Yeah, I don’t like when corporations put stuff like that into their ToS, but at the same time, I 100% understand why every open-source license under the sun has it. You’re giving it away for free, so you don’t want people to sue for more than you’re providing for free.

Mastodon.social is currently very much in the latter camp of giving things away for free. I also understand that a service is yet another beast than a piece of software, since they hold your personal data and may leak/sell it. But yeah, at this point in time, I wouldn’t want someone to be able to sue Mastodon.social out of existence. I guess, it depends a lot on how it’s formulated in the end…

A video game I play recently added on-screen panic buttons, so for all the items you might want to use in a pinch. It’s a turn-based game, so you really have all the time in the world to check your items, but they’re still all listed there to remind you of the options you have. And of course, I still manage to completely ignore them when I get into a panic. 🫠

Those Spectacle changes look good. The old UI made some amount of sense, if the primary use-case was taking complete screenshots, but even for that, there’s probably a single shortcut to do that directly.
And I do find, I generally want a smaller cutout these days, because you can just fit more stuff onto modern displays, some of which is going to irrelevant.

I could imagine that they didn’t want to do something called “Destiny 3”, because people would expect that to be better than Destiny 2, which is virtually impossible, if you’re gonna start over from scratch, with how many years of development have gone into Destiny 2 by now…

Oh damn, I suspected as much, but I interpreted the arm in the third panel to be part of the jaw. So I thought, maybe with the big ears it might be a Dingo, but that seemed awfully specific for what should be the fairly obvious setup for a joke…

I’ve never used Facebook, but I’ve seen people say that Friendica is quite similar to Facebook (in case you care about that).

Yeah, the wording is confusing. A long time ago, there was no paid software, there was only software where you got the source code and other software where e.g. it was pre-installed on some hardware and the manufacturer didn’t want to give the source code.

In that time, a whole movement started fighting for software freedom, so they called their software “free”.

Well, it didn’t feel like I’m tweaking to my needs (that came afterwards on top), it rather felt like I’m just undoing design decisions that someone made to cater to their specific needs.

And I named the time mainly to give an idea of how much there was to tweak. My main problems were:

• That I could not undo some of those unusual design decisions.
• That it doesn’t exactly make the system more robust when you need lots of non-default settings.

Well, that was just kind of one example to illustrate that it isn’t just a static screenshot, you actually see what’s going on in real-time. It’s also useful when you’re running a longer operation, like OS updates or encoding a video, and want to see when it’s done or that it hasn’t failed. You can just tell when the command output has stopped moving or a popup has appeared…

But thanks for the recommendation anyways!

I certainly think that it has many eccentric design choices. It’s not going to be for everyone. Some parts of it, I also think just look bad, which I had to customize. Well, and openSUSE’s theming made a big difference, too: https://simotek.net/tech/projects/opensuse-e/enlightenment-on-opensuse-13-2/nggallery/thumbnails

“Retro” is also definitely a word I would use, though more positively connoted. It has *different* eye candy to the usual desktop designs, which is a big part of the charm. In a sea of flat designs and tiling window managers, it stands out as its own thing.

I tried it a few years ago. I was really impressed by how lightweight and gorgeous it is. In particular, I found it really cool and actually useful that you got a live view of your other workspaces on your panel. You could even fullscreen a video on your other workspace and then watch (a very small version of) it in your panel.

But yeah, even though I came back to it multiple times, I never ended up sticking around. It would crash regularly (not the worst thing, since recovery was generally seamless, but still meh), but in particular, it had some peculiar design decisions.

For example, if you double-click a window titlebar in virtually any window manager, it will maximize. In Enlightenment, I believe it got shaded (i.e. the contents of the window got hidden and only the titlebar was still visible).

Another prominent one was that its applet for connecting to WiFi and such didn’t support NetworkManager, but rather only ConnMan. If you’ve never heard of ConnMan, yeah, I only know it from Enlightenment, too. Similarly, my distro (openSUSE) didn’t package it either (and openSUSE was said to offer a relatively good Enlightenment experience). That’s something which should just work, because you can’t expect people to look up how they can connect to WiFi while they can’t reach the internet.

And yeah, these are just the big ones that stuck in my head. There were lots of smaller usability issues, too. Many things you could fix by changing the configuration, but we’re talking many in an absolute sense, too, i.e. you might spend an hour or more just tweaking things so that they behaved like you might expect.

I mean, to my knowledge, it’s still Rasterman keeping most of the development together. You don’t need a ton of adoption when one guy tirelessly works on it.

Although I’m guessing Samsung probably sponsors him, so that’s probably quite crucial for him to be able to put that much time into it.

Damn, quite a different drawing style from the usual. I guess, it helps make the animals actually look taxidermied, which I imagine is not easy.

Green Is My Pepper

Can that actually happen like this? If Windows killed the bootloader wouldn’t that mean that you couldn’t boot into Kubuntu either? Or can it somehow kill the bootloader when the PC is turned off?

It’s just the normal “Pager” widget, configured to show application icons.

I find “minimap” more descriptive for what I’m doing, because I don’t minimize, nor stack windows, so if a window exists, it has a location.
Which is also ultimately how I use this thing. Imagine a large desk where you need to jump between topics every so often. You’d put related sheets of paper next to each other and leave a bit of space between the groups. Sheets of paper are just application windows in my case (I will open one or more windows per task, I don’t mix tasks together based on application like people usually do). Well, and my desk also happens to be very long, so I can comfortably fit a minimap for it in my panel.

And because I really like multitasking, I’ve actually got multiple desks, in different colors:

For these, I use Plasma’s Activities. The different colors are done by having a transparent panel and then setting the wallpaper to different colors + telling Plasma to use the wallpaper for determining the accent color.

In this screenshot, you can also beautifully see a workspace with 5 Kate windows, which is genuinely where I shoved a bunch of notes, for me to sort through them later. 🙃

Not a piece of software I’d use voluntarily: The web version of MS Teams.

I get to use Linux at $DAYJOB and I have a rather customized KDE setup (basically window tiling, 20-80 workspaces, a workspace minimap in the panel).
Usually, I’m surrounded by other nerds, who’ll ask about it occasionally, but you know, they’ve heard of or used Linux before, they know that some crazy things can be done.

Now, yesterday, I was in a call with the legal department. I started sharing my screen and explaining my relatively simple problem. And the guy took longer than I expected to respond, which made me quite self-conscious, whether he needs time to process my explanation …or rather what in the fresh hell I did to my computer to make it look like that. 🙃

People here are saying that Waydroid works quite well for running Android apps on mobile Linux.

I tried postmarketOS a few months ago on my SHIFT6mq and for me, the dealbreaker was that I couldn’t get my SIM card to connect, so no mobile internet and no calls. As I understand, this strongly varies between phone models, though.
Aside from that, I did like what I saw a lot. I used Plasma Mobile and that was a more competent UI than stock Android, because well, it is essentially just Plasma with some tweaks. Felt a lot more like the pocket computer I never knew I wanted.

Also, bonus fun fact: “Alter!” as an exclamation probably comes from “Alter Schwede!”, which means “Old Swede!”.

According to Wikipedia, after the Thirty Years’ War, a German duke hired experienced Swedish soldiers to train new soldiers. And because they were experienced, they were also generally old. I have no idea, though, why that stuck around as an exclamation. 😅