> I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop
Try Alpine Linux, with Xfce which can do most of the same things. Then enable swap compression -- add this to the end of the kernel line in your bootloader:
zswap.enabled=1
This compresses everything going to swap, and decompresses it coming back: less disk reads and writes, and less space used.
> I find Gnome tends to expose me to less nonsense.
IMHO, I find the reverse. It feels like a phone/tablet interface. It's bigger and uses way more disk and memory, but it gives me less UI, less control, less customisation, than Xfce which takes about a quarter of the resources.
Example: I have 2 screens. One landscape on the left, one portrait on the right. That big mirrored L-shape is my desktop. I wanted the virtual-desktop switcher on the right of the right screen, and the dock thing on the left of the left screen.
GNOME can't do that. They must be on your primary display, and if that's a little laptop screen but there is a nice big spacious 2nd screen, I want to move some things there -- but I am not allowed to.
If I have 1 screen, keep them on 1 screen. If I have 2, that pair is my desktop, so put one panel on the left of my desktop and one on the right, even if those are different screens -- and remember this so it happens automatically when I connect that screen.
This is the logic I'd expect. It is not how GNOME folks think, though, so I can't have it. I do not understand how they think.
> IMHO, I find the reverse. It feels like a phone/tablet interface. It's bigger and uses way more disk and memory, but it gives me less UI, less control, less customisation, than Xfce which takes about a quarter of the resources.
I've used Xfce quite a lot in the past and quite honestly most of the "customisation" in it is confusing to use and poorly thought out.
I've also found these "light DEs" to be less snappy than Gnome. I believe this is because it takes advantage of the GPU acceleration better, but I am not sure tbh. The extra memory usage I don't really care about. My slowest laptop I use regularly has 8GB ram and it is fine. Would I want to use this on a sub 4GB machine, no. But realistically you can't do much with that anyway.
Also Gnome (with Wayland) does a lot of stuff that Xfce can't do properly. This is normally to do with HiDPI scaling, different refreshrates. It all works properly.
With Xfce, I had to mess about with DPI hacks and other things.
> Example: I have 2 screens. One landscape on the left, one portrait on the right. That big mirrored L-shape is my desktop. I wanted the virtual-desktop switcher on the right of the right screen, and the dock thing on the left of the left screen.
> If I have 1 screen, keep them on 1 screen. If I have 2, that pair is my desktop, so put one panel on the left of my desktop and one on the right, even if those are different screens -- and remember this so it happens automatically when I connect that screen.
I just tried the workspace switcher. I can switch virtual desktops with Super + Scroll on any desktop. I can also choose virtual desktops on both screens by using the Super + A and then there is virtual desktop switcher on each screen.
I just tried it on Gnome 48 on Debian 13 right now. It is pretty close to what you are describing.
> This is the logic I'd expect. It is not how GNOME folks think, though, so I can't have it. I do not understand how they think
I think people just want to complain about Gnome because it is opinionated. I also don't like KDE.
I install two extensions on desktop. Dash to Dock and Appindicators plugins. On the light DEs and Window Managers, I was always messing about with settings and thing always felt off.
> Much of a modern Linux desktop e.g. runs inside one of multiple not very well optimized JS engines
A couple of years ago I saw a talk by Sophie Wilson, the designer of the ARM chip. She had been amused by someone saying there was an ARM inside every iPhone: she pointed out that there was 6-8 assymetric ARM cores in the CPU section of the SOC, some big and fast, some small and power-frugal, an ARM chip in the Bluetooth controller, another in the Wifi controller, several in the GSM/mobile controller, at least one in the memory controller, several in the flash memory controller...
It wasn't "an ARM chip". It was half a dozen ARMs in early iPhones, and then maybe dozens in modern ones. More in anything with an SD card slot, as SD card typically contain an Arm or a few of them to manage the blocks of storage, and other ARMs in the interface are talking to those ARMs.
Wheels within wheels: multiple very similar cores, running different OSes and RTOSes and chunks of embedded firmware, all cooperatively running user-facing OSes with a load of duplication, like a shell in one Javascript launching Firefox which contains a copy of a different version of the same Javascript engine, plus another in Thunderbird, plus another embedded in Slack and another copy embedded in VSCode.
Insanity. Make a resource cheap and it is human nature to squander it.
> Windows 95 on a 386 CPU with enough RAM was alright.
I benchmarked it for PC Pro Magazine when it came out.
We had to borrow a 4MB 386SX from a friend of the editor's, as we had nothing that low-end left in the labs.
In our standard benchmarks, which used MS Word, MS Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, WinZip, and a few other real apps, Win95 1.0, not 95A or OSR2, was measurable faster than Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on MS-DOS 6.22, hand-optimised.
When it needed the RAM, 95 could shrink the disk cache to essentially nothing. (Maybe 4 kB or something.) Win3 could not do that.
It was SLOW but under heavy load it was quicker than Win3 on the lowest-end supported hardware.
Under light load, Win3 was quicker, but Win95 scaled down very impressively indeed.
Discourse is less of a PITA than Discord, but only marginally. It's still a fugly web forum.
For productive low-noise discussions, I favour mailing lists. Anyone who can't suss out how to participate on mailing lists probably has little interesting to say.
For a FOSS chatroom, that is, live and realtime, Matrix works fairly well these days. Thunderbird has a built-in Matrix client; no extensions needed.
I have never had so much negative feedback and ad-hom attacks on HN as for that story, I think. :-D
Short version, the chronology goes like this:
2004: Ubuntu does the first more-or-less consumer-quality desktop Linux that is 100% free of charge. No paid version. It uses the current best of breed FOSS components and they choose GNOME 2, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.
By 2006 Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" comes out, the first LTS. It is catching on a bit.
Fedora Core 6 and RHEL 4 are also getting established, and both use GNOME 2. Every major distro offers GNOME 2, even KDE-centric ones like SUSE. Paid distros like Mandriva and SUSE as starting to get in some trouble -- why pay when Ubuntu does the job?
Even Solaris uses GNOME 2.
2006-2007, MS is getting worried and starts talking about suing. It doesn't know who yet so it just starts saying intentionally not-vague-at-all things like the Linux desktop infringes "about 265 patents".
This is visibly true if you are 35-40 years old: if you remember desktop GUI OSes before 1995, they were all over the place. Most had desktop drive icons. Most had a global menu bar at the top. This is because most copied MacOS. Windows was an ugly mess and only lunatics copied that. (Enter the Open Group with Motif.)
But then came Win95. Huge hit.
After 1995, every GUI gets a task bar, it gets buttons for apps, even window managers like Fvwm95 and soon after IceWM. QNX Neutrino looks like it. OS/2 Warp 4 looks like it. Everyone copies it.
Around the time NT 4 is out and Win98 is taking shape, both KDE and GNOME get going and copy the Win9x look and feel. Xfce dumps its CDE look and feel, goes FOSS, and becomes a Win95 copy.
MS had a case. Everyone had copied them. MS is not stupid and it's been sued lots of times. You betcha it patented everything and kept the receipts. The only problem it has is: who does it sue?
RH says no. GNOME 3 says "oh noes our industry leading GU is, er, yeah, stale, it's stagnant, it's not changing, so what we're gonna do is rip it up and start again! With no taskbar and no hierarchical start menu and no menu bars in windows and no OK and CANCEL buttons at the bottom" and all the other things that they can identify that are from Win9x.
GNOME is mainly sponsored by Red Hat.
Canonical tries to get involved; RH says fsck off. It can't use KDE, that's visibly a ripoff. Ditto Xfce, Enlightenment, etc. LXDE doesn't exist yet.
So it does its own thing based on the Netbook Launcher. If it daren't imitate Windows then what's the leading other candidate? This Mac OS X thing is taking off. It has borrowed some stuff from Windows like Cmd+Tab and Fast User Switching and stuff and got away with it. Let's do that, then.
SUSE just wearily says "OK, how much? Where do we sign?"
RISC OS had a recognizable task bar around 1987, so 2006-2007 is just long enough for any patent on that concept to definitely expire. This story doesn't make any sense. As for dialog boxes with buttons at the bottom and plenty of buttons inside apps, the Amiga had them in 1984.
Yes, the Icon Bar is prior art, but there are 2 problems with that.
1. It directly inspired the NeXTstep Dock.
This is unprovable after so long, but the strong suspicion is that the Dock inspired Windows 4 "Chicago" (later Windows 95) -- MS definitely knew of NeXT, but probably never heard of Acorn.
So it's 2nd hand inspiration.
2. The Dock isn't a taskbar either.
3. What the prior art may be doesn't matter unless Acorn asserted it, which AFAIK it didn't, as it no longer existed by the time of the legal threats. Nobody else did either.
4. The product development of Win95 is well documented and you can see WIP versions, get them from the Internet Archive and run them, or just peruse screenshot galleries.
The odd thing is that the early development versions look less like the Dock or Icon Bar than later ones. It's not a direct copy: it's convergent evolution. If they'd copied, they would have got there a lot sooner, and it would be more similar than it is.
> so 2006-2007 is just long enough for any patent on that concept to definitely expire.
RISC OS as Arthur: 1987
NeXTstep 0.8 demo: 1988
Windows "Chicago" test builds: 1993, 5Y later, well inside a 20Y patent lifespan
Win95 release: 8Y later
KDE first release: 1998
GNOME first release: 1999
The chronology doesn't add up, IMHO.
> This story doesn't make any sense. As for dialog boxes with buttons at the bottom and plenty of buttons inside apps, the Amiga had them in 1984.
You're missing a different point here.
Buttons at the bottom date back to at least the Lisa.
The point is that GNOME 3 visibly and demonstrably was trying to avoid potential litigation by moving them to the CSD bar at the top. Just as in 1983 or so GEM made its menu bar drop-down instead of pull-down (menus open on mouseover, not on click) and in 1985 or so AmigaOS made them appear and open only on a right-click -- in attempts to avoid getting sued by Apple.
> The point is that GNOME 3 visibly and demonstrably was trying to avoid potential litigation by moving them to the CSD bar at the top.
Well, the buttons in the titlebar at the top are reminiscent of old Windows CE dialog boxes, so I guess they're not really original either! What both Unity and GNOME 3 looks like to me is an honest attempt to immediately lead in "convergence" with mobile touch-based solutions. They first came up in the netbook era where making Linux run out-of-the-box on a market-leading small-screen, perhaps touch-based device was quite easy - a kind of ease we're only now getting back to, in fact.
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