thelinuxexperiment
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New setup hiccups & GNOME Extensions are in a weird spot - Patroncast S03E36
🕑 Added 2023-09-04 09:05:21 +0000 UTCHey everyone!
Here is your weekly patroncast! In this one, I talk about:
- 00:42 The first hiccups with setting up the new laptop, notably with NixOS and Davinci Resolve (spoiler: couldn't get it to work)
- 14:19 GNOME Extensions, and how they feel half supported, and half forgotten by Shell developers, and lack a clear stance from the GNOME team
I hope you'll enjoy listening to this one!
Have a great week!
Comments
The Linux Experiment
Definitely, they should have a clear cut stance on the matter, so people aren't too confused. I find installing / managing extensions very easy with the Extension Manager app, but it's all third party stuff...
The Linux Experiment
Yeah, I was excited to try something new, that would feel really "clean" (as in: your list of installed stuff is in a file, and you don't have 60 weird ways to manage what you installed), but if the one critically important app isn't available, then it's a deal breaker.
UsernamesAreHard
Hey Nick, hope you're doing well. I agree with what you said about Gnome extensions being in a weird spot. To me, either a desktop environment is customizable or it isn't and I think that the Gnome team needs to take a clear cut decision: either Gnome is customizable or it isn't and should be used as is, completely vanilla like on Fedora. If Gnome should be customizable, then I think that the "extensions app" should be included in Gnome out of the box with the most popular extensions pre-installed and officially supported by the team (for example dash to dock or dash to panel). I think that the way users are expected to install and enable extensions on Gnome is pretty clunky too. Something like what cinnamon does with spices is much more elegant and user friendly. Third party customization is often not the greatest experience, even on other desktop environments, like KDE themes for example. I prefer customizable elements shipped out of the box by the desktop environment much more.
alternateved
Eh, sorry to hear about your NixOS hiccups, though that was my exact experience with NixOS. I work as a software developer and although in the beginning Nix was nice and cool as it supposedly allows you reproducible environments and a lot of niceties, the reality was that I had to spend an extreme amount of time troubleshooting broken packages, searching through GitHub for some code examples as documentation was lacking, adding support for some dependencies that weren't available via Nix and during that time it was either Nix way or the highway and reproducibility wasn't exactly there as Nix sometimes worked but other times it did not. I used NixOS (and flakes) for about a year and also stopped using it about a year ago but I see not much has changed. Nowadays I avoid Nix like fire and prefer to either use distro packages (which I sometimes package myself), flatpaks, containers or language package managers.
