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by fulalas 1534 days ago
> But can I gently suggest separating the opinion out from the facts? As an exercise, you might try moving your opinion to a section at the end and limiting the rest of the article to neutrally reporting facts.

Thanks for your kind words. :) I see what you mean, but I don't think there's such a thing as an unbiased text. What we chose to talk and focus is already biased. And that's OK. What seems odd, in my opinion, is pretending we're impartial when in fact we simply can't -- the press, for instance. It doesn't imply, as you said, that by being biased we're adding false information.

> Yes, there are still some inconsistencies with GTK3 and GTK4+Libadwaita, but that is expected, if you update your toolkit from one major version to another.

My main point with this article is criticizing a final release with all these issues. Worse than that: pretending it's a good product when in fact it's worse than previous versions in many objective ways.

> Sure there are maybe some bugs and/or leftovers from the GTK3-GTK4 transition, but same as above, it will be fixed sometime.

The fact that you accept that is exactly what I talked about in this other article: https://medium.com/@fulalas/how-bullshit-has-dominated-the-t...

> systemd is standard for linux

It's not standard. It's just the most popular because people are lazy and keep imitating each other. Although it seems fine to have systemd as an option, it's ridiculous to have it as a hard dependency.

> Webkitgtk is installed on every GNOME-Desktop for other things

Apart from distros that ship Epiphany browser, what else do distros use WebKit2Gtk for?

> But calling it "dubious" is not that appropriate, as they always have a sense.

It's dubious because it's a huge library that takes 1 hour to build and all this just for one silly feature. And again: there's no official way to simply not have it.

> GDM isn't coupled to systemd AFAIK

Just take a look at GDM meson build script and you'll see: systemd_dep = dependency('systemd') libsystemd_dep = dependency('libsystemd')

The fact that you're running it on a non-systemd distro is probably due to an unofficial patch (just like the one I applied in Slackware/Porteus).

2 comments

>Just take a look at GDM meson build script and you'll see: systemd_dep = dependency('systemd') libsystemd_dep = dependency('libsystemd')

This is only required to build it, not run it. It should work fine with elogind as a drop-in replacement, since elogind is API compatible.

>Although it seems fine to have systemd as an option, it's ridiculous to have it as a hard dependency.

No this is wrong, it depends on logind for a very real reason. Managing the seats isn't secure without logind or similar functionality. If they supported operating without that it would compromise security. And if you're on a single seat system and really don't care about security, you might as well disable logind and gdm altogether, and launch your user session straight from the VT.

> Apart from distros that ship Epiphany browser, what else do distros use WebKit2Gtk for?

https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/ApplicationsGtk: Epiphany, Yelp, Devhelp, SWT, Evolution, Pidgin, etc....

> It's dubious because it's a huge library that takes 1 hour to build [...]

How often do you build GNOME-Control-Center with all of its dependencies? Sure, if you are using Gentoo/LFS, that is absolutely expected, but then you can afford to do one (maybe minor) patch to do it yourself.

> The fact that you accept that is exactly what I talked about in this other article

Yes, maybe one or two things like the increased memory usage are legit regressions, but GNOME is doing far less breakage/inconsistencies in a major version update than some multi-billion dollar company like Samsung or Microsoft.

> Better believe they do all this on purpose, trying to discourage anyone from changing their masterpiece. (In the article)

This is really the wrong conclusions, if extensions depend on some internals then you can expect them to break. That is like depending on some undocumented kernel feature of Windows 7 and then complaining that it is not there anymore.