[conspire] Installing Linux on Elise Scher's Chromebook

[Steve Litt]

Syeed Ali said on Fri, 7 Jul 2023 10:48:13 -0700

>On Thu, 6 Jul 2023 23:59:53 -0700
>Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
>
>> Someone may eventually quibble, so:  gtk3 is not technically EOLed 
>> (yet).  But it's been happening by degrees anyway, as the GNOME
>> people always do:  Development has largely shifted to the gtk4
>> effort, and the gtk2 & 3 branches will suffer, as happened with gtk
>> 1.x before them. Also, the GNOME guys have made very clear that they
>> really don't care about any project other than GNOME having problems
>> with their libs. This problem was not seen during gtk2 days, but is
>> now.  
>
>Why would an everyday user care?
>
>To me, the desktop environment is just a container within which are the
>applications I care about.

The preceding philosophy of not caring about your UI's (user
interface's) innards is a luxury that's getting more and more costly
for two reasons:

1) Caustic complexity

2) Summary and arbitrary UI change, and not always for the better


CAUSTIC COMPLEXITY

When you take one or two medicines, life is good. The medicines do what
they're supposed to. Bump that up to five medicines and there start to
be drug interactions. With ten medications you need to have even more
medications to fix symptoms of drug interaction, and the whole thing
turns into a Jenga game.

Same with UI features and with non-modular coding. Interactions cause
edge case and corner case situations that are extremely difficult to
diagnose, so you work around them with strange stuff and hope for the
best. Those who choose a UI without regard to complexity had better be
a ninja with the package manager, with GNU/Linux, and with
troubleshooting, or else they'll forever be asking questions on mailing
lists and people will get tired of them.

SUMMARY AND ARBITRARY UI CHANGE, AND NOT ALWAYS FOR THE BETTER

The following are lightweight user interfaces: Openbox, CTWM,
Windowmaker, IceWM, LXDE, LXQt, i3, dmenu, and all the tiling window
managers. You know what else they have in common? They act the same as
they did a decade ago. You pick one, you customize it to your exact
workflow and style, and you're good for a long, long time. I've used
Openbox plus dmenu plus UMENU for a decade or more, on Ubuntu, Debian
and Void. No change to my user interface.

Now let's talk about the hipster UI's, Windows, Gnome and KDE among
others. They constantly change. You constantly have to relearn
everything. You constantly have to reconfigure everything to get the
workflow you want.

What's their motivation for the constant churn? Who knows? My suspicion
is that Microsoft, Redhat and their captive projects churn to increase
Microsoft and Redhat profits. My suspicion is that some project
developers are more proud of making clever code than solving a problem
in a robust way. After all, their open source code is their portfolio,
and they want prospective employers to marvel at their cleverness and
mastery over a specific language. As far as the projects, my suspicion
is that the big, popular projects view things as a competition and want
to out-feature their competitors.

Anyway, complexity matters.

>With all that in mind, I'd always offer Lubuntu to users because of the
>foundational "light" and "easy" philosophies, and the huge community.
>(Reasonable hardware will Just Work, it'll be obvious to use, and
>there's help to be found.)

The preceding paragraph is completely true, but it's not the whole
story. *buntu is great for beginners and for oddball hardware, but as
the Linux user gets more experienced with commands and shellscripts,
*buntu's training wheels get in the way. On a bicycle you get training
wheels on your first bike, and then maybe keep them when your longest
rides are down the block, but soon enough they get in the way and you
take them off. Because if you don't, they snag on things, they make it
harder to mount your bike, and make it harder for you to repair your
bike. I view "we do it all for you" distros the same way.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Autumn 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm