How to lose even when you’re right
The populace is stupid and superficial by definition. I’m not sure if 98% of people are the basis of Idiocracy, or whether 99.8% would be a more accurate assessment. To the point: here’s how I interacted (I wanted to write that I quarreled, because I’m so full of this shit called software that I’m always rather aggressive) in some comments, only to have wasted my time. This is why I don’t bother anymore with forums and the like.
Liam Proven: Linux Mint 22 ‘Wilma’ still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows. Comments:
1 ● Liam Proven:
[Author here]
some distros being better because they offer “better tools for switching desktop layouts”
Hey, hang on a sec.
The point is much simpler than that, and yes, it is important, IMHO.
A decade ago I started work at A Prominent North American Linux Vendor. It took about 2 hours on my first day to work out that GNOME was not for me. I also tried KDE $CURRENT, also a big no. Cinnamon, no ta, vertical taskbar broken. After a day’s work, Xfce seemed the best bet. It still is.
Half an hour of adjustments and it’s fine and I used it for the rest of my time there. Fast forward 3 years, I start at A Prominent German Linux Vendor. Give KDE a fresh go as it’s the company’s in-house fave. Still a big “no”. Back to Xfce. Now, it takes 15min to set up just right, because I know what to do.
But that is the key point here. I know how to do it.
If you don’t this should not exclude you. The “Panel Profiles” tool means that you don’t need to. It can do GNOME 2, GNOME 3, Windows-style, all out of the box, all with built in components, and you shouldn’t need to know.
GNOME doesn’t support adjustments at all. The GNOME developers know what is best and it is your role to take it and be grateful. Please send them some money, BTW, the company that employs most of them is down to its last $20Bn.
KDE supports approximately 42,000 combinations and the fun is in tweaking 86 options in 27 tabs in 15 dialog boxes (and 6 settings files) to get it just so and that’s what they like.
Xfce does all the important ones of KDE and it does it in about half a dozen settings total, but the Xfce folks take the position that you shouldn’t need to know and will help you, and that’s a good thing and is to be encouraged.
A good way to welcome a new user in is to make it easy for them to get the desktop layout comfy. If you already know what you like, as I do, you do it once and never again. This is a good intro. It’s not a toy to be played with forever. It’s a one-time convenience, and it’s beneficial.
P.S. for the curious, from a default Xfce layout, here’s what I do:
- Unlock the main panel. Move to the left. Set to Deskbar layout, 4 rows.
- Move all the icons off the bottom dock panel to below the start menu on the main one.
- Remove the dock panel.
- Ensure Whisker menus is on, bound to Super, 1 panel row, icon and text.
- Uncheck square icons in the system tray. Add a weather control, CPU monitor.
- 2 row clock, time then date, remove logout button because it’s on the Whisker menu anyway.
- Final adjustments, maybe a few separators for spacing it out a bit.
Takes 10-15min now. With Panel Profiles, it takes 5.
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2 ● ludditus:
No Bedrock choice without KDE!
Everyone who wants to replicate the Windows paradigm (NOT WINDOWS ELEVEN, and no macOS contamination, but the UI metaphor of Win95/98/2k and eventually of Win7) should look for KDE, as I did. (Although MATE and XFCE can also be configured with a single, bottom panel.)
And Mint is the only mainstream distro to refuse KDE to its users. So this article is complete BS. Sorry, Liam, I appreciate you so much, just not this time.
And no, the “fix” for the increasingly wider screen is NOT a vertical panel. Also, the icons-only taskbar in Win10 and Win11 has contaminated KDE too, but I always switch from Icons-only task manager to the classic one. Why are people becoming so dumb all of a sudden? The best invention Microsoft has ever made is the Win95 metaphor, in which you see, without moving a finger, the titles of the windows of all active UI programs. Why would people prefer the macOS-style of plain icons with colored dots or underlines, which give you ZERO information?!
I’d also notice that KDE displays the captions on the taskbar much smarter than Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE: when there are only 3-4-5 windows, they’re wider. In C/M/X, they’re too narrow, regardless of how much unused space is available!
The only reason one would want to use the Icons-only task manager: when a vertical panel is used. Otherwise, it’s just brain damage propagated from macOS to Win10 to KDE.
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3 ● demon driver:
When KDE was created in 1998, they tried to offer a Windows lookalike desktop for Linux with some consistency across applications, and that was good, even though it deterred many Microsoft sceptics back in the day who would have been more sympathetic with a recreation of the concept that didn’t also copy the looks.
Today, KDE suffers from far too many options scattered across illogically and unsystematically organized menus. If I as a software guy and veteran nerd feel overwhelmed and disoriented with a DE, I’m not sure it would be a good suggestion for an average Windows user looking for an alternative.
Cinnamon, even more than Xfce or MATE, is a much easier and more logical transition from Windows, and operating it is much more intuitive for someone who just wants a classic desktop metaphor that looks decent and is easy to operate and walk through.
Linux Mint KDE used to be a flavour until Mint 18.3, by the way. It was dropped because it had “very little in common” with their then-present project, or so they said back then.
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4 ● Doctor Syntax:
Today, KDE suffers from far too many options scattered across illogically and unsystematically organized menus
I’m a bit puzzled by this.
Do you mean the application menu hierarchy? That’s editable so the organisation can be whatever you find logical.
System settings – there are a few oddities but not many that strike me. I can’t see why Appearance and Personalisation are separate but Users and Startup&shutdown really should not be in those but in System Administration. At first it does appear illogical that Applications is in Personalisation but it has to be remembered that this is intrinsically a multi-user system and different users may have different choices here.
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5 ● ludditus:
If I as a software guy and veteran nerd feel overwhelmed and disoriented with a DE
I learned Pascal under CP/M, and I’ve used various Unices, so I’m not that young either. I don’t feel overwhelmed with a DE. Maybe with systemd.
I’m not sure it would be a good suggestion for an average Windows user looking for an alternative.
Considering the average Windows user a bit dumb is not nice, you know.
Cinnamon, even more than Xfce or MATE, is a much easier and more logical transition from Windows
No, it’s not.
for someone who just wants a classic desktop metaphor
Not classic enough. MATE, with a single panel, as it’s preconfigured in Mint, is “more classic” (so to speak).
Cinnamon, in my view, has configuration dialogs that make a terrible waste of lateral space. Yes, screens are wider than 20 years ago, but Cinnamon is so poorly designed that it gives me cramps.
that looks decent and is easy to operate and walk through.
Try walking through Windows’ Control Panel, and then say again that KDE is disorienting. I cannot find anything in Windows, and even the search results are confusing.
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6 ● Liam Proven:
[Author here]
should look for KDE, as I did
No. I try it regularly. For me it is a confusing overcomplicated mess, but the deal breaker is that it does not honour Windows keystrokes. That, like it or not, is the standard.
Alt+space, X should maximise a window. Alt-space, C close it. Ctrl+Esc open the start menu. Ctrl+Shift+Esc, task manager or replacement thereof. Windows+R, run. Windows+D, desktop. Windows+E, Explorer. Win+(1-9) open the _n_th app pinned to the panel.
Even Unity got this right. Xfce does. MATE mostly does. KDE gets it all wrong and worse still has invented its own.
I want to see _one_ start menu, with config options, not 3. I want to see _one_ file manager, not a choice of 2 or more. _One_ text editor, etc. etc.
I want a global option to disable all hamburger menus and CSDs.
KDE is 26. It is time to grow up, and abide by existing UI conventions and standards, not keep on inventing new shiny and accommodating every developer who wants to add their own new app.
I want less, but working better and more compliant. KDE persists in offering more half-done options in each release, and for me, and for many Windows-alike Linux distros, this rules it out of contention.
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7 ● ludditus:
the deal breaker is that it does not honour Windows keystrokes. That, like it or not, is the standard.
You are probably about 4 years older than I am. You have worked with EVERYTHING. Can’t your memory muscle adapt to 2-3 sets of standards? How can that be? Your brain could accommodate Czech and other foreign languages, but not some keystrokes? C’mon.
I want to see _one_ start menu, with config options, not 3. I want to see _one_ file manager, not a choice of 2 or more. _One_ text editor, etc. etc.
Speak for yourself. I want FeatherPad as a Notepad replacement, then I’m happy to have installed, simultaneously, Kate, Geany, Sublime Text, VSCodium, PyCharm, ReText, and more. Just in case. Sometimes, a specific task can be performed easier or better in a specific app, so I want to have CHOICE.
https://ludditus.com/2024/07/25/what-you-need-to-know-when-using-my-custom-almalinux-kde-iso/#8
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Can’t your memory muscle adapt to 2-3 sets of standards?
Why should it have to? People who regularly uses multiple systems and DE’s (like Liam and many of his readers), don’t want to have to stop and think about which keystrokes do task X in environment Y. KDE is all about customization it seems, so why not at least give an easy option to switch to the more standard keystrokes?
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9 ● Liam Proven:
You are probably about 4 years older than I am.
I’m 56 (you know). Maybe.
You have worked with EVERYTHING. Can’t your memory muscle adapt to 2-3 sets of standards?
It can and it used to, but you know what? Life is too short.
I wrote about this in 2021:
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/17/tilde_text_editor
And again this year:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua
In the 1980s I was willing to learn multiple UIs because there wasn’t a single standard yet, and it was useful to be able to run multiple programs with unique strengths. But the 1990s brought standardisation and harmony and it stopped being necessary.
Today, the advantages offered would have to be _extraordinary_ and they are not. Nothing offers me such a compelling proposition that it’s worth undoing a third of a century of muscle memory. I don’t write code. I don’t need Emacs or Vi. But by using the standard Windows/CUA keyboard interface, I can operate my whole computer, under multiple different OSes, at the speed of thought as the Vim-heads like to boast.
Doesn’t matter how well they know Vim, and how fast they are. CUA means I can operate *ALL PROGRAMS* that fast, even ones I have never seen before.
I am not learning the unique keystrokes of what is in my considered professional opinion a substandard Win98 ripoff when I have better, faster, more attractive, more elegant, FOSS desktops available to me that don’t hurt my eyes to look at.
If KDE was amazing, sleek, elegant, blazing fast and beautiful with it — still no, because I have perfectly good tools I like already.
But it’s not amazing. KDE 1 was in 1998 and I used it, but not now.
It’s not sleek: it’s bloated with pointless cruft, from two “help/about” menu options on upwards.
It’s not elegant: Corel Linux OS was pretty elegant, Xandros was pretty elegant, but since 3 it’s been big and overcomplicated, and 4 made it worse, 5 is only slightly better than 4, and 6 is no better than 5.
It’s not blazingly fast: with about a dozen mouse clicks to move the panel to one screen edge, it’s cumbersome and sluggish _even compared to Windows 10_.
It’s *definitely* not beautiful. It is, in my personal and entirely subjective opinion, rather ugly. Not as bad as 4 but only because the ugly tints and gradients were replaced with a flat look. It has ugly textures, ugly fonts, ugly icons, ugly wallpaper, and I am not keen on the dragon mascot either.
And it doesn’t do what I want. It has a million options but only the ones its users want. I want the title bar down the side, like wm2. I want a single panel that can span 2 screens. I want no CSD anywhere and a global option to remove it. I want a fast keyboard-driven start menu like in NT4. I want hierarchies, not 2 columns. I want the start menu stored as a simple directory tree, like in Win9x and NT4, with directories and symlinks, with no database or any need for menu editors. I want single-click toggles to turn subfolders into menus like I could in Windows 20 years ago. What I do *not* want are three different shabby half-implemented start menu alternatives, none of which are as good as Win95 did _twenty-nine years ago_.
KDE is a copy of Windows done by people who did not know how to use Windows properly, who didn’t know how to configure it, how to tweak it, and who didn’t understand that the whole point of Windows 98 rendering Explorer content as HTML was Microsoft trying to defend itself from the US Department of Justice in a monopoly lawsuit. They copied the clumsy ugly hack Microsoft did to justify bundling IE4 into Windows 98 because they failed to understand why it was there, and that this was a *bad thing* to copy not a clever idea to steal.
Speak for yourself.
I always do in the comments. In copy I try to be neutral and dispassionate, but here, I do not feel I need to.
Choice is good, sure, but the Unix philosophy is “do one thing and do it well”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
This is wise. KDE does the opposite.
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10 ● ludditus:
Choice is good, sure, but the Unix philosophy is “do one thing and do it well”.
Nope. It’s “Make each program do one thing well.” Except that KDE is not a program; it’s an environment.
Look, I was a fan of XFCE. I had my reasons to prefer Dolphin, and KRename, and Okular, and so on, so in the end I said: why not use KDE? I’m using a mixture of Qt and GTK software anyway! And XFCE is severely incomplete (with apps that have not reach version 1.0), and with CSD and non-CSD apps, some taken from MATE, so it’s too much like 20 years ago, but broken by CSD!
Do you know that Qt fixes an exFAT bug in the Linux kernel, and thus only Dolphin has that bug fixed, of all the UI file managers? (PCManFM-Qt uses file operations from Gtk, inherited from PCManFM, only the UI is Qt.)
Do you know in how many file managers, when you copy a huge file and hit Cancel, so a gracious cancellation, instead of having the copied portion deleted (say, fclose() followed by remove()), you end up with a truncated file, and you don’t even know it’s a truncated one unless you compare the sizes? Nautilus/Files, Nemo, Caja, Thunar, PCManFM, PCManFM-Qt , they all leave the broken incomplete file. Dolphin is the only one that doesn’t! Now, tell me WHEN did the file manager in Windows leave you with incomplete files? Again, not forced closing, just Cancel or ESC or whatever.
You know a lot of things I don’t know. I know a lot of things you don’t know. I could tell you about a certain vulnerability in Thunar that Sean Davis didn’t notice, despite being the Xubuntu Technical Lead and an Xfce Core Developer. That vulnerability (unimportant by me, but I’m not the judge of CVEs) still exists in PCManFM-Qt and PCManFM, and you know why? Because nobody checked those file managers to see how they behave.
There are literally tons of crap in everything people use. They’re too superficial to care. I could tell you about many things, but nobody is interested in what I have to say. They don’t read my blog, which is fine per se, as it’s cheaply hosted and it would crash.
But I’m stunned how people with a long experience in Linux can be so superficial. Oh, I could list how often a Linux kernel update broke something for me. For an old laptop from 2016 it broke for eternity the audio jacks (because they’re two). I know the patch, I know what models it was supposed to fix, but it did so by breaking another model.
I only report bugs when there’s a decent chance of getting fixed. I had in the past simple bugs closed after 8 or 12 years because they were obsolete, but not fixed (one was in gedit, and it was terribly stupid). Today, if I can’t find the reason of the bug in the sources, I don’t even bother, because I know that nobody will.
Linux is in shambles, but I can’t use FreeBSD for a number of practical reasons. Oh, but people get ecstatic about Linux Mint! Liam, you know as well as I do that the romantic age of Linux is gone. About 500 distros have died. We only have a bunch of reasonably working distros nowadays, and their quality is pathetic.
So if I’m using AlmaLinux 9 with KDE on my home computers, this is for me the lesser evil. The crap that stinks less than Windows. But it’s not much improved in the last 25 years (I only know Linux since 1994, and in the first years with it, it seemed to be improving). The BSDs are really almost as they were in 1996-1998. What a pathetic world.
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11 ● LionelB:
I didn’t know whether to up- or downvote this. On the one hand, I’m not at all a fan of KDE (too much bloat for me), on the other hand, I do very much agree with:
The best invention Microsoft has ever made is the Win95 metaphor*, in which you see, without moving a finger, the titles of the windows of all active UI programs**.
And as you say, you can (and I do) get that with Xfce, and I suspect probably Cinnamon and Mate as well.
I’d also notice that KDE displays the captions on the taskbar much smarter than Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE: when there are only 3-4-5 windows, they’re wider.
You get that with the Fluxbox WM, which is my go-to set-up.
*Was that really a Win95 innovation?
**Especially with multiple workspaces, where you are less likely to have a zillion windows open on any given workspace.
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12 ● ludditus:
And as you say, you can (and I do) get that with Xfce, and I suspect probably Cinnamon and Mate as well.
You definitely can, but it works better in KDE. It’s better implemented, I’d say.
You get that with the Fluxbox WM, which is my go-to set-up.
Fluxbox, Openbox, etc., are not DEs. At some point, I needed fixes for some tearing that appeared in specific generations of Intel graphics, and I could apply those fixes with KWin. So Lubuntu was out of the question, because it used Openbox, which couldn’t care less about that specific hack.
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13 ● LionelB:
Fluxbox, Openbox, etc., are not DEs.
No, sure, though you do get some desktop furniture with Fluxbox (task bar, system tray, menus, multiple workspaces, dock area, date/time app, etc.) which is all I need, and otherwise it stays out of your way.
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14 ● ludditus:
you do get some desktop furniture with Fluxbox (task bar, system tray, menus, multiple workspaces, dock area, date/time app, etc.)
Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) was nice, even if nobody liked FLTK. I did.
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15 ● LionelB:
Interesting. I coded a bit of FLTK many years back and found it a decent toolkit (I think I went with wxWidgets eventually), don’t know if it is used much these days. Wasn’t even aware of EDE, though.
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16 ● Liam Proven:
Wasn’t even aware of EDE, though.
I have mentioned it before:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/linux_desktop_feature
AFAICS it has not been updated in years.
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17 ● Liam Proven:
P.S.
when there are only 3-4-5 windows, they’re wider.
That is a *bad thing*. It is poor design because it defeats muscle memory by making window button size a moving target, likely to spontaneously change when 1 more window opens. It’s the opposite of a good, thoughtful, well-considered design. It’s a bad design by developers thinking “hey we can squeeze more info in here if we let the controls change size on the fly” which is the epitome of the core design problem of KDE all over. It’s creeping featurism: the unchecked desire to put more twiddly bits in, rather than exercising control and discretion and restraint and embracing “less is more”.
Your example is _why I think the design is bad_.
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18 ● ludditus:
With all due respect, your thinking is wrong. As the number of windows increases and GROUPING IS DISABLED, guess what? In all those desktop environments, they’ll get NARROWER. And, since they’ll get narrower anyway, why not start with them a little bit wider?
Think again. You literally didn’t think it through.
KDE DOES NOT start with those labels 1/5 of the screen’s width. But they’re wider, so that what you read is meaningful. Cinnamon starts with a window at 1/12 width. I repeat, as they’ll get more numerous, they’ll stretch ANYWAY, so it’s impossible to use your muscle memory and say “I’ll hit window number 4 with my eyes closed”.
You have a pathological hatred of KDE. I disliked KDE for many years, then I used REASON.
Now I hate GNOME with a passion.
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19 ● Liam Proven:
You have a pathological hatred of KDE.
“*I* make decisions based on reason and experience.
*You* make decisions based on preconceptions and bias.
*He* is a pathological bigot.”
This is not hard.
There is stuff you like that I do not like. There are things you want that I do not want. Some of these are important to you.
There is stuff I like and want that you do not want. Some of these things are important to me.
What you want does not match what I want. That does not make you right and me wrong, or me right and you wrong.
Try to understand that the reasons I have carefully spelled out to you are highly important to me and are deal breakers.
Your benefits are of no interest or importance to me, but the things I list, that you’ve never noticed, are paramount for me.
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20 ● LionelB:
That is a *bad thing*. It is poor design because it defeats muscle memory by making window button size a moving target, likely to spontaneously change when 1 more window opens.
With respect, I don’t believe this is a one-size-fits-all issue. There will always be ergonomic trade-offs. So for me, it is important that I can read an (untruncated) window title at a glance – e.g., a document title. Since I use multiple workspaces and generally not too many open windows per workspace, the window “button” sizes may change, but they are large targets (I rarely miss!)
That just happens to suit the way I work. YMMV.
(I am not a fan of KDE as it happens, but for different reasons.)
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If you visit the Cinnamon Spices page, you’ll see that there are a number of themes which include program titles with the icons in the taskbar, so there’s no need to fully switch desktop environments.
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22 ● ludditus:
there are a number of themes which include program titles with the icons in the taskbar
This has absolutely nothing to do with any theme, and you’re absolutely not knowing what you’re talking about. You didn’t understand the issue at hand. Go away.
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“Go away.”
No.
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24 ● Arkeo:
KDE is the worst DE of them all, on a clean install I don’t even have Qt installed at all.
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25 ● ludditus:
Linux is actually faster accessing NTFS volumes with the kernel-mode driver than Windows.
The Paragon ntfs3 driver destroys data. The Linux kernel team has not acknowledged that, but you’ll find a few reports. I have lost data myself because of this stupid driver that shouldn’t have tainted the kernel!
Since then, I’m back to ntfs-3g. Slower, but safer.
People assume that, if something is in the kernel, it works well. It doesn’t. I wish they stopped screwing the kernel with random code.
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“The Paragon ntfs3 driver destroys data.”
[citation needed]
No, seriously, I would love to see some concrete information about this issue. I did a quick Web search, and I see assertions of data corruption but without a lot of information. Since the kernel maintainers appear to be set to remove FUSE driver support from kernel 6.9, it seems like they would want to know about data-eating bugs in the kernel driver.
This thread contains a huge back-and-forth regarding what errors the NTFS3 driver throws vs. the NTFS-3G (FUSE) driver. I honestly don’t have the technical knowledge to fully tease out the truth, but it seems like a number of commenters in that thread and other locations are fingering multiboot scenarios and dirty/corrupted NTFS volumes for the data loss issue. I agree that the driver should perhaps handle the issue better, but it’s not clear that the driver is fundamentally at fault.
Amusingly, the thread above ends with the following note from the moderators:
Closed due to pointless dogmatism.
If anything will be epitaph of Open Source, it’s this.
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27 ● ludditus:
No, seriously, I would love to see some concrete information about this issue.
It destroyed my data repeatedly. And I’m not dumb. I never EVER encountered such a thing in 40 years of using computers and 30 years of using Linux. Because I was using the FUSE driver since I needed NTFS write access in Linux, and common sense otherwise.
I posted about it in this chapter on my blog:
https://ludditus.com/2024/05/27/epic-linux-saga/#12
The other references, as anecdotal as they are, they’re … for reference only. I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO ME.
Again, I have used dozens and dozens of distros in the last 30 years. You don’t know me, and you shouldn’t know me. You don’t trust me, but you should. I’m anything but dumb. I have never lost data in 40 years, not even from failing floppy disks, not from malware, but I lost data because of the Paragon NTFS driver. To trust the ntfs3 driver in Linux is like trusting Satan (which, of course, doesn’t exist).
It claimed to have copied an entire folder structure, and it took some time (SSD, but still…), but the files were gone, and unrecoverable after unmounting. No tool on Earth could find them.
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I appreciate you being civil this go-round, and thank you for providing some of the backstory. I guess that’s an issue for me to be aware of while I’m still dual-booting.
/me toddles off to run chkdsk.
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“I appreciate you being civil this go-round…”
This is what it looks like when ludditus is being civil? Holy hell. I’d hate to see what they are like on a bad day.
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30 ● Missing Semicolon:
“Since the kernel maintainers appear to be set to remove FUSE driver support from kernel 6.9”. So what about the other FUSE drivers? Are we only allowed to have file systems in the kernel now?
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@Missing Semicolon:
I was speaking specifically of the NTFS FUSE driver. I’m not sure about any other filesystems running in userspace.
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32 ● Mockup1974:
Should’ve just switched to Plasma and create a “Kubuntu, but done right” kind of distro. I mean Ubuntu itself already tames GNOME and makes it usable, newbies don’t care about what Snap is or does, and Gtk3 will get killed one day, meaning big problems for Cinnamon/Xfce/Mate and any other sane desktops that still use server-side decorations.
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End of the selection. Look at the thumbs-up and thumbs-down numbers. (I didn’t vote, as this is not a social network. Or maybe it is. Everything is a social network these days.) Sometimes, they seem to represent a healthy variety of preferences, hence a decent spread between agreement and disagreement. Some other times, they seem to suggest that a lot of Linux users are dumb as shit.
I hate people.
I might show in a later post a tiny example of how Linux Mint adds bugs to Ubuntu instead of fixing them. Yes, it adds some XApps, and Warpinator, and Hypnotix, and uniform theming across three desktop environments (a horrible, bland theming). But it also adds bugs.
As a lonely commenter said, maybe they should have made a proper Kubuntu. But Clem being busy with Cinnamon, the unnecessary bastard that’s sort of a next-gen MATE, it won’t happen. Not in a million years.
●
BTW, they didn’t seem to care about a number of issues I mentioned.
Nobody asked about that exFAT bug in the Linux kernel for which only Dolphin has a fix (inherited from Qt; I repeat, PCManFM-Qt only uses Qt for the UI, but file operations are using GTK, as inherited from PCManFM). I could have given them a quick explanation.
Nobody cared that Thunar doesn’t necessarily get security patches (details here) during the lifetime of a Xubuntu/Ubuntu release; except when this is about a LTS one that gets a backport from the next non-LTS release, should this happen to include that patch. (Mint is Ubuntu LTS.)
Nobody realized how outrageous it is to have all file managers except for Dolphin leave you with partial, broken files, upon canceling a file copy or move. Cancel or Escape should do what it has always done in Windows, i.e., to cancel the operation and delete the partial file. Only if you kill a program or if you press CTRL+C in MS-DOS or in any shell is the outcome of a partial copy acceptable. Again, Dolphin is the only file manager to do what Windows has been doing since 1991 or 1992 (I cannot vouch for Windows 3.0).
Generally speaking, dumb sheeple.
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Oh, I added one more comment:
33 ● ludditus:
Alt+space, X should maximise a window.
That’s a valid complaint. I did have this reflex since Win 3.1. Not anymore.
Ctrl+Shift+Esc, task manager or replacement thereof.
Oh, because Ctrl+Esc is so very different, eh?
Ctrl+Esc open the start menu
Isn’t the Windows key simpler? It does have this function in Windows too! Since Windows 95 and since your keyboard started featuring this Meta/Super_L/Mod4 key. Ctrl+Esc is so Windows 3.1. We’re almost 30 years past that.
Windows+D, desktop.
This one works as intended in KDE (Meta+D = Peek at Desktop).
Windows+R, run.
Windows and you just start writing, then press Enter, ignoring the search results. Windows+R is redundant in Windows too. It’s a relic of the past.
Win+(1-9) open the _n_th app pinned to the panel.
Very few people do that.
What you didn’t consider criticizing, because it would have meant to find faults even in XFCE, is another memory muscle thing from the times of Win 3.1: CTRL+F4. In Windows, it would close the current tab in the tabbed interfaces or the current window within an MDI application. But in most Linux DEs, CTRL+F4 is used to switch to the fourth virtual workspace or desktop, unless you explicitly disable that key binding. To me, this is the most “memory muscle-breaking” issue in Linux, or in Unices as a rule. But if you disable it in KWin, Firefox will honor it, which is important to me.
Your benefits are of no interest or importance to me, but the things I list, that you’ve never noticed, are paramount for me.
Let me list things that “you’ve never noticed” and that are most likely “of no interest or importance” to you, but they should matter.
Neither you nor the other readers (who instead bothered to vote “thumbs down”) seemed to care about a number of issues I mentioned.
- Nobody asked about that exFAT bug in the Linux kernel for which only Dolphin has a fix (inherited from Qt; I repeat, PCManFM-Qt only uses Qt for the UI, but file operations are using GTK, as inherited from PCManFM). I could have given them a quick explanation.
- Nobody cared that Thunar doesn’t necessarily get security patches during the lifetime of a Xubuntu/Ubuntu release; except when this is about a LTS one that gets a backport from the next non-LTS release, should this happen to include that patch. (Mint is Ubuntu LTS.)
- Nobody realized how outrageous it is to have all file managers except for Dolphin leave you with partial, broken files, upon canceling a file copy or move. Cancel or Escape should do what it has always done in Windows, i.e., to cancel the operation and delete the partial file. Only if you kill a program or if you press CTRL+C in MS-DOS or in any shell is the outcome of a partial copy acceptable. Again, Dolphin is the only file manager to do what Windows has been doing since 1991 or 1992 (I cannot vouch for Windows 3.0).
But I was already too aggressive for today’s snowflakes. “There is a large hole in the wall, this ship is going to sink!” “There is a large hole, Sir! Or else I won’t listen.”
Here’s the proof that Liam Proven has absolutely no common sense and no decency: Linux Deepin 23: A polished distro from China that Western desktops could learn from:
Long live comrade Xi!
Deepin looks like a combination of shitty Win11 UI with shitty Chinese design patterns that I’m familiar with from some Chinese Android apps. Add to this iOS-like translucency and shit, just like the retards like it to be.
And it’s Chinese. But don’t worry, next time Liam will recommend us a Russian distro.