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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

The author mentions linux... but where does this happen on linux?

I love using a desktop that does exactly what I tell it. Yes it takes longer to set up. But I use a computer every day, it's worth it.

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GNOME removed a lot of configurability that was present in previous versions.

Yeah but linux is configurable. Don't like your UI? Rip it out. It's not locked down like windows or mac.

SO feels very weird to blame linux here and not... GNOME.

Plenty of major Linux distributions have made GNOME the primary or only "supported" UI, and plenty of site administrators don't want you to switch it out and may enforce that to a lesser or greater extent (e.g. not installing anything else). I do blame GNOME, but they're pretty much the face of Linux these days (I'd say ever since Mandriva went bankrupt tbh. - RedHat in particular is very closely involved in GNOME development).

And "don't like your UI? Rip it out" is less and less true now that modern linux is adding more tight integrations with rapidly-shifting interfaces. E.g. if you're running Wayland then a lot of stuff (e.g. screenrecording) only works with the GNOME compositor. Some of the modern app distribution stuff (Docker? Snap?) requires your DE to be running the right DBus sessions / process namespaces / etc. . If you use one application from a DE it's maybe expecting more things to be running - PulseAudio, clipboard management, ...

It's possible, but these days I'm not sure how big the practical difference is from using something like BB4Win.

Then don't run Wayland or Gnome and see how far you get without going insane. You seem to be forgetting that systems have become a lot more complex than 20 years ago and most people prefer for things to 'just work' instead of fiddling with the terminal to fix their wireless network or bluetooth headphone. And after that there are some pesky security things like every X client being able to read and inject keystrokes in every other window. If you want meaningful security it's useless to cling to the decades old way of doing things.

>Then don't run Wayland or Gnome and see how far you get without going insane.

Pretty far? GNOME isn't by any means the best DE out there? And Wayland is still in infancy?

Even with minimalist distros you fiddle with your terminal to get wifi and x working once and then it's done. It's not like you have to do it all the time (unlike windows 10 which would mute my headphones every single time it updated. still can't remember how to fix that even though it happened twice it was so non-obvious).

Also I haven't touched gnome in years, it's either been i3 or openbox. Feel pretty sane.

I don't know about Mac, but on Windows you can change everything from the start menu to the taskbar to Explorer to anything else you like.

How do you replace the window manager? the default one is really bad

What don't you like about it? Maybe there are some options you'd be interested in trying.

I hate it when people blame linux but they're actually referring to the software that runs on linux (GNOME, PopOS, Unity, etc.) not linux itself

I also strongly disagree with the author. They're probably referring to things like Gnome and Unity and PopOS. The thing is, these are opinionated options in addition to everything else you can do with Linux, rather than replacements that restrict your options. You've also got things like NixOS, which is definitely going in the opposite direction, allowing you basically infinite customization.

Oh, for some reason I read that bit as "the Linux kernel non-consensually personalizes." You're right, though: it's definitely referring to userspace libraries, not the kernel itself. And yes, you can still easily avoid GNOME, Unity, and anything else you don't want to use: Openbox, i3, dmenu, and countless other window managers and GUI applications exist and work perfectly well (as they did a decade ago). That plethora of choice makes "Linux" nearly immune to the effect that the author's talking about.

In general I agree with you about the ability to customize Linux, but the author could be referring to systemd, which (from what I've seen) has been the target of many complaints about being too central and hard to replace, especially with how it is required by so many projects in the Linux ecosystem (from distros like Debian and Arch to DEs like GNOME).

On the other hand, it is extremely configurable, whatever else you might think about it.

The majority of people using Linux (well, on a desktop/laptop) use things like Gnome and Unity and PopOS. I mean, sure you can run Linux from a command line only. But that's not the common use case, and that's not usually what people even mean when they talk about Linux on a laptop.

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