 I've recently come to the conclusion that, at least for me, Linux isn't as fun as what it was 15 years ago when I first discovered Linux as far as me switching to Linux full time on the desktop and part of that of course is natural because when something's new, because I was a new user around 2008, when you're a new user, obviously everything's fresh and exciting. It's a new frontier and obviously you're just completely enamored with this new thing that you're trying out where now Linux is kind of old hat to me, right? I've seen it all and maybe that's part of the problem but I don't really think that is part of the problem because sometimes I do check out new Linux distributions that are quite unique that do impress me but they're very few and far between and I think a lot of the problem with Linux in my case not being as fun as it was 15 years ago is it's a systemic problem. It's a really broad based problem that really affects the entire open source and free software ecosystem and part of this is a lot of our free and open source software that we depend on that we build our GNU slash Linux distributions upon a lot of these programs are now becoming so big and complicated that they become less user friendly they become harder to customize they become in many ways less flexible and because of that it is not the ultimate hackers paradise that it was 15 years ago I just think it's lost some of that luster. Some good examples of how Linux was back in 2008 as far as being flexible and customizable and you could easily hack on things all these desktop environments and window managers you had ultimate theming options is you know around 2008 or so when I first got into Linux it was the GNOME 2 desktop those days with the GTK 2 toolkit and you had literally hundreds of GTK themes available to you on Linux and every color scheme you had some really crazy GTK themes if you go back and look at some of the old screenshots of Linux 15 years ago especially old GTK based desktops 15 years ago they were absolutely gorgeous they were far better than what we have now in my opinion and part of this is because that GTK 2 toolkit was the last time GTK was really simple and easy to use that anybody you me anybody watching this video right now could easily make a GTK theme just theme it with whatever color scheme you want and you could put it out there for the world to use and with GTK 3 and GNOME 3 that all went away GTK 3 became such a complicated mess that pretty much everyone that was theming for GTK 2 most of them just didn't even try to theme for GTK 3 it was it was too much of a mess it was too complicated it was too hard to create a theme and then if you went to the triple to create a theme the next version of GTK and the next version of GNOME would break your theme to where you'd have to start all over and do the work all over again and it's just a nightmare it's a headache and of course now we have GTK 4 pretty soon we're gonna have GTK 5 and it's just becoming more and more complicated and more complex and really a lot of this you know the GNOME desktop environment the GNOME developers and GTK they really just destroyed what was a beautiful thing with desktop Linux and that was the the fact that anyone could theme their Linux desktop to just amazing potentials I also remember the crazy desktop effects we had back then with the spinning cube and being able to draw fire on the screen or to create rain puddles that are dropping on your desktop and you had when you close a window you can make the window explode or it would blow up in flames or it would fold up into a paper airplane and fly off the screen and back then that was because we were still using XOR we are still using XOR for the most part these days but you had you know your standard compositors and one of the very popular compositors back then was CompiS and CompiS was a compositor that had all these amazing effects and you typically back then you use the old GNOME 2 desktop environment in conjunction with the CompiS compositor you get just these amazing desktop effects that were truly world-class no other operating system had the kind of desktop effects that Linux had back then and I would argue today Linux doesn't have those desktop effects the way we had it 15 years ago and the reason is because nobody's putting in that work anymore with these XOR compositors for the last 12 years or so people have been focused on working on Wayland getting a new display server up which is still not even close to being ready yet and of course Wayland is much more complex and the way it does things because now you don't create a desktop environment and a window manager you create a Wayland compositor every Wayland window manager is essentially a compositor you it's a compositor and window manager all together and it's a mess one of the things back in the day with XOR on Linux we have probably more than a hundred different desktop environments and window managers to choose from we have ultimate choice and just amazing variation between all of these desktop environments and window managers with Wayland we're not going to have probably any real variation where it's going to be very limited is because it's so hard to create these Wayland window managers compared to how easy it is to create one in XOR right we're not going to have nearly as many window managers most of them because of the amount of code and work involved are simply going to for the most part be forks of each other because it's just too complicated to start all over and do your own compositor Wayland compositor when somebody's already did one for this other window manager so I'll just fork their window manager and it's not going to be the same right and I it bothers me it really bothers me how this new technology these new desktop environments these new theming tool kits the new display server new audio servers with you know also and then pulse and then pipe wire that are all just hacks that get stacked on top of each other it's becoming a mess and Linux on the desktop really has become again so complicated and so inflexible that it's really hard to be that tinkerer you know back in the day you could take these pieces and rearrange them and put them back together again you could get in the config files you could hack on things and you could just do some amazingly creative stuff with Linux and you can still do that for the most part on Linux but it's not the same right it's becoming much more of a rigid ecosystem and it troubles me now a lot of the lower level Linux utilities especially like the good new core utilities and things like that once you get into the command line stuff all of that stuff is still very simple it's all small modular tools for the most part these small tools they do one job they do one thing do one thing well and they have the ability to pipe their output as input into the next command so you can pipe things into it and you know at the command line we still have that ultimate flexibility and customization we have ultimate power but once you get more into especially the desktop realm you know once you get into user interface stuff especially user interfaces that are designed for being new user friendly a lot of that stuff has had their their power stripped away right you're no longer able to do as much with these new desktop environments and some cases these new programs that crop up one of the things one of the biggest programs on Linux nowadays is system d system d of course is the init system on most Linux distributions although it's much more than an init system it's actually an entire suite of applications the init system is actually a really really small part of system d and that's because system d includes things like system d timers and all the networking stuff and system d has you know a bajillion components to it right the init part of it again it's just a very small part and why does that need to be the case couldn't you have all of that split up now i don't mind system d system d actually works and i will give system d credit as far as to the end user system d is actually pretty user friendly as far as how you interact with it in many cases system d is actually a little more user friendly than some of the other alternative init systems especially some of the older ones that system d was created to replace such as sys 5 init and upstart but really the point of this little rant that i'm going on today you really this is just me in a therapy session you guys are the psychiatrists or the psychologists here you know this is me laying on a couch you know giving you my thoughts here is i don't like the direction that so many of these free software projects are going they're making these pieces of software that are just very rigid and very limiting and it is it is completely changing gnu slash linux as we knew it many of us fell in love with linux because of that customization and that extensibility and that's really lacking and a lot of modern software projects and again i know i'm not the only one that feels this way because i see other people on video or in text uh reddit places like that they post um their desktops and i see them using linux very much like me where a lot of the tools i use i'm looking for extremely customizable extremely extensible tools right and simple tools for the most part why do i use tools like dmenu so much why do i have so many scripts that i've written the interface with dmenu because that thing is just mind numbingly simple right it's so crazy simple the amount of lines of code to dmenu are i don't know probably a few hundred lines of code i don't know i haven't read the source code but if i wanted to it's not a lot of lines of code anybody could go read the source code within i don't know 15 20 minutes probably but it's not just the fact that it's not written in a lot of lines of code it's the fact that dmenu the way it was designed is designed to be extensible customizable and flexible is because you can take any input and feed it into dmenu i can uh the input from a file i can direct it into dmenu or the output from another unix shell command i can pipe it into dmenu right and that is extremely flexible and just very very cool for the most part these days i don't use file managers i almost never use a proper file manager whether it be a graphical file manager or a terminal file manager i rarely ever use gear ed inside of emacs if i need to do any file management 99.9 of the time i do it in the terminal with your standard gendu core utils you know ls and cd and rm and cp you know all of those standard shell commands that are designed for file management that's my file manager because at the end of the day they're simple they're flexible you can do a lot with them you can script with those particular tools and i just prefer that workflow and i just hope that especially the maintainers of various linux distributions and the lead devs of some of these desktop environments and window managers especially some of the up and coming ones that are being designed with wailing in mind i hope they keep this in mind when they're designing their particular software one of the things with free and open source software is i want to be able to hack on it if i can't do what i want to do with your particular piece of software the fact that it's free and open source well that's great i love that it's licensed that way but if i can't really do what i want to do if i can't make it into what i want to make it into what's really the difference between your free software project and a proprietary software project it's really other than the license it's essentially becomes the same thing now maybe that's just me being pessimistic maybe i'm just in a bad mood today i did go to the gym and i worked out for about an hour and a half and it wasn't that long ago that i actually stepped off a treadmill over at any time fitness so you know that puts people in a bad mood maybe that's why i wanted to rant today i don't know but i hope you guys enjoyed this little rant and i hope especially those of you that are developing software take some of the points that i mentioned today and just use it and it's a little food for thought peace guys