Wow, I found the one other MATE user. Cheers.

I got a 1U rack server for free from a local business that was upgrading their entire fleet. Would’ve been e-waste otherwise, so they were happy to dump it off on me. I was excited to experiment with it.

Until I got it home and found out it was as loud as a vacuum cleaner with all those fans. Oh, god no…

I was living with my parents at the time, and they had a basement I could stick it in where its noise pollution was minimal. I mounted it up to a LackRack.

Since moving out to a 1 bedroom apartment, I haven’t booted it. It’s just a 70 pound coffee table now. :/

As for memory management, macOS is the better option due to its fully integrated virtual memory system which is often on and continuously provides addressable space up to 4 per process.

Wow, 4 whole memories per process?!

I imagine telling an Arch user you use Gentoo is like telling a Texan that if you cut Alaska into two halves Texas would be the third largest US state.

There’s lots of software out there that is available to use without payment, but is still license restricted in such a way that you are not permitted to redistribute, modify, use for commercial purposes, etc. To many, these rights are the far more important facet of “free” software, above what it costs.

But since the English language has the same word for all of these concepts, we have all these yucks running around with zero-cost but right-restricted software wearing the “FOSS” badge thinking they’re part of the club. So some people add “Libre” to the acronym to explicitly disambiguate.

And if that isn’t enough, I know a few good dakimakura shops.

Five years of Mate (which is essentially Gnome 2 on life support) replaced by a couple years of KDE Plasma.

Mate treated me well enough, it was mostly stable, capable, and competent. But it was a bit crusty around the edges, and being so niche meant search-engine-visible help resources for anything than went wrong were virtually nonexistent. In hindsight, using it as a beginner’s DE was probably a mistake. I suppose in being so austere and devoid of resources it taught me to develop more of a “get to the bottom of it yourself” attitude to debugging and have humbler expectations about form versus function, but that’s a pretty rough sell to most people. Mate is definitely better as a drink than a desktop environment.

I don’t need to talk about KDE Plasma at all because the rest of the thread already has. I have nothing new to add beyond the comment that I like their mascot character.

I have no informed opinion on Gnome 3. All I’ve gleaned about it is that it’s supposedly “my way or the highway” by design, and the “my way” in question is controversially counter-grain to a lot of established expectations (e.g. it’s literally why Mate exists). Which is neither here nor there to me, objectively. But I will say I have no interest learning a new way of doing things, even if it’s theoretically superior, when a conventional system still exists, is viable, is highly polished, and is kept sharp-edged. Hence, KDE Plasma.

Until they make T shaped displays that I can mount sideways, to get the best of both worlds

Were you also a proud owner of an LG Wing? 😉

I’d rather have multiple monitors so I have the more intuituve window snapping. But to each their own.

Well, I also tend to consider ultrawide monitors a mistake in their own right. Why would you want a 49" wide literally anything if it’s not some kind of immersive media experience where menus are irrelevant anyway?

Of course, if that is in fact exactly what you bought it for, I have no complaints. Even if I disagree with having one for other purposes, that’s still no reason for the OS to punish you for having one when you try to use it that way when that problem is completely avoidable.

I’ve personally always loathed the global menu bar paradigm of macOS. Having a menu bar that’s wholly detatched from the currently open window that is context-aware based on which window has focus always felt like an irritating speed bump to me. My mind feels like the OS itself is hiding things from me by only allowing me to see a single app’s menu bar at a time.

But then again, I have no objective qualms with it. I’m sure I could adapt to it. When have I realistically needed to see more than one menu bar at once? I can’t name a time. I’m probbably just pearl-clutching at the perceived arresting of my agency to do things when in fact I’m losing effectively nothing.

At any rate, we agree it’s a sure sight better than the shitshow that is GTK. “Hm? Window decorators and shit? Nahhh, those are your problem. Go roll your own.” For the flagship windowing toolkit of the GNOME Project, the DE I’d consider the closest in philosophy to what macOS has going on, that was a rather strange position to take.

I do honestly miss the level of artistic and aesthetic polish that a multi-billion dollar corporation can afford to field that no Linux distro really can.

Linux as a rule is and always has been generally quite “Guys Live In Apartments Like This”. Often utilitarian to a fault. UX design by backend devs, because actual frontend devs cost money. No one wants to pay the “beauty tax” for software. DEs like KDE and Gnome are trying very hard and have made great strides, but it’s very slow progress.

And I imagine this comment will be a magnet for power user types who will flock to my post and retort something along the lines of, “All that stuff is bloat/a usability nightmare/clutter/gets in my way/comes at the cost of features”, blah, blah, blah, waaahhhh boo hiss… Yes, it’s all true, and yes, I understand. But Linux and the free software it surrounds itself with tends to be crusty, clunky, and god-awful ugly, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t frustrate me a bit now and again. Does it bother me to the point that I don’t want to use it? Fuck no. Windows isn’t worth the bullshit. But they do at least know how to make an OS slick and beautiful, when it works, anyway.

I’m sure people will also cherry pick examples of FOSS software that are quite ergonomic and lovely to feel. Yeah, there are many examples that exist, but they tend to be diamonds in the rough rather than exemplars of the ecosystem. For every one dev in this community who actually has a fucking clue how to make smooth-feeling and aesthetically pleasing software, there’s a score of devs who slapdash together their programmer-art-tier UIs and call it a day, and a thousand other dev-brained users who look at it and go, “this is fine”. And yeah, it is fine. But sometimes I want more than fine.

It’s a divesting of unwanted responsibility.

If any change can break something then all broken bits will need fixing.

Right. So the less decrepit, old code that contains annoying little time bombs, the less time spent fixing things.

But that’s true of all code in the kernel. […] Why not remove all drivers in case an update breaks them.

And how many people actually need these ancient drivers maintained? More than zero, sure, but how many more than zero?

Maintenance effort is a finite resource. Choosing where it gets spent is an executive decision. Every dev hour you assign to debugging some ancient driver that one or two enthusiasts might still want someday is a dev hour not spent on development of some new feature, or fixing a problem affecting thousands, potentially millions of known, current, active users.

We can’t maintain all code forever. At some point the theoretical value it may have is outweighed by its cost to keep alive, and it gets cut.

A driver can be complete and only need updating if someone else breaks stuff, so leave it alone until then and only remove it I’d no one comes to fix it.

That’s sort of where we’re at now, in a way.

Yes, all of these drivers presumably are still fully functional at the time of cutting. But the devs have essentially all decided, “We are not fixing these anymore” already. If any of these break for any reason, they would all be immediate candidates for axing by your system.

The reason they aren’t just left in with a “we’ll just run it until it dies, then!” mentality is because a project like the Linux kernel doesn’t want to be full of software with undefined mystery behavior where they can reasonably avoid it.

A chunk of code being part of it at all is an implicit promise of, “This is intended to function as-documented. If it does not, we are responsible to fix it.” But we already know no one will fix it. So instead it just becomes, “This chunk of code may or may not work. We don’t know and we don’t care, lol. Use at your own risk. If you can prove it’s broken, we’ll just remove it”.

The Linux kernel does not want to be full of code like that. All of its code should be reliable to build things on. If it’s coming out, it needs to be announced in advance so users have time to migrate. A “we will run it until it suddenly breaks” system doesn’t afford that. The feature ideally has to be sunset while it’s still functional.

“Unstable code, use at your own risk” projects are better relegated to optional packages. If someone wants to bundle up these ancient drivers and offer them as an optional package, they are free to do so. If there ends up being zero will from anyone to do even that, I guess it’s more evidence to how little the functionality was actually demanded.

I’d call it a damped spring oscillation. Still goes up and down, but the extremes peter out with time.

The two apps are identical and built from the same codebase anyway. K-9 is just a branding asset swap.

I’ve seen conflicting info from Thunderbird devs on how long they actually intend to keep both branding packages active. I’ve heard no longer than a year. I’ve heard only as long as it takes to get Thunderbird out of beta. I’ve heard they have some sort of agreement with FDroid that obligates them to keep it listed for some minimum duration of time (???). I’ve most recently heard indefinitely, because their build script is just a toggle now and it costs them nothing. Which one do I believe? I have no idea. I doubt K-9 will be kept around in perpetuity, though.

It’s also what makes FOSS niche.

why is there no replacement for x11 forwarding over ssh??

There kind of is. The project you’re looking for is waypipe.

Knowing how these things tend to go, I predict you’ll try to use it for your use case and it just won’t work for whatever stupid reason. But I successfully used it to tunnel an app from my Debian machine at home to a Windows machine under WSL.

I drive Linux for a similar reason to why some people prefer driving manual transmission cars to automatics.

Automatic transmission cars are ideal for a certain kind of driver that has no interest in how the machine actually works, they just want the machine to do its job as smoothly as possible without them having to think about it. Not bothering with the details is the whole point.

For those of us who do have an interest in knowing how the vehicle works, automatics become kind of suffocating. They’re designed to only ever behave in certain specific ways. If there’s a weird niche thing that we know is possible for the machine to do with manual control, but the automatic system doesn’t support, you’re just SOL. You can’t. This starts coming up in all sorts of annoying little ways, increasing in frequency as your knowledge increases. Death of a thousand cuts. You start feeling like you’re not really driving this car, you’re being taken for a ride.

Windows is like the automatic. It is a black box designed to allow people who don’t care how the computer works to use the computer. To prevent morons from breaking the internal components, they put up barriers around everything and tell you to keep out.

Linux is like the manual. Yes, it does demand more finesse and active knowledge about how the computer works to drive properly. But you’re in maximum control of it. If you want to pop the hood and tinker with every facet of its innards for whatever reason, it does not attempt to stop you. It’s all open, laid bare for you to do whatever you want with it.

Linux has a lot of options available to make it more automatic like Windows, if you want it. The difference is that the automatic-ness is completely optional in Linux. Imagine a car that can be automatic most of the time when you don’t care, but can become manual at the drop of a hat when you need it. Linux can be that if you want it to be. Windows can’t.

The primary thing I hate about them is that every snap package appears to your system as a separate mounted filesystem. So if you look in your file explorer, you can potentially see dozens of phantom drives clogging up your sidebar.

Debian Testing.

Learning about the xz backdoor was a fun week.