I find incrond works way better.

Although he won’t win any awards for his vocal skills, this was the song that drove me in my early years in college as I learned what a hacker really was and learnt more about GNU at a time when everyone miss-pronounced it as Linux.

Well yes I thought you were using emulators. When I was a kid I would frequently break X11 so I spent much of my time on the console framebuffer. All I needed it to to is let me watch TV and videos till I was bothered to fix the config file for X

None.

Why? Erm, living by myself I don’t need to lock myself out ;)

Look up chroot

Mplayer can render to the terminal using aalib

Yes I have used that in the past but it’s way to finniky in operation as it sometimes registers a left or right click instead.

GNU Parallel

Unlock the power of multiple cores in your command lines!

Put your aliases in .bash_aliases

Make sure your .bashrc sources .bash_aliases like this:

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then . ~/.bash_aliases fi

I’ve tried hard to get libreoffice and dvddisaster to render in a terminal but for some reason it never works… 😏

Middle click in chrome…

If you want to use ctrl-v you need to the newer method of ctrl-shift-c first. It uses shift for the same reason windows does in a command prompt, ctrl-c is a reserved combination.

Not a Linux issue. Two different paradigms one older than the other, chose which is best to use.

On my laptop’s I use ctrl-shift-c and ctrl-shift-v due to not having a middle click. With a mouse I middle click instinctively.

Systemd is tolerable but it still messes up my day. I’m moving away from it soon.

The idea was sound, the implementation not so much.

What? This crazyness is coming over from Windows?

All colours are and should be under the full control of the user, as it always has been so. So called “accent colours” removed critical functionality from Windows as well as breaking the UI since windows 8.

As a software tester of 10 years and a CS Degree holder, I certainly would have never passed software that didn’t meet these usability tests.

I’m colourblind. I must have full and unhindered colour modification options, the GUI will look the way I decide based on what I want and how my eyes perceive it. This especially means I must have full control over titlebar colours and any other colours that used to differ based on window focus.

At work in Win 10 I have chosen an “accent colour” which seems to me a massive limitation, having had used superior GUI’s since Win 3.1 where the user is able to chose and adjust anything from the colour of title bars when focused or unfocused to the font used on numerous UI elements and widgets.

The problem is simple. Windows 10 grants (I say that in a sarcastic way) the user have the option to chose a so called “accent colour”. This however fails to do two things. Firstly it forces the design choices of the development team onto every user, something that is clearly wrong for Linux as history shows it was a plus over windows. Secondly, the accent colour fails to address several UI modal changes, completely obliterating them yet the modal elements remain part of the UI!!!

How in windows 10 can I tell if a window has focus or not? In Win 3.1 to 7 and anything running on Linux it was easy: the title bar colour was different. But since Win 8 that was dropped, windows still have focus and modal dialogs but you, the user, can not determine which has what and when.

Now, like I said I’m colour blind which means maybe there is a difference but I can’t see it. So what do I do? Well I randomly start typing commands into the wrong powershell window, or I want to control the browser using the keyboard only to discover that Outlook has focus and has started doing things in response to me banging keys. I have two monitors at work and focus moves between them and windows gives me no indication what has focus at all. Nothing I can see, out of the corner of my eye that is.

Thing is there is just one difference, the focused window might have a bold titlebar text or not. Note I bolded that. But I can’t see this difference without pixel peeping.

Every day I have to put up with this in the windows world and it annoys the hell out of me because the essential functionality was always there and has been removed because someone tossed a coin*. Maybe GNOME won’t fall into the trap of preventing full customisation of the UI, I hope so, user accessibility needs require it. I moved away from GNOME when they moved away from the desktop metaphor as I thought the alternative was terrible, and it still is, so this won’t affect me but it will affect loads of new colourblind users from the start.

The user has the last say and should be able to override anything.

HCI (Human Computer Interaction) rules exist for a good reason, stop chucking them away and make them options if needed.

And finally, take it from an actual colourblind computer users and electronics geek. Colour blindness accessibility filters DO NOT WORK. They simply don’t because everyone has a different kind/degree/combination of colour blindness. Normal visioned people are easy to demonstrate to as all we have to do is apply such a filter in reverse and they are like “Whoa what the hell” yet they fail to see (pun intended) that it’s a simulation that barely represents our individual colour ranges. Windows 10 has a colourblind mode, does nothing. Android has one, which has me try and sort colours to determine my specific adjustments, works better but still barely is used by myself.

The only fix is to give the user full control over all colours because then they, they can adjust the UI for the way they see the universe.

Here is an example from the linked blog. See this GUI. Which window has focus? The one on top? Well if GNOME prevents windows from always remaining above others regardless of focus, yes that would be the case. But if GNOME does allow focus to windows beneath others, well, which has focus? I cant tell.

I had intended on uploading images but that seems to not be working with this post/lemmy instance at the moment. Basically if you look at the blog there are examples. First of all the “pink” example, well that shades of grey to my eyes as pink rarely is a colour I can notice, most pinks are grey. Further down are examples of a stop clock application. Looking at the image I see most of the clocks digits are disabled, thats what grey means, disabled elements. However it turns out that they may be pink? Only the seconds are enabled, this is highly confusing as why would anyone be allowed to think a clock has digits disabled? It makes no sense and has me figure out the answer, which is bad UI design from the start. All the digits should be the same colour. It’s basic HCI rules there.

Further down you see the screenshots of the entire desktop with a window above another. In none of those examples can I tell which has focus. I can not assume its the one on top, plenty of UI’s have “keep on top” functionality, if I’m coming from something else why would I assume GNOME to be different?

Accent colours are bad. They force users to use static themes and UI choices made by other people, that is bad UI design, really bad. Windows 10 is lambasted for it often. If you are going to do it, do it right. The “accent” feature should be part of a simple customisation mode, but it all gets overridden by the advanced tickbox.

I literally can not think of anything software wise, especially FOSS as I use the command line a lot and those tools and concepts go back decades. Being a retro computer geek I can list a ton of old proprietary systems or software that I consider perfectly usable.

Oh wait, I just thought of one: RiscOS Open. The best OS for ARM besides Linux, all my Pi’s run on it and it natively uses BBC BASIC, although not Free as in Freedom BBC BASIC, or even BASIC in general is a programming language that has a lot to offer.

Although not software I think the biggest thing I have in mind would be Optical Media. Most consider it obsolete, even against data tape, but I use it extensively precisely because it has features no other media possesses (ignoring LTO tape). Featurea such as many decades of longevity, cheapness (even today it’s cheaper than equivalent sized flash media) and above all it’s the only media that has read only properties.

SSD’s, HDD’s are not close to archival grade, only optical and tape (ignoring film and the ultimate archival media, vellum) are.

All my data that must be recovered at all costs is archived to BD-R, which in turn is backed up to LTO tape, which in turn is backed up into the cloud. Both the bd-r and LTO tape are written and finished days before the data has been uploaded to the cloud! Because my upload speed is 20Mb/s maximum the old SCSI LTO 4 drive writing to tape at 60MB/s wipes the floor with it, the bd-r records much slower than that but still is done in a fraction of the time.

Maybe if I’m ever able to get 1Gb upload bandwidth I’ll use the cloud more, but at the moment it’s running at a slower speed than my first 486 with it’s 210MB HDD!

Edit: Ah! Wait, I forgot to mention Window Maker. I use Window Maker as my window manager. Works like a charm and hasn’t changed in looks one bit since the 90’s

Many like myself don’t like the old idea of downloading stuff that “just runs”. It’s too much going back to the old ways with windows where you randomly just downloaded a binary off a website and ran it.

Basically it’s the equivalent of sideloading apps on mobile devices. I won’t do that either unless it is required.

Now I do have one such app, in appimage which is my preference anyway. KDEnlive, which I run as an appimage Vs the Debian package only because I’m on Debian 10 on my main machine and have yet to pencil in the upgrade time.

Now, GNU Guix is interesting. Cryptographically secure and verified compilation (or pre-compilation) of source code straight from GitHub etc. Now, that will be more like it!

I have in 10 years of being on Signal never managed to get a single person to be upgraded from SMS to a proper Signal contact.

Plenty of WhatsApp contacts.

I was using Signal to replace the default SMS app on my phone specifically because it was Free Software and I trusted it more as the SMS app. It had nothing to do with privacy, you don’t get that on SMS, but to do with trusting the code.

Alas I’m now using the built in app and have uninstalled Signal.