Technically linux users need third party tools to even boot into a usable OS.
if everything is third party then nothing is? my guess is thats the idea at least
Thats why you have RedHat, SUSE, Canonical etc. Legal entities that offer warranty for that random bundle. Insurance that issues will be fixed.
Because if you are just “a racoon digging for free code” you have nothing to request from anyone.
Not if you call it GNU/Linux 🤓☝️
Alpine linux
difference is you dont need a third party tool to change the thing, if you’re unhappy with the thing, you change the thing out itself, you are not stuck with it.
I’ve been running Linux for almost thirty years. Back in the day i would customize everything. Now I basically install and run it stock.
Same, but a few Plasmoids are nice to have…
I also like it simpler than stock KDE. no sounds, no floating, no animations.
I love how I can just casually uninstall the entire desktop and install a new one in a few minutes.
Or I can be a complete madman and keep both.
genuinely curious since I’ve never tried or even considered it. What happens when you have multiple desktops installed, and assuming it doesn’t cause issues why would a person want to do that?
Typically your display manager lets you choose which environment you want from a dropdown menu. It’s responsible for helping you login and taking you to the desktop.
And you can have multiple login screens if you like. I’m not sure why I would typically do this.
You can choose on the login screen, works well, but it gets confusing if the whole Desktop gets installed: example GNOME comes with gnome-terminal even if there is already xterm or KDE Konsole on the system
typically you get a dropdown at the login screen :)
There’s no added value to having multiple desktop environments, so almost no one would want to. A lot of applications use DE sensitive configurations and there’s potential for conflicts as well as libraries incompatibility. Which can result on paradoxical and bizarre behavior from some graphical apps. It’s odd that it happens but it’s also not something devs plan or account for, so they aren’t even considered bugs. You don’t install multiple DEs at the same time unless you’re purposefully trying to break something or you don’t know better.
The only use case currently is choosing between a DE with X or one with Wayland. But even that one could fuck your system.
For example, opening cinnamon experimental Wayland makes all my flatpaks stop working until reboot. Why? I don’t know, nobody knows. But if I keep using Wayland after reboot they work. If I change to regular cinnamon, they break again until reboot, when they get fixed as long as I keep using regular cinnamon. It just be like that.
I don’t use linux on desktop anymore but that seems like a major step backwards from 10 years ago where your worst worry for running multiple DEs was the bloat from having to run GTK and QT in a mixed environment.
openSUSE pre-installs IceWM, for example, even if you select a full-fledged DE during setup, so that if your proper DE should ever break, you still have a (very minimal) GUI to do your troubleshooting in.
That’s pretty cool! My immediate reaction to hearing “minimal backup DE for troubleshooting” is wondering why that isn’t far more common
Windows used to actually have cool theming capabilities in Windows 98 (And I think ME/2000) what the hell happened to that LMAO
Yes, customizing as they want
(this is me)
this acts like rainmeter and stardock windowblinds weren’t vastly superior …
They weren’t though… I used to love the stardock stuff especially. But they were objectively inferior. I also couldn’t run hyprland or sway with nearly every part replaced by an unconventional replacement like the friggin notifications daemon for example. Even on Plasma, i could literally replace the entire shell. And even on GNOME, I could add an “extension” that essentially replaces the GNOME workflow.
As much as I enjoyed those days of windows customisation, it was far too shallow compared to what i can do on a Linux setup. Will i do all that though? Probably not, i like my Plasma setup as it is right now.
i’m talking about being vastly superior to the built in theme options in windows since it implied third party tools were “bloat” instead of being genuinely useful.
Linux users using Gnome Tweaks to make their PC look exactly like macOS.
When I’m not working on my Mac I enjoy the sheer simplicity of Sway
Why would you want that? Gnome is way better
