[HN Gopher] Using IceWM and a Raspberry Pi as my main PC, sharin...
___________________________________________________________________
Using IceWM and a Raspberry Pi as my main PC, sharing my theme,
config and some
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 250 points
Date : 2021-07-10 21:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (raymii.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (raymii.org)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I've been using lxqt on my Pi 400. It's the closest thing to a
| "light" KDE that I can find, and I like it a lot. The only
| problem is that the version on the Raspbian repository is quite
| out of date. You can get a slightly less old version by enabling
| backports. I wish there was a good rolling distribution for the
| Raspberry Pi. openSUSE Tumbleweed is probably the best but it's
| been glitchy for me and I haven't figured out how to netboot it.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| What issues have you had with Arch Linux ARM? I tried it for a
| little while and things seemed to run fairly smoothly (though
| many AUR PKGBUILDs didn't indicate support for ARM).
| bitwize wrote:
| Void Linux, dude! I've been running it on my Pi 2 since
| forever.
| swiley wrote:
| I did this in college with FVWM but I also had a (less powerful)
| netbook.
|
| Computers are way cheaper if you know Linux.
| brody_hamer wrote:
| > Using noscript to disable javascript in Firefox has also helped
| tremendously.
|
| Id love to see a browser extension that disables JavaScript after
| its consumed a set number of cycles.
|
| A page wants to asynchronously load a sidebar, great. A page
| wants to continuously resize and repaint an affixed element?
| Nope. You're cut off.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| What I would like to see is a tree based handling setup.
| Everything my bank opens (direct child or descendent): let it
| through even if it is a usually blacklisted domain because, yiu
| know, banking is kinda important for me. Same domain via a
| website I couldn't care less about, blacklist away as per
| rules.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| As a user of tab containers I would love if I could have
| extensions work that way too.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| That would be nice if it worked with tab containers.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Indeed - if having such a facility requires me to setup a
| container per top-level domain (e.g. one container for
| www.xyzbank.com and everything that it opens), then even
| that is worth it. Right now, with the combination of ublock
| origin and other privacy plugins, I don't even try to do
| financial transactions like banking/flight booking etc for
| the fear of being left with a semi-processed transaction.
| That is one of the main reasons of me installing Chrome (I
| know that Chromium might also be a good alternative for
| such scenarios).
|
| I guess what I'm looking for is a "allow everything"
| container setup without having to enable/disable plugins or
| fiddle with white/blacklists.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Considering setting up another account to upvote this again...
|
| Why does my machine, when the lid is closed with 1 browser tab
| open, need to spin the fans at full blast? It's a no from me.
| cpach wrote:
| When I went to senior high back in the early 00s I shared a flat
| with three friends. None of them had their own computer. I had a
| spare IBM PC with an old Pentium processor which I lent to one of
| my room mates. I installed Debian, IceWM and Abiword for her. She
| had no previous experience with Linux, but with this setup she
| was able to write her school essays and save them to floppy in
| order to print them out at school. (We didn't even have a router
| in the flat.) It worked really well and was much more stable than
| Win 98/XP :)
| bullen wrote:
| I use TWM instead, it works very well, but requires some
| adaptation time to the window focus and copy'n paste mechanics.
| dysoco wrote:
| There is something appealing about using a low-resource PC with a
| limited selection of software installed in order to be free from
| distractions that could otherwise stop me from being productive
| and write some code or learn something.
|
| I know the problem is mine from not having discipline and not my
| modern desktop's fault for being able to run games, but still, I
| almost want a separate PC for this.
| war1025 wrote:
| We've been using a Raspberry Pi400 (the computer in a keyboard
| model) as a media center pc for a little over 6 months now. It
| plays amazon and netflix videos fine, handles the netflix
| browsing UI pretty well, but has been rather painful for
| selecting shows on Amazon for a few months now. Not sure what
| they changed because it worked great when we first got it.
|
| I'm not sure whether it was the best choice or not, but we
| figured we'd fall back to a regular pc if we needed to, and so
| far we haven't been bothered enough to do that.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I used a Pi 2 as a desktop from 2017 to the end of 2019. Apart
| from using window maker, I didn't made many changes to use it as
| a desktop. Also, since it is an under powered machine by today
| standards, using it as a desktop gave me the feeling of a 90's
| workstation. I even compiled the latest available GTk 1.x version
| and xmms for a better retro feel.
|
| It is possible to use the modern web if you keep the number of
| tabs low and switch heavier sites like gmail to the html mode. An
| ad blocker is needed and Youtube is watchable if you use the
| h264ify extension so it uses the hardware decoder and avoids
| modern video compression codecs.
|
| I could even run libreoffice with Portuguese orthographic and
| grammatical checkers. It is slow, you can't run other tasks
| simultaneously but it works.
|
| Want to watch movies? If it is 1080p or smaller encoded with h264
| it is totally doable. Even streaming in 720p is doable. You won't
| be able to easily watch netflix though.
|
| So, yes a 2GB Pi 2 is good enough for light browsing, light text
| editing, listening to mp3, watching movies and compiling software
| from early 2000's.
|
| Things you can't comfortably do with it: -
| Meetings: encoding and decoding with any codec that is not
| supported by the hardware is just too slow to be usable.
| - Video editing: same as above. Also not enough RAM. -
| Compiling large code bases: libreoffice and mozilla will probably
| fail on anything with less than 8Gb RAM. I could compile OpenCV
| on it, but it took hours. - Keep many tabs open: you
| can if the sites are wikipedia-like. Anything more complex and
| the system starts swapping. Magic Sysrq-f is your friend in such
| situations. - Modern IDE's: no way. Try gnu-nano or
| emacs/vi. Want to develop GUI apps? Use Lazarus-ide. Anjuta+Glade
| probably work stably with recent Gtk+3.x versions. -
| Games: at the time I used it, the driver didn't support desktop
| OpenGL. Emulators for old consoles ran great, emulation station
| ran great, it is possible to run Quake but that is it.
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| I've been trying to use a pi4 as a desktop, with xfce, and was
| a bit disappointed. It's usable but less than an old iPad. So I
| was surprised you got by with a pi2! I'll have to give that
| h264ify a go.
|
| For games, I was super pleasantly surprised to rediscover old
| open source games that I had completely forgot and actually
| love: frozen bubbles, neverball and monsterz :)
| marcodiego wrote:
| My mindset goes like this: in the early 90's, if I had a Sun
| SparcStation, I could do all this; a raspi2 is reasonably on
| par with that, so I should be able to do the same with a
| raspi2.
|
| What makes it a bit harder is that some software that ran on
| a SparcStation was carefully tailored to that machine while
| Chromium is not actually designed specifically for a
| raspi2... But you can go by with it. This thread gives some
| hints that I didn't try at the time like changing the cpu
| governor or using zswap. I didn't even overclocked it out of
| fear to reduce its lifespan.
|
| But you of course, you're limited by what you can do and how
| you do it. I even began contributing to gnu-nano because I
| needed some features that weren't available on it and never
| got used to emacs/vim, but that is another story.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Dietpi allows you to improve performance, overclock the CPU,
| etc
| deckard1 wrote:
| You can't really compare the Pi 2 to a 4. That's like comparing
| a 486 or Pentium to a Ryzen.
|
| The Pi 4 is a serious device. 1GbE, USB 3.0. It demolishes the
| previous Pi devices across the board in performance. I think
| this is where people get confused by others using the Pi4 as a
| NAS or server or whatever. There is this misunderstanding of
| just how equipped the Pi is today.
|
| > Video editing: same as above. Also not enough RAM.
|
| I wouldn't even do this on my Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM.
| Anything less than a workstation with gobs of RAM is just
| asking for a headache. Unless you're just chopping together the
| random video for the family once a year.
| stavros wrote:
| Unfortunately, the $100 price tag puts the Pi 4 in an awkward
| place: Not cheap enough to be a hobbyist board, not powerful
| enough for "serious" things. To me, that's extremely
| unfortunate, because I think many, many more people need a
| cheap, underpowered board they can tinker with than need a PC
| with some exposed GPIOs.
| MikusR wrote:
| What are you talking about? What $100? It costs the same as
| rpi3 rpi2 or rpi1.
| fouc wrote:
| It's worth noting there's also some solid competition for
| Raspberry Pis by other companies making similar hobbyist
| boards. I'm pretty sure there's one out there that might
| fit your needs but I forget the name of it.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I got a RockPi4 instead of raspi4. Definitely not as
| powerful but I don't regret it.
| stavros wrote:
| I heard that things like the Banana Pi (or similar) use
| horrid chipsets that have very limited support, so they
| might not actually be of similar utility. If you know of
| any good ones, though, I'd be grateful!
|
| Nowadays I use an ESP8266 for most things, but it'd be
| nice to have a small, reliable Linux machine for things
| like file servers at my parents' house.
| jbotz wrote:
| It's $75 for an RPi 4b with 8GB of RAM! And from my
| experience it's quite powerful enough for a lot of "serious
| things", including most casual desktop computing needs. And
| it's only $35 with 2GB of RAM, which is all you need for
| all sorts of headless server tasks.
|
| So I really don't get where you're coming from.
| stavros wrote:
| Maybe prices are cheaper in the US, on Amazon.de I could
| only find the 8 GB model for $100 and the 2 GB for $60.
| bear8642 wrote:
| Probably best to buy from official raspi reseller - form
| at bottom of
| <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-
| pi-4-model-b/> with links given specs
| stavros wrote:
| Good call, thanks!
| jejones3141 wrote:
| Amen about compiling large codebases. It took the better part
| of a day to compile MAME. zram is your friend.
| bear8642 wrote:
| > but that is it.
|
| The python demo games that come pre-installed are quite fun.
| The list includes snake, 15-slide puzzle, and fun flood it
| clones
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which could be easily coded on a ESP32, a device much better
| than typical MS-DOS PCs.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I understand what you mean, but these games are not very
| demanding. Weaker machines than a raspi could run these
| comfortably.
|
| I got some MSDOS games running well on dosbox, but you'll
| probably have to compile it from source to enable dynarec if
| you need more performance.
| geokon wrote:
| How do you handle multitasking? Do you shut down what you're
| doing and then switch to something else? I feel this creates a
| lot of friction. It could be good in a way b/c you don't get
| easily distracted :)
|
| I remember in earlier KDE5 version you could suspend activities
| (in the KDE world this is sorta similar to a desktop - or a
| group of running applications). This would free up a lot of
| resources and could mean you can have a lot of applications
| "open" at once, but they're all in a frozen state. At some
| point this features was removed. I'm guessing it didn't play
| nice with a lot of applications. But I haven't been able to
| find anything equivalent.
|
| You can sorta accomplish something similar by going into the
| task managed and suspending a task, but it's not ergonomic.
| Maybe someone has a good alternative?
| marcodiego wrote:
| My multitasking on such machine was limited to a few
| terminals, Chromium and other utilities. With the terminals,
| I had one with nano, another ocasionally compiling code and
| another with mutt; when compiling code, the system slowed
| down but I could still use nano. Chromium stayed with a few
| tabs open for querying stack overflow, google or wikipedia
| and when not using it its tabs were soon swapped out, so
| switching back to chromium and switching tabs took a few
| seconds after compiling something. With regard to other
| utilities, it was mostly hexchat for IRC and xmms for playing
| mp3. Not much, but I didn't need much more than that.
| Raspbian is a reasonably quick distro.
|
| For entertainment it was good enough for old games and h264
| 1080p movies.
| everdrive wrote:
| > - Keep many tabs open: you can if the sites are wikipedia-
| like. Anything more complex and the system starts swapping.
| Magic Sysrq-f is your friend in such situations.
|
| I ran a Raspberry Pi 3 as a desktop for a little while, and I
| believe I ran into the same problem. In most of my Linux
| installations, I format the drives without swap. I've never had
| a problem with it. But, I didn't know how to disable swap on
| the pi3.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I mostly just used OpenBox for a long time, but my 8GB Pi 4 is
| running Ubuntu MATE and it works great as a desktop driving a 29"
| ultrawide (1080p tall).
|
| I'm actually running it from a Class 10 SD Card (external SSDs
| require unwieldy cases for the place it needs to slot in), and
| speed is fine for Firefox and VS Code use.
| synergy20 wrote:
| openbox indeed is light-weight and more popular than icewm
| these days. I wonder what's the GUI stack behind each, some
| code on top of X11 windows?
|
| Neither supports wayland though
| pygar wrote:
| Years ago, as a kid, when the only computers I had access to were
| cobbled together hand-me-downs and machines people would throw
| away I used to do this kind of thing. Like the author, I settled
| on IceWM after trying Fluxbox/JWM/FVWM/"Window Maker" and all the
| various forks with minor variations.
|
| It was fun to tinker, but it's questionable if I learnt anything
| useful other then how to get hobby DEs working on ancient
| hardware. I guess tangentially I gained an intermediate knowledge
| of Linux command line tools and some networking concepts.
|
| PuppyLinux [0] ended up being my choice for easy defaults after
| DSL [1] stagnated. I'm glad to see it's still going and has
| developed its own ecosystem. Even after I could buy reasonable
| computers, for a while I took some pride in squeezing performance
| out of budget computers but ultimately, now that I need to be
| productive to get paid, it's nice to have computers that "just
| work" with modern software.
|
| [0] https://puppylinux.com/ [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux
| [deleted]
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > it's nice to have computers that "just work" with modern
| software
|
| Yeah I never understood people who work with computers all day
| economizing on their computers. Even from scalpers you'll pay
| ~$6500 for top of the line parts and peripherals, which is
| about the cost of a high school student's violin.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Yes, but it's also thanks to this mentality that a simple
| text editor occupies 1 gig of ram and two cpu cores nowadays.
| If the dev's machine is infinitely fast and has storage as
| fast as other people's ram, they stop caring about
| performance issues, because they never encounter them in the
| first place. And I'm not talking about working on hand
| written assembly for a week to get the last bit of
| performance. I've repeatedly found silly things like O(n)
| code calculating something that could be expressed as O(1),
| hilariously complicated xpath expressions that in the end
| just retrieved an immediate child and whatnot.
|
| At one of my first jobs, when my boss got annoyed by some
| software being slow, je always said that developers should
| get the fastest hardware available, but as soon as they start
| testing or using their own software, the machine needs to
| magically turn into a 386 with your home directory on an NFS
| share. Granted, that was 20 years ago so 386 didn't sound as
| hilarious as it does now, but it was still a little extreme.
| But that idea stuck with me, and to this day I do test
| software on slow machines every now and then, looking for
| obvious performance left on the table.
| Avi0n wrote:
| Wow that's pricy. I played 1st section violin through college
| and only have a $2k one. My friend played first chair 1st
| violin section through college and had a $4k violin and it
| sounded amazing. Maybe we got lucky and found a really good
| instrument shop? Another friend had a cello that costed well
| over $15k though so there's that.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The $2k violin is a $3k+ violin in 5 or 10 years, unless
| you drop it. The computer is generally not (especially if
| you drop it).
| an_opabinia wrote:
| At least you're engaging with the premise. You could also
| get a $980 with tax M1 MacBook Air. A Dell prebuilt - even
| the Alienware, which does not have to pay scalper prices
| and comes with a 3070 - is $2,611. These are all comparable
| options. In the instrument world, a $6,500 computer is more
| like a $30,000-150,000 violin and bow. Like the stuff
| professionals use.
| tomcooks wrote:
| 6500 is a bunch of money, reason why you also don't see many
| high school violin students
| pjmlp wrote:
| Easy, not everyone lives in countries where giving ~$6500 is
| a possibility, and if they have access to such money they
| wouldn't be spending it on computer parts most likely.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Even in the US $6500 is a lot of money for most people.
| I've personally never spent even a third of that on a PC.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, indeed.
| Stampo00 wrote:
| I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily driver. I like it because
| the hardware is cheap and easy to replace. It sips
| electricity, which matters to me. It doesn't support Intel or
| AMD. And as a developer, I can more acutely feel differences
| in performance based on the algorithms I choose. If I can
| make it run acceptably on a Pi, it should work okay on a non-
| flagship phone or a 4+ year old office PC.
| cpach wrote:
| Kudos to you!
| chucktingle wrote:
| I'll give you two reasons.
|
| 1. In many countries $6500 is enough to start a business. I'd
| rather do that than pay for an overpriced piece of aluminum
| with a piece of fruit etched on one of the sides. What if I'm
| not the business type? That's fine. It's still probably
| better to save that money.
|
| 2. Modern computing is turning into a dumpster fire. It will
| be pretty soon that the Intel platform will work in the same
| way as the above-mentioned fruitty platform and you won't be
| able to run whatever software you want on it. While I agree
| OP is probably making his life extra miserable [1], I admire
| people like him, since their efforts will give us the next
| free/fun computing platform.
|
| [1] I too run a Raspberry Pi at home, but I've long given up
| on turning it into a desktop machine. There is an easier way
| to run modern software on cheap hardware with a fraction of
| the hassle.
| ineedasername wrote:
| You also gained a comfort level poking around in moderately
| complex system that could break if you did something wrong, and
| then force you to step through problem solving to fix it. This
| is a very important skill. (Though it's also important to
| understand when potentially breaking something, even
| temporarily, is low stakes vs. something to be avoided at all
| costs)
|
| It's a skill I like to call a "video game mentality" that I
| think was probably influential in the rise of technology: video
| games gave players the ability to push buttons and experiment
| in all kinds of ways with a technological system but in a very
| low stakes environment.
|
| I don't think I would have been nearly as comfortable poking
| around and tweaking system variables in my first computers
| running Windows 3.X and 95 if I didn't have years of experience
| poking around in other pixel-based environments in the form of
| videogames. I would break things, panic, realize that whatever
| it was, it was fixable, go through trial and error, learn to
| find other people and resources to help, fix the problem, and
| do it all over again at some point.
| [deleted]
| earksiinni wrote:
| Wow, this took me down memory lane. Puppy Linux and its crazed
| Windows 95-esque dialogue boxes (remember Puppy Unleashed?)
| will forever hold a soft spot in my heart.
|
| Not sure how it is anymore, but Puppy Linux circa 2008 was like
| the GeoCities of operating systems, glorious in its own
| unpolished way. Vector Linux, too, which I believe was Puppy's
| ancestor.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| > Years ago, as a kid, when the only computers I had access to
| were cobbled together hand-me-downs and machines people would
| throw away I used to do this kind of thing.
|
| That was me well into my 20s :) Win2k broke, and I was broke,
| so the only option was to install linux.
|
| It paved the way for me to get into programming, not so much
| shell scripts, but just the powerful idea that computer systems
| were malleable things you could change - something not really
| obvious for those of us who cut our teeth on MS Windows.
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| >Years ago, as a kid, when the only computers I had access to
| were cobbled together hand-me-downs and machines people would
| throw away I used to do this kind of thing. Like the author, I
| settled on IceWM after trying Fluxbox/JWM/FVWM/"Window Maker"
| and all the various forks with minor variations.
|
| I had one of those original EeePC's years ago, 900 mhz celeron
| in like 2008, 800x480 screen, just woefully out of date. Ended
| up running Fluxbox just because of ram usage. With an actual WM
| it couldn't stream The Daily Show smoothly. I really do love
| playing with low spec systems.
| chapinou wrote:
| Indeed. I too find optimizing and making things work on low
| spec systems far more rewarding than brute forcing using the
| latest hardware.
| winrid wrote:
| Same! Ubuntu 6.04 with Gnome worked surprisingly well on a
| 450mhz PIII.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| > it's questionable if I learnt anything useful other then how
| to get hobby DEs working on ancient hardware
|
| I did similar things, and on one hand I feel it's ok that it's
| not all "useful" - it was a hobby after all, but on the other
| hand I do feel it had benefits - you learned patience, creative
| thinking, problem solving, and working on those projects for a
| long stretch of time almost has a meditative effect I felt. I'm
| sorry that a lot of modern kids probably don't get to
| experience this as much as everything is pre-packaged, system-
| on-a-chip, non-fixable etc. (And people are more careful of how
| they dispose of computers due to privacy).
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Wow, Damn Small Linux, what a throwback! That was how I was
| first ever able to run and interact with a Linux system back as
| a teen. I had no computer with Administrator access, but I
| found a zip file with DSL, a QUEMU.exe, and a .bat file which
| would run QUEMU and boot DSL, cause I couldn't figure out how.
| I never even got it to save to a persistent disk, I had to boot
| and re-do all the changes I'd figured out the prior time. What
| an amazingly educational little thing that was!
| j4yav wrote:
| I had the exact same experience, but a fairly clear flow into
| my career. My own tinkering led to a job at a local computer
| store fixing computers when I was about 15, and then a job as a
| build engineer at 18. This was in the 90s so there weren't a
| ton of college students with computer experience to compete
| with, and I think there was more openness to non-traditional
| candidates.
|
| My last job was product director for a major CI/CD platform, so
| there's a pretty clear breadcrumb trail all the way back to
| tinkering with Linux on old hardware to now.
|
| The Linux command line and scripting was part of it, but the
| real deeper lesson was that computers are understandable and if
| you are persistent you can fix or improve nearly anything, or
| assemble something new and useful by building on what's
| available to you.
| jah wrote:
| I ran into two problems when trying to switch to a Raspberry Pi 4
| 8GB as a desktop replacement in mid-2020:
|
| - A noticeably laggy screen update when running urxvt. Any action
| which caused large amounts of text to scroll on the screen (e.g.
| a file listing or paging through a man page) would cause a bit of
| a visual stutter. I was running with with XFT fonts enabled, so
| maybe that was a contributing factor. Web page scrolling also
| seemed to lag a bit too if I recall correctly.
|
| - Lack of gamma support for blue light filters such as redshift
| or f.lux
|
| I'm crossing my fingers there are improvements to these areas in
| the future.
| [deleted]
| andrekandre wrote:
| C++ development (in CLion) is quite doable, although I prefer
| plain old vim on this machine due to CLion being quite laggy.
|
| how about kdevelop?
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Or Kate with language server plugin ;)
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I've been using this setup for about a year now and love it.
| I haven't felt the need to open VS Code or a real IDE in a
| long time.
| Havoc wrote:
| Love the whole rasp eco-system. Major victory for for FOSS/nix
| minded people.
|
| I don't think people selling it as a daily driver are doing it a
| favour though. It isn't meant as such and selling it as such is a
| disservice to the wider *nix universe.
|
| (and yes I understand that rasp as daily driver in rural africa
| is literally the projects original goal. that's different though
| from silicon valley crew attempting to daily drive a rasp though)
| prvc wrote:
| >KDE is my desktop environment of choice. KDE5 is rock-solid,
| configurable in any way possible and works great. It treats you
| like a responsible adult instead of a child like GNOME does these
| days, and after XFCE switched to GTK3, the RAM usage is on-par,
| more often than not a bare KDE install (Debian or Arch) uses
| around 300MB ram. This is with Baloo (search indexer) and Akonadi
| (PIM database backend) disabled.
|
| The GNOME Foundation's supposed rationale for removing basic
| functionality from its desktop is to help inexperienced users,
| and international users. However, those are precisely the same
| users who are more likely to have a shortage of computing
| resources. GTK's bloat is really indefensible.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yeah but if you don't like it, you can just leave it alone and
| it's perfectly functional. That said I use Pop_OS! which is
| gnome based and fine. I like the defaults just fine. I have
| used all sorts of DE over the years, in the end I decided I
| didn't really care :) . KDE is fine, Gnome is fine, xmonad is
| fine.
| andrekandre wrote:
| its kind of ironic if you think about it, youd think removing
| features and simplification should allow for more optimization
| not less...
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Except GNOME rewrote GNOME Shell in JavaScript. I don't think
| GTK3 requires GJS, so I'm not sure why it uses more RAM than
| GTK2, maybe due to CSS? I know it's still Cairo-based, not
| GPU-accelerated or DOM-like.
| zxzax wrote:
| I can't say for sure what the deal is with GTK3, but GTK4
| apps are GPU accelerated and should be faster. Though it
| may come at a cost of using more GPU memory, depending on
| the app.
| zxzax wrote:
| I find it pretty disappointing that these type of articles and
| the resulting comments like yours often can't seem to praise
| something like IceWM or AwesomeWM without also bashing GNOME or
| XFCE or something else because of "bloat." Who cares? Do you
| even care? I don't think you do, you'll just delete that
| desktop and move on and use whatever you want, and that's the
| whole point.
|
| Also, your characterization of GNOME's rationale is totally
| wrong. The goal was never to make a desktop with no features,
| it was more to make a desktop that is streamlined towards
| certain functionality. If that's not for you, then use a
| desktop that's more streamlined towards what you want. There's
| plenty to choose from. What is the real problem?
|
| Edit: I also want to address another common misconception that
| I see -- the GNOME Foundation does not direct development in a
| top down fashion and does not impose any rationale on the
| project. If some feature was removed, it was probably because
| an individual volunteer working on it decided that it wasn't
| worth spending time on that anymore, possibly because the need
| was better filled by a different project.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Nope. I will continue to bash GNOME because it's something
| like "the opposing political party." I want Free Software,
| and by extension, Linux, to gain ground on desktops, and I
| genuinely believe that GNOME's "philosophy" is not a good one
| and is detrimental to this cause.
|
| Roughly, I'd characterize it like the following: I believe
| that the best way for Linux to gain ground is to be a
| serious, perhaps even a little boring, but definitely "grown-
| up" desktop. Simplicity is very important, but tt should lean
| toward configurability and techniness.
|
| What it should NOT do is what GNOME is trying to do, which is
| trying to streamline and appeal to everyone. This approach is
| like trying to beat Apple at their own game, which is dumb --
| given that beating Microsoft at their own game is _well
| within our reach._ Heck, look at Windows 11, we 're like a
| third of the way there already.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Gnome feels like what you'd get if someone read a lot about
| macOS and wanted to emulate it, but had never actually used
| it. Gnome makes it very easy for new users to get started
| and very hard for experienced users to adjust it. Mac makes
| it easy for new users, but still gives power users room to
| grow.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Gnome feels like what you'd get if someone read a lot
| about macOS and wanted to emulate it, but had never
| actually used it.
|
| I find this statement humorous because I've said much the
| same thing about Linux Desktop GUIs in general. "It's
| like they were made by someone who's only ever had a GUI
| described to them in an email". Compared to a system like
| the original Macintosh or RiscOS that thought hard about
| how to abstract things for a graphical display and a
| mouse, or even Windows that just copied as much of that
| as they could get away with, it's really quite terrible.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Specially in the what concerns the developer experience
| of macOS, regarding frameworks, IDE and languages.
|
| On GNOME the documentation seems to have stagnated, then
| we had Anjuta, now GNOME Builder (which tries to be XCode
| like), a UI design tool that is being re-written from
| scratch, the various frameworks don't seem to compose,
| and then each binding does their own stuff, only adapts a
| couple of Gtk tutorial samples to their own language.
|
| Naturally being GNU/Linux, everything that falls out of
| the UI only has POSIX or GNU/Linux specific C APIs to
| refer back to, yet another experience completely devoid
| of how things work on macOS (there is no Foundation,
| Accelerate, Core...).
| anthk wrote:
| Gstreamer, Cairo...
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends on the year, if you haven't been paying attention
| they are on their way out, and then we have again the
| issue of documentation, tooling, language bindings,...
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Even Linus Torvalds and Debian stopped resisting GNOME 3
| and agreed that it's manageable for an experienced user
| to configure it or their needs.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sorry to disappoint you but GNU/Linux is definitely not a
| third of the way to compete with a Windows 11 desktop, and
| the best it will ever manage is to run on top of Hyper-V.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| > I will continue to bash GNOME because it's something like
| "the opposing political party."
|
| This is a vice, not a justification.
| zxzax wrote:
| I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying or what
| the point of your bashing is. GNOME and KDE and XFCE and
| whatnot are not political parties and are not opposed to
| each other. They're not really even close to being that,
| they're open source projects that collaborate on a sizable
| amount of things. If you believe there is a better way to
| do something then just contribute to another desktop. The
| existence of GNOME doesn't prevent you from doing that and
| isn't detrimental to it, especially when you consider that
| the cost of switching to another open source desktop is a
| big fat $0. Please don't unnecessarily politicize things,
| one of the benefits here is that you explicitly don't have
| to do that.
|
| To put it another way: maybe some specific mode of "Linux
| gaining ground on desktops" with "configurability and
| techniness" is your goal, but people working on any given
| desktop (including GNOME) may not share that goal in the
| same way you do, and it doesn't make any sense to expect
| them to.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Obviously, I can't _expect_ them to. I 'm not paying
| them. But I can absolutely encourage and discourage
| different ways of thinking and doing, and I'm absolutely
| free to express that. And yes, I would like to discourage
| "the GNOME way."
|
| To elaborate a bit about why I'm saying this; For quite
| some time, onboarding people to Linux was pretty easy.
| "Just use Ubuntu" was a really good answer. And then
| Unity came along, with a) bloat and b) this new paradigm
| that was ostensibly as simple as a Mac, but different
| enough that people wouldn't recognize it. And this was a
| terrible direction for Ubuntu to go, especially since XP
| was on its way out.
|
| And now, when people ask me, hey, how do I get started
| with Linux, and they've heard of Ubuntu, I can't just say
| "Yeah, go for it." I have to launch into a thing and name
| 2 or 3 different distros, primarily due to the weirdness
| of GNOME. I appreciate freedom and choice, but I'm also
| quite free to say, I believe the following: I really wish
| the GNOME people would more-or-less give up, because they
| have mindshare not off of the quality of their current
| interface, but because of the momentum of their old one
| plus Ubuntu. I believe that (much like Windows, frankly)
| if they actually had to compete in this space on the
| merits, they'd lose out.
|
| KDE (and LXDE and others) are doing a better job of
| making a predictable useful interface.
| zxzax wrote:
| I don't understand what you're trying to discourage, what
| you're saying doesn't follow. That has nothing to do with
| "the GNOME way" and is mostly related to the decisions
| made by Canonical, who decided to make their own desktop,
| and then dropped it in favor of GNOME. Asking the GNOME
| people to give up isn't going to make it viable for
| Ubuntu to develop their own desktop again that is more to
| your liking. Your issue is with them, not with GNOME. And
| according to them, you seem to have it exactly backwards:
| it was Unity that was not able to compete on merits, so
| it was dropped in favor of GNOME.
|
| But anyway it sounds like you just fixed that by using a
| different distro, you can even just suggest the KDE or
| LXDE spins of Ubuntu. Those still exist, and it's not
| hard to use them. If you're already using them then it's
| very hard for me to see what your actual complaint is or
| what you're trying to discourage. It's true you're free
| to express what you want, but please consider that what
| you're expressing may not be something that was done with
| having the full information. I've noticed there is a lot
| of confusion about what GNOME is and a lot of people seem
| to mix it up and equate it with Ubuntu or Red Hat or
| something, which is understandable, but it's not true.
| I'm only here to explain why.
|
| And just to make it painfully clear: it is already hard
| enough to maintain open source and fix all the issues and
| improve the quality of the current interfaces, without
| people constantly demanding that open source maintainers
| give up and stop fixing bugs. If you want to get things
| fixed, you really don't need to do this.
| pjmlp wrote:
| > I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying or
| what the point of your bashing is. GNOME and KDE and XFCE
| and whatnot are not political parties and are not opposed
| to each other.
|
| They surely where born that way, GNOME only exists due to
| the original Qt license.
|
| Then Gtk+ was always the go to framework for C devs,
| while KDE was embraced by C++ community on GNU/Linux.
|
| Murray did a very good job for the C++ refugees on
| GNOME/Gtk, but that has always been a minority versus
| being on KDE land.
| zxzax wrote:
| I honestly haven't seen any real license drama about that
| for like 10 years now. Qt and GTK are (mostly) the same
| license.
|
| Also I really wouldn't say that C and C++ are equivalent
| to political parties, that's like saying the same thing
| about coke and pepsi.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Everything that implies taking sides is politics, no
| matter what.
|
| You haven't seen any drama, really?
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commer
| cia...
|
| C vs C++ flame wars have been a thing since C++ was born
| at AT&T.
|
| Since you aren't following up the news,
|
| "CppCon 2015: Kate Gregory "Stop Teaching C"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk
|
| "We stopped teaching C"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZUTJ2UNXxI
|
| You can find similar stuff from C side, specially if you
| back in time to GNOME mailing lists, Usenet archives from
| comp.lang,languagex
| zxzax wrote:
| I figured you would post that. I have heard no actual KDE
| developers saying that's a problem. They don't use Qt
| LTS. The "drama" there seems to be mostly confined to
| unrelated internet forums.
|
| As for your posts about C, I can give a personal
| anecdote: I would agree with those sentiments, C has a
| lot of really bad problems as a language. But yet, I
| still write it a lot more often than C++. So It's not as
| simple as you're making it out to be. Also I checked some
| of those slides and I wouldn't describe anything there as
| a "flame war."
|
| >Everything that implies taking sides is politics, no
| matter what.
|
| If you really want to look at things that way, you could,
| but this seems to not be strictly true. Just because
| there is taking sides does not mean there has to be
| fighting or politics.
| jejones3141 wrote:
| All I can say is that GNOME 3 seems to take Havoc
| Pennington's famous essay about as far as it can go,
| considering configurability a bug. I don't know exactly when
| it started, but it definitely came to my attention bigtime
| with the infamous gnome-screensaver.
|
| Useful links: 1. https://ometer.com/preferences.html, the
| subset of Mr. P's original essay that the original contains a
| link to. 2.
| https://www.derstandard.at/story/1313024283546/gnome-
| designe..., an interview with Jon McCann.
| zxzax wrote:
| Yes, I would agree that a lot of GNOME developers still
| view that as a design goal. But not all do, and even so,
| having less configurability doesn't mean less features. If
| you ask me, practically speaking, what it has meant is that
| there is a larger collection of smaller apps to choose
| from. So if the app you want lacks a configuration option,
| you might be better served by trying to find a different
| app that just works the way you want the first time.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| > "Who cares? Do you even care? I don't think you do"
|
| > " The goal was never to make a desktop with no features"
|
| Wow, your first paragraph you accuse people of lying at
| worst, or capriciously taking a position that doesn't matter
| to them at best. It gets better in paragraph number two where
| you misquote GP and go boxing with that strawman.
|
| So to address your first paragraph, I'd say people here care
| a lot, and the bashing they do is not out of a place of
| tribalism, but out of a place of constructive criticism. Most
| of us here would LOVE to see improvement in
| $ArchEnemySoftware, and the failures strike deep because this
| stuff means so much to us. A mixture of disappointment with
| the status quo, and/or poor judgement calls with design or
| execution, rather than knocking a bit of tech that doesn't
| appeal to us.
|
| As for the second paragraph, GP didn't say "no features" in
| reference to GNOME, but decried the basic features that were
| removed, thereby rendering the software less useful to them.
|
| I'd take a brighter outlook on discussions like these, if the
| points land on the right ears, perhaps positive change might
| happen in GNOME. We can hope anyway.
| zxzax wrote:
| I'm not accusing anyone of that and I'm not misquoting,
| please stop with this hostility. In my experience, people
| are happy to switch when it suits them. By "no features" I
| was referring to those basic features. Sorry for the
| misunderstanding.
|
| I also didn't see any constructive criticism, if you have
| any specific suggestions for positive change you'd like to
| make, then please make them. I'm all ears. But for the
| record, if you'd like to get involved in development,
| places like HN and reddit are generally not a good place to
| do it. The people who are most likely to listen to requests
| don't visit here.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| So let me get this straight. According to you, I should
| not criticize software that does not meet my needs lest
| it be interpreted as bashing and ruin the party for those
| who do use the software in question? That's my take,
| please correct me if I'm not understanding your point
| properly.
|
| Also, no hostility here. I find these discussions
| illuminating.
|
| As for Reddit and HN, these places are excellent places
| for such commentary. Often times the maintainers of
| different packages heed complaints leveled here and
| change their ways. That's a win for everyone if the
| change is a positive one.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| > " I find it pretty disappointing" - Then you go into
| the praise vs bashing.
|
| What do you find disappointing? I guess that's what I'm
| driving at. When somebody knocks MacOS, and it's a valid
| point, I hope somebody from Apple is reading! Then maybe
| it gets fixed. So why would that arrangement disappoint
| you?
| zxzax wrote:
| For me personally I find the endless "Linux desktop wars"
| to be disappointing. It doesn't matter, this stuff is
| open source, if you really want it to be fixed then just
| go write a patch. But in my experience most people will
| just take a few minutes to switch to one of the many
| alternatives.
|
| I'm just relaying what other people have told me, these
| type of forums are full of uninformed comments, and are
| not a good place to solicit feedback. You could hope that
| maybe an Apple engineer would read it but they probably
| won't. You would have better luck sending them feedback
| through their official channels, where you know they will
| read it. If you're giving feedback to a YC startup then
| this would be a good place, but otherwise not so much.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| " these type of forums are full of uninformed comments"
|
| Hacker News has solid representation from Big Tech, FOSS
| projects, and Academia. What data do you have to back up
| that this is a bad place to air grievances with software?
|
| Whenever anyone mentions Amazon, my ears perk up. If it
| is within my power to correct, I take action. So what
| data do you have to support the assertion that HN
| comments are uninformed, and that this is only a good
| forum for YC startups?
| zxzax wrote:
| That's just my personal observation, I haven't seen many
| unfocused airings of grievances that ended in positive
| change. Sure there are knowledgeable people here, but
| they may not always be speaking within their area of
| expertise; it helps to direct it at someone who is within
| that area of expertise, in the case of HN, that area is
| startups.
|
| I've seen plenty of complaints about Amazon here go
| unanswered. Amazon is a pretty big company, I'm guessing
| you don't know everything about it and may not be the
| right person to ask about many things. If I had a
| question, I'd definitely ask you if it was something you
| were an expert in, but I don't know what that is because
| you didn't say.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Have you even seen an Amazon issue reported here that you
| had power to correct?
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Yes
| zxzax wrote:
| Thank you for doing that, it's really fortunate that you
| are, but please understand that not all of your coworkers
| do the same thing. I think it would be nice if they did,
| but currently they do not.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Yeah you're right. But I care about this stuff a lot. I
| love tech, I love the life it has afforded me, and I want
| people to have a good experience, even if it is something
| as simple as billing software!
|
| Obviously Amazon has some huge issues to overcome, both
| culturally and policy wise. If you keep bringing issues
| up, I'll do my best to get them in front of the right
| folks.
| zxzax wrote:
| >According to you, I should not criticize software that
| does not meet my needs
|
| I have not said that, I just asked you for your specific
| criticisms.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I don't know what GP deemed as basic functionality that
| was removed from GNOME. I use MacOS on the desktop.
| zxzax wrote:
| Well there you go, you switched to a Mac :)
| imwillofficial wrote:
| So GPs opinion isn't valid because I switched to the Mac,
| got it
| zxzax wrote:
| No, not at all. If you do ever use this and you develop
| an opinion on it, feel free to share.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I find it really weird how you seem to think you're the
| arbiter of how much people care, when they can share
| their opinions, and what opinions are valid.
|
| Perhaps you should keep those ideas to yourself and only
| concern yourself with your own level of contribution to
| the topic at hand. I don't need you to mind my comments.
| zxzax wrote:
| I don't think that at all, I'm just another person giving
| my opinion, like you. Also, I don't understand why you
| said that, but then asked me to keep my opinions to
| myself.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| > Also, I don't understand
|
| You've made that abundantly clear in this thread.
| zxzax wrote:
| If you have something you want me to understand, please
| explain. I'm happy to listen to what you have to say.
| Like everyone else, I'm not perfect, sometimes I don't
| understand things and I need some help from people like
| you.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| You have not argued in good faith. You have continually
| claimed one thing and then declared the opposite a
| comment later.
| zxzax wrote:
| >You have not argued in good faith.
|
| That's not correct, as a show of good faith I've
| explicitly asked for specific details on what the
| complaint is. I can't help you if you don't provide those
| details. If it seems I haven't done that, I apologize,
| that was not my intention. I'll try to be clearer next
| time. Let me know if there's anything specific you want
| me to clear up.
| prvc wrote:
| >Do you even care? I don't think you do, you'll just delete
| that desktop and move on and use whatever you want, and
| that's the whole point.
|
| For the record: I care.
| zxzax wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Is there something particular that you
| need that doesn't work on an RPi? If it turns out to be a
| small fix, then ultimately you may end up caring a lot less
| than you think.
| prvc wrote:
| Also, telling an individual user to "just use another DE"
| does not solve the problem, whose effects are widespread,
| on a whole ecosystem of software, its users, and
| developers.
| zxzax wrote:
| Could you please explain specifically what one or more of
| these effects is? I may be able to offer suggestions on
| how to mitigate it. When I was talking about using
| something else I was specifically referring to the
| article, which is talking about using a different window
| manager, and makes a good case for switching, and may
| even be able to help you deal with some of those effects.
| I assume you agree with the article, if not then I don't
| understand because it seems odd to me to single out this
| one passing mention in a paragraph that otherwise goes
| against what was just said, so please elaborate if you
| can.
| daptaq wrote:
| I'm not sure what the other user was thinking about, but
| I think that GNOME's push towards client-side window
| decoration is annoying and imposing. Depending on your
| WM, some applications become "useless", they waste space
| on small screens and just reinforce a sense of
| fragmentation. I get that it looks better on GNOME, and I
| appriciate it when using GNOME, but as there seems to be
| no system to remove the CSD on traditional systems, I
| still think it is an overall bad move.
| zxzax wrote:
| Others may find that pushing towards server-side window
| decoration is annoying and imposing, so this is
| unfortunately an area where not everyone can be happy. In
| any case you may be interested to try a patch:
| https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic
| [deleted]
| lobstrosity420 wrote:
| The people that characterize GNOME this way are desperate to
| identify themselves with a certain sub group of Linux users
| that prides themselves in doing things the hardest possible
| way (such as recompiling your terminal every time you want to
| change the font size) because it makes them feel 1337. Don't
| sweat it too much, it's just a little bit of garden variety
| internet tribalism.
| anthk wrote:
| Not leet. Gnome is unusable in any machine older than 2015.
| Also, CWM flies on my 2007 netbook.
| zxzax wrote:
| I completely disagree, I'm using GNOME on a laptop from
| 2008 now. It's working fine for me. I did tweak it a
| little bit however.
| zdragnar wrote:
| > and international users
|
| I might be mistaken here, but it seems to me that the
| international users who want a simple experience are already
| well served by smartphones (android or otherwise).
|
| The international users who are going to install linux on a
| laptop are the tinkerers and fiddlers and the self motivated
| learners who aren't going to be motivated by a dumbed down,
| inaccessible interface.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| you are mistaken.
|
| smartphones have small screens, and terrible keyboards.
|
| almost no one will creatw anything except simple photography
| and tweets on a phone.
|
| my phone can't even provide capital letters reliably.
|
| self motivated learners aren't stopped by a simple UI; they
| can use terminal and web apps.
| csande17 wrote:
| It's important to remember that GNOME is primarily
| funded/developed by Red Hat, who are owned by IBM. Red Hat's
| goal isn't to make something for the kind of person who would
| install Linux on a laptop themselves -- they're trying to
| make a clone of macOS they can sell in bulk to enterprise
| customers. The intended user population is very different.
| zxzax wrote:
| I'm not sure where you heard any of that, but I have never
| heard any Red Hat employees say anything to that effect,
| ever. Fedora still exists, and to me that seems perfectly
| fine to install on a random laptop.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not necessarily with that line of thought, Red-Hat has
| already acknowledged many years ago that there is no
| money to be made on the GNU/Linux desktop (Mandrake, SuSE
| and Canonical also found out years later).
|
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/2536558/red-hat-
| sees-n...
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/56947/
| csande17 wrote:
| It may surprise you to learn that Red Hat's primary
| revenue stream is not Fedora, but a separate distribution
| called "Red Hat Enterprise Linux".
| zxzax wrote:
| Sure, but that shouldn't really matter to an ordinary
| Fedora user, at least not to the ones I've heard from.
| csande17 wrote:
| If Fedora (or GNOME, for that matter) fits your needs,
| you should feel free to use it! But if you're wondering,
| like the grandparent comments, why projects like GNOME
| seem to be moving away from fitting your needs, the
| answer is that they're being designed for Red Hat's
| enterprise customers first and any use you get out of
| them is a happy afterthought.
| zxzax wrote:
| Again I'm not sure where you got that, I have not heard
| any Red Hat or Fedora developers say that's the focus. In
| fact if you follow GNOME development, there are various
| other directions that people are pulling in. It might be
| the case coincidentally for some things, but that could
| be yet another one of those happy afterthoughts.
| nextos wrote:
| If you are reasonably experienced and constrained by resources,
| a great option is to use a window manager without a desktop
| environment.
|
| That's my setup because it has fewer moving parts and lower
| latency, as there are only a handful of processes running and
| no compositor.
| hpoe wrote:
| That's why I now run i3 for my daily driver with emacs.
| lobstrosity420 wrote:
| The idea that the GNOME DE or GTK3/4 are resource intensive is
| a meme with little basis in reality.
| pjmlp wrote:
| GTK3/4 alone not really, as my Linux netbook is doing just
| fine with XFCE.
|
| Now having GNOME with its Javascript based shell and
| extensions, making every click take a couple of seconds
| longer and me wondering what it is doing, no thanks.
| zxzax wrote:
| The javascript is used mostly to drive the shell GUI, it
| shouldn't be taking seconds off all your mouse clicks. If
| there is really bad slowness, you should consider reporting
| that as a bug, it may not be the javascript that's at
| fault. The performance shouldn't be any worse than a
| typical lightweight web app running in firefox. That is of
| course if you ever end up using GNOME again for whatever
| reason.
|
| I don't understand why you have to wonder what it's doing,
| the javascript is all self-contained and hosted locally.
| It's not using npm or anything like that. And the
| extensions are pretty much the same as any other app you
| use that supports plugins.
| pjmlp wrote:
| "Memory leak in gnome-shell JavaScript bindings"
|
| https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3410651
|
| "GNOME Shell Performance Improvements in Ubuntu 20.04"
|
| https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/gnome-shell-performance-
| impro...
|
| "Boosting the Real Time Performance of Gnome Shell 3.34
| in Ubuntu 19.10"
|
| https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-
| perfor...
|
| When I complain about GNOME performance, I am not making
| it up, learn that and bye.
| zxzax wrote:
| I don't understand what the issue here is or what you
| want me to learn, those seem to all be bugs that were
| already fixed. If there are additional unfixed problems
| that others aren't aware of, and you're not making it up,
| then please mention those, and maybe I can help you get
| them reported.
| Zababa wrote:
| This site asks for 1.5 Go of ram https://ubuntugnome.org/,
| Ubuntu 20.04 asks for 4 Go of ram. Compared to the 30 Mo for
| IceWM in the article (apple to oranges, I know, but still 3
| orders of magnitude), or the 300 Mo for KDE. The author also
| notes that since XFCE switched to GTK3 they use more
| resources. That seems to be plenty of basis in reality.
| Perhaps you mean something else by "resource intensive"?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| What's Go and Mo?
| Narishma wrote:
| Gigaoctet and Megaoctet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)
| jejones3141 wrote:
| o = "octet" (byte), so Go = gigabyte, Mo = megabyte.
| csande17 wrote:
| Keep in mind that the 1.5 GB number is the total amount of
| RAM you need to have a good time using the operating
| system, not the amount consumed by the window manager
| alone. Even OP consumes just about a gigabyte of RAM with
| all the programs on their Raspberry Pi.
|
| That's not to say GNOME _isn't_ resource intensive -- it
| is, especially when compared to desktop environments that
| were either written to be lightweight or written 30 years
| ago -- that just isn't the best way to measure it.
| Zababa wrote:
| > Keep in mind that the 1.5 GB number is the total amount
| of RAM you need to have a good time using the operating
| system, not the amount consumed by the window manager
| alone.
|
| That's why I said apples to oranges initially, but you're
| right, I could have clarified that part.
| badjeans wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=gnome+3+memory+leak
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=gnome+3+cpu+use
|
| sure...
| lobstrosity420 wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=a+google+search+doesnt%27t+
| p...
| sudhirkhanger wrote:
| I feel like as soon as you start using Firefox and Chrome on
| these highly customised low-powered machines the power/ram saving
| customisation goes down the drain.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Firefox doesn't run well on a raspi. Chromium with an ad
| blocker and h264ify is good enough to even watch youtube.
| analog31 wrote:
| Ask HN: What do you install this on top of? Do you just start
| with the vanilla Raspbian installer, the bare bones installer
| without GUI, or something else?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| If you're not going to use the default RpiOS GUI (which
| honestly is actually very good), you can start with RpiOS Lite
| and then just add whatever desktop you want.
| BasicObject wrote:
| I've never needed more than IceWM. Great window manager. Easy to
| configure too. Glad development has picked up on it.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| My dumb, barely related question - how far away is VR/AR from
| having the necessary pixel resolution to be able to have a fake
| emacs/vim floating in space three feet from my eyes?
|
| At that point there is a change in the ergonomics and location of
| coding / most desktop work.
| adius wrote:
| SimulaVR is the leading project in that direction I think:
| https://simulavr.com
|
| With a Oculus Quest 2 - which has the highest resolution of the
| affordable VR headsets - it's still a little too grainy for
| prolonged coding sessions. But I think they'll get there in 1-2
| generations.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| I'm in the same boat - eagerly awaiting when I can have a VR
| terminal experience. I chimed in just so you didn't think you
| were a lone crazy holding out for that.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| We lone crazies need to stick together. Support meetings each
| Thursday - we have cookies :-)
| zz865 wrote:
| I built a rpi for games and it was OK but never got any use. One
| thing I ended up using it for was taking to the office and
| plugging it into my work monitor. With a BT keyboard and phone
| hotspot for internet.
| euske wrote:
| What kind of apps that a typical Linux programmer would need to
| run these days? For me, they are
|
| - terminal (shell, editor)
|
| - web browser (email client, file viewer, etc.)
|
| - clock
|
| With these, I only need a bare minimum window manager (fvwm2 in
| my case). In my view, KDE/GNOME are made not to scare away
| beginners and there isn't much productivity gain in using these
| environments. Once you're used to using Unix/Linux, you can
| graduate them and start using a more lean setup (while you don't
| have to, of course). One thing I can see might be handy is the
| System Settings / Control Panels apps. Other than that (and
| inertia), what are the reasons that people stick to these
| environments?
| herbst wrote:
| I run atom and terminator (a tiling terminal emulator) in my
| dev environment. Its rather heavy for 'just' development. On
| the other side it runs without any issues on my T420. Which is
| a cheap old laptop.
|
| I also love Gnome. For me this is the best, not in your way,
| desktop environment ever done. For me however :)
| cortesoft wrote:
| Don't you also need to run whatever you are programming? So a
| compiler/interpreter, REPL, maybe a database, docker, k8s, etc?
| I assume most devs still want to be able to compile and test
| locally?
| jude- wrote:
| These things aren't really part of a graphical user
| interface.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Oh right, I didn't fully read or understand the comment...
| was thinking more about the minimal computer OP was talking
| about.
| swiley wrote:
| I like to have dvcs and a terminal multiplexer in the VTE. I do
| email over ssh and pdfs in mupdf which is way lighter than the
| browser. I also mess with gEDA some.
|
| But yeah, gnome etc is overkill if `sudo vim etc/blah` doesn't
| scare you and you only speak english.
|
| My gf _does_ freak out editing networks and such and also needs
| her thai IME to just work so she runs gnome.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You just replicated my DG/UX experience with IBM X Windows
| terminals in 1995.
|
| Maybe we don't have to be frozen in time and rather use modern
| tooling?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > With these, I only need a bare minimum window manager (fvwm2
| in my case). In my view, KDE/GNOME are made not to scare away
| beginners and there isn't much productivity gain in using these
| environments
|
| Yeah, everyone who just develops in C and/or web thinks like
| this. It's one of the primary reasons nobody aside from them
| uses Linux Desktop.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Probably add VSCode and Spotify nowadays.
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| I use KDE now, but not much of it really. I do mostly the same
| things - terminal/browser/some utilities/text editor. I used
| lighter WMs in the past and they were interesting, but I didn't
| have time to sufficiently get past the experimental stage with
| them. Since I really don't do much, it's easier to just get
| something with easy and stable defaults with only a few changes
| I need for a setup.
| jude- wrote:
| I have the same question. The longer I've used Linux as my main
| OS, the less I've needed a desktop environment. My setup for
| the last half-decade has been basically the same as yours, and
| I've found it to be _more_ productive than KDE /GNOME (or
| Windows or MacOS) ever were.
| squarefoot wrote:
| What is the status of video acceleration on the desktop, wrt
| surfing the web or playing videos from the browser or a player? I
| used the various Raspberries as main media player with Kodi for
| years with great results, but the desktop experience using
| Raspbian+XFCE has always been awful, I mean the slugginess due to
| lack of video acceleration when playing videos, which otherwise
| is present and works great in Kodi; normal desktop usage was
| fine. It should be related to the video acceleration being among
| the closed blobs that not all distros include, but I thought it
| had been already reverse engineered before. My last attempt at it
| was about 6 months ago though.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Raspberry Pi is a great form factor with popular, documented
| hardware support for doing weird IO while consuming very little
| power.
|
| Browsing the web in 2021, on the other hand, requires Watts.
|
| > _Using noscript to disable javascript in Firefox has also
| helped tremendously_
|
| It's this kind of thing that made me switch to a Lenovo M93p for
| my desktop. It's a great form factor with perfect Linux hardware
| support. You can also feel good about recycling someone else's
| unwanted hardware.
|
| I really wanted the pi to work out but it just couldn't handle
| the JS heavy stuff I use in the day job (webmail, task-tracking,
| information management / CRM.)
| Syonyk wrote:
| That's not the hard part of using a Pi as a desktop PC...
|
| I've been using them for light to moderate desktop use for years
| now. The important things in desktopping a Pi, as far as I'm
| concerned:
|
| - Fix the storage. The SD card is fine for a toy. It will not
| withstand actual daily use, either in "delivering sane
| performance" or "handling a lot of random writes without dying in
| a year." Get a USB to SSD adapter and a cheap 32GB or 64GB SSD
| from eBay - doesn't have to be fast, doesn't have to be new. It's
| radically better than an SD card in any use case that resembles
| desktop use. You can either boot straight from USB, or, to
| improve compatibility with weird USB to SSD adapters, boot from
| the SD card, mount root from the SSD, and use the SD card for
| swap or something (see below).
|
| - Enable zswap if you're not on a 4GB or 8GB Pi4. It should be a
| module included in the Pi kernel now (I had to argue for a while
| to get it included). This is _not_ zram - this is _zswap._ There
| 's a huge difference. It's a compressed swap system that can
| flush out old or poorly compressible pages to the actual swapfile
| - which, since you're now fronting it with a compressed swap
| region in RAM, can be over on the SD card. The bulk of the stuff
| written to it will never be used again, unless you're just
| massively overcommitting RAM, at which point nothing really will
| help. I think around the 5.x kernels, z3fold starts working,
| though I've not seen a real practical difference between z3fold
| (up to 3 compressed pages per page of RAM) and zbud (only two
| compressed pages), _as long as same filled pages are enabled_ -
| that will crunch a page of 0s down into a "Got it, all 0s,
| done!" note and not bother wasting space compressing it.
|
| - Set the governor to performance. 'sudo cpufreq-set -g
| performance' The stock governor is really bad about ramping up,
| and leads to lag in typing, especially if you're using the
| atrocities that are modern "desktop" apps (Electron). Eventually,
| the system will spin up and do something useful, but you improve
| the performance and responsiveness rather substantially by just
| pinning the cores to their fastest speed and letting them stay
| there. I'm sure there's some measurable power difference doing
| this if you're concerned about the absolute lowest power, but
| it's not substantial, and "race to idle" solves a lot. If you're
| using a Pi as a desktop, try it - you'll like the change.
|
| - Use adblockers. It's amazing how much CPU time the internet
| spends on stuff that is advertising, tracking, and generally
| evil. Most websites behave a lot better once you remove that
| garbage.
|
| Otherwise... once you've done that, they're actually quite
| capable little systems! The Pi4 with 4GB or 8GB is the best
| option right now, and for most people I'm not sure the 8GB really
| gains you much - I have one, use it fairly heavily, and rarely
| see any RAM pressure past about 4GB. But it does make up for some
| slow disk.
|
| I've written about some of this more extensively over on my blog
| over the years, if anyone wants more details - link is in my
| profile.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| With the Compute Module 4 and certain boards, you can use (and
| even boot from) NVMe SSDs natively. Makes a world of difference
| for so many things!
| Syonyk wrote:
| I should sit down and benchmark those one of these days.
|
| The jump from USB2 to USB3, either with or without UAS (it's
| nice, but doesn't lead to a huge jump in benchmarks) gets you
| a ton of disk performance, and my gut feeling is that while
| you could certainly measure the performance delta from USB3
| to NVMe, it wouldn't lead to a practical increase in speed
| for typical desktop use. Going from glacial SD cards even to
| USB2 SSDs is a huge jump, but USB3 to NVMe seems like it
| would be going from "Fast enough that it's no longer a
| bottleneck" to "Even faster."
|
| Though for reasons I don't understand fully, all the ARM
| boards I've tested have very poor USB3 performance compared
| to Intel. Same SSD, same USB adapter, and the Intel systems
| absolutely crush the ARM systems (Pi4 and Jetson Nano) in
| small sector IO performance.
|
| The main problem with NVMe is that the various carriers that
| support it aren't cheap, and often (at least in the past 6-8
| months) aren't really available. You can get a USB3 adapter
| and used SSD for $30, reliably, any time you want.
| jandeboevrie wrote:
| Jeffs case review of the argon one m2 case was the reason I
| bought it. The pi boots directly from an SSD, much faster and
| no more broken SD cards.
| prox wrote:
| Great tips! I have been using the internal SSD for a while now.
| I do regular backups or just clone a new SSD.
|
| In the article : Firefox uses 900Mb! How did we get to the
| point that a browser needs 900Mb???
| homerhomer wrote:
| I have a Raspberry Pi 400 and it does a pretty good job as a
| desktop. I also have a HP x360 laptop from 2017 with Windows 10
| and it's HORRIBLY SLOW and constantly kicks on the fan. I'm
| convinced that cahoots with the hardware manufacturers.
| sprash wrote:
| The general perception of IceWM as a minimalist Windows 95 clone
| hides the fact that it is indeed a very powerful fully fledged
| tool for window management. Just icewm-winoptions file and the
| icesh program enable so much opportunities for automation, it
| makes the average tiling window manager look tame and primitive.
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