Maybe they do care, but there's simply other tasks which take priority right now; or possibly they're doing some unimportant task because they don't even know about your issue because nobody reported it; it could be they know about it, have it on their list of tasks, and have detailed a workaround but nobody bothered to read the docs; or possibly the people behind the distros really don't care - either because what's important to you is different to what's important to others, or simply because other people have depressingly low standards.

Which of those things it might be for each individual issue could perhaps be guessed at, if you posted the relevant issue tracker links for the bugs you identified.

Some times. One never has choice in the matter. Glad that we do.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-1540-dm-1388/

I'll admit. KDE used to be simple. After a while. I just trained myself with Window Managers.

Cars and motorcycles are more complicated now and not fixable at home.
Just a sign of the times. Disposable Tech.

Edit: having wrote how to's and helping on forums.
I can tell you documentation is the least thankless item on the distro team I belong to.

My experience with Pop!_OS 21.10 (for Nvidia):

Booting
During the boot there are heaps of warnings, errors, animated red asterisks and a looong time before seeing the UI completely loaded.
The installer window tries to open just after boot, but because it takes a while to actually open, a window shows up saying that installer is not responding and it asks if I want to kill it.
When installer UI loads you realize it can't be closed. Well, kind of. The only way is to right click on the task bar and click on 'Quit'.

2.9 GB and the multimedia experience is terrible
If you try to open a .flac the system says there's no application associated with this extension. If you try to open using the video player, it plays just fine.
Most videos simply don't play -- some make the player popup an error message, others load a black screen.

Installing applications
If you open Pop! Shop you'll find that's pretty easy to find and download applications. After installing Mpv, comes an 'open' button, but if you click on it there's an error: 'AppInfo not found for package: mpv Media Player'. If you try to open using runner or the application menu it opens just nice and all multimedia files play flawlessly.
If you search for 'aud' you'll see 2 equal entries for Audacious.
After installing Opera via Snap the terminal hangs for more than 30s. The whole process of installing Opera takes more than 3 minutes, while the download itself takes less than 1/3 of this time.

Using the system
If you try to open the file manager using the global shortcut it opens, however if you hit the same shortcut again nothing happens -- probably because Gnome thinks it knows better what users want than themselves.
Many times file manager opened via shortcut loads out of focus (if there are other applications open).
If you try to drag a file from the file manager to the taskbar nothing happens.
If you open runner (alt+f2) and execute 'editor', runner closes and nothing happens.
Gnome experience feels claustrophobic. There's no centralized way to see all available applications and even the taskbar seems to hide things from you. And client-side-decoration is probably the most advanced bullshit on Linux after dconf and systemd.
By trying to install another desktop environment you need to execute *sudo systemctl restart gdm* (as suggested in PopOS webpage). However, sometimes this command hangs forever in a black screen. When it works and if you try to logout, that gear icon will only show up if you try a different login and manually type the username (well, the same...).
Why alt+drag is not enabled by default?
When asking apt-get to install LXDE, it says Qt is required -- why?
When asking apt-get to instal KDE, it requires 1.5 GB -- why?
Apt-get can't install 2 things at the same time -- Windows feelings

Nice things
Contrary to Xfce, LXQt and many other DEs, Gnome has a very smooth scroll performance in Chromium-based browsers.
UI performance in general is very fluid, although there's always some delay (~300ms) to open applications, which doesn't happen on Xfce, LXQt and LXDE, for instance.
There are global shortcuts for most of the common tasks (file manager, terminal, runner, etc), but many are not intuitive (win+d doesn't show the desktop, win+up/win+down doesn't maximize/minimize windows, etc). Of course we can change it, but choosing intuitive defaults is key, right?

That's no surprise with Manjaro. Manjaro is designed to be broken and is a distro only for those that want to and able to fix a broken distro and or liars because the developer of Manjaro is a liar along with much of the community. I suggest trying other distros because not distros are like the ones you mentioned. Also, distros run differently in a VM. Doing an actual install will show really how they are.

I must admit that I am a bit newer to Manjaro than other distros, I have only been using it for a year and a bit. During that year I have found it very solid, difficult to break and easy to fix, I cannot imagine what you have encountered to make you say such things, but my experience would totally NOT support such conclusions.

Please give MX21 a 'test'! I'd genuinely like to hear....

1 members found this post helpful.

@GentleThotSeaMonkey, sure.

MX-21 Xfce x64 -- Live session on real machine

Boot
Boot screen has keyboard selection selected by default, which means it will never boot automatically into the UI.
Although I chose Xfce flavour, it comes with Qt native apps -- like qpdfview and Featherpad (huge fonts!) -- and Gnome apps -- like Archive Manager and GNOME PPP (what the...?). It's a good practice to follow the desktop environment toolkit, which in this case is GTK3.
Global shortcuts just work (except for win+t which doesn't launch terminal). They could improve the screenshot shortcuts to include alt+print (current window screenshot) and shift+print (selection screenshot)
No black screen issue using Mesa drivers, finally!

Multimedia experience
By far the best among big distros. Almost everything plays just nice. The exception are mp4 videos with multi channel AAC which don't play any sound.
All videos open with this odd blinking glitch that lasts like 1 sec -- replacing Vlc with Mpv fixed everything.
There is a lack of consistency: mp3 files open in Clementine (Qt app...) but flac files open in Vlc.

General use
The clip icon is the only one without tooltip -- probably an upstream issue.
This Tweak application (MX native) allows you to change some settings that are otherwise very obscure. Cool!
Downloading snap was easy, but *sudo snap install opera* doesn't work: error: cannot communicate with server: Post "http://localhost/v2/snaps/opera": dial unix /run/snapd.socket: connect: no such file or directory
However downloading the deb file from Opera website just works with no dependency error
It has a host-file ad-block. Really nice!
There's a script to install Nvidia drivers. It seems to work, but it's not as nice/user friendly as the one found on *buntu.
When you run an application from MX Tools, then MX Tools disappears until the application is closed.
When you open LightDM GTK+ Greeter it says the system is using Adwaita-dark, but it's actually mx-comfort.
Xfce default font settings are not ideal, but MX changed it to the correct ones -- nice!
I know it's asking too much, but there's a Xfce fork that removes this client-side decoration bullshit. Would be a nice bonus. I did this on Porteus
Opening Thunar (file manager) as root put the whole UI in this slow/odd mode. Thunar eventually opens but it doesn't show all the items from Places (Videos, Downloads, Music, etc). I tried to close it and open a root instance again but it took around 10 seconds to actually load Thunar.

Conclusion
My general impression is that MX distro is committed to make things work out of the box, and it provides some additional applications that can help users do boring/hard tasks. My main concern is that the shipped applications are a mix bag of different toolkits/themes, making this distro look a bit unpolished/non-professional.

1 members found this post helpful.

I have to agree with OP here. While my daily driver is really stable and I almost never have issues, I do often run into all sorts of weird problems when I try other distros, even top-10 distros, and it really annoys me that Linux development by the largest distros has become largely out of touch with the everyday desktop user. Gnome is a complex joke with a failed punchline, a complete distortion of the greatness it used to be. KDE is slowly pulling itself together after a decade of being bloatware, XFCE is basicaly the only reasonable choice among the top desktops, and even it isn't totally amazing, and that's only the beginning of sorrows for new users trying to find 'their' first distro.

And the people with the real money and large groups of devs seem so out of touch that it takes years for the smaller volunteer dev teams to fork and patch up the messes the big guys make in order to create proper, stable, user-friendly software from them. We really do need to step back and think a bit. If we want Linux to be taken seriously as a desktop option, we have to start making things that work on desktops. Not just your desktop, but desktops in general.

1 members found this post helpful.

That sounds very depressing, Deepspeed.
I experience none of that when I boot up my machine.

I'll grant you, it's a jungle, and it may take you a while to find your favorite tree. Don't give up just yet.

It's funny that you say that because I was about to post my impressions about Gnome after using it for a few days. TL;DR: yes, it sucks and I agree Xfce is the most decent one, although has its flaws and the defaults are quite odd.

Gnome 40.2 vanilla (in Slackware current x64 -- double checked some things in Ubuntu/Manjaro/PopOS 21.x):

• By default it boots into overview mode, which is the weirdest view I've ever seen in a desktop environment.
• Desktop doesn't support files -- this is outrageous!
• Network/sound/power look different things on the taskbar but they're actually a one-button thing.
• To connect to a wifi network you need to click 5 times -- even when we reach the available wifi networks double click doesn't work.
• If you minimize an application it vanishes. You need to go to overview mode to find it at the bottom bar.
• Sound icon on the taskbar doesn't have device selection.
• Sound icon on the taskbar doesn't allow you to just mute, restoring the volume back when unmuting.
• No global shortcuts to do basic stuff like show desktop/terminal/filemanager/etc.
• Modal dialogs are attached to the main window in a such a way that when you move it the main window goes together so you can't see what's behind it.
• If you add an application to the bookmark (bottom bar), you're actually moving it out of the Applications list; not only it disappears from there, but the remaining items don't shift left. If you move it application back it doesn't necessarily go back to its original position in the grid.
• Runner (alt+f2) has no name suggestion/autocomplete.
• Applications view blocks alt+tab.
• Applications view crops its items and there's not even a tooltip. This gets especially funny when using anything lower than 1080p (vbox screenshot).
• Drag and drop between diffent applications has an annoying delay, meaning you need to wait like half a second before dropping.
• dconf is yet another standard created to increase entropy that reminds me of Windows Registry.
• No way to turn off compositor.
• When using nouveau drivers (for Nvidia cards) the whole UI responsiveness is just bad and there is no window animation.
• When you select a new image for the background desktop, it gets copied to ~/.local/share/backgrounds.
• No alt+drag/resize, which is the default on Linux for decades -- there's super/win to move only.
• All file dialogs (including Nautilus itself) hide the storage units under 'Other Locations'. And what's worse: you have to click just once, breaking the coherence of double clicks all arund the system.
• Nautilus doesn't differentiate between type-search and actual file-search.
• Nautilus file transfer has no pause/resume, and the current speed label takes a looong time to show up.
• Nautilus shows file size in kB/MB/GB not KiB/MiB/GiB. Yet another decision to confuse people, with no reasonable justification and no way to change it.
• Nautilus doesn't show thumbs in list view mode until you reach the third step zoom.
• Nautilus grey out color for cut files is almost impossible to notice.
• Nautilus sort files using case sensitive, which means 'VirtualBox' comes before 'firefox'.
• Nautilus doesn't show the status bar until you select a file/folder.
• Nautilus makes a nice decision to not save its view per folder, but this decision doesn't apply to columns settings (when in list view).
• Nautilus refuses to run (alt+f2) if you do this a second time without closing the first instance.
• Nautilus doesn't provide a way to create an empty file, just an empty folder.
• Nautilus search file content (full text) simply doesn't work.
• Nautilus search requires you to hit back twice to close an empty search result.

Gnome tries to sell itself as a coherent and minimalist desktop environment that can be extended by plugins, but it's not lightweight nor fully decoupled (e.g. webkit/gdm/systemd are required to build/boot). Many of its decisions are not intuitive and quite often there's no official way to change them. It would be somehow acceptable if Gnome were light and small, which is definitely not the case. At least it's not as bloat/slow as KDE. I can't see any advantage when compared to Xfce, which is much lighter, faster, flexible and intuitive.

1 members found this post helpful.

I do not find the latest releases of KDE either bloated or slow. There are leaner and meaner options, but when I say "meaner" ...


Size is one of the things you sacrifice some of to get more features. If you do not need or want the features you CAN get more speed form a smaller package. Only YOU can decide where the compromise line lives for you.

That said, if you have FAST hardware and significant resources ANY of the mature desktops will be fast and feature rich enough.

What we have now is less spooky than it is varied. We have a wide range or levels of maturity, following different goal and coding philosophies, with multiple spinoffs and advantages. If you dislike what you have found you have three options to improve: keep seeking until you find one that fits you better, spin off a new clone of an existing project and modify your clone to behave in a way that fits you, or play with the settings and options in one that ALMOST fits until you are happy with it.

Or, and this should go without saying, you can adjust your expectations to what you find or spend your entire life complaining without trying to fix the issue. Frankly, these two (together or apart) are the ones we see most often. Personally, I avoid those two and adjust things like crazy because that is what I DO with almost everything (but I do not recommend EVERYONE do that!).

If your complaint is not that "this is broke", or "that does not work as documented", or "this option is missing from this environment" and just "everything sucks" then you are not going to get anyone to fix anything. Pick a flaw, measure and report it, and follow up with people who live in the code (be polite, please) and you might see it fixed.

Very few coders make projects to offend people. Provide constructive suggestions with adequate information, measures, or cases to help them understand and replicate your issues and they will listens. (After a while. Keep in mind they also have lives and are living in a pandemic surrounded by insane idiots, as are we all. There are a LOT of distractions!)

@wpeckham, thanks for your kind reply.

Don't you think this can also be decided by the developers? At least that's what I try to do as a Linux developer: set everything that I can to help the user.

How can a regular user can have a smaller package of Gnome or KDE? Just to give you an idea: on Porteus we try to build the smallest desktop environment module possible that doesn't break basic functionalities, and here are some numbers:

• Xfce 73 MB
• LXQt 157 MB
• Gnome 168 MB
• KDE 338 MB

KDE is almost 5 times the size of Xfce and it's clearly slower. I struggle to see any interesting advantage of KDE when compared to Xfce or even LXQt. Not to mention the time (and knowledge!) to build this insane ammount of packages that KDE requires to run as vanilla as possible.


This is a very common misconception about software. The faster your machine, the faster it will run a fast software, and more pleasant and productive your experience will be. Having a super fast machine doesn't mean we should use heavy software. Also, why do we think modern software has to be heavy?

As I said, I'm not looking for a distro not even a desktop environment. I like Linux very much so that I'm a Linux developer I work on Porteus distro and I already have my prefered desktop environment. It doesn't block me to have a critical opinion about all this mess.

I wish this was always the case. At least the most common case. But it isn't unfortunately. Open source developers are particularly rude and arrogant, thinking their way of seeing software should be the same as the average user. Many arbitrary decisions (e.g. LXQt default search settings being case sensitive, not recursive and using regex) and heaps of topics being locked just because of ego.

But, hey, it could be worse. It could be Windows, right?

That only works if your usage and the developers usage are exactly the same. why do you think there are so many spinoffs? the two are almost NEVER the same. The developer makes the best choices they can, and makes enough configurable so you can tune things for YOUR preferences. They cannot decide what preferences you HAVE to live with unless they work for Bill Gates!1. What versions of each, because that makes a HUGE difference! 2. Run size in memory for KDE is the smaller figure. 3. As for KDE advantage, have you tried Cube Animation?No argument there. My favorite desktops are KDE and FluxBox, although I can live with almost any gui, since I mostly work in screen anyway. You must know different developers than I do. That, or you approached them in a way that made them predisposed to be unfriendly. All of the ones I know are interested and concerned about what theyr users are doing with their software and what they can do to make it better for them.;-)

Wanna hear my story, very similar.
I've got a base OS with Xorg and Nvidia drivers. My xterm settings are hopped up, looks nice over the black background.

Been mulling over WM/DE for a couple weeks now, tried a few, about a hundred to choose from but nothing strikes my fancy like this little monster, especially when I install feh to display a wallpaper. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna end up with a home made contraption, no WM or DE just ME.

^ well that doesn't sound depressing at all