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The state of the desktop art
Jun. 10th, 2020 05:50 pmI would say that you need to bear in mind that Linux is not a single piece of software by a single company. Someone once made the comparison something like this: "FreeBSD is a single operating system. Linux is not. Linux is 3,000 OS components flying in close formation."
The point is that every different piece was made by a different person, group of people, organisation or company, working to their own agenda, with their own separate plans and designs. All these components don't look the same or work the same because they're all separately designed and written.
If you install, say, a GTK-based desktop and GTK-based components, then there's a good chance there will be a single theme and they'll all look similar, but they might not work similarly. If you then install a KDE app it will suck in a whole ton of KDE libraries and they might look similar but they might also look totally different -- it depends on how much effort the distro designers put in.
If you want a nice polished look and feel, then your best bet is to pick a mainstream distro and its default desktop, because the big distro vendors have teams of people trying to make it look nice.
That means Ubuntu or Fedora with GNOME, or openSUSE with KDE.
(Disclaimer: I work for SUSE. I run openSUSE for work. I do not use KDE, or GNOME, as I do not personally like either.)
If you pick an OS that is a side-project of a small hardware vendor, then you are probably not going to get the same level of fit and finish, simply because the big distros are assembled by teams of tens to hundreds of people as their day job, whereas the smaller distros are a handful of volunteers, or people working on a side-job, and the niche distros are mostly one person in their spare time, maybe with a friend helping out sometimes.
Windows is far more consistent in this regard, and macOS is more consistent than Windows. None of them are as consistent as either Windows or Classic MacOS were before the WWW blew the entire concept of unified design and functionality out of the water and vapourised it into its component atoms, never to be reassembled.
Don't judge a book by its cover -- everyone knows that. Well, don't judge a distro by a couple of screenshots.
As for my expertise -- well, "expertise" is very subjective! :-D You would easily find people who disagree with me -- there are an awful lot of strong biases and preconceptions in the Linux world.
For one thing, it is so very customisable that people have their own workflows that they love and they won't even consider anything else.
For another, there is 51 years of UNIX™ cultural baggage. For example in the simple matter of text editors. There are two big old text editors in the UNIX world, both dating from the 1970s. Both are incredibly powerful and capable, but both date from an era before PCs, before screens could display colours or formatting or move blocks of characters around "live" in real time, before keyboards had cursor keys or keys for insert, delete, home, end, and so on.
So both are horrible. They are abominations from ancient times, with their own weird names for everyday stuff like "files" and "windows" -- because they are so old they predate words like "files" and "windows"! They don't use the normal keyboard keys and they have their own weird names for keyboard keys, names from entire companies that went broke and disappeared 30 or 40 years ago.
But people still use these horrible old lumps of legacy cruft. People who were not yet born when these things were already obsolete will fight over them and argue that they are the best editors ever written.
Both GNOME and KDE are very customisable. Unfortunately, you have to customise them in the ways that their authors thought of and permitted.
KDE has a million options to twiddle, but I happen to like to work in ways that the KDE people never thought of, so I don't get on with it. (For example, on a widescreen monitor, I put my taskbar vertically on the left side. This does not work well with KDE, or with MATE, or with Cinnamon, or most other desktops, because they never thought of it or tried it, even though it's been a standard feature of Windows since 1995.)
GNOME has almost no options, and its developers are constantly looking for things they don't use and removing them. (Unfortunately, some of these are things I use a dozen times a day. Sucks to be me, I guess.) If you want to customise GNOME, you have to write your own add-on extensions in JavaScript. JavaScript is very trendy and popular, which is a pity, as it is probably the worst programming language in the world. After PHP, anyway.
So if you want to customise GNOME, you'd better hope that someone somewhere has programmed the customisation you want, and that their extension still works, because there's a new version of GNOME every 6 months and it usually breaks everything. If you have a broken extension, your entire desktop might crash and not let you log in, or log out, or do anything. This is considered perfectly normal in GNOME-land.
Despite this, these two desktops are the most popular ones around. Go figure.
There was one that was a ripoff of Mac OS X, and I really liked it. It was discontinued a few years ago. Go figure.
Rather than ripping off other desktops, the trend these days is to remove most of the functions, and a lot of people like super-minimal setups with what are called "tiling window managers". These basically try to turn your fancy true-colour hardware-3D-accelerated high-definition flat-panel monitor into a really big glass text terminal from 1972. Go figure.
There used to be ripoffs of other OSes, including from dead companies who definitely won't sue. There were pretty good ripoffs of AmigaOS, classic MacOS, Windows XP, Acorn RISC OS, SGI Irix, NeXTstep, Sun OpenLook, The Open Group's CDE and others. Most are either long dead, or almost completely ignored.
Instead today, 7 out of the 8 leading Linux desktops are just ripoffs of Windows 95, of varying quality. Go figure.
I mentioned that I still don't use GNOME even though there are extensions to fix a lof of the things I don't like. (My latest attempted ended in failure just yesterday.) Someone asked what functionality was still missing. It's a reasonable question, so I tried to answer.
It is not (only) a case of missing functionality, it is a case of badly-implemented or non-working functionality.
I can go into a lot of depth on this, if you like, but it is not very relevant to this list and it is probably not a good place.
A better place, if you have an OpenID of some form, might be over on my blog.
This post lays out some of my objections:
"Why I don't use GNOME Shell"
& is followed up here:
"On GNOME 3 and design simplicity"
Here's what I found using the extensions was like:
A quick re-assessment of Ubuntu GNOME now it's got its 2nd release
For me, Ubuntu Unity worked very well as a Mac OS X-like desktop, with actual improvements over Mac OS X (which I use daily.) I used it from the version when it was first released -- 11.04 I think? -- and still do. In fact I just installed it on 19.04 this weekend after my latest efforts to tame GNOME 3 failed.
I don't particularly like Win95-style desktops -- I'm old, I predate them -- but I'm perfectly comfortable using them. I have some tests I apply to see if they are good enough imitations of the real thing to satisfy me. Notable elements of these tests: does it handle a vertical taskbar? Is it broadly keystroke-compatible with Win9x?
Windows-like desktops which pass to some degree, in order of success: Xfce; LXDE; LXQt
Windows-like desktops which fail: MATE; Cinnamon; KDE 5
If I was pressed to summarise, I guess I'd say that some key factors are:
• Do the elements integrate together?
• Does it make efficient use of screen space, or does it gratuitously waste it?
(Failed badly by GNOME Shell and Elementary)
• Does it offer anything unique or is it something readily achieved by reconfiguring an existing desktop?
(Failed badly by Budgie & arguably Elementary)
• Do standard keystrokes work by default?
(Failed badly by KDE)
• Can it be customised in fairly standard, discoverable ways?
• Is the result robust?
E.g. will it survive an OS upgrade (e.g. Unity), or degrade gracefully so you can fix it (Unity with Nemo desktop/file manager), or will it break badly enough to prevent login (GNOME 3 + multiple extensions)?
If, say, you find that Arc Menu gives GNOME 3 an menu and what more can you want, or if you are happy with something as minimal as Fluxbox, then my objections to many existing desktops are probably things that have never even occurred to you and will probably seem trivial, frivolous, and totally unimportant. It may be very hard to discuss them, unless you're willing to accept that, as an opening position, stuff that you don't even notice is critically, crucially important to other people.
Elementary is quite a good example, because it seems to me that the team trying to copy the look and feel of Mac OS X in Elementary OS do not actually understand how Mac OS X works.
Elementary presents a cosmetic imitation of Mac OS X, but it is skin-deep. Its developers seem not to understand how Mac OS X works and how the elements of the desktop function. So, they have implemented things that look quite Mac-like, but don't work. Not "don't work in a Mac-like way". I mean, don't work at all.
It is what I call "cargo cult" software: when you see something, think it looks good, so you make something that looks like it and then you take it very seriously and go through the motions of using it and say it's great.
Actually, your aeroplane is made of grass and rope. It doesn't roll let alone fly. Your radio is a wooden fruit box. Your headphones are woven from reeds. They don't do anything. They're a hat.
You're wearing a hat but you think you're a radio operator.
Apparently, LXDE is switching to Qt:
http://blog.lxde.org/?p=1013
Which leaves the question of how easy it would be for Xfce and Maté to move.
( Read more... )
as something to be deprecated and avoided because it uses Gtk2 and
that is now superseded code.
I think that's a bit sweeping to denigrate all Gtk2 desktops like that.
Yes, GNOME Classic and Cinnamon both offer Windows-like desktops
now with taskbars and start menus. If you don't like Unity or GNOME
Shell, then there are "traditional" alternatives.
But the un-Windows-like nature of Unity and GNOME Shell are not the
only reasons that people use them. There are other issues than the
cosmetics to consider.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
Oh, so GNOME is Reinventing tabs.
Oh yay! Another reason not to use GNOME! Thanks, guys! I had enough already, but every additional one makes the decision easier and easier!
• Titlebars. I liked title bars. You merged them with toolbars. I don’t want that. No thank you. But it’s not a choice, it’s mandatory! Well, thanks folks, but your desktop isn’t mandatory, either!
• Menu bars. Menu bars are fast and efficient. You got rid of them & patronise me like I’m on some crippled smartphone app, where a tiny, hard-to-find hamburger menu is enough for the paltry selection of choices in a crippled mobile app. GNOME brings this to the desktop, so now, my decisions are easier! Not only do I not want to run GNOME, I don’t want to run any GNOME app, either!
• You got rid of all the menus, but for some weird reason, you kept the menu bar. That’s a centimetre of my widescreen gone forever. Gee, thanks! Oh, and the clock is front and centre. Why? Do you want me to stamp in and out of my desktop with a card clock, as well? At least I can have app indicators for Skype and Dropbox and stuff ins– oh, you’re taking those away too? But they were useful! Not to you? But isn’t the customer always right? I’m not paying for it so I’m not a customer? Well if I am not paying, why do you want a gig of RAM? I’m paying for that! Can I have it back, please? No? Oh. Guess I will go use Xfce then.
• Hey, where are my desktop icons? What do you mean they’re a legacy feature? They were useful!
• At least the virtual desktops down the right were handy. Shame they are always on the right of my primary screen, not of the whole desktop, but I get that you don’t want me to use multiple screens. I don’t know why, but– oh, you’ve moved them? Where to? To the bottom? But I have a 16:9 monitor! I have nearly twice as much width as depth! Can I move it where I want? No? Why not? Whaddya mean you know what I want better than me? Hey, I got news for you, buddy… Meet my friends Mr
rm -rfand Mrfdisk. They got a message for you.