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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

>thumbnails in the file picker!

Use a decent desktop environment, like Plasma :)

Gnome's file picker is notoriously, offensively bad - to the point that it makes me completely lose trust that any thought has been put into the human factors of the rest of the system. Plasma, on the other hand, continues to surprise with its thoughtful and accommodating design choices.

Life is too short, and brainpower too limited, to justify wasting either on frustrating software.

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I love KDE too. It's so configurable and just plain powerful. And looks great as well.

I really felt so empowered when I left macOS for FreeBSD with KDE and I still do. I found I really hate opinionated software because usually I don't have the same opinions :)

How's FreeBsd on your hardware? I've been itching to try it on my ThinkPad, but with an infant and work, I'm not able to find the time to do so!

It's great for me. It runs for months as a daily driver without any issues. No crashes. In HiDPI also.

However I run it on a desktop NUC with wired everything. I don't use WiFi, Bluetooth or Suspending. I'm not sure if the more laptop-related usescases will be ok. For example I had to turn off my bluetooth controller because it hangs the boot process. I think this is just a peculiarity of my particular controller though.

Also I have one weird key repeat thing I still have to investigate :) But I think my Apple keyboard is just a bit funny.

Its like better windows! Sometimes pretty glitchy, but worth it for about 80%-90% problem free.

>Life is too short, and brainpower too limited, to justify wasting either on frustrating software.

This is exactly why I switched from Linux to Windows and never looked back.

For me, it's vice versa: this is why I switched to Linux, because it gets out of my way.

No amount of good UX can justify the tools constantly spying on you.

The Windows UX these days is also horribly jankful in other ways, too.

I feel like Windows 2000 made a stronger case for "switching to Windows and never looking back" than Win7-11.

Windows 7 was actually pretty clean. It was basically Windows XP with a nice look & feel. Also the last Windows without bloat everywhere (ok, IE)

But yeah, 2000 was somehow the apogee.

Plasma is pretty nice nowadays but I sometimes miss the simpler times of KDE 3.5

For the time, Win 2k was also amazingly easy to install (compared to win95, dos, Linux, WinNT). It really was a revelation.

I just realized that I probably used it or win2k3 daily for nearly 10 years.

Not just manual installation but fully automated remote installation too. From a manageability perspective, the 2000 series was a leap forward, with Active Directory and Group Policy. I always found it odd that Apple never even attempted to provide a proper solution for remote management of their OS and just left it to 3rd parties like JAMF. (I know they've made inroads into "enterprise" since then, but this definitely hamstrung them there for a long time)

Apple bought fleetsmith and has full GPO-style provisioning profile support for iOS, TVos, and macOS.

You can even do DEP so that certain serial numbers marked as "yours" will autoenroll/provision on wipe, on a blank/fresh OS.

Exact opposite from me. I just cannot use windows anymore. Windows 10 feels like windows xp with adwares pre-installed.

Unfortunately RAM is quite limited too. The idle windows memory consumption is horrifying.

It's funny you have concerns with Windows using too much memory at idle, I actually have no idea how much memory my daily-driver Ubuntu install uses at baseline, but my #1 issue with desktop Linux is how badly it behaves when low on free memory. Windows and MacOS will at least warn/prompt you to kill programs. On Linux, by default....the mouse just stops moving and you can't do anything. You can fiddle with settings and install tools like earlyoom to mitigate it, but the default behavior is insanely bad for a desktop OS. Despite having 32GB of RAM I still run into it occasionally and it drives me nuts.

I think this is due to memory overcommitting on Linux. It can actually be turned off.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19750796/allocating-more...

But I like that about FreeBSD, it just says no when you try to allocate more memory than you have (including swap!)

Fedora now handles this much better by having systemd-oomd by default now https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/EnableSystemdOomd

The more I am using Linux the more I wish I had gone with Fedora for my personal desktop when I was forced to switch from Windows to Linux a couple of months ago (forced by hardware issues with an unused onboard video controller which I can set Linux to fully ignore but sends Windows in an infinite reboot loop).

Don’t get me wrong. Out of the Windows, Mac and Ubuntu machines I have, the Ubuntu one is still my favorite (especially since switching from 20.04 LTS to 20.10) but Fedora is doing things so much more along the lines of what I want.

It’s more cutting edge but still very stable and well tested. It doesn’t force snaps onto me. I’d much rather install flatpak software. And it has a cleaner Gnome interface. Even though I kind of like the Ubuntu sidebar dock, it’s not worth all the other awkward behaviors with Ubuntu trying to override Gnome (for example, the existence of the Ubuntu Software store really annoys me since it doesn’t support Flatpak and simply seems to run a lot worse than the Gnome software store that I also have installed).

Indeed, I think I'm going to make the jump to Fedora from 20.04. Really hard decision too as I've been an Ubuntu guy for the majority of my computing life.

Agree on all points as well - Vanilla GNOME > Unity, Flatpaks > Snaps. The Snap Store is just GNOME Software with some plugins/tweaks FWIW, this is changing (has changed?) soon though. I learned this by investigating a memory leak https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/issues/942

Enable zram. It does make a huge difference on lower RAM devices (I have 8G in my laptop)

Get a good amount of swap on ssd, the default 2GB on most distros is not nearly enough to save you when you really need swapping. IIRC you can even make it sparse to not occupy disk space when you're not using it.

> IIRC you can even make it sparse to not occupy disk space when you're not using it.

While this sounds great, not allocating storage for swap means either you'll have that space unallocated or you won't have any swap because your system is full.

Administrative overhead is simpler though, and sparse files don't have any performance overhead in later kernels (Citation needed, read somewhere on some wiki)

I have a couple of sparse swap files handy for when I know I'll need them. And it happens with some very specific and predictable use cases. Usually it's when I need to load some big timeseries csv files from pandas and parse a datetime index. Or when I need to process big images. It's useful to be able to attach some additional swap when you need it and drop it afterwards.

For everyday use I never even exceed 16GBs... Guess everyone has different needs, but there is no way it swaps over 32GB for normal applications, even taking into account overcommitting.

Where do you put the swap? Do you move data off of your drive(s) to make space for the swap?

I usually have either free space or some cruft I can throw away if I really need to free some.

I'm gonna go wild and crazy and assume you work with IT in some way since you're on HN.

How on earth does idle RAM consumption matter to you when a GB of RAM is cheaper than a beer?

I'm not a Windows fan, I don't let Windows control any hardware other than a GPU on any of my systems but i do run it in a VM for gaming. I just don't see the problem, more RAM usage could even be better for performance. It's a useless metric.

Where do you live where a beer costs 5€?

Sweden, a beer in a bar is at least 5€

Unused RAM is useless though. The OS better cache some useful stuff there and evict when something else needs that.

If you are low on RAM and on Linux I really recommend getting zram, which will compress memory pages making swapping less needed.

I have 40GB RAM (Weird number indeed, 8GB soldered, 1x 32GB stick) in my machine. The problem I have is that even with 2 WDS500G2B0C-00PXH0 NVME in RAID1 it takes awhile for the machine to hibernate and resume from hibernation, It's faster to boot the system cold (but then I don't have state).

I've been reading but never really figured out. Can ZSWAP or ZRAM write compressed to disk somehow too?

Thanks! :)

>to the point that it makes me completely lose trust that any thought has been put into the human factors of the rest of the system.

This doesn't really make any sense. The issues with the file chooser are known, what's missing are design and development resources to do a redesign. The main problem is actually that the human design effort is being put into the rest of the system and not here; losing trust because of this is somewhat of a self-sabotage that you probably want to avoid.

I can't stand KDE/Plasma for what many would consider a silly reason: I want Confirm/OK/Next actions to be in the lower right side of dialogs, and Cancel/Back in the lower left.

I have a vague memory of this being configurable a long time ago (maybe KDE 3), but this setting disappearing in later versions.

Is it possible to change this in later versions of KDE?

I just fired up the Settings dialog, and they're already where you describe?

https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/okular/okular/configure.png

This is how the dialogs looked the last time I looked. Are you saying that it's changed?

KWin is great, as are Dolphin, the 'System Settings' GUI, and many other KDE applications. But for the life of me I cannot understand the praise of Plasma. It crashes or otherwise breaks regularly for me (for instance, my autohiding panel will sometimes disappear completely, forcing me to kquitapp5/kstart5 plasmashell to get it back) Edit mode is a usability nightmare, I feel like I need to be super careful about where I move my mouse while using it because otherwise it does things I didn't intend with errant mouse hovers. And while it may not be the fault of plasmashell itself, many of the plasmoids are broken, janky, or generally just not very good. While I use KDE, I try to avoid all the plasma stuff as much as possible.

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