Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world. It's explicitly designed to be boring and not very customizable so that delicate users don't get scared.

I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind.

You don't need to go scary tiling WM, Xfce probably works well, it's been years since I last used it.

If apt is out of date that's probably because you're using a stable rather than rolling release distro.

All of this requires some research and tinkering. If you're me, you prefer research to being told what to do.

> I use i3 and basically everything is configured via text files. Keyboard shortcuts are trivial etc. You don't need Karabiner to "rebind" because you can directly bind.

This is the kind of hyperbole that Linux advocates like to throw around a lot, and it’s unfortunate, because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what people are asking for when they say things like “I wish there was a decent replacement for Karabiner”.

i3’s config files let you bind i3’s config. That’s not the same thing at all.

With Karabiner, in 3 seconds, I can have ^w bound to “delete word backwards” functionality in every single application globally. You can’t even remotely accomplish that in i3’s config by itself — you need to venture into X config files, and special gtk config files for gtk/gnome apps, and some other set of config for KDE stuff, and then after that you still have to deal with the occasional one-off app like Firefox closing a window when you went to delete a word out of force of habit, and so you get to spend time discovering yet another way to tell it to respect a key binding.

And then at some point during some random update some random set of apps will break all over again. It’s a far fucking cry from Karibiner.

I don't think that there's a general appreciation for the depth and configurability of the cocoa/nextstep text and keyboard engine among linux and windows users.

Almost all macos applications use it everywhere, so globally modifying keyboard bindings in all applications in all circumstances is easy. If I want to bind Meta-f to jump a word forward, I can have that behavior in every single text box or editing region in every single application. Url bars, forms, everything!

Accomplishing the same thing in linux typically means descending into the hoary netherworld of xkb mappings. <shiver/>

I have a tickling suspicion that if any free-software OS has any chance at replicating that sort of global unification/consistency across apps, it's Haiku. Sure, there are plenty of apps that are just straight ports from the Linux ecosystem, but there are also lots of apps written first and foremost for BeOS/Haiku (or ported to Haiku exceptionally well) and consequently feel like they "belong" just as nicely as the ones that come preinstalled.

> And then at some point during some random update some random set of apps will break all over again. It’s a far fucking cry from Karibiner.

My experience: Karabiner breaks on every Mac OS X release, and unlike xmodmap, I have never been able to get the following setup completely working in Mac OS X (some combination of: not being able to rebind the modifier keys, not being able to exchange () and [], and one time not even being able to rebind caps lock after an OS update):

https://oneofus.la/have-emacs-will-hack/2018-04-08-lisp-mach...

The X Window System is not Linux. It is not even GNU/Linux. But at least it is better than Mac OS X for things that I want to do, like running on different operating systems, and avoiding unwanted breaking updates shoved on me by multinational corporations.

> i3’s config files let you bind i3’s config. That’s not the same thing at all.

That's why bspwm uses a WM independent tool for all keybindings:

https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd

This is also not really not something that solves the same problem as karibiner at all, afaict. This is just binding shell commands to hotkey sequences.

For bspwm, where all it’s functionality is exposed to shell commands it can very narrowly achieve something similar, but again, Karibiner’s scope of operation is all apps system-wide.

What people are wishing for when they wish for “a karibiner equivalent” isn’t a hotkey mapping app per se — there’s obviously dozens and dozens of half-baked versions of those. What people are actually wanting is a system for setting globally-consistent keybindings such that they can set it once and universally every app respects it. That would require either a system wide protocol for agreeing on keybindings no matter what wheel-reinventing UI/desktop toolkit an app was built in, or an Uber-keybindings app that knew how to write defaults to the 20 different preference files that control this stuff for different toolkits.

> or an Uber-keybindings app that knew how to write defaults to the 20 different preference files that control this stuff for different toolkits.

Or a VIM plugin

If you want the latest software, install Arch Linux not Ubuntu/Debian.

You appear to have replied to the wrong post

> Gnome (3) is just a bit crap. It's the Windows DE of the GNU/Linux world.

Windows is way WAY more customizable than Gnome 3. As an example all the issues the GP mentions are things Windows support out of the box (among many other stuff).

Gnome 3 is the result of arrogant programmers pretending to be "UX designers" and act as if they were Steve Jobs without having an ounce of his skills/taste while ignoring that even Steve Jobs took advice from others.

> Windows is way WAY more customizable than Gnome 3.

What? Last time I've tried it I couldn't even set CAPSLOCK for layout switching. Even Gnome is WAY more customizable than that nonsense.

I still maintain that the problem is the UI toolkits.

The mac ecosystem now has _multiple_ viable indesign and photoshop alternatives.

AppKit, Cocoa, UIKit and all those frameworks gradually added all the features third party app developers hacked into their own UI libraries.

GTK is something developers frequently curse about and theme developers frequently abandon because the gnome team keeps breaking their themes.

QT while great is nowhere near the ease of use of the cocoa frameworks and for every 20 cocoa books you find one QT book.

Bottom line is, as much as you may hate Xcode it's exponentially easier to make a good looking application on a mac compared to any linux counterpart. At the end of the day, people want to use (for example) photoshop or something similar without dual booting.

And if you use the Apple toolkits, you lose around 95% of your potential market. For my project, Krita, made with Qt (not QT, Qt...), 90% of downloads are Windows, 7% Linux, 3% macOS. And since Apple seems hell-bent on making people share-croppers in their walled garden with asinine things like Metal, and notarizing and all that, well, in a year or two, it might be 0%, and I'll be fine with that.

I would think that 3% is because there are other viable alternatives. Personally, I've paid for Pixelmator and Acorn on macOS because my needs are more about cropping, adding text, file format, levels, or color space changes--those apps seemed to pop up quickly and had features like hardware acceleration before Photoshop because they leaned on Apple's APIs. My industry is still heavily invested in Photoshop, so I'm already familiar with it and I don't have much of a need for digital painting.

For digital painting I usually suggest people check out something like Krita or Affinity (they are already aware of Photoshop). I just don't have much firsthand experience with them since I felt like my needs were met with other software.

Sidenote: After actually downloading Krita it is more Photoshop-like than expected. I'll check it out as a replacement for myself. There's also been a huge, but very rare, need for Photoshop at my job (we use Linux) which has always been a problem (usually in modifying textures where Nuke isn't a good fit). The current plan was to try and find a CS6 license and either dual-boot Windows or use WINE or to buy Elements. Gimp was always too much to ask of them. I'll see if Krita fits that need.

That’s not because you have 3% macOS downloads that you can say that everyone loses around 95% potential downloads. It may simply be because your app is not marketed towards Mac users and alternatives exists.

Krita is great (and I happen to be one of your 3%!).

Given that macOS has a reputation, deserved or not, of being the de facto OS for graphic designers, why do you think you have so relatively few Mac users?

90% Windows users is basically what you would expect based on its desktop market share. The interesting thing is having more than twice as many Linux users as Mac.

This could be one of those places where the efficient market hypothesis is wrong because of incomplete information. The reputation of macOS for graphic designers is well known, but if the result of that is that everyone makes graphics design programs for macOS and not Linux then the macOS market gets saturated with supply and each supplier has to share the market with many competitors. Meanwhile the opposite on Linux, less competition so more volume per supplier.

It implies that Linux may be a good market for graphic design software because there is currently less supply there than demand. At least until more of the suppliers figure that out and release their software for it. (But that may itself cause more graphic designers to switch to Linux, which would then still justify the porting effort even as other suppliers move there too.)

Many digital painters seem to have moved to the iPad and apps like Procreate which can be had for a few bucks. I also find eInk hardware like the Remarkable tablet and the like interesting, they run on Linux. Have you thought about a standalone tablet that runs only Krita? Even if it's only black/white, having the tools from Krita on a device like that would be killer.

That mirrors my experience with hobbyists. My wife doesn't like using a Wacom and we could never warrant a Cintiq. So she uses Procreate on a tablet. It's also kind of hard to get her to try new stuff because the little time she has to draw she wants to spend time drawing.

For people who do it for their job, they're willing to invest in the hardware and software. I can't speak directly to painting software, but in my industry people really cling to the software they know or the rest of the industry uses. It's an uphill battle even if the software is better or cheaper to get adoption.

Procreate is really nice, I have moved on from Wacom Tablet/Krita to iPad Pro/Procreate. I suggest any artist give it a try.

Well, I just added a tiny bit to that 3%...I hadn't heard of Krita before, but it looks great. Looking forward to trying it out.

> GTK is something developers frequently curse about and theme developers frequently abandon because the gnome team keeps breaking their themes.

Let's compare comparable. Neither Cocoa nor Win32 do support third-party themes; for the exactly same reason why GTK is breaking them.

I remember themes for Windows XP. Have no idea, though, how many hacks were involved .

XP required themes signed by Microsoft. There were cracks that removed that requirement, but the result was, that when something was broken, you got to keep all the pieces.

For OSX, there were also hacks that changed the system appearance, and Apple took increasingly harder stance against them. Again, they break more than they solve.

The reason why platform vendors do not support third-party theming is, that it limits their ability for further development. They would need to preserve compatibility for something, that is internal implementation detail. For first party themes, they can keep them in lockstep with the rest of framework. For third party, they cannot. So they prevent third parties from existing.

Good point. I’m also convinced that macOS are more willing than Linux users to pay for software, which makes it possible for the developers to get some monetary return on the time they invest in creating good and usable software.

FOSS development can of course be funded via Patreon, donations, etc. But IMHO those models doesn’t seem to work so well for sophisticated GUI applications. (With some exceptions here and there.)

I tend to feel like there’s already enough roadblocks in the way to get things done. I used to tinker around with my OSs but now I want them out of the way to a large extent.

> I used to tinker around with my OSs but now I want them out of the way to a large extent.

This might seem counter intuitive, but configuring your own desktop kinda achieves "out of the way" on Linux... it gives you something persistent and reliable, it's a worthwhile investment. Like the parent, I use i3wm, it might seem a bit too spartan at first, but that's part of the beauty... less to configure, less gui in the way, less opinions, config a single text file, defaults are sane! I have hardly changed anything beyond my initial dot file setup about 5 years ago, yet have taken them through many desktop installs without any messing around.

Also configuring your desktop is not the same as Linux in 2000, you don't need to sift through thousands of lines of x11 config. Just pick the bits of desktop you like and stick it in a shell script, copy some config files here and there that you deem worthwhile configuring (smaller DEs or WM make this a far more minimal tasks than the big all signing all dancing KDEs and Gnomes).

... it's a small investment in time to pay for sanity and persistent experience over many years, the macOS days I could not bear the random changes pushed on users which became more and more heavy handed towards later versions.

TL:DR I like my custom configured linux desktop... because of how it prevents me from having to continually configure my desktop.

Unfortunately no-one provides what I consider to be a sane default.

I'm fairly happy with what I have. I add the odd alias to my dotfiles and a few things I pick up but for the most part I've had my config for half a decade or so now.

By contrast I could never figure out how to like, get Windows to fuck off with the telemetry ads bullshit. It always felt like I would disable it and then behind my back some randoservice would enable it again or install an update that brings back OneDrive or some madness.

The best bit about my Linux setup is that it's all just files. Home folder, few flat text files with the odd bit of json, we're home.

For what it's worth, I've had a lot of success with the Tron script[1] for getting rid of Windows Bloat. It disables a ton of garbage via Registry Keys which windows is much less likely to overwrite. It can be a little aggressive on some stuff like blocking your microphone from working in any app (easily fixable) but I'd rather have it that way than having to uninstall Candy Crush once a week.

[1]https://github.com/bmrf/tron

Stating it that way makes it seem like you're opposed to learning something new. That's fine, but a lot of people including GP just looked once and never did anything else.

Frankly, yes, I'm opposed to learning new tools when the old tools I used for the same task did the task just as well.

Knowledge is power, so learning should increase your power. If learning is necessary to just keep being able to do the same things you were doing, you're not increasing your power, you're struggling to stay where you are.

I’m not. However, I can’t keep going back to square one. I need problems I’ve solved to remain solved, not have to jump into X configs in Vim because my monitor layout won’t stay between sessions (random example from many years ago). I have 5 hours of work to do today, I’d like to not spend 2 of them in man files “learning” about an abstraction I can’t afford to be digging into right now.

Most people have far better things to do than getting into a tinkering rabbit hole to enable basic desktop functionality.

Right. So use Mac, and go for a nice walk outside whenever something pisses you off that is unmodifiable.

You have the free time since you're not tinkering, right? :P

Pretty much, yes.

You're talking about problems that "piss you off", whereas Linux has problems that not only piss you off, but completely stop you from being able to do what you need to do.

It's easy to talk about these things in abstract terms, but frankly I've run across two problems with Mac ever that I actually had to fix in order to do what I needed to do:

1. Get "gcc" to point to "gcc" instead of clang.

2. Get Valgrind to work (which problem is admittedly still not solved).

The problems that I've had to fix in Linux often start immediately upon booting up for the first time and attempting to connect to wireless, and end with me emailing documents to a Mac to print them because I needed the document printed within an hour, not after 8 hours of tinkering.

You assume that everyone wants to modify everything (or the unmodifiable, as you put it). After going through many years of FreeBSD and Linux, I now just want things to work. Mac gives me that. Should have switched sooner.

I used Linux as my daily driver until about 2008 when I switched to macOS exclusively. I made the transition to Ubuntu across all of my machines over the last three years and its been a much more pleasant experience.

Upgrading macOS and Xcode is a pain, especially with Homebrew and Macports. You'll have to recompile most of your installed applications and it's all managed with a hacked together package manager. Virtualenvs won't survive updates if Python is sideloaded because of linking issues. It's just a mess.

The result is having to spend an unknown amount of time fixing things that upgrades break on macOS, meanwhile upgrades on Ubuntu just work.

There was a time I fine tuned every aspect of every desktop environment I had. I had custom widgets on Windows 3 by replacing bitmap resources in Windows 3.1's SVGA.DRV. Did the same up until Gnome 2.

Then I stopped. These days rarely go beyond setting terminal font (I built mine, so it's only fair I play lab rat with it) and some Emacs settings. The effort spent in customizing every detail of every app is very rarely, if ever, recovered.

I feel a bit embarrassed I recently added overline support to tmux because I wanted proper overlined status lines on my terminals. In my defense, I did it for fun, not to improve my performance.

It works for you, yes. This entire page and thread of comments exists because for someone it didn't.

I see very little evidence of that.

I suspect what you mean when you say "it didn't work" is actually, "they didn't like it", which is actually not the same thing. I see a lot of people saying they didn't like things on Macs, not a lot of people saying things didn't work on Macs.

I've never used an OS that actually _didn't work_.

Unless we're talking about 15+ years ago before Linux had driver support for most stuff, or trying to like, just install Mac OS on an unsupported platform without hackintosh workarounds.

Everyone here saying that they used to tweak everything and now doesn't has just aged. You no longer feel the joy of your youth of computing in the same way. This is natural.

It's not really a rabbit hole. It has a clearly defined end.

I transitioned from GNOME to i3wm quite a while ago (after like 15 GNOME upgrade cycles, where I always had to figure out what changed, and fix what broke), and it was basically a day or two figuring out what I want and inventing/learning the shortcuts (not fulltime days, mind you). And maybe 2-3 instances of "this feels stupid, how can I improve it".

Certainly orders of magnitude less time than I ever spend making Windows do what I want on every damn re-install.

Now that I had my configs, I just copied them to all my 4 or so desktop/laptop machines, and it's such a timesaver. i3wm being ultra stable, there's no ongoing maintenance.

Xfce still works well, I just upgraded from 4.12 to 4.14. The only thing that broke on upgrade was the desktop background - I had to reset it to black

Agree! I've been using XFCE for many years, after deciding that Gnome wasn't actually pretty enough to justify all the extra pain.

For me, window managers are mostly just a convenient way to arrange a baroque collection of web browsers and terminals... Occasionally, I use file organization/navigation or a couple other programs that are helpful in my job. But ultimately, I just need a minimal window manager that gets the hell out of the way. (in fact, after setting up awesome rotating Moebius wallpapers, I mostly don't see them, as they're almost entirely buried under the web browsers and terminals.)

Windows as a DE is quite excellent. Better than macOS even.

Don't do that. People may spit out their coffee. ;-)

Honestly, Windows 7 is superior in use vs MacOS.

i3 is the best thing to happen my computing in years.

You'll need to copy some config if you want your volume buttons, brightness buttons, etc to work. But as far as I am concerned it is the only good Linux display manager.

Surprise surprise not everyone is you.

Go ahead and tinker but leave some space for others to do the same their way. It’s not “crap” it’s “not my preference”

“Delicate users”. The bravado of someone getting good at organizing text really well. You’re such a mans man.

> You’re such a mans man.

/flex

Which version of gnome are you on?

>No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff)

I just checked gnome settings and it has option to change touchpad speed. Don't have a mouse so can't comment for that but it should be there.

>To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness. I mean, I'm a programmer, so I'm capable of it, but it's seriously annoying

Open the app and right click the app icon in dock(if that is what you mean by favorites bar) and it should have an option to add to favorites.

>modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent

I have found gnome to have the easiest way to edit all shortcuts. Settings>Devices>Keyboard should show you all the keyboard shortcuts and if you scroll to bottom you will find option to add custom shortcuts which you can set to any command. Much more extensive than the frustrating MacOS keyboard shortcuts in my opinion.

> installing a gnome-shell extension was way more difficult than it should be

https://extensions.gnome.org/ for finding the extensions for installing the extensions on the website use this chrome extension using which all you then have to do is click install while on the website https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gnome-shell-integr... Gnome tweaks to manage them otherwise

> brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt

Agreed. That's why I use pacman. Pacman is hands down the best package manager I have ever used. Combined with AUR it has the most extensive up-to-date packages. Pacman is the default package manager for Arch Linux. I use arch, btw. Had to do this :)

I agree linux was in a pretty bad shape a decade ago and we still need to improve a lot but to say it is still the same is ignoring all the hardwork of a large number of wonderful people who have been contributing to the codebase.

> Which version of gnome are you on?

3.24 I think? whatever the ubuntu beta is using.

> I just checked gnome settings and it has option to change touchpad speed. Don't have a mouse so can't comment for that but it should be there.

I can assure you it is not

edit to add issue link: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/issues/3...

> Open the app and right click the app icon in dock(if that is what you mean by favorites bar) and it should have an option to add to favorites.

neat! that didn't work for kitty though, for example, I had to do it manually.

> I have found gnome to have the easiest way to edit all shortcuts. Settings>Devices>Keyboard should show you all the keyboard shortcuts and if you scroll to bottom you will find option to add custom shortcuts which you can set to any command. Much more extensive than the frustrating MacOS keyboard shortcuts in my opinion.

The shortcuts panel is indeed very nice, and the shortcuts that you can change there are nice. However, many aren't changeable there, and you have to install (!) and go to the very poorly designed keyboard modifications panel of gnome-tweaks, for example, to change caps lock to esc and tell gnome what you want your windows/mac key to do.

Where it falls down from karabiner is:

1. there's no way to have different settings for different keyboards. I have two that I use regularly, with fairly different layouts

2. it lacks the power of karabiner; I'd love to have a rule like "command-c equals ctrl-shift-c but command-t equals ctrl-t". Trivial in karabiner, impossible in gnome

> all you then have to do is click install while on the website

I'm glad they have that, but I don't want to give my browser that security hole, so I grant you that one's a bit on me. Should be easier to do a manual installation anyway.

> I agree linux was in a pretty bad shape a decade ago and we still need to improve a lot but to say it is still the same is ignoring all the hardwork of a large number of wonderful people who have been contributing to the codebase.

I do not at all mean to trash the hard work people have done, I really (truly!) respect it. However, from this particular user's perspective, the problems are about equal to what they were a decade ago.

The thread of responses from the Wayland issue tracker about why "allowing the user to change the scroll speed" is an impossible problem to solve is truly depressing: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/issues/87

I don't know why it would be a Weyland or X issue. Scroll speed should be controlled by the widgets, GTK in the case of GNOME. Trying to set it at the compositor level seems misguided.

Haven't used Weyland, but X is far more than "a compositor."

Keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, etc.

X stops at a very low level. Scroll Wheel events in X are treated as button presses. There's no X API call to get a "scroll by this much" per Button4 or Button5 events. It wouldn't even make sense in the context. All of that is handled by libraries above the X level.

I am on Gnome 3.32.2. I remembered Ubuntu lagged behind but didn't know this much.

Maybe the touchpad speed is added in later versions of gnome.

Your keyboard shortcut use case is much more complex than mine and I haven't used Karabiner(though I should try because until now I am hating my mac experience and I am stuck with a mac as a daily driver for the past month).

It should be possible to use multiple keyboards with different layouts and shortcuts as a colleague of mine used to use his build this way. I have always been on the road so don't have the luxury. https://superuser.com/questions/351936/separate-keyboard-for...

I don't use kitty but use alacritty and there is an option for changing the copy and paste shortcuts. So you can use command+c for copy. Also for your original query about command-c ctrl-shift-c have you tried setting it up as a macro? Maybe that would work.

> I'm glad they have that, but I don't want to give my browser that security hole, so I grant you that one's a bit on me. Should be easier to do a manual installation anyway.

I worry about this as well. I used to use this but later realised that I don't need new extensions and just use my existing list so I made a script for this which has been serving me well for some time now. Though with my shift to i3 my gnome use is quite limited for a few years now so can't say if it would hold for routine use case.

> I do not at all mean to trash the hard work people have done, I really (truly!) respect it. However, from this particular user's perspective, the problems are about equal to what they were a decade ago.

Agreed. A long road to travel.

whoops, 3.34.1 is the version I'm on, I just misremembered.

Try "kmonad" for a Linux karabiner replacement. You'll need to follow some instructions on the GitHub readme but it can do what you want to do.

thanks! will do

> I can assure you it is not

I have it on vanilla Gnome 3.34

https://imgur.com/BldCTMf

Everything you have listed is solvable by using a different distribution/desktop environment. You can use something like Manjaro to get really up to date software, and it comes with different desktop environment flavors like Cinnamon. I think a more modern desktop environment would suit you best, and I highly recommend Cinnamon.

This is my issue with Linux, though, despite having a dev VM environment of several distros. There are a metric f*ckton of Linux distros out there and, for every one of them that fixes the problems mentioned in one breath, they break or ignore a whole litany of other things. When I first started with Linux, it was pretty much Red Hat or bust and that was a pain but you knew what you were getting into. Now, it's nearly impossible to know what a lot of the differences are between all the different distros and which one may or may not work for your particular situation. Worse yet, it's now happened to me twice where I've set up a distro, spent the time to get it mostly working, and then, after using it for a few weeks, there's some annoyance or hardware issue that I can't resolve that is resolved in another distro. So I install the next one, get it mostly working, and then run into some other non-trivial annoyance or issue. Repeat, ad nauseam.

Linux, to me, is still very much a tinkerer's OS. If you don't have the time to tinker and get things working and just want to get things done, Linux is not the way to go.

> Worse yet, it's now happened to me twice where I've set up a distro, spent the time to get it mostly working, and then, after using it for a few weeks, there's some annoyance or hardware issue that I can't resolve that is resolved in another distro

A problem should only be unfixable without distro hopping if it requires a newer kernel or some other updated software. Even then, you can usually opt into a newer kernel and fix it in whatever distro you were running. So a rolling release is unlikely to face this issue, or if you check your hardware compatibility before installing.

Generally though, Linux is Linux, and troubleshooting would solve these problems.

>Generally though, Linux is Linux, and troubleshooting would solve these problems.

Sure... but, to me, troubleshooting is tinkering. I don't want to have to troubleshoot my input device because it suddenly changes after an install or kernel update. Yes, I know that I can solve these problems but I don't want to have to do it all the time.

The idea that this is frequent or as arduous as it has been in the past really is an outdated trope.

For the most part it just works. More so than windows in my recent experience.

It's really not. I think you're giving Linux far too much credit. If it really did "just work" and was that easy, you'd see way more computers in the wild using it. It's literally a free alternative that can be installed on any computer. The two biggest barriers to adoption are non-existent with Linux and yet it still has a minuscule user base comparatively. Unless you don't exclude servers, Linux doesn't "just work" for most people.

And I think you're conflating market share with how well something works.

> If it really did "just work" and was that easy, you'd see way more computers in the wild using it.

I encounter a number every day, in software engineering. For non-technical users installing an operating system is beyond what most can comprehend anyway. I'd wager the vast majority of hardware never sees an OS change in its life. Add on that desktop linux is not supported by most games and you've more or less excluded the semi-technical market too. That easily accounts for a small user base regardless of how well it works.

And if you take into account what people use it for - software development largely, in my experience - it seems natural that it has a smaller user base.

> Unless you don't exclude servers, Linux doesn't "just work" for most people.

You haven't really shown that, just a small market share.

I don't understand the point you're making here. You initially said that Linux being arduous is an outdated trope and then admitted that the only people you see using Linux are software engineers and that non-technical users can't even comprehend the install. Who is Linux non-arduous for, then, except technical users and software engineers? Was your argument meant to apply to only the technical users because that wasn't clear, if that's the case.

> You initially said that Linux being arduous is an outdated trope

Yes

> then admitted that the only people you see using Linux are software engineers and that non-technical users can't even comprehend the install

Any install, you don't see them installing windows either. I'm not sure my mother (for instance) really comprehends what an operating system is as a separate entity to "the computer".

> Was your argument meant to apply to only the technical users because that wasn't clear, if that's the case.

My argument, as stated, was that it works fine and the trope that you'll spend your life fiddling with it is outdated. This has absolutely f*ck all to do with how many people use it, as that number is affected by a lot of other factors.

You'll find elsewhere on this page I've talked about messing around with xrandr to get DPI-related stuff looking good on Xfce. And yes, I had to spend some time figuring that out, an evening of my life gone.

I had to spend a comparable amount of time recently trying to figure out how to get my bluetooth keyboard working properly when attached to OS X, and ended up creating a custom keymap for it. And since Catalina my macbook pro has spontaneously rebooted a bunch of times while asleep.

Windows has been a complete bastard with its update packages lately, and it took days of effort to update the four PCs in our house to Windows 10 1903, for no known reason, having got stuck on an older version that was going out of support and started throwing up warnings about being out of date. I'm still not sure how I fixed that, having tried a whole bunch of different methods over the course of several days. Incidentally the old version it got stuck on only had partial support for HDR which explains a load of other weirdness I was seeing on one of the machines.

So to me this idea that Linux on the desktop is a pain in the arse to keep running properly but other systems are not just doesn't ring true.

They've all cost me time and effort lately. Probably the least troublesome system we have in the house is a laptop running Linux Mint that we use to order pizza in the living room... Or my old ARM chromebook I suppose, but that's in well deserved retirement now.

>It's literally a free alternative that can be installed on any computer.

Practically nobody installs operating systems on their computer. The computer they bought comes with one and it never changes. The stability of Linux isn't the problem here.

Ok but even if I, hypothetically, conceded that point, all it would take to make my point is 1 piece of hardware or software that didn't work as intended. Wacom tablets, for example, do not have drivers that can be installed from Wacom. Yes, there is an Open Source project for those but most users wouldn't know or have the technical capability to install that past what's been contributed to the kernel.

For technical users, Linux is fine but it still needs some tinkering. Technical users are more comfortable with tinkering so it's probably not a big deal and "just works" for them but that's a very liberal definition of "just works", imo.

From the Linux Wacom project

>Our drivers are pre-installed in many major distribution... Oftentimes, you can simply plug in your tablet and start working.

I understand it's just an example though. Yes you can sometimes buy some strange hardware that won't automatically work. This happens in Windows too, and installing a package does not require more technical capability than installing something on Windows.

>them but that's a very liberal definition of "just works", imo.

Anyone that's managing to install Linux on their computer has the knowledge necessary to make it " just work." Anybody that buys a computer with Linux on it should expect it to just work.

>Anyone that's managing to install Linux on their computer has the knowledge necessary to make it " just work."

I disagree wholeheartedly. Linux is easy to install. It's not easy to write a driver for a piece of hardware. It's not even easy sometimes to install a driver that someone else wrote.

Case in point: the state of VR on Linux right now. It works for a lot of people that can dork around with setting things up. It's not, in any way, shape, or form, ready for use by people.

Edit: The Wacom example still supports my point anyways. The drivers that you say are included are from the project page. They are not official Wacom drivers and, as such, are missing functionality for some tablets.

> Linux, to me, is still very much a tinkerer's OS. If you don't have the time to tinker and get things working and just want to get things done, Linux is not the way to go.

Completely disagree with you. There are many fully featured desktop environments that are as feature rich as Windows or OSX. Cinnamon, elementary OS, Pop_OS are just three off the top of my head. And hardware support has gotten amazing since 2012 and onwards.

I use a flavor of linux on a few chromebooks and have used it on several laptops from brands like Apple, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, MSI as my primary OS since 2012 and haven't had any notable hardware issues. Things simply work out of the box.

Can you be more specific about what issues you experienced? When was it that you had these issues? I am having a hard time believing you, because my personal experience has been so positive.

This reads like every forum post where someone has asked "how's X distro work on Y laptop", and then people respond with something like the following:

"Runs great! No issues. Suspend/resume are wonky but I'm able to get by. Bluetooth doesn't work reliably but who needs that? Wifi is slower than in Windows."

This is also my experience, recently, with investigating laptops to switch to from my MBP2015. The average person does not give a single shit about this stuff. They expect it to either work, or they'll go where it does. Pop!_OS is certainly a step in the right direction, but it is in no way a true competitor to the ecosystems found on Windows/macOS.

I've run Linux/FreeBSD on and off since 2002ish, too, so I don't feel off in saying this.

There is almost no laptop out there that "just works" with Linux. You might get lucky, and the stars align when you do an install/buy a pre-set Linux laptop from System76/Dell, and then it works, but this isn't always the case for people.

On a Mac? Keyboard issues aside, things "just work" most of the time. I can run a Mac and ship actual products to people, or I can run some open source cobbled together setup and spend my time trying to make it work instead.

You only live once, so you should only do the latter for ideological reasons.

> This reads like every forum post where someone has asked "how's X distro work on Y laptop", and then people respond with something like the following: "Runs great! No issues. Suspend/resume are wonky but I'm able to get by. Bluetooth doesn't work reliably but who needs that? Wifi is slower than in Windows."

I am not sure what you are talking about. I didn't mention a single suspend/resume/bluetooth or wifi problem. I mentioned the following brands: Apple, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, MSI

And laptops from these brands that I purchased and used worked out of the box. You are free to not believe me, but you shouldn't put words in my mouth. I am typing this on a Dell Latitude E7450 and there are no issues with this laptop whatsoever. Suspend/sleep works flawlessly, no audio issues, no wifi issues, bluetooth works flawlessly, everything worked out of the box on manjaro linux.

Also I use my Lenovo X1 carbon with manjaro linux to develop software for a fortune 500/inc 500 corporation 8 hours a day and have been doing it for close to a year without a single issue.

My work gave me the latest fully loaded macbook pro but I returned it because I hate the keyboard (it's unreliable as hell and has no travel distance and feels awful) and the touchbar is an abomination. The keyboard is one of the single most important things on a laptop and if the keyboard experience is lacking, the whole experience sucks. I am very happy with x1 carbon latest gen and manjaro linux and my setup destroys the macbooks other devs use when it comes to things like running unit tests.

Can you elaborate? What was the point you were trying to make?

>This reads like every forum post where someone has asked "how's X distro work on Y laptop"

This is exactly how I felt reading that response. Yes, I'll admit that I don't have experience with every distro that's out there so there may be situations that are as the parent comment described. However, I've been using Linux on servers for 10+ years and still find desktop Linux to be a pain in the ass with the exact caveats that you're describing, regardless of the flavor I've used.

When was the last time you tried to seriously use linux? Server linux and linux on personal computing devices are not the same thing at all so not sure why you brought that up. In reality most of the hardware related pain points disappeared in 2012'ish and now there are many user friendly distros that just work out of the box. My grandma uses linux.

> You don't know what you're talking about. Please exit the conversation.

First of all, stop with the personal attacks and inflammatory baits. Take them to reddit please. Read over these: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> They're the Linux kernel except the desktop versions have a window manager running on top of them that handles the GUI which typically isn't found on a server.

Bingo! Servers are designed to run rock solid stable distributions with the minimum amount of software necessary to get the job done. Desktop distributions come with a desktop environment that allow the users to do things like pick a wifi network or change audio volume. At work we use alpine linux docker images which do not come with even a text editor. They are two very unique use cases. No one sane runs web servers with a full blown Ubuntu desktop distribution because the overhead would be insane. This is one of the reasons why linux servers are so common, and dominate the market share, because they don't have to run full blown desktop environments that'll never be used.

Comparing desktop linux distributions to linux servers is like comparing a ferrari to a honda civic, because both of them are internal combustion engine cars.

And I'm having a hard time believing you because the hardware support for the MacBook trackpad has been abysmal on Linux in multiple flavors. Someone else in this thread mentioned support for mouse scroll speed and that's definitely one that I've run into and had to use workarounds to get to a comfortable place. I also need to use a Wacom tablet that should have 100% support on Linux because it's at least 8 years old that doesn't work properly as an input device. I've had issues with support for wireless cards, peripherals like printers, and even support for things that worked at one point in one flavor that didn't work in another.

I'm glad that you've had a great experience but I can assure you that it's less common than you're making it out to be. And this doesn't even begin to get into the issues that aren't really the fault of any one Linux distro (software availability, for example) but that are just a side-effect of Linux not being a popular desktop OS, regardless of the flavor. Linux can be used as a primary driver in certain cases and I'm sure that some of those cases also happened without any kind of hardware issues. I just don't think that's common nor do I think it's enough to recommend it as a primary driver for anyone that's not a tinkerer.

You should try a modern distribution like cinnamon. I too have a wacom tablet and it works out of the box without requiring any driver installation whatsoever.

I concur. Manjaro solves a lot of the problems of the Linux desktop, and brings with it the great Arch community.

And for keybindings, you're probably better off figuring out how xmodmap works.

It's not pretty. But honestly, if you want pretty when it comes to keybinding, nothing beats a good keyboard. Like the UHKB, Ergo Dox, anything supported by QMK basically.

Look into "kmonad", it is designed to bring the features of the QMK fireware to any keyboard on a Linux system. It is better than xmodmap IMHO.

Is there good documentation/tutorials on setting up xmodmap? It seems like that's a road I'll need to go down at least a bit.

The GNOME project has gone very far astray. Their UX "experts" are self-appointed tyrants who want to control how you use the computer and seem to get sick kicks out of telling users that they're wrong whenever users want do something even slightly different. "You THINK you want to change your mouse speed but actually you're an idiot and you're wrong" is a classic example of this.

GNOME is more of a problem than linux itself. It doesn't have to be this bad. More distros could be packaging KDE (or even XFCE?) as the default, but incentives seem misaligned.

I switched to KDE on Arch Linux two years ago and I am happy since. Even KDE Connect works there (android notification sync).

"Linux" in 2019 refers to such a broad array of software that it's almost meaningless when talking about a specific experience. It's annoying to do, but trying some different distros and guis is well worth the time. There are plenty of people who self identify as full time linux users who cant stand to use each others computers, so there isn't any kind of consensus about what a good linux experience is because people are often trying to get very different things done.

Personally i thing gnome 3 is utter garbage, and poisons people against the whole ecosystem because it's usually what people try first because the screenshots look shiny. You might have a better time with mate or something similar.

Many of these complaints are resolved by using another desktop environment, e.g. KDE.

Others of the distro (use another one if you want up-to-date packages).

I last used KDE about a year ago, so I'm not sure if this is still a problem, but even KDE doesn't let you slow down mouse cursor speed, only make it faster. Is that still the case?

They didn't even have a slider for controlling mouse speed, only a numerical text entry. It boggles the mind.

The "Mouse" Systems Setting I have on screen on my up-to-date KDE right now has a slider for pointer speed with no numerical entry. There is only a small handful of other settings that quite useful (acceleration profile, invert scroll direction, and a couple other things). KDE has been working hard on usability lately.

Yes the KDE Usability & Productivity initiative helped a lot making KDE suck less in this regard. A lot of configuration dialogs were improved, a lot of small irritating bugs were fixed and the default are more sane now. And because Nate Graham blog about all these changes every week, KDE also got a lot of new contributors.

Btw Plasma 5.17 will be released tomorrow, so all the improvements of the last 6 months will be available very soon.

KDE's pointer acceleration settings have never worked on X11 unfortunately.

...for you. For me they always worked, maybe not around the time of the libinput transition.

There were no mouse acceleration options for Plasma until release 5.13 which was released in 2018, which is well after the libinput transition. Essentially since the feature was added there's been an open bug report on it not working on X11.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=398713

Settings->Input Devices->Mouse

There is a slider for adjusting pointer speed.

I felt the same way so for my Linux laptop I moved over to Plasma. It's a real desktop with sane defaults, and I can recommend it. Obviously not quite the same level of polish as the Mac, but try it, you may be pleasantly surprised.

Gnome3 has been such a regression of user experience, I've never had a good time using it.

> To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness. I mean, I'm a programmer, so I'm capable of it, but it's seriously annoying

Just install the Menu Editor app from the Ubuntu Software channel.

> installing a gnome-shell extension was way more difficult than it should be

Go to extensions.gnome.org, install the Firefox or Chrome extension and click the "Install" button on the website to install gnome-shell extensions.

> brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt

Use snaps or flatpak. Using Homebrew on Linux feels wrong.

Stay far away from Gnome3; it's a performance, usability and accessibility dumpster fire.

MATE, XFCE, LXDE and KDE are all better choices.

Funnily, I find I am most productive in Gnome 3, despite its many flaws. The workflow that revolves around the super key to view, launch, and switch between windows and desktops works very well, and I have not been able to fully recreate the same experience in any of the other DEs (though I haven't tried Budgie).

One big change that helped reduce the performance lag is turning off animations using the Tweak Tool. It was like a breath of fresh air once I made that adjustment.

Sadly Gnome3, although sucking badly in many aspects, dumbed down and bloated, is the only viable option for tablets. Unless something has changed in the last months, having correct screen orientation and rotation consistent with correct touch management without adding/editing scripts by hand is a nightmare: imagine you finally get the screen correctly orientated but now if you drag the finger to the right the arrow goes up.

Dont forget Budgie. While not quite as polished as it can be its a newcomer so I am not surprised. It is otherwise a sweet DE for me.

I ran budgie for about a year before switching back to windows for work and its leagues better than Gnome in my experience. Though at this point I think I would go for KDE given the opportunity.

I dont mind KDE and I do like Kubuntu but at work everyones on Gnome DEs so I try to have close enough environments so they dont blame KDE for all my problems when things break.

I get it. The mac dev's like to blame windows at my place.

Windows usually has some easier to setup utilities to develop on for some projects. We have Mac, Windows and mostly Linux devs. I sometimes wish I was on Windows its more predictable to me.

I wanted to find out the proper way to disable middle-click paste because all the solutions I could find involved basically disabling the button all together, but I still wanted to use it for closing tabs etc.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to do it. One high rated StackOverflow answer I found suggested purchasing a mouse with a less sensitive mouse wheel.

This was one of my biggest grievances with desktop Linux. Not driver support or a lack of applications or ugly interfaces, but the fucking middle click to paste enabled by default!

It just shows such poor taste for defaults, especially when tap-to-click is enabled. Text gets randomly inserted everywhere. On Manjaro this causes sticky notes to be created everywhere on the desktop. It's insane that someone gave it the thumbs up.

And the stackoverflow solutions all just disable the middle click altogether like you said.

> * modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent

That's not a Linux problem, it's a window manager problem. Setting keyboard shortcuts is a piece of cake in StumpWM.

> * searching for help usually yields results that are half a decade or more old, and it's very difficult to figure out if it's current advice or not

That's a search engine problem, and it affects a lot of stuff besides Linux.

> * brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt

That depends on your distro. Lots of systems use Apt, and they all have their own package servers. I've used Debian testing for years, and it's always been reasonably up to date.

I had a somewhat similar experience with Linux on an old Mac mini a few years ago. Too many things had to be fiddled with using config files and scripts. I had to resort to using a Magic Trackpad like a regular mouse. There was quite a bit missing "out of the box". I will admit that Linux has improved a lot over the years. But I find that macOS seems to be the one with a "batteries included" experience and is the least annoying among Windows, Linux and macOS. While it's possible to setup Linux to one's preferences with some effort, I find Windows to be standing in my way and slowing me down most of the time even for trivial things (I'm looking at you, Windows 10).

I think the one annoying thing about Windows is the forced updates. Apple has started taking a leaf from Windows. A few weeks ago my system updated and asked to restart without giving me any choice of saying no.

This is necessary for security. Still you can trivially disable updates for a week or report them again and again.

What would be nice though is if they developed a live patching system like the modern Linux kernel allow which means: Windows partial updates without rebooting.

No operating system should update against the user's wishes. And this time the system didn't give me an option to delay, it simply let me know that it's about to restart and that I better save my work.

Sometimes people must be protected from themselves. Still, windows should allow you to delay it many times until forcing you, it's a shame it doesn't.

I was talking about OSX. I think operating systems should make it very clear to the users what critical updates need to be installed, but they shouldn't force users to update against their will and interrupt their workflow. Something like this:

> These critical security updates are essential for continuing safe and secure operation of your computer!

> Critical security update x: allows an attacker to take control of your PC

> Critical security update y: ....

> Critical security update z: ....

In the U.S at least we give people personal liberties over much more serious matters such as allowing people to refuse care in a medical context. The health of someone's personal PC is nothing next to that.

My operating system should never destroy my work or force me to waste time manually getting back to the productive place I was.

On Windows you can delay it many times (by scheduling the restart repeatedly a few days apart) but if you're not vigilant about doing that, it will just go ahead and destroy stuff.

I agree this is the logic behind this situation - but sometimes, I want to use the Hole-Hawg to do the thing I want it to do. I am uncomfortable with losing that freedom.

Further, there have been some updates labelled "security" such as in Windows 7, which were actually telemetry. I think the ability to do mandatory updates skewed the perspective of the team behind them as to what constitutes security (eg: this telemtry will help us catch dangerous work flows which do need a fix of some kind!). IMHO, when you take away users autonomy, you make them into the dumb users you fear.

> To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness.

.desktop files are about the dumbest damn thing ever. Why is the 'category' of an application, which pretty much every menu interprets as its sub-folder location, determined here [0]? Why is there absolutely no ability whatsoever to set a relative path to an icon file [1]? It's like there were designed by someone who had never used a GUI before and had one described to him while writing the spec [0].

[0] Given other choices made by FreeDesktop.org, this might actually be true.

All your points seems like they are trivially solved by using another DE and distribution

your definition of "trivial" is different from mine haha

(fwiw: my propensity for installing new DEs and distros in the hope of solving all my problems was what made me leave linux in the first place)

While I'm glad that I'm not the only one who is in the same situation and frame-of-mind as you, I wish more people admitted this. The endless chain of Linux re-distroing to fix issues is absolutely the main issue with Linux.

I blame Ubuntu's mid-2000s decision to offer "Ubuntu", "Lubuntu", "Kubuntu", and "Xubuntu", which seemed to convince people that the only way to change desktop environments is to reinstall Linux.

They're all there, just a few clicks away in whatever crap-ass GUI Ubuntu has stuck on top of apt these days. At the end of the day, all these distros are just Debian, Redhat, or (rarely) Arch under the hood, so if you get sick of lack of support for JimBobLinux, you can just install Debian and quit fucking around. I did that 15 years ago (good god) and haven't regretted it.

The answer that never changes regarding the use of desktop Linux.

Because Linux isn't a UI.

Desktop GNU/Linux, better?

No, but it illustrates what I was getting at: that's dozens of operating systems.

> * modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent

Lol, different strokes for different folks. Having to use Karabiner instead of the much more versatile tools on Linux really peeved me when I switched over a few years ago.

I like to rebind my caps lock to function as an extra modifier key. On Linux, you just set it to Hyper; ezpz. On Mac, you just straight up can't, so I have to bind it to command+control+option+shift to get the next best thing (since I would never actually press all four of those keys). And I've had issues with Mac's Keyboard Shortcuts -- some of my shortcuts have just stopped working. I used to have CapsLock+[1-9] as shortcuts to switch to Workspaces 1-9, but some of the shortcuts just stopped working and I've had no luck finding a fix.

On Linux, it may take more effort to do something, but it'll always be possible. So many of the things I want to do on Mac are just not options. When I retire this MacBook, I'll be going back to Linux.

This pretty much sums up both why I switched from Windows to Linux and why I'll never buy anything Apple is pushing. On Linux, the easy stuff is annoying and the hard-but-necessary stuff is even more annoying; on Windows and Mac, the easy stuff is easy and the hard-but-necessary stuff is impossible.

Edit: Well, that and also because, if my OS is going to randomly break whenever some idiot pushes a "update", it might as well be one I don't pay money for, and one that only updates when I tell it to.

> modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent

This had been a headache for me as well, but I've had great luck with AutoKey. Obviously it would be better if there was a native solution, but at least this works IME.

> modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent

Good news. There is. It's called autokey. Its a bit clunkier and crashes occasionally, but it allows you to rebind you application shortcuts.

Finding this made migrating back to linux possible for me.

https://github.com/autokey/autokey/wiki/API-Examples

> * No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff)

Oh yeah, that! Lost another five-ish hours to that, and eventually just decided to live with crappy scrolling.

Having used Linux since about 2000, gnome has regressed and KDE has improved. I switched to KDE about a year ago and haven't looked back:

> * No way to adjust mouse scroll speed; official answer seems to be "don't want that". (Or install imwheel and change your mouse scroll to be equal to hitting the down button (!) which breaks other stuff)

- Never had to do this, but I checked. Under "Input Devices" I see "Mouse wheel scrolls by:" as a setting

> * To make an icon on the favorites bar in gnome, you have to edit a .desktop text file! Madness. I mean, I'm a programmer, so I'm capable of it, but it's seriously annoying

- With KDE you can drag any application to the quicklaunch widget, or right-click to add.

> * modifying keyboard shortcuts is extremely difficult; I really wish linux had a karabiner equivalent

I've not used Karabiner, but a quick look does make it look more feature-complete than any single GUI tool I know of on linux. However, keyboard shortcuts are all configurable from a central place on KDE. My biggest downside is that the organization of the "Global Shortcuts" has a UI that only makes sense to a KDE developer. IMO a single list would be more useful than having categories.

> * searching for help usually yields results that are half a decade or more old, and it's very difficult to figure out if it's current advice or not

True of most systems these days unfortunately; looking for the date of the post on forums/stack-overflow helps

> * installing a gnome-shell extension was way more difficult than it should be

I've not needed to install a KDE widget that wasn't in the base setup, so I cannot comment.

> * brew isn't the best, but on linux I need to use both brew _and_ apt because you can't reliably get anything approaching up-to-date software with apt

I have nothing good to say about Ubuntu in general except that it's popularity means that it is easier to get the correct answer by googling. It is by far the most finicky distro I've administered, including Gentoo (which is so high-maintenance that you should only run it if administering systems is a fun hobby). If you want up-to-date software from your package manager, use a rolling release distro. Otherwise the best you can do is something like a base setup and then side-load the software you want. This problem has been identified to the point where there are several brew-like systems (and things like snap as well), but no clear winner yet.

> I remain reasonably happy with it, but Mac is still so far ahead of it in terms of usability it's wild.

I think this will always be true. The Mac has such a lead in "There is a bright path and things will be fine so long as you don't stray from it" coupled with the fact that they control both hardware and software means that there just don't seem to be enough people who both want a Linux like that and have the know-how to make it happen. The counterpoint is perhaps chromebooks, which occupy such a different price-point compared to macs that they make their own niche at least in primary and secondary education.

> If you want up-to-date software from your package manager, use a rolling release distro. Otherwise the best you can do is something like a base setup and then side-load the software you want. This problem has been identified to the point where there are several brew-like systems (and things like snap as well), but no clear winner yet.

I use openSuSE Leap with a bunch of OBS (build service) repos added. I get a nice stable base OS with updated packages when I want them. And it runs KDE/Plasma nicely, too, and not as an afterthought or something like other distros.

KDE let's me do all this stuff, on OpenSuse. Zypper is also way ahead of apt.