Re: Fedora proposing to remove X11 Gnome

On 2025-05-01, CrudeSausage <crude@sausa.ge> wrote:

On 2025-05-01 10:15, Borax Man wrote:

On 2025-04-30, CrudeSausage <crude@sausa.ge> wrote:

On 2025-04-30 06:24, Borax Man wrote:
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< snipped for brevity >
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>
To be honest, it was many years of using a PC before I too understood
that there could be a viable alternative on the PC, and I was more "tech
literate" than average.  This was in the 90s.  I knew of OS2 and some
toy OS's.  I started to get annoyed with Windows, and desire features
and abilities that it was lacking.  When I found that Linux was a thing,
it kind of mostly met what I was looking for (more power!).

>
I was always curious, so it didn't take long for me to learn that there
were things other than DOS back in the day. I got acquainted with
Windows 3.0 fairly quickly, learned abut MacOS quickly thereafter and
soon developed an interest in OS/2 since my nerdy cousin assured me that
it was better than everything under the sun. Admittedly, I remained in
the Windows camp during that time but kept trying Linux out from about
1994 or 1995 on. I recall installing Slackware on my PC through
floppies, but I had no idea how to get much done. I tried again in 1998,
but I couldn't get sound to work and the resolution couldn't get past
800x600 (I had no idea what I was doing). By 1999, I was ready to move
but Linux itself wasn't entirely ready for what I wanted to do. I only
really started using it as the main OS on my Dell laptop around 2008 (it
worked great on that), but even then I kept Windows as my overall main
operating system. Once the PRISM revelations emerged, my interest in
Linux grew and I kept trying to make it my default operating system with
various degrees of success. Now, I can confidently say that there are
way more benefits than there are drawbacks, no matter what hardware I
run it on.
>

 
I had seen references to Linux here and there on the Internet in the
late 90s, but I just supposed that as a system I would not either be
able to run it, or make good use of it.  I was invested in DOS, DOS
games and programs, programming in DOS so while I didn't like Windows
much, I wasn't that interested in leaving the ecosystem I did
understand.
 
However by 1999-2000, after having to reinstall windows again and again,
and knowing that staying in the past wasn't the way forward, thats when
I took Linux seriously, after hearing a bit more about it.  I still knew
very little, except it was good for the Internet and that it might be
good for "power users".
 
I was browsing a newsagency late 2000, saw a copy of Linux Format with a
Definite Linux 7.0 cover disk and decided to give it a try.  Then I
learned about it being a Unix close, about the Free Software movement,
and saw a bit more of a world of computing, with a long history that I
had seen references to, but was now a part of.

>
I think that Linux would have been adopted faster in the late 90s has
the Linux zealots at the time not been lying through their teeth and
claiming that Linux was stable and worked perfectly across the board.
Most people didn't know a thing about repositories and installing
software through, didn't understand what open-source was and what its
benefits could be and definitely weren't open to persevering with the
operating system when their hardware didn't work the way that it should.
>

I don't think that would have made much of a difference.  With lack of
support for hardware, and games, and MS Office, I think they were the
dealbreakers.  I do think they were a bit, not dishonest, but
misleading.  It was said that Linux helped you learn more about the
computer, but in really you learn about Linux, not the computer (at
least not the hardware, that is abstracted away from you).

The whole "Free Software" thing was also a big misdirect.  You don't get
much freedom from being able to modify and redistribute the modified
source code.  I started using Linux before I knew about this, but this
evangelism was mostly meaningless to people who didn't have the skills
to actually make significant change to the kernel, or any of the
programs.  I felt this "benefit" was just Linux evangelists reaching for
something, and being unaware, by design, of reality.

Linux (and Unix like systems) actually offer freedom because you have
choices of workflows, of tools, and you are able to compose things
together.  The freedom comes because you can craft your own experience,
NOT because of the GPL.  Too much was made of the GPL being freedom.

I found Linux to be just as crashy as Windows in the late 90s. I had
hope that BeOS might penetrate the market since it was a lot more robust
than the two, but it went nowhere. I would say that Linux's core was
always quite stable but everything atop it not so much. In my opinion,
it only became rock solid in the last decade or so.
>

 
That was my experience too.  When I first used it, programs would just
dissapear, and leave a "core" file.  Individual programs DID crash more
than in Windows, but they rarely took the system down with it.  There
were fewer crashes on Windows, but they were often more catastrophic,
taking everything down with it.  A Linux program crash, well, it just
vanished.  At least everything else was usually untouchged.  When I
found I could telnet into the system, on the occasions the screen did
freeze, I could either kill the process, kill X, or shut the system
down, at least avoiding an unclean unmount.
 
But I would say by Red Hat 7.3 (the 2003 one), it was much better, and
improved since then.  As has, admittedly, Windows, though it has other
janky behaviour.

>
I had a lot of luck with the SUSE Linux versions back in the late 90s
and early 2000s. Tumbleweed was also the first Linux to work perfectly
on my old MSI for suspend (admittedly, Linux worked perfectly on my old
AMD-centric Dell laptop in the late 2000s). Windows has always been fine
for me, but I would also reinstall that thing once every three months or
so. Even in that short time though, it managed to screw up from an
update or corrupted system files.
>
>

I could not stand at all, formatting and reinstalling.  I customise my
system, and losing all those settings, those small changes you make,
like that file I added to stop the windows key screwing up the full
screen DOS prompt.  You've got to do them all again, and remember what
you did.  That was one of my top 3 pet peeves that moved me away from
Windows. Perhaps top one.  I very, very rarely reinstall.  One I install
an OS, I expect it to remain until the computer dies.  I've only
reinstalled Linux maybe three times in the last 10 -15 years.  Once to
jump from Fedora 11 to 18 or something, the other two to switch two
computers to Debian.