On Saturday, September 14, 2013 22:00:02 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> And besides, KDE and GNOME have always been about giving a more Windows-like (or mac-like) feel to Linux, and in no small part for the sake of new Linux users. Plus, the latest ones, KDE4 and GNOME3 were largely about re-designing things in hopes of making them easier still. (At least that's been my understanding.)

KDE 4 was more about redesigning KDE's architecture. They went with a less cartoony look and feel by default than they had for KDE 3, but ultimately, KDE 4 is a _lot_ like KDE 3, only built in a much cleaner and modular manner underneat the hood. It's main problem was that the developers released it when it still wasn't really ready (because the app developers wouldn't port to it until they released, and KDE 4 wouldn't really be ready until the app developers had ported stuff to it and found bugs - a bit of a catch 22), so initially, KDE 4 had a _lot_ of problems, which gave it a bit of a bad rep. But at this point, it works as well as KDE 3 did, and most of the features are essentially the same. Some aspects of both KDE 3 and KDE 4 are quite Windows- like (albeit generally more feature-full than what Windows provides for the same thing), though I think that it's more a case of simply not redesigning things that didn't need redesigning rather than trying to emulate Windows.

As for Gnome 3, I don't know what they're smoking. It's one of the most bizarre DEs ever - enough so that there are at least two major Gnome 2 clones floating around (IIRC, one is actually a fork of gnome 2, and the other is a fork of gnome 3 made to look like gnome 2), and a lot people seem to hate Gnome 3. At least KDE hasn't tried to completely change its basic UI paradigms like Gnome 3 did.

Oh well. Unfortunately, DEs tend to end up being an almost religious argument. I'm a big fan of KDE, so that's what I tend to promote, and I really don't understand some of what the Unity and Gnome guys have been up to (or the Windows 8 guys for that matter), as I'm of the opinion that the basic UI paradigms that we've had since Win95 (if not before) really don't need to be redesigned. We've had plenty of incremental improvements over the years, which is great, but it seems like the UI guys just can't accept that you don't need to keep completely redesigning stuff. It's not like we redesign door knobs or pots all the time. We found basic designs for them which work, and we've stuck with them, and at most, new designs are variations on the same basic design rather than being completely new. Unfortunately, it seems like the UI guys just can't accept that UIs are the same.

- Jonathan M Davis

Am 15.09.2013 04:58, schrieb Nick Sabalausky:
> On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 16:05:09 -0700
> Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:
>
>> On 9/14/2013 3:13 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> Plus I seem to be the only Windows user in history who has never
>>> said "Uhh, ok" to a "Super-helpful web browser toolbar! You'll love
>>> it! Install now!"
>>
>>
>> People today keep trying to get me to install this linucks-thingy.
>> "Trust me! It's better than Windows!" Yeah, right :-)
>>
>> I'm probably the only Mac user in history who doesn't find it
>> intuitive and has to constantly google how to do basic things.
>>
>
> Wait, you mean "Mac user who doesn't find *Mac* intuitive"? I spent a
> year as an OSX guy (way back) and ultimately came to the same
> conclusion: I couldn't do half of what I wanted without it seeming to
> fight me at every turn. And it always put up a damn good fight, too.
> I've used 10.7 since then, and it seems to have only gotten goofier. (At
> least it's easy to disable the backwards-scrolling.)
>
> Even moving the mouse pointer across the screen was (and still is) an
> effort, no matter what the sensitivity setting. It's no wonder so many
> Mac users swear by the touchpad - that's the only pointing device where
> OSX's acceleration is non-broken enough to *let* you move from one end
> of the screen to the other in *one* motion instead of three or four
> *and* still be able to hit a button-sized target without surgeon-like
> hand control.
>

Really?

The only mouse related configuration I tend to change, is to use both buttons, instead of Cmd+Button.

Maybe using mices since Amiga 500 days helps :)

--
Paulo

On 09/13/2013 02:42 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, September 13, 2013 21:48:15 Namespace wrote:
>> Just out of interest.
>>
>> I use Sublime 2, Notepad++ and as IDE currently Mono-D. But I
>> will try this evening VisualD.
>
> I use gvim regardless of the language that I'm writing in. I even use
> it for word processing, because if I have to write a document that
> requires that, I use LaTex.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>

+1

Except mine is Emacs. :)

Ali

On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 03:08:32 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 04:23:35AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > 
> > Windows (nice):
> > % program-cli file.txt
> > % program-gui file.txt
> > 
> > Linux (wtf?!):
> > % program-cli file.txt
> > % program-gui file.txt >/dev/null 2>%1 &
> 
> That's only if you don't care about the output of the GUI program, which is usually an indication of errors.
> 
> Well, unless the GUI program uses one of those stupid chatty toolkits that like to spew EVERYTHING to stdout/stderr, no matter how inane. It violates the rule that programs should be silent by default, and verbose only when asked to be or when an error condition is important enough to warrant soliciting the user's attention.
> 
> But even then, I usually don't care about these random spews. They can be useful if the GUI program segfaults (which GUI programs are somehow very likely to, for some reason), then you at least have a possibly useful error message. Sending everything into /dev/null by default is a bit counterproductive.
> 

I do agree that being able to access the stdout/err of a GUI is a good thing. I just don't usually care ;), and frankly I think that fact just further underscores my point that launching GUI apps on Linux isn't handled particularly great.

Even assuming the usefulness of accessing stdout/err of a GUI, I still don't think plastering it all to the active interactive shell that launched it is a particularly sane default. There's gotta be better ways: Like logging it all (either as opt-in or opt-out logging - I don't care as long as it's consistent.) Or maybe a /proc/stdout/[pid] and /proc/stderr/[pid].  And then maybe a combined /proc/all/stdout. I dunno, something. There's gotta be a better way.

Windows knows when a program is GUI or CLI, I think that helps give it a leg up in (potentially) addressing the matter nicely (even if it does currently just throw away all GUI stdout/err, AFAIK). I know situation-specific behaviors are somewhat anti-Unix, but I think GUI vs CLI is significant enough to justify a certain amount of differences (And it's not like Unix doesn't have alternate behaviors where appropriate - ex: some files have finite size and some "files" don't, some are physically on HDD and some aren't. All perfectly justified inconsistencies.)

Come to think of it, anyone have any idea if Plan 9 approached this "launching gui apps" any differently than Linux? I'd be curious about that.


> One situation where they can be annoying is when you're switching between vim (of course) and the gui program, and the random spewage messes up vim's TUI, then the solution is to hit ctrl-L, which *most* properly-written TUI programs understand as "something threw up all over your terminal, please repaint"

Cool tip! Thanks! I didn't know that. It'll certainly come in handy.


> And if I need to start multiple GUI apps from the same spewage terminal, I just ctrl-Z to suspend the first one, 'bg' to background it (the afterthought equivalent of &), then start the second app.

You know, I always keep forgetting about "bg". I always remember "fg" because that's how I undo the mistake of hitting Ctrl-Z when I meant Ctrl-C ;) But I keep forgetting I can stuff things into the background after-the-fact. Which is weird - I first learned about "fg/bg" over a decade ago :P


> Or
> better yet, with ratpoison, since it's just two keystrokes to open a
> new terminal, I'd just open a new terminal, start the gui app with
> just a single &, then *kill* that terminal (also just 2 keystrokes in
> ratpoison) so that the OS sends all output to /dev/null for me
> without me ever needing to name /dev/null manually. :) That's 4
> keystrokes compared to that idiotic verbose bash syntax for
> redirecting stdin/stderr to /dev/null (which I'm no fan of, just for
> the record), that takes ... let's see... 15+ keystrokes. Ratpoison
> FTW. :)
> 

Ehh, while I'm sure that's easy, it seems like more thought/steps than really *should* be necessary in most cases.

> 
> > But that's not always right - sometimes you need this instead: % gksudo program-gui file.txt >/dev/null 2>%1 &
> 
> GUI programs that need sudo privileges are Teh Evil. I avoid them like the plague. Unless they're the system package manager, but in that case I'd use the CLI equivalents anyway, so this baroque dance is never necessary for me. :-P
>

Well, I like my GUI-based text editors, and I like to be able to edit configuration files when I need to (not that I like *needing* to). So you do the math ;)

> 
> > But that's not always right either. On some systems it's:
> > % kdesudo program-gui file.txt >/dev/null 2>%1 &
> 
> I have an intense hatred of anything GUI that asks for root privileges. GUI apps are just too fragile, too fat, too crash-prone, to entrust with root privileges.

That may be a fair point. But I've been in the (perhaps bad) habit of running Windows as admin since forever, and it hasn't killed me, so ehh, whatever. ;)


> I have no confidence they will not
> also have nasty bugs that destroys or overwrites system files (a pet
> peeve of mine is gui programs that insist on creating stuff in $HOME
> that isn't their own app-specific dotfile or under their own
> dedicated dotdirectory

Actually, windows apps are pretty bad with that too. Probably even worse since Windows is *supposed* to have at least two separate equivalents to $HOME for each user:

- The well-known "My Documents" for files the user *explicitly* creates
  and saves (equivalent to the non-hidden files in $HOME, and usually
  something like "C:\Users\{user name}\Documents" on Vista and up)

- And a separate %APPDATA% for any data a program implicitly saves
  (equivalent to the hidden files in $HOME). Settings, game saves,
  persistent user-specific caches, etc. (Usually something like
  "C:\Users\{user name}\AppData\Roaming" on Vista and up.)

(There's actually more, including a non-roaming machine-specific directory, and a common parent directory of all of them that's unique to the user and ultimately contains *all* the user-centric data...at least the user-centric data that isn't in the registry. But those two above are the real key ones.)

But a lot of windows programs just spew all their shit into the user-centric "My Documents" instead of "%APPDATA%/AppFooBar" where it all belongs. Even Microsoft's own Visual Studio does this (unless they've fixed it - they apparently change everything in every version anyway). So then *MY* *DOCUMENTS* gets cluttered with random shit I know perfectly well *I* didn't create. So I have to create a "MyDocs" subdirectory to use as my *real* "My Documents". But I can't tell Windows it's my real "My Documents" or everything will start spamming that directory instead (Unless the program is *really* poorly behaved and hard-codes something like "C:\Users\{user name}\Documents", though I don't know how rare/common that is.)

Ugh...I don't know how I managed to learn that much random shit about Windows...<g>


> > Of course, Linux *also* provides many ways to do it *wrong*, which are naturally more convenient:
> > 
> [...]
> 
> None of this are an issue if you've a fast way to starting up / switching to a specific terminal dedicated for containing spewage. :)
> 

Yea, but then you have to actually *do* that ;)

> (Of course, the fact the majority of gui programs love spewing like this is a sign of a fundamental pathology common to such programs, but that belongs in another rant. :-P

They appear to use stdout/err as a logfile. I guess that could be convenient during development, but...ugh.

> It's one of the many reasons I
> have an aversion to all things GUI. In fact, in *my* book, a proper
> GUI program should automatically detach itself from the terminal at
> startup -- there are well-known, standard ways of doing this, but
> alas, most GUI developers don't care enough to do it.)
> 

I would buy that book ;) Actually though, do you have a link regarding that auto-detaching?

On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 13:41:48 +0200
"deadalnix" <deadalnix@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> You are either dishonest or a complete morron. By respect for you, I'll pick the first one.

Huh? Is there some user-spoofing going on here?

Am 15.09.2013 01:35, schrieb Nick Sabalausky:
> On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 17:38:52 +0200
> "Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Saturday, 14 September 2013 at 06:57:23 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>> Windows and most of the other distros at the time offered: the
>>> ability to install a bare minimum system that could still
>>> function without *requiring* X11
>>
>>
>> oh god X11 was too brutally slow to use on an older computer
>> anyway. Windows 95 was actually fast.


An interesting anecdote.

At the begining of my UNIX days, it was a pleasure to use the usual set
of APIs, which tend to be less convoluted than on Windows.

Then I started looking into X11 programming with Xlib and Motif, and could not believe that they managed to make it even more complex than
any other desktop graphics programming API!

On those days, Gtk and Qt were still to be born and framebuffer applications running with setuid coded in svgalib were the way to go
for graphics coding on Linux distributions.




>>
>
> My first introduction to Linux was around 2001 with Mandrake and Red
> Hat (the two main "newbie-friendly" distros at the time). I couldn't
> believe how insanely sllloooooow Nautilus was compared to Win98 and
> Win2k on the same hardware.
>
> Plus, the X11 installation kept completely destroying itself for no
> apparent reason. One day, a few weeks after the most recent
> from-scratch OS installation, X would just simply decide not to start.
> And I never could manage to fix it without yet another OS
> re-installation.
>
> That, plus the constant tinkering, the awful state of pre-apt/yum
> packages, and the attitudes of many Linux users at the time left me
> swearing off Linux and running back to Windows until several years
> later when I finally gave it another try with "This new Ubuntu thing
> everyone seems to be talking about."
>
> Boy have things improved. Not perfect, granted, but far better than I
> had ever expected.
>

While true, this experience is easy to replicate in 2013 with the wrong
laptop, sadly.




>>
>> Actually though now there's the whole qemu/kvm virtualization
>> stuff who's potential I really don't think has been fully
>> explored.
>

> I feel exactly the same way. EVen though I've never been a
> big VM-language fan, machine virtualization rocks. (Aside from Intel's
> deliberate marginalization of it for anything but high-end.)
>
>

I like vm languages, if the implementation offers a proper jit. :)

As for virtualization, I have also became a big fan and no longer dual boot.

--
Paulo

On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 17:08:56 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday, 13 September 2013 at 23:56:26 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > Personally, I find the Windows/DOS
> > shell to be completely unusable and use git-bash when I'm
> 
> cmd.exe is indeed painful to use. I blame it's weird history and tab completion. It has them so you want to use it.... but they are weird.
> 

I think they help make cmd.exe usable, but you're right, they are weird. And limited.

The history does at least seem to have a certain logic to it, but in practice I usually find it more confusing than bash's or, uhhh, whatever BSD's default shell is.

In fact, after I got over my initial shock (only a few minutes), I started to grock the logic of BSD's shell history, and I'm starting to like it more than bash's history. So easy to call up the command you want, even if it's old: Just type the beginning and then "up/down" automatically filters to that prefix. Nice. The redirection system has some interesting points too, although I'm not familiar enough with that aspect yet (as opposed to bash) to really judge it.


> The commands don't bother me, the different quoting and (lack of?) looping don't bother me - I prefer to just use D for anything more than a line or three of shell anyway - but the history and compleition are really annoying.
> 

Yea. And as far as the commands go, it's easy enough to install the Windows port of all the basic Gnu tools. So I can tee stuff, and pipe to grep and such just as well on Windows as I can on Linux. And piping/redirection works fine on cmd.exe, pretty much identical to bash actually.

So I'm actually fairly comfortable on the Windows command line, all things considered. My biggest beefs are that I can't resize the terminal's width or copy-paste without the mouse, but there's a million alternate front-ends to cmd.exe which do that stuff just fine. I even have a couple installed, I'm just too lazy to change my habit of always reaching for cmd.exe ;)

On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 12:42:45 +0100
Russel Winder <russel@winder.org.uk> wrote:

> On Sat, 2013-09-14 at 09:53 +0100, Russel Winder wrote: […]
> > OK Vim beats Emacs on that one, for Emacs it Esc 1 2 Ctrl+Down, 4 keystrokes.
> 
> Of course Vim is completely unusable since it relies on using monospace fonts, where everyone one knows that reading is best done with proportional fonts.
> 
> <yes-this-is-a-bit-of-an-intentional-troll/>
> 
> :-)
> 
> 

Actually, there's a way to make proportional fonts work just fine for code:

http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/

I'm totally sold on the idea of elastic tabstops. I just wish Scintilla would support them so I can actually *use* them in my editor.

On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 13:49:43 +0200
"Namespace" <rswhite4@googlemail.com> wrote:

> I never thought that this becomes a discussion about windows versus linux. :o

I never thought I'd see an OS debate that wasn't a flamewar!

On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 10:18:45 -0700
Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg@gmx.com> wrote:

> On Saturday, September 14, 2013 10:11:59 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > Nah, it's still too rainbow-y for me. I still prefer no syntax highlighting.
> 
> Whereas I would feel almost like I was walking around blind if there were no syntax highlighting. I can certainly read code without syntax highlighting, but it's much harder. To each their own I guess.
> 

I feel colorblind without highlighting.

I know that sounds like a bad joke (and feel free to take it that
way ;) ), but it really does make me feel full-colorblind.