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Discussion on: It's time for a change: I'm trying Linux on the desktop

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gabek profile image
Gabe Kangas

That's an interesting approach that I've never really heard before, to stay within the lane of a single distro's apps. But doesn't that severely limit you? The world of quality modern linux desktop software is pretty limited as it is, so if you only use the software written for a relatively new (comparatively) distro, doesn't that really lock you in?

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adam

I think for gnome and kde desktops it's pretty doable. They both have nice ecosystems of applications. If you value consistency you can get it for 99% of apps. The few special cases would be for complicated software like image/art software like Gimp/Krita and maybe media clients and text editors depending on how picky you are.

I think Elementary would be the only one I know of where you could kind of get "locked in" since in my experience trying run apps written for that distro on other platforms they tend to look bad if the author didn't test them off elementary. That said they are just Gtk apps, They just use a different style sheet and have their own library of widgets for certain things. Pantheon - the desktop environment used by elementary is available in other distros now too.

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gabek profile image
Gabe Kangas

Cool! I think I'll spin up an Elementary instance this weekend and try to stick to only what they supply in their app store and see how the experience differs. Thanks for your detailed insight!