Is It Time For a Change In GNOME Leadership? 112
Longtime Slashdot reader BrendaEM writes: Command-line aside, Cinnamon is the most effective keeper of the Linux desktop flame -- by not abandoning desktop and laptop computers. Yes, there are other desktop GUIs, such as MATE, and the lightweight Xfce, which are valuable options when low overhead is important, such as in LinuxCNC. However, among the general public lies a great expanse of office workers who need a full-featured Linux desktop.
The programmers who work on GNOME and its family of supporting applications enrich many other desktops do their more than their share. These faithful developers deserve better user-interface leadership. GNOME has tried to steer itself into tablet waters, which is admirable, but GNOME 3.x diminished the desktop experience for both laptop and desktop users. For instance, the moment you design what should be a graphical user interface with words such as "Activities," you ask people to change horses midstream. That is not to say that the command line and GUI cannot coexist -- because they can, as they do in many CAD programs.
I remember a time when GNOME ruled the Linux desktop -- and I can remember when GNOME left those users behind. Perhaps in a future, GNOME could return to the Linux desktop and join forces with Cinnamon -- so that we may once again have the year of the Linux desktop.
The programmers who work on GNOME and its family of supporting applications enrich many other desktops do their more than their share. These faithful developers deserve better user-interface leadership. GNOME has tried to steer itself into tablet waters, which is admirable, but GNOME 3.x diminished the desktop experience for both laptop and desktop users. For instance, the moment you design what should be a graphical user interface with words such as "Activities," you ask people to change horses midstream. That is not to say that the command line and GUI cannot coexist -- because they can, as they do in many CAD programs.
I remember a time when GNOME ruled the Linux desktop -- and I can remember when GNOME left those users behind. Perhaps in a future, GNOME could return to the Linux desktop and join forces with Cinnamon -- so that we may once again have the year of the Linux desktop.
XFCE (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know that I would call XFCE "low over headed' these days. I would not call it bloat-y either but with all the XFCE projects included its a full featured desktop environment with just about everything you'd expect from something that isnt specifically chasing Windows or macOS.
I have not used cinnamon in a long time, but I am really stumped as to what more than XFCE you could really want in terms of a traditional desktop experience.
Re:XFCE (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know that I would call XFCE "low over headed' these days. I would not call it bloat-y either but with all the XFCE projects included its a full featured desktop environment with just about everything you'd expect from something that isnt specifically chasing Windows or macOS.
I have not used cinnamon in a long time, but I am really stumped as to what more than XFCE you could really want in terms of a traditional desktop experience.
Agreed. It does everything I want from a desktop environment, and does it well, and still manages to have a modest overhead. And that matters. The laptop I'm typing this on would struggle with feature-heavy desktops like Gnome, but it runs XFCE like champ.
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XFCE is the right fit for most users who don't have any specialized requirements.
I have been using it for about a decade now (Xubuntu), and really satisfied with it.
It does what it is supposed to do, and stays out of the way.
The time for this (Score:5, Insightful)
has long past, IMHO. The damage they did might be irreparable.
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I am not sure. XFCE and mate exist, it is hard to imagine even if they "made gnome great again" that it would there would be a compelling reason to switch back.
That said one thing Gnome was doing was the stuff under the goffice umbrella. Most of that plugs in just fine to any GTK environment but in terms of adding to the Linux desktop experience that is an area that could still be improved.
Re:The time for this (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. The laudable praise applies to Gnome1 and Gnome2, but not to Gnome3.
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GNOME is the new CDE, literally. It replaced CDE in commercial UNIX(tm) desktop environments. And also like CDE, it is terrible. It is still a major DE, but only due to deployment numbers, which are in turn only the result of it having been made the default for the most popular Unix[lik]es. It's still relevant, but only because it's shoved at people.
AKA "Only our preferences are legitimate" (Score:5, Interesting)
Folks have been complaining about GNOME's UI choices for well over 20 years now. Guess what, it "rules the linux desktop" more today than it ever has.
Are there other, viable alternatives? Absolutely; more than ever, and you're free to use them (or not) if that's your preference.
But don't go projecting your preferences onto everyone else.
BTW, "the effective keeper of the linux desktop" is overwhelmingly Microsoft; WSL installs vastly dwarf "native" installations.
Re:AKA "Only our preferences are legitimate" (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely.
People like GNOME. People like Cinnamon. People like the Windows 95 UI.
If people want a DE from the 90s. Great they can have that. If people want a modern DE. Great, we can have that.
I just don't buy this, "Make GNOME Great Again", mentality either.
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Does it really "rule the Linux desktop", though?
I'd imagine that most "Desktop Linux" users are really using ChromeOS, which has it's own unique GUI. Ubuntu has it's own highly modified interface as well.
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"WSL installs vastly dwarf "native" installations."
Cite.
Re: AKA "Only our preferences are legitimate" (Score:3)
Also how is that relevant anyway? If we're talking about the desktop that is
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Microsoft does not discolse the number of WSL installations, but anectdotally, it's well north of 100:1. Granted, that's heavily weighted towards professional developers in corporate settings where Linux is the primary (if not only) deployment platform.
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"anectdotally,"
So plucked out of your arse then based on little more than your own experience. Based on my experience I could say the exact opposite, no one uses WSL here.
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In my household, all but one desktops run only Linux. (The other is a Mac) ...But unlike you, I know better than to project my preferences onto others.
At my current employer, I'm one of *two* native linux users (out of about 30 engineers). The rest use WSL.. or MacOS.
$dayjob-1 was predominately a windows shop (with nearly 70,000 total employees, maybe 10% engineering staff) and you had to get director-level signoff to use anything other than Windows, because $security. (My research group -- 6/7 of us us
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"But unlike you, I know better than to project my preferences onto others."
LOL :) Wow, irony , much?
"At my current employer, I'm one of *two* native linux users (out of about 30 engineers). The rest use WSL.. or MacOS."
Fascinating. Here we have hundreds of linux VMs not to mention docker containers inside them.
"$dayjob-1 was predominately a windows shop"
Oh right, and hows that relevant to linux usage?
"but WSL was just a couple of mouse clicks away"
No serious corp with in IT dept that cares about security le
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We saw a burst of growth of Linux on the Desktop with Ubuntu in the 2000s and people enthusiastically recommending it. Then, when GNOME 3 and Ubuntu's Unity were introduced, I saw the level of interest noticeably drop, and it disappeared completely when Ubuntu switched to GNOME 3. The figures are difficult to obtain, but anecdotaly, people talked about Linux on the Desktop as a serious proposition 15 years ago. Now it's a joke.
The reality is GNOME 2, which is what Ubuntu pre-Unity was, was driving Linux-on-
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"Folks have been complaining about GNOME's UI choices for well over 20 years now."
GNOME 3, which brought the huge changes in UI as compared with GNOME 2, is about 13 years old, not twenty.
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Solid logic there bro. Keep the status quo and NEVER ask if anything could be better.
Solid logic there, Bro. GNOME 2 and then GNOME 3 made significant changes for the better, with smaller incremental improvements in each point release.
Of course, "better" is according to their own developers, but unusually (for F/OSS efforts) was also informed (and backed up) by usability research.
*you* may not like what they are (and have been) doing, but that doesn't mean they've never stopped working to make things "better".
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Solid logic there, Bro. GNOME 2 and then GNOME 3 made significant changes for the better, with smaller incremental improvements in each point release.
There is no argument that they made numerous significant changes; however, 'better' is a judgement and it is very clear that many people do not agree on this judgement.
With Gnome and KDE version 2, everything was flexible as it was designed by technical people for technical people. While definitely imperfect, it was still fantastic and a pleasure to use.
Then, suddenly, for some reason, BOTH teams decided that the user having full control over their environment was a hindrance to adoption, so they revoked co
It will get weirder (Score:5, Interesting)
If valve keeps having success and expanding the SteamOS like they are, the future might be whatever valve chooses as the default DE
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I'm not the CIA to come up with weirdass execution plans like that
Window Managers (Score:4, Insightful)
Also there is KDE. If I was forced into a Desktop Environment, right now KDE would be my choice. When (if) Wayland ever is forced on us as a real X replacement I would go to KDE.
But right now I stick with window managers and I hope the WM I use the most is ported to Wayland. But the issue is, from what I have read, writing a WM is harder on Wayland than X so many Window Managers will end up in the dustbin.
Before people bring up Sway, I do not like tiling WMs.
Re:Window Managers (Score:4, Informative)
There is a decent Wayland compositor called Hikari that is not a tiling manager and is pretty stable. It is particularly interesting to me because I run FreeBSD rather than Linux and Hikari is developed natively for FreeBSD. It works under Linux too of course. I like to run OpenBox for my WM, although I do like tilers also and have run dwm, i3-gaps and am considering spectrwm.
In the end though, I actually kinda despise Wayland. It is a foolish project whose target is basically to replace something that works, and works really well. Sure it has crufty corners and what have you, it's a mature project. Wayland is quickly acquiring its own set of expected extensions (oh I'm sorry, "protocols") where the newest hotness won't work unless you have the right extensions available, which is one of the exact things the Wayland devs whined about with X. I actually think the whole model Wayland is using is wrong.
Another old and crufty system people might be familiar with would be Windows. When I write stuff for Windows in C++, I use the same API that I learned in the late '90s, and it all still works fine. Also happens to be the dominant UI in the world for personal computers.
Re:Window Managers (Score:4, Interesting)
What's worst is that X has security mechanisms that nobody uses and which could have been improved to cover the problems.
The one and only reason why X is being abandoned is that the people who were working on it don't want to do that any more, they wanted to work on something new.
Fifteen years later, Wayland still doesn't do what X does.
It's impossible for me to believe that they couldn't have fixed the cruftiness of X in fifteen fucking years. They chose not to, which is their prerogative, but their lack of progress certainly doesn't support their claims that it made more sense than replacing X. They can choose what to work on, and I can choose not to believe obvious bullshit.
looks like former X.org developers have mod points (Score:2)
Look kids, your whining has proven to be a load of dingo's kidneys. Wayland is still years from doing the things X does. X is here and working and you abandoned it to make a new thing that doesn't work
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The one and only reason why X is being abandoned is that the people who were working on it don't want to do that any more, they wanted to work on something new.
The codebase of Weston is easier to understand than the codebase of X. So it's easier for developers to improve and maintain Weston than X.
And of course, with X you'd have to start by deprecating then removing everything that nobody uses today.
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The one and only reason why X is being abandoned is that the people who were working on it don't want to do that any more, they wanted to work on something new.
The codebase of Weston is easier to understand than the codebase of X. So it's easier for developers to improve and maintain Weston than X.
And of course, with X you'd have to start by deprecating then removing everything that nobody uses today.
Why would you remove older stuff exactly? There are literal decades of software that run reliably on X using stuff that the Wayland people would want to deprecate. I use xterm every day on X, and it is written using the Xt toolkit, basically the first UI toolkit to be released for X from the '80s. I also run and build software from the 90s written using Motif, even NEW software written for Motif. Mature stuff should be left as-is unless some issue is discovered, then it should be fixed.
The problem with open
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The one and only reason why X is being abandoned is that the people who were working on it don't want to do that any more, they wanted to work on something new.
The codebase of Weston is easier to understand than the codebase of X. So it's easier for developers to improve and maintain Weston than X.
And of course, with X you'd have to start by deprecating then removing everything that nobody uses today.
Why would you remove older stuff exactly? There are literal decades of software that run reliably on X using stuff that the Wayland people would want to deprecate.
The problem with open-source software in general is that unless a company is paying for development, generally contributors only work on things that are personally interesting to them, which often doesn't include taking care of old software written decades ago in styles that are no longer fashionable, even when those pieces of old software are foundational to a system's operation. Note that the vast, vast majority of contributors to the Linux kernel are full-time paid developers from companies who use Linux.
I didn't say "older stuff", I said "everything that nobody uses today".
If an old offline production system never updated still requires some obscure X feature, that's fine because it would never be updated to use X12 or Wayland.
If it does require that feature, then the company will hire a developer to maintain X11.
It's going to be hilarious in another decade or two when C and C++ are still primary languages and Rust has been replaced by Zig or whatever sexy thing comes after that one, heh.
I don't think developers are paid to develop in Rust because it's trendy. I would say it's trendy because the risk of security vulnerabilities and crashes of Rust code is much lower.
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I don't think developers are paid to develop in Rust because it's trendy. I would say it's trendy because the risk of security vulnerabilities and crashes of Rust code is much lower.
I would argue they are absolutely paid to program in Rust because it is currently trendy to do so. There are a number of "safe" system programming languages that will reduce the risks for security vulnerabilities, including programming languages like Ada where the compiler enforces the guarantees. There are also numerous methods or techniques of programming in "dangerous" languages like C which have been developed over time, things like the MISRA standards, which if compliance were guaranteed the quality of
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I didn't say "older stuff", I said "everything that nobody uses today".
If your definition is that nobody uses it, then that is nothing, and you have proposed that nothing be removed.
If you cannot say what you mean, then your comments have no value.
If that was what you actually meant, then it had no value to begin with, as you said nothing.
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The codebase of Weston is easier to understand than the codebase of X. So it's easier for developers to improve and maintain Weston than X.
So why is it still not working properly 15 years later?
And of course, with X you'd have to start by deprecating then removing everything that nobody uses today.
X is modular so that's not a problem.
Got any actual problems to report? I don't believe the first point since it still sucks 15 years on. I flatly do not believe they are further along with this solution than they could have been with cleaning up the codebase of X.org after a decade and a half.
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X is modular so that's not a problem.
Also, why bother? I'm astounded about how much people care about a few old pixel drawing routines that aren't much used any more. They are done. Finished. Complete. They need not take up any headspace beyond making sure there's a method to write pixels into a pixel buffer and, well, if that's a problem then the entire system is hosed anyway.
I flatly do not believe they are further along with this solution than they could have been with cleaning up the codebase of X.org a
Re: Window Managers (Score:2)
TBF they inherited a mess, or so they say, but they clearly didn't clean it up when they were working on it so that isn't saying much.
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Don't all programmers think they have inherited a mess?
I have no doubt xorg was a bit messy, but it deals with the real world and the real world is messy. In fairness I haven't actually followed the saga of the code but I have seen "it's a mess let's rewrite" play out make times in my career. It's almost always done by those who fail to heed the parable of Chesterton's fence. Usually it ends up not making things better because the new system isn't simpler due to deep, clear headed thinking about the problem
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Interesting, will have to keep Hikari in mind. It looks like cwm, which I use on OpenBSD. This should be fine for me once I am dragged into Wayland kicking and screaming :)
That day may not be too far off, I heard gtk5 will only support Wayland, dropping X.
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It's a shame that so much effort was put into replicating the Windows and Apple UIs over the years. Microsoft and Apple did a lot of damage by claiming their UIs were the most intuitive and easy to use, and convincing so many people in the process. People used to write boo
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Command-line aside, Cinnamon is the most effective keeper of the Linux desktop flame -- by not abandoning desktop and laptop computers. Yes, there are other desktop GUIs, such as MATE, and the lightweight Xfce, which are valuable options when low overhead is important, such as in LinuxCNC. However, among the general public lies a great expanse of office workers who need a full-featured Linux desktop.
MATE and XFCE are fine for the vast majority of users. For everyone else who needs that last 3% of functionality there's KDE. GNOME has run its course and should be allowed to die in irrelevance for what it did to us regarding systemd.
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Hard agree. At work GNOME is forced on us as the default desktop of Debian, and man, I loathe that garbage.
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Those of us on the periphery were simply told 'that's deprecated' or 'we are replacing that from scratch' or 'that doesn't fit the new guidelines'. Great way to drive off support from the smaller developers. Most of us simply left shortly after.
To beat a dead horse, the GUI guidelines were ridiculously wasteful of space while removing anything
It's called MATE (Score:2, Troll)
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Also weren't the needs of Gnome the reason for systemd to be foisted upon us?
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Yes, GNOME chose to depend on systemd for functionality they already had working on X, and then Debian chose to depend on systemd so they could support GNOME even though KDE was unencumbered OSS by that time and they could have gone that direction, and everyone else followed suit. Really the blame falls on GNOME first and Debian second. The claim was that the majority of Debian devs supported the decision but it is not at all clear that this was true, it looks more like the decision was pushed through on a
Re: It's called MATE (Score:2)
I agree, but the problem with mate is that it still suffers from gnome's bullshit, because it depends on gtk, and when gnome devs vandalize it, it eventually ends up in mate.
The big feature loss for me was the ability to change tab by scrolling on the tabs. It worked in menus, in caja, basically everywhere there was gtk tabs.
One moron with power was surprised once by it, and decided to remove it, because it "can confuse people and some people have sensitive mouse wheels".
He supposedly asked on gnome's irc a
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The big thing I absolutely hate that's filtered into all the other desktops is the fucking up of the scrollbars.
They used to work fine. Drag to where you want, click above or below for page up/down, click on the arrows for line up/line down.
Some idiot removed that... for no apparent reason. I'm still trying to figure out why. It's not like it made the scrollbar hard to use, leaving aside all of those being intuitive behavior, they also weren't an issue if you never used them.
Now MATE has the same thing. Why
Re: It's called MATE (Score:2)
If it's like my case, I bet the reason is "I don't use those up and down buttons, and don't drag the scrollbars, and since my use case on my laptop is the only use case I can think of, let's nuke those features that obviously nobody uses, since I don't use them.
Touch screen has no place for real work (Score:2)
Touch screens really have no place for real work on a computer. It really only works at all on consumption only devices like phones and tablets. Ubuntu's old Unity and Gnome are just about useless for any real work. Cinnamon in my opinion truly is the best of the DE's out at the moment. My only gripe with Cinnamon is still in regards to gaming and the fact that as of yet, they still give no way to disable effects for full screen apps like games so that you can enable flipping/g-sync etc.
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You've got too narrow a focus. There are applications for which touch screens are preferable. It's just that programming sure isn't one of them.
Re: Touch screen has no place for real work (Score:2)
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Where did you see "desktop machine"? I missed that. For a desktop machine (that isn't a convertible) I agree with you.
A full-featured Linux desktop (Score:3)
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Indeed, what is the definition of "full-featured"? Wallpaper? Taskbar? "That's nice" or "looks cool" but useless desktop gadgets? Distracting pop-ups or taskbar animations? Animated advertising in menu, taskbar, and window title bars? What?
My desktop is complete with having only a pop-up program list that I call via key combination and the ability for virtual desktops, nothing else. Okay, one could count the digital clock tucked away in the corner as part of it. It's the same for why I use the simple and c
Gnome is still around? (Score:1)
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Gnome is still here because Red Hat pays some developers to work on it.
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Redhat is the real issue. Good thing redhat is dying.
Speak for yourselfâ¦. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why do you like Gnome? At one point I found Gnome2 to be my favorite desktop, but I've never seen anything worthwhile about Gnome3.
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Sorry if my line of thought is out of date - my IT teams just upgraded my work virtual desktop to RHEL8. Poor me.
Multiple critics, all of them right (Score:1, Troll)
Whatever. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've used GNOME since early 2.x. GNOME 3 was a big shift. But so what?
Current GNOME looks and works great on my desktop and laptop. I can launch whatever I need quickly. I can manage workspaces and windows and files. It gets out of the way. Do I think their insistence on no tray icons is stupid? Yep, but it doesn't matter, there's an extension for that. Does it work with touch devices? Yep. But I don't care because I don't use touch devices with it. Does their Online Accounts thing work in a corp environment? Not really. Oh well.
Like, I barely think about GNOME. It's just there doing its job. It's FINE. It works. It looks nice. I have no major complaints.
The only people it "left behind" were users who thought early Windows was peak UI, didn't have the neuroplasticity to try something new, and thought the project owed them something in return for using it.
Again, oh well.
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Seriously. The link about Activities is from twelve years ago. GNOME 3.x made its changes that "diminished" so much like what, fifteen years ago? GNOME leadership has changed, numerous times, in that period. They even got rid of Activities some time ago.
Why is this angry old man on the front page with this nonsense?
I mean it's cool if you like Cinnamon but just . . . what? Use Cinnamon. Or MATE. Or KDE.
Do people really still care about this stuff? The Linux desktop is healthy, it isn't going anywhere, do wh
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The only people it "left behind" were users who thought early Windows was peak UI
What do you mean by "early Windows"? IME there are only two kinds of people who yearn for older Windows interfaces who exist in any significant numbers. They are the Windows 2000 people, and the Windows 7 people. Neither qualifies as "Early Windows", which would be Windows [NT] 3.x. Those Windows interfaces were excellent for their day, because they were designed by a group of corporations (not just Microsoft) which wanted a very usable GUI which would work the same across all of their various platforms. El
Perhaps (Score:2)
Perhaps Papa Smurf could lead the Gnomes in a new direction? He somehow led an entire group of Smurfs peacefully with only one Smurfette .. quite an accomplishment!
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Perhaps Papa Smurf could lead the Gnomes in a new direction? He somehow led an entire group of Smurfs peacefully with only one Smurfette .. quite an accomplishment!
She was happy but tired.
Is this a terrible post? (Score:2)
One, this headline question mark nonsense is just one step above a "One cool trick Red Hat hates."
Two, what even is this? GNOME's current leadership dropped "Activities" years ago. The link is from the 3.6 release notes, from . . . 2012? Gnome 3.x did its "diminishing like fifteen whole years ago.
This has a lot of Old Man Yells at Cloud vibes. It's coll you like Cinnamon I guess.
What? (Score:2)
GNOME has never been good. It's UI has been bad since day one when they decided they didnt like KDE and wanted to make a far worse alternative.
lost it (Score:2)
I used to be a happy user of GNOME 1.x and then even happier with 2.x, then couldn't stand 3.x. Moved to MATE and lost interest in GNOME development and lost faith on its developers.
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I take it by "installs easily" you mean it comes on the PC.
Otherwise it's the same build a USB stick and reboot, wipe the drive, and let the installer run as Linux. Or MacOs for that matter.
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If only.
I ended up installing Ubuntu, MacOS and Windows in close succession recently. Ubuntu and MacOS were as you describe. Windows though... someone's mother bought an ASUS laptop and the Windows setup froze, so they asked me to reinstall it for them. Okay, no problem. Nope, still froze. No explanation, no way out, not even an error message. The Ubuntu install I replaced it with went fine though.
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not my experience, I refurb older PCs and I struggle with Linux daily
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not true, how many times have I struggled to get Linux to install, many times unsuccessfully, too bad Linux people can't accept the truth
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i install and reinstall windows all day long, and linux too, windows works, linux often has issues
so many liars, shame on you
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I hate to say anything positive about Windows, but I've install both Linux and Windows in the past year into VMs and both were painless. So painless I can't even remember anything in particular about either installation.
Also, XFCE for me please. KDE was cute when I first started dabbling with Linux decades ago as it "looked" similar to Windows. Then I kept toying with other distros and discovered there are lots of choices. I like the clean, simpleness of XFCE. It doesn't offer up any distractions like some
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i've had issues installing and starting Linux distros even on hypervisor, not as easy as you fan boys make it out to be or everyone would be using it
there's a reason it's not successful despite being free, it's not as easy to install
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I'd be curious to know which distro was all that difficult to install as it just doesn't match my experience this past decade. Maybe if you were on bleeding edge hardware but once again, it must vary by distro as the last couple I've installed went without a hitch. Even FreeBSD wasn't hard to install. It's just prompts. Getting an esoteric piece of hardware may be another story but Windows can and does have the same issues.
The hardest Linux install I did was Slackware in 2000 and it was still doable by a 16
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let's see, ubuntu MATE, kali, MX, and bohdi, and I install linux on new and old hardware"
I'm a retired IT manager, I deal with all the OS's take your attitude and shove off please
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I help people install Linux and windows and I help people build and take care of their own systems, I can tell you most people aren't as stupid as you make them out to be, typical elitist attitude
same people that vote and look how that turns out
denial runs deep when one is a believer, this isn't a religion you know
no wonder nothing gets better
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yah, I also run both free and open bsd and I was doing Unix before there even was a windows so it's not like I don't have some experience either
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On two identical computers with blank hard drives, Linux is WAY easier to install than Windows.
So much this!
You typically download the distro you desire with the desktop you desire, Rufus it into an installable ISO, boot and choose to install, make certain it is attached to the internet, and let 'er rip.
Another thing - Linux at least so far doesn't turn older drivers into unobtanium. I've had a good bit of that problem in Windows.
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To be fair, that's my experience of both, at least for the past 5 years or so.
For Windows 10 or 11, you pretty much dwonload an ISO from mcirosoft.com (or the tool that will create a USB installer for you), run that, and it installs everything for you. It's been years since I've had to manually install drivers for anything on either Linux or Windows (unless its for gaming, when I need to mess around a bit with Nvidea software).
Neither presents any problems for anyone remotely competent, and neither require
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try installing it to a Dell insprion duo
you abusive linux fan boys suck too
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sure
how many times have I seen Etcher fail with this message "Something went wrong. If it is a compressed archive, please check that the archive is not corrupted. The writer process ended unexpectedly." Brand new USB, nothing wrong with the archive / iso either. Notice the utter lack of any helpful info. Typical.
or installers that prepare a thumb drive only to see that drive disappear from the very list of drives you need to select it from for the next step
or Linux installs that just hang forever, or just k
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bodhi legacy install on a hypervisor VM with an iso that's been checksummed with sha256
"(initramfs) Unable to find a medium containing a live fiesystem"
hangs forever ....
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ubuntnu debian, kali won't install on my old dell insprion duo
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You posted two comments about how Dell sucks but you blame Windows in the same place. Perhaps the problem is you.
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no, the problem is always abusive people like you
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On two identical computers with blank hard drives, Linux is WAY easier to install than Windows.
rotflmao
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Re: Installing Linux sucks (Score:2)
exactly. I've been installing multiple machines every year for 20 years.
I can't remember the last time it was harder than plug usb, click ok,ok,ok. and wait for the reboot.
The hardest install i have done of the last 20 years were using discs down the interstate on a laptop. That was in 2009; good times!
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often even flashing a boot drive fails
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no, using the recommended tool, which failed without generate a useable error message, that's ok, I'll find something that installs eventually
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and how many idiots still struggle " fu 2
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people here can't handle the truth, Linux installs still fail often, and are overly complicated
the windows installer just installs every time
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to the users who modded me as a troll, f U 2
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Also gnome is designed with sane defaults and is very hard for a novice to mess up in a way that stops them from working. KDE is awesome and easy to customize, so your random user with no computer experience will break it in horrifying ways, this makes Gnome nice for corporate environments.
This command launched on login makes it much harder: /PlasmaShell evaluateScript "lockCorona(true)"
qdbus6 org.kde.plasmashell