On Tue, 9 Feb 2016 11:04:44 +1100
Sylvain BERTRAND <sylvain.bertrand@???> wrote:


> Then from a desktop perspective, what should I expect to work? I'm
> targetting usage level similar to gnome regarding network
> configuration, mounting of removal medias and digital camera, etc
> etc...

Hi Sylvain,

It's true. Gnome was good at networking, media mounting and removal,
digital cameras, etc. My personal opinion: You'll never reach that
state of "automatic" again, and that's not a bad thing.

Let me explain...

From 2000 through 2013 I consistently used "We do it all for you"
distros: Mandrake, Mandriva, and then Ubuntu (later Xubuntu and
Lubuntu). Most of the time, when I plugged in a thumb drive, BANG, its
mounted-self appeared on the desktop (or whatever). Plug in a camera,
and some program pops up with all the photos, ready to crop, enhance,
whatever. Networking, it just works, and if you go to a place you've
never been before, you click the little icon on the panel (taskbar),
choose your ESSID, enter the password, and you're connected.

Most of the time.

But man, when these distros didn't fulfill their function, they left
you in a whole lot of pain. NetworkManager fails: Now what do you do,
with NetworkManager having usurped all the Linux networking you ever
knew and replacing it with opaque layers. You change
your /etc/resolv.conf to resolve at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, and whoomp,
Network Manager replaces it some time later. That wonderful, beautiful,
just-how-you-want-it Kmail frequently throws off dbus-daemon instances
consuming 98% of CPU, to the point where I had to run a daemon to
detect and kill these. That auto camera program: Turns out I wanted to
edit my pics in Gimp, not in its half-assed editor.

We-do-it-all-for-you software is tempting, enticing, embracing. Your
software handles all the tech, and you just do your work. But implicit
in this is that you do your work the way your software demands. You
become very slick at the points, clicks, drags and keystrokes of your
software, but you're doing it the software's way, and over time you've
been so seduced by your software that your roll-your-own chops are
rusty and many times you just don't bother making the interface *you*
want.

And we-do-it-all-for-you software makes rolling your own much more
difficult, because it epoxys layer after layer of its impenetrable
abstractions over what you know as Linux, to the point that stuff that
would have been simple in 1998 Red Hat 5.2 becomes a tracking
expedition to sniff out the path taken by the abstractions to
manipulate the underlying Linux (or do an end run around it).

The post I've written so far is a long way of saying that
we-do-it-all-for-you and roll-your-own are a tradeoff. Gnome is almost
completely we-do-it-all-for-you. Linux From Scratch is almost entirely
roll-your-own. Most power users (non-newbies who use the computer for
more than surfing porn and interacting with Facebook) want to be
somewhere inside the extremes. And since Gnome demands systemd and we
won't have systemd on our systems, this means saying goodbye to
complete and utter we-do-it-all-for-you, which is a good thing.

Finally, I submit my opinion that if a person really wants
we-do-it-all-for-you, he should forget about Gnome, forget about Linux,
and buy a Mac. Mac does we-do-it-all-for-you right.

SteveT

Steve Litt
February 2016 featured book: The Key to Everyday Excellence
http://www.troubleshooters.com/key