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Comment by willtim | Hacker News Reader

The Gnome stack is horrible. I long ago started questioning the sanity of the devs when they tried to build an entire office suite in C. Start any Gnome/GTK app and it will continously spew assertion failed log messages at you. Gnome has also forced certain standards, e.g. Network Manager when superior alternatives exist (the excellent Connman).

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Hah, I tried using Connman for a while instead of NM, and I cannot vouch for its superiority.

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.

I seem to recall that Connman came to be after Network Manager was established. And frankly i am unsure if it was Gnome or Red Hat that brought it on, but then i find the lines blur between the two (after all, it seems like the most active Gnome devs are on RH payroll).

Connman was developed by Intel, there's absolutely no Gnomeness involved at all. I think you are correct that Network Manager was first, but it took a long time to stabilise and came with far too many dependencies, including X11 and a full Gnome install!

> Network Manager

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's slow to connect, uses a lot of resources and cannot be installed without bringing in hundreds of megabytes of dependencies (e.g. X11, Gnome libs).

> It's slow to connect

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]

On RPM based distros, it's even less. They made it the default network manager on RHEL 7, even for the minimal cloud images.

Try installing it on Ubuntu headless server, then it will bring in hundreds of megabytes. You obviously already had most of the dependencies installed. Intel developed Connman because NetworkManagers shortcomings make it unsuitable for embedded devices.

That was on a headless server, 16.04 cloud image.

It pulls in much more without --no-install-recommends, but you don't need any of those.

I'm stuck in GNOME -- any advice on breaking free is appreciated!

First, replace the core GNOME apps you use most frequently with lighter alternatives. Take it easy, do it one at a time. Try rxvt-unicode instead of gnome-terminal. Try Thunar or Dolphin or an mc clone instead of Nautilus.

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.

All you need to do is install XFCE. It has a great terminal, a solid file manager, a compositing WM, and easy configuration. I don't bother setting things up piecemeal or fiddling with .Xresources any more.

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.

Contrary to some other advice here, I switched to a new window manager first (xmonad, FWIW), but kept running a bunch of GNOME stuff too. Gradually, I have phased out most of GNOME and my computing life is simpler and more stable as a result.

I highly recommend Trinity DE.

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