| I agree with everything the author said. I could have written that. But having said that, I’d add this. I’m astounded at the customization that’s still possible. Gnome-tweaks still works on Ubuntu 23.04. I moved the activities bar to the bottom and merged it with the dock (some extension). I changed the fonts to Helvetic’s everywhere in the system ui — just gnome tweaks. Only annoyance was that I had to create a symlink to make the Firefox snap see the fonts I had installed. It’s pretty cool that hidpi
even works. I now think things like dbus are intrinsic to the problem of IPC for GUIs. —— I can see why snap exists. Its worth it to make it hard for a random ‘curl | sudo bash’ from breaking important programs. But yes it’s ridiculous that I can’t update Firefox snap while it’s still open. And that it won’t auto update if I just close Firefox after getting the pop up about needing an update and wait a few seconds. I’m optimistic that will happen. Even in 22.04 I could entirely disable the dock using the same tools to disable third-party extensions. —— I’m a huge systemd hater. But I recently noticed it has something to run an arbitrary one-off program as a unit with all of the isolation/logging facilities that provides. It’s a pretty great from a tech perspective. So I’ve softened my criticism somewhat. :) —— It’s amazing how compatible the various distributions still are. I’ve concluded these problems are not easy. The complexity in modern Linux is probably fine within a constant factor (analogy with time complexity — I’ll edit to clarify). If we didn’t have multiple daemons etc we would have a single giant “unified” system like systemd for gui also — like windows. —- Finally, I think if we really want a simple gui stack we need to: 1. Get rid of graphical login and go back to VT login + startx. 2. User switching by alt-ctrl-f2 + startx. 3. Screen lock performed by actually logging out using the gui equivalent of tmux. (Jwz’s post linked here was educational.) —— Thanks for reading so far. And THANK YOU Ubuntu and Red Hat for keeping the flame still burning. PS: one final pet peeve. Why the heck does Ubuntu think it’s ok to half-ass booting other OS’s? Was super impressed that Oracle Linux (RHEL clone) actually listed all my OS’s and booted all of them after install. My hat is off to you. |
Agreed, it really could use some kind of staging installation that it can quickly switch to.
> And that it won’t auto update if I just close Firefox after getting the pop up about needing an update and wait a few seconds. I’m optimistic that will happen.
This does seem to happen now. I'll get a notification that something has an update ready, I'll close it, and a few moments later a notification that the update has been installed and I can click that notification to relaunch it.