I use Dash to Panel to show taskbar icons for running applications, with the topbar moved to a sidebar to save valuable vertical real estate: https://imgur.com/tc0IbuM.png
I use the Workspaces Indicator extension to keep track of which one I'm in, but I use workspaces to focus on specific tasks using groups of applications... not an individual workspace for each application. I normally only have one or two workspaces in use.
I disable the Activities button and Overview completely, with the Super key opening the Applications View directly.
I previously used Arc Menu to replace the Applications View, but dropped that when they added folders to the Application View. It's still a bit clunky, but it's usable now that is supports some minimal organization.
I run in a VM everyday for work since they won’t let me install Linux directly and Wayland and Pipewire have been problematic for me. Video playback is pretty choppy (which I don’t need, but it’s not a smooth experience) and if I want to get sound out of the VM I have to move back to pulse. It’s been pretty frustrating. Systems, though - haters can stuff it. Systemd is good.
+1 rsync, to an external harddrive. Superfast. Useful also in case I need a backup of a single file that I changed or deleted by mistake. Work files are also backed up to the cloud on mega.nz, which is very useful also for cross-computer sync. But I don’t trust personal files to the cloud.
Don’t forget that a local backup is as bad as no backup at all in the case of a fire or other disaster. Not trusting the cloud is fine (though strong encryption can make this very safe), but looking into some kind of off site backup is important. Could be as simple as a second hard drive that you swap out weekly stored in a safe deposit, or a nas at a trusted friends house.
Completely agree! I didn’t mention this, but I keep the back-up hard drive in another apartment.
This reminds me of a story that happened in some university in England: they had two backups of some server in two different locations. One day one back-up drive failed, and the second failed the day after. Apparently they were the same brand & model. The moral was: use also different back-up hardware brands or means!
A qualified yes. I love the overview, which is, IMO, the most elegant way to launch applications and manage workspaces of any OS or DE. I also love the general look and fluidity of the environment and how it gets out out of your way when you don’t need it. But I preferred the pre-GNOME 40 vertical workflow to the new horizontal workflow.
There are also three must-have extensions that make GNOME usable for me:
AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support. GNOME can wish away tray icons if they want to, but the tray hasn’t gone away and is still necessary for some applications.
DashToDock. Makes app switching more accessible and adds right-click to close.
Gnome 4x UI Improvements. Increases the size of the workspace thumbnails so you can actually see what’s in them (like it was before GNOME 40).
Linux phones for me. Really impressed by how these things have come in the last 3-4 years, and now we're getting close to having at least one that's usable day-to-day (with plenty of rough edges, obviously). As soon as that happens I hope more people will decide to take the plunge and really start pushing things forward.
Yeah, the desktops are A++ for the last 10 years, it’s the phones that I’m excited to get to a similar level. I have one and it’s an expensive dust collector, I dust it off every few months and not much is changing
I’m just disappointed in the direction of UX they’re all taking. Ubuntu Touch was looking innovative and made me excited. Then that didn’t happen and now we just have a bunch of Android look-alikes but worse and buggier. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very glad to have GNU/Linux on a phone either way (especially NixOS Mobile), but I’m not excited to use one.
I don’t know if it’s just me getting older or if innovation in how we interface with technology has just sort of stagnated. In the past there was so much happening. New input methods (all kinds of pointer devices, joysticks, weird keyboards); graphical paradigms (floating windows vs tiling panes, tabs, stacking, grouping, virtual desktops); display technologies (vector graphics, convex screens, flat screens, projectors, VR headsets, e-ink); even machine architectures (eg Lisp machines) and how you interacted with your computer environment as a result.
As far as I can tell, VR systems are the latest innovation and they haven’t changed significantly in close to a decade. E-ink displays are almost nowhere to be found, or only attached to shitty devices (thanks, patent laws) - although I’m excited for the PineNote to eventually happen.
How do we still not have radial menus?! Or visual graph-like pipelining for composing input-outputs between bespoke programs?! We’ve all settled on a very homogenous way of interacting with computers, and I don’t believe for a second that it’s the best way.
Just want to add that I don’t think it’s a technological plateau. I think it’s capitalism producing shiny and “upgraded” versions of things that are easy to sell. Things that enable accessible and rapid consumption. High refresh rate, vertical high-resolution screens for endless scrolling in apps optimised for ads-scrolled-past-per-second. E-ink devices only good enough that you can clearly see the ads on them as you read your books. Things are just not made for humans. They’re made for corporations to extract value out of humans.
Having used Ubuntu touch for a bit I’m way more excited about gnome mobile. I just think it’s overall a better paradigm. Ubuntu had some neat ideas but overall it just didn’t do it for me.
A WINE type app but for OSX (or really just iOS) apps would be awesome to have both desktops and phone. Call it CIDER or something similar. I reckon the way Apple does their app stores these days it would be hard to actually get most software working, but I don’t think that alone is a showstopper.
Having both that and Waydroid on a phone would be pretty great. You might want to check out Darling for running Mac apps on Linux in the meantime, since its goals are similar to Wine's (but it's still early in development in comparison)
I second LinuxMint. When I first got in to linux I was (shamefully 😅) looking for something that was as close as possible to Windows and a turn key experience with both installation and app compatibility. Linux mint was what I settled on personally.
Fedora is a bit more complicated to install and configure, but once that’s done it’s not a difficult distro to use. And Silverblue makes it even easier to maintain than Mint as it’s immutable.
I use many extensions, but I also like this “keep the vanilla simple” approach of Gnome. Instead of trying to support many different workflows, it does only one, and it does it well. Everything is much more polished, compared to other DEs, simply because there’s less stuff. And support for extensions seems to be excellent, since there’s so many of them and they often work very well.
After my terrible experience with EndeavourOS and its atrocious community I'm distro hopping again. Currently having a bad time with Gnome Nobara, might try the KDE version but I do prefer something that doesn't require a reinstallation or complicated upgrade methods. Would be great it rolling distros wouldn't just self destruct though. Maybe I give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a chance. I heard it is supposedly more stable.
Well, the latest GRUB update bricked itself, not just for me but also others. I asked for help in their forums, as I am too stupid to chroot into encrypted btrfs filesystems, since the guides expect you to actually know what you're doing if you don't have a standard setup. A few community members then decided to troll & insult me and turn my support thread into a flame war instead. At the end a moderator closed it and removed pretty much everything to hide it away and said I should open another thread if I still wanted help. He sort of reprimanded them very slightly verbally but I don't think he took any actual action, so I decided that I don't want any more "help" and left.
The big irony of this case is also that the whole shit talking comes from the same people who constantly cry about Manjaro, but that thing ran for longer, with less issues and didn't actually suicided itself. I just switched myself because I wanted to change the file system and thought I'd try the highly praised EndeavourOS.
For OpenSUSE I'd need a bigger USB stick though, as I don't want to use the network image.
I use Arch because it is generally the easiest one I’ve found to pretend it’s 2010 again. Most Linux distributions are fine, but they’ve all been busy trying to solve problems I don’t have and accepting that some niche corner cases are fine to break. I’m just a niche corner case in general.
I have nothing against Wayland trying to modernize the UI stack, but if their answer to half the things I need is “well the compositor should do that” and the compositor doesn’t in fact do that yet, then I don’t want to use Wayland yet. I have nothing against Flatpak trying to modernize application packaging, but their current story for making applications available from a shell is effectively “why do you want to do that”, and well…I do want to do that, so I guess I don’t really want to use Flatpak yet.
That’s just me. Like I said…I’m a corner case. I understand that everyone else wants their computer to be an appliance that does what most people need without requiring any tinkering. And I’m not opposed to getting rid of the need to tinker. I’m too old to view tinkering to make something work as I thing I look forward to. I just view tinkering as a one-time cost with perpetual returns. I’m OK editing an xkb file to make some obscure input device work the way I want it to, because that might take me an afternoon, and then I just have that device do exactly what I want for the rest of its life with no further effort. Make it so that I never have to edit another xkb file again and I’ll be just fine. But you can’t do it by just saying, “no more needing xkbcomp because it doesn’t work anymore, and if you needed it, go see if the compositor vendor will write some code for you”.
While there is still lot limitation using only flatpak, snap or appimage, i believe that in the next decade they will slowly grow and end up that packaging nightmare.
So we can have an OS up to date, latest app without worrying any breakage. But i’m not well versed and dunno if people and dev will follow that road.
I think it’s time to ditch apt, dnf, rpm, aur. I imagine it would ease dev work but i’m not sure.
linux
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.