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Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

The problem is the desktop situation is such a mess. Do you go with a gtk or qt desktop and which one? And then X11 which is ancient and creaky, or wayland which is fatally nerfed in design (if not it's entire development philosophy) even when it does do what you need which is far from always?

OTOH windows is becoming adware/spyware and macos is becoming big brother lockdown-wear, so maybe it is time for linux to shine.

Personally windows (actually, almost anything microsoft) enrages me anytime I'm unfortunate enough to have to use it, and I'm getting increasingly annoyed at macos limitations and won't be buying apple again, so my next machine will run linux.

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Last time I checked, I could run Qt apps on my MATE desktop and Gtk+ apps on my KDE desktop. I prefer X11 because it's mature and works perfectly for me. I might try Wayland sometime, but it had better support all of the weird things I do with X11.

More to the point, the choice is a feature, and it comes with a bit of chaos. Would you rather live in an effectively single-party state like Singapore where everything is shiny but you get caned for spitting gum on the street (MacOS), Russia which is a third-world mafia state masquerading as a gas station masquerading as a world power (Windows), or a messy democracy like The Netherlands where everyone has a voice but sometimes the government collapses because they can't agree on everything (Linux)?

I live in The Netherlands and I've run Linux on the desktop for 30 years.

>Would you rather live in an effectively single-party state like Singapore where everything is shiny but you get caned for spitting gum on the street (MacOS)

This sounds like a good place to live for me, because I don't spit gum on streets and wouldn't want to live around people who do. What kind of disgusting person would do such a thing? And who chews gum these days?

Personally, I think this is a terrible analogy.

As an outsider, the Netherlands seems a lot more stable than many other democracies, including Germany and the US.

The Dutch government literally collapsed a couple of days ago.

So there's anarchy in the streets in Amsterdam now?

Also, Singapore doesn't cane people anymore. However, they still don't have true freedom of speech like in many Western countries.

Yeah, they just restrict you from doing stuff; like browsing large swaths of the Internet, for instance.

That’s a hilarious analogy. I agree with the general sentiment.

However… there is a difference between meaningful choice and choice that is simply a byproduct of grumpy disagreements from 20 years ago.

Choice has compound costs. Primarily, it creates interop issues. The best is example is, of course, software distribution (hey what ppa do I need to install node). It also creates an explosion of configuration options and points of failure.

The desktop distro maintainers should, imo, put their disagreements aside and find common ground to the most pressing issues. Perhaps funded by some billionaire or their mega-corp.

Honestly it's less like Netherlands and more like Sudan (or France?) sometimes. I've also used linux since SLS for what it's worth.

Choice is fine as long as everything can integrate properly and work together.

Maybe the desktop could do with a little bit of Singapore's sort-of benevolent-ish dictatorship - that's how the kernel is developed after all.

Lasermoon for me, which was a slight fork of SLS.

Before that, whatever Linux it was it came on about half a dozen 1.44MB floppies. I remember it used a Linux 0.9 kernel, but not much else - except it was a Real Proper Unix System like I had at university, except *on my very own desktop PC*! With a compiler and everything! And SLIP!

Oh that brings back memories, yes I'm sure I tried that one too. One of them came on a bunch of floppies in sets, for the main system, X, and whetever, I think there were more like 12-13 of them in total; took a whole day to copy them and install IIRC. Not quite as bad as installing AIX from 5 1/4" on a 6150 I snagged somehow.

Let's see, I think Lasermoon and Zipslack were on the cover CD with Computer Shopper in about what, 1993? Pink and yellow CD. I think I only binned it a couple of years ago - stupid of me!

Perhaps that was MCC/Interim?

I went KDE Plasma. It works pretty well, it feels close enough to Windows that the transition is as painless as possible, and it's got tons of advanced tweaks for power users. GTK and Qt apps both seem to run fine under it. Most importantly, it gets out of my way and lets me work.

(Other alternatives I enjoy include Cinnamon and Xfce. I cannot stand gnome-shell, it's like a tablet OS or something.)

Lots of popular distributions support KDE out of the box (Kubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora KDE, etc), and it'll install on pretty much anything else with minimal fuss. That's the most fun part about desktop environments on Linux: you don't have to pick just one. You can install a bunch side by side and switch between them when you log in. Once you know this, it becomes fun to experiment :)

>Which DE

If you want a full-fledged modern DE with active development, the choice is only between GNOME and KDE imo.

>GTK or Qt

I used to worry about whether to go full GTK or Qt, these days I don't really care. Both work in either environment and the theming is usually consistent as well unless you have a custom theme, so they don't even look out of place.

>X11 or Wayland

It seems like Wayland is going to be the future, so it's only really a matter of whether it works well enough for your uses yet or not. If it does, great, use Wayland, if not, stick with X11 for a bit longer.

It honestly doesn't seem like that much of a mess to me.

IMHO, this is more a choice overload [1] than a technical problem. You can pick whatever distro (another choice overload) and start using the default desktop environment, which is more than enough. Qt vs. gtk for desktop development? Use whatever you think will work for you, they are stable enough, and you can use almost any (even remotely popular) language under the sun for development. Java/Scala/Kotlin + Swing (or SWT) will also do the job (and let's put aside that Swing looks "old"; when you know what you are doing, you can make a modern looking-app with JVM stack as well, e.g. IntelliJ).

On Windows and macOS, you don't have any choice, so people usually see that as good enough because they can't compare it against alternatives on the same platform.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice

The other side of overchoice is that the community won't focus on maintaining, supporting, and optimizing one of them in particular, which does become a technical problem as old things fall into disrepair. Even sticking with Ubuntu meant having your entire UI change for no reason a few times. Whereas Mac OS is smoother than all the Linux DEs, isn't too different to use vs 1-2 decades ago, and you can search "how to do X on Mac" pretty easily.

Every Linux desktop user says "use what works best for you, we're all different," but I really don't buy that we're so different to warrant multiple competing DEs / window managers / whatever on top of the same OS.

Been using for 15 years, I've never sat there and worried about gtk or qt, Maybe wayland or X11, but I've just naturally moved to wayland?

Just install something like Fedora, and you won't worry about it, it will just work.

I personally hate Ubuntu btw Canonical is just not for me. I have no idea how it's so popular. Personally Fedora or NixOS are just so superior I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else.

>Personally Fedora or NixOS are just so superior I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else.

Could be. I should try NixOS or fedora again but seriously don't overstate it. Cannonical are not my fav company. Installing an LTS ubu works fine, it has annoyances (maybe nixos and fedora are better?) but it's still so incredibly far ahead of windows or macos it's not even close for me. Sure, I'm used to linux on my laptop (thinkpad t480s intel graphics) that anything else will be a massive hassle to maintain, with driver issues, os-level spyware and all that other headache. When I use my kids' macs they always feel janky, windows? Forget it, it's just so unpolished and ew.

Pretty different to RH7 in 2002 in quality and polish when I first tried linux.

Sorry I meant any other distro.

With respect I was trying to point out quietly that I've heard that kind of distro-jingoism for 20 years and the failure to appreciate another person's distro of choice to the point where you think nobody should ever be using it is just a bit silly. The distro I use is fine, if yours is even better, great!

NixOS is great in many ways, but it’s really quite difficult to use. Anything that requires use of the command line is a no-go for everyone but hardcore enthusiasts. Even I, who have contributed to Nixpkgs, wish I could just stick to a GUI sometimes. Not to mention how NixOS breaks assumptions software has about your computer and therefore makes development much more difficult than it really needs to be.

>I personally hate Ubuntu btw Canonical is just not for me. I have no idea how it's so popular. Personally Fedora or NixOS are just so superior I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else.

Ubuntu got popular years ago because they made a distro that supported everything and was really easy to install and use. Fedora has always been a pain because it doesn't support a lot of stuff out of the box (i.e. codecs): a distro that can't even play MP3s was a non-starter for many people 10-15 years ago. NixOS isn't nearly as easy to install and get started with.

Ubuntu has been coasting on its inertia for a long time though, and many other distros have caught up with it or surpassed it, such as Mint, while Ubuntu has been shooting itself in the foot with things like Snaps.

> Personally Fedora or NixOS are just so superior I don't know why anyone bothers with anything else.

The AUR.

Arch is also freaking awesome too!

Yeah I didn't fall in love with Linux until I got to arch. It's fantastic.

Personally, I prefer OpenSUSE to Fedora. I've been running Leap for several years. Fedora didn't perform as well on my hardware nor was it as stable. Over the last several months, I've been piloting Arch and will likely settle there. Canonical and SUSE are both moving in directions that I'm not in favor of, e.g., tighter coupling to the enterprise/money making side. From a company perspective, sure it makes sense. But from an individual perspective, perhaps less so. I'm not looking for the Linux equivalent of Windows: bloated, telemetry, privacy invading, etc.

Because it mostly works with proprietary drivers without any religious issues.

Canonical has it's own religion though, so you're trading one problem for another.

As long at it isn't the FOSS one about OS purity.

What new limitations has macos added?

It's not all necessarily new, but for example on every update I seem to get 'Operation not permitted' somewhere new.

Then why can't I change the spaces animation (turn it off)? Windows snapping without leaving a gap on the edge of the screen? Etc, etc.

And are they now doing scans for copyright-infringing media and so on - I wouldn't be surprised.

I'm an adult. It's my computer. Let me do what I want with it.

> why can't I change the spaces animation (turn it off)?

You can turn on "reduce motion" and it will replace it with a much simpler fade in.

Sure, but that affects other things too - why can't I just turn this one annoying animation off completely?

That's what killed Macos for me. What's the point of all that hardware if everything has 0.5 second delay - it's ridiculous.

For casual computer users, that animation/delay is the difference between “oh no, what just happened?!” and “oh, that button sucks this window down into the taskbar picture where I can easily find it later. Cool.”

You want the window to just vanish (which I get), because you have a model of computing that doesn’t need the genie animation. Most everyone on HN has a model of computers far in excess of the median computer user.

That explains the default, not their inability to change the behavior.

Interesting. I could have sworn in older macOS that it could be disabled entirely. In Ventura, via settings, I can adjust it from taking 11 frames, 23, or 29 frames (manually counted in a screen recording), but I can't seem to completely eliminate the animation. TIL.

Fair enough, like you said, these aren't new, though.

> Then why can't I change the spaces animation (turn it off)? Windows snapping without leaving a gap on the edge of the screen? Etc, etc.

Spaces is irritating, I just don't use it, Apple has a tendency to introduce new workspace and window management solutions and then abandon them. Yabai or Amethyst might be you closer to what you want (both open source).

> And are they now doing scans for copyright-infringing media and so on - I wouldn't be surprised.

This isn't true AFAIK.

I’m not sure about copyright infringed media but they are scanning for CSAM now.

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-communication-safety-nude-...

The article you linked doesn’t say they are.

Its title claims they are, but that appears to be clickbait.

In the body of the article, the author confuses the cancelled always on filter for illegal images that reports to authorities and an opt-in, on-device filter for unwanted adult images.

Well for Windows users the only real answer is KDE, since it's almost the same in terms of interface and has a similarly high degree of configurability (imo a baseline requirement for any desktop OS). Kubuntu is pretty good, with only a handful of incredibly annoying things, compared to a never ending river of incredibly annoying things on GDM3.

It doesn't really matter which desktop you pick, they're all the same.

If you went to buy a car, would you be fatally paralysed by indecision at seeing two different makes that looked ever so slightly different parked side-by-side?

Of course not. That would be idiotic.

Right, all those car review mags, test-drives, manufacturer design language, not to mention handling characteristics, performance, etc, is all really stupid when all everyone wants is just to go from A to B.

Going from A to B is more complicated than it sounds when you're considering reliability 5-10 years into the future, but the reviews don't go into that either. All you can really do is pick a reputable brand.

Well if your use case is say, off-roading, and you decide all cars are the same and end up with a minivan in a ditch you kind of did that shit to yourself.

So what's the equivalent for choosing a distro?

99.999% of people don't need to go off road, and only need a bog standard desktop distro.

Most people don't need to choose a Linux distro at all, cause Windows or Mac works fine for them and will never have obscure problems.

The car analogy is that you've got the boring Toyota (Windows), the boring but somewhat nicer Honda (Mac), the slightly more efficient CVT Mitsubishi (typical Linux) that needs some major component (X11 or w/e) replaced in 2 years and fewer people will know how to deal with it, or the same Mitsubishi except with stanced wheels and degen exhaust setup to be cooler (Arch Linux w/ XFCE or w/e).

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