I agree with everything the author said. I could have written that. But having said that, I’d add this.

I’m astounded at the customization that’s still possible. Gnome-tweaks still works on Ubuntu 23.04. I moved the activities bar to the bottom and merged it with the dock (some extension). I changed the fonts to Helvetic’s everywhere in the system ui — just gnome tweaks.

Only annoyance was that I had to create a symlink to make the Firefox snap see the fonts I had installed.

It’s pretty cool that hidpi even works. I now think things like dbus are intrinsic to the problem of IPC for GUIs.

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I can see why snap exists. Its worth it to make it hard for a random ‘curl | sudo bash’ from breaking important programs.

But yes it’s ridiculous that I can’t update Firefox snap while it’s still open. And that it won’t auto update if I just close Firefox after getting the pop up about needing an update and wait a few seconds. I’m optimistic that will happen.

Even in 22.04 I could entirely disable the dock using the same tools to disable third-party extensions.

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I’m a huge systemd hater. But I recently noticed it has something to run an arbitrary one-off program as a unit with all of the isolation/logging facilities that provides. It’s a pretty great from a tech perspective.

So I’ve softened my criticism somewhat. :)

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It’s amazing how compatible the various distributions still are.

I’ve concluded these problems are not easy. The complexity in modern Linux is probably fine within a constant factor (analogy with time complexity — I’ll edit to clarify).

If we didn’t have multiple daemons etc we would have a single giant “unified” system like systemd for gui also — like windows.

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Finally, I think if we really want a simple gui stack we need to:

1. Get rid of graphical login and go back to VT login + startx.

2. User switching by alt-ctrl-f2 + startx.

3. Screen lock performed by actually logging out using the gui equivalent of tmux. (Jwz’s post linked here was educational.)

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Thanks for reading so far. And THANK YOU Ubuntu and Red Hat for keeping the flame still burning.

PS: one final pet peeve. Why the heck does Ubuntu think it’s ok to half-ass booting other OS’s? Was super impressed that Oracle Linux (RHEL clone) actually listed all my OS’s and booted all of them after install. My hat is off to you.