Imagine looking at the war on drugs, prohibition in the US, etc then thinking “I think we should ban this drug that’s already normalised and used by millions. Then nobody will use it and everything will be fine.”
It. Doesn’t. Work.
It especially wouldn’t for something as addictive as nicotine and so trivially purchasable abroad and easy to import.
Tobacco is already dying. Just let it continue to run its course.
I remember when I went on my lunch break and came back to see my PC part way through upgrading to Windows 10, which I never agreed to. So yeah, Windows update can definitely act bizarrely.
Love that they’re making these accessibility improvements as an open platform that other DEs can also leverage. Linux and Linux programs are going to become a lot more accessible to people because of this foundational work.
Compliments to the gnome devs and to the STF, accessibility is something very important that understandably doesn’t usually receive much development.
There’s no real reason to use it over Arch/EndeavourOS
Their holding back of updates for 2 weeks is stupid and can cause breakage/dependency issues when you also have stuff installed via AUR (which doesn’t get held back for 2 weeks)
They hold back packages for 2 weeks, citing stability and that they can check for issues then patch before they push, but then they just… don’t do that. Known issues still get pushed.
Manjaro repos have had issues with malware in the past
Manjaro has on multiple occasions had their SSL certificates expire, with their advertised “fix” being to roll your system time back. This is a job that can be automated, or at the very least should have a reminder for someone in Manjaro to sort out. The fact it happened once is an embarrassment, but the fact it’s happened more times is absolutely inexcusable.
Those icons absolutely do not look normal, there’s some kind of theme being applied to all of them, likely a dark mode before it became a standardised feature, by the looks of it.
Yup. People always latch on to the “Sony (it was actually on Philips, who ran the disc factory that Sony had a stake in, but that’s just nitpicking) installed a rootkit on PCs in the 90s via CDs” and say about how awful that is, and they’re right, then they throw that out the Window and install more advanced rootkits filled with god knows what telemetry when they install games.
In fairness to KDE, yes, VMs absolutely can cause issues, and it’s likely you’d experience fewer of them if you ran it on real hardware.
But yeah, Plasma is relatively buggy. This is improving at a rapid rate, though - Plasma 4 and early Plasma 5 were straight up unusable, hence distros flocking to Gnome (KDE actually used to be the standard!)
The difference in stability between Plasma 5.27 and versions before about 5.16 is night and day. And Plasma 6 has been repeatedly pushed back so that it can be stable from the get-go.
I think several DEs could see mainstream adoption.
If the team that works on Cinnamon got a little bit more manpower and were able to implement larger changes such as adopting Wayland, I think they’d have a chance. Wouldn’t hurt to make the default theme a bit nicer too. I think the main thorn in Cinnamon’s side is the development pace and the fact that it would probably be viewed by the average person on the street as a weird Windows clone.
Plasma’s largest obstacle to mainstream adoption is bugs and instability, but in fairness it has improved a lot over the past couple of years. Seriously, compare 5.27 to any Plasma 4 release or any Plasma 5 release before like 5.16 - it’s night and day. Kwin still crashes and takes all your programs down with it, though. That’s a showstopper, but will be fixed in Plasma 6.
Speaking of Plasma 6, the fact they keep pushing it back probably means they want it stable from the beginning. KDE are doing a good job putting the “KDE is buggy” statement to bed.
I guess I agree that Gnome as it stands is the most appropriate for widespread adoption. It’s extremely polished and beautiful, it has comparatively decent accessibility features, it’s extremely stable despite being a frequently updating distro, it has amazing gesture support (better than MacOS even, imo), it’s decent in terms of touch support, the GTK4/Libadwaita app ecosystem is healthy, etc. but it’s not completely without issues.
Unfortunately this is all academic though until big laptop OEMs start actively pushing for Linux on their devices.
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.
With Discovery essentially being the Burnham show, when I was originally watching I was 100% expecting the Burn to be some temporal shenanigans from Burnham, and that’s where the name came from.
Mate, there are prominent US politicians saying they aim to destroy the issue of trans people, to find a solution to a the trans problem. What do you think that means?