I am mostly a windows user these days, but fifteen years ago I ran Linux as my main OS.
I ran Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude E5400, at first I ran Gnome 2 or KDE 4 as my DE, but got annoyed with how much vertical space they used, so I learned how to use Fluxbox.
Fluxbox is great, a small stacking WM, that is easy to configure and worked like I wanted it.
I still set it up to run gnome-settings-daemon as I had no idea on how to do apply a GTK theme without it.
The really annoying part of running fluxbox as a WM was that I never figured out how to shut down the computer from a menu, it allways complained about me not having permissions to shut down the computer, so I used to do a log off and before the GDM login screen loaded I could press the power button on the laptop and have it shutdown the computer gracefully, timing was key, but it worked.
Good question. Docker can be used for orchestration which I‘m pretty sure is a lot more than flatpak is designed for. So if this interests you (I‘m fine with docker) feel free to try it out and update me.
The whole WM landscape of Linux was a big turn off for me. I had used CDE on Solaris before and never really thought about choosing or customizing my DE. That was one of the big reasons I ended up loving OSX (no choice of WM and very few customization options, along with globally consistent hotkeys) and ended up using that as my primary GUI Unix environment, along with headless Linux for most of the last ~20 years.
Right. Actually one of the things I love about Linux is that it offers so many options so you can make your own combination to create the perfect system for your specific needs.
You can get all the visual distractions out of your way and tweak litterally everything to an incredible granular level. No other OS can pretend to be so user focused while staying so simple in appearance. You’re not adapting to your system, it’s built for you.
The problem I have with customization options is that I don’t want to customize it, and when I go looking for a setting to change, I don’t want to be drowning in options that I’ll never use. The way I always thought about it is when I buy a saw or a hammer, I go straight to using it. I don’t customize my saw or hammer. That’s not why I buy them. I buy them to build things with them. The tool is not the end goal. Similarly, the DE is not the end goal. I want to spend time getting work done, not spend time customizing my environment.
Recently though I’ve been looking around again a little bit, looking for a DE that has what I want out of the box. LXDE seems closest so far.
We’re exactly on the same page: “the tool is not the goal”. The only difference may be that I see chosing options for an app as options for a tool. If I want to cut wood or metal I need a different saw. Even though the tool is basically the same it doesn’t serve the same purpose. Hence I configure options once and for all, like I would consider which hardware I need exactly in terms of use, ergonomic, power… before buying it.
I don’t spend time tweaking the look of a tool because it’s doesn’t fit my approach of things anymore. As such I don’t even use a DE. But I feel the need to build the right tool (i.e. system app) I need to perform a job as efficiently as possible while keeping the tool itself minimalist and as invisible as possible. On my daily use I have tools that I couldn’t live without anymore but if you ask me a list I will either forgot them or put them at the bottom because I will not think about them right away since they became a second nature.
I certainly see the comfort of the out of the box approach and it can serve a lot of people. In my use case I just realize that - using the example above - it could be like using a wood saw on metal in some cases. It may work but not as good as you would expect to have the job done properly. Also, the fit them all approach means building an app with tons of options activated and I prefer to have available to me only the options I really need. The philosophy feels less bloated to me and I’m not overloading my system with stuff I’ll never use. It’s more time consuming at first to chose the right app but with time it became quick enough and it definitely save me way more time in the long run when I use my system.
Sure, that is why we have defaults, but why force them? Why not create the defaults, and then allow the user to remove them if they wish?
You’re free to patch it out if you’re so inclined.
This is somewhat of a non-answer. Technically, yes, it is possible for a user to patch OSS as they see fit, but that does not excuse poor design desicions, nor is it necessarily fair to expect the user to do that.
If your setup allows you to be a productive member of society, you’re golden mental health wise. /s
You may want to get your eyes checked if watching HD video on a tiny screen seems preferable unless all your content fits your displays native resolution; I am fairly certain my eyes are terrible. Maybe that’s why I love that dark themes are becoming more popular.
Transparency is nice, but Windows Vista is partially what converted me to Linux. I dislike rounded corners too, since content is always rectangular.
I don’t know why no mainstream desktop OS really has a good mouse driven tiling setup out of the box. I have a dual screen setup, so I mostly just full screen apps and alt tab if needed which reduces distraction. If I’m trying to focus on a single thing, the second screen gets turned off.
I find myself becoming more minimalist over time as well. Society seems to be more distraction driven by the day, so having an OS that stays out of the way is a boon.
When I’m in a GUI, I like the Win95 UI paradigm. That’s one of the few good things that came out of Microsoft: I like the classic Windows look-and-feel. That’s why I run Mint / Cinnamon. I’ve tried minimalistic tiling window managers and I can’t stand them.
However - and that’s the weird thing - most of what I do in Cinnamon is open terminals with tmux that I… tile. And within one tmux pane or window, there’s a very good chance I’ll run vim with several files edited in split screens 🙂
I spend 75% of my time working in a terminal - sometimes in a real Linux console, but most of the time in a Cinnamon terminal. And I’ll do the minimalistic thing within the terminal because that’s how I’ve been rolling since the early eighties and it’s just how my workflow is most efficient. But I really like the Windows-like graphical environment around the terminals. Call me weird…
The zones are there so you can set your ports/services as needed for home, work, public wiffi etc. the idea is you leave your ports alone and just swap adapter to the zone you are working in. Network Manager has a quick toggle on wifi to do this from connection settings. So at home your laptop has ssh, smb open etc, when you connect to starbucks wifi you set wifi to public. The other part of zones is each as a fallback default you can specify. So if a port or service traffic doean’t match your home zone you can have if failover to default, in my case default is public. if that doean’t match either it can failover to “drop” or “block” etc. they have a heirachy.
if you are just dealing with cli it can be intimidating. You can try OpenSUSE in a VM and use the Yast Firewall Gui tool to play around with adapter, default, zones, services and ports and get familiar with the idea behind it.
I believe you may have misinterpereted my post. I wasn’t asking why zones exist, I was asking specifically why one cannot delete the default zones in Firewalld.
I see. I guess my point was they exist for a reason, as the default target of one zone handsover to the next zone (target) and then its target, in order to handle traffic not in your zone rules. Maybe you know that already. If you have a static machine at work mayne you don’t need home zone, but it is not causing “bloat”. You would also still need drop, block and so on. My thought is if you think firewalld is bloat, just use iptables directly.
I see. I guess my point was they exist for a reason, as the default target of one zone handsover to the next zone (target) and then its target, in order to handle traffic not in your zone rules.
Yes, I am aware of that. Just allow the user to specify the zones though. Why force the default ones?
but it is not causing “bloat”.
It is if it’s saving alternative configuration that will never be used.
It makes sense for them to include the Reject, drop, type for obvious reasons, the others seem like they asked “what will be the most common use cases for networks?” so they threw them in as work, home, public and trusted, external, dns , etc so that somebody starting out doesn’t have to create zones from scratch. I doubt having one extra zone takes up very much in the way of kb of space. compared to how much junk I have in my downloads folder that i should triage. What would be nice though would be a rename function, because we may have different Work rules depending on which workplace you are at that day with a system.
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