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Things work differently on Linux. The software is supposed to respect Unix philosophy and standards. So it should matter what combination of packages you run. T

Things work differently on Linux. The software is supposed to respect Unix philosophy and standards. So it should matter what combination of packages you run. They're not supposed to be tightly integrated, the gnome team seems to have forgotten all of this. As for managing displays, it has become much better with wayland and it's improving fast.

kelnos 5y ago
I think the problem is that making things look to the user as an integrated, polished experience is exceptionally hard when you have the loosest of loose coupling all over the place, and differing views as to how to get things done. Sure, you can put APIs and documented IPC interfaces between things, but that doesn't mean everything will match up in a usable way. So, eventually, you just decide: screw it, we'll own the entire stack, or at least gain enough influence over the people who make parts we don't control, such that everything works seamlessly for us. In part, this is why Apple can give their customers such a polished, "just works" experience. Buy all-Apple gear, and stay in their software ecosystem, and (modulo bugs) everything will work together seamlessly. I don't like this outcome by any means. And I still think that some desktop components certainly benefit from loose coupling and well-defined interfaces, and it's possible to avoid the "polish" downsides in some cases. But doing everything that way, while still being able to put everything together in a polished way, might actually be impossible.
- indymike 5y ago
  Maybe the idea if a perfect,integrated experience doesn't matter as much as we think. The web's chaotic ux won. Games... roll this own up. Now electron is eating the engineered ui.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    It matters a lot for a desktop UX. People have no patience for a laptop that can't sleep when the lid shuts.
    - curt15 5y ago
      Or animations that stutter. Smartphones have been managing consistent 60fps animations for years now, and MacOS is similarly smooth.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    > Maybe the idea if a perfect,integrated experience doesn't matter as much as we think. This is not an uncommon view. However I can’t help but be convinced it’s the main reason the year of Linux on the Desktop hasn’t happened yet. The user really does want their computer to seem like just one “thing,” at least in the way that it comes out of the box. When we visit websites it’s understood that these pages don’t interact with each other and weren’t designed to work together. The OS, on the other hand, is supposed to be a system per the name.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Then how is it the browser with the absolute majority? https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are_at_least_10_different_microsoft_design/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...
      - ironmagma 5y ago
        I'm not sure what you're asking. The browser is not an OS, so the websites are not supposed to form a system. People using Microsoft's default browser is yet more evidence that people generally stick with the OS defaults, because they are supposed to work.
        kaba0 5y ago
        I wanted to write OS, and couldn’t edit it later on :/ My point was that windows is the most popular OS despite it having a ridiculous amount of “native” looks. So linux not having one is not the reason for its less than ideal desktop uptake.
        ironmagma 5y ago
        Looks are not the most important part. Functionality is. Besides, as bad as Windows’ UI fragmentation is, Linux’s is worse. When opening a Linux application, from Pidgin to Firefox to the control panel to Telegram, there is absolutely no guarantee of what you’ll be getting. Having 7 design languages is bad, but what’s worse is having 0.
FireBeyond 5y ago
One example of fragmentation: You: "it has become much better with wayland and is improving fast". Two comments above you: "wayland has been a steaming pile of crap since it still can't work in basic graphics modes 10+ years after being announced, to the fact that it has loads of quirks that vary from one environment to another."
- kaba0 5y ago
  That’s not fragmentation, that’s just the usual die-hard linuxer that knows jackshit about actual technology, but has a huge ego going with it. The typical conservative mentality.
jrm4 5y ago
Absolutely. This is why I'm absolutely hostile towards current-day Gnome. Even if they do make some incremental improvements, the reluctance to do so in a "share-it-back" way is the exact opposite of why I got into Linux in the first place. I quite literally wish it failure. (But KDE? I don't know, I don't use it much, but it seems like at least their stuff is mostly-compatible-if-you-work-it-a-bit, unlike Gnome's full on hostility to 'cross-compatibility.')
- md8z 5y ago
  Please avoid such hostility, open source is a team sport and we are all on the same team, even projects that do things in ways that may be not immediately useful to you or I. That kind of hostility is what leads to open source people burning out. I am not sure why you think they don't have a "share-it-back" mentality or why you would wish any project failure. They use mostly the same set of open source licenses as KDE.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    No. You don't get to simply declare we're on the same team if you're obviously trying to score points for the other side. In this case "the other side" is exclusivity and Gnome keeps doing it. As a lawyer, I hate to inform you that the entire point of licenses is to put real teeth on ideas that people are likely to renege on. LIKE HERE.
    - md8z 5y ago
      I am not trying to score points for any side, all of these projects can and do share code when it's practical and useful to do so. There is no "exclusivity", I'm sure you know that most of these licenses in use are compatible with each other. The end result is that we are already unwittingly on the same team, it took me a while to realize it but that's the whole reason things like Github and such have taken off. I'd love to discuss your experiences with that as a lawyer if you have any interesting stories, but I would have to ask you to please avoid the hostilities, that doesn't help when trying to fix issues. We both have the same access to the same code.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
It isn't just GNOME, almost all Linux distributions rely on tightly-coupling a set of libraries and binaries. That's why you can't take a binary from one distro and reasonably expect it to work on another and it's why there are dozens of repos and thousands of package maintainers and shipping on Linux is a pain in the ass.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  We manage it with Ardour just fine (except NixOS, which disables LD_LIBRARY_PATH). Once you understand what's required, it's not particularly hard.
- teitoklien 5y ago
  - flatpak And - appimage Both work out of the box on almost any distro, just fine
- dTal 5y ago
  Meh. I don't think it's technically difficult to just ship binaries that work on any distro, as it's incredibly common - Firefox, Blender, Arduino, Cura all manage it just fine. Mostly they just come as a tarball you unpack, occasionally you get an AppImage so you don't even need to do that. Technically it all works fine. But the Linux world still holds a cultural aversion to running mystery binaries, echoing from a time when the sense of battle against proprietary software was felt more keenly than it is today. Expecting people to run binaries they didn't compile was considered rude and antithetical to core values; distros being the only authorized exception. Even today, attempts to dislodge the distro as the official distributor of binaries are met with controversy and suspicion.
  - aulin 5y ago
    I've been working with Linux since more than 20 years and I don't recall any cultural aversion against binaries, at least the ones shipped by your distribution. Compiling everything has always been a very niche hobby limited to mostly Gentoo and similar distribution users. What we've maybe always being diffident about is app bundles, big images of apps with all their dependencies most of which duplicates of already installed libraries. But I guess we're moving on from that with snap, flatpack and the likes gaining traction.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jcelerier 5y ago
The Unix philosophy is in practice horseshit for anything that isn't semi-structured text processing, and for discoverability. Gimme a software with all the functions laid out in menus that I can explore !
md8z 5y ago
"They're not supposed to be tightly integrated, the gnome team seems to have forgotten all of this." That is a misconception that I've noticed, maybe it's because KDE uses different APIs for a lot of things, or maybe it's because of the way some distributions package it. But none of the Linux desktops are really that tightly coupled when you actually dig into it. For example managing the desktop settings is handled by its own daemon appropriately called "gnome-settings-daemon" that loads all its settings modules via a plugin system. KDE is structured similarly in that its code is split across a great number of small support libraries. If there is no secondary consumer of those APIs it's probably because nobody has bothered yet to make and test additional combinations of packages that actually work.

kelnos 5y ago

I think the problem is that making things look to the user as an integrated, polished experience is exceptionally hard when you have the loosest of loose coupling all over the place, and differing views as to how to get things done. Sure, you can put APIs and documented IPC interfaces between things, but that doesn't mean everything will match up in a usable way. So, eventually, you just decide: screw it, we'll own the entire stack, or at least gain enough influence over the people who make parts we don't control, such that everything works seamlessly for us. In part, this is why Apple can give their customers such a polished, "just works" experience. Buy all-Apple gear, and stay in their software ecosystem, and (modulo bugs) everything will work together seamlessly. I don't like this outcome by any means. And I still think that some desktop components certainly benefit from loose coupling and well-defined interfaces, and it's possible to avoid the "polish" downsides in some cases. But doing everything that way, while still being able to put everything together in a polished way, might actually be impossible.

indymike 5y ago
Maybe the idea if a perfect,integrated experience doesn't matter as much as we think. The web's chaotic ux won. Games... roll this own up. Now electron is eating the engineered ui.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  It matters a lot for a desktop UX. People have no patience for a laptop that can't sleep when the lid shuts.
  - curt15 5y ago
    Or animations that stutter. Smartphones have been managing consistent 60fps animations for years now, and MacOS is similarly smooth.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  > Maybe the idea if a perfect,integrated experience doesn't matter as much as we think. This is not an uncommon view. However I can’t help but be convinced it’s the main reason the year of Linux on the Desktop hasn’t happened yet. The user really does want their computer to seem like just one “thing,” at least in the way that it comes out of the box. When we visit websites it’s understood that these pages don’t interact with each other and weren’t designed to work together. The OS, on the other hand, is supposed to be a system per the name.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Then how is it the browser with the absolute majority? https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are_at_least_10_different_microsoft_design/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...
    - ironmagma 5y ago
      I'm not sure what you're asking. The browser is not an OS, so the websites are not supposed to form a system. People using Microsoft's default browser is yet more evidence that people generally stick with the OS defaults, because they are supposed to work.
      - kaba0 5y ago
        I wanted to write OS, and couldn’t edit it later on :/ My point was that windows is the most popular OS despite it having a ridiculous amount of “native” looks. So linux not having one is not the reason for its less than ideal desktop uptake.
        ironmagma 5y ago
        Looks are not the most important part. Functionality is. Besides, as bad as Windows’ UI fragmentation is, Linux’s is worse. When opening a Linux application, from Pidgin to Firefox to the control panel to Telegram, there is absolutely no guarantee of what you’ll be getting. Having 7 design languages is bad, but what’s worse is having 0.

FireBeyond 5y ago

One example of fragmentation: You: "it has become much better with wayland and is improving fast". Two comments above you: "wayland has been a steaming pile of crap since it still can't work in basic graphics modes 10+ years after being announced, to the fact that it has loads of quirks that vary from one environment to another."

kaba0 5y ago
That’s not fragmentation, that’s just the usual die-hard linuxer that knows jackshit about actual technology, but has a huge ego going with it. The typical conservative mentality.

jrm4 5y ago

Absolutely. This is why I'm absolutely hostile towards current-day Gnome. Even if they do make some incremental improvements, the reluctance to do so in a "share-it-back" way is the exact opposite of why I got into Linux in the first place. I quite literally wish it failure. (But KDE? I don't know, I don't use it much, but it seems like at least their stuff is mostly-compatible-if-you-work-it-a-bit, unlike Gnome's full on hostility to 'cross-compatibility.')

md8z 5y ago
Please avoid such hostility, open source is a team sport and we are all on the same team, even projects that do things in ways that may be not immediately useful to you or I. That kind of hostility is what leads to open source people burning out. I am not sure why you think they don't have a "share-it-back" mentality or why you would wish any project failure. They use mostly the same set of open source licenses as KDE.
- jrm4 5y ago
  No. You don't get to simply declare we're on the same team if you're obviously trying to score points for the other side. In this case "the other side" is exclusivity and Gnome keeps doing it. As a lawyer, I hate to inform you that the entire point of licenses is to put real teeth on ideas that people are likely to renege on. LIKE HERE.
  - md8z 5y ago
    I am not trying to score points for any side, all of these projects can and do share code when it's practical and useful to do so. There is no "exclusivity", I'm sure you know that most of these licenses in use are compatible with each other. The end result is that we are already unwittingly on the same team, it took me a while to realize it but that's the whole reason things like Github and such have taken off. I'd love to discuss your experiences with that as a lawyer if you have any interesting stories, but I would have to ask you to please avoid the hostilities, that doesn't help when trying to fix issues. We both have the same access to the same code.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

It isn't just GNOME, almost all Linux distributions rely on tightly-coupling a set of libraries and binaries. That's why you can't take a binary from one distro and reasonably expect it to work on another and it's why there are dozens of repos and thousands of package maintainers and shipping on Linux is a pain in the ass.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
We manage it with Ardour just fine (except NixOS, which disables LD_LIBRARY_PATH). Once you understand what's required, it's not particularly hard.
teitoklien 5y ago
- flatpak And - appimage Both work out of the box on almost any distro, just fine
dTal 5y ago
Meh. I don't think it's technically difficult to just ship binaries that work on any distro, as it's incredibly common - Firefox, Blender, Arduino, Cura all manage it just fine. Mostly they just come as a tarball you unpack, occasionally you get an AppImage so you don't even need to do that. Technically it all works fine. But the Linux world still holds a cultural aversion to running mystery binaries, echoing from a time when the sense of battle against proprietary software was felt more keenly than it is today. Expecting people to run binaries they didn't compile was considered rude and antithetical to core values; distros being the only authorized exception. Even today, attempts to dislodge the distro as the official distributor of binaries are met with controversy and suspicion.
- aulin 5y ago
  I've been working with Linux since more than 20 years and I don't recall any cultural aversion against binaries, at least the ones shipped by your distribution. Compiling everything has always been a very niche hobby limited to mostly Gentoo and similar distribution users. What we've maybe always being diffident about is app bundles, big images of apps with all their dependencies most of which duplicates of already installed libraries. But I guess we're moving on from that with snap, flatpack and the likes gaining traction.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jcelerier 5y ago

The Unix philosophy is in practice horseshit for anything that isn't semi-structured text processing, and for discoverability. Gimme a software with all the functions laid out in menus that I can explore !

md8z 5y ago

"They're not supposed to be tightly integrated, the gnome team seems to have forgotten all of this." That is a misconception that I've noticed, maybe it's because KDE uses different APIs for a lot of things, or maybe it's because of the way some distributions package it. But none of the Linux desktops are really that tightly coupled when you actually dig into it. For example managing the desktop settings is handled by its own daemon appropriately called "gnome-settings-daemon" that loads all its settings modules via a plugin system. KDE is structured similarly in that its code is split across a great number of small support libraries. If there is no secondary consumer of those APIs it's probably because nobody has bothered yet to make and test additional combinations of packages that actually work.