Systemd: how to get into rescue mode

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, 11 Jan 2020 at 15:52, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Unity should've kept on being developed as an alternate shell, like Cinnamon :(

I agree.

Cinnamon is essentially a fork of GNOME 3, of course, and since GNOME
3 is still in active development, Lefevbre has a moving target to
track, which is tough.

And personally I think the tech choices of GNOME 3 -- e.g. much of it
being in JavaScript -- to be poor. This applies to Cinnamon, too.

There are now at least 4 Win9x-like Linux desktops based on Gtk in
active development:
* Cinnamon (fork of GNOME 3, needs OpenGL for rendering)
* ZorinOS' desktop (a different fork of GNOME 3)
* MATE (a fork of the Gtk2-based GNOME 2, now moving to Gtk 3)
* Xfce (also Gtk2-based, moving to Gtk3)

I think the time is right for some consolidation and maybe a merger
here. There's a _lot_ of duplicated effort.

And of course there's Enlightenment, but it uses EFL.

And LXQt, based on Qt, successor to LXDE, based on Gtk2. And KDE,
based on Qt, and its fork Trinity.

Too many Windows-likes, IMHO. None add anything important. None are innovating.

I am not impressed by Zorin myself, but I've been evaluating the free
ZorinOS *Lite*, which is Xfce+DeskbarX, and it's actually pretty good.

> I'm unfamiliar with Deepin, Zorin, and MX, except that I know that
> they exist.

Deepin is Chinese. It has its own desktop, a mix of Windows and Mac
ideas and some of their own. It used to use both Qt and Gtk elements.
Now it's been rewritten. It's very good, very slick and polished. It
makes Budgie look very sad indeed, for example.

> How about Elementary?

Uses GNOME tech plus a lot the team have written themselves. Result is
a rather poor knock-off of Apple macOS.

I don't see much point -- they do not really understand how macOS
works well enough to imitate it successfully. So, for instance, it has
a GNOME 3-style huge full-screen-width panel, and it's almost entirely
wasted space. Apple has the menu bar there; neither GNOME nor
Elementary does, so it's a waste of space. A clock and a few status
icons, but GNOME is deprecating status icons and removing support.

Elementary should have started with GNUstep, which was a mature and
polished system already when Elementary started.

The Solus team have restarted already, beginning with fork of the
classic-GNOME-look "GNOME Classic" in early versions of GNOME 3. They
called that "Consort". As GNOME 3 developed it removed GNOME Classic
and Consort collapsed.

So they started again with Budgie, which shows a lack of understanding
of desktop functionality to me, and doesn't do anything you couldn't
reproduce with LXDE or Xfce and a bit of theming.

My current fave desktops are Mint XFCE, Deepin and Zorin Lite. Not
sure if I will switch from Ubuntu to any of them but it's possible.

> I'm a Fluxbox user, but I have Gnome installed and I use it from time
> to time, if only to try to customize it enough to make it work for me.

That's the only reason I keep GNOME around, too.

And the answer is, yes, I can, I can make it into something that looks
and works rather well, except for no global menu bar. But the first
time that the OS version is upgraded, it will fall so badly to pieces
that you can't even log in any more.

So except on old Ubuntu boxes that I've upgraded, these days, after
trying all of:
 • GNOME 3
 • Cinnamon
 • KDE 5
 • Budgie
 • LXQt
 • LXDE
 • Moksha (Enlightenment fork in Bodhi Linux)
 • OpenBox
 • WindowMaker + GNUstep
... I use Xfce. It's the best there is, and it's also one of the
smallest and lightest.

Sad times, when so many smart people devote so much effort to just
duplicating each other's work.

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