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
Using Windows 1.x to show off your machine… even in 1985, an interesting choice.
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.
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.
This is the firmware I’ve been working on. Basically I wrote it because at the time (early 2023) there wasn’t a “good” keyboard firmware like QMK or ZMK for the CH32V305. Now it supports keyboards, joysticks, and a rudimentary pointing device made out of a PS2-style analogue stick.
https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/ch32v-keyboard/-/tree/fightstick?ref_type=heads
That branch has the mapping I used. Note this firmware has a keyboard-centric assumption that switches are wired as a matrix (between two sense lines), even if that matrix is 1x24, rather than just grounding a sense line individually.
The stick portion was one of those “Pandora Box” devices that was built into a cabinet and pre-wired to a crappy Android TV box.
I bought it because I figured it was probably cheaper than cutting a decent looking cabinet and buying the buttons off AliExpress. That also meant it came with a predefined cable harness to fit the Android box. In the hopes of making it tidy, and reversible, I ordered a little throwaway PCB that accepted the existing 40-pin plug and bridged it to a nanoCH32V305 breakout board. Of course, I made a design mistake, so the PCB had bodge wires, so not much was saved.
If you’re starting from scratch, you could direct-wire to the MCU breakout board.
I’m thinking it might be my 2.5G router when it drops. Or worst case, maybe retire the Atom I’m using for a NAS.
I’ve been using some much smaller CH32V305 based keyboard controllers for a while, recently built a fightstick aroubd the platform. Now if only I fidn’t suck at joystick games, having grown up on gamepads.
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.
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 found this strange because paper tickets would be desired as souvenirs. I tape them to my stereo cabinet, when I actually get one.