These are why I use FVWM and set up everything by hand, better this than feeling helpless in a supposedly user-friendly environment.

But I think under normal usable desktops, like MATE, you can do such things easily enough.

but no one else really had the resources to maintain it

That’s what I’m saying to not be true. Right now the project is controlled by RH, and they are not interested, but also don’t leave it. Maybe if this weren’t so, we’d see changes.

Its critical infrstructure, they can’t just hand it off until they’re done with it (RH10).

Yes they can, the same way they ship kernels full of backported stuff and patches.

Xlibre is happening by one of the biggest community contributors, but honestly it’ll end up like KwinFT.

The guy is unfortunately accompanying his fork with anti-vaxxer and alt-right statements.

I think Xorg will keep existing. There are a few projects buried many times and still alive, one more.

But RH is intentionally blocking the good things that could have happened without their “leadership” and imposing opinion that it’s deprecated and on life support.

The way they promoted PulseAudio, SystemD, Gnome 3, now Wayland. All that.

Say, they do almost no development of Xorg, but they don’t surrender the control of the project to someone who’d want to. They don’t accept PR’s, sometimes with responses that the project itself is deprecated or something.

They intentionally keep control, to avoid someone picking it up.

They could mean that they were a Unix user since 1991. They could also mix up years, which would be natural. Say, with 1993 or 1994. In any case you’re the obvious RH shill here.

This is a good example of RH shilling.

Also not uncommon to see “community activists” popping up here and there, with no history at all, doing small things and then somehow participating in coordinated RH-aligned action eventually. Remember that moment Stallman was pressed into defense? Not that he’s a very nice person, but the campaign was interesting in the sense that not many normal people participated in it, mostly such activists.

Also Fedora and “well-built” - it’s glossy and smooth-looking, but not “well-built”.

Also this

from paranoid people new to the community who don’t understand how this ecosystem works.

is a marker of RH shill too. They usually start with casually stating that everyone is fine with RH and the only ones complaining are noobs, nuts and troublemakers, we don’t do that here. Except it’s not true.

Quantity of development doesn’t equal quality. I personally think if RH were to vanish overnight, Linux would be fine. Of course nobody spends additional effort on projects mostly done by RH. If there’s no RH, either the projects will be dropped for lack of necessity or there will be said effort from other sources.

Amount of contributions doesn’t equal quality, mind that. RedHat also does work to sink projects which don’t fit their strategy for Linux development, and I want to ask by what right they even have such a strategy and try to impose it upon others.

EL 7 is EL 7. But that time is over

Than today’s Mac and Windows - sure. But take w2k or macos 9 - and hell no. Those are much cleaner and more consistent.

Evil or not, w2k is something everyone should thank MS for, it’s really how it should be.

probably would not want to rebuild to configure something.

It builds in a second. About DWM. It’s 2k lines of C code, all they do is basic functionality. It’s not some cumbersome process of setting up an environment, and then looking at running lines of compiler output as if you were some fscking Neo installing Gentoo.

To remain polite, I’ll note that this subject has nothing to do with “your average user” or anything else connected to selling something useless to somebody who doesn’t care. All this grandma and average user and other talk is absolutely out of place about tools never intended to be sold on a market or be used by everyone. You are not required to use suckless tools in the first place.

Something having an X-Wing pic keeps out a lot of people too, cause not everyone likes Star Wars. What’s your point?

If you’ve seen suckless tools, the whole point is that they are rudimentary. DWM is one header file and one source code file of ~2k lines.

It’s not lazy because having a config file wouldn’t add anything to using those things, and it’s not elitism or gross because it’s not hard for those who understand why’d they use suckless tools at all. It also contributes to atmosphere.

FFS, please stop trying to press other people to do things your way, that’s what’s gross.

Linux is built on the foundation of cooperation and mutual aid

It’s very dangerous to make casual users and activists and someone like me equal to people doing actual work.

As demonstrated by RedHat-fed activists abusing that equality again and again, making “the community” appear what RedHat wants it to be.

Besides, if we ever hope for “the year of Linux desktop” to be a real thing, we have to be inviting.

You know who’s not being inviting? Microsoft and Apple. The former just informs you that the PCs you can buy come with Windows that version, the latter just shows how damn fscking important and rich you’ll look if you buy their stuff.

The problems are all technical (with “user-friendliness” and “just works” movement as it exists contributing to them and not solving them), if they didn’t exist, nobody would care that the community is grumpy.

Yes, they will have dumb and silly questions. Yes, many of such quesrions have already been answered before, and yes, they could have searched better.

It’s fine to be dumb and ask questions, but with Unix-likes it’s somehow common that newbies first ask for advice, then get it, then react with “that’s dumb, should have been done like in Windows” and that tends to irritate people. And sometimes they want to do things the hard way, but blame the system for them lacking knowledge to do that.

If we want for all our favorite programs and games to finally become Linux native, if we want to ensure Linux experience becomes smooth, if we don’t want to be seen as a community of red-eyed nerds, we need all those people in.

Something is wrong. Amateur radio and in general knowing stuff about radio being associated with a “community of red-eyed nerds” was a fact, but never prevented people from using radio in the 90s and 80s. Most people can’t do electric design for their apartment, yet they use electricity.

And there’s no detriment to this greater than constant infighting and elitism, than forcing people to bury down the wikis instead of providing useful support, and so on.

So why don’t BSDs have that problem?

That’s a rhetorical question, because in BSDs they don’t slap layers of layers of tools intended to make things “easier” and parallel ways to do the same. Linux user-friendliness movement is doomed in the way that it’s not aimed at making kernel interfaces and basic tooling simpler, it aims at making graphical and scripted slap-ons that make things kinda work. All with different logic, taking the nerves out of newbies, and at the same time those newbies can’t exactly tell what’s wrong.

And infighting and elitism are because it’s hard for everyone to admit they are all wrong, all sides. The “elitist” side, because yep, newbies shouldn’t struggle with setting up sound where in BSDs that’s kinda easy, for example. The “newbie-friendly” side, because they are focusing on the wrong thing.

The development process is the problem. Both with the kernel and the userland and with major DEs.

Do you follow the same principle when seeing anti-vaxxer posts en masse? Or any other fillers?

I usually answer a few questions with advice and then leave, when the op genuinely just uses other people as ChatGPT. But I understand those who start making jokes.

It’s hard making things simple, it requires research with focus groups, constant testing, firm guidelines based on the results.

They’ve done a lot of that in the middle 90s to middle 00s, when after things moving fast most GUIs were so atrocious it was just necessary. Thus classic Windows versions and classic MacOS (till 9) and Amiga Workbench and even Windows XP are very usable. Even OpenLook and Motif are not so bad.

Today we have a lot of network effects and inability to just drop something we hate to use, thus the market incentive for a similar widespread optimization of GUIs doesn’t form.

So - both KDE and Gnome today are horrible, but Gnome folks are at least trying very hard. I generally like KDE more, but their ergonomics were always overloading me as an ASD person to the degree of being exhausted by 15 minutes of using it.

Gnome is less overloading, but - use of titlebars to show custom controls for every application is good for wow-effect, but bad when you want to expect only one function from titlebar in every application. And the paradigm of Windows taskbar or Motif icons or something else for hidden windows being indicated and immediately accessible is good. If they don’t like taskbars, they could add something like iconbox in TWM or old FVWM or such. And a more Spartan (like usual) application menu.

TLDR, between imitating Apple/touchscreen UIs and ergonomics Gnomers have to make a compromise, or pick one lane. Right now it’s quite irritating when in some place they pick the latter and in some the former.

The biggest barrier to widespread adoption is the portion of the toxic parts of the general community.

You should be careful with that. Because what exactly are those toxic parts, when deciding upon strategy of fighting against them, might be understood differently.

That’s why most elitists on Linux spaces don’t know WTF they are talking about, but the elitists who deed have been pressed out earlier.

Also I really don’t see any problem with pointing someone to a place in a well-written manual. After answering a few simple questions, of course, and seeing that they don’t understand hints that all this is documented specifically to avoid annoying other people.

You need to edit a C header file used as a config file, and run make and use the resulting executable file. That hardly keeps out anyone.

At the same time DWM is very convenient, and so was WMII.

I understand these people lack power elsewhere in their lives and want to be powerful where they believe themselves to be experts, but it’s a real pity they express it with a complete lack of empathy.

You seem bitter.

There are two kinds of Linux elitists - 1) those who know nothing, but have recently discovered Unices and think they are all-powerful and there’s the right way to go and simple solutions and everything is clear, and the future is bright, 2) those who are tired to rephrase the manuals and want newcomers to sometimes think why they don’t expect Russinovitch-level knowledge of Windows internals from other normal usual Windows users, but with Linux every stupid thing they want to do should be baby-fed to them down to that deep level.

I really hate the first kind, it’s the type who think making yet another “nice wallpapers” Ubuntu-based distribution makes them cooler than me, or that Wayland is already good enough for everything and my arguments that there’s no FVWM under Wayland should be disproved by myself doing my own google search, and so on.

The second kind is normal for every area of human existence. You don’t have to know everything, but also nobody owes you accepting you as equal to those who do, or your opinion, and nobody owes you the benefits of knowledge, and nobody owes you making things work the exact way you want.

TLDR - community members are as valuable as their contributions. If someone’s contribution is reposting Nixie Pixel videos (or whatever is their alternative now), then no matter how “not elitist and nice” they are, they are not very useful compared to those with knowledge. But if someone’s being elitist without any knowledge (as is typical among Arch Linux users), then maybe they are even less valuable.

If you’re not capable of taking proper care of your pet, don’t get a pet in the first place. Picking up the shit your dog left in a public place is part of owning a dog.

So you never ever think you took 3 waste bags when you took 1? Nothing ever falls out of your pocket? Forgetting something is “not being capable of taking proper care”?

Or maybe you are simply not capable of reading before answering. That’s typical for people without ASD.

If your kid has a baseball game the next day, don’t go drinking today. That’s the selfish part. Although I would argue if you do get drunk, you kind of just have to deal with it and go to your kids game regardless.

I don’t drink.

or pick up your dog’s shit, then that’s selfish

If you didn’t notice that you have only one waste bag, and your dog had a need in more than one place, and you’ll be late for something, and in addition to that generally have a bad sense of time and place (ASD definitely, BAD or ADHD probably), then it’s not.

It’s not anywhere near the same category as being too burnt out to do the dishes after a double shift

Imagine that sometimes people wake up this tired. Someone left an electric light on outside and you can’t force yourself to cover the window - bad sleep. Forgot to drink some water before falling asleep - bad sleep. Ate something salty in addition to that - horrible sleep.

If you have roommates and you left dishes in the sink, you are being selfish.

Suppose so.

If your kids have an early baseball game, and you are too hungover to show up, then you’re being selfish.

Hangover is a bad feeling.

Not returning a cart should be punished with crucifixion though.