Yup. Ubuntu promises the best of both worlds, and in my experience the end result is noticeably worse than Debian. You notice when things are deliberate and tested versus cobbled together and made to work.
Consider checking out Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). Best of two worlds - stable foundation of Debian, easy-to-use interface of Mint. I have been using it for about 2 years now, very happy with it.
Still supports a proper taskbar, one per screen with windows from only that screen on that screens taskbar (that's just how I've done it since the 90's but it's a must have because I think in terms of screen relations to where stuff is, it's my mental model) and virtual desktops (Cinnamon and XFCE both do this as do others) and it supports Wayland (which is why I'm not still on Cinnamon which I really liked as it's just coming out of experimental support for Wayland).
You can also disable sorting of windows in the taskbar, disable combining them (eugh, I hate that so much) into a single entry (never understood that design choice on OSX or DE's that do it by default, don't hide my shit when there is space to show both).
It is complex for a UI in that there are lots of things you can tweak (spread around in the settings) but just because you can doesn't mean you have to of course.
I mostly just leave the defaults except for the above and rebinding a bunch of the window management, beyond that I strip it back to a start menu, taskbar and clock on both screens.
Mostly I like it because when I'm using it I never have to think about it, if I have to consider the DE (in that it's not just working the way I'd expect it to) then it's failing as a DE because it is getting in the way.
XFCE, Cinnamon and KDE all clear that bar (others may, they are just the last three I used going back well over a decade), Gnome hasn't since v2, KDE has defaults but it doesn't have "opinions" on how you should use it the same way as some of the others.
Switching to KDE from Cinnamon was a non-event after years of using Cinnamon, it took maybe half an hour to find the all the settings I wanted to make it work how I wanted.
It is extremely stable/polished (at least on Fedora) out the box, I want to use my machine to do things, playing with WM/DE's used to fascinate me and 25 years ago I had the inclination, now I just want boring software and a DE as the main interface to the computer should be boring in actual use.
TLDR: I want the classic WIMP desktop, I don't want to have to configure a bunch of half supported/unstable extensions to do it.
I suspect there are plenty of people out there who habitually buy the most expensive of what Apple has to offer in any category. I guess Apple was leaving money on the table by not having anything in this price range in the first place.
Users perceiving the products as largely interchangeable and quickly DDoS'ing the other providers when one is down. So much for the possibility of a moat.
Users perceiving the products as largely interchangeable and quickly DDoS'ing the other providers when one is down. So much for the possibility of a moat.
there really needs to be a configurable rules/decisions engine. I.e. i would prefer to walk everywhere, i will take public transit if it saves me more than 15 minutes total or 5 minutes per leg, evaluate this at every interchange node.
There are some routings in london for example where the best course of action is actually to take a train, get off walk 5 minutes then take a different train, google will always tell you to stay on the train to a point where you can change trains in the same station.
I'd also be able to tell it "never suggest that I get bus routes A, B or C; they do not in practice turn up on time".
> There are some routings in london for example where the best course of action is actually to take a train, get off walk 5 minutes then take a different train, google will always tell you to stay on the train to a point where you can change trains in the same station.
Had a good one in Amsterdam recently; rather than walk 9 minutes to the nearby central station and get a train there, it wanted me to walk 6 minutes to the central station's metro station entrance (which was a bit closer), get a metro, then join the train at another station entirely. Would have taken about twice as long.
Google isn't making arbitrary decisions here - it's reflecting social norms. Americans aren't big on walking. I've seen pictures of beautiful leafy suburbs that don't even have sidewalks.
This is overstated. At least as of 2017, Americans walked about 93% as much as people in France, for example, and a little more than people in Portugal or Greece.
I don't have sidewalks in front of my house but our neighbors all take walks - and walk to main street. A quiet street that sees a few cars an hour doesn't need a sidewalk to be walkable.
The other scenario of no sidewalk are like rural roads that are very long with nothing in between. So there sorta "no place to walk to".
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