One of the best things that come with Linux is its freedom. Ironically, one of the worst things that comes with Linux is also its freedom.
As you may know, we can choose our desktop environments when installing any Linux distro. With OpenSUSE, the default environments that you can choose from are GNOME and KDE. I have been using KDE since I started using Linux 6 months ago, and today, after a round of shitposting on /g/ (BAD idea), I go back to earth, realized KDE Plasma was super slow, and decided to try something new.
Side note: Desktop environments are these things that control, after you log into your account, how your windows and desktop look like, and what applications are used for what task. Think of it as denominations of Judaism. First we have the orthodox Jews who prefer terminal over anything, then comes Christians who have these fancy graphical interfaces and desktop environments, then it is divided among themselves into Catholics who use KDE, Evangelists who prefer GNOME, and so on. Then comes the third one in the trilogy, the Muslims who are proud of their Ubuntu installations, but in case the FOSS fighters find out, we're not talking about that.
Now back to my dear laptop. After installing Cinnamon, GNOME becomes unusable (Oops, fatal error, please fuck off, user), and one can't configure much with it anyway - the menu bars are so small but the navigation icons in their file managers are ridiculously big. Cinnamon is a mess.
Then I tried xfce. It's a simplified version of KDE, and it works. I feel much faster now, and the customization is bearable. I only hate it the first time I logged in, when a buzz destroyed my ears. Fuck the beep system, why does it have to be so high volume?
The xfce desktop is much better than its KDE counterpart. I think I can stick to this from now on.
Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Free and Stuck Up
So, back to Linux.
It is a wonderful thing that Linux happened. The principle it propagates, "free", may have been the biggest leap of human society in the 20th century. However, for somebody totally uninterested, or unaware of what is free (as in freedom, not as in free candies in the back of that man's van), it might be frustrating.
Now this is maybe the fourth time I installed Linux on my laptop in the last 6 months, but every time I do it, I have to look online for help, because all my media files can't be played. I understand it perfectly, that these files are encoded with propriety formats and therefore need a decoder that is not free albeit gratis, or even worse, propriety, to play, but it would be much better if the vendor just put some information somewhere easy to find, like for example on the fucking desktop, instead of us having to type our problems into online search engines, which hilariously and ironically, are all propriety, just to know that we need packman and this special package called "gstreamer-0_10-fluendo-mp3" in order to play mp3 files in Clementine (spoiler alert: fluendo is NOT free - oh God, oh Heaven, oh Sky, what a blasphemy that someone dares developing non free shit on our free platform!).
On the one hand, I think it's good that people try to enforce this idea of freedom. On the other hand, I think many of them are so stuck up on some kind of higher moral ground that they put themselves in, that it makes free softwares and free format repulsive to beginners and/or potential users who are converting from propriety software usage. I knew Ubuntu since 2008 or even earlier, but only after 7 years was I convinced to switch completely to Linux. And it will be a long time until I get rid of my mp3s and avis.
It is a wonderful thing that Linux happened. The principle it propagates, "free", may have been the biggest leap of human society in the 20th century. However, for somebody totally uninterested, or unaware of what is free (as in freedom, not as in free candies in the back of that man's van), it might be frustrating.
Now this is maybe the fourth time I installed Linux on my laptop in the last 6 months, but every time I do it, I have to look online for help, because all my media files can't be played. I understand it perfectly, that these files are encoded with propriety formats and therefore need a decoder that is not free albeit gratis, or even worse, propriety, to play, but it would be much better if the vendor just put some information somewhere easy to find, like for example on the fucking desktop, instead of us having to type our problems into online search engines, which hilariously and ironically, are all propriety, just to know that we need packman and this special package called "gstreamer-0_10-fluendo-mp3" in order to play mp3 files in Clementine (spoiler alert: fluendo is NOT free - oh God, oh Heaven, oh Sky, what a blasphemy that someone dares developing non free shit on our free platform!).
On the one hand, I think it's good that people try to enforce this idea of freedom. On the other hand, I think many of them are so stuck up on some kind of higher moral ground that they put themselves in, that it makes free softwares and free format repulsive to beginners and/or potential users who are converting from propriety software usage. I knew Ubuntu since 2008 or even earlier, but only after 7 years was I convinced to switch completely to Linux. And it will be a long time until I get rid of my mp3s and avis.
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