The_Grinch [he/him]

I had a similar situation with a slightly damaged screen. It was just the very top right corner of a laptop. I just created a square panel in XFCE and blocked off the corner with it so when I fullscreened a window it wouldn’t go into the corner.

Interestingly, depending on where the window is when I click fullscreen, it might fullscreen the “tall” way, or the “wide” way. I’m not sure what logic XFCE uses there but it’s pretty cool.

Is this a reference to one of their crashouts I missed? I stopped paying attention to them lol

I’m pretty sure GTK used to do exactly that, and for a while after they stopped supporting it there was a patched version of GTK that brought that functionality back.

I’m mainly salty about this because programs with forced CSDs make my tiling window manager look like shit, and getting away from them is becoming increasingly difficult.

That’s because they’re engineering their desktop for first time users who look first, then click. Having things visually “tidy” without too much “clutter” or anything that might make them feel overwhelmed is what they’re looking for. Being predictable, consistent, or able to learn by muscle memory is less important. If you’re measuring success based primarily on increasing number of users, onboarding is by far the most important aspect of design.

Seasoned users of a piece of software know exactly where the button/menu/tool they want is, and their needs are often directly contrary to a first time user’s needs. These users want the element they’re looking for to be accessible in as few actions and little thought as possible.

The ideal software that you would use day to day is able to be approachable, but holds your hand while you become a seasoned user. Menubars were ideal for this. Every function is laid out for new users to look through. You have spacial memory for where each function is organized. On MacOS and a couple linux desktop environments functions with a keyboard command associated would have that command displayed beside them (and you can even set one if one doesn’t exist, or change one that does), gently assisting you to use the program more easily. Several desktops also offer searchable menubars which is just another layer of convenience. Big shiny buttons for common functions and a hamburger menu are simply a step backward from the traditional menu bar. You’re only a new user of a piece of software once.

At best, GNOME, the party in control of GTK and design for a huge swath of software, refuse to play ball and cooperate with the rest of the linux/FLOSS desktop ecosystem. At worst they want to throw out all the literature about muscle memory, predictability, and familiarity in UI design and impose their frankly annoying Fisher-Price design on everyone else while calling you an out of touch elitist for resisting this.

I just hate how the CSDs keep moving the title buttons around depending on how wide the header bar is. I want my buttons in the exact same place and order no matter what. If I have to think about how to minimize/maximize/close a window for a tenth of a second it’s too long.

They also regularly take away very useful menubars and that’s even worse in my opinion.

The article you linked says rewind 3rd party, opt in, and stored locally. I don’t think anyone would have an issue with microsoft’s AI either if it was opt in and without telemetry.

They’re just going to do this with the TPM and similar chips that windows 11 semi-hard requires, and android, iOS, mac OS have already, anyway. The website will refuse to display if any modification whatsoever has been done to it, and any browser that refuses to comply to their standards will be blocked. There will of course be a couple hacks to get around it, but eventually they will close those leaks too. The open internet is very soon coming to an end.

We have gemini, IPFS, and usenet to my knowledge.

That’s exactly what I’m saying. The reasons all exist on the spectrum from “we have no reason to care” to “We have every reason to make this difficult for you”

Or btrfs with snapper snapshots you can roll back to. Either way I suspect hard drive corruption. That’s usually what it is for me (although I do lose power with abnormal frequency)

I believe in the conspiracy theory that the reason connecting devices directly to each other anymore without doing a bunch of backflips through third parties is more or less intentional. If you could send a file to your friend sitting right next to you with some sort of wifi-direct or bluetooth or even just via usb-C cable that is seamless and actually works, it would impact every web service from facebook to onedrive. You also have a chilling effect on what kinds of data you’re going to share as well.

That said, tailscale is the ticket for me. The client is BSD licensed, and there exists a self-hostable server which is floss (headscale). Works like airdrop but better.

Arch. I think when people say “bloat” they don’t mean it in the traditional sense of the word. Most people are installing plasma or gnome and pulling all the “bloat” that comes with them. To me at least it’s more that no one is deciding what they think you’re likely to need/do, and overall that makes the system feel much more “predictable”. Less likely to work against what I’m trying to do.

Ignore all the comments about Arch being hard to install or “not for beginners”. That view is outdated. When I first installed Arch when you had to follow the wiki and install via the chroot method. Now it’s dead simple to install with the script and running it isn’t any more difficult than any other distro.

Mainly though it’s because of the AUR.

I don’t like how so many distros ship with discover configured to install flatpaks by default. It’s a huge newbie trap when you click “open file” and uh where are all my files?? You should only install a flatpak if the program is not available for your OS, or if the native version doesn’t work for some reason.

Oxygen² theme was promised around the release of plasma 6 so probably next year!

That’s a shame. I’d probably be content using Mac OS if there was a switch somewhere that put it in “developer mode” or something which would allow you to do that.

Swaywm on Mac OS would be neat.

I’ve haven’t spent much time on mac OS but doesn’t it allow you to run your own desktop environments? I’ve seen things that look like tiling window managers on mac OS.

I agree, Gnome can CSDeez nuts. They’re really ruining my tiling window manager experience. Worse still than the death of global menus is the death of unity HUD style interfaces which were just catching on (press alt button to start a search interface for all the menu options) they were so nice for the likes of gimp and open office.

Sorry if it’s moderately less “ooh ahh shiny” but it’s objectively an incredibly efficient way to find things. Gnome has posed no valid alternative for this and several other features that they have sunset.

As a sway user even I agree with this move. We don’t need our own apple-like entity directing the course of Linux UI design toward pretty walled gardens. We can have our pretty and approachable UI cake and power user/traditional desktop features too!

And what precisely is the moral issue with stealing? Depriving someone of their personal property, which piracy is not.

It certainly feels like we’re on the precipice of something breaking what with computers rapidly getting more locked down, these secure enclaves and/or TPM chips verifying that you’re watching on an approved OS and web browser before allowing you to stream, and then the video is encrypted until it gets to your actual TV. Crazy what they’re getting away with.

In the near future I foresee pirates pointing cameras at TV screens then using AI to clean up the video, then media companies responding by creating randomized slightly different versions of videos so they can trace them back to the account holder who shared it (move some tree branches around, slightly different colored hat on background actors, etc) and perhaps getting legislation passed to stop cameras from being allowed to record IP protected material, and so on.

They want >$100 a month to come out with maybe one movie and maybe two TV shows worth watching each year? No thanks, piracy for me has become more of a means to assuage my fear of missing out and keeping in touch with the cultural moment than actual enjoyment of the media they’re putting out right now.

I do not believe the quality would go down if their budgets were cut significantly.