1x27: Buffalo Wild Wings Dollars

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#49

A little copy-pasted from what I wrote on G+:

IMHO we don’t really need the DEs. As soon as apps start using their distinct features, they lose portability. And who needs fancy stuff like a 3d desktop anyway? I’m only running a window manager on all my desktop machines. Only one of them has just recently been added LXQt, just to see how the new version behaves. I removed lots of features, and basically all I have from it now is the bottom panel with a menu and the clock. What else could one need? That would just bloat the beautiful desktop. :smiley:

Of course many apps use some DE-specific features. I don’t like those. And I think we have to distinguish between different kinds of apps. If you bind an app very closely to a DE, then it becomes more exclusive. I prefer apps that don’t pull in half of the GNOME or KDE libs and stuff. It doesn’t have to be that way. We could develop a new layer, something like a widget provider. Then we could effectively run any app on any DE.

#50

Yes, refusing to use any desktop features allows you to run any app on any DE. However, it means that there is no consistency between your apps. How does an app change the volume? Show that a download is happening? Offer quick access to its features? Show that there are pending notifications? With your way, every app does that itself, in a different way. Providing this sort of low-level consistency across applications is what a DE is for.

#51

Just wrapping up: you don’t need a DE for a notification daemon. That works by itself very well.
You don’t need it for audio control either. I just run pulseaudio and control the volumes there. The apps shouldn’t control them. Otherwise I would totally lose overview; I have 3 output devices and several apps that produce audio.
Considering downloads: Why would I need another widget for that? I would prefer to have a notification when something finishes, pretty much like on Android. But we already have the notification daemon for that.

But to better understand you: What consistency do you actually mean? E.g. what “features” would I need quick access to? I would guess that I’m looking at things from a totally different point of view. The consistency I want pretty much includes only the theme and common keyboard/mouse controls.

That is the main reason why I moved aways from DEs: They just overdo things. And they do it heavily!

#52

To show notifications when they come in, yes. To show you that notifications arrived and you haven’t read them after they’ve left the screen… that’s not what the existing separate notification-daemon does. Sure, you could build a notification-daemon which remembers the notifications and shows them somewhere, but… where? In a window on its own? And if you say, I’ll install this new notification daemon, and I’ll install a convenient pulseaudio monitor, and I’ll install these other things, then basically what you’re doing is building your own DE out of bits. Some people like doing that, but would you not agree that others think that it’s nice to not have to?

#53

That’s exactly my point. I don’t think this is a user preference thing. You describe the process of picking choices of specific sets of software. That is what single users who want it as well as distros do already: Choose a basic kernel config (and maybe patchset), a boot manager, an init system, display server, display manager, frameworks etc. and then build some more apps on top of it, sometimes their own. And then we have the DEs which are also chosen by the distros to be integrated as well - but they do the same job again by providing their own widgets. That is what I think is unnecessary work. We gain strength from sets of packages we can choose from for specific needs, but we loose that strength if they become tightly coupled. I would prefer the DEs to only provide interfaces. So if you want a fixed set of software, choose a distro and you have it. That would be enough!

#54

So would I. And then people don’t implement the interfaces correctly. Since you talked about the notification daemon, let’s take that as an example here. The notification protocol has an option which says “notification daemon, can you handle having action buttons in a notification?” Gnome and KDE notification daemons replied “yes, we do”, and they were the only notification daemons. So nobody ever bothered to check the actions-supported value. When Ubuntu released notify-osd, which does not support buttons in notifications, and correctly replied “no” to the query asking whether they do, a whole bunch of apps broke because they assumed that buttons worked in notifications without checking, and the developers of those apps blamed Ubuntu and notify-osd for breaking their apps.

People don’t code to the spec. They code to the implementation. Raymond Chen’s The Old New Thing blog has spent ten years explaining this sort of implicit backward-compatibility constraint that the OS has to deal with. Saying to people “but we obeyed the spec” makes them say “but you broke things so we don’t care about the spec”. So there’s little point in encouraging it. Build apps for Ubuntu. Cross-platform highly integrated apps are basically too much work.

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#55

Good point here and I totally agree. That is why I suggested widget providers instead. :smile:

#56

I guess I misunderstood you. I agree, apps are the end of the means. A switch is a critical part of the current when lighting up a beautiful candelabra. But,should the switch be the primary focus and not the candelabra?

#57

That is miles away from what I was describing. Asking them to wholesale change DE’s after a small amount of time would be more jarring, not less. I was talking about a few small aesthetic changes which would make non-power users coming from other OS’s more comfortable with Linux initially. As an example: Coming from OS X? We’ll put the dock at the bottom. Then, after some time interval or at the next upgrade have an indicator say something along the lines of: “We notice that you were a previous OS X user and have the dock at the bottom. Most $DE users prefer to the the dock at $preferred_location because $compelling_reason. Would you like to move it?”. I can think of a couple areas where this may help, although I’m not completely convinced it actually would help.

–jeremy

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#58

I see the theory here, but I’m not sure I actually agree with it. Making a Linux desktop superficially like something you’re familiar with may help, but it may also hinder; the dock at the bottom helps with your OSX-trained muscle memory, but that dock doesn’t actually work the same way. Since things are different under a Linux desktop from what you’re familiar with, I’m inclined to make them look different too; I think that having some things look familiar will actually hinder understanding both in the long and short terms. (Few people wanted their tablet to work like Windows 7, for example.) But I freely admit that this is just my opinion and @jeremy’s opinion is just as likely to be right; what this needs is actual user testing, I think. (I wonder whether Canonical’s user testing covered it. I wish they’d published the results.)

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#59

To be fair, I’m not convinced either, as I mentioned at the end. I think there is merit to just being different right from the get-go and would have liked to see some actual user testing around this as well.

–jeremy

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#60

I think the form factor helped a lot there. For a lot of people, smartphones and tablets were a completely new device. I remember when I visited the Computex in Taipei in 2006 and saw a tablet PC with Windows XP on it, I was really wondering why would people buy and use that… Fast forward to 2014, and a lot of manufacturers are trying to sell laptops that can be used in 3 or 4 different ways depending on how you orient the screen! (and on the software side, it’s very often Windows 8, because I guess Microsoft tried hard to get a desktop that could also be used as a tablet OS).

OK, OK, I digress.

To be fair, I was playing the devil’s advocate here :wink:

Neither am I. In the end, when you get comfy with a system, you either

  • keep using it exactly the same way or, if you are a bit adventurous,
  • try to dig into its options. It’s a lengthy process but sometimes it can be very rewarding. How many computer engineers do I still see right clicking a link and select “open in a new tab” instead of just middle-clicking the link? :slight_smile:
#61

what about when Unity pushes new graphics requirements that suddenly break and don’t work on most people’s hardware? I was used to Linux/X/Gnome2 being able to pretty run on anything. All of a sudden Unity with poor coding targeting only the most recent OpenGL spec shows up and because they are busy shimmying it in before it’s ready the whole release quality goes down. Between 11.10 and 12.04 I had about 3 laptops and a desktop that suddenly couldn’t run Ubuntu. Like some of them, the laptop mice stopped working (this is on upgrade. it did work under Ubuntu, then I upgraded and it didn’t). The interface was buggy, slow, unresponsive, and best of all, crashed every few hours. The result. 2 Computers downgraded to 10.04, one to fedora, and one just went back to Windows. That’s why I stopped recommending Ubuntu for a spell. (clearly still pretty bitter about that “betrayal”, I was just getting some people won over). And yes, I blame the team and Unity. Unity wasn’t ready, and the whole release suffered for it.

FWIW it does look like they have learned and are being more cautions with Mir.
Also, now that Unity is more stable, and has had a bunch of missing features slowly added in, I do find it pretty fast and usable, and going back to a Menu based system actually annoying. But even now, Dash has a 2 second open delay for me on many systems and doesn’t promote apps in search by default which makes it a heroic pain over Windows 8 tile mode search. Sadly

#62

Yep. Run LTS releases. I explicitly keep my parents on the LTS, precisely because interim releases aren’t particularly guaranteed to be stable and are only supported for nine months. This is why LTSes don’t offer an upgrade until the next LTS is released. If the introduction of a new DE or a new audio system is likely to cause you a problem then the Ubuntu team will (mostly) not do that in an LTS release. Also, again, I did not say that you should use Ubuntu; if you don’t like it, or are unhappy with its stability, don’t use it, and that’s the right thing to do. What I would like to see is that when someone decides to move to Ubuntu from some proprietary OS, the response should not be that they shouldn’t use Ubuntu and should instead use Fedora or Xubuntu or something else. Encourage them into the free software world, not into a particular corner of it.

#63

I’m just wondering if there has been efforts to give an option, during an install, that offers some basic tutorials (here’s some features and this is how to use them)? Some people, like myself, can be a bit thick. Sure, there might be tutorials on Youtube or elsewhere, but some might not think to search. And then, at the end of the tutorial, where to find resources could be listed. This could be very useful for one who cannot get networking going (and therefore cannot get online to find help), and there is a tutorial about networking there to help out.

#64

That’s a good idea! In Ubuntu it could be a few additional slides during the installer or a “Take the tour” once everything is up and running.

#65

If I am not misrepresenting @jonobacon and if apps are more important than shells that means Unity and Gnome 3 have wasted past three years for nothing. Plasma 5 does prove that in some sense. It is the same traditional desktop experience but more elegant and sophisticated and with modern components to build modern apps.

“KDE’s experience hasn’t changed”. KDE used to be ugly with its protruding Oxygen buttons all over but now with Plasma 5 it is beautiful and as far as I can the only competitor it has in 2014 is Google’s Material design.

But I agree with you in saying that it’s all about apps. Plasma 5 speaks a modern design with flexible library but I am going to use same Amarok on it. Banshee or Rhythmbox hasn’t changed for either Unity or Gnome. They remain same useless piece of archaic software and a shame on Linux music space.

So you are right in saying that my desktop experience has remained same overall these years.

“Should programming be part of a school curriculum…” I think you get better at what you do more. You can’t improve one aspect of your brain by working on another. Chess players are chess players they don’t magically turn out to be great scientists or strategist. I would focus more on making available computers universally as soon as possible and making kids know that they can change things they don’t like. But formalizing programming could make it another subject like History for which no one cares anymore.

#66

I’m just listening to this interview with Ken Moore, the author of the Lumina DE, and I highly recommend you guys to consider what Ken says well:

#67

There are some students that enjoy History. I wouldn’t think the idea would be to make a programming class mandatory as other classes are, such as History is (which is probably why it is resented). It just seems that there could be a benefit of using more resources for programming courses, both in the tech world and just in helping the students themselves in other ways.

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#68

[quote=“donniezazen, post:65, topic:8272”]
But formalizing programming could make it another subject like History for which no one cares anymore.[/quote]

I disagree History is a fascinating subject, or can be if taught properly. If you teach it as a list of facts to remember such as: Kings & Queens of England, Scotland, Wales and the United Kingdom 757-Present then of course most people will switch off but my daughter recently learnt about medieval siege machines such as the Trebuchet and Mangonel through a computer game where they attacked a castle.

By learning through play she got a feeling for how these machines worked and the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Programming can only be leant by doing. Start with Scratch (or similar) a graphical environment for teaching and testing the key concepts without the need to do significant typing. Then move on to a more typical programming language such as Python.

Children get a sense of achievement if encouraged to have a go. They can be creating something in minutes, some will spend the rest of their lives to master the subject. Most won’t and will only ever tinker at the edges but as a result they:

a. Learn how to structure their thinking.

and

b. Gain some understanding of what a computer actually does and how it works.

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