The overall attitude of the devs regarding user opinions, resulting in the plethora of extensions available, and the tone deaf attitude regarding all of them.
Trundle on over to KDE-land, and you find a very different tone. They’re not too proud to adopt paradigms that conflicted with core design principles if they’re widely beloved (look at Overview as a prime example). Fractional scaling is miles ahead of Gnome in functionality and performance impact, solved in both X11 and elegantly in Wayland so that xwayland apps have a hook to get correct DPI info without looking blurry. The deep customizations available have negated the need for much of their session modifications, as they rapidly adopt good ideas (floating panels anyone? Ahh yes, Plasma has got you).
They’re also extremely nimble when it comes to changing course on their backend. They went from having a buggy Wayland session to having the most stable one by far. They also take criticism far better, either taking it in stride or recognizing then they did something off-base.
Gnome can go to hell, and fuck the stupid ass GTK which is objectively inferior to QT. Redhat can nibble on my shit too for all I care.
How so? I miss the old gnome, but I have accepted gnome 3 for what it is. Kde was quite interesting for me back in 2012, but it didn’t perform well with my old setup. What’s new with kde? Id like to give it a try, but I’m too old to break my SO by having both gnome and kde on it.
The KDE guys have been on fire for the past two years. Between their theming, color selection, and session handling they’ve come a long ways. They’ve also implemented some gnome-only features such as the overview, albeit in a very optional way. As opposed to eliminating a panel and forcing you to use the overview to see what applications or windows you have open, or available to launch, it’s just a window management tool instead of a UX paradigm.
Their wayland session is stable and also deals with xwayland in a very different way. If you set a custom scaling factor, the QT apps and GTK apps are talked to in a way that makes the same scaling factor consistent across all your applications, even under a wayland session with xwayland. The Gnome devs hand-wring about how the world has to be perfect before implementing an idea, where the KDE devs try something and then iterate if it’s successful.
Personally, I keep the redundant backup as cold storage to minimize loss. Three 8TB content or archival drives that are always attached via USB but not powered until needed, plus another on NAS for streaming, and two more 8TB each for double backup that are only turned on when I want to do a sync. So the drives get minimal wear, and whenever a primary dies, the backups get promoted and a new one is bought to be third in line. I have lost too much data in the past. As well as I can manage, never ever again.
What is kind of funny is that my computer has the SSD for system and home, and I only ever used the storage to copy over files from my home. I also have a little 1TB SSD That I could have used as an offline backup… but didn’t do that. I had the tools, just never thought to do it. I will look into a NAS, that would be nifty. Can’t bork that with a new install.
It only takes a few tragic events before “backup frequently, often and offline” really takes hold and doing preemptive backup becomes a neurosis. You have to experience a certain amount of fear, loss and regret to get there.
edit: the upside is I haven’t reinstalled a primary OS in years. Something is fucked? Restore that last image and keep rolling.
The author is exited but I’m not. I am not a big fan of corporations taking the free work of FOSS developers and turning it into a proprietary dystopia.
I think that having a strong public domain is good for everyone. For instance properties like Sherlock Holmes really took off once it was in the public domain and people could write spin-offs and whatnot without worry that a copyright lawyer would come along and sue them.
Linux is the same thing, Amazon using the kernel and stuff to build an OS on doesn’t take anything away from anyone else who uses Linux as a desktop or server environment, and in fact can lead to some good pass back, even if it is just that the devices are easier to root. Take a look at the Open-wrt project, where Linksys built their router on top of a Linux kernel and it led to a whole ecosystem of open routers. People went out of their way to buy a WRT-42G just with the intent of rooting it, and Linksys got their money either way.
It’s pretty annoying you replied to someone’s nice, well thought out comment with your own bullshit. Then speculated about something you could have googled in 7 seconds max.
Amazon using Linux isn’t the concern. What OP was referring to are things like their use of Elasticsearch. It’s basically Amazon’s version of embrace, extend, extinguish. It got so bad, that the devs of Elasticsearch changed their licensing as a way to fight against Amazon’s tactics.
Open source is great. But when other companies take the open source code as their own to the detriment to the original open source devs, that’s not sustainable. That behaviour will kill open source.
Even UTF-16 used by Windows isn’t fair because it needs twice as much space for hieroglyphs. Won’t someone think of the ancient Egyptians?
Seriously, now that most display systems can handle putting accents on letters instead of needing a code point just for á, a new universal encoding would be nice. Purge it of Unicode’s precomposed letters, duplicated Chinese characters, and duplicated-in-retrospect letters and you could fit another few alphabets into Plane 0.
But convincing tech companies to make webpages bigger seems difficult.
Accidentally flashed a live image (PCBSD, IIRC) onto my 1TB external HDD instead of the thumb drive. Lost years of collected music and movies that night. I learned two things:
Don’t do this sort of thing in the middle of the night, when you’re tired and should be sleeping.
Late to the party but this why I like Ventoy. It only looks for removable drives and then all you do is drag and drop your live images onto the removable drive. Pretty hard to mess anything up.
Wrecked my first Ubuntu install over the course of 2 years, wanted something new and tried Arch. The 4th time pacman wrecked my system I moved to Fedora at around F20 and have been happy ever since. I tried Gentoo in there somewhere, and managed to install it, but just the install burned me out. That was back when the Sakaki guide was one of the only ways to install on UEFI except with Fedora.
I would say my biggest mistake was not understanding the scope of Linux and that something like Arch and Gentoo are more for a CS grad student level of user.
I have a much better understanding of operating system design principals and architectures now, but I still prefer Fedora, really because the Anaconda system, Nvidia kernel driver build system, and UEFI shim are the best system for Linux I have encountered. The bootloader is one of the largest vulnerabilities in modern computers.
Yes! I am becoming more careful. I am definitely getting deeper in my knowledge of programs and linux. The stuff to learn is immense. But, it makes my life so much better.
I got started in Linux about 15 years ago. I’m not skilled nor a techie but knowledgeable enough to make things work. After running endless cracked windows machines I switched to Linux and started distro hopping. But I didn’t have enough money at the time to afford a lot of hard drive space.
I remember going from one distro to another while trying to transfer a couple of GBs worth of work on the same drive. Two GB of data was a big deal to me at the time. At one point late one night after about the tenth distro attempt, I wiped an entire drive worth of my unbacked up work. Worst moment of digital loss I ever had.
I’ve kept double triple and quadruple backups since then … and I still worry about losing data.
I tend to be pretty cavalier with my data, because only recently have I started amassing anything of value (starting to be the adult I needed to be 10 years ago).
Yes… I have some storage shopping to do.
It was waaay past midnight when I made my mistake. I should have been sleeping at least 3 hours before.
Appreciate the good humor on your part! I’m just being a bit tongue in cheek but PSA: everyone should follow 3-2-1 backup protocol! You’ll never lose your data again!
3 backups
2 formats
1 off-site
So I recommend everyone get 2 decent HDD’s (2nd is clone of 1st) and 1TB of cloud storage. Most services are under $100/yr and let me tell you, you’ll want to spend 5x that to save half of what you lose without it. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to follow this system.
I may or may not have a OneDrive account that I was paying 2 bucks for but cancelled when it charged full price. I may actually have a lot of the important stuff on there!
Alas, none of the newer stuff like my upated password manager key and anything else after I ended my brief return to Windows.
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