How would you set up a fallback kernel in Arch?

Ugh I can’t find the xkcd about this where the guy goes, “you know what we call precisely written requirements? Code” or something like that

Wine stuff was janky as hell. As were Qt apps. For one thing wine applications, too, expected a Tray, and would instead spawn a tiny window at the corner for tray stuff. Plus there was weird behaviour with some windows and the way they layered. As for Qt apps? Gnome offered no features for setting the look of Qt apps, so if I set Gnome to dark mode (by the way, very neat feature how Gnome’s default theme deals with that, no joke here, very seamless and elegant, even if I’d never use light mode willingly), Qt apps would still be bright and I had to just install a third-party application for it (qt5ct) and set something in my /etc/environment.

Sorry, I laughed out loud when I read that. Only in Linux land would we run into issues like this because stuff is modular so when things aren’t the way something expects, shit breaks in the stupidest ways.

All of these things had solutions, to be sure, an extension for the tray, a third-party application for the Qt apps, etc. But then I did an apt upgrade and literally all the extensions broke. So I had to spend an extra hour that day figuring out what I’d do about that. Joy of joys.

Oh I learned early on to either update super regularly so I can see what’s breaking as it happens, or be careful upgrading. The number of times I’ve broken shit by updating software is insane (and not limited to GNOME). Even on macOS, the number of times I’ve fixed something by symlinking a library file to the same location with an older version name is stupid. I can see why people are interested in something like NixOS.

Then there is the Gnome File Manager.

You could’ve just stopped there, I had forgotten how weirdly awful it was. The amount of time I spent getting that stupid thing to just fucking have options like “Open in Terminal” is insane.

Cinnamon absolutely is fantastic, and I 100% agree that it gets out of the way really well.

I’m curious what you needed to do that GNOME was fighting you. I’m not invalidating it, I’m genuinely just curious, since I haven’t used a Linux system for personal/work use for about 5 years now, so my ideas of GNOME/KDE/etc. are almost certainly dated. To clarify: vanilla GNOME is kind of awful, and I’ve always wondered if anyone genuinely uses it stock while also being aware that extensions exist.

Gnome devs want to decide what is best for you

Rebuttal: I’m extremely fickle, so someone else making choices for me is what I need. In KDE I spent wasted days customizing and just gave up in the end. It’s the same idea as using prettier instead of using your own lint rules: you stop wasting time and just do the thing you’re there to do.

In general, for configs (linting, neovim, etc), I prefer taking something really good and tweaking the parts I dislike—which is the model GNOME uses. Probabilistically, it’s exponentially likely that your preferences are only a little bit away from someone else—just use their thing and spend 15 minutes tweaking them.

A majority? I mean use something else if you like them better, no need to shit on GNOME

I honestly like the vertical integration, but I can see why Linux folks would be annoyed. Honestly GNOME fits my workflow perfectly after a few extensions (mainly Dash to Dock). I’m super fickle, so its rigidity helps

I remember a guy who tied his baby’s rocker to the drive and wrote code to open and close the CD drive repeatedly lol. Fun times.

Yeah I could never get into either. eMacs bindings feel odd at times, though some are pretty good. I wish I could get into Doom emacs like some others. And gimp…I know how to crop stuff and concatenate images, but that’s it

It’s likely transpiring and not compiling, so it’s a lot easier than it seems. Source: made a language that adds features to Python and transpiles to valid Python.

Yup, that’s been my experience with getting people to at least consider Linux as well. The first thing they ask when I tell them it’s a different OS like Mac is, “so can it run XYZ?” Most people don’t actually care and just want something that runs the apps they use.

Interestingly, my mom (a Windows user her whole life) seemed just as alienated by macOS as by Linux. Her work gave her a Mac and she couldn’t understand anything after about a week so she just asked for a Windows system instead.

Oh god I feel so called out. I wish I paid more attention to my commit messages but I’m usually too busy fixing the directory structure and refactoring. Sigh.

Please don’t ever have kids.

Honestly I get both sides of it. Your view makes sense as an end-user and from a philosophical perspective. But some people have legacy software that needs conflicting dependency versions, for instance. It’s just a trade-off.

The WM folks can be obnoxious lol. But it comes from a place of passion and love for the ecosystem so it’s not bad.