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Why do we still put up with GNOME?

I've spent the last 10 years off and on from Linux. Had I used something other than GNOME, I believe my experience would have been better.

I've been on KDE for the last 3-4 years and things work so well I could never imagine going back to GNOME.

It is a preference - and not everyones. I always hated middle click paste, middle click is amongst the first thing I remap on my systems to do the macOS "exposé"-style of window rearrangements. Other people will have other preferences.

THANX! I don't know how people live on platforms that don't have this :)

As for the negative Gnome feedback (not from you but others) I do like Gnome, it's just enough window manager for me, I like the defaults and I like the touchpad gestures etc. Generally looks and works well for all I do. I always feel swamped by KDE.

Did they publish some rationale somewhere? It’s a useful feature.

Probably changed to work the same as macos. Not sure if windows does middle click paste.

Jesus, do the people who work on GNOME even like Linux?

If you want an experience that's similar to GNOME-when-it-was-good, I'd suggest Cinnamon, the desktop environment of Linux Mint.

Plasma, meaning KDE.

I've been using the Kubuntu 26.04 prereleases for a few weeks. No surprises from KDE, but Wayland has broken a few things. Autotype in Keepass does not work, keynav and even the Wayland keynav forks don't work, and Wayland does not support priority keyboard layouts for switching between two specific layouts.

What???? That's the most expected feature of any *nix user since the dawn of X Window!

Not aimed at you but... no sh*t. The "Rewrite it in Rust" community never heard of the second-system effect.

I'd rather use something written in a crappier language that has been battle-tested for decades, personally.

Indeed, many bugs are API usage bugs, something that no language can verify. (The API is implemented in C anyway.)

I wish they'd put the severity. There are 4 highs, the rest are medium or low. Here are the high ones:

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35338 - `chmod --preserve-root` can be bypassed. That doesn't seem that bad tbh.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35341 - `mkfifo` accidentally resets the permissions of files that already exist, so if you manage to do `sudo mkfifo /etc/shadow` then it becomes world readable.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35352 - TOCTOU in `mkfifo` lets you do the symlink trick to get it to change permissions on an unrelated file.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-35368 - You might be able to get chroot to execute arbitrary code.

Tbh I doubt if any of these would ever result in a real hack, unless your system is doing really mental things like running shell scripts with untrusted input.

I could only find a couple of CVEs that looked actually serious for GNU Coreutils too though. IMO if you're using these tools with untrusted input your system is janky enough that there are going to be serious flaws in it anyway. Probably though quoting mistakes.

LMDE is Debian-based, I believe you meant Linux Mint itself, which also doesn't use snaps.

You get all the driver support and tools from the Ubuntu base, with some nice additons. However, not all desktop environment are supported.

This is a bad strategy, I fell victim for. I configured so it would use apt instead of snap package, but canonical silently stopped shipping packages and I was running some packages that were not updated for a long time and debugging weird bugs, because I didn't assume that this was a problem. If one wants Ubuntu, one must accept snap. If you use apt with disallowed transition to snap, you might be stuck with old packages that were transitioned to snap.

My choice for now is Debian, didn't finish transition yet, very annoying to plan this in my schedule. I'll churn from Ubuntu after more than 15 years of daily driving... I also don't like ubuntu user with uid:gid 1000 in their Docker images. It's a cancer.

This is what I do, because on my work computer IT imposed Ubuntu.

I initially tried to just use snaps but firefox was crashing quite often so I had to go with adding the mozilla's repository and of course configure the fake "firefox" package that actually installs the snap to be low priority for apt.

I’m curious about proprietary Nvidia drivers. Ubuntu normally comes with fairly outdated, if not obsolete ones, but there’s a semi-official PPA with more recent versions. How does Debian handle this?

Easier said than done, surprise: apt, who we know and love, is redirected to Snap for an ever-increasing number of packages.

"Don't use Snap", you say? I'll do you one better! Skip Ubuntu. 'Just' use anything else more suitable. Debian is an excellent replacement being upstream, but I hold no illusions over undeclared requirements.

Problem is most things are only snap. You can get them ocherwise but not by default

The issue is them adding it back, sometimes even on apt upgrade, or silently installing it as a dependency for certain apps without mentioning it unless you look closely. That gets tiring after a while and I gave up on Ubuntu as even after having removed snap multiple times it always returned.

Doesn't snap come back on the next OS upgrade?

I was using Ubuntu and installed the apt version of Firefox as the snap version would not open html files in locations like /var/tmp and would not work with USB devices. Every time I ran `do-release-upgrade`, all of that work would need to be redone. It was very annoying.

Ubuntu is the Windows 11 of Linux. You have to do brain surgery on it post install, to remove unwanted crap. At least there's the option of using a different distro.

That statement may have been true in 2014, but

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Jetson#Software

This is not correct.

Snap is preinstalled on all official Ubuntu graphical editions.

However, Xubuntu's _Minimal_ install does not include any snap packages at all, not even a browser. This means it's trivial to remove snapd:

sudo apt purge snapd

Then you can install the `extrepo` command, and use it to install Firefox ESR direct from Mozilla's repos, or Chrome from Google's repos.

Once it's online you can copy and paste a couple of commands to "pin" snapd and prevent it from being reinstalled. Then you can switch to current Firefox or anything else without snapd sneaking back in.

Xubuntu Minimal is also available as a separate ISO file, which is not true of any of the other flavours.

“Urban myth” kind of suggests that it was never true, which isn't the case, though it is one of those out-dated truths that doesn't go away quickly.

At one time Ubuntu as the easiest distro to get certain hardware running with because of the inclusion of proprietary drivers & codecs (unlike its Debian parent, amongst others, at least at the time) and making them easy, near-automatic, to configure compared to others that did include them. The distinction is long gone, and Ubuntu is simply one of several (many) good ones in that regard, but the perception that others have not long since caught up persists.

This looks like it might be the best solution, no snap, maintained by an actual system integrator and laptop maker, and I also like the new Rust-based desktop environment. I wonder how well it runs on Framework laptops or MacBooks as well.

Isn't that essentially a release of Ubuntu with a different kernel, DE and maybe some userspace utilities?

Ah I can resonate with your feelings! I've been using a MacBook Pro as my daily driver since 2013 and I initially liked it a lot, but things have not improved over time. MacOS got more buggy, bloated and less and less customisable. I never fully got used to the way window switching works, and to the fact that I always see all the apps from all work spaces. I still regularly switch to the wrong work space when I switch apps. So confusing. So now I'm in a process of switching back to Linux - it's just so much more fun! I have an M1 MacBook Pro now and Asahi linux is really nice on this one.

I do like the energy consumption of MacOS and that sleep just works so well. Also the laptops feel really nice. I got a few things to make life easier (sketchybar, rectangle.app, see other posts here) but overall these days Linux is just a more polished experience. Never thought I'd say that. At least it's the least glitchy experience nowadays.

As a both old Linux and now decade user of MacOS, after I got used to no middle-click paste and no focus-follows-mouse:

1. Keyboard shortcuts are Emacs, Ctrl-A: start of line, E: end of line, K: kill selected or to end of line, Y to paste, etc. https://support.apple.com/en-au/102650#text

2. Karabiner elements (FOSS) fixes keyboard mappings outside of the Settings: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

3. I have the dock on the left hand side, not bottom and I have a 2 monitor (iMac 5K 27"+ Dell 4K 27") setup with the iMac flat in front of me and the curve/2nd to the right. Menu bar is then close to the main windows.

4. Menu bar widgets etc are fixable with thaw https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw

5. Window management via keyboard is fixable with rectangle https://rectangleapp.com/

6. Use Macports to add all the Linux/Unix utilities, works with MacOS properly (eg Python/Java frameworks). Ports can have variants, plus you can have multiple versions installed side-by-side with `port select`. https://www.macports.org/

Not sure about fonts, on a 5K iMac they're fine and the 4K Dell works too. You need to use a resolution that fits with Mac's ideas of resolution, so I've got the 5K and 4K both at 2560x1440, which is Mac's idea of 2x resolution.

I have the dock on auto-hide with a fairly slow timer for it to pop up, as I never actually use it. May be useful to you as well

> I am sure a lot of this is fixable

It is - sucks that you have to though. For keyboard shortcuts use Karabiner Elements.

There's working, and there's working.

20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era. And you had to be careful when shopping for things like wifi cards, as only certain chipsets could be made to work.

Much of which was kinda fair enough, because if you're a volunteer making an open source OS because of a strong belief on the open source ideal, you don't want to distribute closed-source driver blobs or patent-encumbered codecs. But it meant mean the initial installation process was not always easy. One of the things that contributed to the success of Ubuntu was a particularly easy initial setup process.

Today, things are a lot better - you'll still get unsupported hardware from time to time, but it'll be much less severe. If your laptop has a non-USB integrated camera you might have to download and install a kernel module. Your corporate laptop's built in fingerprint scanner might not work, but who cares?

Linux has been better for old hardware since early 00s. Just don't expect hw acceleration to work for older GPUs.

Windows 11 set a low bar to clear... Most popular hardware will work on linux, but like always its better to check before your buy.

Distro like Ubuntu are a fair compromise to get amd/nvidia GPU drivers, wifi, and brother laser printer/scanner networking installed. =3

edit: seriously, why down vote the guys karma if its a honest question. Try to be kind people.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/glossary/linux-standard-base/

When I was shopping Lenovo.com for my ThinkPad in 2018, there was a table with ThinkPads certified for Ubuntu Linux in one column, and certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in another column.

I chose the T580 as a RHEL-certified notebook, and it was fantastic. Lenovo.com let me configure each individual component exactly according to my needs and tastes, and it was custom-assembled and shipped from Shenzhen.

It did arrive with Windows 10 pre-installed (this was the least hassle and most popular OS option). I initially installed CentOS, but quickly realized that Fedora would be the sweet spot, and so it was a Fedora system for most of its lifetime. Near the end, I did revert to Windows 10, which also worked flawlessly.

The ThinkPad T580 literally never malfunctioned. It was still 100% working when I turned it in for recycling in 2025.

I've also run Ubuntu on my "daily driver" desktop system, which ran from 2006-2022. Yes, that's 16 years' worth of Ubuntu installs and upgrades. It was mostly a KDE Plasma (Kubuntu) system. I enjoyed every bit of that.

In 1999, I was avidly using OpenBSD on really old hardware (such as HP Apollo 425t workstations.) OpenBSD simply couldn't deal with the special graphics subsystem on those machines. I tried and tried to get something working, but there were obstacles, not only with the hardware and drivers, but also the monitor connection needed a particular type of cabling and a proprietary monitor, too.

However, OpenBSD did great for networking, security, Squid cache, proxies, all kinds of things. And even in 1999, though it was early, I ran Linux on a 386DX-40, because Linux supported the "ftape" floppy tape driver at that time, and I had some kind of QIC tape backup from Eagle that wouldn't be recognized by OpenBSD or NetBSD.

Meanwhile, in that same year, my "daily driver" desktop machine was a 486 with VLB, dual-booting Windows 98 and OpenBSD. The Windows 98 was set up with a Cygwin system and X11 server, so that I could run X11 clients on the OpenBSD machines, or the Linux machine, or whatever else was on the LAN.

Windows is a dumpster fire at this point. Just unusable

> Those packages can simply be reverted

For now, that is. I am afraid that they will stop providing coreutils and sudo for some of the future releases (like they did with upstart) because obviously they know better what's good for the users.

There were some issues with how the menu icon manager handled the new security policy defaults. This means the editor will break, and the displayed menu may be missing any item that didn't follow the naming convention syntax. Its a lot of packages to bring into compliance, for that one silly feature the devs had to put in before it was ready...

Maybe they fixed it since the rc release, but there were some rough edges in Feb... the kernel USB support cooked the thumb drive partition structure.

In 22.04 to 24.04 the kernel Nvidia GPU driver EOL abandonment began... In 26.04 people will discover most EOL hardware support prior to RTX series will be difficult to bring up.

Probably wise to wait a few weeks for the bug reports to clear out a bit. =3

Same on my Framework Desktop. Looks like it works only with a limited number of TPM chips for now.

In what way is TPM protecting your data if someone steals the entire server? TPM only ensures that the boot environment has not been modified. Whatever key is being used to automatically decrypt the disk would be in the clear.

Unless I'm misunderstanding your situation, I think you should look up the "Evil Maid Attack" to better understand how to mitigate risk for your threat model.