#Fedora and #GNOME are kinda growing on me
Fedora is a new install for me. I had tried it many years ago, and didn’t like it, feeling it was too unstable. I’m a huge Debian fan.
I’ve found Fedora to be stable, and so far I’m liking the relative newness of the packages. I think that’s something that a lot of folks overstress, but I’m beginning to see the benefits it brings, too.
GNOME is something of a marmite desktop environment: you either love it or hate it. I’m still sitting on the fence of it, although I find myself switching from the haters to the appreciators.
One thing I think is actually a killer feature of GNOME is its search capabilities. I used to write scripts to launch some apps I use daily. I found that by getting GNOME to search the relevant directories, I can type out a few keys and get the relvant files displayed.
GNOME indexes the contents of files, too. I think it’s a very powerful and possibly unerused feature.
I have in the past complained that GNOME was rather resource-intense, but I have a hunch that it a lot to do with search indexing.
So, yeah, GNOME, interesting. I won’t blame you for hating it. I can kinda see what the point is, though.
GNOME publish a HIG (Human Interface Guide), which I actually think is a good idea. UNIX is all about setting mechanism, not policy, and although I agree with that in general, I think desktop design is one place where an interface guide is a good idea. Each app shouldn’t be its own collection of unique keybindings, but should be consistent where possible. Windows and Apple have interface guides. Hell, even Amiga wrote a book stating how it expects programs to behave.
Flatpaks. From what I’ve experienced so far, I’m going to say that I don’t like them, verging on hate. Distros already have package managers, we should just use those. In a sense, we have already “solved” the software distribution problem, although admittedly for a weak value of “solved”. I saw an article online today, Flatpak is not the Future, and it echos my current thinking on the matter.
PS Some time ago I put the home directory into a separate directory. The idea may not be without its drwaback, but so far I am concuding that it’s the way to go.