I think GNOME being minimalist with extensions is a good thing, but I disagree with what GNOME considers basic functionality or not. Two things that stick out:
an app launcher. Literally every other desktop on the planet has one, how this isn't considered basic functionality is beyond me. Give your grandparents a vanilla GNOME computer and tell them to get to Facebook and you will see how necessary this is in real time. Default should be dash-to-dock with intelligent autohide so you only see it when you need it. This would fulfill GNOME's hangups about it while also improving usability, so I fail to see a downside.
tray icons. GNOME treats background processes like bugs to be squashed. Let's just get real here for a second: sometimes you want programs to run in the background and sometimes you want to be able to see what they are doing in real time. I want my email clients to tell me when I get emails, I wan't my Nextcloud to tell me when there are sync issues, and I want Discord to tell me if I get DMs. This should be considered basic functionality.
an app launcher. Literally every other desktop on the planet has one, how this isn’t considered basic functionality is beyond me. Give your grandparents a vanilla GNOME computer and tell them to get to Facebook and you will see how necessary this is. Default should be dash-to-dock with intelligent autohide so you only see it when you need it. This would fulfill GNOME’s hangups about it while also improving usability, so I fail to see a downside.
GNOME does have a launcher, which works just like the launcher on Mac and Android. You can even select whether to see all your apps or only the most-used ones. I do agree that a taskbar/dock with intelligent auto-hide is a must, though (at least for my usability). That’s also not to say that some folks would rather have a Windows style launcher, and there are several DEs that provide that.
It's not really the same design philosophy as iOS and Android since those actually have the equivalent of desktop icons, which function like a taskbar app launcher. So even they have a way of launching apps without a secondary menu.
an app launcher. Literally every other desktop on the planet has one, how this isn’t considered basic functionality is beyond me. Give your grandparents a vanilla GNOME computer and tell them to get to Facebook and you will see how necessary this is. Default should be dash-to-dock with intelligent autohide so you only see it when you need it. This would fulfill GNOME’s hangups about it while also improving usability, so I fail to see a downside.
Gnome has one. You tap the super key for the dock, then again for the full app list. I see thiscoomplaint all the time, and it confuses me every time.
“I don’t like the default app launcher” or “I’d prefer an always visible dock” fine, but Gnome doesn’t have one? What?
tray icons. GNOME treats background processes like bugs to be squashed. Let’s just get real here for a second: sometimes you want programs to run in the background and sometimes you want to be able to see what they are doing in real time. I want my email clients to tell me when I get emails, I wan’t my Nextcloud to tell me when there are sync issues, and I want Discord to tell me if I get DMs. This should be considered basic functionality.
I both agree and disagree with this. Gnome is trying to make a unified system for this sort of thing, and that’s admirable, but until it works, we kinda need a notification tray.
For user data on my PC and on home server I mostly use Duplicacy. It is fast and efficient. All data backed up locally on NAS box over SFTP, and a subset of that data is backed up to S3 cloud storage.
I have a Mac, this one is using TimeMachine, storing data on NAS, then it’s synced to S3 cloud storage one a day.
And on top of that VMs and containers from home server are backed up by Proxmox built in tool to NAS. These mostly exclude user data.
Had a low end laptop, i believe it was lubuntu that i installed because i knew ubuntu was too bloated for that laptop. However I was not aware that it used snap and running firefox kick started the fans on that old laptop. Resouce hog seen and searching for firefox direct binary from apt seemed like a chore so i replaced with mint. Snaps automatically i did not want to deal with for old computers. Was happy with mints removal of snaps and it is very user friendly.
I use GNOME (under Fedora) on a laptop that sits at my right hand side, so I use it with only one hand. Using three-finger swipe to change workspaces is awesome - I usually use a workspace for each app, or sometimes two apps share a workspace, but I don’t worry about which one they are on, it’s so easy I just swipe until I find the one I want.
I use an extension to auto-reveal the dock when I go to the bottom of the screen. The default behavior of going to the top left of the screen, only to traverse all the way down to the dock at the bottom (or the right for workspaces), just seems really inefficient, especially on a touchpad.
I had it all tricked out with other extensions but they keep breaking with new GNOME releases, so I’ve mostly given up on that.
I usually bring up the dock by tapping the super key or using a three finger swipe up. I barely use the hot corner at all since Ifigursed that trick out.
I can live in GNOME and only use the defaults. It just takes time to adjust my workflow. What helps me with whatever I’m using or whatever I’m doing (in life), is to not focus on the things “missing” and just make the best of what I have (to work with).
Since two years I’m on KDE but not because I was fed up with GNOME. I just wanted to try something else. Pretty much using stock KDE only that I moved the taskbar to the top of the monitor.
I’m actually in the middle of deciding on a new distro, I’m trying to get away from Ubuntu/snap, but Debian 12 with LxQt or Xfce isn’t playing nice with my laptop. I just finished writing out Mint and Tumbleweed flash drives, gonna give them both a shot, but I’ve never really used openSUSE before.
Honestly, what I like about it started with the mascot. Otherwise, I like the fact that the rolling release has automatic testing to make sure it’s mostly reliable. Many people will also tell you how amazing YaST, their “control panel”, is. There’s definitely some stuff to get used to, like patterns and zypper. But, for a set and forget system, it’s hard to beat IMO.
Absolutely. Rolling distro with stability is very rare in the linux world. Opensuse TW is rock solid with updated software. I stopped distro hopping because of it.
Steam/Proton/Gamescope work outside of steamOS. Valve contributes to open source software, including linux amd drivers, that can easily be used outside of steamOS
As long as the game does not depend on Steam APIs for DRM (which is not Valve's fault), you can absolutely copy over the game files and play it outside of Steam, and even use Proton, although it's only officially supported in Steam.
sure except if you dont have access to your account you dont have access to your files which means you can get cut off at anytime for any reason. plus you need proprietary software to download those files in the first place afaik
While what you say is true it is also irrelevant to OPs question. SUSE is a corporation, so is canonical, so is mozilla’s corporate wing. can you clarify what your point was, pal?
edit: ah, i used the word corporate, fair point then. I meant in the sense of vendor lock to defacto standards rather than ‘corporate bad’.
Yeah not what I meant. Steam store is proprietary, you can’t move your games from them and they are the one that kick-started always online DRM and lootboxes and basically surfed the wave of online money laundering.
Corporation or not they are not your friend,never were and never will be.
They’ve made my life more enjoyable for reasonable cost, they bring vast amounts of resources to open source projects, and they deliver a platform that the least technical of people can use an enjoy. You’re free to say they are not your friend, but i won’t make perfect the enemy of good.
*freed from Microsoft's monopoly. Valve is still a corporation.
They have a lot of work to do before they can publicly release it. They really messed up basing it on Arch, IMO. Whereas Fedora has their Silverblue and SUSE has their CoreOS, Valve is really treading new ground with an immutable Arch distro. As it is now, the immutability is a major barrier to doing even very simple things. If I want to install an external driver on Silverblue, I just navigate to it's folder and run rpm-ostree install -driver-. SteamOS has no rpm-ostree equivalent, so you have to disable read-only which is more complicated and defeats the purpose of immutability anyway.
Valve will have to develop a bunch of brand new tools or (more likely) contract the work out, which as far as I know hasn't happened yet even 1.5 years after official release.
I guess my point is they made an easily accessible experience that is not frustrating to use for the average user which will help dispell the belief that linux is hard to use or that gaming is only for windows. They provided a console like experience and made it hard for normies to break it. You’re free to install silverblue on the thing. Personally i’ll probably re-image with arch later but for my use so far I haven’t really have to change anything. I haven’t run into an issue that couldn’t be solved with a flatpak yet.
As a gaming OS it works great, I'm just talking about what they need to do if they want it to be a successful desktop OS. Their plans are to release it as such so I hope they put in the necessary effort before that, because it's severely lacking right now.
Pi4 for HomeAssistant + audio streamer with a HiFiBerry card, with external SSD, google Coral stick for Frigate, and a Zwave stick. Running OSMC as OS.
Pi3b with OSMC as audio streamer
Small fanless HTPC on a six year old Apollo lake mini ITX mobo. Looking forward to upgrading this one soon with one of the recently announced alderlake N100 fanless mini itx mobos.
Kinda a tangent, but I’ve been using KDE plasma for a while and have really been enjoying it as a kinda in between of windows style desktop with some more gnome-like features (like workspaces, which tbh I’ve barely used). Of course both are super customizable, but it seems to me to maybe be a bit easier to customize Plasma? I’m not sure, I haven’t used stock gnome as much.
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