GNU/Linux

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Thad
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GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Mon Mar 03, 2014 7:50 pm

So this week's reason I'm using Debian/XFCE instead of my preferred OpenSUSE/KDE:

Mozilla bug 833117 - Does not disable glib slice allocator with glib >= 2.35

I'm not entirely sure what the fuck that means except that Firefox and Thunderbird are completely unusable. So that's cool. (Apparently this is also an issue in Sid, so it's a good thing my fallback OS is Jessie.)

I GUESS I could try a different browser and mail client under KDE, but I really don't wanna. Last time I checked KMail, it didn't even have a built-in spam filter and wanted you to configure bogofilter manually, which I am not going to do because this is not 2003 and I have outgrown my "run absolutely everything possible in the terminal" phase. At which point I wouldn't have been using KMail anyway.

Evolution was okay I guess but it did some weird shit where it refused to recognize known-good passwords, and didn't have simple context-menu options for basic tasks like creating filters. On the other hand, I don't remember it randomly disappearing my IMAP folders and making me re-add them like Thunderbird has a habit of doing, so maybe it's a wash.

And I hate every browser that's not Firefox because I don't like my images turning into blurry messes when I increase the size of my text. (Makes sense on phones -- standard reminder that we should probably not be treating a 27" computer monitor the same as a 5" phone -- and it sure makes my day job easier, but text-only zoom or GTFO.)

(I kind of hate Firefox too. I just hate it less than every other browser.)

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sei
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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby sei » Wed Mar 05, 2014 12:38 am

I assume text-only zooming extensions for Chrome weren't to your liking.
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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Wed Mar 05, 2014 8:08 pm

Not if I have to take my hand off the mouse to use them.

(Konqueror, last I checked, is just downright weird -- Ctrl-+ or - will increase or decrease the size of text, but Ctrl-mouse wheel does a fucking pixel zoom. Like, it doesn't even vector-scale the fonts; it jaggies them up. Damnedest thing; I have no idea what possible purpose it could have or under what circumstance anyone would ever want that. Konqueror being Konqueror, there may be a way to make the mouse scroll behave like the key scroll buried 3 or 4 menus in, but damned if I could find it.)

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby zaratustra » Wed Mar 05, 2014 9:42 pm

sei wrote:I assume text-only zooming extensions for Chrome weren't to your liking.


ooh thanks

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby sei » Mon Mar 10, 2014 6:37 pm

Thad wrote:Not if I have to take my hand off the mouse to use them.
You still have options.

  • (two-handed solution) Make an autohotkey* mapping on the left side of the keyboard that triggers your zoom in/out mapping.
  • (one-handed solution) Make your mouse's 4+th button ctrl/super/alt/whatever and then use that button in tandem with your scroll wheel. Not a default mapping? Authotkey mapping.
  • More things along similar lines.

AHK is pretty powerful and can even pay attention to the title of the window is in focus, so you can match for Firefox/Chrome/whateverthefuck and have said combo only active when appropriate.

It may sound like a bit of trouble to set up, but set-up is mostly a one-off cost.

*I'm sure Linux has an equivalent of AutoHotKey (Windows only?) out there. Maybe xdotool, ldtp, xmacro, or something similar will prove usable.

zaratustra wrote:
sei wrote:I assume text-only zooming extensions for Chrome weren't to your liking.


ooh thanks
You're welcome.
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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Mon Jun 02, 2014 3:50 pm

So the past few days have brought us GNOME 3.12 and Mint 17; the Reg has reviewed both and seems to like both. The biggest problem with GNOME 3.12 right now is that it's going to be awhile before any major distro actually bundles it.

As for Mint, the Reg seems pretty pleased with the latest revisions to both Cinnamon and MATE. The last time I used Cinnamon I found myself wondering what the hell it did that XFCE doesn't; the answer is that a GNOME Shell backend means better support for high-DPI monitors. Food for thought.

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 24, 2014 1:55 pm

Ars reviews Mint 17.

I'm pretty happy with OpenSUSE (which I've finally got Working the Way I Want It To) on my desktop and Xubuntu on my laptop, but if I had spare time to fuck around testing distros I'd take a crack at Mint just to see how it's working right now. (That and whatever the first distro to use the latest GNOME desktop is; probably Fedora.) But realistically I don't have spare time to fuck around testing distros, so I'm not going to. It looks pretty decent though.

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby sei » Thu Jun 26, 2014 3:45 pm

Anyone know of a GNOME Do equivalent for KDE?

KRunner (the alt+f2 default) doesn't have fuzzy search (or MRU sorting?) which I miss.

EDIT: I should probably just install Do itself on my KDE VM, come to think of it. But some qt-based launcher would probably look better with the KDE setup.
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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby sei » Fri Jun 27, 2014 12:25 am

i mean seriously if i hit alt+f2 and i type "sys" i want the fucking system settings, not the system bell configuration

fuck krunner
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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Wed Sep 10, 2014 5:28 pm

Contemplating a new graphics card -- not in a huge hurry, but thinking about it.

Is AMD support under Linux any better than the last two times I tried?

(ETA: Hm, come to think of it I've still got one of those old Radeon cards; I guess if I see an AMD card I really like I can always try the drivers out on my spare card before buying.)

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Kayma » Fri Sep 12, 2014 10:26 pm

Last time I messed with Radeon driver support (about a year ago on my work computer) it was a nightmare.

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby IGNORE ME » Fri Sep 12, 2014 10:32 pm

The next GTX generation is due out next month if that makes any sort of difference.

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Sun Jul 10, 2016 2:04 am

Plasma started crashing like a motherfucker about two weeks ago so I'm trying other desktops until it (if history is any indication) fixes itself on a future update.

Cinnamon is still bafflingly primitive considering how long it's been around. I can apparently install a dock widget that will allow me to stack icons (so that it doesn't fucking display all 15 of my Firefox windows side-by-side Win95-style and render the entire taskbar fucking useless), but not move the taskbar to the side of the screen.

Xfce is Xfce. It's what I've been using on my laptop for years, except for some reason on my desktop it keeps fucking shutting down my display even though I've told it not to do that in Power Settings. And the display does not come back on like it's supposed to; I have to fucking SSH in from my laptop and send a command to bring it back up. I am trying to figure out how to fix this.

GNOME 3, by all accounts, has gotten much much better since its initial release, but it looks like it's still doing most of the bullshit that put me off it in the first place. I can apparently install third-party tweaks to give me a desktop and a taskbar, and run Cinnamon's x-app suite instead of GNOME's to avoid losing all the features that the GNOME devs have decided I don't need anymore, but at that point I'd basically be running Cinnamon with a big stupid mostly-empty bar across the top of it.

I haven't tried MATE yet (I never much liked GNOME 2), and there are a bunch of other DE's that have started to crop up after GNOME and Unity shit the bed, like Budgie and Pantheon and I don't even remember the names of some of the others.

I know some folks just like a simple window manager, but every one of them I've ever tried has been ugly as fuck and a pain in the ass to configure.

And I really don't want or have time to fuck around with trying other distros. I like OpenSUSE, I just wish KDE would start working correctly again. And there are enough headaches in the coming years with new package systems and windowing libraries; if I switch to, say, Xubuntu on my desktop now, then I'm looking at a DE that's lagging on Wayland compatibility -- assuming Xubuntu even supports Wayland rather than being forced to eat Mir's dog food. Which brings us to the Snap-versus-Flatpak debate. Will Snap end up like Unity, with Canonical continuing to push ahead with it despite absolutely no other distro picking it up? Or will it end up like the Ubuntu Software Center, with Canonical quietly retiring it and switching to the thing everybody else is using?

All these questions are a long way off, obviously, as apparently Snap and Flatpak don't even fucking work on the distros they're designed to work on yet. Point is, I don't need the aggravation of switching distros while wondering how soon the next time I switch distros will end up being. I just want KDE to quit fucking crashing.

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Friday » Sun Jul 10, 2016 3:14 am

The next GTX generation is due out next month if that makes any sort of difference.


I spent about 30 seconds mentally filtering out "GTX" from this post and wondering what the fuck Picard and Data had to do with computers and Linux.
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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Sat Jul 16, 2016 5:48 pm

Settled in with MATE for now. It's very Win98, but it's more customizable than Cinnamon and doesn't have the issues I've been having with KDE and XFCE.

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Wed Apr 05, 2017 5:01 pm

Ubuntu is killing Mir and Unity and switching back to GNOME. If this comes as a surprise to you, then welcome to the forums, Mr. Shuttleworth.

So, I have two questions: (1) what's the over/under on how long it takes them to kill Snaps and switch to Flatpak, and (2) will they try to make the GNOME 3 UI suck less (and aren't there already enough projects trying to do that already -- OK, I guess that's three questions)?

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Kayma » Mon Apr 10, 2017 9:31 pm

I'm not exactly in love with Gnome 3, but I sure did hate Unity. Good for them.

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Tue Apr 11, 2017 2:21 pm

They're both pretty far down my list. My desktop runs KDE, my laptop runs Xfce, I've decided that both MATE and Cinnamon are acceptable. I haven't tried Budgie or any of the other new ones. I thought Unity was OK back when it was a netbook interface, but never liked it for the desktop.

I've really hated GNOME 3 every time I've used it, but I'm about to give it a shot on my new HTPC, mostly because Fedora seems like the most forward-facing stable distro right now, but also because it seems like GNOME's UI wouldn't be so bad on an HTPC. Guess I'll see.

Course, the best thing that ever happened to GNOME's UI was Ubuntu. I imagine that they'll bring in some tweaks that make it more usable, just like they did with GNOME 2.

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Wed Sep 26, 2018 12:57 am

Linus Torvalds appears to have finally gotten the message that adolescent, profanity-filled temper tantrums are no way to run a railroad. He's taken a leave from kernel development to "get help on how to behave differently"; meanwhile, the kernel is adopting a code of conduct.

(I think experiencing runaway success at a young age really stunts people's emotional growth. I bought the same "fuck your feelings" line of bullshit as Torvalds when I was in my twenties; I like to think I grew out of it, though Lord knows I backslide from time to time. I think having people willing to call me on my bullshit was a big help. Torvalds has had people calling him on his bullshit too, for decades at this point, but when you're a big enough deal that you're surrounded by people telling you how great everything you do is, that tends to drown out constructive criticism.)

It is always interesting -- and truly depressing -- to see what kind of people crawl out of the woodwork to gnash their teeth and rend their garments when somebody says how great it would be to be nice to people. I guess the guy who makes sc-controller (a useful library for using the Steam Controller, and various other game controllers, on Linux) is a GamerGator; he's announced he's stepping away from development over the kernel developers' decision.

Which, what? The fuck's that got to do with sc-controller? First of all, sc-controller is a userspace program; it has nothing to do with the kernel. And second, this "Linux has become part of a political movement and I can't be part of that" nonsense -- dude, you published your program under the GPL. You don't think that's political? Stallman wept.

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Re: GNU/Linux

Postby Thad » Tue May 21, 2019 5:58 pm

Antergos Linux Project Ends

Well, shit.

This won't affect the computer I'm already running Antergos on, since Antergos is just Arch with an installer and a few extra packages, and those extra packages are being moved to the Arch User Repo. I was planning on rebuilding my main PC as an Antergos box in the next few months, though (whenever AMD's Navi cards come out), and I'd just as soon not fuck around with vanilla Arch's install process.

Maybe someone will put a decent fork out. Otherwise, I guess maybe I'll give Manjaro a try.

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