3 ms·

I agree with "not_your_vase" says, but also people want fancy, look at GNOME, KDE, Windows and MACs. I use fvwm and it is far from fancy, but it gets the job d

by jmclnx 4y ago

I agree with "not_your_vase" says, but also people want fancy, look at GNOME, KDE, Windows and MACs. I use fvwm and it is far from fancy, but it gets the job done and is quite efficient. Proprietary software Companies discovered early on eye-candy sells, and many people in the Linux Land is following what Apple and Windows developers do because most people want a similar fancy look. In many cases PCs and Laptops are more of an entertainment device as opposed to a data processing device, that means Browsers are getting lots functionality for that use-case, and that is not cheap. I had hoped the move of the masses to Cell Phones and Tablets would stop this trend, but seems it only to have accelerated it. Now a "rant" On the Linux side, Wayland is a big concern for me because I may be forced into using software that has a lot of functionality I do not need, stealing RAM from processing/analyzing large sets of data that could use gigs of RAM. Right now my distro of choice still easily allows me to avoid that bloat, but the Wayland move may force it to follow to use something Red Hat created that to me is way to complex and is overkill. Luckily OpenBSD and NetBSD (on a BSD now) is trying to avoid that mess, but Wayland may force changes I believe neither of these systems wants. Adding the bloat these systems have been able to avoid. Already dbus is needed for Firefox/chrome... What else will they be forced to port.

circuit10 4y ago
Even for productivity having a UI that “feels” nice is important for usability
zzo38computer 4y ago
I dislike the fancy decorations in GNOME and KDE, and I do not use any desktop environment on my computer. However, many programs still use GTK and expect such desktop environments, and they have other problems; I prefer Xaw, that you can also use X resource manager files, etc. You could also use command-line programs. Some programs (especially older programs, but also some newer ones that I have written) allow to use pipes with external commands from within the program (for example, Heirloom-mailx allows to write attachments to pipes; I find this very useful, because when someone sends a picture to me, I can use that to view the picture). Web browsers especially have become full of problems. It lacks better controls that the end user can customize and link with other programs etc, and is full of bloated features that don't help and often make it worse anyways. Unfortunately, WWW is a mess, I have some ideas for improvement which are unfortunately still need to be a mess a bit but still can be somewhat better; some of the specifications could be "turned around" to be implemented more usefully for the user instead of the author, e.g. a request/response overriding configuration can substitute for many of the other settings, etc. ARIA might also be helpful in some cases. I also don't like Wayland, and I don't like Unicode either (what someone mentioned is that Unicode makes text processing very slow; apparently that is even worse than I thought). There are parts of the Freedesktop specification which are problematic, in my opinion, too (as well as some parts which are unnecessary but can be avoided). And then there are sandboxing systems to try to improve security, but they have problems too, such as requiring file names to be Unicode (you can't use EUC-TRON), and having rather limited functionality with allowing end users to connect them with other programs, e.g. it does not seem to have a way to ask the user for a command which will be executed by popen. And then, you might want permissions to differ by command-line switches, etc, and that is also difficult. (I do have idea how to make a better one, though.) Those who are trying to avoid this bloat should make packages which are designed to reduce it by making programs (modifying existing ones if necessary, and avoiding certain dependencies, including the most common web browser engines) without D-bus, Wayland, systemd, etc. An operating system with capability-based security (including proxy capabilities too) also would be a good idea, I think. (I have some ideas relating to operating system design; maybe some other people will be able to help with this too)
- kaba0 4y ago
  Unicode is about functionality, not some fancy unnecessary decoration. Not wanting that (without a care for an alternative) is just stupid and we really should not be talking about that at all in 2023.
  - zzo38computer 4y ago
    > Unicode is about functionality, not some fancy unnecessary decoration. At least, it is what was intended, but it has many problems. You can do international text without it. Unfortunately, it is also used for fancy decorations too. One possible alternative is TRON code, although usually it would be to not to force character encoding on programs that don't need them. With Unicode, there is then duplicated work of validation, etc, which can both cause some data to be lost and can slow it down because it does things redundantly, etc. It tries to display text using mixed directions in a way that isn't very good, etc.
kaba0 4y ago
Wayland is a protocol, and several implementations of it uses less memory than the huge monolithic xserver. Hell, likely the biggest userbase of wayland is the car industry where they use it for embedded screens running on embedded hardware.

by jmclnx 4y ago

circuit10 4y ago

Even for productivity having a UI that “feels” nice is important for usability

zzo38computer 4y ago

I dislike the fancy decorations in GNOME and KDE, and I do not use any desktop environment on my computer. However, many programs still use GTK and expect such desktop environments, and they have other problems; I prefer Xaw, that you can also use X resource manager files, etc. You could also use command-line programs. Some programs (especially older programs, but also some newer ones that I have written) allow to use pipes with external commands from within the program (for example, Heirloom-mailx allows to write attachments to pipes; I find this very useful, because when someone sends a picture to me, I can use that to view the picture). Web browsers especially have become full of problems. It lacks better controls that the end user can customize and link with other programs etc, and is full of bloated features that don't help and often make it worse anyways. Unfortunately, WWW is a mess, I have some ideas for improvement which are unfortunately still need to be a mess a bit but still can be somewhat better; some of the specifications could be "turned around" to be implemented more usefully for the user instead of the author, e.g. a request/response overriding configuration can substitute for many of the other settings, etc. ARIA might also be helpful in some cases. I also don't like Wayland, and I don't like Unicode either (what someone mentioned is that Unicode makes text processing very slow; apparently that is even worse than I thought). There are parts of the Freedesktop specification which are problematic, in my opinion, too (as well as some parts which are unnecessary but can be avoided). And then there are sandboxing systems to try to improve security, but they have problems too, such as requiring file names to be Unicode (you can't use EUC-TRON), and having rather limited functionality with allowing end users to connect them with other programs, e.g. it does not seem to have a way to ask the user for a command which will be executed by popen. And then, you might want permissions to differ by command-line switches, etc, and that is also difficult. (I do have idea how to make a better one, though.) Those who are trying to avoid this bloat should make packages which are designed to reduce it by making programs (modifying existing ones if necessary, and avoiding certain dependencies, including the most common web browser engines) without D-bus, Wayland, systemd, etc. An operating system with capability-based security (including proxy capabilities too) also would be a good idea, I think. (I have some ideas relating to operating system design; maybe some other people will be able to help with this too)

kaba0 4y ago
Unicode is about functionality, not some fancy unnecessary decoration. Not wanting that (without a care for an alternative) is just stupid and we really should not be talking about that at all in 2023.
- zzo38computer 4y ago
  > Unicode is about functionality, not some fancy unnecessary decoration. At least, it is what was intended, but it has many problems. You can do international text without it. Unfortunately, it is also used for fancy decorations too. One possible alternative is TRON code, although usually it would be to not to force character encoding on programs that don't need them. With Unicode, there is then duplicated work of validation, etc, which can both cause some data to be lost and can slow it down because it does things redundantly, etc. It tries to display text using mixed directions in a way that isn't very good, etc.

kaba0 4y ago

Wayland is a protocol, and several implementations of it uses less memory than the huge monolithic xserver. Hell, likely the biggest userbase of wayland is the car industry where they use it for embedded screens running on embedded hardware.