I’ve had a little adventure with my Fedora Atomic Workstation this morning and almost missed a meeting because I couldn’t get to a desktop session.
This sort of stressful random breakage when waking from suspend or unplugging a monitor was enough to give me a sort of low level background anxiety while using Linux that I didn’t notice until I forced myself to try macOS for a while in earnest.
Until of course Sierra started making my GPU randomly crash.
linux on the desktop is 45% stockholm syndrome, 15% wishful thinking, 15% undergrad code shambles, 15% cargo cult microsoft aping, and 10% cynical corporate complexity to sell support contracts.
What’s your preferred alternative? The walled, proprietary gardens of Apple or Microsoft? OpenBSD?
It’s a serious question, Debian Stable as a desktop OS is working reasonably well for me. I wan’t a unix-like system - No Windows - which offers broad choices of hardware - no OS X - and it should be free software - one of them. I’d switch to OpenBSD for most of my work, but I need stuff like docker for work and want resonable gaming support at home. I could switch between different OSes for different tasks, but why bother? Debian truly is “the universal operating system” for me, even with all it’s faults.
FWIW, I use FreeBSD on my Laptop. I know it is not ideal but I choose to do it and work through the pain because I can and because I think it’s good to support options.
OpenBSD has good Gnome3 support, see here, although note that the instructions mentioned are out of date, it’s best to follow the readme that is installed when you pkg_add gnome.
“systemd coupling” is mostly logind. It’s only really necessary for starting gnome-shell as a Wayland compositor. Someone should try either reimplementing logind for *BSD (there were such projects but I don’t think anyone got it completely working) or adding support for something like my little loginw thing to gnome-shell :) same for kwin_wayland.
I actually use Weston right now, and going to write my own libweston-based compositor eventually… (loginw was created for that)
Do you write your own scripts for stuff like volume/backlight control, locking etc? Having used I3 for over a year, this was the least enjoyable part for me because sometimes stuff would break/change/rename and I’d have to fiddle with my scripts.
Yes I’ve been writing my own scripts. I haven’t had any issues with it. But like I said, I’m explicitly deciding to add some pain in my life to support something I think is bigger, so it’s not for everyone. Lumina, though, is a full DE AFAIK so that should handle the things you’ve brought up.
Huh. Because my Linux desktop is peerlessly stable, bears no resemblance to anything Microsoft has released in the past thirty years, and is community developed and supported. I in fact find that the commercial desktop environments are unstable, unusable buggy garbage, and I’ve had the misfortune to have to use both of them fairly significantly.
Don’t confuse “Linux on the desktop” with “GNOME on the desktop” (or, for that matter, “intentionally using unstable software on the desktop”).
This sort of stressful random breakage when waking from suspend or unplugging a monitor was enough to give me a sort of low level background anxiety while using Linux that I didn’t notice until I forced myself to try macOS for a while in earnest.
Until of course Sierra started making my GPU randomly crash.
linux on the desktop is 45% stockholm syndrome, 15% wishful thinking, 15% undergrad code shambles, 15% cargo cult microsoft aping, and 10% cynical corporate complexity to sell support contracts.
What’s your preferred alternative? The walled, proprietary gardens of Apple or Microsoft? OpenBSD?
It’s a serious question, Debian Stable as a desktop OS is working reasonably well for me. I wan’t a unix-like system - No Windows - which offers broad choices of hardware - no OS X - and it should be free software - one of them. I’d switch to OpenBSD for most of my work, but I need stuff like docker for work and want resonable gaming support at home. I could switch between different OSes for different tasks, but why bother? Debian truly is “the universal operating system” for me, even with all it’s faults.
FWIW, I use FreeBSD on my Laptop. I know it is not ideal but I choose to do it and work through the pain because I can and because I think it’s good to support options.
What is the preferred DE on *BSDs? GNOME?
I just use i3. TrueOS is pushing for Lumina. Gnome is basically Linux only at this point with all of its systemd coupling, from what I understand.
OpenBSD has good Gnome3 support, see here, although note that the instructions mentioned are out of date, it’s best to follow the readme that is installed when you pkg_add gnome.
“systemd coupling” is mostly logind. It’s only really necessary for starting gnome-shell as a Wayland compositor. Someone should try either reimplementing logind for *BSD (there were such projects but I don’t think anyone got it completely working) or adding support for something like my little loginw thing to gnome-shell :) same for kwin_wayland.
I actually use Weston right now, and going to write my own libweston-based compositor eventually… (loginw was created for that)
For X11, both gnome-3.26 and plasma5 should work.
Do you write your own scripts for stuff like volume/backlight control, locking etc? Having used I3 for over a year, this was the least enjoyable part for me because sometimes stuff would break/change/rename and I’d have to fiddle with my scripts.
Yes I’ve been writing my own scripts. I haven’t had any issues with it. But like I said, I’m explicitly deciding to add some pain in my life to support something I think is bigger, so it’s not for everyone. Lumina, though, is a full DE AFAIK so that should handle the things you’ve brought up.
Huh. Because my Linux desktop is peerlessly stable, bears no resemblance to anything Microsoft has released in the past thirty years, and is community developed and supported. I in fact find that the commercial desktop environments are unstable, unusable buggy garbage, and I’ve had the misfortune to have to use both of them fairly significantly.
Don’t confuse “Linux on the desktop” with “GNOME on the desktop” (or, for that matter, “intentionally using unstable software on the desktop”).