Re: Fedora proposing to remove X11 Gnome

On 2025-05-02, CrudeSausage <crude@sausa.ge> wrote:

On 2025-05-02 11:20, Borax Man wrote:
>
< snipped for brevity >
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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 enjoy the freedom of knowing that the operating system I am running
today will run just as well on this machine in five years. People don't
realize how refreshing that it until they start realizing how much money
they've been spending on technology, trying to keep up over a decade or
so. Things become obsolete, but there is no reason for them to be
replaced within three years the way that they used to in the 90s. Linux
allows us to prevent that from happening.
>

The desktop I'm typing this message on, I build in 2009.  I have not had
a need to upgrade, except for a scant few games I would not mind
playing.  Just a few games, thats it.  Because I don't game, there is no
other issue, at all, with having this "old" PC.  It runs fine in every
other way.

This was why when my wife wanted a new Apple, I talked her into a Linux
box.  WE don't want to be in the situation where software goes obsolete,
and the new OS cannot be installed anymore.

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.

>
Funny enough, the one feature I find most useful in Linux is the cursor
automatically becoming gigantic if you lose track of it. When I want to
highlight a word or a text to kids who see a duplicate of my screen,
simply jiggling my mouse around makes the cursor huge. It seems so
trivial, but it's a fantastic feature of KDE for teaching. I can manage
losing some customization myself, but only because I got used to it from
the constant formatting of the 1990s. With age, it is admittedly
becoming more of a chore which is partly why I set up Timeshift to
ensure that I can keep my desktop running.
>

The last time I had to reinstall a system because it broke was over 20
years ago.  And when that happened, I probably could have fixed it, but
I didn't take backups (bad idea!).

My daughter has a laptop for school with Windows 11.  Today its going to
become a dual boot machine. I'm a little undecided on the distro, either
Linux Mint, Linux Mint Debian edition or plain Debian.