Comment by tored | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tored | Hacker News Reader

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Even if Windows 10 has problems with scattered settings, old style programs vs new style apps, default apps and start menu annoyances, Linux Desktop annoyances are on a completely different level.

The huge Gnome 3 schism, that lead to many different Gnome forks. And consequently GTK is more of a Gnome 3 toolkit rather than a universal toolkit, which will affect non-gnome GTK apps.

And if you manage to pick a desktop, hopefully by avoiding Gnome 3 because it constantly changes workflow and uses buggy JavaScript plugins, you realize that you will probably have Gnome 3 installed anyway because apps or the distro having dependencies to Gnome, if you don’t want to settle for old forks of those apps with less features.

And if you didn’t pick Gnome (or KDE) it is a good idea to install a compositor if you don’t like software rendered desktop like the good old Windows 9x days.

Be sure to turn the compositor off if you plan to play any games, especially if you thinking about playing on Wine. Or accept to always play in full screen. This will of course annoy you every time you need to look up something online.

If your game doesn’t run well, just add this unknown PPA that will installs nightly compiled graphics libraries (who wouldn’t?).

And if your computer freezes mid game, sorry you didn’t change the virtual memory size before because it is a fixed size. Tough luck.

And then of course the entire X vs Wayland situation.

> And if you didn’t pick Gnome (or KDE) it is a good idea to install a compositor if you don’t like software rendered desktop like the good old Windows 9x days.

So I haven't gone out of the way to install a compositor (are you talking a wayland compositor, or the older Compiz type stuff)?

But I have 2x1440p and 1x1080p and I've not noticed any perf issues, which I assume is what you're highlighting as the downside?

And I use all three major desktop OSes daily, so it's not that there's some blazing fast responsiveness to be had on Windows or OS X I'm unaware of.

> If your game doesn’t run well, just add this unknown PPA that will installs nightly compiled graphics libraries (who wouldn’t?).

This feels like five years out of date. Just pick a compatibility tool dropdown in Steam for most people. Lutris if you want something open source.

> And if your computer freezes mid game, sorry you didn’t change the virtual memory size before because it is a fixed size. Tough luck.

I haven't had a swap partition in years, and not once has it lead to a game crash.

Older compositor like compiz and compton. I have only used Wayland with Gnome 3. Without compositor I experienced screen tearing. Less popular desktop environments and window managers usually only support X.

My subjective feeling is that the snappiness is better in Windows than Linux and MacOS. I think that the pure desktop experience (moving & resizing windows, graphics, font rendering, login/logout, shortcuts, etc) is still unbeatable on Windows. What has gone downhill for Windows is the changes due to mobile & tablet adaptions and the cloud integration (Microsoft account vs local account etc).

I needed to install more up to date graphic libraries thru a PPA to avoid artifacts and weird rendering for a Steam installed game (Crusader Kings 3). Lutris is great, but to my understanding you need to manually install dxvk to get the best performance (someone can correct me on that (and Wine 6 broke a lot of things)). Also make sure you are running the correct gfx kernel module or otherwise hack your grub file.

Yes, you can disable swap entirely and hope it doesn't affect stability. By default Ubuntu creates a 2GB swap file, but if you are on a 16GB machine (not an unusual setup for a desktop computer) that can fill up pretty quickly and Linux will go into a swapping frenzy. You can't even ssh into the machine, just hard reboot or hope it recovers this hour.

When this happens the first time, it is not obvious that it is the swap file that is at blame for what happened. I'm not sure if it even exist a GUI for chaining the swap file size in Gnome (Disks app maybe?). But if you manage to change the swap file size, you have to decide, can I turn it off and hope nothing breaks or should increase it to match whatever RAM or more. It is weird that a desktop operating system ships with a feature that doesn't work.

>And consequently GTK is more of a Gnome 3 toolkit rather than a universal toolkit, which will affect non-gnome GTK apps.

This is not really true, and has not affected anything that I've seen. Basically every GTK desktop (including GNOME) has another separate widget library on top of GTK, to include its own widgets specific to that desktop. Also GTK3 is currently release frozen and will not be adding any more features, GTK4 is the current version.

>hopefully by avoiding Gnome 3 because it constantly changes workflow and uses buggy JavaScript plugins,

I haven't seen any desktop system that doesn't change workflow over time, or doesn't have some bugs in the plugins. That's a sad fact of life when you have hundreds of plugins made by various people, with varying quality. FYI KDE is also using javascript as a plugin language for the desktop, and for a number of other QML things, so it makes no sense to single out GNOME for use of javascript: https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/scripting/

>And then of course the entire X vs Wayland situation.

The situation with compositing should improve over time with Wayland, the idea there is to not ever turn off compositing (though the Wayland implementations are still optimizing this for the various edge cases).

GTK, here are two forum threads that covers this.

GTK3 regressions from a GTK2 perspective

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/gtk3-regressions-from-a-gtk2...

Horrible GTK3 / GNOME UI design is leaking into Ubuntu Mate applications in 20.04

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/horrible-gtk3-gnome-ui-desig...

And then you have the terminal Termite

https://github.com/thestinger/termite

  This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their hostility towards other 
  projects using VTE as a library. GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of 
  the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are 
  meant for others to use.

JavaScript can definitely work as scripting language for a desktop environment, but it doesn't work for Gnome in the current state.

I have written about this topic before, see thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27195694,

quoting myself

  Personally I prefer building GUIs in a scripting language 
  like JavaScript over a compiled language like C and C++

and

  I think for Gnome and other desktops that uses this 
  technique, it is in the right direction

But the negatives in short are poor documentation, memory leaks, you end up only using the approved plugins (if you don't like to restart your desktop more than once a day) which of course negates the whole idea of a plugin system.

>GTK3 regressions from a GTK2 perspective

It's a bit odd to read this sentence. GTK2 got its last minor release over 10 years ago, and was EOLed 6 months ago. It's a dead project. GTK3 is also feature frozen as of 6 months ago, and will not see any features brought back from GTK2. If you want to get some of these issues fixed, it would be best to start submitting patches to GTK4, or trying to find other solutions that will work there. Or, you could try to revive some of that GTK2 code yourself, although I wouldn't recommend it -- a lot of that code is very obsolete.

>Horrible GTK3 / GNOME UI design is leaking into Ubuntu Mate applications in 20.04

This is a design decision made independently by the MATE developers to update their app to a different design, no? I don't see what GNOME has to do with this. Regardless of your feelings on it, at least one person seems to have thought it was the right decision.

>And then you have the terminal Termite

I remember this issue from last time it was discussed, I think the Termite maintainer overreacted as a result of a very normal technical disagreement. I don't really witness them rejecting patches any more than any other project. I also disagreed with that developer's decision to fork on a technical level, I thought that was unnecessary and could have been avoided.

>But the negatives in short are poor documentation, memory leaks, you end up only using the approved plugins (if you don't like to restart your desktop more than once a day) which of course negates the whole idea of a plugin system.

Some people are actually working on the docs, please contribute if you are able: https://gjs.guide/

There have been issues with memory leaks in the past, but those are bugs that can pop up with any garbage collected language. I'm not sure what you'd expect them to do, besides do the normal thing, and fix the individual bugs whenever possible.

I hate that I always have to say this, but there is no alternative to only using approved plugins, on any plugin system. I don't know what you mean it negates it. In Javascript the crashes and hangs are usually from unhandled exceptions and infinite loops -- This is even worse with a C or C++ plugin system, because those are memory unsafe and can cause bad segfaults. If the javascript is causing segfaults then that's probably a bug that should be reported.

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