Given that there are no doubt significantly more MacOS, Gnome and XFCE users in the Northern Hemisphere - I’d say no… That’s the default location… Same with elementary… and Mint / Cinnamon? What about MATE? I think MATE’s the same (that’s the default DE on recent builds of ghostBSD) - yeah - in MATE - the status bar with date time is at the top…
Systemtray was probably the wrong terminology - that’s a Windows thing…
It’s possible to relocate the Windows start menu / system tray to the top… Never saw the point really… I just try not to use Wndows as much as possible… but guess it’s unavoidable n my line of work - all the jump servers are f–king Windows… I so much preferred it when I could VPN from Mac or Linux, then SSH to a Linux jumphost…
MacOS is more popular percentagewise in oz than most other countries.
Maybe we could introduce a mod to invert DE’s in our part of the world… make it dependent on location.
I use Linux Mint because it’s basically Ubuntu, minus all the crap (GNOME, snap, etc.) – aimed for the desktop end-user who just wants to do user stuff.
In the past I was a tweaker and hence chose Gentoo. Now I’m just a desktop end-user.
So, why am I not using Windows? It’s the desktop user’s goto, right?
Well, Windows keeps changing stuff, and not always for the better. Also, the amount of mysterious problems I’ve had with it is staggering. USB ports not working and needing a driver fix to the start menu not opening and security patches being reverted for no apparent reason.
Linux Mint just keeps behaving the same way. Sometimes there’s new features – which is good – but not at a cost of renovating the entire GUI.
distros that just work and provide a good everyday desktop
distros that overdo it , adding unnecessary complexity
new developing distros with teething problems
but
there is little agreement about which distros fall into each category
Why do people see things differently?
I "railed’ against systemd for a few years - but I did the same with SMF on Solaris… I do miss the simplicity of writing a basic start / stop / kill script in /etc/init.d (and linking to it my default runlevel - e.g. /etc/init.d/rc3.d or rc5.d)…
In both SMF and systemd - I didn’t like the windows-esque similarit to “net start blah blah”… But some decade+ down the road? SMF and systemd are BOTH light years more sophisticaed and usable than Windows “net start … ad nauseam”…
I was ideologically opposed to the ominous growth of snaps on Ubuntu ecosystem…
I’ve since reconciled with both of them and happy to live with both
So a machine cant distinguish identical twins… but their mother can!
Identical twins learn different things as they grow up… I bet they would choose different distros.
My wife uses Debian based on my choice
Her sister uses a macbook.
So I can confirm: yes, they learn different things
Yes, definitely!
But that wasn’t true for their teachers!
That goes far beyond current state of natural science, and even beyond materialism. One of the twins knows exactly when the other is hurt, even knows where on her body the other is hurt, as she feels pain there, but not the normal way. So one of twins accidentally cuts her hand while cooking in the kitchen few districts away, the other feels unreal and unexplainable pain in her hand here, then she calls her on phone, what happened. Or when our first boy was born, I was not sure of the exact minute (as it happened in a surgery, leaving me outside), my sister-in-law knew exactly, and corrected me regarding the minute (the hour part was OK ). Funny thing is my wife confirmed that minute part later.
That worked the other way around too, my wife knew, when my sister-in-law started to give birth, and we had to get on the way towards the hospital - before anyone could call us on phone.
So yes, twins have special bond, and so they are proof of that materialism and classic physics are not the ultimate explanation of the universe
I’ve always had mine at the top. I don’t remember why now. I always assumed it was because in an earlier version of Windows that’s how it was, and it bugged me when they changed it. They allow me to put it at the top up to this point, so I do. It is called a pulldown menu right?
I’ve never liked using the TrackPoint. It isn’t available on all that many devices, so I assume it isn’t super popular. I also avoid using a trackpad when I can in preference to a mouse.
I’ve been a Linux user since 1998, and settled on Mint about 16 years ago. Also, once MATE appeared in Mint, I have used it as my DE of choice. I’ve tried Cinnamon, and XFCE, but prefer MATE. I’ve tried out MintDebian.I still do some “distro-hopping”, and "“play around” with several Puppies(which I really like).
Yeah, it is called that, and it is easier to use as you mouse down over the menu items… top to bottom is a natural way to scan a list
So my Xfce is configured with Applications Menu at top , in the tray.
In the bottom panel I have only icons and load monitor.
Maybe I noticed some lagginess of SNAP apps when I had slower hardware - e.g. AMD Phenom II X6 16 GB DDR3 RAM and mechanical HDD…
Dell Latitude with an older gen i7 and 16 GB DDR3…
Way back when I used Chromium - I noticed it was quite slow to start up because it was a SNAP. Noticed same with other snaps… Firefox maybe?
Now? Can’t really tell the difference. I’m running Sayonara as a snap on Ubuntu 24.10… I really can’t be bothered to figure out what is installed as a snap, and what’s installed via apt deb package… Some of the third party stuff I use is installed via apt (dpkg actually) from DEB files like Synergy KVM and ResilioSync.
As for SystemD - it’s EVERYWHERE - it’s my job… I was stumped recently - had to roll out some “agent” software - the installer mostly went fine (different script for DEB based VS RPM based) until it came to a piece of crap RHEL5 system I’ve been badgering the owner to decom for years now - the agent installer assumed systemd and barfed… I guess I could have figured out how to make it work via SysV init scripts - but was the level of effort worth it? No…
You have to move with the times. When you retire you may have the luxury of doing it your way.
Snaps are like static binaries, but with some extra crud to fit them into the package system. I dont see why they should startup slowly… there must be some clunky scripts involved. A static binary is large, but not so large that it would affect load time. I have one app (keenwrite) that comes as a static binary… it loads quite fast and my machine is rather like your Dell with early corei7 and ddr3.
