Linux Has Become Complicated and Limiting (Gnome, Wayland, etc.) [video]
youtube.comEh, I have basically exactly the opposite opinion.
I've been using linux as a daily driver since 2007, Ubuntu for a long while, then Arch+Gnome since about 2018.
I feel like linux has never been as freeing as it is right now. I have compatibility with basically all of the software I need to do my work as a developer. I have a very functional display manager when I'm using the system as a workstation and an incredibly powerful and flexible set of tools to use on the system in general.
I run a bunch of real services that I host and share with family, and administration of those has never been easier from a "how much time do I spend dealing with maintenance" point of view (although the initial setup required fairly good understanding of a lot of systems/tech). Those boxes all sit in my basement running the same distro I run my workstation on, just configured for a different use case (headless).
I guess it's not as easy to throw a spinning/burning cube compiz theme on my machine anymore, but that wasn't really what got my motor going in the first place.
The problem isn't that GTK3x is hard to use, It's that its simply not capable of creating beautiful UI's like GTK2x could. It can't create any tool bars without making them thick and huge, even DE's like xfce that try to maintain that old gtk2x look and feel can't do it anymore because of this.
Absolutely, and it's the GNOME camp where this awful excessively padded user interface style is coming from, and spreading across the platform to other desktop environments. Personally, I gave up on modifying the CSS theme files for GTK3 to reduce the ugliness - I made it just barely tolerable, but not any better than that.
He’s a Arch + WM user who loves to tinker. If that is you, then you’ll agree with his take. If you just want to get stuff done without tweaking your OS and without supporting Microsoft or Apple or Google and whatever BS they’re doing these days, then Gnome and Wayland are a godsend.
Even with GNOME I end up going down a tinkering rabbit hole because there’s so many papercuts that need fixing, many of which unfortunately can’t be fixed without making source changes and potentially even maintaining forks. Even after spending hours on my setup it still feels half-baked, which is irritating to say the least. Other DEs aren’t much better and sometimes even worse.
don't worry GNOME will abandon everything they're doing now in favor of some new half-baked thing and you can learn all new ways to make it functional again
KDE is way better and really feels like a finished product IMO. Things you don't like you can just change unlike gnome which has almost no customization.
It can be complex and limiting. Alternatively I run ArchLinux + Sway and life is pretty simple.
Some people prefer "easy to use" which I interpret as probably not needing to read the docs to accomplish it's primary use-case.
Others prefer simple which I interpret as meaning once you have read the docs you will likely understand the software in it's entirety.
If it wasn't already obvious I'm in the latter category, simple rules IMO.
For me rather than “easy to use”, the goal is “batteries included”.
Tiling WMs like Sway aren’t my thing, but I’ve tried minimal setups in the vein of openbox+tint2, and it was irritating how many little things didn’t work unless I set up some daemon to handle them. It also just felt a good deal more fragile than a monolithic DE.
His points, paraphrased by me:
* Gnome 2 had a lot of themes but since then, there aren't that many.
* Compiz fun is gone.
* Wayland limits the number of supported desktops.
* The desktop is more complicated and it's harder to tinker.
* He believes that customisability (should) set FOSS apart from proprietary software.
I would get his argument if say there was just Ubuntu, and Gnome was the only desktop in town, but it isn't. You have XFCE, LXDE, KDE, and not to mention the litany of window managers out there that either run a standalone desktop or on top of another desktop. I occasionally look over on /r/unixporn and see some of the crazy wm configs people have put together.
And if you just like the good ol' days of gnome 2 then go install mate (Gnome 2 fork) or trinity (KDE 3.5 fork)
Many companies and now projects have come to a realization:
Customizability = Complexity = More Maintenance
FOSS groups can’t really afford to have a bajillion options they need to maintain and test compatibility between them. Also, maintenance (especially for free) isn’t fun.
> Customizability = Complexity = More Maintenance
There's truth to this but the extent to which it's true I think depends on how much the system was built customizability in mind.
So for extensive customizability to work without being a serious impediment to development, it needs to be a goal from the start, and most cases it isn't — it's more common for that type of feature to be bolted on further down the road.
Thanks for the summary. I don't see anything there of concern (to me).
The last two seem particular to individual desktops or opinion.- I'm not leaning into Gnome (or Ubuntu/Canonical) - Don't need my desktop to be fun, it should get out of the way for the real fun - Can't say I've ever used more than 4 desktopsis compiz fun really gone though? You can have debates about the rest of it, but it seems like folks really have kept most of the compiz stuff like wobbly and burning windows alive :)
It's the last point that rubs me.
FOSS should be whatever the developers decide it should be. It's not up to the users to decide what requirements a piece of software should fulfill.
The Linux userbase has bisected into two camps: The very extreme, and the very simple. The very extreme want (of course) Arch Linux, wayland, tiling window managers, proton, 4k, high-dpi, and probably also use this machine for software development. The very simple just want Facebook and Youtube. Anyone who falls somewhere in-between, I.E. the "semi-technical", who are able to do config file changes, but don't want to have to run and understand tons of shell commands, are very under-served. This third category of people includes doctors, lawyers, (non-software) engineers, writers, artists, etc. who unfortunately would be the best Linux evangelists, if people would actually make Linux usable for them.
Slightly tangential, but I recently gave Wayland a try on KDE, as I kept reading how screen tearing is not an issue. On NixOS this is as simple as choosing a Wayland session in SDDM.
My setup was one main 4K screen in landscape, and one secondary 1080p screen in portrait.
Immediately I noticed several major bugs:
- The taskbar panel was stuck at 60% on the Y axis. Unlocking it and moving it manually was not possible. That's the furthest down it would go.
- The taskbar panel had very large icons. Much larger than the 64px I configured it with.
- Right-clicking on certain parts of the desktop would popup the menu on a different part of the screen.
- Hovering over the min/max/close buttons of any window would render the cursor at like 5 FPS.
- Scaling in Firefox was way too small. The cursor itself scaled down when hovered over the Firefox window.
- Playing a video in Firefox on the portrait screen and making it fullscreen, would rotate the video to landscape.
I briefly tried to look into some of these issues, but quickly gave up.
I'm sure veteran Wayland users will say that this is an issue with KDE, with Firefox, with Xwayland, or whatever else, but that doesn't help me one bit. The point is that the complexity in the display system is so high, that I have no idea where to look for the culprit.
Oh, at least screen tearing wasn't an issue.
It's frankly embarrassing that the state-of-the-art in rendering GUIs on Linux is so broken. Wayland is a decade old now, yet it hasn't made multi-monitor support easier, and has only introduced more complexity into the system, by leaving support up to each application. What a clusterfuck.
I went back to X, and I'm waiting for the screen tearing fix[1] to be released.
[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
The beauty is that Linux can be as easy or complicated as you want it to be.
Fedora (GNOME/Wayland) is simple to install and use. As a long time Arch user (since 2010) I appreciate the modularity and freedom to customize exactly what I want. A few years ago I switched to Fedora on my main laptop – I learnt a lot tinkering with Arch but had to switch gears and focus on getting other stuff done.
The only caveat is that you have to be picky when choosing a laptop if you want to avoid installing propitiatory wifi-drivers or adding kernel parameters, but these days there are a decent amount of laptops that works without tinkering.
It hasn't become more complicated, quite the reverse; since Gnome 3, the UI has become ever more simple and polished and accessible. And more opinionated, yes. You can still tinker with and change the desktop - it just takes more effort.
I consider that a plus. It's the difference between having a finished product versus being given some planks and tools and be expected to finish the product yourself.
I don't need a desktop I first configure and tweak for two days until I'm happy and can become productive. I want a desktop that allows me to be productive right from the start. And that requires some opinionated decisions by the developers.
I'm amazed at how polished and well thought-out Gnome 44 is.
More and more of these little annoying edges have been smoothed away in the last few years since Gnome 3 entered. And I'm happy about all of it.
X works just fine for me. Long as you remember to run it under compression.
I suppose it could get absurdly complex if you're a fan of opinionated frameworks and whatnot... For me the basics have been sufficient for the last decade or so.