software got worse over time

ayleid96

ayleid96

But literally, what exactly changed for better in the last 10+ years?

I cleaned the dust of my old laptop with FreeBSD 9.1 installed. It has nvidia 6200, GNOME 2 installed and some ancient version of wine. Its more usable than anything i used in the last ten years(i am speaking for both bsd and linux).

GNOME 2 is just amazing and functional, i can change so many settings, file manager is awesome, i can configure many important aspects of the system using GNOME's GUI tools(Something i am really angry about with *nix devs, is it that hard to make something like that? People can feel like home). GNOME 2 thinks like user, its so functional and light and pretty and literally has everything you need. And no, MATE is not nearly as good as GNOME 2. It lacks many many stuff and it just became so bloated over time.

I can easily play world of warcraft here and couple of other games i like. These ancient version of chromium and firefox still render pages nicely enough to be usable.(I am currently writing this on chromium version 23). Torrent works, the original XMMS port is still present.

Why did we move on? For what? This laptop was buried in time for about 12 years and its still just awesome both in hardware and software. Everything just got worse.

Now we have latest drivers, latest web browsers, latest desktop enviroments that are minimalistic(GNOME 3) and not functional at all, i can't configure literally anything system-related on that soulless shell. And you need tons of RAM to run it all.

I feel incredibly awesome using this little time capsule and i think i will stick with it for quite some time.
 
Software was also written and tested well before releasing, so you had a mostly bug free experience; now days they are pushing versions out as fast as possible not caring if anything screws the system up or anything.

Sad part is, people (including admins) are getting used to if some software or service crashed multiple times, they don't even care anymore and just restart and go on like it's an every day occurrence (probably is for some software).
 
Lennart will forgive me but you can restart automatic pulse-audio after it crashes.
The idea that software should not crash in the first place is a bit forgotten.
Lennart will forgive me but systemd has all the features to restart crashing services.
 
ayleid96 said:
Why did we move on? For what? This laptop was buried in time for about 12 years and its still just awesome both in hardware and software. Everything just got worse.
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Because of tablets and smartphones, KDE and GNOME want to make sure their applications and desktop environments can work on them. I can't stand to use either one, no KDE is not any better with Baloo and Akonadi crap and those Plasma widgets. TDE would be a good port, I think its a better fork than MATE is to GNOME 2.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Don't forget nepomuk & strigi. Ubuntu once had the "feature" to send the data you search for to central servers.
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Oh yeah, argh!

I'm currently using KDE Plasma because I can't decide on the desktop anymore. MATE is not the best, but I still think its ahead of Xfce. I will probably just compile TDE soon.
 
I'm using xfce4. I think mate is also good.
[ I dropped labwc-wayland because of a bar problem. A minimized window is "lost"]
[ I dropped wayfire-wayland for the same reason]
[Sway does not has this problem as it is an i3 clone]
 
I like wayland, but then I lose nice things like xscreensaver. In Wayland, the compositor must have its own solution for screensaving and its usually just a lock these days. I use a lot of Athena applications that are guaranteed to need XWayland so I'll probably stick to Xorg for the foreseeable future.
 
I never stumbled upon tablet/touch usage that includes KDE/gnome. They literally destroyed themselves for nothing, not like android would adopt their DEs.
Look at windows, it has kiosk mode that enlarges taskbar a little and they added some swipe menus without touching traditional look and feel.

GNOME 3 is just too ambitious. Standard installation takes over one 1gb of ram for literally animations and one top panel. XFCE lacks administration tools, LXDE is feature-less, MATE tries too hard but fails and also lacks administration tools.

I literally want to fork latest GNOME 2 source and make it possible on modern systems... I could take that as my hobby project.
 
Also, tap to click works out of the box, I don’t need to decipher tons of xorg’s manual pages to get stupid thing working.
 
Can I ask whats different in MATE than GNOME 2? It was forked from the latest version too. It uses GTK3 now is the only big difference I can think of.
 
Sadly my only suggestion to computer environments is to simplify. Possibly get used to and get proficient with the command line and simple window manager.

They provide similar functionality to a full on DE but most importantly, there isn't much interest in those things from the "open-source community" so there isn't much there that they can damage with their naïve shitty faux user-friendly ideas.

Yes, they will try to damage it with Wayland which cuts away our ability to use a light window manager but I don't see Wayland as ever taking the majority in our lifespan. It is fairly useless without the XServer plugin and much of the proponents around Wayland don't realise this. They don't (or don't know how) to disable it.
 
ayleid96 said:
I never stumbled upon tablet/touch usage that includes KDE/gnome. They literally destroyed themselves for nothing, not like android would adopt their DEs.
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They do have a use-case in Linux phones and tablets like the Pinephone or Pinetab, but I just think smartphones are cringe in general.

ayleid96 said:
Look at windows, it has kiosk mode that enlarges taskbar a little and they added some swipe menus without touching traditional look and feel.
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Windows is doing the same thing as KDE for example, it feels very much like I'm using a mobile device when I touch it. Thankfully we have alternatives in the UNIX world.
 
I get it, but I don't understand how people have a stubborn stance, of let's add more useless software to it with little gain of features. Let's make it so it needs 3 compilers and countless additional build utilities.

For instance, why does adding SVG functionality need as many dependencies as it does, compared to any other image functionality? Why are portaudio and sndio so simple compared to libcanberra? To make 1 little ding sound?

See how a port in FreeBSD which is made for RedHat Linux utilities needs so many of its own custom dependencies just for their make and configuration files.

They won't admit what you're saying.
 
My pet peeve is all the instances where developers have “improved” a desktop environment by making you move your mouse pointer three times as much and click things three times as often. The rot really set in around ~2010.
Say I want to shut my computer down. I want to shut it down. I don’t want to click a menu of some kind, then click “leave”, then choose the type of leaving I want to do (lol) such as “restart” or “sleep” or “shut down”, then be confronted by a dialog that says I will do my leaving in 60 seconds but hey, if I click yet another button, I get to leave straight away!
Thanks, I’m enraged now.
 
Wayland could be a major improvement when fully finished. Linux used to have strong screen tearing on Nvidia Optimus laptops that was usually not easy to fix.
Not so much positive has happened in most other areas. KDE 4 was in my opinion more polished and a visually nicer desktop than the new KDE Plasma 5.
I find that cmus has the best audio quality of any music player on FreeBSD.
Browsers have objectively become better (faster) than before.
I like Telegram on FreeBSD. On the other hand, Freenode has disappeared which I thought was one of the best social channels.
What BSD and Linux miss most on the desktop is a decent desktop environment that is visually appealing and efficient and stable. Unity 8 was well on its way to becoming a modern desktop in my opinion, but it received a lot of unfair criticism in my opinion, and then like many Ubuntu projects it was stopped halfway through.
FreeBSD specifically lacks browsers on the desktop, eg Brave would be nice if it worked natively.
 
Best desktop ever
 

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kpedersen said:
Sadly my only suggestion to computer environments is to simplify. Possibly get used to and get proficient with the command line and simple window manager.

They provide similar functionality to a full on DE but most importantly, there isn't much interest in those things from the "open-source community" so there isn't much there that they can damage with their naïve shitty faux user-friendly ideas.

Yes, they will try to damage it with Wayland which cuts away our ability to use a light window manager but I don't see Wayland as ever taking the majority in our lifespan. It is fairly useless without the XServer plugin and much of the proponents around Wayland don't realise this. They don't (or don't know how) to disable it.
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I second this. In two ways:

1) Simplify your workflow: I emanicpated from using a particular desktop environment by specializing(!) on simple tools: Terminal + tmux + vim (for all software development) + some easy editor to keep track of documentation for myself (currently Geany). By using this setup consistently, I have been able to be productive in a professional workforce environment for years, which proves that this is no hobbyist stuff. I don't care anymore, if the desktop environment is Gnome 3 or WindowMaker; although I prever the latter since it's more ergonomic for what I am doing.

2) Wayland is a hoax: I recently had to implement monitor hotplugging for an emebedded device for a customer. The requirement was super-simple: Duplicate graphics output on all accessible monitor outputs, regardless when a monitor is plugged in (hotplugging). I tried different compositors, nothing worked. On the forums they said: „No, that's not implemented yet, nobody has yet bothered to. Do you want to do it?”. Yes, I would, but did not have the time for it. In the end, we switched to Xorg and everything worked like a charm. Product-Management (who did not care for nerdy stuff like what a particular windowing system was) was happy. Conclusion: Xorg is the better, because more mature, software.
 
ProphetOfDoom said:
My pet peeve is all the instances where developers have “improved” a desktop environment by making you move your mouse pointer three times as much and click things three times as often.
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I'm waiting for the dialog box that pops up "You moved your mouse. Do you really want to move your mouse? Click yes to continue" which moving your mouse to click yes causes another you moved your mouse dialog to pop up. Of course they are modal dialogs so you have to click them.

I'm with the others that say/imply "Forget desktop environments, learn about simple window managers" I've been just fine with WindowMaker for a heck of a long time.
 
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