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Personally, I gave up on Gnome and run LXDE a bit like i3 - autopositionning the windows with Fx keys mapped to a given set of coordinates, so F10 will make a window use a square on the left covering 80% of the screen, F11 will move the window to the remaining 20% on the right, thus hiding conky - etc. The only advantage I find in LXDE is that it has a titlebar I can 'reveal' if I wish to mess around and fiddle with the window position (like when tracking the arping replies in a remote lan and using a bit of scripting to see the evolution of the metric as I fiddle with things)

I like my desktop lean and mean. I do not want distractions. When I am dealing with a remote system crashing under load, the last thing I want is my desktop or my shortcuts to behave in weird ways. Things must always work, in a consistent way. Funny thing is I can only get that in Linux... and in Windows 10.

Customization is a feature, just not everyone needs that feature.

So I disagree with your assessment, as some users will find Gnome or KDE too distracting.

Some people try that, too (and XFCE). Admittedly, they're better than a tiling window manager, but LXDE's last stable release was 2016 and it doesn't have a compositor so all of that graphics hardware in your computer specialized to prevent X11 DAMAGE events from forcing applications redraws and for saving power is going unused.

Does using a compositor really _save_ power in practice? GNOME's one certainly doesn't, in my experience. It would spin my fans up after a few moments of dragging a window around. Of course it has no configuration options so it is not possible to fix it. kwin is almost as bad last time I checked on my hardware.

I agree ; I'm considering moving to wayland but still now LXDE does everything I need well enough to not have bothered for the last few years

I'm curious what you find distracting in Gnome? Unless you're running in Classic mode the newer versions got rid of everything except the top menu bar and that is less busy than it used to be. The default launcher works very well using the keyboard only, I actually quite like it (though there are definitely other things I don't like about the Gnome defaults).

What I find distracting: the menu bar indeed, the file manager on the desktop, the title bar of the windows, the buttons on the titlebars of the windows

That doesn't leave much of gnome.

> The only advantage I find in LXDE is that it has a titlebar I can 'reveal' if I wish to mess around and fiddle with the window position

Unless I'm misunderstanding, you can use Alt + left click to move any window around, and Alt + right click to resize. No need to reveal the title bar except perhaps to read the occasional title.

Correct, I really like alt left click to move windows but for some reason I prefer resizing with the title bar even if takes one more event (keypress) to make it show up, and one more to remove it when I'm done.

Off topic, but have you looked at LXQt? It is surprisingly nice, albeit with slightly more memory usage.

I never thought I could move away from LXDE but I think I'm going to soon.

Interesting - I will consider it, thanks a lot for the suggestion! Memory use is a concern, but so are wakeups in a tickles kernel on a laptop.

At the moment I'm considering Sway mostly because of the wide use and community, but it's a "long term" project this month or the next :-)

> I agree with you that compositing/window manager fragmentation is a problem. And this article is a perfect example of that. The author may think that they're happy using i3 with Firefox and st at the moment, but the desktop computing environment has gotten so complex and the expectations of users who interact with desktop applications so rich, that a small hobby project DE/WM cannot fully satisfy all of those use cases over the long term.

Users have different needs and preferences, so I see the fragmentation as a positive thing because it gives people choice.

For me personally, xmonad, one of these hobby projects, has been perfectly sufficient for the last 10 years. I also didn't really touch my configuration much in the last ~8 years. More importantly though, I find it actually reduces my mental workload since I no longer have to handle window placement myself.

Definitely. I have had i3 on every computer I use for a couple of years now and I don't think I will ever go back to a conventional window manager.

No matter the thing I'm doing, every useful or efficient placing of windows is always no more than one or two keystrokes away.

Eh, I've been running xmonad within Gnome since (checks git blame) 2011 and I don't think I'm changing things anytime soon. Well, for the first 2 years I fiddled a lot and made sure I could just configure a computer the way I liked with a script. Occasionally I'll have an issue like Ubuntu switching to Gnome 3 but even that, the biggest disruption in years, just took an evening of fiddling to fix.

> Font rendering on Linux is as advanced and capable as any other OS including in the areas of kerning and hinting. It should just work without any user intervention and look great.

This isn't entirely true. AIUI, Apple enables LCD filtering and subpixel rendering by default, because it knows that you're using an LCD and what the subpixel order is. However, these are usually toggleable via the GUI, and even without them it usually still looks fine.

Since Mojave, MacOS nolonger does subpixel rendering.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/13/macos-10-14-mojave-remove...

On non-retina displays, which... is nowhere near the normal use case for Macs at this point.

On all displays. It matters less on Retina displays.

External displays are nowhere near the normal use case?

No, my point is that this change only affects non-Retina displays. In my experience (worldwide, many companies, etc) anyone who uses a Mac with an external monitor generally doesn't settle for some POS. It's a high-end screen that matches the MacBook, hence why it's not that big of a deal.

The change affects all displays.

The highest supported resolution on a MacBook is still scaled down. Only a couple of expensive LG displays match the actual density as far as I know.

The MacBook Air only got a Retina display a few months ago. The low-end iMac is still 1080p.

People forget that subpixel rendering was a thing on CRT's before LCD's were around. Subpixel order is pretty universally standardized. Is there an EDID data element for pixel order?

I didn't know that! How does sub-pixel rendering work on CRT's, which (to my understanding) don't have a set matrix of pixels and subpixels?

It worked like shit, blurring perfectly fine text. At least the last time I had a CRT, which was very early 00's