As someone who used Gnome 1 in school, tried KDE 1 and 2 on the family PC for a while, then later switched their private PC to that same Hardy Heron Ubuntu Gnome 2 install and moved from there to Gnome 3.2 or 3.4 when it became available in Ubuntu - this was nice, the cheese theme especially.

I don’t really know what kind of demographic misses switching to different window managers in this way though. I never did. But I don’t really get the tiling window manager craze either - that is certainly easy enough to set up as a different session.

A few things he missed though:

• Previewing media files in the Nautilus side panel.
• Gimp had no menu bar, most everything needed to be done from the context menu. The saving grace was that most menus could be torn off into little palette-style windows though.
• The Gimp installation with the orange window he shows is just a user setup wizard. I remember that e.g. at my school, it was important to fix the DPI setting for our monitors on the first run because the window manager wasn’t reliable on that front.
• I believe there was a sliding animation when hiding a desktop panel with the <|> buttons at the side. That was nice at the time.
• I am not completely sure whether Sawfish had that feature or whether it was only available on the KDE window manager, but you could double-click the title bar of windows to hide the window content and show only the title bar.

Kubuntu is no longer primarily developed by Canonical. That might be a reason why it’s different from regular Gnome Ubuntu.

Ubuntu uses the Ubuntu font. It’s their barnding font and they’ll probably stick to it.

💔😖

Rhythmbox was never a core application

Rhythmbox was originally a GNOME 2 app that never fully made it into the GNOME 3 era. Otoh, “core apps” is a concept introduced some time after GNOME 3.0. That timeline can’t match up.

The original GNOME 3/4 core music player was/is GNOME Music. Except GNOME Music was so reduced as to be barely useful, especially at the beginning. Creating an opening for e.g. Lollypop.

Also the first impression is the distro’s concern not GNOME’s.

Before core apps were introduced thereight be distros that would randomly ship GNOME with VLC, FileZilla, and xterm. I.e. apps that don’t integrate well with GNOME and are not regularly used by average users.

The idea behind core apps was trying to influence app selection on such distros. To make sure that all distros would ship with a default selection of useful, well-integrated apps. Iow, first impression is a major reason why core apps are even a thing.

For example, I should be able to use whatever file manager without worrying about the whole DE bloat

I don’t think I worried about “DE bloat” any time in the past ten years. Might be different if I was using Raspi desktop. :)

The issue is not that it’s bloat but that it makes a bad first impression, especially on new users. This is very much “batteries-not-included” software.

In the old days, before it bitrotted, Rhythmbox could do a lot. You could play an entire album or playlist, search, sort, sync your iPod, you could play and rip CDs – and it was much quicker than iTunes nonetheless. Alternatively, you could use Totem for music and video and even that could do playlists. Modern Totem has some playlist functionality, but that functionality is so basic, it only works by opening multiple files at once from the file manager. Now Decibels basically does the same thing as modern Totem, except with a waveform background but not better in any other way.

play audio files directly in the file manager

Isn’t that what gnome-sushi is for?

I don’t think that’s what he means, see this Phoenix interview (German). No doubt his ideas are rather harsh (not the best word, but I need to leave now) though.

(Ftr, for anyone confused at this exchange – the Twitter thing was in a completely different thread.)

Volker Beck […] calls for Israel to permanently annex Gaza

Where does he do that? (I know this is 4 days old.)

Also all weapon deliveries needed approval by the Foreign ministry and the Economic ministry, both run by Green ministers, with the other Minister Habeck being now the “chancellor candidate” of the Green party.

And there have been no weapons deliveries for the best part of 2024 (iirc, the last German weapons deliveries were in February), with the Greens stepping on the brakes there.

I think GNOME Software uses some fwupd library rather than the straight-up command-line fwupdmgr, but yeah, basically.

It’s in the firmware category, i.e. it comes from LVFS. It’s neither a Flatpak nor a DEB/RPM/… package. Many of these, I believe are actually exe files for DOS (happy to be corrected on this, it’s a while since I last read Richard Hughes’s blog).

Iirc, GNOME Software is plug-in-based and the Flatpak plug-in is just one of the plug-ins.

I guess you’re right in that the headline is not Onion-worthy. But I find “it’s not cheating to cheat using a machine, let’s sue” a rather creative approach.

Or did they change that?

No

There are no FOSS payment methods. In fact, you’re probably lucky to find a payment processor that will handle FOSS stuff at all.

A man of the people, chatting with one of the people.