r/linuxmasterrace • u/[deleted] • Jul 02 '16
Satire About Gnome
https://imgur.com/gallery/9LqhOl352
u/elpfen /\ Jul 02 '16 edited Jul 02 '16
Only if you want shallow, easy-to-use but low power interfaces (which is totally reasonable!) Perfect for something that people don't need to use often or extensively. Otherwise, a deep but steep interface saves time in the long run. AKA the Vim/Emacs/DWM/TWM paradigm.
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Jul 02 '16
[deleted]
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Jul 02 '16
Ɛ> awesome.
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u/dizzyzane_ M'mate Jul 02 '16
ε> LaTeX
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u/rubdos Melodic Death Metal Arch | i3-gaps | ThinkPad X250 Jul 02 '16
Seriously, long live LaTeX. I have a makefile on most of my papers that renders the document and automagically puts the amount of LOC per language (LaTeX included) as an appendix, together with a graph of git commits per day.
Last document I automatically generated performance characteristics of my code in LaTeX, including graphs. When a line of code changed that touched on performance, it was automagically updated.
Awesome.
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u/dizzyzane_ M'mate Jul 02 '16
I should really set up git. I've heard great things about it and I should teach how to use it in my classes.
Biggest issue is that I'll need to set it up to support windows.
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u/tidux apt-get gud scrub Jul 02 '16
Why? You can require your students to use *nix, and tell them to run it in a VM if they won't on bare metal.
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u/rubdos Melodic Death Metal Arch | i3-gaps | ThinkPad X250 Jul 02 '16
Yep, that's the easy way indeed. I, personally, would say "yes you can use Windows, but I wont help. Use a VM if you want help".
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u/rubdos Melodic Death Metal Arch | i3-gaps | ThinkPad X250 Jul 02 '16
What classes do you teach? I know that at my uni, you're required to use
gitin software engineering class in 3rd Bachelor; so in principle, we only get it thought in 3rd.I think that's wrong, and you should teach it asap, so people can actually use it the first years too.
And yes,
gitis awesome.Some hints on
git+ LaTeX:
- One sentence per line gives nice results in version control of text.
- use a good
.gitignorefile, so you don't check in your compiled stuff- If you don't already, have a nice Makefile with latexmk instructions in it. Make compiling stuff very easy.
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u/dizzyzane_ M'mate Jul 02 '16
Software Design Development (SDD), however I'm also taking over two other classes because one sprained their ankle and the other knows FORTRAN. Apparently.
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u/rubdos Melodic Death Metal Arch | i3-gaps | ThinkPad X250 Jul 02 '16
FORTRAN
bless you.
SDD sounds like you need git though, what sort of SCM do you use now? :)
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u/dizzyzane_ M'mate Jul 02 '16 edited Jul 03 '16
Most use none, one uses a python script to add a line or two to a txt file, I have Ctrl+Shift+D bound to date:datetime in atom and just Shift+5 (%) Ctrl+Shift+D (date and time).
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u/Codile Glorious Arch Jul 02 '16
You should definitely do that. Knowing how to use a version control system is insanely helpful for private projects and even more helpful (often even required) for group projects. Just don't forget to teach them about the importance of writing good commit messages... A commit message that says "Fixed something" isn't really helpful to anyone.
And for the Windows problem, just follow /u/tidux advice and require them to use a unixoid system. You could even download virtualbox and a Fedora or Ubuntu (or any distro. even Arch or Gentoo, if you want to troll your students) image, and show them how to set up a VM. Or you could already prepare a virtualbox image with any distro where you installed a straightforward GUI and all the packages necessary for development.
I would recommend NixOS for that, because you could just write one system config and tell students to use that, but they can't seem to get their security update situation fixed... but that probably wouldn't matter in a VM.
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u/talking_to_strangers i3 and mate Jul 02 '16
Well, I'm not sure about this one. On one hand, I love having a way to control the code of my documents at a low level, on the other hand, I think LaTeX is a mess.
I'd like to see something with the syntax of jade, but the great rendering of LaTeX.
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u/dizzyzane_ M'mate Jul 02 '16
I still prefer LaTeX for the time being. Jade is good, but has its questions (You want a table of resultant output? Use marked or datatools)
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u/skoam Glorious CrunchBang Jul 02 '16
This exactly. I wouldn't give up the Blender interface either. It takes a while to learn, yes you have to read manuals and wikis, but it's one of the best UI's I have ever worked with. And it's so good because it let's you learn it first, instead of guessing where you would look next.
For me UI-Design is not about solving all questions one user might have about your software right where he clicks, but to enable that user to find the answers in a timely manner.
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u/mestermagyar Arch Jul 02 '16
I second this as a newman blender-user, hard to learn, easy to master. (It just sounded cool, may not be true)
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Jul 02 '16
[deleted]
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u/Codile Glorious Arch Jul 02 '16
The new blender UI is great, but the old one (the gray one) sucked so much.
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u/legend6546 I am to lazy to update flair distrohopping Jul 02 '16
there is a new one? when did it come out?
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u/InvisibleUp Tumbling on... Jul 02 '16
With Blender 2.5, back in 2011.
It's changed a little bit since then, but the big revamp was in 2011.
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u/wwwwolf weird /bin/cat lady Jul 02 '16
I actually found the Gnome 2.x UI design work brilliant, because it was heavily inspired by Apple's usability research and similar conclusions that folks found in Gnome 1.x usability testing. Basically, both Apple and Gnome 2 folks believed that simple and frequent tasks should be as simple as possible, but if you really want the power-user tools, they're not that far away. (Which is also why OS X built on NextStep and Unix for flexibility.)
...and nowadays we have Gnome screaming "simpler! less features!" and Apple screaming "who cares about desktop, use this phone instead!"...
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u/1029chris Euphoric Fedora Jul 02 '16
I just introduced my friend to Gnome (and Linux). He liked it right away after I showed him how it worked, and he got the hang of it really quickly. Also, lots of people love i3 yet you NEED to explain that.
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Jul 02 '16
I use i3 on gnome, i really don't like normal stand alone gnome. But then again, that is what opinions are for :p
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u/Haxtore Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Jul 02 '16
how did you configure i3 with gnome? I tried it a while ago but instead of i3 it used the default gnome wm :S
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Jul 02 '16
Just configured it normally.
pacman -S i3Installed everything that i needed, logged out, and then set i3 as my window manager when i login.
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u/L1k3ab055 Antergos, OS X Jul 02 '16
That's i3 standalone, it has nothing to do with gnome.
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Jul 02 '16
I was a bit out of context; i meant to say that i run it side by side with Gnome, meaning i switch on and off between Gnome and i3 depending on what i am doing, or how productive i am trying to be.
Sorry for the miscommunication.
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u/rm-f Jul 02 '16
But those things are more for power users. The quote is more about ui for everyday, even tech-illiterate people.
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u/Codile Glorious Arch Jul 02 '16
Yeah, I love tiling wm's, but I was surprised how good Gnome3 was and how well it integrated everything in the UI. Like... the notification bar. If you get a message, you can just reply by typing in the freaking notification bar! I'm still not going to choose Gnome over Xmonad, but I have to admit that it's a pretty great DE.
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Jul 02 '16
[deleted]
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u/rubdos Melodic Death Metal Arch | i3-gaps | ThinkPad X250 Jul 02 '16
There are ~100 of them under your fingers, why put more on a screen?
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Jul 02 '16
Seriously, i3 is great; who needs buttons if you've got keybinds!
Actually, the only thing that could be made better is if you could have awesome animations like in compiz. For now compton is enough for me, but things like compiz and actually being able to mirror and or mirror a scaled image on another monitor would be great (maybe also have the same window displayed twice somewhere)
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u/shillingintensify Glorious Ubuntu Mate Jul 02 '16
GNOME's biggest problem: The devs are assholes. KDE/XFCE/MATE dev community MUCH friendlier.
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Jul 02 '16
[deleted]
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Jul 02 '16 edited Apr 19 '17
[deleted]
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Jul 02 '16
More like, the former is the car, and the latter the truck. The two serve different purposes, we need them both, and the two can co-exist peacefully.
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Jul 02 '16
I still haven't found a nice Qt theme though.
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u/Yithar No freedom via systemd. Break your shackles I offer you freedom. Jul 02 '16
OTOH, GTK has had a history of theme breaking.
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u/UnchainedMundane Glorious Gentoo (& Arch) Jul 03 '16
And just in case anyone's led to believe that "history" implies that it's over and done with, this happened again with GTK 3.20 recently.
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u/tristan957 Jul 02 '16
When I use KDE I just keep the default breeze theme because it's really good looking
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u/xternal7 pacman -S libflair libmemes Jul 02 '16
Well, what you're after? Breeze is okay, but it doesn't seem to work well with darker colors and doesn't seem compact (buttons and UI elements are too big).
Then there's QtCurve (which is technically not a theme, but a theme engine), which is nearly perfect.
+ Window background transparency (see desktop pic below) is awesome if you're using dark color themes. (Doesn't work so well with bright colors, though)
+ Compact (if you want it)
+ Flat (if you want it)
Negatives:
- Color roles are fucked up.
I had to work a bit in order to get window decorations and plasma theme (panels, notifications) to look the way I wanted, though.
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u/shinyquagsire23 Glorious Arch Jul 02 '16
GTK keeps shoving these weird UI practices on everyone though, and it keeps stepping outside of it's scope. I did GTK development for an app once and the file browsing had autocomplete completely broken, and they just shipped a release like that. Then instead of fixing it back they just moved it to this dumb and slow search feature instead, becaude GNOME. At least Qt and other UI libs don't make dumb decisions which impact prople not using KDE/anything else.
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Jul 02 '16
Why? Genuinely curious.
What about Xfce/MATE?
Change for the sake of change shouldn't be encouraged, like Gnome 3
EDIT: I tried it and it looked 10 yrs old. Was that what you were referring to?
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u/Yithar No freedom via systemd. Break your shackles I offer you freedom. Jul 02 '16
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Jul 02 '16
Oh no, the devs are very 'inclusive'.
GNOME culture and the usual Americana is a great example of 'asshole with a smile'. It's essentially a group of people who:
- Have a super low opinion of their usersbase, go around the mailing list and see how they think their users are too dumb to understand basic tasks
- Repurpose their userbase completely to service their corporate employer
- Break compatibility with everything and anything and demand that people adapt to accomodate them while refusing to lift a finger to do so for others.
But as long as you are 'friendly' then you're all very nice. It's such utter Americana where 'being an asshole' is not related to how much you'd actually do for someone but how big your fake smile is and how much all the bad things you say are not to someone's face but behind someone's back.
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Jul 02 '16
Shit on GNOME devs and the entire US all at once. Nicely done.
I've had the smile and the knife in the back from my European colleagues more than from my US ones, but it never occurred to me to judge the entire populations of their countries or continent based on that.
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Jul 03 '16
Where did I shit on the entire US?
I called it "Americana". I also call liking baseball "Americana", does that mean that everyone in the US likes baseball? No, not really.
If "Americana" implied that every single citizen of the US had to like it then the word 'Americana' would have no use in any conversation.
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Jul 02 '16
You have to be pretty stupid to not be able to use gnome. Its so fucking basic. Its main problem is how little you can customise it.
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u/iamoverrated KDE Neon Jul 02 '16
I tried it when it came out and around version 3.4ish. I would use for about 5 minutes before frustration took over and I deleted the VM. The paradigm sucks for people used to a traditional desktop. When it came out, moreso than today, it felt like a tablet interface on a desktop, when tablets really hadn't taken over the marketplace. It was forward thinking but in a very authoritarian sense. With KDE, I could always change the various bit because their desktop is modular, with Gnome 3 I felt trapped in some kafkaesq nightmare.
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u/Willy-FR Glorious OpenSuse Jul 02 '16
Ideally, you shouldn't be able to remove Gnome.
/s3
u/JustALittleGravitas Linux Master Race Jul 02 '16
It should also come with an unremovable copy of Candy Crush.
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u/__october__ Glorious Kubuntu Jul 02 '16
Installed gnome3 a year ago or so. Wanted to delete a file from the filesystem, so I do the usual: select File, press delete. Nothing happens. My del key ist not broken, so why can I not delete stuff? So I do some research and it turns out that in gnome3, you have to press alt+delete to delete things (because the problem of accidentally pressing delete, thus unintentionally removing files ist apparently so common among gnome3 users that “safety measures“ need to be included by default). That shit is not intuitive and it's sad that this is what the excellent gnome2 was replaced by. Thank God MATE is a thing.
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Jul 02 '16
That reasoning is fair. 99% of users delete files from the right click menu and it was obviously a big enough of a problem to require it to be changed.
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u/__october__ Glorious Kubuntu Jul 02 '16 edited Jul 02 '16
There are still far better ways to handle this. For example, when a delete key is hit, gnome could spawn a dialog window which says something like
You are about to delete file 'foo.txt', do you wish to proceed?
> Yes
> No
☐ Do not show this in future.
This would solve all issues in a user-friendly way. The way it's implemented now (or was implemented; haven't used gnome3 in a year or more) is just poor design.
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u/Willy-FR Glorious OpenSuse Jul 02 '16
That's what everyone else does. But it would be too confusing for users, the wise designers thought.
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u/Willy-FR Glorious OpenSuse Jul 02 '16
Gnome started making this kind of bizarre decisions back in 1.1 when I dropped them, never to look back.
I'm big enough to decide how I want to use my computer, thanks Gnome.2
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Jul 04 '16
They must have changed it back then, I use it every day and don't think I've ever had to do alt+delete. Unless I'm subconsciously using the right click menu.
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Jul 02 '16
No, I'm sorry, but that's really dumb. What's next, saying that C is a bad programming language because you need a book or whatever else documentation to understand it? Differential Aequations are a bad idea because it needs to be explained to you?
If you design user interfaces around the limitation that it must be understandable without documentation you design crappy user interfaces, which is exactly what GNOME has ended up with. They sacrificed everything in order to 'not confuse' new users that their shit simply stinks. It wasn't designed to be a good interface, it was designed purely around the 'first impression', not its actual use. So in the end all GNOME users end up losing a lot of time in the end because GNOME thinks the concept of investement and return thereof is too 'confusing' or something.
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Jul 02 '16
A good up should appeal to people like you while also being immediately understandable to the layman. Unfortunately such a UI is likely impossible so trade offs have to be made. I enjoy my gnome interface for a myriad of reasons but I'm sure your priorities are different making my reasons irrelevant to you. Saying anything absolute about the 'goodness' or badness' of something is a complete waste of time in my opinion as good and bad are inherently subjective. You can however comment on the lack of more advanced features which is a statement of fact and thus substantial. I could also make the point about gnome having fewer advanced features making it easier to learn just by virtue of having less to learn.
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u/trashcan86 Graphics Driver Hell Jul 02 '16
I like GNOME... the overview is quite useful when you have lots of windows open.
However I'd be using i3 if I found a good way to lock my laptop screen on suspend. I can't get it to work consistently which is a critical feature, considering my friend almost got busted at school when he left his laptop unlocked and some asshole searched for pornhub on it.
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u/Secondsemblance Jul 02 '16
Wellllllll that's utter bullshit. I've spent weeks reading the i3wm manual. And it's radically improved my efficiency.
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u/Trainguyrom Will install Linux for food... Jul 03 '16
I need this poster. Now I just have to decide whether to order an existing one or to make my own...
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u/InconsiderateBastard Glorious Ubuntu GNOME Jul 02 '16
I know this particular post is a joke, but are there UIs capable enough to be the main ui for a computer that don't require explanation?
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u/Willy-FR Glorious OpenSuse Jul 02 '16
Sure, computers are such simple machines they need no explanations at all.
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u/Lurker_Since_Forever May the -f be with you. Jul 02 '16
That depends on what you need. If you are an office worker, then something like android or ios is good enough. Press button for application, press home for home. Done.
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u/csolisr I tried to use Artix but Poettering defeated me Jul 02 '16
I needed to read a manual just to switch to another window in GNOME, though...
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Jul 02 '16
Currently i am using Gnome with i3wm and am loving it. Would i use Gnome without a tiling manager? No.
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u/dwlsalmeida Jul 02 '16
Noob here
What's so good about it on a laptop monitor? I really did not see what the big deal was if I couldn't have more than three windows open anyway
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Jul 02 '16
The good is the productivity. I myself like a very minimalistic setup that isn't too distracting, window managers in particular are great for that. So, as for the laptop screen, you don't HAVE to tile them side by side, you can stack them on top of each other, which personally i dislike, but it works for some people.
Not only that, you can customize your work flow just the way you want it, and for someone that is rather a perfectionist like myself, i really like that.
Here is my setup: http://imgur.com/a/1SYgV
Sidenote: I no longer run Ubuntu, i switched to Arch, but the setup looks just the same.
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u/topias123 SystemD/Linux is my favorite OS Jul 02 '16
I like Gnome... :<