captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated , 18 hours ago

I've been daily driving Linux Mint for 10 years now. The answer to this question is "for what most people consider everyday usage, you have to use the Linux terminal about as often as you have to edit the Windows registry." And in fact over the 10 years I've been a Linux user, GUI tools in Linux are increasingly available, and I've heard Windows normies talking about the registry more.

When I started out, Mint shipped with Synaptic Package Manager, and a lot of distros didn't include a GUI at all. Now GUI package managers are the rule rather than the exception and most have bespoke polished app store -like things. You of course can still use apt or dnf or pacman or whatever, but you decreasingly have to.

I never once touched the registry on my Win 98, Win XP, Win Vista or Win 7 machines. Win 8 required a couple registry keys to turn off that...curtain that you had to click away to get to the login screen? and a few other "tablet first" features Win 8 had, and now I hear "just go and add these registry keys to put the start menu on the left, turn off ads, re-enable right click and retract the rectal thermometer."

Linux is becoming more normie friendly while Windows is genuinely becoming less normie friendly.

captain_aggravated , 18 hours ago

Using screenshots, demonstrate to me how the current edition of Linux Mint's Software Manager application is "garbage" and show me how the Apple App Store, Google Play Store or the Windows Store is better.

I can agree that there are not great software managers out there, Pop!_Shop always felt like it was malfunctioning to me, and Synaptic Package Manager works but has some significant klunk, but...what's wrong with Mint Software Manager that anyone else gets right.

captain_aggravated , 18 hours ago

Microsoft is one of if not the biggest and richest companies in the world and they got that way on a strategy based on the public's fear and hatred of reading comprehension.

captain_aggravated , 17 hours ago

The flaw is in the question: terminal apps practically always include more functionality especially for batch processing and automation of tasks.

I'll give an example: Find me a GUI application that can quickly convert a gigabyte of .doc files into .pdf format. Pandoc can do that with a single command.

Also: You're probably comparing the process of "using" a GUI app with "using" a terminal app, in other words, if you spend 8 hours sitting in front of Premiere or KDENLIVE clicking a mouse, you expect to do the same job with ffmpeg by sitting in front of it for 8 hours typing commands, right? But that's not how it's designed to work; it's designed for you to write scripts that do the things you commonly do, which takes time to do once, then you run those scripts, maybe even from the GUI.

I'll give a real example: the software I use for my personal journal is called RedNotebook. This stores the data in a human readable markup format (I think it's YAML?) and displays it in rich text, including the ability to display inline pictures. I like putting pictures in my journal.

First problem: what it actually does is store a relative path to the location of the picture in your file system; if ever I was to change the location in my file system where I store the journal or my pictures, or change operating systems, this would break. So I created a Pictures folder within the Journal folder to copy all pictures there.

Second problem: My phone takes 12MP or larger pictures and the journal displays them at full scale so they take up the whole screen. I'd like to shrink them.

Third problem: The app's "Insert picture" funcionality opens a file browser window written in QT which is different than the one from most of my GTK-based desktop apps use and I'd have to manually find the file.

Simultaneous solution: I wrote a short bash script that calls ImageMagick to shrink the image among a few other cleanup details, and builds the appropriate string to paste into my journal and puts that string in the primary buffer. I then wrote a Nemo Action so that the option to run this script appears in the context menu iff I right click on exactly one image file. Now I can add an image to my journal by browsing to its location in my file manager, right clicking, clicking Add To Journal, and then middle clicking in RedNotebook where I want to paste the picture.

There are hundreds of tedious little things I would do over and over again clicking through endless menus, windows and dialogs that I can script away, like paving my own bypass lane.

captain_aggravated , 16 hours ago

And there it is.

captain_aggravated , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

Oh is that like bankofarnerica.com or whatever, hoping the r and n look enough like an m for at least some people to click?

edit: under absolutely no circumstances click on the above link. Your bank will be robbed and your foreskin soldered shut. To very don't.

captain_aggravated , 2 days ago

There is a post that's circulating around the Lemmyhood where someone asks an LLM to solve the "there's a goat, a wolf and a cabbage that need to cross a river" problem, and it returns grammatically correct logically impossible nonsense. I think this is instructive as to how LLMs work and how useless they really are.

Presented with a logic problem, it doesn't attempt to solve any problems or apply logic. That it does is search through the sumtotal of all human communication, finds dozens if not hundreds of cases where this or a similar problem has been asked, and then averages the answers. Because answers might be phrased in different orders or different sentence structures, or some people published wrong or joke answers sometimes but it has no means to detect that, they get averaged in with equal weight and so the answer it puts out begins with "Take the wolf and the goat, leave the boat behind. Take the boat back." It has a fascinating ability to output seemingly relevant and grammatically impeccable worthless noise. Just like everything I say.

The only compelling use case I've seen for these things is writing frameworks for fictional stories. There was an episode of the WAN Show back when LMG still existed where Linus gave ChatGPT a prompt to create a modern take on the premise of the movie Liar Liar. And it came up with an actually compelling outline, I'd go see the movie made out of that outline. Because it's fictional, it doesn't have to conform to reality.

I doubt it could write an entire acceptable movie script though, it would have gaping plot holes, would have no theme or cohesive narrative structure, but every individual line of dialog would make grammatical sense and some conversations might even seem coherent.

As a research or information gathering tool, they're worse than useless because it has no way of detecting if information is up to date or obsolete, serious or farcical, correct or incorrect, it just averages them all together, basically on the same theory as the Poll The Audience lifeline on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire: Most of the crowd is almost always right. Except with this approach what happens is it will cite a completely fake made up paper and attribute it to a genuinely real scientist who works in the relevant field and allegedly published in a real reputable scientific journal. It looks right, it passes the sniff test. It's also completely useless.

And that's when they're not throwing weird emotional tantrums.

captain_aggravated , 3 days ago

your truck is bad and you should feel bad.

captain_aggravated , 6 days ago

Pinta would be great if it didn't crash. I've only noticed it getting worse over time.

captain_aggravated , 6 days ago

Another detail I noticed is if you type paint or notepad in the search it brings up drawing and the text editor which is nice for people transitioning to Linux.

That feature is actually implemented on a per-application basis. Each application has a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications/ or possibly in ~/.local/share/applications/ which includes a lot of the stuff you see in the Menu, including the application's name, the comment it displays when you hover over it, etc.

Check this out: In the Nemo file manager, go to /usr/share/applications/, then scroll down until you see Text Editor. If you double click this, it will launch Xed, Cinnamon's text editor. But if you right click, Open With...and choose Text Editor, you'll see a text file named xed.desktop with a bunch of stuff like Name{en_GB]=Text Editor so that it displays the name correctly in a bunch of languages. Scroll down near the bottom and you'll see an entry that says "Keywords=text;editor;tabs;highlighting;code;multiple;files;pluggable;notepad;" or something similar. If you type any of those words in the Menu's search bar, it'll come up with Text Editor. You'll need root permissions, but you can even add your own here if you want.

On the same note, if you type "letter" or "document" it will find LibreOffice Writer.

---

I never did like the idea of trying to make the search bar in the Start menu an omnifunctional thing, because all it does is make it useless. The Menu's search bar should be for finding and launching applications. Searching a couple directories full of .desktop files for names and keywords is very fast and responsive, which is what I want for launching programs. Recursive file searches through the entire file system take longer, as do web searches. Those functions should be separate.

captain_aggravated , 6 days ago

I think Syncthing specifically does not work with iOS.

captain_aggravated , 6 days ago

Idea 1

I've been looking for a journal/to-do/checklist app that isn't completely thumb chewing stupid. I've yet to find anything as good, flexible and feature complete as what you'd get on PalmOS devices in the early 2000s.

I often use my journal for brainstorming and planning, and basically the best I can do is bulleted lists. I would like a checklist section that can do things like recurring tasks, one-off tasks, daily tasks, and persistent tasks. (Daily tasks: Feed cat. Each day it puts a task with that name in the Tasks window for you to check off. Persistent tasks: Fix the kitchen drawer. This same task remains in the Tasks window until it is checked off, and then stops appearing.) I would also like "take 5 loads of yard debris to the road 0/5" and be able to click to advance it to 1/5. Marry this with a journal app so that you can keep track of progress on stuff like fitness goals or whatever.

And please. Even if it is stored as human-readable markup, please. PLEASE. Let the user edit it in rich text mode. Too many of the "journal" apps out there require you to edit in markdown mode and then you can switch to a "view" mode to see what you've done. Also: Don't be that guy whose app cannot be themed. I don't want some light mode Gnome lookin' bullshit in the middle of my dark mode Cinnamon.

Idea 2

Do a fully local fitness tracker. Apple/Google/Samsung health apps are there primarily to invade your privacy and no one should ever use them. I get that this one is more useful as a mobile app running on a device with MEMS sensors, possibly rigged to a smart watch with biometric sensors, and there is no such thing operational in the GNU/Linux world, but still it might get some use.

Idea 3

You asked for it: Woodworking CAD. This "seems quite complex." The best workflow I can find is in FreeCAD, which is too complex and cumbersome for the job. It's a general purpose engineering CAD system and it's designed to work in abstract absolutes; you can't think in terms of "put a mortise and tenon joint here" you have to think "create a sketch on this face and constrain a rectangle to this edge with these dimensions." And then it doesn't give you things like automatic cut schedules, materials lists, templates. FreeCAD is allegedly extensible, it is allegedly possible to create your own workbench to add more specific features. I even tried. There is no documentation, they didn't write down what they were doing as they were doing it, so...I'm not sure why they bother at this point.

I've been interested in a CAD package that works the way a woodworker works. I've thought about trying to implement this in the Godot game engine, but even then the project strikes me as "monumental."

captain_aggravated , 6 days ago

Oh I know, I use Syncthing on 4 devices for various things, it's really convenient. But my understanding is that iOS is the one major platform that doesn't run it, and the OC specifically asked for iOS compatibility. It is my understanding that iOS isn't open enough to allow it.

captain_aggravated , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

I'm after a thing that can work as a journaling, brainstorming and task managing tool, and I've yet to find the thing I'm after.

I used to work in rapid prototyping, we offered our services to the general public, and we'd get the occasional "citizen inventor" off the street with some napkin drawings or a mockup taped together out of cardboard, they'd describe their "invention" to me, and there was nothing I could do to convince them that it wouldn't work because it would require two solid objects to pass through each other or something else against the laws of kinematics. Your imagination allows you to think about impossible shapes. And that might be what's happening to me, that I want software that changes what it does to match what I want it to do at the time.

Also, just searched Mint's software manager for "todo" and came up with this:

TodoList: To-Do List & Tasks. Does not function without creating an account with...someone. Worthless.

Gnome-todo Like most Gnome applications, absolutely barebones, nowhere near enough features. Is also apparently known as "Endeavour". I'm guessing there was a backlash to giving software cute but not particularly descriptive names (like gnome's PGP keyring tool being named Seahorse? For some reason?) and so at some point they changed the names in some but not all places so the namespaces are nasal fucked. Great, thanks Gnome.

Getting Things GNOME! Hey, something that bears Gnome's name that isn't below minimum viable. Has a kind of Trello vibe, and if I were ONLY building checklists for things this might do but I"m also looking for note taking/journaling/brainstorming and this isn't it.

OpenToDoList Has a few of the features I'm looking for, but the UI is baby punching terrible. Lots of icons that aren't obvious what they're for with no tool tips and...it's just combative, it's trying really hard to be a pain.

Sleek So apparently there is a thing called a "todo.txt syntax" which is a plaintext format for arranging a todo list for cyborgs, and someone wrote a baby punching terrible GUI front end for it. A note for todo list app developers: When you click the little circle to check off an item, it should become checked off, not wait until you refresh the view in some other way like change to a different tab.

Adventure List Launches to a blank white window with a "Sign in with Google" button in the middle and no other controls. Worthless.

That seems to be it; lots of other stuff in here that doesn't seem relevant.

I mentioned PalmOS I think. Old PalmOS devices came with some default organization apps like a to-do list and a notes app and a calendar/clock and a contacts list, all burned into ROM. But really it was more like different facets of the same app; you could make a to-do list and then put it in your calendar, etc. It all worked together in a surprisingly seamless way I've yet to find since.

captain_aggravated , 6 days ago

As I look through Flathub, maybe KOrganizer is the closest thing to what I'm looking for, although it's got KDE's disease of being hideously overcrowded with every possible feature.

I think what I'm after is somewhere between KOrganizer and RedNotebook. I currently use RedNotebook to keep my journal, which in my case takes the form of talking about my day, what I did, what I'm thinking, and sometimes what I'm planning. It has no todo list functionality, but I can use it as a sort of note to self thing, it has a search function that allows me to easily look back. I almost always have it open and running on my computer.

imagine RedNotebook, but with some todo and checklist functionality so that I get today's page, there's a blank page for a journal entry so I can record what I did today, and maybe a separate side pane for daily tasks, maybe several panes stacked vertically for "regularly scheduled" where daily stuff like "change cat's water dish" or weekly stuff like "garbage day" or monthly stuff like "water bill due" could pop up, and it would serve not only as a reminder to do those things, but a record of having done them. And maybe another pane for ongoing stuff, like...say I want to list all the things I want to build in the wood shop this summer; this might not be time based but just a running checklist. It would be kind of cool to be able to look back at that and see when things were added, checked off, or removed.

Lifeograph might be designed for this but 1. damn if I can figure out how it works and 2. it won't stop shining bright white rectangles at me.

captain_aggravated , 5 days ago

It should also be common or required practice to make note of "Google account required" or something in the app's description.

captain_aggravated , 5 days ago

Especially on something like Flathub and especially for apps that can plausibly run locally. Like, I kinda know beforehand I'll need an account with Discord to use the Discord app, because it's primarily for communicating with other people. But a todo app? Dafuq does that need the internet for?

captain_aggravated , 5 days ago

I'm starting to think, especially with high contrast and high brightness flat panels, having working light and dark modes are an accessibility feature. Apparently folks with bad astigmatism or some other such struggle with light text on a dark background? Me I'm just very light sensitive and a modern LED backlit monitor showing large areas of white is physically uncomfortable for me to look at.

captain_aggravated , 11 days ago

x works with my touch screen laptop via Mint.

captain_aggravated , 11 days ago

If I'm honest, it's because Pop!_OS isn't really that good. What does Pop!_OS do particularly well other than "download this one for Nvidia drivers"?

captain_aggravated , 10 days ago

It's not hard to feel premium compared to Ubuntu these days. Canonical gave up trying to be an end-user desktop OS years ago. Look at their corporate garbagepuke website these days. Ubuntu is now merely the other Red Hat; it's an enterprise grade thing that normies should ignore.

Mint runs circles around Pop!_OS in the "just works, just keeps working" department.

captain_aggravated , 10 days ago

In my experience?

Mint has been around longer and has had more of the lumps smoothed out. Mint, and their flagship DE Cinnamon, has always been about actual usability. There's a pragmatic streak that runs through Mint that isn't there in some other distros.

It has been my experience that Mint is usually the one that "just works" and the one that "continues to just work." Cinnamon's UI strikes a balance between KDE's "ALL THE FEATURES! MAXIMUM CLUTTER!" approach and Gnome's "Nuance doesn't exist, implement as little functionality as possible so the window stays empty and beautiful" approach. You won't find yourself asking "why can't it do this?" the way you do with Gnome-based distros. You don't have to start installing extensions just to get things that were considered basic features twenty years ago. You aren't sent to the terminal particularly often, you can genuinely manage most of the system from the GUI.

I would also say that Cinnamon is going to be more familiar to a Windows user than Gnome. Trying to use Gnome the way Windows users are used to handling things, say by minimizing and maximizing windows, is deliberately a pain in the ass on Gnome, and has a tendency to make newcomers think "Man this shit is unusable." Cinnamon doesn't have that problem; it's still fun convincing people that I'm running Windows 9.

captain_aggravated , 13 days ago

I think because Syncthing isn't really for "sharing" files. It can move large files across the internet but it's not designed for "hey send me a copy of that blu-ray your ripped" sharing.

captain_aggravated , 14 days ago

What I try to do for managing apps is use the standard repository and flatpak as much as possible and any other method as little as possible.

I use Linux Mint, and the Software Manager has a "Show Installed Applications" option from which you can pick and choose to uninstall. I think the Pop!_Shop offers similar functionality in Pop!_OS but last time I used it, it felt like they put more thought into how it looks and very little into how it works. One of the main reasons I stopped using Pop!_OS.

captain_aggravated , 15 days ago

If we divided Gnome right out of the open source community, we wouldn't have lost much.

captain_aggravated , 15 days ago

I remember in an interview talking about the Steam Deck and its controls, GabeN said (paraphrased) "What we learned from the Steam Controller is there needs to be zero learning curve. Players want to pick it up and understand it immediately."

Given that ethos, it's not difficult to understand adopting KDE over Gnome. Most of Valve's customers are coming from Windows, and KDE resembles Windows' UI, where Gnome resembles iOS after a stroke.

captain_aggravated , 15 days ago

So, what you're saying is you think Gnome resembles MacOS after a stroke? Fair enough.

Whichever who cares. I find Gnome so feature poor and so "why would you ever want to do that?" and so "You have to do it the way it occurred to us, not the way it occurred to you." that I legitimately hate it.

captain_aggravated , 15 days ago

A coherent ecosystem...of blank windows with not enough functionality crammed into a hamburger menu made the way it is mostly for aesthetics. A workflow that doesn't make sense to most people who are trained on PCs. A dev team who hate their users.

No thanks.

captain_aggravated , 15 days ago

Do you type on a QWERTY keyboard?

captain_aggravated , 12 days ago

Naw, Cinnamon will still be here.

captain_aggravated , 19 days ago

Oh no, what will all the Arch users do?

captain_aggravated , 20 days ago

What idiot applies for a job at Google?

captain_aggravated , 23 days ago

Somehow I never considered that, MacOS' stupid stoplight buttons aren't particularly accessible, are they?

captain_aggravated , 23 days ago

It's pronounced "juh-know-may."

captain_aggravated , 23 days ago

It's a Klingon tea-like beverage. A warrior's drink!

captain_aggravated , 24 days ago

Somebody fork it then?

captain_aggravated , 24 days ago

This is why I'm thinking the almost religious ideal of "free to everyone for anything" is probably a mistake, because there's a lot of FOSS software being used by corporations for evil things like shareholder profits.

We need to start licensing things under a "free for humans, insultingly expensive for corporations" model. "My code is free for private citizens, sole proprietorships, small businesses, charities, students, etc. and $900,000,000,000 per minute per seat for any organization with stock that is traded on an exchange."

captain_aggravated , 26 days ago

I've had very good luck with Linux Mint and a GTX-1080. It does require opening the Driver Manager and clicking the button with "Recommended" next to it.

captain_aggravated , 26 days ago

You can, though it might not be a great experience. Using Gnome on Mint especially is kind of funny tasting given the distro's history.

Mint used to ship a KDE version but stopped to focus on other things, as there were plenty of distros that offered a good KDE experience. Kubuntu and KDE Neon are both fairly close to what Mint KDE would offer.

When Gnome decided to do whatever Gnome 3 was, a lot of people didn't want that. And I know of four DEs now that sprang up that were trying to fill the void that Gnome 3 sucked into the world with its creation:

• Mate. The good old fashioned "we don't like the changes, so we're gonna fork it and keep making the old thing ourselves." Mate is Gnome 2 that kept on chooglin.

• Cinnamon. At first, the folks who ran Mint tried to release a set of extensions for Gnome 3 to make it work more like Gnome 2, then decided to fork Gnome 3 to make their own DE and called it Cinnamon.

• Unity. Canonical's DE they made during their "re-invent every single wheel" phase. They abandoned it in favor of Gnome with some extensions to make it look a little like Unity did, and my understanding is some teenager picked it back up.

• Cosmic. If I understand right, and I might not, System76 has bent Gnome into such a pretzel for Pop!_OS that they're calling it their own thing called Cosmic.

Mint ships two of these four DEs. They make Cinnamon themselves and they work pretty closely/share members with the Mate community. They also offer an xfce version for a few reasons, another GTK-based DE that isn't GNOME.

So using Gnome on Mint, the "anything oh god anything but Gnome" distro is just kinda funny to me.

captain_aggravated , 26 days ago

First to clarify, you mean with the clutch pedal "out." Pushing the pedal down actually disengages the clutch, ie forcing the plates apart to disconnect the engine from the transmission.

In a gasoline powered car that is in gear, yes there is a braking effect. Diesel engines don't, which is why semi trucks have a thing called a Jake Brake.

Also, depending on what went wrong with your engine/why it is shut down, you may not want to choose to do this.

captain_aggravated , 28 days ago

It is surprisingly difficult to 3D print chocolate molds. Most plastics aren't flexible enough, and flexible plastic like TPU is fussy.

captain_aggravated , 1 month ago

And why the fuck does a calculator app take 60MB of RAM when perfectly functional calculators ran on Windows 3.1 on systems with 8-24MB of RAM total?

captain_aggravated , 1 month ago

My definition of software bloat is when the feature set creeps up to including features that the vast majority of users do not need to a degree that starts impeding the usefulness and usability of the software.

FreeCAD, for example. FreeCAD has several workbenches that it did or still does ship with that no one has a use for. The Robot bench, for example, which simulates those giant robot arms that build cars. The venn diagram of people who work with those robots and people who use FreeCAD are two circles 284 miles apart. There is/was a Ship bench that could draw a boat hull in one click. No one on earth needs that. A working Assembly bench? Still years away. Who on earth needs that? I've hidden a full third of the stock workbenches just to reduce the noise in the dropdown menu and it's made the software more comfortable to use.

Linux Mint includes a LOT of little utilities, lots of little CLI programs and whatnot that the majority of users will never use, but other than occupying a few dozen MB of disk space it's not really a problem. It doesn't get in the way.

captain_aggravated , 1 month ago

I've played quite a bit of Satisfactory on Linux. Proton is some amazing stuff.

captain_aggravated , 1 month ago

I'm guessing this person saw an open source license as a temporary means of spurring adoption of their software, and once enough of a market share had been built up, they'd stop publishing under an open license and have a sudden captive audience...apparently not understanding how any of this works.

captain_aggravated , 1 month ago

They don't care as long as their software is quasi-mandatory.

captain_aggravated , 1 month ago

Looking around at that page...no thanks.

captain_aggravated OP , 10 days ago

jury is still out.