I guess I could survive using OSX, or even going back to watching TV and playing the NES. But what about the incomplete keyboard on the Macs? Hard to think page down, home etc. are power user features.
Installing multiple desktops is not always trivial. The installation is but you can have duplicate or triplicate menu items like two "Screensaver", two "Appearance", two "System Monitor" and other shit like that. I still have a few such Gnome 3 leftovers (my system came with Mate, I installed Cinnamon, which threw me into Gnome Fallback so was useless, then used Mate again, then installed Xfce, then cleaned up the Cinnamon a bit by apt-get removing it).
I didn't know Mandriva was a company and died, that must be why there's now Mageia (I never tried it) For a no-shit desktop I've now identified linux Mint 15 Mate. (you still have to do a couple things like adding google search engine back to firefox - you can only add the english one btw). Before that I'd recommend Mint 13 Xfce.
*Everything* is second class citizen on linux, already. You never know if you're running the "one true platform", be it distro, package management, init system, desktop. Should you run a.rpm or.deb distro? (with debian being the white knight according to a lot of the dorks). Is YAST the solution to all problems? Is systemd the true solution, or a lock-in like the one you describe? Is Xfce great, or second class? What about KDE? KDE is the epitome of big dependencies (installing one KDE app will pull in "half of KDE"). I'd wager installing a KDE app is a bigger problem that the imaginary Mir dependencies you openly fear.
[replying to myself] The ability to install only a bare system, from network booting even if needed, is by the way why I use straight Ubuntu sometimes, else I use Mint. I liked being able to install Ubuntu 10.10 on a Pentium II 233 with 96MB and give it to a novice user (who never owned a computer before)
Not a huge deal : you can run X or Wayland as you say, or run XMir so you get a traditional desktop even with MIR, or you can install Ubuntu without MIR or Unity in the first place. Right now you already have zillions options to install Ubuntu without Unity, and you can install Ubuntu without any display server as well.
Worse : it's modded "overrated" as the only mod, meaning it's unjustified by admission of the moderator and it is clearly abusive. Now let's hope someone who reads at -1 and has mod points will clean this up or that it will be meta-modded accordingly.
Yeah right, like maintaining terabytes for decades is that trivial and entirely free. I agree that optical media is mostly dying, especially DVD-R which are unreliable, uneconomical garbage. But pressed discs are cheaper and vastly more reliable than them (unless you read them over and over again and end up getting them scratched).
Audio CDs can be pretty bad, they have no error correction, you may want to listen to some of them often thus they more often get damaged (don't tell me you watch a particular season of Breaking Bad weekly or monthly). They are really supplanted by flac, mp3 etc., and stereo 16bit, 44.1KHz or 48KHz can be stored more easily than bluray video. So sure, go file server and/or hard drives for music. But if you can afford bluray sets.. I don't think they're much wrong. If you're concerned with the physical space, there's the option of throwing the boxes away and putting the discs in binders. The box is worthless anyway. Now certainly, the price could drop by half or more.
That's a nice feature if you like it. I remember having to disable it so you can close firefox tabs with the middle button, and I relied heavily on middle button scrolling (I still do)
The guy typing at the phone might have been waiting in a queue behind eight vehicles, faile to noticed and been a long way from the light. Then an asshat came 10 or 20 mph too fast and/or with bad brakes, and the stationary guy was after a sharp curve, invisble to the other asshat. And maybe it was raining..
So there can be bad stuff happening, which wasn't immediately obvious to me right after reading the blurb.. Also if you stall, you usually start the engin again immediately, or flash the emergency lights.
My bad, I used button 1 for fire, middle button for secondary fire and right button for jumping. The default configuration was retarded, it had jumping on space bar, middle unused. (a good decision for users with a two-buton mice)
omg thanks a lot, I would have never known that. On Windows, and MS-DOS edit I'm a heavy user of shift-insert, ctrl-insert, shift-del. now I can use that on laptops.
I love LXDE, but wish it had the feature of creating shortcuts (other gtk2 DE can create shortcuts, they merely miss the start menu functionality I had in Windows 98 SE)
Mozilla confused me actually, by adding a new way of clicking. They removed the arrows next to back/forward, and replaced them with long click, which I had never experienced before (barring stuff like the rocket launcher in Unreal Tournament)
"Cut buffer" is still what people colloquially refer to the behavior of the X11 CLIPBOARD as, even though it (obviously) now uses a different underlying mechanism. The mechanistic distinction is entirely irrelevant to the UI issues we're discussing here.
I have no idea what "cut buffer" means (to me, cutting means destroying the data you've selected) and while I weren't around for the old days it meant anything, I don't like much misappropriation of old meanings. Some people still believe they can low level format their hard drive, even though it's been strictly impossible for a long time (it's done with expensive specific equipment in the factory, with more precision than the write heads have)
It's when you're copy/pasting between two terminals, or between a terminal and browser that the middle-click gets nice. In a terminal there was no right-click or ctrl-v/ctrl-c to begin with. You can use mouse pasting in VT text terminals too (ctrl-alt-F1, ctrl-al-F2 etc. or just no X11 server running) if the gpm daemon is installed. It uses right-clicking then.
Don't forget to install the javascript extension for user ~nicci310ify, rated two or three stars and published on october 2011 with one update in november 2011, so that you can add an ability like being able to mute the sound or change the date format in the top bar.
I use middle mouse button even if it's a wheel. I use middle mouse scrolling in firefox all the time. In Counterstrike I will unbind "mwheelup" and "mwheeldown" to not trigger them by accident. I will prefer a straight old three-button mouse to one where the scrollwheel works but not the third button (thanksfully the scrollwheel always clicks as third button. Only laptops make it more complicated)
There is something very broken : you want to paste something into a URL bar, but first have to delete about 80 characters. So you select the last 80 characters of the current URL, then press del, or backspace if you're illiterate, then middle click and bam you paste the text you've just deleted and lose the text you had copied.
It's silly but infuriating and pissed me off for a few years, till I installed a Firefox extension that cleans the URL bar on left click (it adds a broom icon on the bar's right). For some reason the feature was present in the dillo browser, over half a decade before.
I can speculate it's why Gnome 3 devs want to break it. Also I had middle-click not functioning in epiphany-browser, version 3.4! but the breakage is semi-random. Another feature is you can't scroll though tabs with the scrollwheel, which makes it painful (a shame, because elsewise the browser feels like a better, less resource hungry Google Chromium)
How is scrolling under the pointer a generic action? It wasn't, until the late 90s. And maybe your window isn't scrollable at all, or only horizontally. To me you're drawing a very arbitrary barrier.
I have a similar set up with Xfce right now on the main rig (with top panel permanently shown and bottom panel auto-hide), else I used Mate before and use it on new installations too. LXDE was brilliant too, but just missing a little bit.. and I'm delighted it's moving to Qt instead of GTK3!
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I guess I could survive using OSX, or even going back to watching TV and playing the NES. But what about the incomplete keyboard on the Macs? Hard to think page down, home etc. are power user features.
Installing multiple desktops is not always trivial. The installation is but you can have duplicate or triplicate menu items like two "Screensaver", two "Appearance", two "System Monitor" and other shit like that. I still have a few such Gnome 3 leftovers (my system came with Mate, I installed Cinnamon, which threw me into Gnome Fallback so was useless, then used Mate again, then installed Xfce, then cleaned up the Cinnamon a bit by apt-get removing it).
I didn't know Mandriva was a company and died, that must be why there's now Mageia (I never tried it)
For a no-shit desktop I've now identified linux Mint 15 Mate. (you still have to do a couple things like adding google search engine back to firefox - you can only add the english one btw). Before that I'd recommend Mint 13 Xfce.
*Everything* is second class citizen on linux, already. You never know if you're running the "one true platform", be it distro, package management, init system, desktop. Should you run a .rpm or .deb distro? (with debian being the white knight according to a lot of the dorks). Is YAST the solution to all problems? Is systemd the true solution, or a lock-in like the one you describe? Is Xfce great, or second class? What about KDE? KDE is the epitome of big dependencies (installing one KDE app will pull in "half of KDE"). I'd wager installing a KDE app is a bigger problem that the imaginary Mir dependencies you openly fear.
[replying to myself] The ability to install only a bare system, from network booting even if needed, is by the way why I use straight Ubuntu sometimes, else I use Mint. I liked being able to install Ubuntu 10.10 on a Pentium II 233 with 96MB and give it to a novice user (who never owned a computer before)
Not a huge deal : you can run X or Wayland as you say, or run XMir so you get a traditional desktop even with MIR, or you can install Ubuntu without MIR or Unity in the first place. Right now you already have zillions options to install Ubuntu without Unity, and you can install Ubuntu without any display server as well.
Gnome2, Mate, Xfce have alt+drag for moving windows too, and probably other WM/DE.
Worse : it's modded "overrated" as the only mod, meaning it's unjustified by admission of the moderator and it is clearly abusive. Now let's hope someone who reads at -1 and has mod points will clean this up or that it will be meta-modded accordingly.
Yeah right, like maintaining terabytes for decades is that trivial and entirely free.
I agree that optical media is mostly dying, especially DVD-R which are unreliable, uneconomical garbage. But pressed discs are cheaper and vastly more reliable than them (unless you read them over and over again and end up getting them scratched).
Audio CDs can be pretty bad, they have no error correction, you may want to listen to some of them often thus they more often get damaged (don't tell me you watch a particular season of Breaking Bad weekly or monthly). They are really supplanted by flac, mp3 etc., and stereo 16bit, 44.1KHz or 48KHz can be stored more easily than bluray video. So sure, go file server and/or hard drives for music.
But if you can afford bluray sets.. I don't think they're much wrong. If you're concerned with the physical space, there's the option of throwing the boxes away and putting the discs in binders. The box is worthless anyway. Now certainly, the price could drop by half or more.
That's a nice feature if you like it.
I remember having to disable it so you can close firefox tabs with the middle button, and I relied heavily on middle button scrolling (I still do)
The guy typing at the phone might have been waiting in a queue behind eight vehicles, faile to noticed and been a long way from the light. Then an asshat came 10 or 20 mph too fast and/or with bad brakes, and the stationary guy was after a sharp curve, invisble to the other asshat. And maybe it was raining..
So there can be bad stuff happening, which wasn't immediately obvious to me right after reading the blurb.. Also if you stall, you usually start the engin again immediately, or flash the emergency lights.
My bad, I used button 1 for fire, middle button for secondary fire and right button for jumping. The default configuration was retarded, it had jumping on space bar, middle unused. (a good decision for users with a two-buton mice)
omg
thanks a lot, I would have never known that. On Windows, and MS-DOS edit I'm a heavy user of shift-insert, ctrl-insert, shift-del.
now I can use that on laptops.
I love LXDE, but wish it had the feature of creating shortcuts (other gtk2 DE can create shortcuts, they merely miss the start menu functionality I had in Windows 98 SE)
Still I wish LXDE makes a good comeback.
Mozilla confused me actually, by adding a new way of clicking. They removed the arrows next to back/forward, and replaced them with long click, which I had never experienced before (barring stuff like the rocket launcher in Unreal Tournament)
"Cut buffer" is still what people colloquially refer to the behavior of the X11 CLIPBOARD as, even though it (obviously) now uses a different underlying mechanism. The mechanistic distinction is entirely irrelevant to the UI issues we're discussing here.
I have no idea what "cut buffer" means (to me, cutting means destroying the data you've selected) and while I weren't around for the old days it meant anything, I don't like much misappropriation of old meanings. Some people still believe they can low level format their hard drive, even though it's been strictly impossible for a long time (it's done with expensive specific equipment in the factory, with more precision than the write heads have)
It's when you're copy/pasting between two terminals, or between a terminal and browser that the middle-click gets nice.
In a terminal there was no right-click or ctrl-v/ctrl-c to begin with. You can use mouse pasting in VT text terminals too (ctrl-alt-F1, ctrl-al-F2 etc. or just no X11 server running) if the gpm daemon is installed. It uses right-clicking then.
In Windows XP with TweakUI, Autohotkey, ResHack and a few tools like a "Minimize To Tray" one, I could do things I cannot do in Mate or Xfce.
I meant "from user", but I use gnome and there was a clippy assistant that said "looks like you've finished writing your comment. congraturations!"
Don't forget to install the javascript extension for user ~nicci310ify, rated two or three stars and published on october 2011 with one update in november 2011, so that you can add an ability like being able to mute the sound or change the date format in the top bar.
I use middle mouse button even if it's a wheel. I use middle mouse scrolling in firefox all the time. In Counterstrike I will unbind "mwheelup" and "mwheeldown" to not trigger them by accident. I will prefer a straight old three-button mouse to one where the scrollwheel works but not the third button (thanksfully the scrollwheel always clicks as third button. Only laptops make it more complicated)
I've never eaten or seen Cheetos but damn.. why such disgusting food references?
Try bread and cheese (without sugar in the bread), or potato chips and beer, or peantus with wine or whatever.
There is something very broken : you want to paste something into a URL bar, but first have to delete about 80 characters. So you select the last 80 characters of the current URL, then press del, or backspace if you're illiterate, then middle click and bam you paste the text you've just deleted and lose the text you had copied.
It's silly but infuriating and pissed me off for a few years, till I installed a Firefox extension that cleans the URL bar on left click (it adds a broom icon on the bar's right). For some reason the feature was present in the dillo browser, over half a decade before.
I can speculate it's why Gnome 3 devs want to break it.
Also I had middle-click not functioning in epiphany-browser, version 3.4! but the breakage is semi-random. Another feature is you can't scroll though tabs with the scrollwheel, which makes it painful (a shame, because elsewise the browser feels like a better, less resource hungry Google Chromium)
How is scrolling under the pointer a generic action? It wasn't, until the late 90s. And maybe your window isn't scrollable at all, or only horizontally. To me you're drawing a very arbitrary barrier.
I have a similar set up with Xfce right now on the main rig (with top panel permanently shown and bottom panel auto-hide), else I used Mate before and use it on new installations too.
LXDE was brilliant too, but just missing a little bit.. and I'm delighted it's moving to Qt instead of GTK3!