Isn’t that the purpose though of Ubuntu though?
No, because back in the day when Ubuntu was “Linux for human beings” you could literally feel that in almost every aspect of it, from the ease of its installation to its icon theme and system sounds to its help pages. It was their “selling” point - it made Linux friendly and reachable for many people, as it did for you and me.
It’s been more than 15 years since I used Ubuntu but from that point I really could feel that what @merci3@lemmy.world says is true - it no longer offered any real benefit compared to Fedora, Solus, Mint or whatever distro targeted at people getting into Linux. You won’t find many people saying that Ubuntu really stands out from their similars about something. It just became another option, forgot what was “Ubuntu” about (remember the Amazon ads scandal?) and seem to be really stubborn into impose to the community their way of doing things (snaps, mir…). Or tell me with a serious face how the snap thing makes the life easier of someone wanting to install a deb.
It’s correct what you say - as many other distros, they have done a great amount of work over the years and most of us are grateful to it because we could get into Linux thanks to it, nobody can deny that. It’s just that said work no longer seems the case nor they seem really interested about that.
Sadly Lemmy has gotten so much Reddit toxicity so I don’t get why you got downvotes. As a non native speaker I won’t mind if I got some downvotes too if I could get advice improving my english on my shitty comments instead
My bet is “because historic reasons”.
I remember my Nokia 3220, which was the paradigm of phone personalization at its heyday. You could personalize almost everything of it - from its back cover to getting another chassis and/or keyboard with different colors, to its wallpaper, how things showed up in the “home” screen (wether if a list or a grid) to the ringtones and the light patterns they showed when the phone rang. You could even personalize said light patterns doing some dark magick with MIDI (I did one with the opening riff of Metallica’s “Hit the lights” back in the day). Frankly that phone was the tits and imho everything regarding fun but useful phones has gone downhill from there.
But about the font? No, you could not set a different one. There was no other different font, and am pretty sure it was the exact same typeface as the one in the 1100. It was hardcoded.
Same story with a Motorola Rokr Z6 I had the chance to have - you could personalize almost everything from it (it ran Linux under the hood!) except its font.
I’d say Android dragged those concepts from those old phones, and it was just like a couple years ago or so they went “oh! shit! oh! shit!” and remembered about the fonts - all we had meanwhile was the Roboto font in Android 5, which imho was a huge downgrade from the ol’ good Droid Sans family - so now they did some cheap ass effort to try to catch up. And meanwhile typeface formats have evolved a lot - not just bitmap fonts, not even just TrueType fonts, but OpenType fonts (I recall reading somewhere they’re Turing complete?) and now variable fonts. Supporting all of that stuff doesn’t seem easy, and it’s not like AOSP or Google like to put effort in stuff people actually care - they’d spend some time or it or they can choose a subset of all of that to make their lifes easier. If they want to, that is.
And not that in iOS things are better, though - I recall having to do some weird shit with mobile iTunes or something to set my mum’s favorite ringtone because it won’t allow custom ones that easily as we can in Android.
No, but I want to be one.
I mean, that’s great, no? You don’t have to use an account and on top of that you don’t get that ai bs.
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.
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.
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.
I still remember looking at it (with its super cool sports car illustration) at the top result(s) at Sourceforge (when Sourceforge was the hub for all things open source, back in 2006), downloading each update from whatever computer from uni and bringing it back home to doddle stuff. Inkscape always was in my top 5 tools for uni along with GIMP (and Krita afterwards), Imagemagick, ConTeXt and MetaPost.
Wanted to join the wallpaper contest but it has to be only and only through a Gitlab account, and the requeriments are rather limiting - and, specially, not a fan of contests that are decided by thumbs-up (or heart emojis, like in this case)
It’s been a while since I used to use Gimp una daily basis (well, since I graduated from uni, now more than 10 years ago) - and even then there was talk about Gimp 3.0 “in the works and soon to be released”. That’s why the 3.0 release has become like a meme.
I don’t use it anymore and it’s been a while too since I cared about it. But still if they’re getting more developers involved it’s the best improvement they can make imho, even better than any feature they can cram on it. It’s not the lack of resources or the few time their devs have to work on it - it’s their tribalism and ultradefensiveness to even the mildest constructive criticism.
It’s utterly ridiculous they get so defensive when someone asks them about the reason you can’t draw a circle or a rectangle in Gimp as easily as you can with frigging Microsoft Paint. I am yet to know the reason about that.
Last time I tried to express my views about the Gimp’s UX issues at r/linux one of its devs answered almost immediately and tried to lecture me about how everything is in the source code and that they’re not hiding anything and that I was trying to do FUD stuff with them. On top of that absolute nonsense, Reddit being Reddit, I ended downvoted to oblivion just because. What has that to do with being humble and accepting Gimp has plenty of room to improve? Who knows.
Hope that absurd panorama changes with new brains involved in it and Gimp can do that giant leap and keeps improving for the better because, seriously, the biggest issue with Gimp is not its lack of manpower. If you don’t believe me just look at what Krita was when it was “Krayon” and shipped with Koffice, and what it is now.
Once I read somewhere it was because it made possible for them to make phones thinner.
I remember one time at r/peloton one of those tribalistic mildly-xenophobic nutcases told me, after sharing an article in spanish which had some ambiguous word, something to the effect that “spanish is the most confusing language in the world”.
Yes, that genius told that. In english.
This is absolutely great! Thank you so much for sharing. It’s my launcher now
Me too. Was unemployed for 2.5 years and completely broke. My own sister bullied me about that to no end on a daily basis. Lost almost all of my hair in less than six months (didn’t even hit 30 with hair in my head and no, my parents nor grandparents never went bald). Was dumped and heartbroken and lost my only and best friend in the world - my dog.
But somehow the COVID thing brought inner peace, a stable job, and pretty much could turn my life upside down.
Actually there’s some support for Wayland. Tried it last year, but had to do serious rummage trying to make it work. For starters I can recall it spitted a video but the command throwed an error at the end and could not understand why. Also i seem to recall the video stopped way after finishing the command.
Even had to recompile all of ffmeg to add support for wayland recording (though Gentoo makes this really easy). One thing for certain is that Gentoo’s ffmpeg stable version is fairly behind from upstream’s so that could have had a hand on it too.