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by teekert 1078 days ago
I was on KDE for a bit, love it on my ultrawide monitor with tiling. But on my laptop Gnome is so sweat. I have a 2nd hand HP ProBook and I swear, for the very first time ever in my Linux life the trackpad feels like my MacBook trackpad. 3 fingers swipe up, overview of windows, another swipe is app grid, swipe left right, move to other desktops. I really find the whole experience very smooth and I enjoy it a lot (all Wayland, on NixOS).

I have suspend/wake working well so far, USB-C charging + screen + all peripherals via 1 USB-C cable, all "media" buttons work. And this is still on 8 GB of ram (soon the 2x32 GB will arrive ;)), I haven't even heard the fans so far! I'm on Teams, camera works, nobody would even know I'm on Linux if it wasn't for my constant evangelizing!

I'm really impressed (yeah, I know, Linux people easily are when it comes to desktops, basically we're impressed if things work).

I did enable AppIndicator. Solaar, NextCloud and Tailscale all really require it to be considered functional. I don't understand why that is not a standard thing (it is on many distros though).
2 comments
lproven 1078 days ago
> Gnome is so sweat

... Sweet?

I don't like GNOME. I don't like GNOME accessories; I hate CSD and hamburger menus and that big empty wasted top panel. I want more things vertical, while GNOME is moving its vertical workspace-switcher to horizontal.

The Cosmic tiling is good. That's an improvement. GNOME's window management sucks, and this is better.

I also really don't like systemd-boot and it broke one of my laptops severely.

So, I am happy that it is good for you, but it is not something I'd choose.

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teekert 1078 days ago
Arg yeah sweet indeed, pronounciation is just no guide at all in English (neither in Dutch btw)...

...Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height, Put, nut, granite, and unite. ... [0]

And I do agree on the very high amount of pixels wasted in the top panel, expecially on an ultrawide monitor, something MacOS does better. On a laptop screen it's ok for me.

[0] http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

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lproven 1078 days ago
:-D A wonderful poem. When I was a TEFL teacher, I sometimes tortured advanced students with it.

As for the panel... well, Dash-to-Panel tames it:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

... but it does not handle vertical mode well. E.g. Status icons should be in rows, not a single column.

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SSLy 1078 days ago
Do you have a git repo somewhere with your configuration.nix?
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teekert 1077 days ago
Not yet, but it's fairly simple, I now have 1 week of NixOS experience ;) I installed with the graphical installer, choose Gnome, added some specific things like darkmode and many packages to the configuration.nix. Then I read about Home Manager and put packages under there.

OOTB the Gnome install was as good as can be. It's a nice way to play with Nix, batteries included.

Right now I need to deploy a server used for bioinformatics, and I need Conda... And that is a pain [0], so again I'm on the fence: Deploy Ubuntu or NixOS and persevere... I'm thinking Ubuntu, then perhaps later in the learning curve I go for Nix or perhaps just make a container to use on Nix.

[0] http://www.jaakkoluttinen.fi/blog/conda-on-nixos/

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SSLy 1077 days ago
deploy ubuntu or fedora, and run nix with home-manager. that gives you devshells/devbox which you can migrate into at your own pace
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teekert 1077 days ago
Yes, I just did that, thanx for the tip :)
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