gas_station_boner_pillsI'll try something different next install, I swear.
TrickDacyI know this is a joke, but before I discovered GNU-Linux I used XP and didn’t hate it. I was usable. Microsoft hadn’t yet completely stripped away user autonomy.
Yhe next laptop I bought came preinstalled with Windows Vista (AKA Windows Millenium verion 2). It was so frustrating I decided to investigate altwrnatives. I even considered going Macintosh. But I was at a bookstore and saw one of those Linux magazines with a free disc from which I could install Linux. I think it was Ubuntu on the disc (before Unity). I was hooked. I use Trisquel now.
I mean, everyone liked XP and most everyone tried to keep using it years after Microsoft wanted us to stop. Everyone hated vista.
But modern gnome is excellent. My joke was trying to point out that hating it while liking the old version seems like a uniquely old man thing to do, just hating change for being change
Gnome 3 got rid of desktop icons and the menu of Gnome 2, it was also a resource hog. Mate offers what I liked about Gnome 2. Sue me.
Alas, we cannot sue for wrong opinions :/
I dunno about the resource hog comment especially. I run it on a raspberry pi 5 just fine, and at least compared to mac os and windows 10, it always feels snappier to me on all the hardware I have been able to try multiple options on.
The fact MATE exists is proof I am far from alone in my views. Indeed, this is one of the benefits of FLOS software. Noone is ALLOWED, for example, to create a fork of Windows XP if they want to. Microsoft would quickly stamp down and take to court any attempt to do so. But you and I can both be Linux users who prefer different GUIs. Some of this simply comes down to preference - I prefer GNOME as it was before it was ruined and that is what MATE offers me 😄
Yes, and I prefer GNOME once it was modernized and made to look like it was not designed by 1990s developers (who are NOT designers, and it shows).
I care more about functionality than superficial design. I take a similar position in media (TV & film). For example, I love Babylon 5 even though the special effects are admittedly primitive compared to modern science fiction programs. The WRITING and DIRECTION in Babylon 5 is brilliant. I can forgive something superficial if there is substance to it
Is “superficial” design not valuable in UI design? I look at these other DE settings UIs and they’re an absolute mess. GNOME could do better also, but I pretty much can find everything common in an obvious place, and the more weird options are somewhere I can also find them, typically in GNOME tweaks.
In effect everything about UI design could be called superficial. But humans operate on “superficial” things all the time. I could use a terminal to do many more things than I do (which is already a lot) but as a human I’m kinda evolved to operate visually, so I often opt for that. Nothing wrong with it.