this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Cool Plasmoids on Plasma6:

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Technically linux users need third party tools to even boot into a usable OS.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago (1 children)

if everything is third party then nothing is? my guess is thats the idea at least

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Thats why you have RedHat, SUSE, Canonical etc. Legal entities that offer warranty for that random bundle. Insurance that issues will be fixed.

Because if you are just "a racoon digging for free code" you have nothing to request from anyone.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago

Big akshually vibes

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not if you call it GNU/Linux 🤓☝️

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Alpine linux

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

difference is you dont need a third party tool to change the thing, if you're unhappy with the thing, you change the thing out itself, you are not stuck with it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yes but we get to choose the bloat we want. Windows uses need bloat to cover up the native bloat.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I love how I can just casually uninstall the entire desktop and install a new one in a few minutes.

Or I can be a complete madman and keep both.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

genuinely curious since I've never tried or even considered it. What happens when you have multiple desktops installed, and assuming it doesn't cause issues why would a person want to do that?

[–] [email protected] 44 points 3 months ago

Typically your display manager lets you choose which environment you want from a dropdown menu. It’s responsible for helping you login and taking you to the desktop.

And you can have multiple login screens if you like. I’m not sure why I would typically do this.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

openSUSE pre-installs IceWM, for example, even if you select a full-fledged DE during setup, so that if your proper DE should ever break, you still have a (very minimal) GUI to do your troubleshooting in.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's pretty cool! My immediate reaction to hearing "minimal backup DE for troubleshooting" is wondering why that isn't far more common

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I think this is nice but also adds some bloat.

Like that OpenSUSE model only works if both use XOrg, so if XOrg breaks it doesnt work.

On Wayland, either DEs get their shit together and share libraries, or GNOME, KDE, Wayfire, labwc, COSMIC, and in the future XFCE, Cinnamon and more all use their own stuff.

This would mean you need to add another wayland compositor and the GUI stuff.

There is a bit of a lack of complete minimal DEs. Raspberry Pi has their stuff based on Wayfire, LXQt 6.1 will be wayland ready and can be used with many compositors.

These would be good candidates, but really what is a broken Desktop?

But I will do a post in Fedora discuss about this, even though I dont think the Atomic variants need it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

You can choose on the login screen, works well, but it gets confusing if the whole Desktop gets installed: example GNOME comes with gnome-terminal even if there is already xterm or KDE Konsole on the system

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

There's no added value to having multiple desktop environments, so almost no one would want to. A lot of applications use DE sensitive configurations and there's potential for conflicts as well as libraries incompatibility. Which can result on paradoxical and bizarre behavior from some graphical apps. It's odd that it happens but it's also not something devs plan or account for, so they aren't even considered bugs. You don't install multiple DEs at the same time unless you're purposefully trying to break something or you don't know better.

The only use case currently is choosing between a DE with X or one with Wayland. But even that one could fuck your system.

For example, opening cinnamon experimental Wayland makes all my flatpaks stop working until reboot. Why? I don't know, nobody knows. But if I keep using Wayland after reboot they work. If I change to regular cinnamon, they break again until reboot, when they get fixed as long as I keep using regular cinnamon. It just be like that.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I don't use linux on desktop anymore but that seems like a major step backwards from 10 years ago where your worst worry for running multiple DEs was the bloat from having to run GTK and QT in a mixed environment.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

They're making it sound worse than it is, in my opinion.

The problem is that it depends on which DEs you mix and match. Some DEs might do catastrophically bad things for other DEs, whereas others don't cause any problems.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

It's not. Its actually always been like that. Like I said, this kinds of problems are odd and rare. The real issue is that the most help you'd get from the devs teams is a shrug, as it is an unsupported use case. I actually do have both gtk and qt libraries running and they work nicely together.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

I have many DE's installed right now and I never encountered any problems because of it, these issues sound really bizarre. With the cinnamon thing it sounds like cinnamon mangles something while running, but you would still have this problem if you only ever installed cinnamon, so... ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

This is so wrong. Especially the assumption that almost no one would want to have more than 1 DE installed.

Most DEs have their own configuration which don't conflict.

If the maintainer of a distribution has their shit together library incompatibility is no issue. Even on Gentoo you have to ignore everything portage is trying to tell you before you get in trouble.

In the past I even ran two DEs at the same time, sort of. You could start an xfce-panel while using enlightment or good old classic windowmaker.

Later I used Gnome and running my own fork of dwm in a nested Xserver. With wayland this option hasn't gone thanks to Xwayland.

If systemd is correctly set up for it, you get a different seat for every DE, no matter if some seats are hosting the same DE or a different one. I am not sure what will happen if you have several graphical logins with the same user, never tried it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Especially the assumption that almost no one would want to have more than 1 DE installed.

I am not so sure about this. Over the years this is first I've even heard of the concept

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I got an underpowered gaming laptop I use lxqt when running heavier things, plasma the rest of the time, biggest issue I've found is lxqt dirtied up the desktop with home/trash/documents links

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

typically you get a dropdown at the login screen :)

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (13 children)

Windows used to actually have cool theming capabilities in Windows 98 (And I think ME/2000) what the hell happened to that LMAO

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

Monopoly happened

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

In my opinion, it peaked in Windows XP. XP's themes were way more customizable than 98's. You could patch the uxtheme DLL (disable the signature check) to allow third-party themes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I miss the sound themes. The animal theme was really cool with its sounds.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

More like officially supported modding. For example, Gnome extensions are third party add-ons.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Plasma "get new stuff" does need an overhaul though, after a poorly-coded theme could wipe a guy's drives. So careful what you install and always have backups, kids!

THAT BEING SAID:

I remember Win98 letting you customize wallpapers for individual folders.

I remember being a Win-ME kiddie that was thrilled with all the fun wallpaper/icon/sound/screensaver themes it came with. . .even though Windows ME lol.

Then XP was so bright and vibrant and fun I didn't care too bad that it let you choose from THREE dazzling color schemes. I also loved that StarDock cursor freeware that gave me a bunch of obnoxious animated cursors.

Vista's desktop applets seemed so neat except for the "massive security hole" part.

And here we are with 10 or 11: [Pulsing blue light] "We'Re sEtTiNg Up YoU'Re bLaNd DeSkToP...get hypnotized by spinny circles and forget you once had choices."

It's going so backwards, and they think they're so ahead of the curve by letting you tint your theme based on wallpaper color. Pffft.

Since I switched to Plasma I've had SO MUCH FUN setting up my desktop however I want it. I have a laptop install that feels like "Vaporwave XP", but my main rig is all efficient and sleek and pretty, and I get the urge to flip it all around every few months. It makes personal computing feel personal again!

Mimicking old themes is especially fun because you're still on a security-patched system that works the way you expect, but with improved nostalgic feelings!

I really want to learn to make my own splash screens and icons and cursors some time. The fact that I easily can do this and the community could enjoy them is SO COOL.

I miss when it was commonplace for people to customize and personalize their computers. It would say a lot about them. Now most normie folk don't even know how to change the wallpaper...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

You can just place this file to disable the component entirely.

The getnewstuff needs an overhaul, but not related to this. This is about the naming of global themes.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

Yes, customizing as they want

Ihust need to configure. I just need to configure. Configure, configure configure

(this is me)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

The thing that tilted me the most on macbook was that I had to install a 3rd party tool to have shortcuts to move apps between screens. SERIOUSLY?

It's a free app, but still.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

this acts like rainmeter and stardock windowblinds weren't vastly superior ....

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Got to remember that most windows and Mac users aren’t even aware of the bloat. I don’t know how many times I’ve gotten on my mom’s pc that she said was going slow and found countless extensions, tool bars and off brand programs installed. Between her being in her 50s and her grand kids hopping on and clicking everything, nobody knows or gives a damn.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Linux users using Gnome Tweaks to make their PC look exactly like macOS.

When I'm not working on my Mac I enjoy the sheer simplicity of Sway

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Tweaking gnome to look like macos is easy. Turning kde to look like macos? Now that's dope.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Cairo + global-menu and a little bit of taskbar rearrangement should do the trick

[–] possiblylinux127 2 points 3 months ago

Why would you want that? Gnome is way better

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

I sure do love installing KDE Plasma however I want

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I've been running Linux for almost thirty years. Back in the day i would customize everything. Now I basically install and run it stock.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Same, but a few Plasmoids are nice to have..

I also like it simpler than stock KDE. no sounds, no floating, no animations.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

"I need a computer that jUsT wOrKs"

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