• 0 Posts
  • 126 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
cake
Cake day: February 15th, 2021

help-circle
  • Yes, I think you’re talking about something else, related to your particular needs. But the post OP opened (which you were replying to) was about discussing what “implications for Linux” would the new Steam hardware have.

    I feel the only part in your comment that was somewhat relevant to the question raised by OP was:

    Anyway IMHO the big questions for VR on Linux more broadly is what changes upstream on KDE in terms of immersive UX? Is KDE Plasma becoming a VR graphical shell? Does it have 3D widgets? Does it impact freedesktop in any way?


  • The only reason Linux became a thing is because Torvalds managed to get engagement and popularity amongst a niche community of hackers that happened to share the same needs/goals.

    Because what gives it importance is the needs we share. “The need of 1” is measured in relation to “the need of many”. Community is a huge piece in the “open source” puzzle. A community of 1 is not a community… it’s a personal space. If you don’t share your software with a community then declaring it “open” is pointless.

    Also… when I said “relevant” I specifically meant for the questions raised by OP. I’m not talking about “relevancy” in some weird transcendental way… I don’t believe such a thing exists… everything has a viewpoint from which something can be said to be “relevant”… however, as you yourself said: “your preferences are not relevant to my needs”.



  • Relevant section:

    At first, around 1996, it was common practice to make the Windows key act as Meta. However, because of the existing alternative keys for Meta in Emacs, the reintroduction of a hardware Meta key binding did not prove exceptionally useful. This made Super the next most frequently emulated key of choice, and thus it became the standard assignment for the Windows key under X11.

    Most Linux software and documentation calls these keys “Super” keys. However, they are still referred to as KEY_LEFTMETA and KEY_RIGHTMETA in the kernel,[5] and some documentation such as that of KDE Plasma refers to it as just the Meta key.[6][7] “Windows” and ⌘[8] are also used in documentation.


  • You’re not being fair, that wasn’t the conversation thread at all… I didn’t reply to OP’s initial message directly.

    It was more like this:

    1. OP: Hi guys, I’m looking for yellow tomatoes, do you know where can I get them?

    2. Commenter: I go to this store, they have tomatoes that are yellow enough for me… for more sophistication you need to go to a much further away local shop.

    3. OP Response: My question isn’t sophisticated! …all I want is my tomatoes to be of the same color as all the other yellow vegetables I exclusively eat, all yellow, tomatoes and ketchup being red is a step in the opposite direction.

    4. Me: there’s a reason why the red ones are sold, [valid cultural reason]. But you can still change them, here’s a manual / recipe to turn them yellow when cooking.

    As you see, when I was talking about reasons it was mainly directed to the apparent indignation of comment “3”, when the person was painting their request as something that should be seen as the more reasonable / less sophisticated approach… so I gave the reason to show how the opposite is also more reasonable / less sophisticated from another point of view.

    But even then, I did link to the manual for readline to configure the input handling. It’s not like I just dismissed the initial question like your simplification implied.

    PowerShell still runs inside a terminal emulator (e.g. Fish), so it changes nothing in the input/output behaviour.

    You can definitely change the input/output behavior by changing the program that runs on the terminal… in fact, when I posted that link earlier, what I said is that you can configure this in readline, which is a library that bash and many other programs that run in the terminal (not all, not fish, for example) use for interpreting the input, so all terminal programs using the readline library for handling interactive input have the same shortcuts. It’s not the terminal the one with those shortcuts coded into it.

    “GUI-friendly terminals”? What does that mean, in the context of the conversation? Why are you talking about GUI?

    Because a terminal emulator is a GUI app… OP wasn’t talking about about real terminals, nor about a virtual console session in Linux (which runs without any GUI), but about a terminal emulator you open in a window within a graphical compositor.

    My point was that most of the popular (amongst terminal nerds) GUI app terminals stay away from the traditional GUI toolkits when possible because they want to keep the app slim and lightweight. And it’s those toolkits the ones that orchestrate the standardization of the typical Windows-like shortcuts (similar as the readline library, but for GUI apps). This is also why in many terminals you don’t even have a menu when you right click, since those menus are usually done with GUI toolkits. But there are also heavy-weight terminals like the ones bundled in some more user-friendly DEs that do include GUI toolkits as dependencies, so they might actually have an easier go at playing nice with other conventions in their respective DEs. However, you’d still need to pair it with a shell that also plays nice (or configure it to play nice, if possible).


  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux terminal with text selection
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    13 days ago

    Is it weird to explain the reason why something is as it is? If you were already aware of it then it shouldn’t be as baffling.

    There are also modern terminals and shells that do things the way you expect in a more convenient way, but maybe you also know this, OP mentioned powershell, that can be used in Linux too. It’s just that this hasn’t been a focus for traditional and slim/lightweight terminals coupled with traditional shells which is typically the popular combination amongst heavy terminal users, many of the slim terminal apps stay away from GUI toolkits that are what normally give consistency in settings to the GUI apps. And because they are slim and try to eliminate what isn’t absolutely needed, typically they don’t do configuration profiles, specially given that it’s relatively easy in Linux to backup and reuse your configuration across installs. It’s more of a job at the OS/sysadmin level.

    There’s also not a real standardized setup in Linux as a whole. There are environments that default using the Super (Windows) key for all window management, or use TUI terminal apps for most things so they get terminal navigation keys for all their apps. Some people even configure Gtk/Qt to use vim/emacs style for navigation in text boxes because for them it’s the other way around, all their apps use terminal shortcuts because… well… they are terminal apps.


  • The thing is that vi and emacs have existed since long before those other new editors came around.

    What you want is possible to do by configuring your ~/.inputrc (see readline manual page for details), it’s just that the defaults are different because they are from a time when many keyboards didn’t even have arrow keys (and the ones that had them were in non-standard positions) so most of the shortcuts that became standard in those days are completely different than the ones common today. Given that the terminal is meant to emulate old style DEC VT100 terminals (that’s why it’s called terminal “emulator”) it made sense to use those default that people had grown used to.

    Personally, I’ve grown used to Ctrl+a, Ctrl+k, Ctrl+w, Ctrl+e and Ctrl+y …I dont have to reach to wherever the Home key is in whatever keyboard I happen to be using at the moment (specially with modern 75%/60%-sized keyboards today). Or use a combination that also requires shift and having to hold so many keys together. In fact I went the opposite direction and customized my Powershell profile while I’m on windows to keep many of those old shortcuts in the Windows pwsh terminal as well.


  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlFSF announces Librephone project
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    27 days ago

    Good marketing means achieving an arbitrary limit of what you consider “good” marketing. So it depends on where you set the bar.

    The best marketing necessarily requires some level of unethical behavior, because being honest and saying the whole truth doesn’t sell. Everything has drawbacks and benefits… the better marketing minimizes (or even hides / fails to mention) the drawbacks and emphasizes the benefits, which is a form of deception.


  • I feel it’s a bit like the usability vs security dilemma… you can try to optimize to have both, but then you won’t have as a result neither the most secure system nor the smoothest user-friendly experience, but something in between (you might still consider that “secure” or “usable”, but that just depends on where you set your expectations).

    If you want to maximize marketing then the result won’t be as ethical as it could be, and if you want to maximize ethics then the result won’t be as marketable as it could be.


  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlis i2p relevant today?
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    28 days ago

    I always saw I2P as a more modern and distributed onion-routing alternative to Tor.

    The thing is that people are used to making use of Tor in different ways than the way they use I2P, but you can also have outproxies (ie. exit nodes/relays) in I2P the same way as in Tor… and you can also host a service inside the Tor network without relying on an exit node, like in I2P. It’s just that people only seem to want to host exit nodes for Tor and not so much for I2P, this led to internal communications in I2P being more common (which is a good thing), whereas in Tor it’s common to use it for anonymous access to the clearnet (which strains the network and causes chokepoints, specially with big downloads or torrent sharing). That’s just a matter of usage, not capability.


  • I didn’t downvote you, but it’s unclear what you meant by stating that.

    Depending on how one interprets it, it can be seen as a justification for using “fascist” (since there isn’t a more accurate word) or simply a way to emphasize that the term is inaccurate and shouldn’t be used.

    So I’m not surprised if you get up/down votes from both sides in either direction, specially in a polarizing discussion. Not because of what you said being wrong/right, but because of what they might read between lines.






  • For full independence, why not simply detach development from community?

    You can even have multiple independent communities with multiple independent moderation teams all about the same software.

    As a developer I’ve never needed to engage a particular community on a personal level in order to make a PR to a project… if the technical maintainers want to accept the change, they will, if they won’t then that’s fine, they probably have their reasons. It’s ok to communicate with communities to get feedback, but I’m not making contributions for the social approval, I’m making them when I believe they are useful, and most of the times I write them because I want to have that change myself. If it’s rejected and enough other people are interested in the change, it can be forked. That doesn’t mean I hate the maintainers or that I don’t want the original to exist or anything, it’s not personal.

    But well, I understand that some communities wanna make software and they intertwine development and social relationships. However, if you do this then I don’t see how can independence be a thing. Either separate them and don’t intermix them or mix them and don’t expect them to be separate.




  • On the upside, the end user needs to use up less data for the same content. This is particularly interesting under 4G/5G and restrictive data plans, or when accessing places / servers with weak connection. It helps avoid having to wait for the “buffering” of the video content mid-playback.

    But yes, I agree each iteration has diminishing returns, with a higher bump in requirements. I feel that’s a pattern we see often.


  • It’s not like improper use of “steal” is unheard of, I see all the time people use “I’m gonna steal that” and similar even when it applies to things openly given for free. And considering that it’s quite clear that the MIT allows others to take without sharing back (it’s the main difference with GPL) I’m quite sure the commenter was aware that it wasn’t really theft, yet chose that word probably with the intention to insult the practice, rather than as a fair descriptor.

    So yes, you’re right, it isn’t theft… but I don’t think that was the point of the comment.