has dust changed

Dust. Dust never changes.

Yep. I run Garuda and the main pull is that it’s a more user-friendly Arch with a lot of stuff I want to use preinstalled. I don’t really care about how XTREME it is or whether I might potentially get 1 FPS more.

It’s a pun on the Met Gala. Honestly, this might be the most sensible Heathcliff I’ve seen so far.

I agree that it should be easily reachable. Just not through one single keypress. macOS’s Spotlight serves a similar purpose and is reachable via Cmd + Space (with the Cmd key being right next to the space bar). That’s just as easy to do as hitting one button but is extremely unlikely to happen by accident.

I personally use the start menu mainly for shutting down the computer as all commonly used programs are pinned to the task bar. A shortcut that opens it has no value to me as opposed to e.g. one that shows or hides a terminal window or one that mutes/unmutes me in Teams even when it’s in the background.

And I do consider it disruptive because having the start menu unexpectedly pop open and swallow several keypresses (and in the worst case launching some application I didn’t want to run) takes my attention away from what I was doing and forces it into something completely irrelevant. If this pulls me out of deep focus I can lose the equivalent of ten minutes of work due to one keypress.

The core of the problem is that this behavior is very annoying for people who don’t use the start menu all the time and there’s no way to change it. If it was just a default for a rebindable shortcut then it’d be a minor hassle once and nobody would complain. But the way it is it feels like Microsoft is trying to force-feed me the start menu, workflow be damned.

I think it’s extremely badly designed. A single keypress – especially if the key is in such an easily reachable position – shouldn’t steal focus. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a game or in Visual Studio, it’s disruptive.

This behavior would make sense as a media key somewhere near the F-keys. But as the default action on a modifier key it’s just bad design.

I can’t believe that launching the start menu is an action on par with opening an application menu or typing a capital letter.

The Windows key as part of a combination is great. It’s an extra modifier key.

The Windows key by itself is terrible because it immediately steals focus from the current application and can’t be disabled without something like AutoHotkey.

That image doesn’t look AI generated to me. GANs are typically terrible at keyboards.

Also, Ubuntu is moving towards using snaps for everything so they’re pretty much the successor to PPAs.

Mostly yes but there’s one other option that simplifies the whole thing: Chromebooks. They’re actually pretty decent for someone who doesn’t need much beyond a browser, a mail client, and a basic office suite.

Sure, they’re tied to Google with all that entails but they can be a real option for someone like a senior who relies on relatives for tech support.

Unbothered by typos. Moisturized. Happy. In My Lane. Focused. Flourishing.

How about autoscrolling shmups where you don’t die after every hit and get to upgrade your ship between missions?

The oldschool entry in this niche would be Tyrian – released in 1995, made freeware in 2004, then ported to modern OSes.

2004 was also when Jets’N’Guns came out. It looks more modern, has a quirky sense of humor and a badass metal soundtrack. It also has a sequel.

Both games can be found on your (PC) digital marketplace of choice.

And also ells, rods, cubits, paces, furlongs, oxgangs, lots, batmans… all with subtly different regional definitions (with regions sometimes as small as one village).

People used loosely defined measurements based on things like their own body parts or how much land they guessed their ox could plow on an average day. Things like mathematical convenience or precision were not all that important; being able to measure (or estimate) without tools was.

I have to disagree on one point – that iOS home screens somehow look more orderly because they’re full of icons arranged in a strict top-left-to-bottom-right fashion. It doesn’t look any less cluttered than an overly full Windows desktop.

I found desktops that limit themselves to core functionality and maybe a nice wallpaper to be better looking and more usable since the days of Windows 95 and that hasn’t changed since.

That “strict grid of icons” look certainly is uniform across iDevices and that’s what appeals to Apple but I never found it to be particularly attractive.

Garuda’s gaming spin should. At least mine runs on Plasma 6 + Wayland and I didn’t do anything special to get there.

I think Latte-Dock has been unmaintained for some time now. It’s a dead project and maybe doesn’t even work properly with Plasma 6. So it’s a good time to drop it.

On the one hand I like the basic idea, on the other hand I think that some fundamental problems aren’t fully solved yet. There big use case are passkeys and direct password manager integration – neither mesh well with the idea of software that isn’t allowed to talk to most of the system.

I’m certain that this will be resolved at some point but for now I don’t think Flatpak and its brethren are quite there yet.

True, although that made people think that Windows 2000 was the intended successor to Windows 98 – me included. Not that I minded; in my opinion Windows 2000 was straight up better than Windows XP until XP SP2 came out. Anyway, Microsoft spends far too much time getting cute with version numbers.

They could’ve sold Windows 2000 as Windows NT 5 and Windows Me as Windows 2000; that would’ve kept the “NT X” versioning scheme for the professional line and the year-based scheme for the consumer line.

But the versioning scheme for the NT line is all kinds of weird in general. Windows 7 is NT 6.1. Windows 8 is NT 6.2. So we’ve established that the product name is independent of the version now. That means that Windows 10 is NT… 10.0. Windows 11 is also NT 10.0.

Okay.

The official Linux client has been discontinued. Microsoft’s official solution is to use a browser – they explicitly mention Firefox.

There also seem to be unofficial clients. No idea if those are any good.

To be honest, the first incarnation of Spaces was really damn good; they deserved some credit for that. Then they made it worse so it matches iOS.