I'm not sure I agree. It takes getting used to, and the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need. The settings feel like you're almost in a config file. Except for on old computers, Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points.
I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to," and I'm not sure minimizing it immediately is the best approach to bring people into the ecosystem.
I've tried Cosmic recently and it's glitches galore right now (on nvidia at least). I think safest point is KDE. The most familiar paradigm, mature wayland support with mixed refresh rate displays, HDR and other modern features that XFCE can't do.
Yeah, I think it might be a driver thing (or driver interaction with XFCE code).
After ~10 years of using XFCE, I recently for the first time encountered flickering, after an NVidia driver update. I disabled compositing and it went away. Still happy, but clearly something broke there. Pretty sure someone's trying to fix it, somewhere.
> the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need
Who is actually getting this impression? What thing that they "need" is in doubt?
> I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to,"
You assume incorrectly. Every OS and DE finds some way to be obnoxious, even when you've learned the tricks and keyboard shortcuts. XFCE just seems to have the least of them. It's predictable. I think a new user will be able to navigate it immediately. I don't know about KDE, but I sure couldn't say the same about Gnome 3.
> The settings feel like you're almost in a config file.
What on earth?
No, the config has dialogues and intuitive controls. There is a settings-editor you can go into if you need to, with a bit more of a regedit kinda feel, but I haven't looked in there in years.
> Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points.
In Gnome, can I move the UI elements to locations I want them in? Or are we still in a situation where it's opinionated and you have to seek plugins to get an experience that you actually want?
> In Gnome, can I move the UI elements to locations I want them in?
No.
> Or are we still in a situation where it's opinionated and you have to seek plugins to get an experience that you actually want?
Yes, 100%.
COSMIC feels like GNOME but done right to me. It's not as pretty but while it looks and works pretty much the same by default, you can choose what goes where.
For older machines I'd recommend Mate. It's a fork of old Gnome 2, so it got a lot more polish back on the day, even though some of it bit rotted away.
It's still a very nice desktop and you can combine it with Compiz if you want to have some fun.
"Too late now, I suppose, but the only file extension I would endorse is “.markdown” [...]
(I personally use “.text” for my own files, and have BBEdit set to use Markdown syntax coloring for that extension, which is why I never saw a need to endorse an official extension.)"
It is my assumption that Gruber chose ‘.text’ over ‘.txt’ for several reasons. To give it a little difference when searching for files. To be more legible to non-computer people. And finally, while Classic MacOS did not use file extensions, the Resource Fork type code for text files was ‘TEXT’
Also a little extra distinction: “.txt” is a relic of 8.3 DOS filename conventions. He was not bound by these. If you’ve got the space, of course you’ll go with “.text” over “.txt” because text is the input, HTML is the output, Markdown is the tool for converting one into the other, per the first line of the introduction:
> Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.
Ergo they’re not Markdown documents, they’re text files that can be converted into HTML using Markdown.
I use CC regularly for editing large text files (especially turning interview transcripts into something readable) and have found it works much better than web chat interfaces because of filesystem access and ability to work with large files.
That’s great to know. I’ve come to the same conclusion. I’ve found that things work best when they happen right where I’m already working. Uploading files or recreating context in a web service adds friction, especially when everything is already available locally.
I was speaking at a conference recently and was asked to chair the session at the last minute. It was hybrid, so all the speakers needed to share their slides on Zoom. I have been daily driving Linux for 14 years, and this has almost never been a problem (there was a moment with i3 but it seems better). But I hadn't bothered to test this since installing (and generally loving!) PopOS COSMIC.
The problem, at root, is Wayland. Zoom has some kind of workaround it seems, but it's not working yet in COSMIC.
The result was sad: speakers having to speak with their slides being run by one of the remote speakers, and anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.
> anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.
It always boggles me how supporters of Wayland (or other things that are new and better and worth deprecating the old one for) miss this. It only takes one experience like this to make the average person view Wayland (or Linux as a whole) as a total failure.
Wayland isn't a piece of software. It's a protocol. Compositors that implement it are Gnome's Mutter, KWin, wlroots, hyprland's compositor, and others. COSMIC implements their own compositor too and that's probably where the problem lies...
I use Gnome, and Wayland sessions have been flawless for years. Screen sharing works, everything works.
Also, I've seen colleagues struggle to get screen sharing working on both Windows and Mac; most OSes now don't just allow any program to read from any window, so if someone forgets to allow a permission somewhere, no screen sharing.
I don't want to post the typical "work on my machine" comment, but
I regularly see screen sharing failing on almost any platform.
In many in-person conferences in my field they started to request a copy of the pdf file before the talk, that will be projected and shared using a dedicated computer.
And, as explained, it doesn't matter. The problems, at root, are human psychology and incompatible but popular software, and that's sufficient to drive people away. And the issues are not new: we had exactly that with Windows Vista.
+1. I have tried a bunch of local models (albeit the smaller end, b/c hardware limits), and I can't get handwriting recognition yet. But online Gemini and Claude do great. Hoping the local models catch up soon, as this is a wonderful LLM use case.
UPDATE: I just tried this with the default model on handwriting, and IT WORKED. Took about 5-10 minutes on my laptop, but it worked. I am so thrilled not to have to send my personal jottings into the cloud!
There are good uses for block-chain like things, even beyond sprinking in a mention to help raise grant funding, but the headline-grabbers have generally not been those...
I find this is an extraordinary tool for 90% of needs, and I love that it can interact with multiple models. It is a great example of how to productize the ecosystem in a user-loyal way.
I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to," and I'm not sure minimizing it immediately is the best approach to bring people into the ecosystem.
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