Another Linux lie: we have desktop environments

Truth is, you don't really.

Enter MATE, the supposedly heir to Gnome 2. Its developers went out of their way to insulate themselves from any user feedback, and so their degradation went on, for a decade, undisturbed. Recently, they sunk to a new low.

Fast forward to Fedora 41 where its keyboard layout switching is not working in the new VM that I am building for a user. There is no flag, no two-letter code, and no switching, not even when I click the empty area in the tray or right-click and choose the layout from the drop-down menu. WTF?

So, the user and I roll our eyes and decide to upgrade to F42, in a slim hope that it might fix the issue. I start system upgrade and leave the VM alone, for the night. In the morning, we are mesmerized by the MATE lock screen that is refusing to unlock: the password is wrong, We notice that it has switched to the other keyboard layout that we were totally unable to activate last night. How? It's a mystery.

To add insult to injury, the layout indicator on the lock screen dialog changes accordingly to the key combination, but the input remains in the other encoding, i.e. we are unable to log back in.

The genius degenerates of the MATE dev team went out of their way, to make sure that it is truly impossible: they do not allow pasting from the clipboard or entering key scan codes via Alt-Numpad.

I say let's try to log in through the Hyper V console. So we RDP into the server and connect. It is sitting at the initial display manager login screen, which seems to have been unaffected by the KB switcher. I punch in the password, it complains that can't open the display, and the screen goes black. There are no options left than to shut it down and restart.

Genius is as genius does: always as a degenerate.

On top of that, there is some kind of memory leak, since the VM allocated an extra 1 GB overnight, even though during all of the set-up it never even reached the initial 8 GB that I had allocated to it. All it was doing was the downloading of the upgrade. They are oh, so fucked, that it is hard to beat them in their race to the bottom.

Scanning Google search results for problems with keyboard switching in the recent Linuxae, the bespoken Linux FOSS community managed to truly FUBAR it. I don't understand why they absolutely refuse to test before releasing. It has become their maniacal motto: never test nothing, let the users suffer. Reading through Github back-and-forth about these issues makes my blood freeze: they are so incompetent and so bureaucratically regimented that it makes the IRS sound in comparison like the proverbial Chaosmen of the PT.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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