linuxmemes

I think it's more peak moron. Morons everywhere.

See, while I understand that the "the system should be invisible and get out of the way so people can do things with their computers" philosophy isn't for me, I entirely understand it as not only valid, but preferred by most people. --

-- It's just that Gnome's approach to "getting out of the way" is at best counterproductive? I used Gnome for like 3 months in 2022, figured I'd give it a try, I'm always down to try new stuff. And I felt like I was just constantly fighting against it, having to do configuration stuff and install third-party addons not as a funtime activity because I like to make my computer look prettier, but because if I didn't, shit just refused to work. It was only much later that I learned that the reason I had to keep wrestling Gnome is because the peeps behind it had actively decided that the things I needed to do were stupid and didn't need doing.

You'll see me praising Cinnamon in a different comment. Cinnamon, a cousin of Gnome's born of Gnome 2, is what I'd call a DE that gets out of the way. It doesn't have all the moving parts that KDE does, and that is to its credit. Because it has everything it needs to have and no more but also no less.

Also what is the difference between a system tray and a control center?

Functionally, there isn't one. Both serve the same ultimate purpose: To be an area where background services and system functionality can be accessed quickly and easily, while staying out of the way of whatever you're doing in the foreground.

The tray is just an older, arguably more primitive metaphor for the same thing: "Just give every service and app its own icon, and make it so that icon can be clicked to access its options and features". It's simple, but it works.

The control center is more elegant, like, really, it is. It saves screen real estate and such. Giving you a little scrollable window where every controllable thing has its own little area. But that is contingent on the application itself implementing that functionality. When an application expects an old-fashioned tray, Gnome's control center just tells that app to go $&#* itself, when they could, if they wanted to, just add a corner on the control center for "legacy apps". But they don't wanna, because they think they know better than everyone else.

Oh no, I entirely agree with the system tray being a leftover from an older era. The Control Center is actually super elegant. But it doesn't do to come up with a nicer, more elegant solution while telling all legacy support to go &*&$ itself in the same breath because it's no longer your problem.

That's some Apple bollocks, and if I wanted to deal with Apple's shit I'd get a Mac.

Easy access to a few key functions is nice, IMO. Though helping someone on their computer and seeing half the taskbar occupied with two dozen system tray icons makes me vomit just a little, so I get it.