MangoCats

Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency

Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That’s the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.

Does Gnome have too much dependency on Gnome: yes or no?

Absolutely. If you don't mind using Gnome exactly as Gnome wants you to - this year - then it's usually a pretty refined desktop experience, but if I wanted to be told what to like, how to like it, and to shut up and be happy, I'd use a Mac.

I prefer XFCE for its modularity... don't want a launcher bar? Don't run the launcher; nothing else misses it when it's gone.

Mess around with Gnome too much and it becomes a nightmare mess of dependencies.

Like search engines, and libraries...

LOL sure

I'm not talking about the ones that get hired in your 'leet shop, I'm talking about the whole damn crop that's just graduated.

I have limited AI experience, but so far that's what it means to me as well: helpful in very limited circumstances.

Mostly, I find it useful for "speaking new languages" - if I try to use AI to "help" with the stuff I have been doing daily for the past 20 years? Yeah, it's just slowing me down.

Now you make me question whether it's a future deportation destination...

It's a farmed turkey, it's mostly white meat.

It definitely depends on what you are trying to get out of it.

I'll grant: low lag audio performance in Windows is... dismal. Which is why everyone had conference call lag adjustment issues in 2020, "go ahead", "no you go ahead", "ok" - both start talking simultaneously again... It seems better these days, I'm sure that's at least in part due to training of the conference participants, but maybe they have been working on getting the lag down without too many dropout / stutters.

We have a bespoke low lag audio system that was specifically implemented in Linux even though we put the GUI in Windows because of those lag / stutter issues, years back the audio was done on a dedicated DSP chip, but a Core i7 is more than up to the task on Linux these days.

The Linux audio pains I refer to were: A) audio just doesn't work at all, and B) audio works, until you start to try to use two audio applications simultaneously - then they start to mess each other up. Both of those were better in Windows long before Linux came up to speed. But a lot of how Windows audio gets acceptable performance is big laggy buffers.

Attitudes develop over time... his may indeed be a defense mechanism or simply a response to all that hate.

things before were way worse… why not throw Sticks and stones at those people?

My earliest memories of Linux audio were in Slackware in the mid 90s, reading and re-reading the HOWTO that started off with a bunch of attitude about how real computer users don't need audio, but we can do it anyway "so, if you must hear Biff bark..." and then a bunch of very unhelpful things to try following that never ever worked on any system I ever tried to use them on. Diverse systems that, of course, all played audio through Windows flawlessly.

But he’s also an abrasive know-it-all. A modicum of social skills and respect goes a long way towards making others accept your pet projects.

You mean like Linus Torvalds?

Linux audio has been a cluster^$%< of epic proportions since the mid 1990s. At least you can make single application systems work well these days, but Windows has really whipped the llamas ass on the audio front for 30+ years now, in terms of "it just works" user experience - without being hyper-draconian on the application ecosystem.