As a long time Debian user, I agree with their choice. Their thought process is logical and sound.
Not sure I agree with their continued use of GNOME, though; seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME's years of user-hostile actions and moved to either KDE or to increasingly more obscure build-a-desktop stuff (ie, sway + waybar, or river, or bspwm, or w/e).
Some major distros already do KDE by default, and basically phone in their GNOME support by virtue of "GNOME claims it 'just works', so let it 'just work' and hang themselves on that claim".
But yeah, having a Debian-based atomic image distro seems to be very interesting. Would be more useful in enterprise than in the user desktop, but I guess they can do that in the future.
> seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME's years of user-hostile actions and moved to either KDE or to increasingly more obscure build-a-desktop stuff (ie, sway + waybar, or river, or bspwm, or w/e).
This is a bizzare take. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat and its spinoffs all default to GNOME.
I'm quite sure the last time I installed Debian, a year or two ago, I didn't choose a DE so it installed no DE at all.
Are you people talking about installing from a GNOME-based live image or something? I think most people use the netinstall image, which uses no DE and, I'm about 90% sure, has no graphical environment selected by default.
This is correct, but lacking context: If you don't select the desktop task, no desktop is installed; if you select the desktop task, but no specific version of it, it installs GNOME.
There are also KDE, XFCE, LXDE, and maybe others, to also install; but the user has to select those instead of the default desktop task.
Yeah. If anything, the exact opposite has happened, and KDE and GNOME work together on almost all new developments through FreeDesktop/XDG and they even have a shared conference now (LAS)
Aren't those just the older distributions who are already saddled with their defaults? What are the more recent distributions doing (steamos,popos,..etc)?
Dismissing things as "bizzar takes" is a good way to miss very clear signs.
...????? what? Distros are not saddled with any obligation towards defaults (for DEs at least). Were you not around for the whole Ubuntu + Unity debacle?
Doesn't the unity debacle show how hard it is to switch out the desktop default. Anyway, I think looking at the de defaults of newer distributions, especially those established after the gnome 3 disaster might give a more accurate picture about the popularity of the de.
maybe the issue wasn't switching it, but how canonical implemented it, like many other things they start. and they had even aquihired the compiz creator, if I remember correctly. and compiz was a huge thing, probably the best thing ever to happen to linux desktop
90% of Ubuntu's mistakes are "a little of column A, a little of column B".
As in, they sometimes have good ideas, and then just entirely butcher the implementation: either they do it directly (Unity and Mir's in-house development), or they adopt an external source of bad implementations (Redhat's pulseaudio and systemd initiatives; both good ideas on paper, but then just become a thorn in everyone's side for a decade until better alternatives appear ).
In the case of systemd, I think most of the thorns have been ironed out and I don't see a competitor taking over anytime soon. With pulseaudio you're right though, thank goodness for pipewire.
Systemd basically became its own in-place rewrite. Theres still a lot of thorns in it, but, for example, Debian's build of it just strips it down to only working parts; everything else is either optional or replaceable with pre-systemd parts.
I felt like you before, but ended up using it at work since it was what IT supported. After using it for a month, I switched all my personal machines over. For me, modern Gnome is the most usable, consistent, and smooth desktop experience I've used. And this is from someone who has used KDE, Windows, MacOS, and custom desktop environments with i3 and bspwm.
Can I rearrange visual elements so my desktop is similar to how it has been in gnome 2, mate and xfce for the last 20 years? Can non-blessed apps get into the systray/notification-area/whatever?
Genuine questions, I've not tried Gnome since the early days of gnome 3 when they broke everything and more or less made out you were a luddite and unwanted loser if you weren't up for a massive change in workflow.
There are enough extensions to do whatever you want. My Gnome desktop has no top bar. Activities are totally hidden: I don't have any mouse or keyboard event that shows them. I use 5 virtual desktops and switch between them with hotkeys. I have a bottom bar with status icons, task bar, application menu, a menu of bookmarked directories, a menu of the last notifications, a menu of recent files. Notifications popup from the bottom. I alt tab between windows on the current desktop. Possibly other stuff but that's the most I can remember.
If I remember well I stayed with Gnome Fallback until there were enough of those extensions to rebuild my desktop with Gnome shell. That was about at the time of Ubuntu 20.04.
In my experience, with every update, half the extensions stop working. And then it's unclear if they will ever come back, how supported they actually are, and now and then the whole thing crashes and I don't know if it's because of a rogue extension or something else..
> Can I rearrange visual elements so my desktop is similar to how it has been in gnome 2, mate and xfce for the last 20 years?
Gnome 3 has been out for over 10 years (12, to be exact). At this point if they change the UI there would be people like you saying "can I get back how it has been for 10 years?".
I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals. Personally I started using Gnome 1, then moved to KDE3 when Gnome 2 was released, then moved to Unity with Ubuntu and now Gnome 3/40, Ubuntu flavor as well. I also used XFCE for a year or so at some point. I just need a month or so to get used and configure it a way I feel natural, and that's it.
I can obviously only speak for myself, but over the years I've tried a lot of different desktop environments and window managers (http://www.xwinman.org/ was a favorite when I was getting started with Linux back in the mid 90'ies).
Nowadays I use a pretty out of the box gnome (well, with whatever bastardizations Ubuntu has done to vanilla Gnome, with the unity-like sidebar etc.). I just want something that works, not a million papercuts that bleed me dry (e.g. I have a networkmanager applet to configure my VPN, works out of the box, no need to fuzz around with making various scripts or manual editing of config files. Screw that, I have actual work to do as well.), and it seems gnome & ubuntu have been pretty good at delivering. I don't care that my current desktop works differently than my old favorites fvwm or olvwm. I save more time by having my muscle memory get used to current keybindings and my eyes get used to the current look, than desperately trying to make gnome in 2023 look and behave like fvwm in 1995 (or whatever arbitrary snapshot in time one takes as the bestest ever and anything which is different is crap).
I would suggest looking into fedora workstation. I switched from Ubuntu around fedora 35 and have not looked back. Stock gnome, integrates into flathub easily. Dnf and apt are similar enough.
I’m not asking anyone to change the Gnome UI. That seems an uncharitable misreading of my question TBH.
I’m asking, honestly and in response to encouragement to give it another try, whether it is now changeable, and can support the way I work relatively simply. If the answer is ‘no’ (or worse “you’re doing it wrong”) then I won’t.
Gnome tries to force their defaults as much as possible but I do have Telegram or Slack sitting in the "tray bar" near the top-right corner of the screen.
That seems like a genuine improvement from way back when, having a visual indicator for slack messages is definitely one of my major needs. Not that slack was on the radar back then, but at the time I was annoyed that Pidgin (which I also needed for work) wasn't allowed to have a tray icon.
I could live without most of the rest of the things that are sitting in my top right right now. Discord and skype are nice-to-haves but not work related so strictly optional.
> Pidgin (which I also needed for work) wasn't allowed to have a tray icon
Telepathy was but -- I still am annoyed about this more than a decade later -- it wasn't allowed to actually indicate whether you had new messages or not, just that you had some notification from some app somewhere, and you had to drill down through your notifications to see it. It was just annoying, like when Gnome decided it would be hilarious to allow a laptop to not sleep when closed but only for 30 seconds.
I have no idea why the Gnome devs chose to die on this hill.
I'm just interested really - I was burned by the changeover from 2-3 and haven't really looked back since. I'm not looking to change either, my needs are met. But I can change my opinion of the state of the thing if it seems like improvements have been made.
I was like that in GNOME 1.2/2.0 times, tried probably every DM/WM that was packaged for Debian.
Then realized the thing I do is "switch between a bunch of full screen apps (especially when we have terminal emulators with tabs and tiles builtin)" and "move them from one screen to another screen".
So I sit down, tuned i3 to my liking and never looked back. And now first order of retrievability of most apps is caps lock (rebinded to super) + 1-8/F1-F8, and second order is rofi doing search by window name via alt+tab.
Some rules make sure same app always land on same virtual desktop so I just have my stuff in autostart and it lands in right place every time
> I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals.
This is easy to explain.
UI changes always bring pain to established users. There is no way around this. Users will accept the change if the benefits of it exceed the pain it brings.
IT professionals spend a great deal more time interacting with the desktop than most users, so they become "established users" more quickly and rely on UI patterns more strongly. So when the UI changes, it hurts that much more. The benefit of the change has to be that much greater to compensate.
> I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals.
It's often bad. Poorly-motivated, poorly-conceived, and poorly-executed.
Some of us have watched non-pros suffer through this stuff. It's much, much worse for them. I've come to believe you better have a goddamn great reason to modify UI, these days, and that a complete overhaul or redesign is almost never justifiable.
XFCE didn't look like today's XFCE 20years ago. It looked more like CDE which it was trying to replicate back then. So I think your memory is a bit broken.
I would argue that the gnome2 and mate arrangement with top and bottom panels made sense when screens were in 4:3 form factor but is kind of stupid in 16:9 and 16:10 modern screens as it waste a lot of vertical screen estate.
On my Fedora laptop I still have a "Gnome Classic" option at login but I don't know what it does. Last but not least, extensions allows a lot of flexibility. Sometimes they do get broken upon new release and it takes the maintainer months to update (especially if they are debian users) so key is not running a distro that ship the latest Gnome version. For example on Fedora there are always 2 stable versions maintained at the same time, new one and old one, currently 37 and 38. 37 will be retired and out of support when 39 will be released and you can expect at that time that most extensions have been updated to Gnome 44 and you can switch to 38 easily without hiccups.
It’s not my claim that Xfce was around 20 years ago, but that it lets me continue to use my desktop the same sort of way I have for the last 20 years.
As someone with two 32inch 4k screens, having a top and bottom bar with a height of my choosing on one of the screens is barely noticeable. But each to their own, this is my preference and that’s kinda my point, people have preferences!
It sounds like things are still unstable a decade or so on :/
This long time Debian user does not understand why he would choose Gnome over the incredibly satisfying out of the box experience of KDE Plasma combined with its easy customizability. I suspect that I am not Gnome's target segment... What sort of user is Gnome targeting ?
Last I checked out Zorin in a distrohop phase, Zorin used a heavily customized version of GNOME 3.38. While they may have updated their GNOME version since, I don't suspect they've changed to KDE.
To me Gnome feels more tablet like, but still nice with Mouse and Keyboard. I feel that it makes effective use of my screen, it's just full screen, or super-key left/right for a split. Hit Super, start an app, what's not to like? And then there is the menu with things like bleutooth/wifi etc. It's all very minimal, but to me it feels like they made exactly the right choices. What would you change to a default Gnome desktop?
I guess that would be me. I mostly work in the terminal and I just don't care that much about the window manager. As long as it's simple, works consistent and looks somewhat nice and clean, I'm fine. Gnome fills that role for me.
Gnome's target demo seems to be people who aren't linux enthusiasts... who are for some reason using linux anyway. So basically, people who are made to use linux on their computer at work, or hapless elder relatives of overzealous linux users who had linux installed on their computer without understanding what it was.
KDE Plasma is too buggy for my liking. It seems to be mostly scaling-related. I do like that it’s more feature-rich than GNOME, but bugs/UX trump that.
That isn't a KDE-related bug, but a Wayland related bug. GNOME using Wayland also has this bug: Wayland apps that do not internally deal with HiDPI scaling don't get scaling.
Both GNOME and KDE's WMs recently supported WM-side scaling now that the protocol for it has been agreed upon.
My understanding was that the KDE distros I was using were still on X11 but I could be mistaken. Fedora 38 with GNOME (on Wayland) has been mostly bug free for me. Certainly better than KDE.
To be absolutely fair to both sides, we're in a rough transitory period due to intra-project politics. Some people have a better time on X11, some on Wayland, and its down to which distro they're on and how new (or old) it is.
Today, however, Gnome and KDE both have excellent Wayland support, even mostly okay on Nvidia binary drivers (but still, use the FOSS drivers if they work for you, or just stop buying Nvidia hardware until Nvidia stops trying to throw AMD and Intel's excellent FOSS work under the bus).
Modern gnome is a joke. For two years now, scrolling doesn't work in folders with many files. I can't find the issue in their bug tracker right now, but they're just like "well yeah it's not easy to fix". Like, how can you break something that fundamental in a way that makes it too hard to fix? And this isn't just some minor cosmetic issue, it literally is a showstopper if you frequently navigate large directories. Holy crap, but at least it looks pretty!
FWIW I may not have large enough directories but on the ones I just tested I didn't had this bug. I am not negating such a bug may have existed but a link to the actual gnome bug tracker would be more relevant, it may have already been fixed for all I know.
Also, are you implying that KDE or any other DE do not suffer any bug?
Last but not least, you are not forced to use Nautilus in Gnome. If Nautilus is not your preferred file manager you can perfectly live with a Gnome desktop while using Thunar (from XFCE), Nemo (from Cinnamon), PCManFM or even Dolphin if you don't mind the toolkit difference. I am personnaly using Gnome for most of my laptops but use Kitty as default terminal emulator instead of Gnome Terminal.
So that was relevant until two months ago and is not right now.
Software have bugs, some are fixed quickly, other not. Dolphin (KDE file manager) also have bugs, it seems to crash for a number of reasons, also has scrolling issues, or bugs triggered by scrolling.
Do I say KDE is unusable because Dolphin can crash or has sometimes issues with scrolling. Nope that would be stupid. If I run into a bug with one among n components on a DE, I either report, fix it by patching it and supply a patch upstream, find a workaround or use temporarily an alternative component of that DE.
I had to switch from Arch + i3 to Ubuntu 23.04 and gave Gnome a try with the intention to keep using it. I like the look and feel, and the appindicator and tiling assistant extensions are all I would need.
The first thing I did (on X11) was to set fractional scaling to 125%. Changing this setting reliably renders the settings app unresponsive and it needs to be killed.
The second thing I did was to tile the settings app to the left (without having installed the tiling extension, I am talking about Gnome's tiling feature). The window gets graphically corrupted and after a few seconds I get a notification that "Ubuntu has experienced an internal error".
"Screw it", I said, "time to go Wayland, it's the future anyway". I did a couple totally benign random things and I somehow managed to cause a crash there too...
I just fetched my dotfiles and rebuilt my i3 on Ubuntu Server...
Back in my daily GNU/Linux days, I even wrote magazine articles about Gtkmm.
Nowadays, I rather not use a desktop that requires extensions for basic stuff (written in JavaScript!), no longer supports window shading, and hates files on the desktop.
I have two main issues with Gnome. The first is that I find it unintuitive and difficult to use. The second is that it's really hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to remove some of the pain points and add missing functionality.
FWIW, I really like Gnome, on my Laptop, on my desktop I currently use Plasma, because it has an ultra-wide monitor so the build-in tiling is really great (turn on wobbly windows and watch that jelly window snap into its grid position, it's glorious).
I currently use Gnome 3.22 and really like it, especially the one in Ubuntu. I also have a Debian 11 with Gnome at home on my laptop. Used to be all against it. But then I used MacOS X for a few years and then switched to another box with Linux and Gnome. Such a breath of fresh air compared to the Mac. Now I can switch virtual desktops with simple keybindings, without using the mouse. Most actions are a no brainer. I guess Gnome 4 is even better.
Vanilla's decision to base their distro on Debian is a good one. I am going to install Debian as well when this Ubuntu 18 LTS version reaches EOL.
gnome 4 didn't happen. they abandoned their previous numbering of even/odd for the minor version being release or devel (like 3.22, 3.23) in favor of whole new numbers and patch. The current release is 44.1
GNOME is alright, I really like what they've done with it recently and for me it's almost perfect for daily use. I just wish it had a better file manager. If I were to pick a DE I would use KDE/XFCE or Cinnamon though.
Seriously, they managed to make a good user interaction flow, one that dismisses a lot of Windows idiosyncrasies. If they manage to port everything to GTK4, it will work out great.
The biggest issue lies in going against the norm, and most software is built against that norm. There are plenty of extensions to fix that however. But I do agree that they go overboard sometimes, like the inability to select the terminal that appears on nautilus' right click menu. That's were a lot of it breaks down for me, I should be able to select the tools I want, and not go through hacks to do something that's so simple to implement.
I tried it again recently, and I still find Gnome to be pretty horrible. It's very hard for me to use out of the box, and it very strongly resists being configured.
I get that some people love it -- and more power to them -- but I really don't understand why. I suspect that there's something fundamental about Gnome philosophy that I just don't understand.
I actually always kind of liked the Gnome look & feel, but I agree they dumb things down way too much. Even to the detriment of the user experience, where you have to go dive into dconf to work around the bugs they introduced.
And anyway, that was only until the new libadwaita crap, with yet another "flat look" they would look to force upon us.
Sounds like you've accidentally compared Wayland to X11 (which has nothing to do with your choice of DE; GNOME and KDE continue to support both for now, and both are looking to remove X11 support over the next two-three years (=major version cycle)); Wayland may be failing to accelerate compositing on your system due to missing driver stack features.
If you're on an Nvidia GPU and are trying Wayland, either use an up to date distro and stop using the Nvidia binary driver, or stop buying from Linux-hostile companies like Nvidia.
If we could force Nvidia to pull it's collective head of it's ass, we would; the entire Linux community has been trying for ~15 years, and it hasn't budged an inch.
I didn't know about Vanilla OS. So it's a distro that wants to provide a stable and coherent set of packages, with as few modifications as possible from upstream? And they opted for deb for the compatibility?
I see the appeal of being Ubuntu-based. They do the bulk of the work of releasing stabilized snapshots of Debian Sid. But indeed you need to revert a lot of stuff if you do this, and increasingly so.
> Ubuntu provides a modified version of the GNOME desktop, which does not match how GNOME envisions its desktop
As a KDE user on openSUSE that spend a lot of time on Ubuntu (before Gnome 3), I think this is the one thing that seems nice about Ubuntu customizations. This Unity-like version of Gnome seems appealing.
Basing on Debian seems like a good idea. Debian is great. Releasing stable snapshots of Debian Sid while handling security seems painful.
Good luck to them, I hope it works out well for them!
Kudos on moving to Debian. And it'll be interesting to see what they settle on for vetting package updates to Debian Sid (Debian's constantly-updated track).
A long time ago, I ran Sid at home, but it was eating up time and presenting risk (e.g., at least once, it made a workstation unbootable). So I moved home and then startups to Debian Stable, which has much fewer surprises, mostly only security updates. Debian Backports (a supplementary package repo that provides newer versions of some packages) sometimes makes Debian Stable easier, in the rare care you really need a new version of a package (and not something you'd normally get from PyPI, NPM, Cargo, etc. or mirror&vet in your code repo).
I’m not sure if the classical distro model still has merit. There is just too much software now to package it all, properly, in time, by a handful of unpaid contributors, with badly documented ways. That just doesn’t scale, at all.
I’d wish we could finally settle on some kind of universal packaging mechanism, be it containers or flatpak or snaps, and get it over with. Too much time has been sunk in reinventing this wheel over and over again.
I like the balance this strikes. I think the future is moving towards some combination of super stable distro + containerised bleeding edge packages, where required (and isolated, where possible).
I'm still on a *buntu variant for now, but I would like to migrate to a set-up like this soon.
> Ubuntu provides a modified version of the GNOME desktop, which does not match how GNOME envisions its desktop
At one point I didn't understood what the deal is with default WM being Gnome.
I was happily using compton+i3 on Ubuntu Server customized for lightweight workstation. That's until Fortinet VPN Client or similar crap didn't refused to work w/o some Gnome libs.
Weirdly, installing Gnome from apt (or the snap garbage, don't remember) was not a clean solution and this software would not work on Ubuntu Server + Gnome while running with no issues on Ubuntu (Desktop) shipped with Gnome.
I'm happily Ubuntu-free now (went with Debian) and impatiently waiting for increasingly commercial Ubuntu to lose its popularity as it clearly makes some developers lazy.
There are distros like Linux Mint that are desnapped. Wouldn't it be more sensible to base off of something like that?
I really like Debian. I love making minimal riced desktops with it. You can make a system that runs without Python :)) But Debian has two main issues:
First is the reality that everyone targets Ubuntu first and all online instructions are Ubuntu first. If you build off Ubuntu then you can be relatively sure the instructions work for you as well. The latest Ubuntu LTS package/library version set is one most projects will support
Second is that Debian doesn't have PPAs, nor really any equivalent mechanism. You end up having to resort to Appimages for end-user executables and who-knows-what for everything else. Prompt updates are then sorta out and it turns into a manual pain in the butt
Relying on AppImages/flatpack/etc for apps is a feature of immutable distros like VanillaOS, not a bug. The point is you never mess with the base system image. The goal is to leave the root as untouched as possible, with a transactional modification system when you absolutely must poke at the base system image, and install everything using your app packing format of choice.
Fedora Silverblue is another distro following the same 'immutable' principle based on OSTree. Silverblue wants the base system to be immutable, bundling in toolbox (similar to distrobox) to create a container with a regular mutable sysroot that can use the regular package managers. If you break the container you can tear it down and build a fresh one without nuking your host OS.
The goal is a reliable base system image that you can't break. It's something I've had happen many times with standard distros. Updating when too far behind is fairly likely to break something.
'Compatibility with Ubuntu' doesn't really matter as the system is already different enough even when based of Ubuntu for just googling 'issue Ubuntu' isn't going to be applicable. Do that stuff in a distrobox container.
It is a fair criticism though. Immutable distros are pretty new in the landscape of desktop linux distros so googling issues for them won't give you a lot of answers. And a side-effect of what they are means a lot of the time the answer to "how to do X to the system" is "you don't". They're reliant on having a solid base system image because changing it isn't very user friendly.
I say this as a Fedora Silverblue user, I personally think the tradeoff is worth it for me.
> Second is that Debian doesn't have PPAs, nor really any equivalent mechanism.
You can, at your own risk, use ubuntu PPAs in debian. Also some projects publish their own debian repos - I have google chrome and terraform coming from custom repos at the moment, that's the real PPA equivalent.
I've been using debian for decades and I don't even know what an Appimage is ... but then I guess for commercial software I'm OK with snap. Intellij, skype, zoom, whatever can come from there. OSS comes from the distro repo.
Also, the alternatives to PPAs are ... third party APT repositories. There is no technical difference to the users. PPA is just a hosting service from ubuntu.
PPAs is what launchpad calls apt repositories. It's possible to use launchpad to host apt repositories for Debian stable suites (testing/unstable would likely be more of a pain, but I haven't tried that) by specifying what suites to use when uploading. There are other SaaS hosts of apt repositories (e.g. packagecloud), or you can install one of the apt repository systems via apt on a VPS or similar, so if you have a deb built for Debian, there are options out there to distribute it.
You can build and publish repos for Debian (amongst others) on the OpenSUSE build system, though it's rather different from ppa and copr, for instance. Use osc(1) on Debian.
can i just point out the sublime, crystalline irony of something called “vanilla os” using one of the most spuriously patch-happy distros in existence as a base?
Is it possible to have an i3-like experience on a modern GNOME desktop? I just really like the keyboard-based and predictable navigation between windows (no alt-tab hell). What can I do here?
I am pretty used to Debian+i3 minimal installs (arandr, pavucontrol, etc) but some things will always be a pain in the ass
Or did you mean just GNOME but with more keyboard driven window management? If so there is tiling assistant extension for GNOME that isn’t bad from what I’ve heard.
> Is it possible to have an i3-like experience on a modern GNOME desktop?
Unfortunately GNOME doesn't care about customisability or power user needs. They meticulously remove features they deem unnecessary, while actual people who rely on those features kick and scream "no".
In the old days, you used to be able to use a different window manager with your desktop environment, which meant you could just substitute Metacity for the actual i3. I think it's (maybe) still possible with X11/Mutter, but most likely no chance under Wayland, as the compositor combines several other roles in the stack, and the resulting desktop is much less modular.
If you're used to i3, stick to i3 (or Sway). If you need bits and pieces of another desktop environment, you can probably run GNOME or KDE apps just fine; or maybe you can try running the XFCE panel or similar. Also have a look at XFCE, LXQt or Lumina. They all start off with an integrated UX, but should be easier to replace whichever bits you don't like.
One of my best friends uses the Pop Shell [1] GNOME extension to bring in an i3-like experience. It seems to lag behind a few GNOME versions, but system76 has instructions on how to use it on other distributions if you don't want to use Pop!_OS [2]
- I recently bought a monitor and plugged it in. Sound stopped working until I rebooted. Figured it out easily with pavucontrol of course (just toggling things) but only after reboot. Annoying but fair enough.
- Connecting/disconnecting monitors is flaky, sometimes it requires a few toggles in arandr (which already helps a lot). Maybe there is a better tool I could use?
- Some wifi networks sometimes dont' work out of the box even though I'm just using the easy nm-applet.
- Like one friend's hotspot that I needed to use one time, didn't work and I gave up
- Some "exotic" public wifi networks like libraries require more effort.
- or even simple public wifi networks that simply require a web portal login (I've learned to just open nmcheck.gnome.org to access the portal easily, since accessing the default gateway IP address doesn't always work)
Obviously it's all a question of how much effort you put into it. I try to keep things as simple as possible to avoid spending time on this stuff. Would love to get any suggestions or ideas :)
Well I kinda asked about i3 related problems not just generic linux desktop voes but I'll try my best.
> - I recently bought a monitor and plugged it in. Sound stopped working until I rebooted. Figured it out easily with pavucontrol of course (just toggling things) but only after reboot. Annoying but fair enough.
And that isn't a problem under GNOME ? Both use Pulseaudio...
Anyway I ended up resorting to writing some custom udev rules and some horrible hacks [0] to get my sound interface to work correctly; the interface was 2 in/4 out but it showed up as stereo in/4.0 out, and I needed dual mono + dual stereo outs. But as pulseaudio have no memory whatsoever on plugin config, it needs to be reapplied any time device is plugged in...
...and after upgrade ALSA of all things horribly broke it in different way [1], where someone added 500ms latency to default profile used to split device into sub-channels to"fix cracking" (that happened to only some users), and the interface I used was assigned that profile
Linux Sound story is by far my least liked part of it. And the new modern pipewire just hangs on my machine, not accepting any commands...
> Connecting/disconnecting monitors is flaky, sometimes it requires a few toggles in arandr (which already helps a lot). Maybe there is a better tool I could use?
I so far only experienced it with one flaky monitor at work, it looks like some deeply rooted problem. I guess if I had to solve it I'd just make some script trying to apply the profile and bind it to keys to quickly fix it. I don't think arandr is the culprit here, rather something between graphics server, driver, and monitor.
> Some wifi networks sometimes dont' work out of the box even though I'm just using the easy nm-applet.
I didn't had that problem in particular on laptop at least (also using nm-applet), but same thing works under GNOME ? IIRC it also uses network manager. We had some problems with users trying to use networkmanager for VPN and it not supporting all options plain OpenVPN did.
The most grief that networking gave me is actually systemd-resolved [2] but no good fix for that so far.
This is great news! I just yesterday installed VanillaOS, and I did kinda miss the "Vanilla" aspect. I have that when I install Gnome on Arch. But you can really feel the Ubuntu under the hood.
Their reasoning is pretty solid. Ubuntu is a terrible upstream for a distribution; it relies on Snap, which is [partially] proprietary. So if a distro is a derivate of Ubuntu, it can't have its own Snap repository, so it either uses the upstream repositories with no changes, or has to de-snap. If they're going to de-snap Ubuntu, you might just use Debian as a base.
I wonder if these guys are considering joining forces with the Mint guys, since many of their efforts seem to be in the same direction. I definitely hope this brings some extra hands into Debian, which seems to be much in need of it these recent times.
Is it ready for day to day usage ? The atomicity thingie looks really cool if it means I can easily move my installation+home from a machine to another machine and have the exact same apps running with the same settings.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadNot sure I agree with their continued use of GNOME, though; seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME's years of user-hostile actions and moved to either KDE or to increasingly more obscure build-a-desktop stuff (ie, sway + waybar, or river, or bspwm, or w/e).
Some major distros already do KDE by default, and basically phone in their GNOME support by virtue of "GNOME claims it 'just works', so let it 'just work' and hang themselves on that claim".
But yeah, having a Debian-based atomic image distro seems to be very interesting. Would be more useful in enterprise than in the user desktop, but I guess they can do that in the future.
This is a bizzare take. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat and its spinoffs all default to GNOME.
Are you people talking about installing from a GNOME-based live image or something? I think most people use the netinstall image, which uses no DE and, I'm about 90% sure, has no graphical environment selected by default.
There are also KDE, XFCE, LXDE, and maybe others, to also install; but the user has to select those instead of the default desktop task.
Dismissing things as "bizzar takes" is a good way to miss very clear signs.
As in, they sometimes have good ideas, and then just entirely butcher the implementation: either they do it directly (Unity and Mir's in-house development), or they adopt an external source of bad implementations (Redhat's pulseaudio and systemd initiatives; both good ideas on paper, but then just become a thorn in everyone's side for a decade until better alternatives appear ).
You mean the most widely used distributions which together account for the overwhelming majority of desktop Linux users?
> saddled with their defaults?
How exactly is having a default a burden? The niche alternatives you listed also have defaults, just different ones.
> Dismissing things as "bizzar takes" is a good way to miss very clear signs.
On the other hand, having bizzare takes is a sign of being misinformed.
I felt like you before, but ended up using it at work since it was what IT supported. After using it for a month, I switched all my personal machines over. For me, modern Gnome is the most usable, consistent, and smooth desktop experience I've used. And this is from someone who has used KDE, Windows, MacOS, and custom desktop environments with i3 and bspwm.
Genuine questions, I've not tried Gnome since the early days of gnome 3 when they broke everything and more or less made out you were a luddite and unwanted loser if you weren't up for a massive change in workflow.
If I remember well I stayed with Gnome Fallback until there were enough of those extensions to rebuild my desktop with Gnome shell. That was about at the time of Ubuntu 20.04.
Gnome 3 has been out for over 10 years (12, to be exact). At this point if they change the UI there would be people like you saying "can I get back how it has been for 10 years?".
I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals. Personally I started using Gnome 1, then moved to KDE3 when Gnome 2 was released, then moved to Unity with Ubuntu and now Gnome 3/40, Ubuntu flavor as well. I also used XFCE for a year or so at some point. I just need a month or so to get used and configure it a way I feel natural, and that's it.
I can obviously only speak for myself, but over the years I've tried a lot of different desktop environments and window managers (http://www.xwinman.org/ was a favorite when I was getting started with Linux back in the mid 90'ies).
Nowadays I use a pretty out of the box gnome (well, with whatever bastardizations Ubuntu has done to vanilla Gnome, with the unity-like sidebar etc.). I just want something that works, not a million papercuts that bleed me dry (e.g. I have a networkmanager applet to configure my VPN, works out of the box, no need to fuzz around with making various scripts or manual editing of config files. Screw that, I have actual work to do as well.), and it seems gnome & ubuntu have been pretty good at delivering. I don't care that my current desktop works differently than my old favorites fvwm or olvwm. I save more time by having my muscle memory get used to current keybindings and my eyes get used to the current look, than desperately trying to make gnome in 2023 look and behave like fvwm in 1995 (or whatever arbitrary snapshot in time one takes as the bestest ever and anything which is different is crap).
This is precisely why I install Xfce and just get on with my life.
I’m asking, honestly and in response to encouragement to give it another try, whether it is now changeable, and can support the way I work relatively simply. If the answer is ‘no’ (or worse “you’re doing it wrong”) then I won’t.
And sorry if I misinterpreted you.
I could live without most of the rest of the things that are sitting in my top right right now. Discord and skype are nice-to-haves but not work related so strictly optional.
Telepathy was but -- I still am annoyed about this more than a decade later -- it wasn't allowed to actually indicate whether you had new messages or not, just that you had some notification from some app somewhere, and you had to drill down through your notifications to see it. It was just annoying, like when Gnome decided it would be hilarious to allow a laptop to not sleep when closed but only for 30 seconds.
I have no idea why the Gnome devs chose to die on this hill.
By the sounds of it, that's a resounding 'maybe'.
Then realized the thing I do is "switch between a bunch of full screen apps (especially when we have terminal emulators with tabs and tiles builtin)" and "move them from one screen to another screen".
So I sit down, tuned i3 to my liking and never looked back. And now first order of retrievability of most apps is caps lock (rebinded to super) + 1-8/F1-F8, and second order is rofi doing search by window name via alt+tab.
Some rules make sure same app always land on same virtual desktop so I just have my stuff in autostart and it lands in right place every time
There isn't as much resistance when it's a good change
This is easy to explain.
UI changes always bring pain to established users. There is no way around this. Users will accept the change if the benefits of it exceed the pain it brings.
IT professionals spend a great deal more time interacting with the desktop than most users, so they become "established users" more quickly and rely on UI patterns more strongly. So when the UI changes, it hurts that much more. The benefit of the change has to be that much greater to compensate.
It's often bad. Poorly-motivated, poorly-conceived, and poorly-executed.
Some of us have watched non-pros suffer through this stuff. It's much, much worse for them. I've come to believe you better have a goddamn great reason to modify UI, these days, and that a complete overhaul or redesign is almost never justifiable.
I would argue that the gnome2 and mate arrangement with top and bottom panels made sense when screens were in 4:3 form factor but is kind of stupid in 16:9 and 16:10 modern screens as it waste a lot of vertical screen estate.
On my Fedora laptop I still have a "Gnome Classic" option at login but I don't know what it does. Last but not least, extensions allows a lot of flexibility. Sometimes they do get broken upon new release and it takes the maintainer months to update (especially if they are debian users) so key is not running a distro that ship the latest Gnome version. For example on Fedora there are always 2 stable versions maintained at the same time, new one and old one, currently 37 and 38. 37 will be retired and out of support when 39 will be released and you can expect at that time that most extensions have been updated to Gnome 44 and you can switch to 38 easily without hiccups.
As someone with two 32inch 4k screens, having a top and bottom bar with a height of my choosing on one of the screens is barely noticeable. But each to their own, this is my preference and that’s kinda my point, people have preferences!
It sounds like things are still unstable a decade or so on :/
They are not. Extensions aren't part of the main DE. The main DE is solid. And most people live happily without extensions.
People use windows after all
This long time Debian user does not understand why he would choose Gnome over the incredibly satisfying out of the box experience of KDE Plasma combined with its easy customizability. I suspect that I am not Gnome's target segment... What sort of user is Gnome targeting ?
Is this what Zorin uses? They look very similar.
Last I checked, even Linus uses it.
I guess that would be me. I mostly work in the terminal and I just don't care that much about the window manager. As long as it's simple, works consistent and looks somewhat nice and clean, I'm fine. Gnome fills that role for me.
Just a bunch of terminals + full screen browser/IDE/whatever else
Took a bit of customizing... years ago and I haven't needed to change much since
Both GNOME and KDE's WMs recently supported WM-side scaling now that the protocol for it has been agreed upon.
To be absolutely fair to both sides, we're in a rough transitory period due to intra-project politics. Some people have a better time on X11, some on Wayland, and its down to which distro they're on and how new (or old) it is.
Today, however, Gnome and KDE both have excellent Wayland support, even mostly okay on Nvidia binary drivers (but still, use the FOSS drivers if they work for you, or just stop buying Nvidia hardware until Nvidia stops trying to throw AMD and Intel's excellent FOSS work under the bus).
(found at least a Reddit post from three months ago that seems to be the same bug: https://old.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/1129jro/nautilus_scr...)
FWIW I may not have large enough directories but on the ones I just tested I didn't had this bug. I am not negating such a bug may have existed but a link to the actual gnome bug tracker would be more relevant, it may have already been fixed for all I know.
Also, are you implying that KDE or any other DE do not suffer any bug?
Last but not least, you are not forced to use Nautilus in Gnome. If Nautilus is not your preferred file manager you can perfectly live with a Gnome desktop while using Thunar (from XFCE), Nemo (from Cinnamon), PCManFM or even Dolphin if you don't mind the toolkit difference. I am personnaly using Gnome for most of my laptops but use Kitty as default terminal emulator instead of Gnome Terminal.
> are you implying that KDE or any other DE do not suffer any bug?
...
It appears the video in that post shows the bug, so, rather relevant?
The according issue seems to be[1], which has indeed been fixed two months ago, but as OP said was opened two years ago.
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2971
Software have bugs, some are fixed quickly, other not. Dolphin (KDE file manager) also have bugs, it seems to crash for a number of reasons, also has scrolling issues, or bugs triggered by scrolling.
Do I say KDE is unusable because Dolphin can crash or has sometimes issues with scrolling. Nope that would be stupid. If I run into a bug with one among n components on a DE, I either report, fix it by patching it and supply a patch upstream, find a workaround or use temporarily an alternative component of that DE.
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&content...
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&content...
The first thing I did (on X11) was to set fractional scaling to 125%. Changing this setting reliably renders the settings app unresponsive and it needs to be killed.
The second thing I did was to tile the settings app to the left (without having installed the tiling extension, I am talking about Gnome's tiling feature). The window gets graphically corrupted and after a few seconds I get a notification that "Ubuntu has experienced an internal error".
"Screw it", I said, "time to go Wayland, it's the future anyway". I did a couple totally benign random things and I somehow managed to cause a crash there too...
I just fetched my dotfiles and rebuilt my i3 on Ubuntu Server...
Nowadays, I rather not use a desktop that requires extensions for basic stuff (written in JavaScript!), no longer supports window shading, and hates files on the desktop.
Vanilla's decision to base their distro on Debian is a good one. I am going to install Debian as well when this Ubuntu 18 LTS version reaches EOL.
Seriously, they managed to make a good user interaction flow, one that dismisses a lot of Windows idiosyncrasies. If they manage to port everything to GTK4, it will work out great.
The biggest issue lies in going against the norm, and most software is built against that norm. There are plenty of extensions to fix that however. But I do agree that they go overboard sometimes, like the inability to select the terminal that appears on nautilus' right click menu. That's were a lot of it breaks down for me, I should be able to select the tools I want, and not go through hacks to do something that's so simple to implement.
I get that some people love it -- and more power to them -- but I really don't understand why. I suspect that there's something fundamental about Gnome philosophy that I just don't understand.
My perception has been the opposite. The distros that I see people using are Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. I use NixOS and Gnome is the recommended DE.
Gnome has sane defaults and in my experience does actually "just work" on a surprisingly wide variety of modern hardware.
And anyway, that was only until the new libadwaita crap, with yet another "flat look" they would look to force upon us.
I'm just looking forward to Cosmic DE.
It integrates with D-BUS, uses Gtk+, has several extension points, nice set of apps, plugins,
Moved from mac to Ubuntu and feel right at home in Gnome. Not sure what you're talking about here, but it seems quite opinionated.
Sounds like you've accidentally compared Wayland to X11 (which has nothing to do with your choice of DE; GNOME and KDE continue to support both for now, and both are looking to remove X11 support over the next two-three years (=major version cycle)); Wayland may be failing to accelerate compositing on your system due to missing driver stack features.
If you're on an Nvidia GPU and are trying Wayland, either use an up to date distro and stop using the Nvidia binary driver, or stop buying from Linux-hostile companies like Nvidia.
If we could force Nvidia to pull it's collective head of it's ass, we would; the entire Linux community has been trying for ~15 years, and it hasn't budged an inch.
I see the appeal of being Ubuntu-based. They do the bulk of the work of releasing stabilized snapshots of Debian Sid. But indeed you need to revert a lot of stuff if you do this, and increasingly so.
> Ubuntu provides a modified version of the GNOME desktop, which does not match how GNOME envisions its desktop
As a KDE user on openSUSE that spend a lot of time on Ubuntu (before Gnome 3), I think this is the one thing that seems nice about Ubuntu customizations. This Unity-like version of Gnome seems appealing.
Basing on Debian seems like a good idea. Debian is great. Releasing stable snapshots of Debian Sid while handling security seems painful.
Good luck to them, I hope it works out well for them!
A long time ago, I ran Sid at home, but it was eating up time and presenting risk (e.g., at least once, it made a workstation unbootable). So I moved home and then startups to Debian Stable, which has much fewer surprises, mostly only security updates. Debian Backports (a supplementary package repo that provides newer versions of some packages) sometimes makes Debian Stable easier, in the rare care you really need a new version of a package (and not something you'd normally get from PyPI, NPM, Cargo, etc. or mirror&vet in your code repo).
I’d wish we could finally settle on some kind of universal packaging mechanism, be it containers or flatpak or snaps, and get it over with. Too much time has been sunk in reinventing this wheel over and over again.
I'm still on a *buntu variant for now, but I would like to migrate to a set-up like this soon.
At one point I didn't understood what the deal is with default WM being Gnome.
I was happily using compton+i3 on Ubuntu Server customized for lightweight workstation. That's until Fortinet VPN Client or similar crap didn't refused to work w/o some Gnome libs.
Weirdly, installing Gnome from apt (or the snap garbage, don't remember) was not a clean solution and this software would not work on Ubuntu Server + Gnome while running with no issues on Ubuntu (Desktop) shipped with Gnome.
I'm happily Ubuntu-free now (went with Debian) and impatiently waiting for increasingly commercial Ubuntu to lose its popularity as it clearly makes some developers lazy.
I really like Debian. I love making minimal riced desktops with it. You can make a system that runs without Python :)) But Debian has two main issues:
First is the reality that everyone targets Ubuntu first and all online instructions are Ubuntu first. If you build off Ubuntu then you can be relatively sure the instructions work for you as well. The latest Ubuntu LTS package/library version set is one most projects will support
Second is that Debian doesn't have PPAs, nor really any equivalent mechanism. You end up having to resort to Appimages for end-user executables and who-knows-what for everything else. Prompt updates are then sorta out and it turns into a manual pain in the butt
Fedora Silverblue is another distro following the same 'immutable' principle based on OSTree. Silverblue wants the base system to be immutable, bundling in toolbox (similar to distrobox) to create a container with a regular mutable sysroot that can use the regular package managers. If you break the container you can tear it down and build a fresh one without nuking your host OS.
The goal is a reliable base system image that you can't break. It's something I've had happen many times with standard distros. Updating when too far behind is fairly likely to break something.
'Compatibility with Ubuntu' doesn't really matter as the system is already different enough even when based of Ubuntu for just googling 'issue Ubuntu' isn't going to be applicable. Do that stuff in a distrobox container.
I say this as a Fedora Silverblue user, I personally think the tradeoff is worth it for me.
You can, at your own risk, use ubuntu PPAs in debian. Also some projects publish their own debian repos - I have google chrome and terraform coming from custom repos at the moment, that's the real PPA equivalent.
I've been using debian for decades and I don't even know what an Appimage is ... but then I guess for commercial software I'm OK with snap. Intellij, skype, zoom, whatever can come from there. OSS comes from the distro repo.
Also, the alternatives to PPAs are ... third party APT repositories. There is no technical difference to the users. PPA is just a hosting service from ubuntu.
Imo this is changing. You're seeing it happen even in this thread.
"No, we don't care about your data. Ours is better."
Ha ha
https://vanillaos.org/faq
I am pretty used to Debian+i3 minimal installs (arandr, pavucontrol, etc) but some things will always be a pain in the ass
https://regolith-linux.org/
Or did you mean just GNOME but with more keyboard driven window management? If so there is tiling assistant extension for GNOME that isn’t bad from what I’ve heard.
Unfortunately GNOME doesn't care about customisability or power user needs. They meticulously remove features they deem unnecessary, while actual people who rely on those features kick and scream "no".
In the old days, you used to be able to use a different window manager with your desktop environment, which meant you could just substitute Metacity for the actual i3. I think it's (maybe) still possible with X11/Mutter, but most likely no chance under Wayland, as the compositor combines several other roles in the stack, and the resulting desktop is much less modular.
If you're used to i3, stick to i3 (or Sway). If you need bits and pieces of another desktop environment, you can probably run GNOME or KDE apps just fine; or maybe you can try running the XFCE panel or similar. Also have a look at XFCE, LXQt or Lumina. They all start off with an integrated UX, but should be easier to replace whichever bits you don't like.
[1] - https://github.com/pop-os/shell [2] - https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/
Things like ? I might've baked some fixes for few issues that bothered me...
- Connecting/disconnecting monitors is flaky, sometimes it requires a few toggles in arandr (which already helps a lot). Maybe there is a better tool I could use?
- Some wifi networks sometimes dont' work out of the box even though I'm just using the easy nm-applet.
Obviously it's all a question of how much effort you put into it. I try to keep things as simple as possible to avoid spending time on this stuff. Would love to get any suggestions or ideas :)> - I recently bought a monitor and plugged it in. Sound stopped working until I rebooted. Figured it out easily with pavucontrol of course (just toggling things) but only after reboot. Annoying but fair enough.
And that isn't a problem under GNOME ? Both use Pulseaudio...
Anyway I ended up resorting to writing some custom udev rules and some horrible hacks [0] to get my sound interface to work correctly; the interface was 2 in/4 out but it showed up as stereo in/4.0 out, and I needed dual mono + dual stereo outs. But as pulseaudio have no memory whatsoever on plugin config, it needs to be reapplied any time device is plugged in...
...and after upgrade ALSA of all things horribly broke it in different way [1], where someone added 500ms latency to default profile used to split device into sub-channels to"fix cracking" (that happened to only some users), and the interface I used was assigned that profile
Linux Sound story is by far my least liked part of it. And the new modern pipewire just hangs on my machine, not accepting any commands...
> Connecting/disconnecting monitors is flaky, sometimes it requires a few toggles in arandr (which already helps a lot). Maybe there is a better tool I could use?
I so far only experienced it with one flaky monitor at work, it looks like some deeply rooted problem. I guess if I had to solve it I'd just make some script trying to apply the profile and bind it to keys to quickly fix it. I don't think arandr is the culprit here, rather something between graphics server, driver, and monitor.
> Some wifi networks sometimes dont' work out of the box even though I'm just using the easy nm-applet.
I didn't had that problem in particular on laptop at least (also using nm-applet), but same thing works under GNOME ? IIRC it also uses network manager. We had some problems with users trying to use networkmanager for VPN and it not supporting all options plain OpenVPN did.
The most grief that networking gave me is actually systemd-resolved [2] but no good fix for that so far.
- [0] https://devrandom.eu/blog/post/2022-11-03_splitting_stereo_i...
- [1] https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf/issues/192#iss...
- [2] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/27543
I wonder if these guys are considering joining forces with the Mint guys, since many of their efforts seem to be in the same direction. I definitely hope this brings some extra hands into Debian, which seems to be much in need of it these recent times.