I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.

Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P

No, this is a general practice-- I see it a lot with third-party vendors who want you to integrate with their services. They’ll expire the documentation portal password after 90 days, but the actual user facing service still accepts the same “password123” that’s been set since 2004.

I suspect the pattern is to protect the vendors from developer scrutiny: by the time you’ve jumped through enough hoops to read the docs and realize it’s trash, the execs have signed the contracts and the sunk costs are too high to bail out.

Also add another 6 months to actually get the credentials for the test environment.

I guess I was startled when I went for my go-to desktop (fvwm) and it wasn’t in the main repo, but the AUR.

It feels like it means they’re not actually maintaining a lot of their package pool, just tossing it off on third parties.

I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.

A lot.

Lots of quality of life tweaks, but the firehose of content drowned me.

Works in Lutris now too, no real hassle.

GNOME always seemed to be a solution chasing a problem, particularly once the licensing fears for Qt/KDE were settled.

But now it’s one of the things Red Hat seems to impose on the world. Feels like everything controversial comes out of them or Canonical. I guess they have the commercial cash to prop up things like GNOME and Wayland and systemd and snaps until they gain traction, while more community-focused products can’t break the world for no reason.

I sort of liked GTK back in the day when it was still the Gimp Tool Kit first and foremost. When it was 1999 and your other choices were a broken Lesstif, an early C++ centric Qt, clumsy Tk, and pre-Cambrian Xaw, it was nice to have something full-featured and tasteful.

Now I hesitate to pull in a GTK app because it won’t theme right (I want to use the same bitmap fonts I liked in 1999, but apparently Pango stopped supporting them) and runs the risk of convincing the package manager to dump several gigs of GNOME crud on my drive.

I gather even the GIMP itself no longer tracks current GTK-- it’s become solely in service to GNOME and their absurd UI whims (* * * * client side decorations)

Check my post history, posted the laptop a couple weeks ago.

I do like that there’s a reasonably comprehensive website with docs covering a lot of common pain points, which is more manageable than fighting with searching through a galaxy of wikis of varying degrees of currentness and relevance.

Reminds me of the celebrated docs of BSD systems.

There’s also a case that going a bit away from “easy Windows replacement” is useful because even trivial users need to get some bearings shifted to avoid floundering when they reach something not-quite-Windowsesque. (I. e. dealing with updates and software distribution is an important lesson that isn’t obvious if they hide everything in an ersatz App Store)

Of course, my first proper Linux setup was Slackware with a 2.0.30 kernel. I wanted the Unix-like Experience.

I always leaned into “Commercial Unix Workstation Circa 1993”. I’ve considered CDE/NsCDE, but a lot of the pack-in software is of limited value, so I’m going for FVWM on the desktop and MWM on the laptop.

I should mod my big tower case to look like a brother of a HP 712.

There’s a window manager called “progman” https://github.com/jcs/progman but it gives you the look, but not the program selector.

I have a similar one, different seller and possibly submodel, but also a refurb HGST 12T enterprise drive. It sounds like I left a soda on my desk most of the time, subtly popping and ticking.

I’ve heard the power efficiency is less “unique to ARM” and more due to different performance priorities of current x86 designs. The Apple M-series targets a different power/performance tradeoff than Intel and AMD.

Recent Ryzens, for example, often can be set in an “Eco mode” for, say, 80% of the performance at 50% of the energy usage, just by tweaking clocks and voltages. A full-out efficient design x86 could probab;y do even better.

FVWM.

I feel like the “desktop environment” is a Faustian bargain. You get a plateload of software that looks consistent, but none of it is best of breed.

I can recall being a bit wowed by the original KDE 1.0 betas on my old 486, when Konqueror was the file manager as much as the browser, but in the end it felt like thry were trying to recreate the experience you got wth the pack-in software of Windows 95.

And **** GNOME for really pushing the client-side decorations model. I configured my window manager to put the title bar and close button where I want it, thank you.

I think Slackware would be more of a 2CV than a Multipla.

I think people don’t like dramatic changes in business model. I had installed it for like 3 days, long before the switchover, to test out something from another dev. When they made the announcements, the hammer went down in our org not to use it. But that didn’t stop them from sending sales-prospecting/vaguely threateningly worded email to me, who has no cheque-writing authority anyway.

Plus, I’m not a fan of containers.

STOP DOING CONTAINERS.

• Machines were not meant to contain other smaller machines.
• Years of virtualization yet no real-world use found for anything but SNES emulation
• Wanted to “ship your machine to the end-user” anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that. It was called “FedEx”.
• “Yes, Please give me docker compose up meatball-hero of something. Please give me Alpine Linux On Musl of it” – Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

“Hello, I would like 7.5GB of VM worth of apples please”

THEY HAVE PLAYED US FOR ABSOLUTE FOOLS.

What distro are you using? Been looking for an excuse to strain my 6900XT.

I started looking at getting it running on Void and it seemed like (at the time) there were a lot of specific version dependencies that made it awkward.

I suspect the right answer is to spin up a container, but I resent Docker’s licensing BS too much for that. Surely by now there’d be a purpose built live image- write it to a flash drive, reboot, and boom, anime vampire princes hot girls

I think I got that one; back then you could order cheap CDs of a bunch of different distributions from third-party vendors because most people didn’t have broadband. Depressingly, it seems the firm I used (CheapBytes out of California) is gone now.

I had used Slackware before that since my ‘learn you linux’ book came with a Slackware disc set. I recall it being frustrating because I had actually bought WordPerfect for Linux, a libc5 product, and it didn’t work right with the new glibc universe.