On 5/7/19 1:05 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 
> I've been looking for a keyboard-driven, no-frills but functional
> browser for a while now. I used to be an Opera fan, until they made that
> horrible decision to throw away the Presto engine and go chrome (ugh).
> So I switched to Firefox instead.  But these days firefox is just such a
> bloated piece of memory-leaking, resource-hogging junk that I threw it
> out as well.

I'd been a looong time fan^H^H^Huser of Firefox, but I'd been getting fed up with it too. Aside from the constant stream of UI and feature-killing blunders, it would frequently render my ENTIRE DESKTOP unresponsive (even the mouse would lag and then just stop). I'd have to Ctrl-Alt-F2 to text terminal, htop, and kill FF's helper process. But imagine how fun it was BEFORE I figured out the problem was Firefox!!

On top of that, Mozilla pretty much forced me to pin my installed FF version (which became fun when my system upgraded one of its dependencies, breaking it).

Finally, I discovered Pale Moon just a few weeks ago. Managed to find (better!) alternatives to the add-ons that weren't compatible. It's been SOOOOO much better. Memory usage is still gigantic, but frankly I blame the web itself for that, and at least it doesn't go berzerk or pull any of the other anti-user crap Mozilla's been big on for the past decade.

Don't know whether it would meet your keyboard-driven requirements though.

> 
> I have fundamental ideological problems with the concept of forced
> updates.  The computer should be a tool, to be used at the *user's*
> convenience, not a loud-mouthed, demanding, temperamental spoiled brat
> that will NOT shut up until it gets what it wants.

Amen to that.

> That's why I can't
> stand things like Adobe Reader, that regularly pops up notices at the
> most inconvenient of times demanding to install this update or that
> patch, or worse, advertising some Adobe product IN THE MIDDLE OF AN
> IMPORTANT PRESENTATION.  The whole notifications system esp. on Windows
> is utterly atrocious for this.  You're in the middle of an important
> conference at a moment that really should *not* be interrupted, and
> suddenly there's that annoying *ding* and an annoying popup that needs
> to be dismissed.

I pretty much hate notification systems period (at least on desktop/laptop). I'm a KDE user and the biggest thing I hate about modern KDE vs KDE3, even moreso than bloat, is how it tries to use its smartphone-envy notification system for everything until you find the right hoops to jump through to turn that garbage off (especially for file copying). And...those hoops you have to jump through *keep changing*!!! Meh, but at least KDE *lets* you change things without needing poorly-maintained third party hacks...

On Tuesday, May 7, 2019 10:31:30 AM MDT Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 5/7/19 4:33 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > [...]
> > scratch with no reputation involved, I don't know if you can really
> > force
> > people to stay up-to-date without getting in their way. I'm not saying
> > that
> [...]
>
> All very good points. And actually forcing people to update, of course, isn't very good. But my point is that installing updates really doesn't *have* to get in anyone's way in the first place. Certainly not like it does on Windows. All you really need is something like this:
>
> 1. Check that the user hasn't disabled auto-updates.
> 2. *In the background*, download libfoo-2.1.archive, in a low-priority
> process
> 3. *In the background*, extract libfoo-2.1.archive to
> systemComponentsDirectory/libfoo-2.1, in a low-priority process
> 4. Do the same for the other components/packages in the update.
> 5. *In the background*, atomically journal a note of all the new packages.
> 6. Whenever you can, on startup/shutdown/whatever, spend the *fraction of
> a second* it takes to update the symlinks:
> systemComponentsDirectory/libfoo-active ->
> systemComponentsDirectory/libfoo-2.1
> 7. Keep systemComponentsDirectory/libfoo-2.0 around for awhile in case a
> rollback is needed.
>
> Done. Nobody had to be inconvenienced for more than about one second, and it was at their own leisure anyway.
>
> But of course, Windows updates don't even remotely resemble anything like the above. I have no idea how they've managed to come up with...whatever convoluted, insane, exponential-time bizarreness that Windows Update does in order to make an update happen...

The amount of time that Windows takes to update - both with fetching the updates and with installing them - is insane. And it seems to happen far too frequently that windows update just gets stuck and never finishes. Regardless of the timing or whether they're forced, the actual update process for Windows is absolutely terrible. I've seen updates take several minutes on *nix systems, but unless you're installing a ton of packages, it's usually pretty quick - and most distros that I've used don't even grab anything in the background. It's _never_ quick with Windows. Even whatever they do when you reboot during the update process takes a ridiculous amount of time. However they've set up the whole mess, they clearly have fundamental problems with how windows update does pretty much anything that it does.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 06:00:04PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 5/7/19 1:05 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > 
> > I've been looking for a keyboard-driven, no-frills but functional browser for a while now.
[...]
> Finally, I discovered Pale Moon just a few weeks ago. Managed to find (better!) alternatives to the add-ons that weren't compatible.

Glanced over it briefly.  Looks very promising indeed.  If it supports the Vimperator plugin, I may very well switch to it, since luakit appears to be only marginally maintained recently.


> It's been SOOOOO much better. Memory usage is still gigantic, but frankly I blame the web itself for that,
[...]

I've been entertaining the idea of writing my own browser just so I don't have to deal with the crap anymore. It would be basically ELinks with graphics, with no (or very restricted) animations, and highly constrained scripting (I am very uncomfortable with the idea of promiscuously executing any old Turing-complete code obtained from any old random online source of unknown trustworthiness).

Except I doubt I have the time/energy it takes to implement an entire browser on my own.

My latest pet peeve with web bloatedness is those awful completely useless and pointless SVG/CSS spinners that soak up so much CPU that it makes the browser run slower than my 1MHz Apple II from the 1980's. It used to be that you could just block animated gifs or turn off JS, but now it's embedded in the lousy *stylesheet* (or worse, SVG embedded in HTML) so there's no sane way of turning it off. And it's sprouting up everywhere like mushrooms, 'cos everybody and his neighbour's dog just can't wait to see the world slow down to the bad ole pre-GHz days.


> Don't know whether it would meet your keyboard-driven requirements though.

If it supports Vimperator, I'm all set to go! :-P


[...]
> I pretty much hate notification systems period (at least on desktop/laptop).  I'm a KDE user and the biggest thing I hate about modern KDE vs KDE3, even moreso than bloat, is how it tries to use its smartphone-envy notification system for everything until you find the right hoops to jump through to turn that garbage off (especially for file copying). And...those hoops you have to jump through *keep changing*!!! Meh, but at least KDE *lets* you change things without needing poorly-maintained third party hacks...

Yep, that's pretty much why I ditched the whole desktop metaphor cliché along with its rodent mascot, and embraced the pure simplicity of a glorified 80x24 terminal in the form of Ratpoison. Throw out title bars and other useless deco, junk useless overlapping windows that you have to manually drag apart and maximize everything, and drive everything from keyboard so my hands never have to waste time reaching for that rodent.  My CPU and RAM are now freed up to do the *real* work of computing solutions to real problems, rather than squandered on rendering eye-candy that do nothing except hog resources from computations that need it, and *man* is my computer responsive like never before. I can Get Stuff Done in a fraction of the time spent enduring the ritual of reaching for the rodent and manually dragging overlapping windows apart -- when the computer is perfectly capable of automatically solving the overlap problem in a miniscule fraction of the time and energy. (Such things shouldn't even *be* a problem in the first place -- the computer's job is to help me get stuff done, not to present me with a poor-man's simulation of the physics of sorting paper on a physical desk. It's supposed to get RID of the need to sort things on a desk, not to replicate the tedium in a digital facsimile!!)


T

-- 
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. -- P. Erdos

On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 04:12:50PM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> The amount of time that Windows takes to update - both with fetching the updates and with installing them - is insane.
[...]
> Even whatever they do when you reboot during the update process takes a ridiculous amount of time. However they've set up the whole mess, they clearly have fundamental problems with how windows update does pretty much anything that it does.
[...]

Like I said, it's probably because every update requires solving the NP-complete problem of resolving DLL hell.  Being Microsoft, of *course* they would represent everything as the equivalent of an arbitrary graph, complete with unnecessary labels (accompanied by needless icons), frills, wizard entities and un-asked-for OS upgrades -- after all, why settle for simple solutions to simple problems when you could throw a SAT solver at a complex problem for no good reason? -- then delegate it to the user's PC to run said SAT solver to sort out the resulting mess.

(Or perhaps it's because all the additional frills they threw in on top of DLL hell have successfully turned it from an NP-complete problem into a PSPACE-complete one, which would explain why it takes exponential time *and* exponential space to run an update. :-P :-P  Now that I think about it, that explains a LOT of things about Windows. Like why you have to download hundreds of MBs just for a few security patches. :-D)

That's not to say Linux updaters don't have their own faults, of course.
But at least on Debian, (1) you're not incessantly nagged with needless
popups, (2) it doesn't strong-arm you into upgrading to an entire new OS
release just to get *one* security patch, (3) it downloads stuff in a
sane amount of time, and (4) it installs stuff in minutes rather than
hours.

(I've had the pleasure of experiencing upgrading from one major release to another with a single command (apt-get dist-upgrade), and having it Just Work(tm) without even needing to reboot(!).  It was so painless I was even pinching myself afterwards in disbelief that I've upgraded to a new release and it *didn't* feel like a monumental achievement. On my wife's Windows laptop, the smallest of security patches requires rebooting, and enduring the process of upgrading to a new OS release was deserving of a medal.)


T

-- 
"I suspect the best way to deal with procrastination is to put off the procrastination itself until later. I've been meaning to try this, but haven't gotten around to it yet. " -- swr

On Tuesday, 7 May 2019 at 22:46:07 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> I've been entertaining the idea of writing my own browser just so I don't have to deal with the crap anymore. It would be basically ELinks with graphics

try links2, it is already basically that.

But I have also been tempted to do this, because my D libraries are actually... basically capable of it. I have html to text (which I use for my email) and even did a basic layouter with css support once. And it kinda worked - I could view my websites of the time. But meh, I keep being forced to use crappy websites that require crappy browsers so no point even trying.


> Throw out title bars and other useless deco, junk useless overlapping windows

I find these things to be so useful it drives me nuts when programs try to remove them. Overlapping is useful when you disable click raises windows!

You should write your own window manager tho. I still haven't exactly done it... I forked blackbox years ago for myself tho, so I still am using a custom one, just not from scratch.

On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 11:07:47PM +0000, Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tuesday, 7 May 2019 at 22:46:07 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > I've been entertaining the idea of writing my own browser just so I don't have to deal with the crap anymore. It would be basically ELinks with graphics
> 
> try links2, it is already basically that.

Interesting.  I'll have to check it out.


> But I have also been tempted to do this, because my D libraries are actually... basically capable of it. I have html to text (which I use for my email) and even did a basic layouter with css support once. And it kinda worked - I could view my websites of the time. But meh, I keep being forced to use crappy websites that require crappy browsers so no point even trying.

What I'd love to be able to do, is to automatically extract website content apart from useless cruft so that I can, e.g., read articles without being inundated with banner ads, popups (JS, CSS, and whatever else these days), useless splash pages, and weird formatting / styling (like overly-wide, fixed-resolution layouts).  Of course, given the general quality of your general crappy website, this probably has to be done on a per-site basis.


> > Throw out title bars and other useless deco, junk useless overlapping windows
> 
> I find these things to be so useful it drives me nuts when programs try to remove them. Overlapping is useful when you disable click raises windows!

I used to use overlapping windows somewhat.  These days, I just full-screen maximize everything, no exceptions.  The only time I really need to see more than 1 window at a time is when copying/transcribing stuff. So really, all I need is (1) full-screen, maximized, and (2) split-screen, 2-panel (horizontal or vertical).  Everything else is dispensible.


> You should write your own window manager tho. I still haven't exactly done it... I forked blackbox years ago for myself tho, so I still am using a custom one, just not from scratch.

I've been tempted to.  While dipping my toes in Android development recently, I wrote a crude X11/Xlib wrapper module just so I can test GL code on my PC before the more painstaking and annoying process of uploading and running it on my phone.  So I do have the beginnings of an X11 API module that would be necessary to write a window manager in D. I've also written a crude wrapper over libfreetype for my equation graphing project, so I do have the pieces necessary for primitive text rendering. (Not really interested in beautiful text rendering for a WM; it should most of the time stay out of the way anyway -- I can't stand wasting precious screen real estate on needless deco and other WM frills -- and only bare basics text rendition is necessary for the occasional WM interactions.)


T

-- 
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool. -- Edward Burr

On 5/7/19 6:12 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> 
> The amount of time that Windows takes to update - both with fetching the
> updates and with installing them - is insane. And it seems to happen far too
> frequently that windows update just gets stuck and never finishes.
> Regardless of the timing or whether they're forced, the actual update
> process for Windows is absolutely terrible. I've seen updates take several
> minutes on *nix systems, but unless you're installing a ton of packages,
> it's usually pretty quick - and most distros that I've used don't even grab
> anything in the background. It's _never_ quick with Windows. Even whatever
> they do when you reboot during the update process takes a ridiculous amount
> of time. However they've set up the whole mess, they clearly have
> fundamental problems with how windows update does pretty much anything that
> it does.

Yup. And on Win10, I've found that even the background-downloading process (I *think* that's what it was, IIRC...), despite being a background process, would consistently slow the entire computer down to the point of being completely unusable (We're talking, like full minutes for a single click or drag interaction.) And being windows, AFAIK, there's no Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get over to a text terminal and sidestep the desktop's slowdown.

It's a shame, really. I actually used to be really huge on Windows. XP was really quite good in its day for the most part (once you disabled big blue playskool mode). The Linux of the same period was quite a pain, as this was before things like apt and automatic package dependency management. And, maybe it was just me, but X would constantly just suddenly decide on a whim it didn't want to boot anymore until being reinstalled. I'm SO glad Linux has improved as much as it has since then.

On Wed, May 08, 2019 at 02:20:23PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> It's a shame, really. I actually used to be really huge on Windows. XP was really quite good in its day for the most part (once you disabled big blue playskool mode).

I was never a fan of Windows, ever since the 3.1 days. Stuck with DOS until it was obvious it's a dead-end, then at the prompting of a friend jumped ship to Linux.  Never looked back since.  But, to each his own.


> The Linux of the same period was quite a pain, as this was before things like apt and automatic package dependency management.

Man, that brings back the memories.  I remember my first Linux install. Too big to download all at once over dialup, so I had to use good ole SneakerNet to transfer package files from my uni's fat WAN pipe on 3.5-inch floppies to my home PC.  And woe betide when I was missing a dependency -- there was no apt, I had to visit each package's page on debian.org, and manually write down each recursive dependency, then solve the knapsack problem to decide which package to put on which floppy in order to minimize roundtrips on SneakerNet. :-D

Not to mention, installation of the OS was *completely* manual.  You had to partition your drive manually to the right sizes and types using a manual partition tool, then run the bare-bones installer that basically installed just enough for the kernel to boot into bash.  You had to download all other packages manually, and everything had to be configured by editing files in /etc.  Which meant you had to read docs, lots and lots of docs and manpages, 'cos screwing it up as root often meant you had to restart the process ALL OVER AGAIN. :-D  And that's assuming docs were even available.  If not, you had to read scripts in /etc and deduce the right incantations to invoke.


> And, maybe it was just me, but X would constantly just suddenly decide on a whim it didn't want to boot anymore until being reinstalled.

It's not just you.  In the early days X had to be manually installed and configured, which meant hours reading monitor manuals, video card specs, dual-booting into Windows to "cheat" by looking at the settings, then translate all of that into X Klingon-speak aka X11.conf and hope you didn't screw up an important parameter, 'cos hardware in those days did not have many safety mechanisms built in, and X can fry your monitor if you gave it the wrong frequency settings.  Or more commonly, it would "sorta" work but then worked unreliably, or randomly decides to fail, or just barf for no discernible reason whatsoever.

Even to this day, I dread upgrading the X server, because the last time I did that (sometime earlier this year) it started causing GPU lockups. The worst part of this is that I usually don't restart X (since I'm *on* it) while upgrading, and I'd also often upgrade from a remote session, so the currently-running X server is an older version that still works, but the version on disk no longer does, but there's no indication of any problem. Months later I reboot... and discover that X has crashed my GPU, again. Then it's a painstaking task of digging into the Debian archive for earlier versions of X (along with their complex dependencies) and downgrading by hand.

That's why nowadays the first thing I do after installing X is to disable starting X during bootup.  I just can't trust it anymore not to randomly break upon upgrading.  It's almost as unreliable as Windows sometimes, and it's an embarrassment.

Of course, recent versions of X have alleviated a lot of the earlier pains -- nowadays you don't have to deal with X config files anymore except in special circumstances: most hardware is auto-detected and auto-configured, and for the most part the default settings Just Work(tm). Still, on my older hardware it can still be temperamental sometimes.  Once it works, it works very well, for the most part -- and can last for months, even years, without rebooting.  Can't say the same for Windows, not by a long stretch.  But upgrades can sometimes introduce random breakage.


> I'm SO glad Linux has improved as much as it has since then.

It's been good and bad.  The installation process is much saner now, for one thing.  And (mostly-)configurationless X is a *huge* improvement over the early days.  But there are still bogonities in some places. Pretty minor ones, though, compared to what I experienced of Windows. And all fixable with a bit of delving under the hood and bashing(!) out some scripts. :-D  So I continue to be a happy camper here, and have little inclination to touch Windows (except when the wife calls "tech support" :-P).

The best part about Linux is that I can configure the heck out of it until it resembles nothing like what a default installation would give you, and things will still Just Work(tm).  Tried that with Windows once, and man... you wouldn't believe how many things stop working as soon as you change a minor option, like lazy mouse focus.  The option is *there* but nobody uses it, nobody supports it, and random programs randomly fail to work or start exhibiting pathological behaviour. You end up in the middle of Unsupported Territory, and there be dragons there. Good luck should you dare to venture in.  I backed off and sailed back to Linux-land the very next day.  Never again, I say!


T

-- 
Too many people have open minds but closed eyes.

On Sunday, 5 May 2019 at 23:32:46 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> We've got a lot of very reasonable, level-headed Linux folk on this board:
>
> I'm helping my mom look for a laptop to replace her ~10 year old one, and given all the mess Windows Update has been making of things since about Win7 onwards, I'm temped to just stick her on Linux (especially if I can't find anything still using Win7). Heck, 90% of what she does is just web browser anyway, with the other 10% being pretty much Linux compatible stuff (Hmm...although come to think of it, only possible exception might be her iPhone...I'll have to look into that, I'm not an iOS guy...).

For all of my relatives (mom, dad, sister, pretty much anyone who comes with me with a problem requiring installing an OS), I have been installing Xubuntu LTS. It works great. The UI is simple, the UI stays always the same (unlike Gnome/KDE), and it's fast even on very old computers.

I would not recommend a rolling release distro. A major upgrade of desktop environment can unexpectedly disrupt their day-to-day workflow. Ubuntu LTS releases have a very long support period, so even if you turn off automatic upgrades, you need to manually update/reinstall once every 6-8 years.

On Thursday, 9 May 2019 at 05:03:34 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> For all of my relatives (mom, dad, sister, pretty much anyone who comes with me with a problem requiring installing an OS), I have been installing Xubuntu LTS. It works great. The UI is simple, the UI stays always the same (unlike Gnome/KDE), and it's fast even on very old computers.

Here is my list of post-installation tweaks:

- Add a weather widget to the task bar. Useful and makes a good impression.
- Add a keyboard layout switcher widget to the task bar (almost everyone here is bilingual).
- Go into language preferences and ensure all language packs for their preferred language (usually Russian, rarely Romanian) are installed. Essentially this means opening the dialog and clicking OK as Ubuntu doesn't install them all during OS installation for some reason.
- Change the default save format in LibreOffice to Microsoft .doc
- Install an ad blocker (uBlock Origin) in Firefox
- Install Skype for Linux
- If they have a printer, set it up (the only common hardware that doesn't work out of the box!)
- If the user wants, move the taskbar to the bottom of the screen, and disable the screensaver lock.