Unpopular opinion, but more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded. Plasma and GNOME are very good, and Unity was actually great to use in its heyday.

Imo what we don't really need more of are the conservative, under-resourced 'classic look and feel' DEs like most of the minor players in the space. Those tend to end up incomplete and ill-performing, and there are already lots of them. I hope the existing ones thrive, but I don't think having more f them would do much good.

But anything as good as the big two, but with a different focus? Let's see it!

Lxqt is the closest to allowing that because it wraps standard tools when possible, but this wrapping of standard tools also means that those tools don't really work.

For example, I use slock for screenlocking, but there is actually no working third party freedesktop screensaver implementation that doesn't tie you into their DE.

Xsecurelock seems to have hacks for it, but it can't even do something as simple as just showing an image without breaking with the wrong window compositor.

I tend to disagree here. I recently switched back to MacOS after years of running both. The DEs on Linux are just one generation behind. Things have gotten better, but macOS and to an extend Windows are ahead.

Linux DEs would be well advised to onboard more graphics and UI experts to make them more user-friendly and stable. Desktop metaphors have more or less stabilized and it's counter-productive to have 5 takes on the Linux-side alone.

The entire problem starts and ends with this term. It is ambiguous, personal, localized, fluid and case-dependent.

What is friendly to one user, is insulting to another. What is friendly to me at 10:00 in the morning is frustrating when I have a presentation in two minutes. What is friendly to an American pensioned welder, is insulting to an Iranian accountant.

Just to explain why I love Linux so much - when I'm in Gnome, I'm not bothered by any alerts or notifications or popups or sounds or ads or anything! It's a silent, stable, good looking desktop that runs my programs and doesn't get in my way at all. It's amazing! I truly love it.

I think Linux DEs are fine, it's just that the default config / on-boarding rarely asks what the user wants and what they need.

More distro/DEs need to incorporate UX/Desktop Layout Switcher, like Ubuntu Budgie, Zorin OS (Gnome, XFCE), Manjaro (Gnome, there are plans to do KDE as well in the forum?), and FerenOS. It'll solve the issues of personal preference in UX, as people could just one-click choose what feels/looks the best for them.

I personally don't mind taking a few hours setting up the UX I want with Fedora KDE, but I doubt most others do.

And that's the problem with the proliferation of DEs. Applications, which range from having no developers actively working on them, to the best teams at Microsoft working on them, have to handle yet another DE, and have to deal with the bugs raised by the users of yet another DE, etc.

UI/UX is hard enough to begin with, but requiring devs to either maintain several UI/UXs, or try and come up with a design that works across the proliferation of DEs is highly counterproductive.

Very few developers actually attempt to do this, on any platform— virtually none, as far as I can tell. It's slightly more common on macOS for developers to actually try to emulate or reuse the design language and look-and-feel of the base system. But on every platform, it's extremely common for GUI apps to just throw the design language and other details of platforms they run on completely out the window. It's the M.O. for the most popular cross-platform toolkit right now (Electron). For every app that maintains multiple UIs, there are at least ten that do that, maybe a hundred!

Besides, COSMIC doesn't use a new graphical toolkit. It uses GTK+, just like GNOME.

But even without them caring for UI/UX, the proliferation of DEs, even with common UI toolkits in the Linux world means they spend a lot of time and energy working on bugs that are not true bugs but are artifacts of a UI theme that the developer did not consider while developing their app.

For example, it's almost certain that the unified tooltip in COSMIC will lead to bugs complaining about how users are unable to drag the window by clicking on the chrome. In this case it would be fairly easy for a dev to close the bug because this is such a prominent and obvious difference in COSMIC. But there will certainly be other UI differences that will not be as easy to pin down to being the result of COSMIC's UI changes, and will not be as easy for devs to close.

Ideally, that's what the freedesktop.org specifications help with. You build against the specs and interfaces, and the code should work across DEs that implement specs from freedesktop.org. In my (albeit limited) experience of writing against freedesktop.org specs, it works pretty well.

Heck, many apps are web-based and uses electron anyways, and those are generally multiplatform anyways.

I think if whatever app they make/port worrks via Flatpak, it should work on all/most modern distro.

Edit: it's GTK so no problem

System76 is only adding to that mess.

Or if they're interoperable. For instance, icewm doesn't have a screensaver of its own, but it just uses xscreensaver so it's fine.

I use KDE now which does provide a lot of choice but I'd love something that has tiling built in. And yeah I know there's add-ons for KDE that do that :)

Edit: this is the one: https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

There's also kwin-tiling https://github.com/kwin-scripts/kwin-tiling

Not sure which is best tbh. I have yet to try them

Guide: https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Manage...

1: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L...

EDIT: Just found this, which explains a bit: http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i...

That's how you end up in a situation where the contents of the window clash with the dressing because more and more apps can't be themed. If they want a consistent look they'll need to fork or write a whole new set of apps.

For some apps I don't care too much, because I run them in full screen anyway, and their specific look is adjusted to their function: IDEs, DAWs, even graphic editors. But if they do support DE-wide themes, I do appreciate that!

If you’re thinking of the website I’m thinking of [1], the screenshot they lead with isn’t just inconsistent. It’s broken, with light text on a white background. And I’ve seen apps fail in that same way for real when trying custom GTK themes.

It’s the same reason web browsers can’t change the system CSS stylesheet without extreme measures like Reader Mode that strip almost all of the design work out of the site: it’s hard to mix design work from two different people (the application author and the theme author) without risking a total mess.

[1]: https://stopthemingmy.app/

GNU/Linux apps will never have something like OLE 2.0 or XPC that actually works consistenly across desktops.

There is D-BUS, but not everyone cares it is there.

Do any Linux experts out there feel the same way?

Screen sharing is already made easy with Pipewire. I've not seen any issues with copy/paste between applications. WiFi driver issues can only be fixed by kernel driver developers with hardware documentation for the exact model of the PCI device they're writing a driver for. The same goes for touchpad drivers, but I've not had any issues with them on our laptops. We sell systems where we can vouch for the quality of the driver support in Linux for the WiFi and touchpad.

https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/src/backend/...

Breaking compatibility with Ubuntu-compatible dev tools is one thing, but the lack of awareness or consideration of tooling standards is evidence that Pop_OS! is not for me.

I won't ever defend nvidia, but... I really think Broadcom is worse. They've ruined tons of routers and wireless cards. Also, the Raspberry Pi is full of blobs because of them.

https://github.com/pop-os/nvidia-docker/commit/aa9fbcff6e6e5...

This changes nothing about my story of the Pop OS developers previously thinking it could be replaced with their bespoke custom tooling.

Unfortunately, the `tensorman` article shows up first (after several complaint/support threads) in a google search result for the subject https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nvidia%20docker%20pop%...

In all actuality, the correct article to reference is https://support.system76.com/articles/cuda/ but alas, this is presently broken on PopOS 21.04 unless you pin nvidia's repo's as you've suggested.

At the very least, an unpleasant experience. Probably some blame to be shared by system76 and nvidia.

https://github.com/pop-os/pop/issues/1708

CUDA support in Docker requires nvidia-docker+nvidia-container-toolkit+libnvidia-container, and that is the whole point of having nvidia-docker installed. We validate that CUDA functions inside of Docker when pushing updates to nvidia-container-toolkit and friends.

Tensorman is not a replacement for nvidia-docker, and you're not going to get anywhere by trying to convince me about the functionality of something that I personally wrote. It is quite literally just a simple command-runner that runs docker commands, specifically for the purpose of managing the official Tensorflow Docker images, and getting a more streamlined setup for managing your local Docker images based on them. The sole purpose is to replace our previous tensorflow packaging in Pop!_OS that became impossible to package because newer versions of Tensorflow did not build beyond 18.04. Tensorflow themselves recommend using their docker images instead of trying to package and install their libraries on your host OS.

I think if Apple had embraced free software early in its history, it could have known a much brighter future (err, present?). Hell, even HyperCard may still be alive and kicking.

Succeed at what ? Re-implementing Gnome in Rust ?

> Re-implementing Gnome in Rust

That seems a bit disingenuous. It's all still GTK.

Are their Clevo-based laptops designed in-house? If they are, why are they designed with such abysmal speakers, mediocre webcam and no attempt to go past the full-HD screen resolution? Why not design something cool like Framework?

This would really be a game changer. Unfortunately, you need a really great number of units, that building your own custom laptop hardware is feasible. I really which System76 success with that.

I always thought, if Dell were smart, they would do their own Linux-based brand, where they would reuse parts from mainline Dell. Kind of how they produce gaming laptops.

- Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/11/20/syste...

- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21586422

If you have any suggestions for the laptop design, System76 is collecting feedback here:

https://github.com/system76/laptop-suggestions

sure they are a bit more related then KDE and QT, still but the same at all

Not re-implementing Gnome. Not re-implementing macOS which Gnome strives to imitate. OTOH I see the value of that: many people got used to macOS, and making things similar, and the cognitive load of switching low, makes business sense. Same as with Windows in early 2000s.

Apple had fiery fest of sales in Q4 2021, outsold all Wintel manufacturers, let alone Chromebooks. And after that, guess what, they now have 8% of desktop/laptop market share, instead of 6% they used to have. You can guess who covers most of the other 90+ percent.

Sent from my 2021 M1 Max MBP.

I use Cinnamon with Manjaro - it is not GNOME but it is GTK. Unity was the same. MATE is old GNOME but quite different from new GNOME — still GTK though. XFCE, LXDE, and pretty much every popular DE outside KDE and FVWM2 is based on GTK.

Choosing Rust has nothing to do with re-implementing GNOME either although I do like that choice. If nothing else, this ensures well tested Rust bindings and paves the way for devs to write other GTK apps in Rust—-perhaps even ones intended to target GNOME itself.