See, I didn’t even know about it - only now that you mention it. Makes you wonder why more people aren’t aware of it, whereas Ladybird has gotten more noise.

What is stopping someone; say the FSF or some other group championing libre software from coming up with their own web engine completely different from the incumbent engines?

Seems you’re not aware of stuff like Servo, which some said was supposed to be the replacement of Gecko, and it’s being written in Rust. But Mozilla ditched it and gave it to the Linux Foundation where its development is reeeaaally sloooooooow.

Afaik The Linux Foundation gives next-to-nothing, if not nothing, to its development. But despite of all of that it seems it has increased its pace (compared to the time it was just given to TLF) and has got donations and stuff.

But a browser engine is an absurdly huge piece of software and it will be a miracle if projects like Rust (or Ladybird, which I just learned it’s targeting its first alpha for… 2026!) get backed by big corporations and their pace gets quicker.

Call me stupid or whatever (seeing the Reddit toxicity that has got into Lemmy I’d be surprised if this has no downvotes!) but I do think Servo has the potential to be a serious contender to the hegemony of Chrome/Chromium in the long haul. The Linux Foundation seems to have enough resources to propel its development and reach that goal, but they just choose not to nor seem to care at all. So yes, unless a miracle happens we normies can only choose between Chrome/Chromium, Firefox or something Webkit. Maybe even going absolutely radical and using Konqueror with its KHTML engine, if you can.

Lol what? As the other comment says, partitioning disks for Gentoo is exactly the same thing as partitioning disks for Arch. If the problem is a PEBKAC thing you can’t just blame the distro.

The alleged “difficulty” of installing Gentoo is just about reading docs and waiting for it to compile stuff, it’s no rocket science as you people are trying to FUD.

I mean, that you couldn’t get past drive partitioning doesn’t make it difficult to install for everyone.

Of course not - if Xfce has too few people working on it, MATE has even less than them, and Enlightenment has even less than MATE. And note that Enlightenment is not only the desktop environment per se but the E libraries (and those are no regurgitated shit - for example, some car makers have used them on their infotainment systems). I’d think it’d be amazing if those two (or those three) could do a Dragon-ball-z kind of fusion, I think those three have really similar goals. Hell, if that was actually a thing most probably I’d move to that.

I know Xfce folks have submitted patches to GTK over the years, but it’s just that GNOME’s enshittification has pregnated GTK to a point of no return and Xfce devs are very well aware of that (for example, the libadwaita thing).

I’m happy with KDE since 2009. But I’d have a really hard time if I were to choose between those two.

I think I “know” MATE because before KDE I used to use Gnome2 so it feels nostalgic to me. The Applications/Places/System menu was the tits and it beat the shit of whatever start menu you put in front of it, and Gnome’s decision to get rid of it was the stupidest idea ever (among many other of their utterly stupid decisions). I’d really miss that menu if it weren’t for that I got used to associate some keystrokes to launch my favorite apps so I don’t even use a start menu or whatever, rather than Krunner.

On the con side it seems to me MATE is being developed at a slower pace than Xfce’s, and it seems less customizable than it - well, at least for me that’s a con - thought I’m not really a “ricer” or anything I just got used to a certain way to do things on the desktop and I remember having to fiddle with Gconf2 to do stuff like you did with friggin’ Windows Registry editor.

I got to use Xfce back in the day too. It has an Applications/Places menu just so people wouldn’t think they blatantly copied Gnome, but it’s more than 10 years since Gnome got rid of it so I don’t know why they haven’t took it. Xfce feels somewhat more customizable, has the veteran badge and seems to have more developers backing it up.

But it’s being developed with GTK+3/4 so I guess at some point they’ll suffer from the shittificationGnome-ization of GTK and, as I said before in some other post, if I were them I’d move all my shit to the E libraries (even more, I’d do a fusion of the Enlightenment desktop and Xfce). Also I happen to be a graphic designer so the lack of care they have onto some things sticks like a sore thumb to me, like those poorly designed settings dialogs on some stuff that even have some dumb horizontal scrolling just because they couldn’t care less about that.

Not knowing how anything works

I mean, that’s how you start learning stuff - not knowing how something works

Being scared by errors that you don’t know how to get around or deal with

Isn’t that the case for every OS in existence? When something breaks, you don’t know how to deal with it. Enter google/ddg/whatever

Not knowing alternatives for your former favourite apps to do things quickly

See point 1 - and yet there are Linux apps that let you do things quicker than Windows stuff. I can’t imagine myself at this point having to use frigging photoshop to crop or add a border to a image when you could do that with a ´magick -crop´

Wondering if you get the peripherals you currently own to run?

Wasn’t that the whole point of live images? Not that they will charge you for downloading them. And hardware support is infinitely better today than back in the day. Just look at what the folks at asahi did - that’s nothing short of incredible

I remember reading about it like 10 years ago along with LunarLinux (e: and sorcerer) as was curious about other source based linux distros. I thought both were dead, glad that at least sourcemage is still alive

Still it’s ridiculous they only allow submissions via a gitlab account. Oh and not only whatever gitlab account - it has to be done with one created in that instance. Same thing for voting!

And if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, there’s all those requeriments for people submitting their wallpaper.

When I learned about the contest thought about doing one and submitting it, but with all those limitations? Not even an email to send your wallpaper? Forget it. Not even sure why they announce this contests in the first place.

Gentoo because I like it.

And portage.

I tried to do a couple of icon sets that went with that trend for KDE. At one point I was involved with the KDE VDG and was about to set the style of the icons they’d use.

But apparently some suit told them they needed to go completely flat as they needed to plaster Firefox/distros/whatever logos on it, so everything needed to look consistent.

So in the end I got bored about it and stepped away. I’m trying to redo a new square-shaped-skeumorphed icon set but it’s so much work - like it’d need to be your daily job to pull it off.

However, if you take a look at it, it’s already in this one - some of them are just the base shape with some logo plastered on it (like the whatsapp one, or the one with the butterfly) and voilá, there’s your icon.

So icon sets are incredibly hard, and if you want a skeumorphism icon set its hard squared. That’s another of the reasons flat icons thrive today.

some tar.gz archive with a sketchy install script

I just can’t… like maybe I’m too old and that’s why I still can’t wrap my head around how we went from “./configure && make & make install scripts are almost the de facto way to install software in linux” to “a sketchy install script”. We’re living interesting times at Linux

It says it uses webkit, so does Epiphany, so most probably it’s based on it.

Whatever it takes to have a fr🤮nch-free system

Mozilla does not look any reliable for people that loves FOSS, yet our current web seems like it’s either Firefox/Gecko or Chrome/Chromium browsers. I wish people were more aware of emergent projects like Servo or Ladybird - even better if they could donate to them. I’m positive either of them could be a serious competitor to the Chrome hegemony.

To be fair E always had great potential (I recall reading somewhere some car makers use it in their infotainment UIs), but alas doesn’t have the manpower to keep it at the same pace as some other DEs, even much newer than it. If I were Xfce and got the last straw of the GNOME-ization of GTK I’d rewrite all my shit with the E libraries - hell, it would be awesome if those two merged together.

Fwiw today I learned about the bash oneliners repo.

I miss that Ubuntu. You know, the one when they took the “Linux for human beings” motto seriously.

If GeckOS isn’t already taken, it could be kinda cool.

Cantarell has served us well, but we’ve been wondering if it would be more beneficial to default to a more modern and well-maintained typeface

Eh. I don’t feel Cantarell “dated” or “not modern”. I don’t even use GNOME anymore but I reckon Cantarell is actually a great font, it’s legible and has character. It’s almost like you can tell it’s about GNOME when you see Cantarell somewhere. If I were them I’d invest into giving it more weights (I’d really like it if it had a lighter version), variations and extending it. They have the power and resources to do so.

imho they’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t even exist. Inter’s default is a poor choice, as some of you have already noted here.