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Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

So, when my then-girlfriend and I moved in together a long time ago, she brought with her a bottle of vegan Worchestershire sauce. I tried it at one point, next to a bottle of Lea and Perrins, and I concluded that the only way you could possibly consider it a substitute for Worchestershire sauce was if you had completely forgotten what Worchestershire sauce tastes like, and were going off of some really hazy memories of it.*

I think of that bottle of ersatz Worchestershire sauce whenever I hear from Linux advocates who say that some piece of GUI software is as good as a big commercial project in the GUI realm. My experience with Linux window manager solutions is that they look good in screenshots but whenever you go to use them, the fit and finish just isn't there.

* I wouldn't say soy sauce tastes all that much like Worchestershire sauce, but it's a far closer substitute than anything I've seen labelled as vegan Worchestershire.

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> I think of that bottle of ersatz Worchestershire sauce whenever I hear from Linux advocates who say that some piece of GUI software is as good as a big commercial project in the GUI realm.

I don't think that this is at all fair. Some anecdata:

I can't compare GNOME with macOS, as I haven't used either, but when I switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu/Unity, I honestly felt that Unity was far superior both in terms of usability and degree of "polish", to the extent that during the transition time, while still dual-booting, I futilely tried to make Windows more Unity-like.

Further counterexamples: Firefox vs IE, VLC vs Windows Media Player, etc.

(Yes, in most of these cases the FOSS version has/had a large organisation behind it, to some degree, but then so does GNOME, at least for the moment.)

I moved from Unity on 14.04 to MacOS, and it overall feels like a downgrade in the session management department; I miss tiny things like the “number of windows” indicator (MacOS: dot on launcher indicates process is running, regardless of number of windows; Unity: 1 dot means one window, 2 dots means 2 windows, 3 means three or more) or the “running, but windows in another workspace” indicator.

I still occasionally use Unity (once every couple of weeks) and I am not missing anything from MacOS

>Worchestershire

Please don't hate me for this, but I'd like to respectfully correct you, with a bit of info on pronunciation that I hope will assist you in future.

I'm a Brit, and in England there's a town called Worcester (usually pronounced "wuster" rather than "war-sester"). It's in a county called Worcestershire (usually pronounced "wuster-shuh", sometimes "wuster-shire", but the "wuster" bit holds).

This county has a famous sauce, inevitably called Worcestershire sauce, that often contains anchovy extracts, hence the availability of vegetarian/vegan versions.

Hope that helps.

Duly noted! I can't edit the post anymore, but I appreciate the correction.

We have the same problem.

Until you hear a Massachusetts native tell you they're from Wahstur(??) - Worcester, you wouldn't have realized that US English still has a lot of varying accents, even after we've been thoroughly homogenized by mass media.

I started a new job yesterday where I have to use macOS. I'd prefer to use GNOME.

I haven't been using macOS for any serious work yet, but so far it feels a lot clunkier and messier. It's like an idiot butler.

I'm making an effort to use it with the default settings, as it was designed, rather than trying to bend it towards my workflow.

I'll see how it goes, but so far macOS is nowhere near competitive with Fedora in terms of polish.

If you decide that you wanna bend it, you would be pleased to search r/unixporn for the [aqua] tag where people remake their workflows for macos

Gnome is not like OSX. Not even remotely. It has created independent UI paradigms that I believe are far superior.

http://extensions.gnome.org/ - extensions to customize your desktop built in javascript and installable from your browser.

Tons of stuff like that. Try it you will like it.

> The company has also claimed that "Lord Marcus Sandys, ex-Governor of Bengal" encountered it while in India with the East India Company in the 1830s, and commissioned the local apothecaries to recreate it.

Think of Gnome as the chutney to OSX's Worcestershire sauce. Ultimately that's what the Brits were trying to replicate you know ;)

P.S. Referring to Bengal in particular, then what we are talking about is Kashundi

That's not a good comparison because many Linux advocates still have to use Windows and/or MacOS so they do know how it feels.

For example, I used MacOS in my last job and Windows 10 in my current job and I still prefer to use Fedora Workstation. In addition to that, my experience with MacOS and Windows 10 showed me where Linux could improve (except software selection which is a hard problem to solve)

My instinct would be to completely agree with you - people can make a lot of excuses for Linux desktops because they want them to be 'as good', given all the other advantages of running Linux.

On the other hand, I left my job and the associated Windows environment in the summer to found a startup. I bought a T430 cheap off ebay as my main development machine. I put Fedora 28 on it, and have been using it for a few months. The entire experience has been a very pleasant surprise in terms of pain.

Fedora installed flawlessly and everything worked, down to fingerprint reader and keyboard backlight. The only command line tinkering I had to do at setup was to install tlp to help the battery life.

Gnome has also been really very good. It handles multiple monitors well, the task switching is good, I like the overall approach once I'd used it for a few days. It is genuinely a better DE than Windows, and I prefer it to MacOS.

My main niggle with Gnome is notifications - there is some magic algorithm based on your activity that decides when they should disappear, and when they do they are never to be seen again (no history or anything). This is my only issue with it on a day to day basis, and it's really not that bad (far less than I have to deal with on Windows or Mac).

Not that I particularly agree with you, but that metaphor made my day.

I'm reminded of Stephenson in Cryptonomicon spending pages talking about a main character's past odyssey to deal with their wisdom teeth as an allegory for their current relationship status.

I switched from OSX to Ubuntu/Unity a few years ago, and recently switched to Fedora/Gnome. I found the transition from osx pretty efortless, and would say I prefer Gnome over Unity.

to be fair if microsoft would bring outlook or even the whole suite to linux there wouldn't be that much for most users to be staying at MS.

That's one of the most elaborate manifestations of ignorance I've came across on internet. Kudos for that!

Apparently you don't even know what you're comparing. In none of MacOS, Windows, Android or iOS is there a separate, standalone component that is a window manager. There is one huge OS, of which the desktop environment is a small part, and the window manager is a small, possibly unidentifiable part of that small part. Whereas a window manager is one part of a completely modular stack of software. It can definitely be perfected into something that works like those abovementioned systems (see elementary OS or Ubuntu, for example; and it's not like the "fit and finish" is there in Windows 10), but the thing is that the core userbase isn't in the market for that sort of perfection. I specifically use this stack of software (and there's way more to it than Linux itself) because I can decide what's perfect for me and still run loads of software on it wihout having to port them. Fit and finish is mine to do.

I totally understand that someone may not want to do that, there are distros for them (Android is one), and then there is Windows and MacOS, all are options. But you're criticising (some) distros for doing what they're supposed to do, i.e. being highly, even completely customisable. Furthermore, I can easily say "they look good in screenshots but whenever you go to use them, the fit and finish just isn't there" about Windows or Macs, and what that basically means in all of the cases is that I'm criticising an unfamiliar paradigm with total disregard for or ignorance of the motives that cause it to be the way it is.

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