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Comment by taejavu | Hacker News Reader

I find it baffling that a website who's sole purpose is to present "the most beautiful desktop environment" would present low resolution, reduced color screenshots to back the claim.

examples: https://ubuntudde.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ubuntudde-l... https://ubuntudde.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ubuntudde-f...

There are better screenshots behind the "Digital Assets" nav link, but I wouldn't have found that, or thought to look there for screenshots if I wasn't concerned about replies to this comment proving me wrong.

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Desktop environments on Linux is really the most asinine dick swinging contest I have ever witnessed in my life.

Subscribe to /r/unixporn for a single week and you will be absolutely amazed at the shit you will learn.

That’s a surprisingly wholesome community! Friendly/welcoming folks, and they take their creativity seriously enough to put work into it and critique it.

I hardly believe that anybody would use most of those environments on a daily use.

I’m one of them and we do. Why do you think we wouldn’t? They’re not lacking any capability, and we generally create them because they’re more efficient for our workflows.

Isn't the efficiency the concern of r/UsabilityPorn instead?

It's 2020. Does the Mac OS allow the user to change the menu bar's color? I was forced to use a MacBook Air for work a couple of years ago and was shocked to find that I was forced to use the drab, grey color that was obviously borrowed from the 1970s Unixes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX, for example) via NeXTSTEP.

I cannot imagine why you would find the joy of configurability an "asinine dick swinging contest". I find /r/unixporn unpretentious and wholesome. I find most posts there done out of sheer joy and pride. No one is selling anything or shilling anything.

It could be described as a "asinine dick swinging contest" because in their battle for DE domination they are all hurting the overarching "linux desktop" community by making sure that every developer would have to support many DE, window managers, distro's and what not to get a reliable app.

Having one DE emerge as victorious would greatly benefit linux desktops as a whole, even if it would kill customizability.

Looking over that subreddit, it doesn't look like a battle for DE domination. It looks like people showing off their creativity.

The original I was responding to:

"Desktop environments on Linux is really the most asinine dick swinging contest I have ever witnessed in my life."

> Having one DE emerge as victorious would greatly benefit linux desktops as a whole, even if it would kill customizability.

Good point.

It’s one thing to want a customizable dock... but you throw the baby out with the bath water when you abandon MacOS entirely because of it. I understand the dock is just one example, I’m sure you have many.

(You’ve always been able to change the settings of the Dock, it’s just not in Apple’s UI. In older times you could replace PNG assets yourself. Modern stuff is vector based but can still be tweaked. Remember iconfactory?!)

If it brings you joy to tinker with your DE to that extent by all means go for it and have fun. Personally, I like to tinker with my toys and like to get shit done with my professional tools. My Mac is a professional tool.

Agreed. A great example of an utterly useless website.

There’s a reason Linux has such terrible GUI design, sadly, and this is it.

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