Is Raspbian child abuse?
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I've spent the past couple of days setting up a Raspberry Pi 3 I bought my son, in order that he can experience the joys of complaining about technology.
However, I might have gone too far, and will have to answer many 'why?' questions with, 'I just don't know, son. Maybe some people like it?'
First impressions (of NOOBS) were pretty good - connect to the WAN, tick some boxes, let it go. The UI looked like something from the 90s but then so did the Windows installer until very recently.
Once I had installed a few I restarted it and let it boot to Raspbian, which is the recommended OS for the Pi. Oh dear.
The organisation was nice, as it had some useful apps pinned and the 'Start' menu had all the things he would need for a while. The taskbar was at the top instead of the bottom where God intended but that was an easy fix.
The first issue was with the colour scheme. In this screenshot it doesn't look too bad, but from the sofa where I usually 'work' it was pretty much unreadable. I find it hard to believe that better colours weren't considered.
The second issue was with the 'Start' button itself. Notice it's a circle. If you move your pointer to the corner quickly enough it will go right past the button and end up in no-man's-land. It's possible that older Windows versions did the same but it definitely feels like a step back from how it's been the last few years.
When I viewed these screenshots I discovered the next problem.
Why are some coloured and some grey? The first group of buttons look like they are disabled, but as I had multiple images to browse they were fully functional.
The biggest FFS moment was when I dared to try and set the clock
Those are definitely the most important things I care about when my clock is wrong. By comparison, look at this terrible Windows 10 box
It scrolls down more to reveal other helpful links to various time- and location-related settings.
This is supposed to be the distro you use to teach programming and computers to children.
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@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
This is supposed to be the distro you use to teach programming and computers to children.
Nah. This is just Debian compiled for the Raspberry Pi. Edubuntu is the distro for teaching kids.
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@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
The second issue was with the 'Start' button itself. Notice it's a circle. If you move your pointer to the corner quickly enough it will go right past the button and end up in no-man's-land. It's possible that older Windows versions did the same but it definitely feels like a step back from how it's been the last few years.
From Win95/NT 4.0 to 2000/ME you could overshoot the button. XP was the first to put the button's 'hot zone' right up against the screen edges.
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Format codes: man 3 strftime; %n for line break
Pro-tip: if you ever find yourself typing something like that, BURN IT ALL DOWN AND START OVER.
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@blakeyrat said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Format codes: man 3 strftime; %n for line break
Pro-tip: if you ever find yourself typing something like that, BURN IT ALL DOWN AND START OVER.
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@yamikuronue said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Nah. This is just Debian compiled for the Raspberry Pi. Edubuntu is the distro for teaching kids.
Ah. Still, it's the one recommended in all the Pi tutorials so a significant percentage of new users will be using it.
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@raceprouk said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
From Win95/NT 4.0 to 2000/ME you could overshoot the button. XP was the first to put the button's 'hot zone' right up against the screen edges.
Not exactly bleeding edge, then.
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@blakeyrat I don't even know what it means, and I'm worried if I look it up it might push something more important out of my head.
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@coldandtired Sadly I've been in enough debates with Linux users that I think I know what it means:
If you want an explanation of what characters coorespond to what parts of time, open a console window and type in this command:
man 3 strftime. If you want to put a linebreak (in your clock? Whaaa?), type%nwhere you want the linebreak. Also we fucking hate you, the user.BTW I also love how "action when clicked" is apparently a free-form text field. Do you type in a console command there? WTF!
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Not familiar with Raspbian I was thinking it was some new diet Gwyneth Paltrow or some other mentally disturbed celebrity was forcing on her kids.
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@blakeyrat Well, that's the lyrics to Careless Whisper gone :(
Are these formats so dynamic that they can't be put in the dialog box itself? Is it impossible to make a button which inputs that command for you?
I swear, just getting a shared folder set up between the Pi and Windows was more typing in the console than I've done in Windows in total.
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@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Are these formats so dynamic that they can't be put in the dialog box itself? Is it impossible to make a button which inputs that command for you?
To give an idea, Windows just picks 4-5 formats for each internationalization and presents those in menus:
There's probably some guy out there who wants a text entry field so he can make sure the delimiter between hours and minutes is the word "time-o" instead of a colon, but I think we as a society can safely ignore him.
Posted at 3 time-o 21.
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@blakeyrat said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Are these formats so dynamic that they can't be put in the dialog box itself? Is it impossible to make a button which inputs that command for you?
To give an idea, Windows just picks 4-5 formats for each internationalization and presents those in menus:
There's probably some guy out there who wants a text entry field so he can make sure the delimiter between hours and minutes is the word "time-o" instead of a colon, but I think we as a society can safely ignore him.
Posted at 3 time-o 21.
For awhile I had my system time set to some ludicrous custom format. 2017.9.8 18.23 I think. As a smoke test to break any shitty code I wrote. Got tired if it breaking everybody else's shitty code, though.
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@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
The taskbar was at the top instead of the bottom where God intended but that was an easy fix.
https://i.imgur.com/DdVYltU.png
Never used it any other way. Dunno why computers don't ship with side taskbars by default.
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@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
The taskbar was at the top instead of the bottom where God intended but that was an easy fix.
https://i.imgur.com/DdVYltU.png
Never used it any other way. Dunno why computers don't ship with side taskbars by default.
Cause it wastes the top-left hot corner and makes the bottom-right one useless?
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@sloosecannon said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
The taskbar was at the top instead of the bottom where God intended but that was an easy fix.
https://i.imgur.com/DdVYltU.png
Never used it any other way. Dunno why computers don't ship with side taskbars by default.
Cause it wastes the top-left hot corner and makes the bottom-right one useless?
Specifically:
Versus
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@sloosecannon said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@sloosecannon said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
The taskbar was at the top instead of the bottom where God intended but that was an easy fix.
https://i.imgur.com/DdVYltU.png
Never used it any other way. Dunno why computers don't ship with side taskbars by default.
Cause it wastes the top-left hot corner and makes the bottom-right one useless?
Specifically:
Versus
I did not know that I could double-click there to close. Nor do I care - there's a perfectly good X button (single-click!), and I've never needed that menu in literally anything besides command prompt. So, yeah, the top left corner was already wasted.
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@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
So, yeah, the top left corner was already wasted.
Which is a compelling reason to make it the default, especially for people who do use it
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@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
The biggest FFS moment was when I dared to try and set the clock
Ah! I see you were trying to configure the Clock widget! Would you like help with that?
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@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
I did not know that I could double-click there to close. Nor do I care - there's a perfectly good X button (single-click!), and I've never needed that menu in literally anything besides command prompt. So, yeah, the top left corner was already wasted.
That top-left double click to close thing dates back to Windows 3.1. I don't know why it still exists in Windows 10.
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@the_quiet_one said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
I did not know that I could double-click there to close. Nor do I care - there's a perfectly good X button (single-click!), and I've never needed that menu in literally anything besides command prompt. So, yeah, the top left corner was already wasted.
That top-left double click to close thing dates back to Windows 3.1. I don't know why it still exists in Windows 10.
It doesn't have to be close, just that the application seldom overrides the default (because, you know, why would you?).
IIRC, you can also override what double-clicking the titlebar does too.Notice that you can tell what double-clicking the titlebar will do by pressing Alt-Space on your keyboard and observing which menuitem is bolded? And what double-clicking the appicon in the titlebar will do with a single-click on said icon?
Try it! It's probably the most useless piece of trivia you'll learn today!
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@tsaukpaetra said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@the_quiet_one said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
I did not know that I could double-click there to close. Nor do I care - there's a perfectly good X button (single-click!), and I've never needed that menu in literally anything besides command prompt. So, yeah, the top left corner was already wasted.
That top-left double click to close thing dates back to Windows 3.1. I don't know why it still exists in Windows 10.
Notice that you can tell what double-clicking the titlebar will do by pressing Alt-Space on your keyboard and observing which menuitem is bolded? And what double-clicking the appicon in the titlebar will do with a single-click on said icon?
Try it! It's probably the most useless piece of trivia you'll learn today!
Doesn't seem to be correct. Notepad++ has Close bolded, but when I double click the titlebar it does the usual restore/maximize toggle.
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@the_quiet_one said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@tsaukpaetra said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@the_quiet_one said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
I did not know that I could double-click there to close. Nor do I care - there's a perfectly good X button (single-click!), and I've never needed that menu in literally anything besides command prompt. So, yeah, the top left corner was already wasted.
That top-left double click to close thing dates back to Windows 3.1. I don't know why it still exists in Windows 10.
Notice that you can tell what double-clicking the titlebar will do by pressing Alt-Space on your keyboard and observing which menuitem is bolded? And what double-clicking the appicon in the titlebar will do with a single-click on said icon?
Try it! It's probably the most useless piece of trivia you'll learn today!
Doesn't seem to be correct. Notepad++ has Close bolded, but when I double click the titlebar it does the usual restore/maximize toggle.
Haha sucker! Made you try it! I win pointis!!!! :D :D :D
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@tsaukpaetra said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@the_quiet_one said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@tsaukpaetra said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@the_quiet_one said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
I did not know that I could double-click there to close. Nor do I care - there's a perfectly good X button (single-click!), and I've never needed that menu in literally anything besides command prompt. So, yeah, the top left corner was already wasted.
That top-left double click to close thing dates back to Windows 3.1. I don't know why it still exists in Windows 10.
Notice that you can tell what double-clicking the titlebar will do by pressing Alt-Space on your keyboard and observing which menuitem is bolded? And what double-clicking the appicon in the titlebar will do with a single-click on said icon?
Try it! It's probably the most useless piece of trivia you'll learn today!
Doesn't seem to be correct. Notepad++ has Close bolded, but when I double click the titlebar it does the usual restore/maximize toggle.
Haha sucker! Made you try it! I win pointis!!!! :D :D :D
Worked for me. TMYK.
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@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
I did not know that I could double-click there to close.
Showing your age, I’d say. Or I am mine, of course.
@the_quiet_one said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
That top-left double click to close thing dates back to Windows 3.1.
Even further:
Even in Windows 1.01 it was the normal way to close a window, and stayed that until Windows 95 added the ×-box in the top right corner.
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@coldandtired It sounds like you're just discovering all the usual problems with Linux distros.
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@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
The second issue was with the 'Start' button itself. Notice it's a circle. If you move your pointer to the corner quickly enough it will go right past the button and end up in no-man's-land. It's possible that older Windows versions did the same but it definitely feels like a step back from how it's been the last few years.
@raceprouk said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
From Win95/NT 4.0 to 2000/ME you could overshoot the button. XP was the first to put the button's 'hot zone' right up against the screen edges.
Relevant reading for the terminally bored: Fitts's Law, specifically the Rule Of The Infinite Edge (have to search the page - there's no anchor to it.)
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I have it set up to shrink the icons, disable grouping and add text (because why not use all that vertical space):
Admittedly it can't fit most titles, though to me it's an improvement over only icons.
It's also interesting to see that Windows can do this for years, yet Linux nearly always gets something wrong (e.g. the text might be rotated 90º, the grouping might be off or the icons are weirdly scaled). YMMV...
@sloosecannon said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@sloosecannon said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
The taskbar was at the top instead of the bottom where God intended but that was an easy fix.
https://i.imgur.com/DdVYltU.png
Never used it any other way. Dunno why computers don't ship with side taskbars by default.
Cause it wastes the top-left hot corner and makes the bottom-right one useless?
Specifically:
Versus
So you lose one corner which might not even work reliably if a program has its own window decorations or if the window isn't maximized, doesn't sound like a great loss to me...
The Windows menu and close corners still work. The bottom right one also doesn't seem like a great loss, and I wonder if Microsoft implemented the same sticking action for multi-monitors as they did for the top-right corner (try it: drag the cursor to the top right with the mouse slammed against the top, it will stick in the corner instead of moving to the second screen). I'm mostly glad there's no Windows 8 charms bar there anymore.
EDIT: Results may wildly vary in Linux, added YMMV
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@jbert I think it would work better with the layout inverted, so that the windows menu remained at the bottom.
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@pjh said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Relevant reading for the terminally bored: Fitts's Law, specifically the Rule Of The Infinite Edge (have to search the page - there's no anchor to it.)
Better yet for
readers: you can search the page for “Jeff Atwood” and get to the relevant section too.
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@gurth said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@pjh said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Relevant reading for the terminally bored: Fitts's Law, specifically the Rule Of The Infinite Edge (have to search the page - there's no anchor to it.)
Better yet for
readers: you can search the page for “Jeff Atwood” and get to the relevant section too.Yes - I deliberately omitted the trigger warning...
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@jbert said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
It's also interesting to see that Windows can do this for years, yet Linux nearly always gets it wrong (e.g. the text might be rotated 90º or the grouping might be off).
Really? I've never seen that on KDE, at least. Which also starts (for me, with the way I have it set up) with each of them able to fit a couple of lines of text. But After enough stuff gets opened they will shrink as necessary.
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@blakeyrat said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@coldandtired said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Are these formats so dynamic that they can't be put in the dialog box itself? Is it impossible to make a button which inputs that command for you?
To give an idea, Windows just picks 4-5 formats for each internationalization and presents those in menus:
There's probably some guy out there who wants a text entry field so he can make sure the delimiter between hours and minutes is the word "time-o" instead of a colon, but I think we as a society can safely ignore him.
Posted at 3 time-o 21.
Windows still has custom formats available, several clicks deep:
And as you can see, it's still a hell of a lot better than that Raspian abomination. For one, it tells you upfront what the codes are - it doesn't even send you to a help screen, much less opaquely implore you to use a CLI to look up an obscure string formatting function, and from there derive the correct magical keywords to make the time look like you want.
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@dreikin The meat here being that Windows shows you the important shit up front, and makes sure that only people with the intelligence required to click through a series of menus are able to really screw with the settings.
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@boomzilla I have found KDE to be much like using Windows. Pretty much everything I tried just worked. It was also the most stable DE I had tried (Unity crashed every 5 minutes, and GNOME had all sorts of weird issues [but no crashes, oddly]. LXDE works, but is kind of minimal, and had a few mouse bugs [which are fixed, AFAIK]. I haven't looked at any other DEs yet).
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@the_quiet_one said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
I did not know that I could double-click there to close. Nor do I care - there's a perfectly good X button (single-click!), and I've never needed that menu in literally anything besides command prompt. So, yeah, the top left corner was already wasted.
That top-left double click to close thing dates back to Windows 3.1. I don't know why it still exists in Windows 10.
For the same reason why you can still disable numlock in 2017 - because there's those two people in the world that absolutely can't live without it. I've met one of them - it was my Advanced OOP teacher at university.
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@gurth said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Childhood memories... When my age still fit in three bits, I've spent hours messing with color schemes of everything in Windows 3.1. I didn't care I've had a black and white display.
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@gąska said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@gurth said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Childhood memories... When my age still fit in three bits, I've spent hours messing with color schemes of everything in Windows 3.1.
It gets worse: what’s shown in that screenshot are the default colours of Windows 1.x. It kind of makes me glad I never had to use it back in the day.
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@pie_flavor said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@dreikin The meat here being that Windows shows you the important shit up front, and makes sure that only people with the intelligence required to click through a series of menus are able to really screw with the settings.
It comes back to the age-old problem that Linux mostly seems to be written by Linux geeks, for Linux geeks. That is, the type of people who want every option available regardless of whether they (or anyone else) are actually ever going to use them. Thus, requiring setting the date with a %-formatted string of the type that can be used directly in
printf()instead of adding a layer in between that uses normal people’s time/date conventions likehh:mm:ss.
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@gurth said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Thus, requiring setting the date with a %-formatted string of the type that can be used directly in
printf()
strftime(). Using those format specifiers inprintf()involves nasal demons.
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@gąska said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@gurth said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Childhood memories... When my age still fit in three bits, I've spent hours messing with color schemes of everything in Windows 3.1. I didn't care I've had a black and white display.
That sounds boring. When my age still fit in 3 bits, I was writing shit for a TRS-80.
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I bought another card today and am flashing Kano.
It looks much more suitable to someone born more recently, who doesn't understand why you can't skip to the next episode when he's watching TV at his grandparents'.
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@pjh said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
strftime(). Using those format specifiers inprintf()involves nasal demons.Ah yeah, that was the one. My excuse is that I’ve only ever once meddled with any type of C.
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@brisingraerowing said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@boomzilla I have found KDE to be much like using Windows. Pretty much everything I tried just worked. It was also the most stable DE I had tried (Unity crashed every 5 minutes, and GNOME had all sorts of weird issues [but no crashes, oddly]. LXDE works, but is kind of minimal, and had a few mouse bugs [which are fixed, AFAIK]. I haven't looked at any other DEs yet).
And every few years they redo their entire interface and piss everyone off!
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@gąska said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
disable numlock in 2017
Is that a thing?
.......
Permanently disable num lock in Windows?
I like to use the number keys for cursor movement. But every so often I hit NumLock by mistake, and then instead of moving the cursor where I want it, I end up with an input like this: 44444488 H...
Holy crap it is!
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@gurth said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@gąska said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
@gurth said in Is Raspbian child abuse?:
Childhood memories... When my age still fit in three bits, I've spent hours messing with color schemes of everything in Windows 3.1.
It gets worse: what’s shown in that screenshot are the default colours of Windows 1.x. It kind of makes me glad I never had to use it back in the day.
I'm sure it looked better across the three (maybe) different types of monitor/TV that were available by default.
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@tsaukpaetra I think my windows 3.1 machine only had like 16 colors. Maybe 4, since I don't remember exactly which machine we ran it on, the 386 or the IBM PC.
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@benjamin-hall Windows 3.1 required a 286 at the minimum and supported video cards down to EGA out of the box¹ (source: Windows 3.1 manual), so you probably had 16 colours.
¹ CGA drivers were available only through the Windows Driver Library, which was a service provided by Microsoft for which you had to contact them.
