Man there is not space on this comment box or time for all the criticism that link deserves.

>Icon Themes can change icon metaphors, leading to interfaces with icons that don’t express what the developer intended.

Icons were never sufficient metaphors to start with which is why we have text labels.

>Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand.

What does this even actually mean.

>User Help and Documentation are similarly useless if UI elements on your system are different from the ones described in the documentation.

This is only true if the user is completing an action that is solely based on clicking an icon with no text which we have already established is bad.

>The problem we’re facing is the expectation that apps can be arbitrarily restyled without manual work, which is and has always been an illusion.

Why has this worked generally fine in lots of ecosystems including gnome?

>If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us.

Earlier discussion seemed to suggest that lots of gnome developers were in fact not fine with this because it hurt gnomes "brand identity"

>Changing third-party apps without any QA is reckless, and would be unacceptable on any other platform.

Reckless?

> we urge you to find ways to do this without taking away our agency

Your agency?

> Just because our apps use GTK that does not mean we’re ok with them being changed from under us.

Nobody cares if you are OK with it.

Still, I try to avoid GUI stuff and freedesktop stuff as much as possible (I do use a window manager, but not GNOME or KDE or whatever), and write better programs when possible, but a few things don't. I don't use any desktop environment at all. The web browser is one thing that isn't so good. Really, many things should be moved out of the web browser and made to work by simply nc, curl, etc. And some things work better with local programs, but others with remote, with whatever protocol is applicable e.g. IRC, NNTP, SMTP, etc, please.

It's really just the popular distros that are following redhat. If you build an OS from scratch or use something like alpine or gentoo it's not so bad.

A neat idea that I hadn’t thought of until your comment:

Because it’s now possible to run multiple VMs at once (containers, etc) perhaps it’s time to run a simple, minimal, admin friendly hacker vm inside Ubuntu desktop?

Let Ubuntu configure all that it needs to get a good functional machine out of the box (working sleep mode for laptops, WiFi management, GPU support, systemd if that’s what it wants.) I then deploy the minimal VM I actually want to poke around with inside that installation.

This is pretty much what many people do in macOS. Apple’s OS supports the bare metal, vagrant / VirtualBox give me my tractably scrutable dev environment.

It’s not a particularly ground breaking concept but it might cheer me up a bit when battling with the volatility of user facing Linux distributions.

> Because it’s now possible to run multiple VMs at once (containers, etc) perhaps it’s time to run a simple, minimal, admin friendly hacker vm inside Ubuntu desktop?

> Let Ubuntu configure all that it needs to get a good functional machine out of the box (working sleep mode for laptops, WiFi management, GPU support, systemd if that’s what it wants.) I then deploy the minimal VM I actually want to poke around with inside that installation.

If there's anyone like me here they might be happy to know that KDE Neon exists and is something like:

- Stable Ubuntu base.

- Infinitely (almost) customizable KDE on top.

- And (IMO unlike Kubuntu) sane defaults.

Thanks for the tip about KDE Neon. I use Kubuntu, but it definitely misses the mark.

Just being pedantic: containers aren't vms. Containers use the native Linux kernel namespacing and segregation facilities to run multiple applications in a somewhat segregated way.

sounds a little bit like https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/