Ah okay I would likely have missed those days since until this year I kept hoping windows wouldn’t completely shit the bed for my gaming PC.

I’ll have to take a look sway; think I’m still figuring out what I like best and GNOME felt familiar to the MacBook I like using for productivity (although now that I think about it, even Apple has a system-tray-like thing on the top of the screen). KDE was also fine but if I have a choice I usually like picking something with a spotlight-search equivalent; GNOME’s just looks more like spotlight so it activates the dumb part of my brain that likes familiarity.

Thanks for sticking with me through this conversation. Sometimes it’s hard to convey over text that I’m more ignorant than asshole on most Linux things.

Swear I’m neither of those things, but you’re talking about the system tray as in that little bucket of icons that sits in the lower-right of a taskbar usually?

This seems like it’d fall pretty neatly in the “you use it, so you think it’s required basic functionally; other people don’t, so they don’t care about it” realm. I do not miss the bucket. It doesn’t seem like awesome functionality (to me) to have to access application features through a bucket of tiny icons instead of the application itself and to be unable to access those features in the application.

I can see how frustrating it’d be if there’s something you like to use or have to use that only works if it can be in a system tray, but it’s not a ubiquitous feature requirement across all applications, so maybe GNOME is for people that don’t care for apps that require this and all the other mainstream OS options are for folks that do? Man that’s an annoying sentence to read; no wonder people get so angry about what seems like pointless minutiae.

I assume I dislike it because my work machine (windows, no choice there) always has about 30 things in its pointless icon bucket that can’t be closed by a basic user and do nothing beyond cluttering the taskbar and getting in the way. I get nothing out of a bucket of icons that exist only to silently scream “I’m running in the background still! Just in case anyone cares!” Not having to see that crap on my personal machine is a relief rather than a frustration for me.

Fair enough. I don’t know what those are, so I guess I can’t miss them.

That was pretty effing funny.

How much do you use your OS, though? I’d characterize it more as it works best by staying out of the way.

I turn the computer on, load a game or an occasional productive application, and I don’t think about it any more than that. My only real interaction with it beyond picking some initial settings is super+search for the thing I actually want to interact with.

Not that guy but phrases like “basic functionality” are just hard to pin down. What you need for your workflow and can’t live without is probably irrelevant fluff to a whole other class of folks.

I haven’t run into anything I need a third-party extension for yet, so I guess it works for some of us, although admittedly I do very few things on that machine so I could easily be missing something vital for most people.

Maybe it’s just the hardware I’ve tried to use it on but it always seemed to take too long for me in 10, too (haven’t used 11). Whether trackpad gesture or win+tab, it’s just always seemed sluggish compared to other options.

Not being able to scroll recycled content all day has been hugely detrimental to me. I’ve actually started reading books again. BOOKS.