A typical aging geek's weekend chatter. Nothing to see here.

  • Gnome: Lawful Evil. It's their way or the highway. Extensions should be checked for heresy on every major update.
  • KDE: Chaotic Neutral. It spreads in all the directions at once driven purely by the urge of reproduction. Different parts contradict each other all the time.
  • Cinnamon: Lawful Neutral. A limited but thoughtfully chosen set of no-frills tools for your daily life. As square as it gets.
  • Xfce, LXQt: Lawful Good. They preserve the old ways for those who still need them; no plans to take over the world.

And while we are at it,

  • Windows: Neutral Evil. Milks the unpretentious mass market for no other reason but profit. No agenda; features are added and changed depending on what sells better and costs less.
  • MacOS: Chaotic Evil, hubris marketed as freedom. Bring us all your money to stay better than thy neighbor, in his face.

P. S. Trust me I know that Windows and MacOS are not desktop environments in the strict sense. (Nor are they Linux.) Yet, both have unique and easy recognizable desktop paradigms.

  • You have to do all nine alignments:

    • Lawful Good: GNOME - Our rules are good and what’s good is our rules. Why would you want to do anything different?

    • Neutral Good: Cinnamon - Let all the newbies come unto me. Enjoy this DE, no strings attached.

    • Chaotic Good: KDE - What are rules? Here’s a feature. There’s a feature. Are you happy yet? Here’s some more!

    • Lawful neutral: Phosh - The rules are the rules. They’re neither right nor wrong, it’s how they are.

    • True neutral: XFCE - Here’s a desktop environment. Use it how you wish.

    • Chaotic neutral: i3 - Here are some config files! Figure it out!

    • Lawful evil: Windows 11’s DE - You’ll do it our way, and if you don’t like it, too bad! Also, here are some ads.

    • Neutral evil: DDE - Get lured in by the beauty. Then fully switch to Deepin. Join the Chinese Communist Party, my child.

    • Chaotic evil: Ratpoison, apparently.

    parent

    Ratpoison sounds like if tmux became a tiling window manager.

    It's probably not that bad if you rebind ctrl+t to ctrl+b, or super+b.

    Note: For anyone trying it out, get sdorfehs instead.

    parent root

    Tmux practically IS a tiling window manager, and I love it. 😁

    parent root

    tmux is a 'terminal window manager' at best. It does not support graphical windows.

    parent root

    Hence the use of the word "practically"

    parent root

    You can't use that word when it is definitely missing a core feature of the tiling window manager: the ability to tile graphical windows.

    parent root

    You're over-thinking it. My implication was that, even though I too use a tiling window manager, I almost never end up relying on the "tiling" aspect of it anymore. I just let i3 auto-maximize my window and add a slight bit of padding. For all situations where I used to rely on the twm to arrange multiple terminals, I now do it all with windows and panels in tmux. Situations where I run more than one term have become exceedingly rare. Still nice to have the ability to tile if I need it, though.

    parent root

    tmux is for the terminal. The terminal does not always live in your desktop environment.

    You may be in a tty and do not have any display server running.

    You may be running over ssh with no X11 forwarding active or no X11 display server on the client machine.

    In these cases, you do not have the ability to run any windowed graphical interface that relies on X11, Wayland, etc.

    Just because it is a similar experience to i3 does not make tmux a tiling window manager for these reasons.

    Konsole, a command line emulator from KDE, supports splitting up the terminal into subsections too. Is Konsole a twm? No!

    Please refrain from mischaracterizing software. tmux is a terminal multipluxer with a fancy terminal interface, not a twm.

    parent root

    whoosh

    parent root

    If you want to entertain mischaracterizations, you're free to do so.

    parent root

    I think i3's documentation is really good. Unless of course you want to implement auto layout ... non-standard JSON with comment is pure evil

    parent root

    Also, here are some ads.

    I lol'ed

    parent root

    I can't believe I almost got baited into reading a lunduke article.

    parent root

  • MATE? Trinity? Cosmic?

    parent

    I covered only the DEs with which I have enough experience to reason about. Tried MATE once; the first impression was that it belongs in the same category as Xfce and LXQt. Never tried Trinity or Cosmic.

    parent root

  • Show me on the doll where Mac OS touched you.

    parent

    Does the doll have a wallet?

    parent root

    Being a premium product doesn’t make them chaotic evil. Over the life time of the product they are good value.

    parent root

  • Mandatory: Alignments are a bad system that leads to bad roleplay and a black/white view of the world. Pretty much anyone is halfway interested in RPG design agrees with this statement.

    Regardless, if we are doing the alignment charts, one should bear in mind that alignments are meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. They are, usually, not some inherent and immutable aspect of something (outside of ?formerly"? certain DnD species, which is a whole different can of worms I don't want to touch), they are a descriptor of someone's thoughts/deeds/modus operandi and are meant to change during gameplay based on the player's actions:

    • GNOME: Lawful Good. I don't think the "lawful good" shoe fits anything outside of GNOME:
      • Fundamentally important and key player in the desktop Linux ecosystem, which we can hopefully all agree is good.
      • Obsessed with rules and the "proper" way to implement things, for long-term benefits for all.
      • POWERFUL code of conduct.
      • Like any Lawful Good DND Paladin, can be easily mischaracterized as Lawful Neutral/Lawful Stupid/Lawful Evil by someone who just doesn't like 'em
        • Also like any Lawful Good DND Paladin, has the potential to become Lawful Neutral/Lawful Evil if adherence to rules is prioritized over doing good, see Blackguard/Anti-Paladin.
    • KDE: Chaotic Good. Good requested features and good requested features NOW, not later, breakage be damned.
    • Most other Linux DEs: Neutral Good. They don't really have any preference on the lawful-chaotic axis, they are just tools for people who need them, provided freely for the benefit of all. Irrespective of my own opinion on how good those DEs are, that's Good!
    • I don't think there is much room for "Neutral" alignments when discussing free software. Oh, I know, maybe something under those weird not-really-free, but not-really-closed visible-source licenses (Polyform etc) but distributed by individuals rather than software vendors, becau..
    • Any proprietary software vendor: this is kind of where the alignment chart starts to break down because in the real world there is no meaningful distinction between Lawful Evil and Neutral Evil and, to be frank, Evil vs Good is the primary/defining axis in DND as well (i.e. a Lawful Evil character is primarily defined by being Evil and is more likely to perform a Chaotic Evil action to demonstrate how Evil they are, than perform a Lawful Good action to demonstrate that they are Lawful). Regardless, Evil in DND is characterized as acting selfishly for your own benefit with zero thoughts given to consequences, so companies and businesses are, by their very definition, clearly and inherently Evil in terms of their DND alignment. Since Alignment is a descriptor I'd say that Microsoft/Apple and co are "Lawful Evil" now, but used to be "Neutral Evil" in the not-so distant past when they used more aggressive and underhanded methods. The reason they don't do need to do this now is because, well, they have already won and the systems of law are essentially shaped for their benefit already.
      • Note that I would also include companies like SUSE and RedHat here, even though they are open-source companies. They are still companies and they are still concerned with accumulation of capital over anything else, therefore, in DND terms they are Evil. Note the in DND terms, SUSE is probably not evil in real world terms. RedHat, on the other hand, works with the US DOD (is it DOW now?), so they are clearly Evil regardless of whether you use DND or IRL definition of evil.
    parent

    Sounds like the old 3-point alignment system of Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic may suit your scheme better, perhaps.

    parent root

    The old 3-point alignment system is ill-suited to Reddit updoots because people use alignment charts to call things they like good and things they dislike evil, so removing the good/evil part kind of defeats the point.

    These categories are so boring. If we are sticking to mainstream (for TTRPGs) games, I'd much rather describe DEs or distros in terms of, like Call of Cthulhu 7. Which mental illness or developmental disorder does each DE represent (it's Call of Cthulhu, you gotta have at least one)?! Do they have Temporary or Indefinite Insanity? Describe their Ideology in 20 words or less. Which STRANGE ENTITIES did the DE encounter in its past?

    parent root

    I raise your Call of Cthulhu and fling in Unknown Armies second edition and suddenly we're all out here clinging on to a sense of humanity.

    Also there is no surprise that we are sooooo many nerds in the linux subreddit :D

    parent root

    I had to deny myself the please of answering your post in detail lest it deteriorate into offtopic. You make some fine points; some others I could write a novel against. Great read, though.

    parent root

    Obsessed with rules and the "proper" way to implement things, for long-term benefits for all.

    Don't make me laugh. Gnome actively works against interoperability.

    parent root

  • I would say KDE is more chaotic good than neutral. It still tries to play fine with GTK and gnome as long as they do not fuck with KDE and freedesktop TOO much.

    parent

    Counterpoint: KDEWallet and SDDM.

    parent root

    what's wrong with either?

    parent root

    Like, I'm not really going deep into it, because these conversations always end on "it runs fine on my machine", but I'll give you one example of many I can come up with on a whim: Up untill recently you had to GUESS that if you don't want to unlock your system wallet every time you unlock your user, you should leave a blank password for the Wallet. Now it has a tooltip, if you find the settings, which is separate from the system settings (or was? idk anymore).

    This is awful ergonomics. This kind of thing is really easy to stumble upon on those two.

    If you never had a problem with either, it's fine. But don't jynx yourself, you may become a part of the club.

    parent root

    I believe if the wallet password is the same as ur user password, it also won't ask for it a 2nd time

    parent root

    I also believed that! And the thing kept buggering me and I had no idea what to do, I'd search on google and there were people reporting both opposite instances. In my case, it didn't work, then I had to find the blessed soul that gave the empty password tip and it finally worked. Exactly this kind of thing that drives me crazy haha.

    parent root

    At a certain point, did you consider just looking at the code? (This may indeed sound elitist, if so, I'm sorry).

    parent root

    i said something about "playing fine with" and you come with ergonomics? i said/admit KDE is _chaotic_. bad ergononmics could be the same category. if you want super-duper-ergonmics-my-way-or-highway, you do lawful.

    This is a totally other topic.. but it's important to shit on KDE.. like totally.. .. sigh.

    parent root

    SDDM at least is pretty buggy often being unable to log in, had different bugs in multi monitor setups and the like. It's also not integrated with plasma like GDM is with Gnome. The devs even think so and will replace it with plasma-login soon-ish. They'll still fix SDDM bugs for the time being, but apparently it's being replaced. I think the reasoning was that it's a general purpose display manager with old code, they want something more closely woven into the DE.

    So it's not "bad" it's just not what they want.

    KDEWallet has been known to be pretty disruptive popping up for every little thing, though, not for a while, it seems to be fine now.

    parent root

  • KDE is more chaotic good. It works out of the box, treats you nicely but can't care much about stupid rules and does its own thing. Wobbly windows for the win!

    parent

  • Bias much? How is Gnome evil or etched in stone when you are in no way obligated to use it?

    parent

    you don't have to use Gnome but developers have to deal with its refusal to implement server-side window decorations and other quirks

    parent root

    It wouldn't change anything as the SSD protocol expects CSD fallback.

    If compositor and client do not negotiate the use of a server-side decoration using this protocol, clients continue to self-decorate as they see fit.

    parent root

    and other quirks

    I agree about SSD, but the "other quirks" is just a DE problem in general and not really gnome specific (even if they're more conservative in what they do implement). Everyone is implementing a slightly different and thus slightly incompatible version of the same API's, and picking and choosing what they do and don't implement. They're kind of like browsers in that way tbh.

    parent root

    This is exactly what I said: it's their way or the highway. Infidels go to Hell.

    parent root

    The OP didn't read it before they posted. This is just GPT output.

    parent root

  • What about other DEs like hyprland? Or you are just window managers, since they offer no adicional software?

    parent

    DEs are Chaotic Good, hyprland is closer to Neutral/Lawful with the ever-expanding ecosystem of hypr[xyz] tools.

    parent root

  • I would swap Mac and Win. Also Gnome’s good for me.

    parent

  • Honestly I would swap KDE and Gnome, as to me the latter has always looked more of a scattered mess of inconsistent software (does anyone remember Volkerding refusing to include Gnome due to its "structure"- or lack thereof)

    parent

    (does anyone remember Volkerding refusing to include Gnome due to its "structure"- or lack thereof)

    Nope, and it seems to be somewhat of a minority position, from what I've heard from distro maintainers KDE's release cycle is far more scattered than GNOME's. With GNOME you're basically guaranteed two releases every year, with the entire gnome suite receiving a major updated at the same time. KDE has (or had) a situation where things come out at different times and don't really move in lockstep with each other, which can generally just be a bit annoying for distro maintainers to deal with.

    AFAIK they said they're improving the situation, but I have not checked in a while... maybe they've already moved to a release model more like gnomes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

    parent root

    Yes, it was a unique position, and I can agree from a developer perspective I guess. Still as a end user this never hurt me, and I really preferred the consistency that KDE gave me.

    parent root

    its mostly just a thing that causes a headache for package maintainers.

    parent root