Comments by "Chaos Corner" (@chaos.corner) on "Brodie Robertson" channel.

  1.  @Arcidi225  It could be better. Given that you have to put your device so close to the charger, you almost might as well plug it in anyway. Plus, half the time, I've unplugged the charging pad to use the cable for something else so I have to plug in my wireless charger before I can use it anyway.
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  2. Epub reflows which means it's a different niche. Of course, PDF is often misused...
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  3.  @thewhitefalcon8539  It's the old issue of when you create an organization, it has to do things to justify its existence even if those things are counter to the original reason for its creation.
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  4.  @smpmuzpid Those keyboards are great. I like to keep them around because you always seem to need a keyboard & mouse at odd times for unexpected circumstances. Media centers, TVs (most can take keyboards and mice), Raspberry Pis...
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  5. Having used Ubuntu and Debian at work for a long time, installing Slackware feels like meeting an old friend.
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  6.  @pastenml Cathedral vs bazaar. Wayland appears to want to be a cathedral.
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  7.  @alexhajnal107 Just wanted to say I'm liking the cut of your jib in this comments section.
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  8. The problem with a recommendation is that a less-informed user might not know when the 'recommendation' is wrong for them. Best to just state the facts. A recommendation is editorial in this case.
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  9. This is bad and I'm not intending to take anything away from it but people should know not to enter their seed words if applications ask for them. If you forgot, this is a reminder.
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  10. The Russians are banned by US govt laws so, unfortunately, I think that's stuck. Though that was under Biden so who knows going forward? I hope they can be brought back onboard in good time. Linus' comments were 'unfortunate' but I'll point out that Russian isn't a race.
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  11.  @BrodieRobertson Your own poll says 5% of people use screensavers. Do some multiplication. That's far from nobody.
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  12. I like to see advancement and X definitely has its issues but I'm always mindful of the joelonsoftware essay "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" and it seems like the Wayland people might be running into some of the things he warned about. X had decades of development and refinement and those developers weren't just twiddling their thumbs.
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  13.  @hubertnnn  Actually, I have Christmas lights with a US plug with fuses. Tiny, tiny fuses.
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  14. Kinda true. But it seems likely the Rust devs told Linus that they'd bring their Rusty goodness and it wouldn't be any extra work for anyone and then they're wanting to insert code into other parts of the project and Linus is supposed to spend time mediating it all. Sometimes, it's easier to let things fail than to try and convince people what they're advocating for is a bad idea. Not that I'd do it that way myself but I also haven't created and managed software that runs on millions, if not billions of devices around the world.
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  15. Laptops have been pushing that way anyway and are pretty available. Having it as a standard will be nice though.
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  16. @ Note that as humans, we have already devised a system to have to avoid interacting with URLs directly in the form of QR codes. They're really that bad. Sometimes people will even add cute pictures or decorations just to hide their nature even more. Other considerations: People often get to the websites they want by typing the domain name into a search engine. Also, the address bar is typically no longer simply an address bar but a hodge-podge of address bar, search and history and tab search because URL addresses are just that cumbersome. Bear in mind I've been mulling these things over since the World Wide Web came with a spinning earth in front of a stylized S.
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  17. Moving your hand to the mouse slows you down. Though as others have said, that is available.
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  18. I wonder when the last time the ball was actually useful was. Assuming it isn't still used in some weird way.
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  19. I think it also reflects a probably lack of hierarchy in the people using the system. A system would be owned by the department and faculty members would probably regard themselves as coequal with regard to access, probably with a large amount of politics thrown in. Think Game of Thrones but with pocket protectors.
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  20.  @leopard3131  The issue likely is that they had a rough idea of what level of effort was required to maintain X (and some careful refactoring may have improved that) but likely hugely underestimated the effort required to bring up a completely new project from scratch to ready for primetime.
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  21.  @BrodieRobertson That's reciprocal though for something like Wayland. If you want application developers to make their applications work on your system, you need to make it attractive to the people who will be using those applications. This whole "You'll eat what you're given" attitude is a big red flag. Besides which, for someone, somewhere, screensavers are a must-have feature. Taking a flippant attitude to peoples' use-cases is no bueno.
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  22. X did not really have screensavers in the early days. It was a heavily requested feature and was eventually made properly usable. Of course, new devs are going to reinvent the wheel...
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  23. 80/20 rule. (Or one of them - it seems there are several. It's the one that states 80% of the work takes 20% of the time).
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  24.  @eternaldarkness500  This is a random boot issue though so fairly straightforward to just reboot.
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  25.  @jamesflames6987 That's not really the point.
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  26.  @BrodieRobertson Apparently some users have been making the case or this would not be an issue. How hard are people with no leverage supposed to fight before they give up and walk away?
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  27.  @BrodieRobertson  I find the cable is a hassle sometimes as I often want the keyboard out of the way to use the desk for other issues. I still prefer wired. I also like the MS Natural keyboards. I'm actually intending to add a USB-C port so I can disconnect they keyboard at the keyboard end of the cable. I may make a video on it.
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  28.  @rogo7330 "Logitech Advanced 2.4 GHz is integrated into all compatible devices, and provides 128-bit AES encryption between keyboard and receiver". Brodie didn't mention it as he said they 'just work' but the devices need to be paired with the receiver (they come paired from the factory) and it's possible to move devices between receivers. I think a receiver can have something like 4 devices associated to it (last I checked).
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  29.  @Akab I really like the MS 4000s though :D There are a couple of mechanical keyboards that have a similar layout I might consider but most don't. MS did have a wireless version but it's rare and expensive now.
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  30.  @MadsterV I heard of some research a while back about being able to decipher keystrokes simply from the sound of the typing. Still, unencrypted broadcasts are a bit uncalled for these days.
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  31. This is Linux. If you want an rm that will hold your hand, you can certainly have it and if you want one that will nuke your system in a heartbeat, you can have that too. Personally, I like a lot of the stuff that has come more recently. Who knows that mv didn't used to work between partitions, for example? Color ls is a nice have. Vim > vi. Choice is a good thing.
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  32. I have a ID card printer that generates a PDF that only prints properly from Adobe Reader. I'm not sure what the issue is but other options print about 1/2" too low. I haven't tried it for Linux though.
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  33. Furiphone? That name is an immediate non-starter. Sorry.
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  34.  @2xsaiko So I've been told since I first heard of it :D
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  35.  @alexhajnal107  Ideally we'd all be using fairly standard toolkit APIs by now and porting between anything wouldn't even be a second thought. (Though there's one company in particular wants to keep things a moving target there). Unfortunately, Wayland seems to regard some features as unnecessary so things would fall to lowest common denominator. I don't do much application programming but when I did code raw X, it wasn't the most fun experience. (though it was fun for the experience)
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  36. Some of the GaN chargers are getting pretty compact too.
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  37.  @Bogster13  And yet they changed them. Which implies they didn't think they could do the things they wanted to do under the old rules. That "more or less" can cover a lot of ground.
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  38. I set my windows PC to sleep after a period of time and it would maybe 1 time in 10 wake up crashed meaning reboots (sometimes with updates. Thanks MS) and lost work so I disabled it.
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  39. I used one piece of software (I won't mention it because they decided to be aholes about licensing) but they did something I thought was smart and that was put the bug/issue reporting in the software itself. When you went to report a problem, it would tell you if the software was out of date or give you a good guess at some of the most common issues (which were often not problems with the software itself). It seems like something like that could work here where the software could tell you you were running an unsupported configuration and maybe refer you to the distribution's bug reporting (and also tell you if your version was way old).
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  40. Yeah, if your libraries do stuff that breaks stuff, it's going to break stuff. That's always been the case.
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  41. This has been ongoing for a while. Important Thinkpad features have been being removed bit by bit. It's all-but just another laptop now.
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  42.  @alexhajnal107  X does have a lot of issues. But if you've ever read the joelonsoftware paper on what not to do with software, he explains that those issues in existing software are often there for a reason. I have no issues with people experimenting with new paradigms but this doesn't seem the place to be doing it.
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  43. Systray is OK as a concept but I think it could be done better. In fact, I think it's part of a whole raft of design issues that descend from aping the Windows desktop.
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  44.  @sergeykish  But what are you supposed to do? I don't remember what was on-screen on that video but I do like where I get prompts that say things along the lines of "Do you want to glarblethump? (If you don't know, the answer is probably no.)". Otherwise, without context, it can often be difficult to know the correct answer, even for an experienced user and people will pick the option which would appear to allow them to proceed.
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  45.  @imzesok For sure. I've had a few bad experiences with dependencies with apt over the years. I think often the dependencies are specified more strictly than required. I actually prefer Slackware. You have to do a little more work resolving dependencies but things tend to get less weird and you're less likely to leave your system in an unusable state.
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  46.  @imzesok I find the installation 'straightforward'. It only has minimal dependency checking so can be a little more work but you don't tend to end up in weird states of with adding xpm support to imagemajick installing a whole X graphical system (which happened to me once on a headless server). If you want the latest packages, compiling from scratch tends to be pretty painless too, even if someone hasn't set up a slackpackage script.
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  47.  @callyral  OK.
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  48. It was a nightmare with everyone having proprietary names and nobody describing what was going on. Some were even QC or PD under the hood.
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  49.  @BrodieRobertson Maybe they're all using xorg or windows. I don't care, I stopped using screensavers a long time ago. I just think the attitude is a poor one.
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  50.  @BrodieRobertson  What percentage of those people even use Wayland? I don't generally go around opening issues for projects that I don't use. It's starting to sound like rationalization for a poor design decision to me. That's really what I take issue with (I don't use screensavers but life - and software - isn't all about me). I think you should give steelmanning the other side a try.
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