The Joy of Linux Desktop Environments
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You can have a log of configuration changes for your system, you can have various profiles with branches, etc. Want to switch to a different profile? Just `git checkout <branch-name>`, done! Want to revert some change, or see how your PC looked like 2 months ago? `git log` and `git checkout` your way through!
I currently have all my configurations[1] in a dotfiles directory representing the home directory (same directory structure etc.) and symlinks to them in the actual home directory. Very easy to manage.
I simply have a hook for my dotfile repo which calls "dconf dump / > .dconf". This dumps the entire tree and it's nicely versioned in the repo.
This is unique on Windows. I actually took a look at dconf on my machine and no application occupied more than one key.
GEdit sits in /org/gnome/gedit and virt-manager in /org/virt-manager as you'd expect.
I also hate Android's behavior, since there are situations where you want to keep them. If I remove GEdit for whatever reason, I expect it to keep my settings.
There are legitimate reasons to criticize Gnome, but this isn't one of them. dconf is totally reasonable and has significant advantages over plain text.
Getting/setting single values in a plain text config file is cumbersome and error-prone, and even if there's a library which is able to read that particular format, it often clobbers comments and formatting. For systems administration, you usually solve this by generating the entire config file from a template since nothing on the server should change your config files anyway.
However, on the desktop, many different application want to read and write keys. Tray applets, the system config panel, even your media player... They would inevitably conflict and you'd have to implement file-based locking.
Another topic: real-time notifications. If you modify the text size in the Gnome Control Panel, what happens is that the panel modifies the value in dconf and dconf sends a notification to all running Gnome applications. You could implement this using inotify, but you'd need code in each of your applications to open the config file, parse it and figure out which setting actually changed.
Single dconf lookups are really fast since everything is zero-copy and doesn't involve any syscalls. This is much faster than opening, reading and parsing config files.
dconf doesn't aim to replace all plain text config files. Storing the i3 or SSH configuration in dconf would be stupid (or even using dconf on a server to begin with).
If your applications directly read and store configuration keys belonging to other applications, you have way worse problems in your architecture than configuration file format.
Cut off one of these and brace for the whining, that gnome is dumbing everything down and locking up your settings.
What? The INI format is very simple and there are numerous libraries that handle it cleanly in any language.
> and even if there's a library which is able to read that particular format, it often clobbers comments and formatting.
What? These are primarily machine-readable configuration files. Why is formatting relevant? And how are comments relevant to dconf, since it uses a binary format anyway?
If a plain-text file isn't good enough, at least have the decency to use SQLite.
Lock files.
This update sequence is also meant to live-update the configuration of the running system. Of course that wouldn't work reliably. My session dropped its hotkeys (the only thing I actually cared about) on every update.
You mean like "dconf dump" and "dconf load"?
I use it for exactly that (importing my hotkeys config).
What you describe (compiled files in /etc) are system-global default values. You only need those for multi-user environments.
> I doubt anybody can measure the parsing advantage of a binary format, but the drawbacks are
The performance advantages are massive. The dconf database is just a hashtable which can be directly mmap'ed, so no parsing happens at all. This does matter for settings which are read hundreds of times (your current desktop theme, for example).
Well, I work as a systems administrator...
>> I doubt anybody can measure the parsing advantage of a binary format, but the drawbacks are
> The performance advantages are massive.
The advantages over reading a big unsorted chunk of text, maybe measurable in an isolated benchmark - depending on the size of the text. But it's not a good idea to put everything in one place.
With the conventional one-file-per program approach the existing file system (instead of custom binary datastructures) is used to speed up the access.
> The dconf database is just a hashtable which can be directly mmap'ed, so no parsing happens at all.
As an aside, mmap is not necessarily faster, or may even be slower. It's probably not worth bothering except in extreme cases. What matters is caching.
"No parsing happens at all", hardly. A hash table just leads to the information. You still have to interpret it. And I assume dconf can only be queried over dbus? This would mean serialization, deserialization, and lots of context switches.
> This does matter for settings which are read hundreds of times (your current desktop theme, for example).
Not convinced. If most keys were read many times, something was very wrong. No. Most things are read by exactly one program.
The pure act of reading config files is neglibible compared to what other things happen at start-up. A process spawn costs about 1ms. Loading the program code itself is a hell of a lot more expensive than loading a tiny text configuration file. There simply is no performance gain coming from putting everything on one crap pile. But it has serious practical disadvantages.
So do I. You only need that feature if you want to, say, set a default wallpaper for new users or prevent them from changing, and I don't see any issues with they way it's implemented. It's a plain text config which can be deployed using your favorite config management system. You'd just put in a change hook like you'd restart a service after changing its config file.
> With the conventional one-file-per program approach the existing file system (instead of custom binary datastructures) is used to speed up the access.
The way it works is that dconf client mmap the database file, so it's the same. dbus does no caching by itself, it uses the same mechanism.
> A hash table just leads to the information. You still have to interpret it. And I assume dconf can only be queried over dbus?
No, dbus is only used for writing. Reading is directly from the filesystem without anything in-between. The serialization format used by dconf matches the in-memory structure, so the application can literally take the value from (mmap) memory and use it as-is. So, no parsing.
I agree with you that it would be less efficient if dbus were used in the read path, this is probably why it's implemented that way.
> Not convinced. If most keys were read many times, something was very wrong.
> No. Most things are read by exactly one program.
> Loading the program code itself is a hell of a lot more expensive than loading a tiny text configuration file
The primary use case for dconf are desktop settings and yes, those are read hundreds of time. Not only at startup, but also at runtime. The current GTK theme or scaling factor is read all the time during rendering.
I'm not advocating that all application config should end up in dconf - as I noted, I like my i3, GPG or SSH config the way they are.
For me, it has lots of practical advantages. For example, I have a script which sets all desktop settings the way I like them (font, scaling factor, focus follows mouse,...) and I can just set them using "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface.scaling-factor 2" instead of figuring out which configs are in which files, how to parse them and merge existing and new configs.
It's not the same. While servers restart on reboot, the config file is not automatically compiled. Also if you don't reboot, most servers are restarted through a uniform interface. Dconf makes an exception without need. You need the dconf infrastructure at deploy time (it might be an installation), and you need to know how to use it.
I've wasted hours figuring out how the configuration is to be used. In the end I still had terrible bugs. I'm glad other programs just do the parsing for me. It works, there never was a problem to begin with.
> The current GTK theme or scaling factor is read all the time during rendering.
I think you are missing the possibility of parsing a configuration once at startup and storing the result in memory in suitable datastructures. It's not like conventional programs would parse the configuration over and over. Fixed binary layouts are very bad for interoperation.
Btw, there is no memory usage problem compared to an mmap solution if every program just parses the _relevant_ information. And it also doesn't preclude a live-update mechanism -- this just has to be done with care. Not every information is trivially live-updatable, as illustrated by the breakage I mentioned.
> I can just set them using "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface.scaling-factor 2"
This can be also done with text configuration files. Some programs do it. Most do it not (including dconf, which doesn't update your original input file) because the tradeoffs are bad. It has nothing to do with the question whether or not the serialization format is text.
Text vs binary is just this question: Do I need absolute performance or absolute discoverability? In the case of configuration files, the answer is clear.
There's a lot of non-obvious configuration options in the X11 stack. An .Xresources file can select better fonts, tweak hinting so they look fantastic, and change settings and color themes for many X applications. Out of the box, many X applications look like obsolete garbage, but they can be lightweight, functional, and awesome looking at the same time with a little configuration and love.
After getting your core apps sorted, consider an alternate DE/WM. I personally love the gaps fork of i3. XFCE is nice if you still want DE functionality.
I personally dual boot Debian Stretch and Gentoo ~amd64 - sharing a home partition. I keep Debian more or less stock on GNOME, while I rice the hell out of Gentoo with i3 and no systemd.
Check out https://reddit.com/r/unixporn for inspiration and ideas.
Also, it would be great if we could stop using "rice" as an adjective. Even if you don't find it offensive, some people do.
It's been over a year since I've switched away (to gasp systemd-networkd with vanilla wpa_supplicant), so I can't recall the exact reasons, but I think it was because of lack of doc, terrible debugability, and bad behavior when dealing with multiple known wifi networks.
What's wrong with Network Manager? Show me any other network manager which handles split DNS, WWAN modems and automatically connecting VPNs out of the box with zero configuration.
It connects to my home wifi in <1s. How long for you?
> uses a lot of resources
10 MiB and 9 minutes of CPU time after an uptime of 4 days with many reconnects, which is totally reasonable.
> cannot be installed without bringing in hundreds of megabytes of dependencies
Not true. Even on Ubuntu, it only pulls in 17.4 MB of dependencies:
apt-get install --no-install-recommends network-manager
The following additional packages will be installed:
dconf-gsettings-backend dconf-service glib-networking glib-networking-common glib-networking-services gsettings-desktop-schemas libbluetooth3 libdconf1
libgudev-1.0-0 libmm-glib0 libndp0 libnl-3-200 libnl-genl-3-200 libnm0 libproxy1v5 libsoup2.4-1 wpasupplicant
[...]
After this operation, 17.4 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
It pulls in much more without --no-install-recommends, but you don't need any of those.
Isn't systemd's configuration entirely plain text?
I think what bothers me about both is that the presence of text files in a predefined location is not enough to make things happen on its own. Instead of the simplest possible everything-is-a-file and interacting with the filesystem is the interface, you have an additional requirement of calling binaries and their subcommands.
It reloads its configuration on SIGHUP (same as daemon-reload).
Want to see what your PC was really like 2 months ago, including rolling back updates and removing new applications you installed and vice-versa? You can do that. Even if you switched desktop environments.
I use Haskell, so I've been meaning to switch to Nix for a while.
I'm not familiar with ebuild or PKGBUILD. You'd probably have to rewrite them as Nix expressions.
My personal favorite is the LXDE / Lubuntu 16.04 setup.
All my subjective opinion, of course:
- Sits in the sweet spot for bare bones distro vs batteries included.
- Without decorations, I have essentially borderless applications, that I can quickly toggle the titlebars etc.
- Kept sane keyboard shortcuts and did not remove them for some arbitrary reasons. Here's a random nitpick, why do some interfaces no longer allow you to press a single letter on the keyboard to launch an option from a menu, example: An option from the list of options in the File menu?
- Very fast, allows a great battery life, all of ubuntu packages and ubuntu community support/troubleshooting, very easy to customize if you need to.
I love it because it is an OS that stays out of my way, has a sane setup out of the box and looks awesome with the borderless windows.
It is perfect in almost every way! I'm worried about their plans to switch to LXQt. It's almost like how Ubuntu 10.10 was IMHO, the pinnacle of perfection, sane choices etc, and then they decide to start all over again.
I turned off the tray at the bottom, the window borders and set apps to start full screen, switching between full screen apps was much nicer than what remains after Apple closed off whatever Total Spaces was using. It ended up being a really productive way to work due to the lack of distraction like crap software from Apple, Adobe, 1Password, iTerm etc endlessly begging for 5 minutes so you can watch their updates download. Or all the other notifications that mostly don't need to be read or exist.
[1] http://www.howopensource.com/2015/03/launcher-for-ubuntu-lin...
Minor pendantic nit: ⌘-C, ⌘-V, ⌘-X originate with Apple, so referring to them as "Windows-like" is backwards.[2] Like I said, minor, eh? Normally I'd suggest alternative wording in the interest of providing constructive criticism, but I'm too lazy to do so right now, so feel free to disregard :)
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Co...
[1]: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste#Populariz...
Last I checked, I thought I saw this was a driver issue, not a DE one? I could be wrong, but I remember coming to the conclusion that it wouldn't work as anything but a dumb mouse at all on Linux (at least, for the time being)
Is there something in LXDE that's missing in LXQt?
Indeed every time I think of getting a new laptop or desktop, I try to do research into how well Linux will run on the hardware. Thankfully there seem to be a decent number of laptops that have Linux preinstalled now.
As much as I enjoy tinkering, even after using Linux for a while I still don't have a strong understanding of how things work, and it's frustrating to be forced to tinker when my intention was to get things done.
Perhaps I need to dedicate more time to understanding how things work?
Just install Ubuntu. Ignore everyone saying Ubuntu is a kiddy OS ("All you need is X, Y, Z-ix"). Ubuntu is Linux Windows (not really, but it is pretty hard to mess up).
Neon or openSuse is more Windows-like IMO.
Stick with Debian and Ubuntu. And more Debian, going forward.
I use Debian for servers though.
Yes, if you don't already, learn basic command line very well, with stderr/stdin/stdout, pipes, sed, grep, find, cat, make, etc. etc. You'll then thrive in Linux, and it will help you with OSX, too.
I guess what I meant was more that I don't understand how Linux the OS works, not how to work in Linux?
For example, if I do something and it doesn't work, I want to see something that went wrong. This could show up:
1. In stdout/stderr 2. In a logfile specific to that software, somewhere on my computer 3. In an aggregated logfile somewhere on my computer 4. Nowhere, but will do 1, 2, or 3 after you enable something in a config file or cli parameter
This all assumes that if there's something you have to look up (like where it logs files to), you can figure it out based on the man page or website or inspecting your filesystem, and then it actually logs some actionable information on the problem.
I've just come to terms with the fact that everything, no matter how simple it should be, is an ordeal the first time I do it. I just set aside time to research and make notes.
I was an early adopter and it was a bumpy start for sure, but you expect that. Just wait half a year or so after a new processor generation and it'll be fine. Zero issues on my Haswell laptop for the past years.
Intel has full-time people working on the Linux graphics stack. I've contributed bug reports and stack traces and they have been super friendly and responsive.
I find that sort of behaviour far more worrisome than a bluetooth headset not working.
Have you tried to intercept the traffic?
Everything I own and do is terrible on Windows and works fine on Ubuntu.
There is some weird finnicky things with Bluetooth headphones (especially headsets) but it is honestly such an easy fix (plug them in) that I don't even think about it.
Windows on the other refuses to connect at all to my Bluetooth headphones (Sony), my graphics card has broken drivers (and continues to) and that is even before I mention all of my gripes with Windows as a developer (compiling on Windows is basically a no-go)
The only thing I use Windows for is gaming, because unfortunately games are basically never released for Linux.
I like Windows and Mac OS, but I feel like they have a long way to go before they're useful for my day to day work.
TLDR; If you want good hardware support without worry, buy from a Linux vendor.
My system76 laptop also had an obnoxious firmware bug (that seemed to only effect linux) with the media keys that they basically told me they couldn't do anything about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52TaFzCDDkA
Linux desktop environments and software also have serious QA issues in general IMO. When running linux on the desktop I found myself spending more time reporting bugs than actually using my computer. I really enjoyed tinkering with linux, but when it comes to day to day use (particular on laptops) I found that the quality and reliability just wasn't there.
I ended up running windows on my system76 machine and eventually moving to a macbook air.
Maybe I'll try again in a few years :(
Rant: When I first wrapped my head around the concept of a desktop environment, the first thought that came to mind was: why don't Microsoft and Apple abandon their proprietary OSes and just build and maintain a solid desktop environment for Linux and the BSDs. It would save them a ton of money, resources, developers, it would improve security. The major drawback was porting the apps written for their OSes to Linux and BSDs, which was a deal breaker. Then came the announcement of Windows subsystem for Linux, first thought: incredible engineering feat but MS did the exact opposite of what I would have wanted, which was a Linux subsystem for Windows. It would have solved the issue of porting Windows apps to Linux. Now I am beginning to realize that all decisions technical or not, are just ugly politics with nice explanations to make the decisions seem like the right thing to do.
cinnamon-core - Cinnamon desktop environment - essential components
cinnamon-desktop-environment - Cinnamon desktop environment - full desktop with extra components
And why in the long run OSS will be subverted because it exists to strip free software of politics...
Not sure if it's what you want but applications can specify in their .desktop file that they should only be shown in a specific environment :
cat /usr/share/applications/xfce4-about.desktop
[...]
OnlyShowIn=XFCE;
The problem is having to tinker. Tinkering is fine if you've got the time and enjoy it, but if you just need your computer to always "just work" this is a problem. Both Linux and Windows strike out for me here. I use a Mac because I almost never have to mess with it... I mean sometimes a year can go by between times when I have to actually mess with my machine. Nothing else does that.
I have to tinker all the time because hw compatibility still sucks. Wifi, sound, video-cards often require tinkering to get them working, especially after upgrading. They are a lot better than they used to be, but they still have a ways to go.
I've had quite a few computers that didn't have any problems and worked right out of the box. That doesn't mean there aren't still problems with other computers.
On Ubuntu it's just a matter of
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:gekkio/xmonad
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-session-xmonadI loved trying out new visual styles. I spent so much time on wallpapers.
It took me years before I realized that what I really wanted to optimize was app layout. Any screen space that wasn't used by an app was wasted space. Space I could use to have a few extra lines in a terminal, a few extra columns of code...
I used AwesomeWM for a few years because I loved its concept of "tagging" windows which let you mix-and-match which you were displaying at a given time (this is my "all code" setting, that's my "all terms", and this is my "some code some term..."). Now I'm on macOS and I dearly miss it.
Anyhow, I haven't looked at a desktop wallpaper in years, and I like my window decorations as minimalistic as possible.
A few weeks ago I switched back to Linux on a NUC, and its like I've come home again.
Various people have a love for tiling WMs because they can navigate and organize things with the keyboard.
Does that ever actually occur? My vimrc changes almost on a daily basis, and I'm frequently changing plugins, writing new tools, and creating new aliases all time time. And that's just for my terminal.
Having to repeat some of those modifications 3-4 times because I'm using a slightly different terminal app for each individual task would, I think, drive me batty.
Don't take it the wrong way, but that sounds like a personal problem ;-)
If I were changing my configuration files that often, I would start looking for an environment that worked better for me.
My config editing is approximately logarithmic. There's a bunch when I start using new software (or start using old software in a new environment), but it slows down quickly as time goes by. Nowadays, I might make a big change to my .emacs once a year, and maybe tweak a variable or keyboard shortcut once every 3 months or so, but generally it doesn't change much. Same with all my other config files.
Yes, and in addition one that exists regardless of what OS/WM/DE you're running, since Vim and Emacs configuraion works basically the same whatever platform they're on.
I have no idea what you're talking about. What are these "slightly different terminal apps"?
That said, different terminal emulators do behave differently.
Nothing wrong with trying several environments until you find one which is the right one for you. But, hopping from one to another, like the article suggests, seems counterproductive to me.
The counterargument is that time spent optimizing your workflow by tinkering with the DE pays off 10x.
> ...Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android, have one common interface...
This is true for the first three without significant modification, but it isn't true for Android. One of my favorite things about Android when I had it was the ability to choose a launcher right from the app store. You can completely change your home screen interface with a downloadable app, and it's actually much easier to do than it is on linux last time I checked.
For desktops I agree, Linux has the most customization when it comes to the interface. But on Android, it's just as customizable as a Linux desktop(I mean... it is Linux after all).
> on Android, it's just as customizable as a Linux desktop
I wouldn't say is true. For android launchers to be functionally equivalent to (or as customizable as) linux DEs, they'd have to be able to customize android's nav bar, pull-down menu, settings app, recents menu, and split screen/tiling/windowing. At the moment, these are all handled at the OS level. Not that android's launcher concept isn't cool, but it's definitely not as flexible as DEs.
Nonetheless, I think Android should've been left out of that group in the OP. Not a big deal, but for someone who used to tinker with Android quite a bit, I couldn't resist commenting the point.
I'm not so sure about that. I used winblinds years ago for XP. Not surprised to learn that they're still around.
The best shell I ever used for Windows in terms of productivity was a blackbox variant, xoblite (http://xoblite.net/).
Pardon the phone recording bit, I had difficulty finding a screen recording software that would record at a decent framerate at 4K.
Stardock is buggy and costs money. Linux DE are free and superior.
I can't even begin to express how much I love i3. I literally switched from OSX just for i3, it's made me that much more efficient, focused, less frustrated and allows me to use my ultrawide monitor to its fullest potential.
It's a good feeling.
Around the advent of Gnome 3/KDE 4 I also realized that I didn't really use any of the Gnome or KDE apps. If I want to burn a cd, I know wodim well. If I want to listen to music, I probably use my phone. The browser is the only desktop app that I use regularly, and that's fairly agnostic.
I've spent years tweaking rxvt Xresources, for example, such that I can drop it on a brand new machine and everything behaves as I expect. I'm well past the point in my career where I'd be looking for, say, a better terminal emulator, or shell, or chat app or any of that stuff; the stuff I've got is working as well as I could hope, and when I need something new I can compose it from the abilities that the shell and the window manager expose.
The last big change I made was after I tried a tiling WM (Xmonad) for a couple of days and realized right away I'd never go back; that's been 7 or 8 years ago. Occasionally stuff changes underneath me in ways that seem somewhat capricious (Pulse Audio, Systemd) but I usually give that stuff a chance and try to adapt to it unless its absolutely unbearable.
I enjoy checking out the new stuff on machines I use at home for fun, but at work I treat the workstation as an instrument; I know what I want and almost everything has a reason.
It's nice stripping back to the original structures, though it does feel like computer archaeology sometimes. There's a lot of services in the upper layers that have to be switched off to get back to plain .xinitrc and Xresources!
On the upside, I know my configuration and it's all in a repository now!
When I first tried Linux in the 90s it was already less of a pain than Windows. Why would I want to reinstate all that Windows-like cruft to be at most 0% more productive than I was without it?
I also maintain some Solaris 10 systems and that's a whole other set of issues, sharing a home directory across different "unix family" systems.
Centos6 will have different Gnome versions than Centos7. However, both will write in ~/.gnome, possibly .gtk, or .gtk-3.0 or wherever the hell they write to these days.
Better to share your data through an nfs share in /data instead of /home and take the pain of not having the exact Desktop across different nodes. Or to create a homogenous environment with only Centos7 for example.
why do you use the maximize / minimize buttons? If you're just trying to see a different app, wouldn't alt+tab do the same thing?
> no window buttons (i.e. active windows) on the top panel
why do you need to see a running list of everything that's open in your face at all times? it seems to me like the only time you should need this information is when you're switching apps. you can also see this information by pressing the Super (aka Windows) key. also, afaik i3 doesn't show you all of the running applications at once either, but no one ever complains about that.
To maximize and minimize windows?
> If you're just trying to see a different app, wouldn't alt+tab do the same thing?
Can you alt+tab with a mouse?
> why do you need to see a running list of everything that's open in your face at all times?
A taskbar at the edge of the screen is "in your face"? What if the panel auto-hides?
> it seems to me like the only time you should need this information is when you're switching apps.
And by hiding that information, you add an extra step to the process. The one-step "click on taskbar button" becomes the two-step "activate the window list, click on window button".
> i3 doesn't show you all of the running applications at once either, but no one ever complains about that.
That's because people who use i3 don't want that feature. People who do don't use it.
GNOME used to have it, but threw it away--along with many other features.
Why is it so hard to understand that not everyone uses their computer the same way you do?
I have used Ubuntu at work for a few years but this was the first time I went with Linux at home.
For the most part, I love it! The whole OS seems to be really light on resources and the UI is pretty nice these days. It also passes a critical test, which is when I hand my laptop to a non-technical friend they don't even notice it's running anything uncommon. Chrome is Chrome I guess :-)
One thing that kills me is the fact that Linux is basically left in the dust when it comes to media on the web. I can't watch HBO Go, installing Flash player requires a PhD, and many websites just tell you to go away for using an "unsupported operating system".
Huh? Chrome has Flash built-in, and for everything else, just `apt-get install flashplugin-installer`.
Right from the installer (that doesn't work well on XPS 13 with name) to Unity to Mir.
Fedora 24 has been brilliant and works awesome out of the box. I am constantly recommending F24 to people and have never had a bad experience.
Are you aware that Redhat actually employs most of the kernel devs ?
Ubuntu does not have the "people's stack" ... It's just another company building a stack that is not as good.
So, what is the point of trying to divide the community of people all trying to work towards similar(ish) goals - the improvement of the alternative desktops - rather than focusing on how they are part of the same thing? It doesn't improve the likelihood of achieving the goal of a "better" desktop.
You are literally stood in a room with 10 people trying to demonstrate how 2 of them are better than the other 8. It's an exercise in pointlessness, makes the free software community unfriendly and sets up fake academic wars [0].
Note: I previously worked for Canonical so have bias, I know people at RedHat and other open source companies. I have had the opinion that this sort of stupid divisionism stuff is bad for FOSS for at least 10 years.
I have the greatest of respect for anyone who has ever contributed a single line to Linux - more than anywhere else, your works really impacts countries like India.
I am not sure why there is this impression. I would be lying if I didn't think so myself.
I preferred KDE the most but I never understood the obsession with the number of customisation options. These surely slowed down development and it felt like you had to be the UX designer yourself instead of sensible defaults behind chosen.
Now I just want something with minimal customisation with decent defaults so I know it won't suddenly break when I have to get some work done.
Try Ubuntu MATE, if you want minimal customization you have some preconfigured defaults in MATE Tweak tool, if you ever want to customize more its super easy compared to every other DE I've tried.
The difficulty is that one persons "sensible default" is anothers "crazy terrible default". Particularly in the Linux world, fuelled by it being committed hobbyists who create much of the desktop software and the tradition of UNIX configurability.
Some major applications are still behind. For instance Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134
Back in 2003, I was experimenting with Rainmeter and a port of Blackbox for Windows, but became quickly frustrated about their limitations. I spent an embarassing amount of time trying out the different window managers, before settling on KDE 3.
There's a downside, however: fragmentation.
Beyond that, there are many projects that I feel meet your criteria: Enlightenment, Deespin, Sugar, etc.
And, of course, you can go ask the folks at i3 or wmii for an opinion, I bet they will be happy to give you several.
That's the mistake. You bring in UX experts (who also happened to understand your primary users)
Graphics design != UX
That would be the hard part...
Personally not my cup of tea, but you might enjoy it.
I'm reminded of the Bremerton Ferry Terminal.
http://www.clinkstonarchitects.com/project/1/Bremerton_Trans...
It's attractive and all but that pretty canopy is turned up in the direction where the the rain and wind normally comes from and the seats which have these neat looking glass tops with embedded fish and octipi etc sculptures are not only uncomfortable, they also have a bar in the center presumably designed to stop homeless from sleeping on them which also stops more than 2 people from sitting and the glass has a lip which causes the rain the canopy lets in collect on the seats making them utterly useless at least 1/3 of the time.
- Graphics designers are not necessarily qualified UI (or "UX") designers - UX designers are not necessarily qualified UX designers - Qualified UX designers are not necessarily qualified designers of an OS UI. Most UX work you can get is essentially applying a few simple principles to yet another implementation of a CRUD app.
I've only seen Linux distros make "design" progress on these fronts:
- Eye candy: making things shake, glow, blink, blah, whatever. This is often pointless, and can exacerbate issues with hardware. - Terrible "modern design" copycatting: making fonts and buttons really huge and interfaces empty with no real clue what someone is going to use it for. KDE Neon's package manager sticks out as a bad offender I saw recently - Out of box setup: releasing something that has all the batteries included. Unfortunately, this also pretty much guarantees: it has software on it you don't need; it has software on it you don't want; it has software on it that will break at some point; understanding and customizing it will be treacherous and nigh impossible.
You can go two ways: make a single/narrow purpose system, or make a general purpose system. Linux is great for single/narrow purpose systems, since it's all pieces you can pick and choose at your will. Of course, that won't work as a general computer.
For a general purpose system, I think we need to stop trying to pretend that it's easy or can work out of the box and start accepting the fact that it's difficult and provide people the tools and documentation to handle it.
So many options of ways to lay out windows but fewer than half the actual applications creative professionals need to do their job, so we're still stuck on Mac or Windows.
Second, professional Linux development is focused on the server. No-one is really paid on the desktop side to create applications for creative professionals [1]. Most of the applications are created by "hobbyist" developers whose target audience is themselves.
This means no-one is really contributing to what "creative professionals" want.
The Linux desktop works for me perfectly, it's been the year of the Linux desktop since 1996 - but then I'm not a 'creative professional' or an 'accounting professional' etc etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing [1] Creative professionals are a more difficult segment than general users because they have high expectations of the platform and specific applications/use-cases.
So basically, linux will not prosper as long as it is not in the interest of the US.
Linus is naturalized though: https://lwn.net/Articles/404729/