Speaking of context menus, even to this day I have not understood the point of the context menu key in a "Windows keyboard" (next to the right Win key). Does someone really use it? Even Caps Lock is more useful than that.
I actually wonder what the cry here is anyway. My impression was that there was not many GNOME users in/. anyway, as many of them had jumped the ship a long ago for other reasons.
I'm actually looking forward to the modern LXDE. A snappy desktop (XFCE is another one) is really what Linux needs and not these bloated behemoths like Unity, GNOME or KDE. Even Windows has surpassed them in performance, which is quite embarrassing. Combined with the excellent Qt toolkit, the new LXDE might be quite nice.
I never understood why something like Mono had to be brought into Linux world. The.NET Framework does not suit there at all. Or are there actually people that get value from Mono? Please educate me.:)
Just imagine that when you dragged across some text with your virtual finger, it got stuck on the end of it. Then wherever you poke your virtual finger, the text appears. Not so unnatural after all.
You might be onto something, but in that case it might be a good idea to paint the tip of the mouse cursor red, or something like that, to indicate that there is content "stuck" on it.
Middle-click-paste only works in places where pasting makes sense, like text areas. In other programs like 3D viewers and editors it has a completely different function, like panning or rotating.
Pasting also makes sense in a 3D modeling tool. Having very different functions for the button is only confusing.
Now it's becoming a cheap-ass knockoff of some nasty hybrid of OSX and Windows with all the unique and useful features removed.
I have been worried about this trend too. When I have been dabbling with Unity and GNOME3 I usually need to resort to things like "GNOME Tweak Tool" or editing some setting file by hand to achieve what I need. Put an actual "advanced settings" category for this stuff, and stop this race to the bottom in terms of who removes the most of the settings and features.
If someone is confused by accidentally pasting something while pressing a button, it can't take all that long to figure out that pressing it is pasting.
You have a problem right there. It's not a good user experience if clicking a mouse button accidentally pastes some blurb to the application. If you paste a lot, having it in a mouse button might be handy. We should have a program to configure your mouse to do exactly that if you want to. But as a standard OS feature it's not that good idea.
It's still funny how configurable Windows is these days when compared to Linux desktops. I think KDE is the only one that has retained all the bells and whistles.
Nothing stops you from only writing a webpage thats HTML1 with no JS; just dont be surprised when noone wants to visit it.
If it contained interesting stuff, HTML1 wouldn't stop me visiting it. Actually it might provide nicer experience than a modern web page which is surrounded with advertisement banners and various menus from every side.
Hey, why not! I support the idea that games from any era can be played at any time. BTW Quake 3 Arena was still the game used for tournaments held at QuakeCon 2013. Playing both old and new stuff makes a nice mix of entertainment.
I think it's the "many people would give up their civil rights for a pint of beer" problem. We use Google products because they are nice and get the job done. Same reason why people use Facebook despite the datamining. Same reason why people get games from Steam despite the DRM. It's not a good thing, but I believe this is the reason. You don't feel the wrath of the evil parts in the typical day-to-day user experience.
One guy went ape shit on me and accused me of "spamming the review queue". I've learned to expect apathy from the maintainers of open-source projects, but outright hostility?!
It's not the first time I hear this story. The hostility of OSS people seems to be a recurring thing. I think it might already be time to find out why this phenomenon happens and whether the situation could be improved somehow.
That would indeed protect the system files, but I think that just mounting the root read-only is a bit crude solution and not necessarily what we want.
As a sidenote, does Linux have anything that is reminiscent to Windows Resource Protection, i.e. a mechanism which detects tampered system files and recovers them automatically?
I dont get it. What are they talking about? Has Linux ever been rock solid? Upgrade your kernel, and things breaks apart. That is hardly rock solid to me.
Actually the kernel is really, really good. My experience is that when there is a problem with Linux-based OS, it's without exception in some userspace component.
"How the fsck do I start notepad on this crappy excuse for a GUI?"
"Easy. You just press Windows + R to get to the command line and type 'notepad'. It's such a great advance over using a menu."
This is true. The new Start Screen is so clunky to use for starting apps by clicking, so many users quickly resort to the search function.
1. The notebook is a lot newer than the kubuntu tower and has more memory and a faster processor, but the tower is faster. High performance? You realize that the ten fastest computers in the world run Linux?
I was talking mostly about vanilla Ubuntu. KDE runs much smoother than the Unity desktop. So I can somewhat agree with you regarding that point.
2. Crashy apps have nothing to do with the OS they're running on, shitty progremmers write crashy apps. The only thing I've seen crash on any of the computers in years is Adobe Flash, and it crashes regularly no matter what OS it's running on. Adobe just writes shitty programs.
Linux is just the kernel. You need to pile up a good amount of pieces to make a full OS, and generally a lot of that stuff crashes much more under Linux. On the other hand, the Linux kernel never crashes. Again, it's the userspace OS components which are the problem. What comes to Flash, my experience is not similar: these days I don't see it crash almost ever, and this applies to both Windows and Linux.
3. Are you kidding? Windows doesn't have a single feature that KDE lacks, but lacks many features KDE sports.
It's the small things, like multi-monitor support which break often. Graphical touchpad configuration does not have all the many options that it has on Windows. Mounting network shares is often much harder and non-straightforward than in Windows.
4. Again, are you kidding? A modern Linux distro will run an old Linux program just fine, try running Microsoft FoxPro 6 on anything newer than Win 98 (It wouldn't even open in XP).
Consistent APIs cover much more than just a guarantee that some old program will work. And even that is often not the case, as old programs will often fail to start due to library incompatibilities in Linux. But what comes to solely old app compatibility, it's not always that rosy under Windows either.
Did Stallman scare you as a child?
You know, I have the feeling that you are a bit butthurt and rigorously want to defend Linux for some reason(s). Hey, no one is going to pry it from your hands. If it really just is your cup of tea, use it and I'm fine with that. I like and use Linux too. But I see good reasons to use Windows too.
I've just read that one bolt of lightning powers one household with all their energy needs for a month. I'm not too sure how accurate that is; but I think we'll need a lot more than that.
I will try to plug the numbers in. Let's see how this goes.
According to the physics.org toast power article, a lightning packs "over five billion joules of energy". I will round that down to 5 billion. A watt is the same thing as "joules per second". A month has 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 2,592,000 seconds. Then, 5 * 10^9 J / 2,592,000 s = 1929 J/s. This means that we can run the house at a constant power consumption of 1929 watts. Converted to a standard kWh number that would be 1389kWh per month.
That's pretty much on the spot. It would indeed be enough to run a house of a small family for one month, accounting electrical heating running around winter.
I sometimes tend to think the opposite: some of the evolution's achievements seem so precisely engineered that it feels more like a designer's product than test of time. Not that I would actually believe in intelligent design and all that stuff.
Definitely crippleware in your sense of the word, but entirely functional. Most of the features are not used in daily life.
Agreed. The Express version comes with all the good stuff of Visual Studio: IntelliSense, optimizing C++ compiler,.NET support, edit-and-continue, integrated debugger, and what else. One feature you might miss is the support for building 64-bit binaries, but usually you won't be shipping 64-bit stuff under Windows anyway. Profiling support has also been removed.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of context menus, even to this day I have not understood the point of the context menu key in a "Windows keyboard" (next to the right Win key). Does someone really use it? Even Caps Lock is more useful than that.
I actually wonder what the cry here is anyway. My impression was that there was not many GNOME users in /. anyway, as many of them had jumped the ship a long ago for other reasons.
I'm actually looking forward to the modern LXDE. A snappy desktop (XFCE is another one) is really what Linux needs and not these bloated behemoths like Unity, GNOME or KDE. Even Windows has surpassed them in performance, which is quite embarrassing. Combined with the excellent Qt toolkit, the new LXDE might be quite nice.
I never understood why something like Mono had to be brought into Linux world. The .NET Framework does not suit there at all. Or are there actually people that get value from Mono? Please educate me. :)
Just imagine that when you dragged across some text with your virtual finger, it got stuck on the end of it. Then wherever you poke your virtual finger, the text appears. Not so unnatural after all.
You might be onto something, but in that case it might be a good idea to paint the tip of the mouse cursor red, or something like that, to indicate that there is content "stuck" on it.
Middle-click-paste only works in places where pasting makes sense, like text areas. In other programs like 3D viewers and editors it has a completely different function, like panning or rotating.
Pasting also makes sense in a 3D modeling tool. Having very different functions for the button is only confusing.
Now it's becoming a cheap-ass knockoff of some nasty hybrid of OSX and Windows with all the unique and useful features removed.
I have been worried about this trend too. When I have been dabbling with Unity and GNOME3 I usually need to resort to things like "GNOME Tweak Tool" or editing some setting file by hand to achieve what I need. Put an actual "advanced settings" category for this stuff, and stop this race to the bottom in terms of who removes the most of the settings and features.
If someone is confused by accidentally pasting something while pressing a button, it can't take all that long to figure out that pressing it is pasting.
You have a problem right there. It's not a good user experience if clicking a mouse button accidentally pastes some blurb to the application. If you paste a lot, having it in a mouse button might be handy. We should have a program to configure your mouse to do exactly that if you want to. But as a standard OS feature it's not that good idea.
It's still funny how configurable Windows is these days when compared to Linux desktops. I think KDE is the only one that has retained all the bells and whistles.
Many modern mouses make it hard to click the middle button without scrolling a notch with the wheel at the same time. Incredibly annoying.
Nothing stops you from only writing a webpage thats HTML1 with no JS; just dont be surprised when noone wants to visit it.
If it contained interesting stuff, HTML1 wouldn't stop me visiting it. Actually it might provide nicer experience than a modern web page which is surrounded with advertisement banners and various menus from every side.
You still play Quake?
How... quaint.
Hey, why not! I support the idea that games from any era can be played at any time. BTW Quake 3 Arena was still the game used for tournaments held at QuakeCon 2013. Playing both old and new stuff makes a nice mix of entertainment.
I think it's the "many people would give up their civil rights for a pint of beer" problem. We use Google products because they are nice and get the job done. Same reason why people use Facebook despite the datamining. Same reason why people get games from Steam despite the DRM. It's not a good thing, but I believe this is the reason. You don't feel the wrath of the evil parts in the typical day-to-day user experience.
Nowhere in the article does it say that pepper (ie. PPAPI) is going anywhere. You'll note that the built in flash and PDF viewer don't use NPAPI
I think he was making a salt & pepper joke.
But, learning a better way is just too hard for some, so they'll continue to troll.
That would be ignorance rather than trolling. A troll generally knows that he is spreading tantalizing information.
One guy went ape shit on me and accused me of "spamming the review queue". I've learned to expect apathy from the maintainers of open-source projects, but outright hostility?!
It's not the first time I hear this story. The hostility of OSS people seems to be a recurring thing. I think it might already be time to find out why this phenomenon happens and whether the situation could be improved somehow.
That would indeed protect the system files, but I think that just mounting the root read-only is a bit crude solution and not necessarily what we want.
As a sidenote, does Linux have anything that is reminiscent to Windows Resource Protection, i.e. a mechanism which detects tampered system files and recovers them automatically?
I dont get it. What are they talking about? Has Linux ever been rock solid? Upgrade your kernel, and things breaks apart. That is hardly rock solid to me.
Actually the kernel is really, really good. My experience is that when there is a problem with Linux-based OS, it's without exception in some userspace component.
But Windows 8 has brought the CLI back.
"How the fsck do I start notepad on this crappy excuse for a GUI?" "Easy. You just press Windows + R to get to the command line and type 'notepad'. It's such a great advance over using a menu."
This is true. The new Start Screen is so clunky to use for starting apps by clicking, so many users quickly resort to the search function.
1. The notebook is a lot newer than the kubuntu tower and has more memory and a faster processor, but the tower is faster. High performance? You realize that the ten fastest computers in the world run Linux?
I was talking mostly about vanilla Ubuntu. KDE runs much smoother than the Unity desktop. So I can somewhat agree with you regarding that point.
2. Crashy apps have nothing to do with the OS they're running on, shitty progremmers write crashy apps. The only thing I've seen crash on any of the computers in years is Adobe Flash, and it crashes regularly no matter what OS it's running on. Adobe just writes shitty programs.
Linux is just the kernel. You need to pile up a good amount of pieces to make a full OS, and generally a lot of that stuff crashes much more under Linux. On the other hand, the Linux kernel never crashes. Again, it's the userspace OS components which are the problem. What comes to Flash, my experience is not similar: these days I don't see it crash almost ever, and this applies to both Windows and Linux.
3. Are you kidding? Windows doesn't have a single feature that KDE lacks, but lacks many features KDE sports.
It's the small things, like multi-monitor support which break often. Graphical touchpad configuration does not have all the many options that it has on Windows. Mounting network shares is often much harder and non-straightforward than in Windows.
4. Again, are you kidding? A modern Linux distro will run an old Linux program just fine, try running Microsoft FoxPro 6 on anything newer than Win 98 (It wouldn't even open in XP).
Consistent APIs cover much more than just a guarantee that some old program will work. And even that is often not the case, as old programs will often fail to start due to library incompatibilities in Linux. But what comes to solely old app compatibility, it's not always that rosy under Windows either.
Did Stallman scare you as a child?
You know, I have the feeling that you are a bit butthurt and rigorously want to defend Linux for some reason(s). Hey, no one is going to pry it from your hands. If it really just is your cup of tea, use it and I'm fine with that. I like and use Linux too. But I see good reasons to use Windows too.
I've just read that one bolt of lightning powers one household with all their energy needs for a month. I'm not too sure how accurate that is; but I think we'll need a lot more than that.
I will try to plug the numbers in. Let's see how this goes.
According to the physics.org toast power article, a lightning packs "over five billion joules of energy". I will round that down to 5 billion. A watt is the same thing as "joules per second". A month has 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 2,592,000 seconds. Then, 5 * 10^9 J / 2,592,000 s = 1929 J/s. This means that we can run the house at a constant power consumption of 1929 watts. Converted to a standard kWh number that would be 1389kWh per month.
That's pretty much on the spot. It would indeed be enough to run a house of a small family for one month, accounting electrical heating running around winter.
Very good point.
I sometimes tend to think the opposite: some of the evolution's achievements seem so precisely engineered that it feels more like a designer's product than test of time. Not that I would actually believe in intelligent design and all that stuff.
Definitely crippleware in your sense of the word, but entirely functional. Most of the features are not used in daily life.
Agreed. The Express version comes with all the good stuff of Visual Studio: IntelliSense, optimizing C++ compiler, .NET support, edit-and-continue, integrated debugger, and what else. One feature you might miss is the support for building 64-bit binaries, but usually you won't be shipping 64-bit stuff under Windows anyway. Profiling support has also been removed.