hunte

I was studying software engineering so I knew about linux for a while but never went ahead to try it as a workstation OS. I started to really dive into it when Windows 10 came out. Win10 is now regarded as one of the "good" editions but that kind of wasn't the case at release time, switching from Win7 it was bloated with a whole lot of unnecessary new "features" and weird changes. Win7 got it's end-of life announced and having Vista and more recently Win8 in memory I just about had it with Microsoft's shenanigans so I started looking for an alternative. I never really ran a doal-boot setup, I had an old little thinkpad to experiment on and in the first year I ran it through basically all major and minor distros I could find. The hopping was real 😄

I was hooked, loved everything about the freedom and it was refreshing building my own OS from scratch so I settled with arch for a while. At first with arch based distros on my main rig as training wheels (Manjaro and Endeavour) and then plain arch with Qtile and then KDE.

Nowadays especially because of my work I rather much prefer more stable experiences, I switched to Fedora after a pacman -Syu borked GIMP in a particularly annoying time (still love you Arch, no hard feelings ❤️) and just now after about 2 years I installed debian with all the RHEL stuff going on. Kinda making a whole circle in this journey.

I was just thinking about this because I have to use windows sometimes at work that linux really brought back the fun for me in computing. Despite all the flaws and issues that we are dealing with like the whole packaging question and things like that, it is just so refreshing to deal with these issues knowing that I can deal with them, rather than waiting how Microsoft will make those choices for me. For me having Windows or a Mac is like having half of a computer where I just have no choice but accept certain things as a paying customer no less.

Idk your laptop's specs but I've been running Arch with XFCE on my Thinkpad T400 for a while now and it was decent enough to do college assignments, take notes, watch videos and stuff like that a year or two ago. Debian is also decent nowadays, and heard good things about Peppermint but I have no experience with it.

Truth is, it doesn't really matter as long as you use a lightweight DE like XFCE, lxqt or cinamon. The thing that will inevitably kill older machines is the modern JS heavy web. Youtube and Reddit were really pushing the limits of that old machine sometimes but it struggled through.

Ubuntu in the early 2000s. My dad bought a little netbook that had it pre-installed. I was hooked, I was using Windows XP up to that point and it was something entirely different. My dad was kind of a techie at the time but none of us had any experience with Linux up to that point, still, we got the hang of it rather quickly and Linux had a lot more not so obvious problems at that time.

That's why I'm saying a long time now, Linux is good enough as it is. It has been good enough for a long time. If you give it to people it works. But you have to give it to them. Normal people don't install their OS', as far as they are concerned it's a part of the machine itself. Linux will only take off if it gets pre-loaded on systems as Windows and Mac was/is to this day. I Canonical wouldn't have partnered with some laptop OEMs back in the day and I wouldn't have gotten linux in my hand it maybe would have took years before I got to know linux and I don't know if I would have installed it on my own.

I managed to get into one that is local to my country so fairly small but has active and dedicated members with great content. I really encourage everyone that before trying to get into one of the more prominent PT sites, look around locally. There are some real hidden gems among these smaller communities.

The internet as a whole was much better when websites and services were not designed to cater to kids.

Arch, it's not that uncommon for a pacman update to bork some application. Such is the nature of rolling release. Not saying it's super common, but in my years using Arch it happened more times than I would have liked.

I used to run into updates breaking dependencies, like Gimp not working after an update and such but since switching most my programs to be Flatpaks I had very few issues.

Running any decently sized instance quickly turns from a hobby to at least a part-time job. A thing that you can't just quit whenever is not a hobby and we should be mindful of that.

I've been using GNOME with a touchscreen folding laptop and it's been pretty comfy. I honestly like GNOME's implementation of optimizing the UI for touch input more than Windows 10's half assed approach. I tried Windows 11 but don't have much experience with it to comment on that.

But I wouldn't say that making an OS UI is a solved problem. Microsoft for example with it's billions of dollars of R&D routinely messes up as you mentioned, still can't get rid of old holdovers from Windows 7 and just generally degrading it's UX with every new version.

GNOME surely has a lot more common with MacOS but I wouldn't say that's bad thing. Apple is the industry leader in seamless UX design after all. For it being a cheap knock-off, I let everyone to decide that but it is quite literally free. Doesn't get much cheaper than that 😅

I've been famoboying a lot for GNOME in this thread but I really think there is a lot of room for improvements. I guess I'm just more optimistic about the project, especially after the last couple of releases.

As a Firefox enjoyer it really feels bad to keep Brave around just to use Teams. Not that I have any problem with Brave just, if a billion dollar company can't be bothered to make a native Linux app that's fine ~~(it's not)~~ but could they at least support the major browsers?

I think there is a disconnect in what you call a feature and what is a design decision. GNOME consciously deviated from the "desktop" paradigm. I'm not saying that's a good thing or everyone has to like it but this is what they did. I'm not trying to nitpick here but I think it's important to see what is actually happening here, desktop icons are not being worked on not because they hate the users and are lazy in implementing things but because there is no traditional desktop. The overall GNOME UI is not made along this line of implementation, instead it has the activities view. Again, I'm not saying you have to like this and maybe it's a dumb way to make a UI, idk, but criticizing it for not having desktop icons is like criticizing MacOS for not having a start menu. It's just not made that way.

I think quite a big problem with KDE that they are also trying to break away from is making the UI resemble too much of Windows. New users then will expect things to behave exactly like Windows when it just can't. That doesn't mean that there are missing features necesserally but that things are implemented differently and the uninitiated user should know that from a first glance.

Overall I get the sentiment. GNOME is different and needs getting used to and does not fit all workflows out of the box. It has missing features that I wish would be implemented but overall I like the direction they took. It's new, different and after a couple of weeks of adjusting I really gotten to like it. I don't really miss desktop icons because I haven't used them in Windows anyway, I personally like to launch my programs from the start menu/app launcher.

People bash the GNOME team for being too strickt with their design rules and implementations but honestly, I like that they have at least a central vision that they are trying to implement. I don't agree with all of them but so far, all in all, I like the direction GNOME has taken since switching to GTK3 and update 40. Things haven't been fast for sure, the road was bumpy and it took some time and several revisions but the fact that such a comperatably tiny team, a lot of them working on this in their spare time, managed to make something that I can honest to God say is a comparable replacement to the Windows or iOS user interfaces is remarkable.

And Wayland also threw a wrench into everything and required several rewrites to old protocols but we are really getting some long awaited features like the task bar icons are being actively worked on, a lot of window UI enhancements with LibAdwaita, HDR, fractional scaling and more.