Ubuntu is a tough one. I don’t like it. I don’t like snaps, but more than that I don’t like their direction in general.
But I have some respect for them too. I think they played a pretty significant role in Linux being as popular (relatively speaking) as it is, and I don’t feel like they have any ill intent.
So I don’t personally care for it but I’m glad it’s around I guess is my point?
“I’m not saying gnome is bad here”… but it lacks basic DE features, pushed useless crap like the activity view to people and slow animations that can’t be completely turned off. To top things they try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years and end up making things worse (like when they decided to remove the desktop icons).
All for a “design and usability view” that doesn’t amount to anything productive.
Do not misunderstand me. I don’t generally use a lot of desktop icons. For the most part, the fewer icons are on my desktop the better, but I do have a few.
But back when Ubuntu briefly got rid of them, it sucked because occasionally I do want some icons on my desktop.
In short: if you don’t wanna use any, you don’t have to; just gimme the damn option.
That’s what they did initially. Unfortunately, keeping around an antiquated optional feature that no developer wants to work on isn’t free. It ends up being a hurdle for improving other stuff and at the same time it doesn’t work as well as the user would expect. There is more context here if you’re interested.
Clarification: In my previous comment I meant that the implementation was antiquated, which is why it was causing many problems.
Although I do think that desktop icons in general are outdated because they’re designed around a desktop metaphor that is itself outdated. Our use of computers has changed vastly over time and the original metaphors are irrelevant to today’s newcomers. Yet most desktop environments are still replicating the same 30 year old ideas. It’s because we’re used to them (which I understand is a valid reason), not because they are necessarily the most pleasant or the most efficient.
That’s fair. Like I said, I mostly don’t use them. But if I really need to remember something in the short term, I’ll put it on the desktop. Or if I don’t really have any other place to put it I’ll put it there.
My point is that it’s useful to have when you need it, even if you don’t normally use it. Although I suppose it wouldn’t be difficult necessarily to find a new workflow. Still, to most everyday people I imagine desktop icons are kind of a non-issue.
I have opened in a tab that article you sent me. If keeping such an otherwise minor feature available is such a problem for future development for developers, I will have to read that. Because it otherwise seems almost inconsequentially small a detail when compared to the OS / file system experience as a whole.
Gnome is extremely productive, the workflow is amazing, much better than the Win95 workflow that everyone else uses, IMO.
Don’t really see how it’s changing every 2-3 years. Gnome 3 was well over a decade ago and not much has changed since. I don’t see why you felt the need to lie about that?
Yes because constant flashy animations that get between you and the task is the definition of “extremely productive”. The same goes for themes made with CSS and other web technologies and their absolute top notch performance. “Extremely productivity” is clicking a button and getting the window/panel/icon or whatever in front of you before your brain can even register the event, not a 2 second fade in followed by another equally excruciating fade-out animation.
What are these extremely flashy animations you speak of? I think you’re just making stuff up. I’ve never seen any of these long animations. I click on an app icon and it opens immediately. I click close and it closes immediately.
Gnome is extremely productive. It’s a big part of why most Linux workstations use it. It’s stable, keyboard-focused, gets out of my way, and has the best workspaces/virtual desktop implementation I’ve come across. I use it for my work. Getting my work done the Windows way is so cumbersome in comparison.
You gonna provide a source on your “completely reinventing the wheel every 2-3 years” claim, or will your next comment contain another new lie?
Use XFCE for a day and then come back here and talk about performance. Not that I like XFCE’s crude approach to thing but it is indeed fast and BS free.
So your proof of Gnome “reinventing the wheel every 2-3 years” is them removing desktop icons (good riddance btw), idk, 7 years ago or something? And activities view (amazing for productivity and I wish others would catch up to Gnome here) well over a decade ago?
Yes. I will need examples. Because those aren’t examples of what you said - show me how using Gnome is night and day different to 2-3 years ago, and show me how using it then was night and day different to 4-6 years ago.
pushed useless crap like the activity view to people
This is easily the best part of GNOME. I wish macOS implemented mission control as well as GNOME has implemented Activity Overview, because using macOS feels like typing with one hand tied behind my back.
slow animations that can’t be completely turned off.
Go to GNOME Control Centre > Accessibility > Seeing > Reduce Animation. It also sets it globally so websites can choose to respect this setting. What animations remain?
They try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years and end up making things worse (like when they decided to remove the desktop icons).
Wait, this is not GNOME, this is Nautilus as a file manager app. There are more providers of desktop icons, namely nemo-desktop is one of the best and you can use that together with Nautilus and the rest of GNOME. Why would you use a worse provider of that functionality?
It wasn’t part of some grand design decision that precluded desktop icons. They just made a bad technical decision 20 years ago that ended up accumulating a lot of technical debt.
Now, if you wanted to complain about something, shell extensions are certainly a horse worth beating. Or only letting you set shortcuts for the first four workspaces and forcing you to use Dconf for more. This is really dumb design.
they try to reinvent the desktop experience every 2 or 3 years
GNOME 3 was released 12 years ago, and hasn't changed that much (unless you consider horizontal virtual workspaces are a major paradigm shift somehow).
Just use something else if you don't like it; no one's "pushing" anything on to you. Clearly, other people do like it.
horizontal virtual workspaces are a major paradigm shift somehow
Yes. I also consider the removal of desktop icons, the default change to going into the activity view and whatnot important shifts and attempts at reinventing things.
FWIW, the stat structure in Linux does not include birth time [1]. It only gives you:
atime: The time of last access.
mtime: The time of last modification.
ctime: The time of the last change to the inode.
I assume the stat command is using a filesystem-specific method to get the birth time.
Anyway, I don’t think any of these stats is guaranteed to be consistent with the rest (or even correct). For example, it is common to disable atime tracking to improve I/O performance.
Assuming the data is accurate, I think the other comment about the file being a copy is the best explanation.
The stat command is using statx, which gives you a slightly different struct. statx is the cool new Linux-only system call for stat-ing. Not every filesystem will support the new btime field. (And, as you correctly say, many of those time fields are wrong, anyway)
The struct returned by stat doesn’t, but statxcontains creation time as well as well. I believe ext4 is already tracking the creation time even if stat can’t provide it.
The stat command on modern distros should get you this additional metadata, unless you use an FS that doesn’t track or expose it, of course.
As far as I know, MuPDF is not that heavy, and can view both PDFs and EPUBs (and others).
I personally use zathura, which is a very, very light weight document viewer, has vi style key bindings, and has plugins for viewing PDF, EPUB, CB, and others. Works pretty well in a keyboard centric desktop environment (I use Hyprland).
~20min after the post went up, OP has posted no thoughts…
So I’ll put in my own…
When I run Linux on a laptop, I tend to run Fluxbox, it uses a tiny ammount of screen real estate and is flexible snd nice to work with.
I am a bit sad that fluxbox won’t be updated to wayland (at least not when I checked the last time), and I hope that waybox will be a good replacement.
Fluxbox… Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time… Back in the days of wintel dialup modems I was trying out Linux as a teenager and trying to get modem support working to get the internet, and at one point I tried out a Linux distro, DSL (Damn small Linux) because it was set up to be installed and run from a USB flash drive with persistent storage on the drive I think. And the window manager of DSL? You guessed it, Fluxbox! Can’t believe its still around.
Have you tried using the Fluxbox implementation version MX Linux makes available? They have put tons of work into their Fluxbox implementation. Perhaps it will provide you with some useful ideas/ help. Their Forums are also quite responsive & helpful. FWIW . I am not a paid announcer ;) …
Haha that’s awesome! These days I’ve pretty much settled on basic defaults to make life easier: Ubuntu and Gnome. Though with snaps getting more invasive, I’m considering jumping ship and moving to the OG, Debian. I settled on Ubuntu years ago when they did a ton to improve driver compatibility and automatic installation for WiFi drivers on laptops back in the Ubuntu 7/8 days (2007/2008). Briefly tried out Linux mint in 2014, and went back to Ubuntu after a few years, gnome worked a bit better for workflow than the traditional windows approach with a taskbar for open windows.
The main logo choice is fine, no complaints there, but the choices for the others just seem so disjointed from each other (not to mention they basically just chose the old Leap logo again, but in yellow). I really liked the idea of having some sort of unifying design element across the logos to indicate they are all OpenSUSE products. There were some decent concepts with that idea floating around.
The point is not to have the script directly install the program (e.g. getting the binary, putting it where it needs to be, and making a desktop file), but to have the script be used as a wrapper for any of the methods you mentioned above. This would allow for a more consistent installing experience, and in the future, a unified CLI. It would also be better for the reasons mentioned in my post.
Work in Cinnamon on Wayland, Plasma 6, XFCE 4.20 for Wayland support, WINE on Wayland, The Fancy Hyprland-like effects coming to Qtile Wayland, basically everything Wayland.
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