[Hz8NSD]

The guys who capable of improving modern Linux desktop are using Mac. So we are losing momentum in Linux desktop targeted software or facility.

They are developing in Mac but targeting server software or devops tools. So pretty modern, hot and bleeding edge things are happening in there but not desktop area.

GNOME - Always doing some experiment. No application. Just changing shell. No reliable usability. Call me when they are done. One good thing about GNOME is they care about beauty and elegance.

KDE - They just don't care about beauty of ... anything. But their applications are freaking featureful, reliable and developed by people who actually using it. I can feel they are dogfooding. I saw KF5 screenshots. They still don't care about beauty.

ElementaryOS(Pantheon) - Better than GNOME. They are having and developing actual application like geary and midori. You can feel they are actually dogfooding in contrast to GNOME couterpart.

Unity - I like Unity itself. Very long time user. But Canonical lied to us it's stable but actually alpha stage. One more bad thing is it smells vendor lock-in pretty much. Anyway pretty usable and has big ecosystem(community + vendor).

XMonad - At first time, it just looks like another tiling window manager. More I use it, it feels like 'custom desktop construction kit' if you don't mind learning about some haskell. As you all know, 'kit' is about fun and learning more than actual result. So I'm doing still this dumb like window manager ...

[andor]

ElementaryOS(Pantheon) - Better than GNOME. They are having and developing actual application like geary and midori. You can feel they are actually dogfooding in contrast to GNOME couterpart.

Are you trolling?

Geary is a GTK3 application. It's great that people from Elementary are helping out, but basically it's made for GNOME, using GNOME's toolkit, object system and programming language. Midori is part of XFCE, and also uses GTK and Vala. The GNOME project of course has their own browser, called Web (previously Epiphany).

http://www.gnome.org/applications/

[DanBC]

> The GNOME project of course has their own browser, called Web (previously Epiphany).

This move to the most generic names possible for the software makes searching for i formation mearly impossible for people who don't know the old names.

Problem with "Files"? Good luck searching for a solution and getting relevant results unless you know to include the word "nautilus".

"Package kit" has four different names in the version on Fedora 20.

[jarek]

Thankfully no one else names apps "Calendar" or "Mail"

[qznc]

I think the "vendor + generic noun" name schema is better than the "fantasy word" or "homonym" schema. So, I consider "Gnome Web" better than "Epiphany" for end users. It is also obvious that "Google Mail" and "Apple Mail" do similar things.

[DanBC]

But I've already given an example where it fails hard - "Fedora files" returns very many false hits.

Package Kit is called "Packages", "Software", "Software Install" and "Package Kit". Searching for "Fedora packages" or "Fedora software install" is obviously sub-optimal.

Here's a screenshot for the package kit name thing. Package in the Gnome menu bar, Software in the program's title bar, Software Install and PackageKit in the About dialog.

http://imgur.com/lylItwU

I would prefer the about dialog to contain a magic-word to be used when searching for that software. So, you can call the file manager "Gnome Files", but in the about dialog let people know that "Gnome Files" is "nautilus".

[kls]

Go is also a pretty good example, you have to search Golang to find results about Go on any engine other than Google's and I would assume I get results on Google, for Go, because I am profiled as a developer. I don't think a lot of thought is put into search brand-ability when it comes to some of these projects, until after the fact.

[snogglethorpe]

As long as they consistently include the "vendor +" part of the name, then fine... But do they?

[This was a huge annoyance with NextStep-derived projects like gnustep... Because they started from a proprietary system developed in relative isolation, all the apps had super generic names, and culturally they were loathe to make them any less generic. This resulted in a big mess on systems where multiple desktop environments are supposed to live in relative harmony...]

[mverwijs]

According to the Midori website (http://midori-browser.org/about/) it aligns with the XFCE philosophy, which is a far cry from 'being part of XFCE'. Instead, it states it is the default browser for 'ElementaryOS', so the assumption of GP is understandable.

[jkot]

> KDE - They just don't care about beauty of ... anything.

Perhaps it is just different aesthetics. Too often 'beaty' means: cut features to half, remove all icons and make huge empty dialogs.

[wooger]

KDE mainly has a a lack of decision making by the devs, & a lack of taste: the default theming, icons & panels are all fugly, and it takes a world of configuration work to make it look reasonable.

The appearance options are so complicated and multi-layered that it's hard to replicate simple changes, and even installing a pre-built theme isn't wholesale: Separate types of themes need to be applied in a few different places.

Then you finally have the problem of GTK apps: They look bad in 99% of KDE themes, and most users are using at least some GTK apps (Firefox, Chrome ).

[jkot]

Still better than other desktops, which do not even allow changing background color.

> GTK apps: They look bad in 99% of KDE themes

??? There is GTK engine which uses QT to render widgets. I really do not see any difference.

I use Chrome and only problem I have is new window placement, which is not really KDE problem. Chrome uses KDE dialogs and even KDE password manager.

[gnufied]

Chrome stopped being a GTK+ app long time ago. They switched to their own internal toolkit(http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/05/google-chrome-35-linux-ar...).

Also, I am not sure why you say Firefox looks ugly in KDE - http://album.gnufied.org/firefox.png . I have made 0 modifications in KDE/GTK theming and firefox looks just fine under KDE.

[felipeerias]

If you want to know the real problem, take ElementaryOS as an example: those people are doing some of the best UI work in GNU/Linux, yet their project is not economically sustainable and they have no option but to work on it on their spare free time.

[wooger]

Does noone but me look at Elementary and see it as an obvious aping of OS X, circa Snow Leopard?

[duaneb]

> Does noone but me look at Elementary and see it as an obvious aping of OS X, circa Snow Leopard?

I'd pay for that. Snow Leopard was the best iteration of OS X ever.

[eitland]

I actually found it much better. Then again I don't like using OS X although I'm happily recommending people trying it.

What Elementary does better for me: * works with standard free software (gimp etc) without looking ugly. * installs easily on standard hw, no need to use laptops with crippeled keyboards (fn/ctrl instead of ctrl/fn) * you can use home/end everywhere instead of a mix of ctrl+a, ctrl+e, fn+something, cmd+something depending ob application. (yes, Excel on Windows annoys me as well because ctrl + a doesn't work like it does in about every other app there, but on Windows this is unusual.)

[deong]

I haven't used it, but if it's good enough at aping Snow Leopard, I'll happily give you Yosemite for it.

[tvon]

I recommend downloading their ISO and trying it as a Live CD.

[deong]

I've been running Arch on my work box for the past several years, but I'm thinking I might move to something a bit less demanding of my time the next time I upgrade hardware. I've never been a fan of the way Ubuntu does their admin stuff (which I'm guessing Elementary inherits), but I might give it a look.

[wooger]

XMonad is nice, but the haskell stuff makes it a chore. There is a great tiling WM called SpectrWM https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/spectrwm that is a re-implementation of Xmonad in C, with a sane text config file.

Works great for me.

The devs are all current/former OpenBSD guys, including Marco Peereboom (Who forked OpenBSD recently).

[oneofthose]

I use awesomewm - it heavily relies on the Lua scripting language. It is great and I use it on all my computers - I feel so unproductive if I don't have awesomewm.

[codygman]

What would the advantages of spectrwm be if you could configure Xmonad with a text file?

[chriswarbo]

And thus the circle is complete! DWM (C) -> Xmonad (Haskell) -> SpectrWM (C)

[smoyer]

I finally got fed up enough with OS X to ditch it ... my rMBP now runs Mint and I've never loved it more. (Note that this is still the most amazing hardware I've ever been issued). I should also say that the Thunderbolt support is pretty new in the Linux kernel and took a bit of finagling to get working.

[lolo_]

How have you found it with retina? When I tried this, the retina support, particularly with chrome, was poor enough to make me switch back to OS X

[smoyer]

I'm running XFCE and haven't found any issues with retina support ... though it's a bit tiny. I'd be happy to run a few experiments if you're interested. Do you mean you were haven't problems with Google Chrome (I generally use Firefox) ... care to describe the problems?

As an aside, I think this is the Linux community in a nutshell - this offer of help is similar to many I've received in the past.

I don't generally comment on the whole systemd controversy but I'll make an exception. I have two points:

1) I think we probably do need something better than init.d scripts. Consistency would be a good thing and better sandboxing couldn't hurt.

2) I've had more issues with pulseaudio than any other piece of software on Linux ... asking for a new piece of software from the guy that wrote pulseaudio is like asking Ross Ulbricht to be in charge of OpSec for BofA.

(Yup ... I'm probably going to get spanked for this comment since he's a far better marketer and politician than he is software engineer)

[lolo_]

I was using Arch with gnome and the main issue was text size for certain applications, in particular at the time no chrome build, not even dev tip would render text in menus etc. at a non-tiny size (though I could zoom websites and get nice retina graphics)

I've now switched to having a dedicated linux desktop and just letting my mac continue to just be a mac for now. After many hours of effort there's a point where you wonder if it's worth it. I want to contribute to the linux kernel, so feel I should live in linux too, the desktop is my solution to this (if a bit extreme!)

Which offer of help? :) I am really undecided on the systemd thing. I read terrible diatribes against it, but a friend recently pointed me towards an article which contradicts many of these points - http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html. the reality is it's a lot faster for sure all other concerns aside. I'm glad arch defaults to using it as a user :)

[digi_owl]

Your friend did you a disservice, as that "myth busting" is attacking an army of straw men.

[lolo_]

I'm not so sure, I've seen these precise accusations made against systemd, so he is certainly responding to genuinely perceived flaws.

[maheart]

> Better than GNOME. They are having and developing actual application like geary and midori.

As stated above Geary is built on top of GNOME technology (Vala, EDS), and uses GNOME infrastructure (i.e. bug tracker and git.gnome.org) -- and I'd argue it's built for GNOME.

Mirdori is also developed independently, again building on top of GNOME technology (i.e. WebkitGTK). Based on this thread[1], "Midori does not securely handle unverified TLS certificates, so it's not safe to use for HTTPS."

[1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-Novembe...

[gaius]

Absolutely. I think of the window managers of my youth, Motif, 4dwm, DECWindows. Then I look at "modern" systems and for every step forward we have taken 2 or 3 steps back in usability, ease of programming, and even aesthetics. Hell I'd rather use - and program - GEM than GNOME. I wonder if this is one of the reasons developers are flocking to the web even for local apps, because programming a modern Linux desktop up is such a disaster.

[Shorel]

Forget about application menus if you use ElementaryOS.

I have it in my smallest laptop, because it is much faster than the alternatives, but it has several shortcomings as well.

Open a video and the video player detects an incorrect aspect ratio? Good luck changing it without menus.

[kh_hk]

You will be surprised if you give KF5 a try. I've been playing with it for two days and it feels really light, customizable and comes with sane defaults. You can take all the clutter out of it and just stay with what you want.

[pjmlp]

While I partially agree and I am actually running Windows on most of my computers nowadays, all the options you listed are way better that the "UNIX way", often discussed here.

As it would mean Motif, http://www.opengroup.org/standards/unix

My little travel netbook is quite happy with Unity.

[nailer]

'The Unix way' and Unix standards (as determined OpenGroup etc) are very different things.

[pjmlp]

I fail to see how you can certify behaviors while stating they aren't what they are supposed to be.

[cbd1984]

"The guys who capable of improving modern Linux desktop are using Mac."

Except the Mac UI is crap. It's uncomfortable and unconfigurable.