On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 1:11:22 PM MDT H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 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!

On Linux, whet you normally get is focus follows click (like Windows), but the scroll wheel on the mouse typically scrolls whatever windown it's over regardless of the focus. However, on Windows, it normally scrolls whichever window has focus. This drives me nuts. So, at one point, I switched Windows to focus follows mouse (which requires that you then make it not bring the window to the front when it gets focus, or it becomes unusable). And while this wasn't great, it was generally better with non-MS applications. _They_ did the right thing. However, applications from MS (such as visual studio) ignored the setting about not bring the window to the front when it got focus, making it a royal pain when visual studio did something like pop up a modal window. Similarly, when I messed with the color scheme, non-MS applications did the right thing, but MS applications ended up with the colors being applied in weird ways as if they didn't use the normal building blocks when putting their GUIs together. So, my experience has been that non-MS applications tend to behave properly when you muck with Windows settings, but MS applications do not. It's really quite weird.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Monday, 6 May 2019 at 17:01:21 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> Thanks for all the responses. (Actually, it's not *my* granny, it's my mom, but she *is* a grandparent, as find I rather enjoy reminding her ;) Yea, I'm an ass...)
>
> evilrat's comments about Mint's GUI are a bit worrying.
>
> Ubuntu LTS certainly seems to be the common recommendation. But I have some (perhaps unfounded?) concerns:
>
> - The LTSes are still, what, 3 or so years IIRC? I'm figuring her next machine will probably last her about another decade, so that's well beyond that. So what's the LTS-to-LTS upgrade process like? Is it basically an OS re-install like upgrading Windows traditionally is? Or is it as simple/transparent/painless as 'Uknown' describes Ubuntu's regular day-to-day update process to be?

Yes, they more or less are. I'm currently helping most of my friends with maintining Ubuntu on their laptops. All of them have a wide variety of hardware, some with dual GPU setups (intel + Nvidia or intel + radeon). Both work just fine, even across upgrades, but your mileage will vary. See the upgrade process : https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/installing-upgrading.html

> - It's been a looong time since I last used Ubuntu, but I remember it being clearly designed to be very Mac-like (ie, OSX). She's not experienced with Mac, she's more WinXP-through-Win7. I remember alternative desktops like KDE/Xfce (along with Kubuntu/Xubuntu) being pretty much second-class citizens. Has this improved?

Lubuntu works fine for me. Kubuntu is facing some issues with shortage of manpower, so its better to install KDE on top of Ubuntu instead.

> I'm not too terribly worried about the whole Linux-on-a-laptop thing. That's what my main machine is and in my experience Linux works pretty well on laptops these days. My main concern in this area is just making sure the BIOS (or...whatever the new thing is called now...) is unlockable so Linux can even be installed in the first place.

All new laptops come with UEFI. You just need to check up on safe boot parameters. These things are reasonably well documented. Some distros support safe boot, others don't. You'll have to see which ones do and adjust the settings accordingly, but this is a one time thing.

> Chromebook's an interesting idea, but probably a no-go. She's gonna need more storage than that, plus something to backup her iPhone to, probably a bigger screen than those usually have, and definitely built-in CDR. She does enough audio recording (yes, actual audio recording, not music piracy) that external CDR would be too much of a hassle.

CD recordings are handled fine by K3B and a lot of other FOSS software, so you wan't have an issue there, regardless of which distro you select.

Just make sure the laptop you buy doesn't have a discrete GPU. Those cost extra and likely won't be used, but will definitely give you some nightmarish updates. Intel integrated graphics has really good driver support so you won't have any issues with it. Another thing is, a lot of cheaper laptops of late are coming with dirt cheap touchpads which are unusable. If possible try checking out the touchpads on the laptop before you buy.

On 5/9/19 12:07 PM, Uknown wrote:
> 
> See the upgrade process : https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/installing-upgrading.html
> 
> Lubuntu works fine for me. Kubuntu is facing some issues with shortage of manpower, so its better to install KDE on top of Ubuntu instead.
> 

Thanks. Good to know.

> CD recordings are handled fine by K3B and a lot of other FOSS software, so you wan't have an issue there, regardless of which distro you select.

Yup, k3b is what I use on my machine. I agree, it works well. And I already have her using Audacity (cross-platform) to record audio. (The built-in Windows audio recording toy was introducing periodic audio slowdown - like playing back a worn-out old cassette.)

Ultimately, I've never heard of a Chromebook with built-in optical drive, which is one of the reasons why, as I was saying, Chromebook is pretty much out of the question.

> Just make sure the laptop you buy doesn't have a discrete GPU. Those cost extra and likely won't be used, but will definitely give you some nightmarish updates.

Haha, yea, I don't think she'll be needing to spend the extra $$ on some NVIDIA gaming setup ;)

> Intel integrated graphics has really good driver support so you won't have any issues with it.

Yup. That's what mine has and it's been working fine. Even handles most indie games and many last-gen AAA no problem. Hollow Knight @ 60Hz on 720p :) Not bad for a $340 five-year-old machine!

> Another thing is, a lot of cheaper laptops of late are coming with dirt cheap touchpads which are unusable. If possible try checking out the touchpads on the laptop before you buy.

Ahh, I didn't know that, thanks! Luckily she usually just plugs in a mouse anyway. (Not too surprising - it's old enough to be from before touchpads became not-horrible in the first place.)

On Thu, May 09, 2019 at 06:34:09AM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 1:11:22 PM MDT H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > 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!
> 
> On Linux, whet you normally get is focus follows click (like Windows),

What, really?!  When did that happen? Back when I still actually used a GUI, it was lazy focus (focus follows movement, no need to click).  But mind you, my GUI days were long before KDE or GNOME, so my information is very dated.  I tried to make Windows follow lazy focus once, and ... as described above it was Not Nice(tm).  Just about *everything* started acting funny. I beat a hasty retreat. Heaven forbid I actually *change* a configuration option that the OS provides via a GUI menu to something other than what Everyone Else is doing.

(As you can tell, this left an extremely strong distaste in my mouth for anything that resembles the Windows philosophy of "do it our way, or take the highway" aka programming by convention / anything by convention, really. If something cannot be configured, I refuse to use it.)


[...]
> However, on Windows, it normally scrolls whichever window has focus. This drives me nuts. So, at one point, I switched Windows to focus follows mouse (which requires that you then make it not bring the window to the front when it gets focus, or it becomes unusable). And while this wasn't great, it was generally better with non-MS applications. _They_ did the right thing. However, applications from MS (such as visual studio) ignored the setting about not bring the window to the front when it got focus, making it a royal pain when visual studio did something like pop up a modal window.

IOW, the configuration "option" isn't really an option.  Not a viable one, anyway.  The cynic in me wants to say that it's only there to silence the complainers like me who clamor for configurability, but it doesn't *actually* pan out in practice.


> Similarly, when I messed with the color scheme, non-MS applications did the right thing, but MS applications ended up with the colors being applied in weird ways as if they didn't use the normal building blocks when putting their GUIs together. So, my experience has been that non-MS applications tend to behave properly when you muck with Windows settings, but MS applications do not. It's really quite weird.
[...]

Probably an effect of the unclean coupling between MS products, i.e., the public API that everyone else uses is different from the internal APIs that MS products freely take advantage of, that competitors have no access to.


T

-- 
"You know, maybe we don't *need* enemies." "Yeah, best friends are about all I can take." -- Calvin & Hobbes

On 5/9/19 8:34 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 1:11:22 PM MDT H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> 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!
> 
> On Linux, whet you normally get is focus follows click (like Windows), but
> the scroll wheel on the mouse typically scrolls whatever windown it's over
> regardless of the focus. However, on Windows, it normally scrolls whichever
> window has focus. This drives me nuts.

OMG, that drove me absolutely up the wall as well, even when I was a Windows guy. Serious UI blunder: You can point-n-click, you can point-n-drag, but you can't point-n-scroll.

And it's not just the window that needs to be active, but often the specific control as well: For example, open the standard 2-panel Win Explorer (file manager, not IE), and try to scroll the left panel and then the right panel. Doesn't work. You have to click which panel you want to scroll. *Then* scroll wheel will work on it - until you want to go back to scrolling the other...

It's exactly the same as if you always needed to "activate" a button or hyperlink before you could click on it. It's just insane.

Luckily, there's this:
http://ehiti.de/katmouse/

I don't know how well it still works on the newer "Metro" versions of Windows though.

> So, at one point, I switched Windows
> to focus follows mouse (which requires that you then make it not bring the
> window to the front when it gets focus, or it becomes unusable). And while
> this wasn't great, it was generally better with non-MS applications. _They_
> did the right thing. However, applications from MS (such as visual studio)
> ignored the setting about not bring the window to the front when it got
> focus, making it a royal pain when visual studio did something like pop up a
> modal window. Similarly, when I messed with the color scheme, non-MS
> applications did the right thing, but MS applications ended up with the
> colors being applied in weird ways as if they didn't use the normal building
> blocks when putting their GUIs together. So, my experience has been that
> non-MS applications tend to behave properly when you muck with Windows
> settings, but MS applications do not. It's really quite weird.

Yea, see, what you and H.S. Teoh describe are exactly the sort of problems that happen when Unix Philosophy isn't used and software tries to pull that "vertical integration"[1] garbage instead.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration

On Thursday, 9 May 2019 at 17:37:04 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> OMG, that drove me absolutely up the wall as well, even when I was a Windows guy. Serious UI blunder: You can point-n-click, you can point-n-drag, but you can't point-n-scroll.
>
>...
> I don't know how well it still works on the newer "Metro" versions of Windows though.


On Windows 10 it's called "Scroll inactive windows when I hover over them" and it's enabled by default.

On 05/06/2019 05:15 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> I mean, with all the talk about user-friendly UI's

The only way I can explain this is so called UI experts are not committed to serving the user. Perhaps the UI folk are actually normal but they under tremendous pressure by other parts of the company.

Nick mentioned RokuTV. I cannot believe that Roku even took off as a product with the responsiveness that it had. The version that we have today is barely bearable. And it cannot be the hardware because I don't think there is hardware that slow today. I think they send every single click over the network. It's laughable. And they imitate responsiveness by making a "click" sound that comes a second after you click the button. Ha ha! :p

> *somebody* on the Windows team
> should have stepped back, realized what an insane nightmare of a user
> experience this kind of behaviour is

My dad's new laptop has Windows 10 in it. The unfortunate result is that he simply does not (more like cannot) use it anymore. While he is doing something else on the interface, a window pops up at the right-hand corner. He doesn't even see it. He is expected to click it? Sometimes some thin banner appears under the menu bar of some applications, warning him about something. He doesn't even *see* it with all the jumble of stuff on the screen. Mind boggling so much so that I don't think UX people are people at all. (I thought I would feel better; but it's getting worse; but thank for letting me write these. :) )

Ali

On 5/9/19 4:48 PM, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> On 05/06/2019 05:15 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 
>  > I mean, with all the talk about user-friendly UI's
> 
> The only way I can explain this is so called UI experts are not committed to serving the user. Perhaps the UI folk are actually normal but they under tremendous pressure by other parts of the company.
> 
> Nick mentioned RokuTV. I cannot believe that Roku even took off as a product with the responsiveness that it had. The version that we have today is barely bearable. And it cannot be the hardware because I don't think there is hardware that slow today.

There wasn't hardware that slow 25 years ago.

> I think they send every single click over the network.

Oh my dear god, I think you may actually be right about that! It would explain so much...

> It's laughable. And they imitate responsiveness by making a "click" sound that comes a second after you click the button. Ha ha! :p

Yup.

But one thing about your comments is disconcerting: This particular TV in question, AIUI, I based on Roku 2. And supposedly, Roku 3+ fixed the responsiveness issue. Is that really not the case? If so, that's even more pathetic than I thought.

The part that *REALLY* gets to me, maybe even more than anything else, is that given full access to all internal documentation and tools, *I*, just by my singular little old lonesome, could do a FAAARRR better job. But like Megadeth pointed out years ago: "...But who's buying?"


>  > *somebody* on the Windows team
>  > should have stepped back, realized what an insane nightmare of a user
>  > experience this kind of behaviour is
> 
> My dad's new laptop has Windows 10 in it. The unfortunate result is that he simply does not (more like cannot) use it anymore. While he is doing something else on the interface, a window pops up at the right-hand corner. He doesn't even see it. He is expected to click it? Sometimes some thin banner appears under the menu bar of some applications, warning him about something. He doesn't even *see* it with all the jumble of stuff on the screen. Mind boggling so much so that I don't think UX people are people at all. (I thought I would feel better; but it's getting worse; but thank for letting me write these. :) )

"We keep making it more idiot-proof, but they keep making better idiots."

My mom's the same way. If a dialog box pops up, she absolutely, WILL NOT read it, PERIOD. As a last resort she'll grab me to "help", but otherwise, to absolve herself the burden of reading and/or thinking, she'll look for a way to "click it away" (I have no idea where she ever got the phrase "click it away", but if I ever find out you'll know because I'll probably be incarcerated for manslaughter...(that's a joke BTW, just to be clear...)). But as far as her actually *reading* a popup dialog...nope...nuh-uh, *never* gonna happen. Stubborn ol'....*&%^@ ^@^&@(* $(**@&*.....*grumble* *grumble*....

On 5/9/19 4:39 PM, Rumbu wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 May 2019 at 17:37:04 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
>> OMG, that drove me absolutely up the wall as well, even when I was a Windows guy. Serious UI blunder: You can point-n-click, you can point-n-drag, but you can't point-n-scroll.
>>
>> ...
>> I don't know how well it still works on the newer "Metro" versions of Windows though.
> 
> 
> On Windows 10 it's called "Scroll inactive windows when I hover over them" and it's enabled by default.
> 

Oh thank goodness for that...*FINALLY*!!!!

(A bit too little too late, but, hey...)

On 5/9/19 11:21 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> On 5/9/19 4:48 PM, Ali Çehreli wrote:
>>
>> The only way I can explain this is so called UI experts are not committed to serving the user. Perhaps the UI folk are actually normal but they under tremendous pressure by other parts of the company.
>>
>> Nick mentioned RokuTV. I cannot believe that Roku even took off as a product with the responsiveness that it had. The version that we have today is barely bearable. And it cannot be the hardware because I don't think there is hardware that slow today.
> 
> There wasn't hardware that slow 25 years ago.
> 
>> I think they send every single click over the network.
> 
> Oh my dear god, I think you may actually be right about that! It would explain so much...

Come to think of it, back when I "cut the cable" as they say now and ditched cable TV, one of the key reasons I ditched was because after the set-top's latest major update, things as simple as *changing the channel* would frequently involve...I shit you not...MORE than a full minute(!!) of delay.

After several months of that complete and utter garbage, we even complained, had a technician sent out, the technician replaced some wiring a squirrel had allegedly chewed through, replaced the set-top box itself, aaannddd....*ZERO* change. So we told Time Warner (now more appropriately rebranded as Speculum) we were done.

So maybe *that's* why Roku managed to take off despite its clear ineptitude: At least Roku's UI lag is on the order of seconds instead of (literally) minutes!