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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 15 2018, @08:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the It's-FOSS dept.

Linux system manufacturer System76 introduced a beautiful looking Linux distribution called Pop!_OS. But is Pop OS worth an install? Read the Pop OS review and find out yourself.

More at : https://itsfoss.com/pop-os-linux-review/


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  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 16 2018, @03:27AM (9 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday January 16 2018, @03:27AM (#622974) Journal

    KDE4 took until 4.12 and 5 took until 5.10 to be usable for me. I spend most of my time in Plasma 5.10, soon to be .11 now, with some in Fluxbox or Xfce with Compiz/Emerald as the mood strikes.
      code so
    I actually did get Gnome looking and working mostly, sorta, halfway decent, but only as an OS X clone and with literally days of tweaking and googling and extension-installing added in. It's a mess. I don't know who the hell it was aimed at but it's a mess, and it feels creepy and big-brother-ish.

    IMO Linux as a desktop mostly peaked around Gnome 2.32 for GTK and KDE 3.5.10 for KDE. Something went horribly wrong with Linux after that and I can't put a name to it. All i know is i hate GTK3 with a passion. I want to like LXQt but it's got almost zero themes and still feels extremely unpolished, mostly because there's no unified look and feel since you need to set icons, Qt theme, GTK 2 theme, GTK 3 theme, font, and Openbox border and there's no single place to do all these. Wishing like hell I could code so I could just write a mini-application for the configuration center to centralize it all...

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Marand on Tuesday January 16 2018, @04:08AM (1 child)

    by Marand (1081) on Tuesday January 16 2018, @04:08AM (#622983) Journal

    KDE4 took until 4.12 and 5 took until 5.10 to be usable for me.

    That's about normal for KDE. Early KDE3 releases were pretty garbage as well, but it polished up nicely by 3.5ish. KDE4 was mostly there around 4.4 or so but took a bit longer to get the majority of the little things dealt with, and Plasma5 has just hit a similar point around 5.9 or 5.10 like you said. That's why I follow Debian's release pattern for it, because by the time Debian adopts it, it's around that sweet spot. Though it seems like Debian this time around just barely missed it, shipping 5.8. There are some annoying bugs in 5.8 that disappear in 5.9 and up that most people won't deal with but of course I run into them regularly because of oddities of my system configuration.

    Still, much better than the alternatives despite those issues. Even Windows and Android are both full of random minor bugs of the same type despite having the weight of massive mega-corps behind them. One Windows 7 example that absolutely infuriated me was the way it would ignore sub-pixel anti-aliasing settings on a per-application basis at random, so that some applications would show red and blue fringing if I used light text on dark background, despite having it disabled at the OS level. Plus its multi-display support being a decade behind Linux, though it finally got a bit better about that with W10.

    All i know is i hate GTK3 with a passion.

    Probably because by GTK3, it stopped being treated as a cross-platform toolkit for application developers and became the GNOME toolkit. Breakage caused in non-GNOME gtk applications is irrelevant, only the needs of GNOME devs matter. If it breaks for non-GNOME desktop users, that's fine too, and like I said in the other comment, that's around when GNOME decided that a unified visual design and "GNOME brand" is more important than anything else. The end result is that Gtk3 is developer-hostile unless you're writing GNOME applications, and user-hostile unless you're a GNOME user. Why anybody would choose it for a new project at this point is beyond me.

    Since I'm making accusations, I'll follow up with some examples:

    * GTK3 change breaks roxterm [sourceforge.net] because "nobody but gnome-terminal used this feature" so they removed it in the middle of a minor point release. You know, when you expect an API to remain stable. The dev gave up on the project because of this. (I've seen a few projects I used die for similar reasons, though that's the only one I can think of right now.)

    * Can't find the bug report due to gna.org shutting down, but gtk3 massively broke tablet support in mypaint by randomly changing how it handled certain tablet events, and when the mypaint devs reported it to gtk3 devs, the response was of course "NOTABUG WONTFIX" and blaming mypaint, even though it affected other programs as well. They eventually backtracked on it and it got fixed later, though.

    * Back when KDE4 and GNOME3 were newer things, they were building enhanced systray options to provide more features than the bare-bones one both supported. KDE did it first, tried to get GNOME devs to support it when they started working on doing the same thing, and the reaction was the typical NIH, GFYS and they implemented their own version instead.

    * Similarly, any nice cross-toolkit integration in desktop environments probably comes from KDE devs, because the GNOME side thinks if you want consistency the correct solution is to only use GNOME applicatons. So KDE devs took on the burden for users on both sides, making Qt styles that copy the current Gtk style, and Gtk styles that copy Qt styles, so that users in both environments can get a consistent interface. for Qt and Gtk applications.

    * GNOME even treats its own users with similar contempt, removing configuration options and intentionally breaking software and themes between point releases because they felt like it. You're supposed to take the default and like it, damn it.

    TL;DR: GNOME thinks it's another Apple or Google and can dictate how everyone works, but without the resources or skills of either.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @07:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @07:31PM (#623243)

      Sadly so much of Gnome, Freedesktop, and a few other big projects that glue Linux userspace together, have the same names and emails attached to them. And more often than not said emails are either redhat or collabora ones.

      End result is that one is looking at a massive echo chamber.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @07:22PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @07:22PM (#623238)

    What happened was a group of people that thought mobile/touch was the future (largely inspired by experiences working on the software side of the Nokia Maemo device platform), followed by a drive to chase after Microsoft as the latter unveiled their GPU powered Vista desktop.

    All this lead to a frenzy of UI/UX experimentation (KDE4, Gnome3), and a pile of new sub-systems and middleware/plumbing (Wayland, Systemd).

    Funny thing is that this coincided with Gnome and KDE holding joint developer gatherings.

    Sadly some very vocal senior userspace programmers have convinced themselves that the status quo of Linux userspace was fundamentally broken and required a complete rebuild. And they have sold this idea to the masses with a lot of bling and bluster.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @08:10PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @08:10PM (#623268)

      menu driven nav is outdated. gnome was right about how to handle workspaces. it's not even close once you get used to gnome3.

      • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 16 2018, @10:50PM (4 children)

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday January 16 2018, @10:50PM (#623344) Journal

        Menu driven nav *is* outdated, and it was outdated before it was invented. Know the proper replacement? Keyboard shortcuts. Which I can set up in just about any WM or DE. I'm mostly in Plasma now and have the same small set of shortcuts for Plasma, Fluxbox, and Xfce.

        In a roundabout way, one that reminds me of that quote about Americans being trustworthy to do the right thing after trying everything else, Gnome (mimicking OS X long before) has a sort of interactive real-time program search; hit the right button, type a couple of letters, and get a dynamic list of matching programs. But...we don't need Gnome for this. Such a thing can theoretically be implemented standalone; just query /usr/share/applications, draw a grid of what you find inside, and make them activate when clicked as if from inside a file manager.

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:24PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:24PM (#623697)

          Except that with Wayland you will need the compositors permission to set up a keyboard shortcut...

          • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:49AM (2 children)

            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:49AM (#624029) Journal

            Good grief, really? I have five words for THAT proposal and they ain't "Mercury Crystal Power, Make Up."

            --
            I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
            • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:06PM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:06PM (#624159)

              Yep. The compositor is the only party of the desktop stack that can read all keystrokes.

              There is perhaps some yakking about getting a protocol in place to allow other programs to petition the compositor to register a shortcut, but expect Gnome to come up with one variant, KDE another, and then Gnome strongarming the rest into adopting their solution before promptly scrapping it as "imperfect".

              • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:08PM

                by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:08PM (#624338) Journal

                Fuck that noise. If I have to I'll move onto a BSD variant that stays with vanilla X.org rather than let this buggy, user-hostile Wayland trash eat my desktop. I've already cut out systemd from my life, and if anything Wayland is even easier to get rid of.

                --
                I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...