Live data from Hacker News

Cool but obscure X11 tools

cyber.dabamos.de

71–80 of 256 posts

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!

For clarity, Bill Gates is also a very prolific guy that people love to hate. I take some time every day to curse both of them for the amount of dispair that they cause with their offsprings.

I've always wondered about this sentiment about software you are free to use or not. Or is it the fact that a majority of others, or those that have the power, choose for you by making life harder if you deviate? Shouldn't you curse those people, instead of the creators of the software?

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#73
post #26

>XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. >An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart”[1] tries to install his malicious init system on various BSD and Linux systems. >Like in XBill, the player has to hit him and restore infected systems. [1] https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/poettering.gif

For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!

Well, I think Lennart misjudged how much trouble his projects caused. And especially Systemd was nothing you could easily avoid. So I can understand that there were quite a few people angry at him and the way he was doing things. In addition, he is someone who can dish out to others too (I remember a (badly prepared) talk he attended and completely sabotaged by asking questions and make the speaker look like a total idiot).

So yes, he is prolific, his software does great things and his critics were definitely going too far, but he isn't completely innocent in regard to what happened.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#74
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For clarity, Bill Gates is also a very prolific guy that people love to hate. I take some time every day to curse both of them for the amount of dispair that they cause with their offsprings.

I've always wondered about this sentiment about software you are free to use or not. Or is it the fact that a majority of others, or those that have the power, choose for you by making life harder if you deviate? Shouldn't you curse those people, instead of the creators of the software?

Red Hat controls both gnome and systemd. They made systemd a hard dependency for gnome. That's the only reason systemd "won".

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#75
Strange coincidence this appears on the front page, as I have been having system instability with freezes, and my hunch is that it's something with the QT library. So lately I've been running only X programs instead of KDE apps, and it hasn't frozen in a while. This list will give me some additional apps to play with.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!

Don't forget to thank him for `avahi' too. Avahi is a fun whack-a-mole game where your computer hides the network connection. You win the game by remembering to kill processes and setting up stuff manually, like most games produced by LP studios. edit: Other popular games include: SystemD: hack your way through a blob of intractability. Try it on Nightmare mode, where you're only given access to a empty bootscreen, f…

Lennart Poettering is a dev who has contributed massive amounts of code most people in this thread use every hour of every day. Code which, for most people, does work.

It's not like free software has a shortage of talented contributors that people hate for a variety of reasons. At some point you have to actually point out the issues productively, rather than the boring character assassination, or just randomly saying "the software's broken it sucks!" like this is the Best Buy tech support line.

I mean, seriously, if you're smart enough to "kill processes and [set] up stuff manually", you're smart enough to disable/remove software you don't like all on your own like a grown adult.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#77
post #21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autokey (Python) gives you similar power as AutoHotKey on Windows and Karabiner Elements/Hammerspoon on macOS. Problem is, that you might want Wayland support, as X is on the way out. [1] https://github.com/autokey/autokey

Last time I tried Karabiner Elements, it was quite buggy and brought down the kernel. Not a happy camper. Then Apple blessed us with allowing Escape-Caps remapping out of the box (guess that Touch Bar resulted in something useful...) Did it improve? What do you remap?

I've started using it a few months ago, and it seems pretty stable.

I've got a fancier mapping for the caps lock key: when you hold it, it works like ctrl, and when you tap it it works like escape.

I've also got something similar for space: when I tap space, it works like space. When I hold space, I can tap additional characters. (So space works like a modifier, similar to ctrl or shift.) For example, space-x = delete, space-p = page up, space-j = cursor down.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#79
post #74
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered about this sentiment about software you are free to use or not. Or is it the fact that a majority of others, or those that have the power, choose for you by making life harder if you deviate? Shouldn't you curse those people, instead of the creators of the software?

Red Hat controls both gnome and systemd. They made systemd a hard dependency for gnome. That's the only reason systemd "won".

Seeing as gnome is/was nowhere near the top desktop environment, ubuntu had its own version of systemd at the time, and systemd had already garnered a huge amount of support across other distributions … no, it's not "the only reason" systemd won. systemd won on merits of practicality, because while the vocal minority hates some of the things it does (such as providing a bundled ecosystem of administrative software that all works together), it's also a big reason why it's popular across people who just want their computer to work.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#80
With the exception of local editors (gvim) and administration software (xload), the need for these applications is easier to satisfy with online HTML5 apps.

These are historically exciting, but nowadays the web browser is your X11.

Post reply on HN