I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess.
> And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier.
What did you switch her to?
I haven't seriously tried KDE, though I've heard lots of good things about it recently. I don't know why Ubuntu chose GNOME over Mate, the latter seems a perfectly fine typical desktop environment paradigm.
> What did you switch her to?
AwesomeWM (which is technically a windows manager and not a desktop environment, but it's full-featured enough to be essentially like a DE), which I keep coming back even after trying other DEs/WMs. I had hesitated to put her on it since its configuration isn't user-friendly (it's a .lua text file..), but I just essentially copied over my configuration, and she's been much happier than on GNOME.
Personally, I am all for standardization and homogeneity. We need standards and homogeneity. I would gladly steamroll over all the people who oppose "monoculture" for the sake of opposing something.
You can't please everyone but I think gnome is the right answer for most people. Don't like something? Come join the discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org (I hope I got that right)
Better link https://gitlab.gnome.org/groups/GNOME/-/issues
I do this with awesome, and it works well. It's a one-liner in rc.lua:
awful.spawn.with_shell "nm-applet"
The problem is I think the deep issues I have with Gnome are not things which are easily fixed, e.g. "stop leaking memory", "don't be a single-threaded Javascript process", "allow me to control workspaces independently on each monitor/screen", &c. &c.
I would love to see Gnome improve though, even if I never end up using it, but I am not currently seeing any obvious signs that this will occur.
I mean I still can't get over the asinine comment covered here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4757077
Very poor choice of words which will hurt us for a long time.
Archived at https://archive.fo/NbzkY
This is the opposite of the standardization and cooperation across desktop environments and window managers that I want!