Gnome Shell in particular offers a ridiculously coherent, sane window management. Nobody agrees with all the choices the Gnome Team took to get here, but it sure is nice there being one way of doing everything that makes sense contextually.
I don't even know if Gnome and Gnome Shell are the same thing. One thing I do know is the default install of Gnome on Debian 13 leaves you without a dock, without a system tray, and without minimize/maximize buttons. They purposely remove the three most important tools the average user relies on for navigation.
It's like trying to make a car without any round edges because "square edges are better". Good luck with the wheels!
I can fix that somewhat with extensions, but every normal person I know will take one look at the defaults and abandon it. That's a reasonable choice in my opinion. Why use something where the first interaction gives you a clear indication you're going to be fighting against developer ideology?
If you want to customize your DE a lot - Gnome isn't for you.
If you just want a clean and productive environment by default... Gnome is great.
Once you stop fighting it, sigh, and go with the flow... modern Gnome is genuinely pleasant in that I spend almost zero time thinking about it, and shit just works.
I still run other DEs for some specific purposes where "general use" isn't the goal, but I can reliably hand non-technical family members a machine with Gnome and they don't have to come ask me a bunch of questions.
My problem with GNOME (after having used it as my main desktop on my Linux systems for many years) is that it removes some really useful features and they are not just expert features, but also features that non-technical users are used to, such as system tray icons and menu bars. You can bring them back with GNOME Extensions, but for instance, the system tray icon extensions are very buggy.
KDE on the other hand just has these and is also great out-of-the-box (I pretty much run stock KDE).
literally the only two reasons I still have windows on my laptop currently are fusion360 and apex legends. I was happily playing Apex Legends on Linux for years until EA decided to disable Linux support due to "cheating". While I understand their concerns, I can't say as a regular player the cheating problem is any better or worse than it was before they removed Linux support.
As for fusion360... Freecad is getting mighty good these days...
It's not free but...zw3d has full* native Linux support. You'd be forgiven for not knowing this because they only offer it on their Chinese website, even though it comes complete with a fully localized English version that you just have to switch on in the settings.
* Integrations with online parts libraries don't seem to work (don't know why they didn't bother, as it looks like it just spawned a web browser anyway), and the simulation add-ons aren't available either, but the main program itself is equivalently functional.
I love this sorta stuff! I once had my blog hosted on a docker container on my Robot Vacuum. I switched back to a saner host when I started getting uptime alerts when the vacuum went under my bed and lost wifi signal!
text of tweet: So I bought a networked printer recently and as you do decided to try connecting to it a few different undocumented ways. I tried telneting to it. It turns out that whatever you type, it prints typewriter style. That was a pleasant and hilarious surprise. #internetofshit
a slightly different (but close enough) Hitachi CPU also powered the Cybiko - a wacky games console few have heard of. I tried writing a disassembler for that particular cpu a while back. Was an interesting platform and oh man the documentation at least to me was gorgeous: github.com/kn100/cybemu/
“The concept for the device emerged from social research conducted in six countries, which identified a need for digital communication among youth. … a radio protocol was patented. This protocol allowed up to 3,000 Cybiko devices to form a network without using auxiliary stations.”
Smartphones can form mesh networks with WiFi, but neither of the duopoly OSes have this as a built-in feature, it's left to apps, and that fragments the potential. The most powerful radio isn't user-controllable, it's strictly pay-to-play and operating a base station is heavily licensed, no peer-to-peer activity is possible.
This is something I'd like to see disrupted, although I'm not holding my breath. I don't like that grid failure or (more likely) government order can knock smartphones off the network so easily as they can.
Back in the days (very early 2000s), Amsterdam got WLAN network called Wireless Oost. This gave people in Amsterdam Oost wireless internet access throughout the neighborhood, without needing cable internet from A2000 (later merged with Chello, who merged with UPC, who merged with Ziggo, all the time owned by a certain company known as Liberty Global (you might have heard of them)). It also served as a (W)LAN. Back then, the local computer club ASCII (comprised of political activists and such, predecessor of the hackerspaces) had a cargo bike called Bakscii (derived from Dutch world of cargo bike (bakfiets) and ASCII). This provided WLAN access at demonstrations and such. It was a neat project which Internet Archive likely still holds.
I was never directly involved with said project, btw, but I knew all of the people who were. Nowadays, I live near Amsterdam and will get 1 gbit symmetric fiber internet soon (most of NL already has access to it). I use a Wireguard tunnel to connect via any network (LTE/NG/WLAN) via my home network which runs Pi-Hole. My point being, security has improved, but there is a constant: wireless internet usage can be triangulated, eavesdropped, and clients can be tracked. It is something we need to live with. Every time I leave my smartphone at home even for something as small as picking up my kids at school or sports I feel good. However I can easily be tracked by all the doorbell cameras in the street.
We are done with subversion on the internet. It is over, a done deal. I've given up many years ago, and eventually I also embraced the thought of such. If you want some private time together go to some cave in Turkey or whatever.
I mean, it was not a smartphone but a PDA and it ran Linux: Sharp Zaurus. I owned a CL1000 (later on I went to Nokia N810, though in hindsight the N800 was just as cool with dual SD). Magnificent devices, and back then I liked they didn't have GPRS or 3G. Such was slow anyway (and expensive connection) so I felt that saved me money. Besides, the WWW was dominated by MSIE. And no GSM meant to me less tracking.
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