more?

I wouldn't expect them to throw out their userbase just for fun?

I suspect ux experts with good intentions, having read the latest studies on usability which told everyone including Microsoft (back before Windows 8) that everything should be optimized for touch and for users who have no clue about the desktop.

They really want to create an awesome desktop for everyone but forget that for a number of their current users their current desktop is more or less exactly what they want.

KDE hits a middle ground by providing (again IMO) sensible defaults and infinte possibilities for styling and tweaking.

Edit: weirdly enough one distro I like is Elementary, who managed to copy the looks of Mac OSX without bringing along stuff like the (IMO) broken alt-tab. I'd still like if they could give me my menus back but at least I find that DE tolerable compared to Unity.

I meant that Libre software is usually written for the people writing it, rather than for third party users, so the older developers wanted to recreate windows for their own use, while the current ones want to recreate MacOS for their own use. A central tenent of Libre software (and the top 4 major DEs are all Libre software) is that the user is the developer. That is, there is no barrier between the person writing the software and the person using the software - they can be one and the same and users can change/fix the software and send the improvements upstream. My hypothesis is that the most proactive developers have always built the software to function as it is most convenient for them, and during the past 10 years enough of the old guard has been replaced by newcomers whose preferences don't align with ours any more. I have very rarely observed a Libre software being written for the benefit of non-developers, rather than for the benefit of the authors - those that are, tend to be some of the highest-regarded pieces of software out there.

I see and I think it makes sense.

Thanks for explaining!

Could be wrong, but I kind of feel that you might want to give Kubuntu a shot. Everything is really predictable, but it still looks nice.

I use KDE on a day-to-day basis, but I wouldn't call it that predictable. They're still infected by the rewrite and change everything disease. They also introduced pointless frameworks like anakondi which had dreadful performance. KDE4 was a incomplete buggy disaster at first and KDE5 can still be pretty buggy. This week my KDE panel decided to vanish losing all its configuration. I'd like to use something which just works, like KDE3 did.

Amen. KDE4 was a disaster in the beginning. I toughed it out then. I was in academia and could spend some hours dealing with breakage.

When Ubuntu shipped KDE5, normal usability stuff broke horribly again. Nowadays I have two kids and a job managing a large IT organisation. I simply can't defend spending the time any more. So I switched to xfce for the time being. Of that breaks the UI in any comparable way, I give in to the hordes that keep ridiculing me for not using a Mac. :(

Honest question:

What do yo mean by "normal usability stuff broke horribly again"?

I'm using Neon now and it is one of the least annoying distros and DEs I have ever worked with.

Totally fair question. Sorry for not being more specific. All multi monitor and docking/undocking broke in seemingly random ways. That's despite giving state transitions ample time (ie. not detaching a screen and then immediately closing the laptop to put it to sleep).

Also I was bit by the bug that somebody else mentioned here: the panels would disappear with sweet reliability. If I remember correctly, this was a bug that would hide the existing dock. So if you simpy recreated it, you'd have two running side by side, and so on.

There was more but I don't remember specifics. The screen issues were enough to be a big practical problem for me.

Edit: speeling

Thanks!

I don't use docking and rarely use multiple monitors so that might explain a bit of the difference in experience.

I started with KDE with Plasma about a year ago, so I don't have that history. Kubuntu runs extremely well on my XPS 13 with hi dpi display, so I don't really the problems you're seeing.

Except the music player! It's pretty broken on a hidpi screen.

I am a very happy user of KDE Neon, it is polished and their ux experts seems to be either real experts in the field ux instead of just being experts in copying stuff from Mac and quoting Fitts law - or they are mostly kept in check.

But does KDE work well on a low resource machine?

I'd not expect it to work too well on even the newest Raspberry PI.

I would however expect it to work well on my 5 year old laptop.

Bloat.

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