My pessimism is that with their coming clamp-down on external sources for -installing- "sideloading" apps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736479 this os may be somewhere between macos and ipados in terms of freedom in the coming years. I have hope that Valve's operating systems and unified platforms will provide a way not only for macos/windows users to move on while retaining compatibility, but for the company to make the transition to arm (as they are with deckard) and retain total binary freedom.

Home computers are inherently more open to sideloading. So I don't see a scenario where they would close it. But may be I'm spoiled by x86, wouldn't be surprised to find out that ARM computers would not be open to boot unlock and all that stuff.

If you're not accustomed to it, arm computers have no BIOS/UEFI boot selection and usually require a custom bootloader to load a new OS. I remember many fun hobby projects of old with x86 where I could take an old x86 appliance and put in a clean linux disk to use the hardware however I wanted, nowadays your OS needs to be signed, and because the root is owned, the software can be limited to that what the OEM or OS company desires, much like what MS is trying to do with TPM2 and Win11. Of all the ARM phones I've seen, perhaps 10% support bootloader unlock, and that's only with a certain carrier, the problem is that it's not a unified platform, support has to be implemented per-device, so even if the bootloader is open, the OS may not be up to date (as many have noted with dodgy third party arm boards)

Just think about how few Android devices have an open bootloader right now, there's no reason to think it'd be any different on larger hardware.

On the flip side, every Chromebook and Chromebox has a unlockable and open-spurce coreboot bootloader.

I love their mechanism where one opens the device and removes a screw to unlock it. Very novel and honestly kind of fun.

We used to call installing software on our own device, installing.

MacOS requires dropping to the terminal to install unsigned applications. There is literally no need for this, except to ensure apple profits.

When do you see this? For me, I just go to System Settings → Privacy & Security. Scroll down to Security and look for the message about the blocked app, click Allow Anyway, and then reopen the app.

If I install Xournall++[1], just opening the application will fail and MacOS will ask me to move it into trash. I am required to execute `xattr -c /Applications/Xournal++.app` to "remove quarantine".

I just reinstalled and can confirm that I don't see anything in the System Settings as you say.

[1] https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp/releases/tag/v1.2.8

It's pretty openly known that GNOME is hostile to its own userbase and their preferences,, why continue to use it instead of KDE or any of the other 10 DE environments?

I don't want extensible software. KDE is terrible in that regards. They have miriads of options, that's too much for me. I want opinionated software. I don't like GNOME, but it's the lesser evil and I learned to deal with its issues.

Also I don't like that KDE does not have its native launcher. I need to install some SDDE stuff which works under Xorg or something like that and looks ugly. Pretty weird stuff all that. GNOME just have GDM which just works.

My ideal environment would be Windows 95-like WM with zero configuration options which just works out of the box the way I want. It doesn't exist, unfortunately. May be I should try to write is, as I complain about it so much. Just have no idea about scale of such a project.

There are no other 10 DE environments. GNOME and KDE are the only two mature ones. Rest are either obsolete, especially with Wayland conquering Linux desktop, or for weird use-cases, like tiling WMs. I'm used to traditional windows managers, I don't want tiling WMs.

XFCE is plenty mature and very stable

Add Chicago95, and you've got some comfortable nostalgia.

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

This is just beautiful, thank you!

Cinnamon DE (linux mint) is stable, mature and miles ahead of gnome

Cinnamon is probably the best to use right now followed by XFCE because it uses XWayland by default. It provides nearly full use in both directions while still allowing both the new plugins and old widgets systems. It's also surprisingly stable. The only bug I've ever encountered in my now ten years of using it is on an N100 powered laptop, where if I let the computer go to sleep instead of turning it off eventually Cinnamon's process keeps requesting CPU time until it uses an entire core to itself.

Cinnamon getting good recently kind of blew my mind. I'm an ancient Gnome 2.x elitist, and typically hated cinnamon every-time I've tried it.

Every now and then I distro hop and ended up on LMDE (linux mint debian edition, the real linux mint) which only has a cinnamon offering out of the box. Much to my surprise its actually good. It still has random bugs triggered by stuff I've tried adding to the panel, but that's par for the course with gnome, XFCE, and MATE lately anyway. Over all it's a solid DE now even if the stock start/menu is underwhelming everything is fixable.

Lots of opinions that are less than idea in gnome. But the only one that really breaks me is lack of typeahead in Nautilus.

I just want to type D, enter and open Documents/, how hard can it be. It's been almost a decade since they removed it, and I still can't use vanilla Nautilus.

I always end up with Nemo or a patched Nautilus.

rant aside, the rest of gnome seems fine. Don't love it, but also don't hate it. I can add my own shortcuts with rofi/dmenu.

Works for me. I'm typing D, it instantly filters the list of files and selects first item. That's "desktop" for me, so I need to type O or press Down to select "documents" and type <Enter>.

The filtering of files is not instant. If you type do<enter> it won't be fast enough. Maybe there have been slight improvements.

But afaik it still defaults to search.

Try: https://github.com/lubomir-brindza/nautilus-typeahead

> My ideal environment would be Windows 95-like WM with zero configuration options which just works out of the box the way I want.

Why would we have any reason to believe that there would ever be a super-opinionated desktop environment that would be good? The examples we have -- which notably DO NOT include Windows 95, which had a zillion tiny knobs, many in the UI, but others requiring dropping to the registry (which is no different from screwing with confirmation files)... and, frankly, doesn't even include macOS, the system with some of the best customization of key bindings and the most universal automation -- are mostly bad. Put in the day or two of effort to make something that isn't opinionated work the way you want, and then reap the rewards for the following few decades of your productive career.

This is an honest question, not trying to get into an argument...

> I don't want extensible software. KDE is terrible in that regards. They have miriads of options, that's too much for me.

Why not use the default provided then and take the defaults as opinionated? That's what I do actually. I might change very few options, but I generally use the defaults. It's not that you have to configure kde before it becomes usable, the defaults are pretty ok.

Extensibility ~= extra complexity will necessarily increase the chance of bugs.

In something as complex as a display stack this is an important tradeoff.

This is only true if complexity under the hood actually affects your default experience. I don't think it's the case for KDE. "The chance" is indeed higher, except in GNOME it seems the bugs are actually real.

> My ideal environment would be Windows 95-like WM with zero configuration options which just works out of the box the way I want. It doesn't exist, unfortunately. May be I should try to write is, as I complain about it so much. Just have no idea about scale of such a project.

Have you ever tried Icewm?

But you don't need to configure kde to use it, you can just use the defaults for everything, nobody is forcing you to configure stuff. It is not some exotic tiling wm where you have to set up everything.

Cosmic.

Help me understand your two posts. From your earlier post you don't like GNOME because it's make different choices about what to support, and here you're saying you don't like KDE because it isn't opinionated enough.

Is the problem that you don't want choices as long as the maintainers always makes the same choice you would have when taking options away?

> It's pretty openly known that GNOME is hostile to its own userbase

It's pretty openly in bad faith to assign malice to open-source developers.

GNOME does in fact have a long track record on this point. Decades old.

And in my option is finally good enough for me to switch from macOS and to recommend Gnome to others. Not everyone likes that Gnome 2 (wasn’t bad, I must admit, but I don’t like it) and especially Gnome 3 was. I quite enjoy modern Gnome, and whilst there are some minor inconveniences I’d prefer being different, I can live with that for the sake of overall simplicity.

Dunno, Gnome hasn't been hostile to me.

I'm sorry, but there are MANY users of GNOME who are happy with the direction. I'd personally choose GNOME over any desktop environment on any OS.

What's the GNOME bug?

I'm using shortcuts <Super>+1 ... <Super>+4 to switch between virtual desktops. Let's say there's Xwayland application launched on desktop 1 and I'm on desktop 4. Vscode for example. Now I press <Super>+1 to switch to desktop 1. At this point, vscode starts printing "11111111" until I press Esc.

This bug manifests both for vscode and Idea. I configured these apps to run under native wayland, but they're not ready and other bugs manifest (e.g. no border around vscode window), which are less annoying, but annoying nonetheless.

Oh wow that explains a ton of problems I was having before I switched to KDE.

try cosmic desktop since it was made to be similar to gnome - it's maintained by system76 and is shaping up to be one of the most polished desktops out there, gnome has been feeling like it's going downwards for a while. I can't comment too much tho since I am too used to KDE at the moment and tiling support is just not there yet compared to KWin.

Interesting. I sometimes get similar behaviour on KDE / wayland, usually it is "2" or "3", and it seems to only affect electron apps. Always thought it has something to do with a dodgy ps/2 to usb converter I use to attach my old mechanical keyboards. I think it does not happen if electron apps are started with "--ozone-platform=wayland" but not completely sure, and I have no reliable way to reproduce or somehow trigger that behaviour.

Windows is bad because it has opinions about advertisements and AI.

MacOS is bad because it has opinions about what hardware you should use.

Linux is bad because it doesn't have opinions.

No opinions? Have you ever read a code of conduct? :)

My opinion is that I should be able to choose my window manager and have a proper tiling window manager if I wish, and Linux is the only one allowing me to do that.

It's a feature, not a bug.

Isn’t Valve having a go at making Linux more consumer friendly?

Depends what you mean by security, if by security you mean sanboxing of apps sure, if by security you mean that you trust what's in your OS and you can control it, it's worse than desktop Linux.

Security isn't just about technical features but also about trust, while I trust my Linux desktop, I don't trust my Android phone with the Play Store running as high privilege, advertising id in the OS and unknown manufacturer additions.

But that's more like talking about a particular distro, like I wouldn't trust North Korea's Linux distro either, compared to Debian.

Meanwhile something close to GrapheneOS running on desktop sounds fantastic.

Perhaps you may like Qubes OS.

Suggesting Qubes OS as the GNU/Linux equivalent of Android is admitting defeat. Android sandboxes multiple apps running on the same system/kernel. Qubes OS sandboxes multiple apps running on multiple different systems (VMs). Qubes, laudable as it may be, is not a parallel to Android.

Qubes is a much more secure alternative to Android without its main downside, which is that Google owns it and steers its development toward enshittification and control [0]. The latter even affects security directly [1].

Android's sandboxes are weaker and AFAIK rely on closed, non-auditable hardware (which is owned by Google in, e.g., GrapheneOS). Qubes protects you more reliably and doesn't require to abandon root privileges or a possibility to take screenshots.

Also, you don't have to run every app in a dedicated VM on Qubes: Instead you group them into security domains, which allowed me to organize my digital life like never before [3].

In addition, Qubes can protect you from supply-chain attacks by isolating VMs from the network and using different OSes side by side. I dream of using Qubes on mobile.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028

[2] https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/user/how-to-guides/how-to...

Are you pretending android doesn't have bugs?

> Just recent months they introduced another bug to GNOME which probably will not be resolved in years. No big company wants to invest in desktop Linux and without investments it's just not good.

Classic straw man: a single GNOME bug doesn’t mean all of desktop Linux isn’t worth investing in.

Developers have been writing Linux desktop apps successfully for decades. Moreover, who cares about polished desktop apps when most apps are just web apps that look the same on all platforms?

For the record, I despise web apps.

> So Android is the only operating system that could realistically be ready in the foreseeable future.

Ready for what ? Working with files on Android is ... interesting. Real app support on Android (shells, compilers, CAD/CAE) is ... interesting and the UX is... total crap.