sound control on 18.04

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 10 Sep 2018 at 14:10, Gary J. Kirkpatrick <garyartista at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Added the sound output device chooser, which works about as I would like.  However once I added it the toppanel stopped working.

I hope you will forgive me, but when I read this line, I laughed. :-(

> I removed the sound device chooser and reinstalled topicons but no luck.  The topicons are more useful.

This is an important aspect of the whole GNOME 3 issue. They are
removing stuff that real live, active users *need* and will not
negotiate this.

Much of it you can put back with extensions, but extensions can clash
or disable one another -- and when you get a version update to GNOME,
random extensions stop working, or clash in new ways, in my personal
experience leaving you with a machine you can no longer log into or
where you can log in but don't get a working desktop.

This is, to me, unacceptable and it's why I won't use it. It is not
good enough if functionality can be put back with extensions if that
method is unstable and won't survive upgrades.

The GNOME developers removed additional icon support a few versions
ago. Most recently they removed desktop icon support, too. (!) They
removed multiple panes from Nautilus.

They don't support menus in the top panel.

They don't support user-customisable toolbars in apps. They don't
support true app menu bars or title bars. (I.e. in GNOME apps.)

They don't support many things I use daily.

I suspect that basically they remove support for anything _they_ don't
use, and in fact, many of them are fairly new to desktop *nix and they
simply don't know about a lot of features, so when they find support
in the code, they remove them, considering them to be obsolete junk.

They removed so many things in the pursuit of simplicity, but GNOME is
still one of the biggest, most complex, resource-hungry desktops, in
part because of extensive use of indirection layers and additional
toolkits. It renders via OpenGL so it works poorly in VMs or machines
without hardware 3D (or as is more likely on Linux, without working 3D
*drivers*).

It doesn't give me anything I want or need. It looks nice, but I find
it hard to use and poor in functionality.

Cinnamon -- a fork of GNOME 3 -- looks just as nice and works better,
if in the boring old Windows-95-style. And it doesn't support a
vertical taskbar, which is something I very strongly want.

Maté -- the fork of GNOME 2 -- does everything Cinnamon does, in a
more flexible way, using fewer resources. Which makes one ask: if a
fork of the old codebase has yielded a more flexible, customisable
desktop, then why bother with the version change and all these years
of upset?

And yet Maté _also_ can't do a vertical taskbar.

So I've switched to an even older, simpler, lower-resource desktop: Xfce.

It does vertical taskbars just fine, doesn't need 3D, doesn't need
OpenGL, works great in VMs, looks smart, and uses less RAM and disk
than any of the competition except LXDE, which is end-of-life.

We have lots of desktops, but most of them just reproduce 80% of the
same shared functionality. That's not diversity. That's just
repetition.

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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