Why I am starting to hate Linux.

[Selene ToyKeeper]

* Brian Sturgill <bsturgill at ataman.com> wrote:
> A couple of days ago I ... Ubuntu ... snaps ... Good luck ...  
> frustration.

Oh geez, I'm sorry you had to go through all that.  It's really 
less of a Linux thing though, and more of an Ubuntu thing.  
Ubuntu hasn't been a good desktop OS since like 2010, and it has 
been getting worse ever since.

Snaps are particularly egregious.  I'd recommend staying away 
from those entirely.  I, and many other developers at the 
company, tried very hard to fix snappy... but my changes were 
rejected, my bugs were closed "wontfix notabug", and we all got 
fired in a mass layoff because a major project failed and the 
management decided to get rid of almost everyone who worked on 
it.  But they kept the top-level folks who designed the project 
and steered the ship, while sacking all the grunts who warned 
them they were steering into an iceberg.

I've been pretty happy with Debian though.  Or, for those who 
want a more complete desktop experience, Mint is good.  Or, for 
people who abhor systemd and don't mind having to write their own 
solutions, there's Devuan.

Anyway, I've been using Debian since 1997, and have carried my 
config and filesystems forward the whole time with no major 
interruptions.  I never really got into the whole "desktop 
environment" thing though, and have been using just a window 
manager with a bunch of extras and customizations as necessary.  
I don't minimize windows, or even have a bar to minimize them to.  
There are no icons or task bars or trays or anything like that.  
Instead, I have a big grid of desktops, and I show/hide groups of 
windows by changing desktops.  Windows can also be grouped 
together into a single frame with tabs, and tiled and floated as 
necessary.  Usually I have hundreds of windows open, and reboot 
once a year or so when I upgrade the kernel.  Almost all window 
management is done with the keyboard, while the mouse is mostly 
just used to toss focus between windows.  I started using this 
setup, approximately, in 1996 with FVWM, then eventually did the 
same thing with Enlightenment, and in the early 2000s I carried 
it to Sawfish, where it has remained.

It has been really nice not having to care about the constant 
churn of GUIs as they come and go.

Anyway, I'm not aware of any OSes which ship with a setup like 
mine, but I hear that "Pop_OS!" at least uses some of the same 
ideas.  Haven't tried it myself, but despite the dumb name, it 
might be worth a look if you're shopping for distros and/or 
interfaces.


-- Selene