I don’t have the answer, though im positive someone else here does. On Fedora, an appindicator extension is included with the distro, but disabled by default, and this is still suboptimal UX.
The biggest offender for me was the overview at login change with gnome 40. It was so controversial that it even pulled in Matt Miller to weigh in on the matter directly. The exchange is extremely disappointing
I still use gnome, and I feel that it’s still the most polished DE available, I’m just worried about what other changes they might incorporate without any user-centric reasoning.
It seems to be characteristic of the Gnome project’s philosophy to do things in what they consider the best way rather than the way a new user might expect. It’s an admirable commitment to deliberate design rather than copying, but it may also make it unappealing to some users. Personally I don’t enjoy using Gnome, but I know people who love it. Thankfully in the Linux world we have options.
Not only that, but they aren’t standardised, and Gnome really likes adhering to standards and staying away from anything they consider unstandardised or janky.
System trays really are a complete clusterfuck.
Sometimes the icons have colour, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they’re minimalist icons, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes you left click on them to do something, sometimes you need to right click, sometimes it’s both, sometimes they have their own menu UI, sometimes they integrate with the system’s, sometimes you can exit an app via them, sometimes you can’t, sometimes they give you notifications, sometimes they just do it through your standard OS notification system, etc.
They are an inconsistent mess. And we all know how anal Gnome can be about UX consistency.
Gnome in the past has expressed a desire for a standardised, cross-desktop system tray that fixes these issues, but tbh I’m sceptical it’d catch on. Not because other desktops wouldn’t get on board, but rather because app developers will just go “meh, we’ll just stick to what we have” and it won’t gain traction.
🤦♀️ I’ve never considered this, but it’s the simplest solution and makes perfect sense. I’m always so diligent to keep my system clean to save a few megs.
This particular server is an old PowerEdge server I’m using to learn server stuff on and a practice home lab. Unfortunately, it won’t boot from SD card, so I have a few DVD RW’s in a drawer. I’ve read that there’s a SD slot inside that you can emulate a floppy, but haven’t explored it.
Disclaimer: I only tried NixOS for less than a month when I was a complete Linux noob, I have since then been daily driving Arch Linux for about 2 years now.
For me, at least on the surface level, NixOS just felt like Arch Linux, with more similarities than differences.
What was nice about NixOS was the single config file for everything, although iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.
Edit: I either remembered it wrong or I was doing it wrong because you don’t have to reboot the whole system according to the reply from hallettj.
What I didn’t like however was all the packages that got installed (through the list in the config file) had really strange directories which I couldn’t find easily.
like on Arch the packages and the executables are basically all at /usr/lib/ and /usr/bin/ and iirc it was pretty much the same on NixOS, except on Arch I’ll have usr/lib/firefox but on nix it would be usr/lib/u123uadqasd782341kasjhiu3sh932s9sdasdsapzxcqw-firefox
Another thing is that it works great for everything you install through the Nix config file, but it’s not necessarily going to clean up any files created by programs that got installed through it when you remove the packages from the config file.
Like say you have installed steam and then you install some game through steam, well that game wasn’t added through the config file so there’s no guarantee that if you decide to remove steam that you will also remove whatever the programs steam installed or if they created some new files somewhere.
Of course the same thing already happens on other OSes as well, so you could say that it’s an upside that Nix is better at cleaning up after itself whenever you remove something, but also because it’s supposed to all be controlled through a single config it just feels that much worse when you have to hunt down some file somewhere.
Again these are mostly my anecdotes from 2 years ago when I was a complete noob. Maybe I wouldn’t have any issues if I tried it today. And chances are I was just trying to do something you shouldn’t even be doing.
Plus at the start I used KDE Plasma 5 on Nix and Arch, maybe it will go better if I use i3wm on NixOS like I’ve been doing for a year and half or so on Arch now.
At least I’m pretty sure that having daily driven Arch for 2 years now I would have much better chances with NixOS now than when I tried it with 0 experience on Linux.
So since you’ve already got the experience from using EndeavorOS you might not have any big problems using NixOS, or at least learn how it works pretty fast.
I want to make a small correction - this is not true:
iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.
nixos-rebuild behaves like most package managers: it makes new packages available immediately, and restarts relevant systemd services. Like other distros you have to reboot to run a new kernel.
And cleaning up Steam games is as issue with most distros too. But I kinda see your point.
Btw Nix (both NixOS and the Nix package manager running in other distros) has this feature where you can run packages without “installing” them if you just want to run them once:
That puts you in a shell with one or more packages temporarily installed. The packages are downloaded to /nix/store/ as usual, but will get garbage-collected sometime after you close the shell.
Thank you for the correction. It was 2 years ago + I was really inexperienced so I could be misremembering things and/or just have been doing things incorrectly
I’ve had serious trouble with pop and usb devices waking up from sleep. Tried for weeks. Also had trouble with many flatpacks. Most help pages and tutorials were outdated or plain wrong, too.
Changed to arch eventually. Never regretted it. Mostly coding and gaming. Eventually deleted windows, because, well, everything just worked. I must have reinstalled pop like eight times. Am still sporting the first arch installation. Well. EndeavourOS, really.
If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.
I don’t know whether you’re shitting on theme developers or GTK app developers with your comment, but they explicitly state that they think theming is fine, they’re just tired of people reporting theme problems as app problems. It’s a completely reasonable take.
If I were an app developer I wouldn’t want to open a bug report, then spend hours and hours investigating a reported issue, only to find out that my app was never the problem in the first place.
The only amazing thing about it is the dual trackpad typing. Apart from that it lacks keys like Alt, Ctrl, Esc and the F-keys. Sometimes the arrow keys, tab and insert send weird key codes.
I just switched from Ubuntu, which I’ve been using for almost twenty years, to Mint 21.3 and I’m impressed. Not only does it seem to have solved my printing problems (at least with one day of use so far, but I’ve had zero failures compared to multiple failures per day with Ubuntu), it just seems snappier (or is that snapless?) and smoother overall. Just dumb little things like remembering my sound device settings after reboot and letting me know the printer was out of paper. Ubuntu just seems clunky by comparison now. Hopefully it isn’t just the honeymoon phase.
No it’s not just a phase. Mint really is very good which is why it’s very popular and widely regarded as the overall best distro whether beginner or advanced user.
The team really do make it their goal to have a user friendly, capable OS that helps you instead of hinders you.
I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because I’m done with Ubuntu but the Ubuntu based mint is still excellent compared to Ubuntu itself.
Just my opinion, but no I don’t think there is a generalized reason to choose LMDE over LM or the other way around. Try them both and see which you like the best. Use that and be happy.
No. The regular version is fine and gets updated more often. For people who want their system not updated so often, the Debian edition only gets a new base every 2-3 years
I did have the same old printer failure today though. I suspect its endemic to Linux (or WiFi printing in Linux) given a Google search turns up the same issue in a bunch of different Linux forums. Debian based and otherwise. It was quicker to right itself in Mint than it was in Ubuntu anyway.
I tried I3 but it seems the new window always appears in a vertical slice, maybe some people like that so windows are set manually. I prefer automatic tiling, I use Bspwm for that. It needs two config files but they are simple, no programming is required. Its way to split screen is almost always good. In the rare exceptions I add a rule in the main config file so the app appears in a floating window.
My personal favourite is qtile and it’s been my main WM for a long time. I3 is another good option. Wayland experience looks to vary from the other comments, but if you do use qtile and wanted to try wayland, you can get it to run using it (although I’ve never tried it myself).
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