Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate [LWN.net]

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 17, 2018 15:47 UTC (Mon) by ncm (guest, #165)
Parent article: Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

If I needed another reason to stop using Gnome, this would do it.

The degree of contempt that Gnome developers exhibit toward their users is breathtaking, and not a little boggling, but rather reminiscent of Apple. Fortunately, when we cannot turn off their "features", we can turn off Gnome itself.

The question that remains is why anybody stays on Gnome. Maybe for the same reasons people stay on Apple, that also escape me. I speculate that people stay with Apple because they know it cannot be made to do what they want, no matter how they try, but that they can learn to live with what it does; and that saves them from spending time trying. Some Apple users I have quizzed agreed.

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Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 17, 2018 15:59 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Apple at least have known hardware to work with. They can tune the settings on Mac OS for a particular laptop model (of which they have only about 50 to support) and it will work reliably. In the PC world, and especially with Linux, you have to have more configuration settings because hardware is much more variable. Even though many users would prefer not to have to mess with so many buttons and levers.

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 17, 2018 17:08 UTC (Mon) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

The reason for that is simple for whatever reasons wayback then distributions decided to use Gnome as their default desktop environment and that decision afaik has never been proparly re-evaluated in distributions since.

That strikes me as bit odd since Gnome has been continious beta stage since it's inception and god forbid that they add knobs to toggle for their only ever existing user base which are advanced users (One would have thought that an existance of an application like GNOME Tweak Tool would have sent a clear message to the community that they were doing it wrong but apparently thats not enough ) since the entire community lacks the necessary development discipline to be able to produce a product that is usable for a novice end users or just users in general that dont want to be fighting their DE just to have a functional environment to do their work in.

Computers are supposed to make users work easier not harder.

Anyway it serves no purpose bothering with any DE on linux other than those that run on android and provide a WIMP interface on top of that ( like samsungs dex etc ) because that what the consumer wants thus that's where the future is and has been heading.

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 17, 2018 17:35 UTC (Mon) by yuuyuu (guest, #127230) [Link] (5 responses)

GNOME has always been against the spirit of empowering the user anyway, in the real sense. Instead of giving the user tools to compose a workflow that suits them best, and the "features" like these they'd like to turn on or off, they seem to be more focused on imposing a certain workflow, focusing on their brand, a certain way of doing things, in that you need to adapt to the way they envision GNOME to work.

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 18, 2018 8:48 UTC (Tue) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (3 responses)

> GNOME has always been against the spirit of empowering the user anyway, in the real sense. Instead of giving the user tools to compose a workflow that suits them best, and the "features" like these they'd like to turn on or off, they seem to be more focused on imposing a certain workflow, focusing on their brand, a certain way of doing things, in that you need to adapt to the way they envision GNOME to work.

Devil's advocate: someone who can look after themself can easily install what they need to make their system configurable to their heart's content, so they haven't lost much. Someone who cannot is probably better served by a simpler, less configurable system, even if it is not quite optimal for their needs. The standard system is also much better tested, which is a big plus for less capable users. So much the theory, I realise that the practice is probably far away.

I am in neither group: I am a capable user, but I do not want to waste time fiddling with my system or running into strange bugs because I tried out interesting options. I like being able to take a new system and be up and running in a couple of hours, and for that I am willing to adapt to the system rather than adapting it to me. So I am probably one of the small group who appreciates the way GNOME do things.

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 18, 2018 9:45 UTC (Tue) by chris.sykes (guest, #54374) [Link]

I'm in the same camp - but I am starting to question if I might be better off running with the defaults of some other DE...

Stripping out configurability in favour of "sensible defaults" is one thing, but enabling a default behaviour that could result in data loss for their users is quite another. Logs filling with JavaScript stack traces every time I hit Alt-Tab is another motivator.

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 18, 2018 16:13 UTC (Tue) by yuuyuu (guest, #127230) [Link] (1 responses)

To each their own ;-)

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Oct 13, 2018 21:47 UTC (Sat) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Exactly :)

For me, it will even vary depending on the year.

Some years, like this one, I really don't want to be empowered on my desktop - as far as decisions, I have enough to be made elsewhere. I have a little cheat sheet with the gnome tweaks needed for alt-tab, etc, and then I move on.

And, yeah, Apple, because learning a bunch of random finger waving motions that you throw at some little touch pad is intuitive.. but some people love it.

And, on some years, I have installed Enlightenment (remember that?). KDE, I've even had to work in *C*DE (Solaris). I have Cinnamon in some places... Yeah, it varies.

At least we can chose our masters! ;)

Fedora reawakens the hibernation debate

Posted Sep 18, 2018 22:35 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

Not always, only recently (2.x and later). Sawfish was nice and configurable, for example.