Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition
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@polygeekery said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
If you have trouble with an application do you go to support for that application or do you ring up the boys in Redmond?
Obviously you're supposed to go directly to Microsoft. Windows itself sends them info about every application that ever crashes.
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@bb36e said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
How do you change a package when it becomes old so that it now displays the message about itself being old, without actually updating the package and making it, well, not old???
(for a more complex application, I could imagine that it checks through the network, but I very much doubt that JWZ would have put that into xscreensaver)
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@mikehurley said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@carnage said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@dkf said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@gurth Try setting the EDITOR environment variable to your preferred editor first…
Because that's so intuitive.
The fact that Linux distros set their least user friend editor as the out-of-the-box default really says something, doesn't it. It says: "fuck you!"
I don't know. I think nano is fairly decent for a lightweight CLI editor. :D
I actually think nano is a worse editor than vim because it uses shortcuts that are the same pattern but different than the standard CTRL+O=open, CTRL+S=save, etc. CTRL+O for output (save) is really messed up. I get my hotkeys really messed up in my head. Vim is at least different enough that you won't be tempted to think it works the same or vice versa when you're back in a regular GUI editor.
I've used so many different applications and systems that my brain really doesn't have any overalll hardwired hotkeys, so I don't have an issue with nano having different ones than others. ctrl-s isn't much more or less natural than :s for me.
Given that this is UX stuff, I am entirely aware that people have very different opinions on what is the Right and True way to do things, and all others be damned, and there will never be concensus on what is the correct way.
CTRL-S/C/V are probably the closest to being the Correct Way , though and I'm just the esoteric odd ball.
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@remi said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
How do you change a package when it becomes old so that it now displays the message about itself being old, without actually updating the package and making it, well, not old???
Complete speculation: submit it as a security update for the old version, possibly directly to the maintainer.
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@bb36e
Now that comment is a tour de force...
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@bb36e So, it automatically deprecates something like 1 year and a half after publication date? Nifty.
But the code to get there. Wow. Just wow. This is front-page worthy.
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@hardwaregeek said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
It used to be the default was always Vi though. Have linux distros finally fixed that bullshit?
Well, I used one a while back where it was emacs, which objectively even worse.
Filed under: Editor flame war in 3... 2... 1...
Do we actually have any emacs proponents around? I think you'll have to shout out the truth about ViM > Visual Studio to get a rise out of this crowd.
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@remi said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@bb36e So, it automatically deprecates something like 1 year and a half after publication date? Nifty.
But the code to get there. Wow. Just wow. This is front-page worthy.
It looks like normal C to me. Stringy-stuff or date-stuff in C always looks like a major WTF even when it isn't.
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@mott555 said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@remi said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@bb36e So, it automatically deprecates something like 1 year and a half after publication date? Nifty.
But the code to get there. Wow. Just wow. This is front-page worthy.
It looks like normal C to me. Stringy-stuff or date-stuff in C always looks like a major WTF even when it isn't.
seconds = difftime(now,mktime(&publicationData));
Done!
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@mott555 I can accept that parsing a date string in C cannot be done in a nicer way. Maybe. Although I reserve my judgement on that. But if he went to the trouble of modifying his source code to add all that, why does he need to use a date string as the way to embed the date into the executable, rather than any kind of number that would be more directly comparable?
Would it really be that hard to have
screensaver_id
(or another variable created for that purpose, if that one is used elsewhere) in atime_t
-like format (or just a number of months since 1900, since that's all he cares about here), and get away with all the string-parsing horror? I mean, when he builds that string (at build time), he must somehow convert from some kind of date object to a string, so why not store that date information directly? Apart to give him the pleasure to write "funny" comments along it?
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@remi said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@mott555 I can accept that parsing a date string in C cannot be done in a nicer way. Maybe. Although I reserve my judgement on that. But if he went to the trouble of modifying his source code to add all that, why does he need to use a date string as the way to embed the date into the executable, rather than any kind of number that would be more directly comparable?
Would it really be that hard to have
screensaver_id
(or another variable created for that purpose, if that one is used elsewhere) in atime_t
-like format (or just a number of months since 1900, since that's all he cares about here), and get away with all the string-parsing horror? I mean, when he builds that string (at build time), he must somehow convert from some kind of date object to a string, so why not store that date information directly? Apart to give him the pleasure to write "funny" comments along it?But who knows what obscure system he had to support? WTF-y C is often a result of portability issues in my experience.
Our Linux codebase is pretty weird in places, mostly because we sometimes get customers who want to run a real-time Linux 1.0 kernel that reports itself as Linux 4.2 for reasons, on a modified flight-certified 4-slot bread toaster which was far cheaper than an actual flight management computer, has a 19.2-bit random-endianness processor, and only supports an odd poorly-documented C standard from 1986-ish which seems to have had the programming guide for a Mr. Coffee accidentally interleaved into the official specs.
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@mott555 said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@remi said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@mott555 I can accept that parsing a date string in C cannot be done in a nicer way. Maybe. Although I reserve my judgement on that. But if he went to the trouble of modifying his source code to add all that, why does he need to use a date string as the way to embed the date into the executable, rather than any kind of number that would be more directly comparable?
Would it really be that hard to have
screensaver_id
(or another variable created for that purpose, if that one is used elsewhere) in atime_t
-like format (or just a number of months since 1900, since that's all he cares about here), and get away with all the string-parsing horror? I mean, when he builds that string (at build time), he must somehow convert from some kind of date object to a string, so why not store that date information directly? Apart to give him the pleasure to write "funny" comments along it?But who knows what obscure system he had to support? WTF-y C is often a result of portability issues in my experience.
He takes the current time from the system where he is running. That part is out of his control, granted, but that's the part that he fucks the less with. Just take it and read the year/month fields. That's 2 lines.
The rest of his monstruosity is parsing a string (
screensaver_id
) that, presumably, he has full control over. I'm assuming it's some sort of constant that's defined at build time (something like-DBUILD_DATE=`date`
in the Makefile). There is no issue about compatibility with anything here. He decided to encode the build date in a string, and then to parse it back. If anything, he is creating potential compatibility issues with this back-and-forth between date and string.Really, I can't see a reason for doing something as complicated, except that it's JWZ going on a rant and being very smug at doing complicated things just because he can do them faster than most of us would do the simple one.
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@remi Jesus who cares? "Oh he typed 6 lines of code and he could have typed 2, what a scandal!"
The point is that Debian didn't respect his wishes and instead just removed that dialog from the program, making the world worse for everybody. (Debian users still get the old shitty version. JWZ still gets inundated by tons of bug reports for bugs he fixed years ago.)
Of course the real problem is: why the hell is software like this considered part of the OS? Because remove that dumbness and none of these other problems exist.
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@blakeyrat That might be your point and I know that you can't bear that people discuss anything else than what you are interested in, but I feel that showing that code on a site dedicated to bad code is really fitting, and worth mentioning.
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@remi said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
That might be your point and I know that you can't bear that people discuss anything else than what you are interested in, but I feel that showing that code on a site dedicated to bad code is really fitting, and worth mentioning.
Well since 6 lines of code instead of 2 (gasp! What a scandal!) is not a "major problem on the desktop", maybe put that boring-ass conversation in another thread I can ignore properly instead of putting it in this thread I'm somewhat interested in.
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also, small rant about terminals:
Terminals are fucking garbage. People just conflate terminal with command line.
A command line is one of the absolute most efficient interface ideas ever invented and continues to improve with new things that makes it even more efficient.
The sad reality is that due to historical inertia a lot of command line applications like shells run in terminals which is a 1970s protocol which has seen very little updating and quite frankly is garbage for many reasons:
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Colours are an absolute hack produced by poorly standardized colour codes that are just normal characters sent to the stdout, it is impossible to differnetiate between those characters actually being intentional and intended to indicate colours. If you
cat /dev/random
eventually it wil produce a valid colour code and the rest of your random stream from/dev/random
will be printed in blue or bold or whatever, same thing with just reading a file in a terminal that contains colour codes. They are a hack and the system can't differentiate. -
This isn't just colour codes, this is any control character used to manipulate the terminal, the terminal is just manipulated by writing characters to a stdout, the same channel used to actually display output. Yeah, again viewing
/dev/random
might just produce a control character that will instruct the terminal to erase the last line. Really, just doecho -e 'this line will be erased\rhello world' > /tmp/somefile && cat /tmp/somefile
, yeah, cat will read the first line that wil be erased and print it to the stdout just fine, The terminal will just read the\r
character and treat it like an instruction to move back to the start of the line again and overwrite the startwith 'hello world'. Because in 1970 some genius thought it was a good idea to use the same channel to display text and control the terminal with control characters rather than getting two different channels for that as resouces were limited or something. -
Modifier keys don't exist in terminals, terminal applications simulate them by applying a bitmask. ctrl+r searchers history in Bash, but what Bash really sees is one character, again a control character, It doesn't see a character + a modifier
ctrl
just applies a bitmask to ther
character and sends it as one character, a giant hack.
Really, terminals are crap and outdated technology that needs a revamp. But people for some reason are incapable of rational thought and separate things in their briain that need to be, command lines are a great and efficient UI which due to some historical quirk runs inside a terminal and is heavily \limited by it. There needs to be a terminal 2.0 protocol in Unix that solves all these issues. I fucking hate this crap line of thought of people unable being to separate this.
There's a lot of interesting discussion about the benefits/drawbacks of these systems in the linked thread.
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Of course the real problem is: why the hell is software like this considered part of the OS? Because remove that dumbness and none of these other problems exist.
Some of it is there are some expectations of what's included in a modern desktop "OS". For instance, Windows comes with Internet Explorer/Edge, MS Paint, Photo Viewer, etc.
I think the main issue is different distros use different versions of core (or even not core) libraries so they need to build the other apps against those versions. Or, even if they use the same version as another distro, they may use different compile-time feature options that affects how other applications need to be built (ex. if a distro compiles libfoo without feature X, apps using libfoo need to be compiled to disable their X-using features).
And since that level of detail is already being poked at within a distro, I can see how things evolved where distros handle all wanted apps to be made available to their users.
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@bb36e said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
command lines are a great and efficient UI
Blakeyrant in 3...2...1...
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@timebandit said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
command lines are a great and efficient UI
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@bb36e said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
please
redirect>> all requestsFTFC
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@mikehurley said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Some of it is there are some expectations of what's included in a modern desktop "OS". For instance, Windows comes with Internet Explorer/Edge, MS Paint, Photo Viewer, etc.
Well it is true that you'd expect locking the screen to be part of the OS, since it's such an important security feature.
@mikehurley said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
I think the main issue is different distros use different versions of core (or even not core) libraries so they need to build the other apps against those versions.
Right; but they shouldn't do that and shouldn't have to do that.
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Not to mention, the concept of a screensaver itself is already outdated.
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Well it is true that you'd expect locking the screen to be part of the OS, since it's such an important security feature.
on the plus side, it looks like everyone's moving towards GNOME so that might push everyone towards a standard suite of desktop applications. unfortunately, their programs don't seem to be very polished.
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@bb36e said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
everyone's moving towards GNOME
No way. I'll stay on KDE
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@adynathos said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Not to mention, the concept of a screensaver itself is already outdated.
that's fair, however there's no denying that the way that software on linux is packaged and distributed using distro repos has its fair share of drawbacks
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@bb36e said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
however there's no denying that the way that software on linux is packaged and distributed using distro repos has its fair share of drawbacks
The default repos are for software you don't care about, provide defaults which are not terribly incompetent.
If I want more control or a new version, I use PPAs or specialized package managers like conda or download the source.In the linked example, they didn't remove the new fork, just added the old fork back, so now both are available.
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@adynathos said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Not to mention, the concept of a screensaver itself is already outdated.
My understanding is that screen locking has to be implemented as a screensaver because of deficiencies in X11. Linux has no concept of "alternative desktops" like Windows does, so any "security" you get from X11 is flawed and fleeting anyway.
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Linux has no concept of "alternative desktops" like Windows does
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
My understanding is that screen locking has to be implemented as a screensaver because of deficiencies in X11.
In all the desktop environments I used (KDE, Cinnamon, Gnome2), the lock-screen is part of the desktop environment (the system UI).
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@adynathos said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
In all the desktop environments I used (KDE, Cinnamon, Gnome2), the lock-screen is part of the desktop environment (the system UI).
Ok... but is it secure, or is it just xscreensaver-like hackery? That's the point.
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Ok... but is it secure, or is it just xscreensaver-like hackery?
IIRC it is still not possible to start a screensaver/screen lock under Xorg if a context menu is visible
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@bb36e said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
IIRC it is still not possible to start a screensaver/screen lock under Xorg if a context menu is visible
Just tried and it works
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
put that boring-ass conversation in another thread I can ignore properly instead of putting it in this thread I'm somewhat interested in.
The Blakeyrat hath spoken, and thus the crowd must bow before His Greatness, lest they incur His Mighty Wrath.
Here, let me offer you a deal: what about I say what I want, and you fuck off? And if you're not interested in a couple of posts, don't spend more energy ranting about them than simply skipping them.
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@timebandit hmm, I guess it'smore complicated than I thought. FWIW this bug is still open: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/+bug/49579
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@bb36e Gnome
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@bb36e Just tried it again with a context-menu from the desktop (instead of one from an application) and it still worrked
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@adynathos said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Not to mention, the concept of a screensaver itself is already outdated.
@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
My understanding is that screen locking has to be implemented as a screensaver because of deficiencies in X11. Linux has no concept of "alternative desktops" like Windows does, so any "security" you get from X11 is flawed and fleeting anyway.
I think @Adynathos original point was that animated screensavers are no longer strictly necessary. Nowadays you can just put the screen in idle / standby mode and it's far more effective for saving your screen.
Silly how that didn't used to be possible on those antique old CRTs with a physical On switch...
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@jbert said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Nowadays you can just put the screen in idle / standby mode and it's far more effective for saving your screen.
Silly how that didn't used to be possible on those antique old CRTs with a physical On switch...I have a feeling the existence of screensavers is a human problem, not a technology one. Old CRTs need a screensaver because people have a habit of not turning off the screen when they get up and leave for undefined periods of time. The very simplest screensaver would just turn the whole screen black, and that would “save” a CRT just fine. However, with that I bet that you get lots of people who come back to the computer and think the screen is off, so they press the on/off button …
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@jbert said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
animated screensavers are no longer strictly necessary
Two of my TFTs at home would like to disagree with that link. It certainly took longer but one of them has severe burn-in.
@jbert said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
Nowadays you can just put the screen in idle / standby mode and it's far more effective for saving your screen.
That's the real solution now we don't have CRTs with 2 minute warm-up times. I still miss the degaussing BRRRMMmmmmmmm though.
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@heterodox Cool. What's the use case for that?
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@cursorkeys said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
I still miss the degaussing BRRRMMmmmmmmm though.
Gaussing was much more fun.... Still have a huge AC Coil (electro magnet) that I could use to pull the image completely off the screen [or by holding it a little bit further away create "acid like" distortions...... Fun times!
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@blakeyrat said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
The point is that
No, the point is that you're an idiot who rants at people who come to a site about s in code when they discuss...s in code.
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@timebandit Do people still even use PPPoE , or WiFi? Are either of those still a thing?
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@gordonjcp WiFi, sure.
PPPoE on the other hand
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@gordonjcp said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@timebandit Do people still even use PPPoE , or WiFi? Are either of those still a thing?
I helped set up the Internet connection at my sister's new house. It was some PPPoE over DSL over fiber thingy. I'd never seen anything like it before. That was when I found out EdgeRouters (at least the little ER-X model) have inexcusably bad PPPoE support. Like 90% packet loss when using PPPoE, making it completely unusable.
As for PPPoE over WiFi...wat...
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@izzion said in Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2018 edition:
@slapout1
The hardest part about editing linux text files is figuring out how to actually exit viYou say but it's actually kind of serious:
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@masonwheeler No wonder China is taking over the world
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@timebandit I guess if you happened to live somewhere where 4G isn't a thing, WiFi might be useful.