131–140 of 282 posts
I love Linux because it creates a space for stuff like this to take place. That said, i3 is enough glitz for me (and it's pretty much none).
We all go through phases. I was on Cinnamon for the past six years and see myself returning to GNOME. I find myself wanting less cruft out of a DE as I get older. And more keyboard friendly too.
I wonder if it's possible to do things like this with Windows or MacOS. I love the idea of cool effects like this (even if the first thing I did after OSX introduced the genie effect was to turn it off—nowadays the hardware is fast enough for it to not be annoying and the split second of the window shrinking away is a nice visual cue as to what's happened especially if one accidentally hides the window via cmd-H).
macOS has gotten a lot less fun, starting with X. I remember no end of UI-customization utilities for pre-X Macs, some of which were really powerful, like Kaleidoscope. I loved being able to make the system look like an NeXT box (there was even an Irix theme) or design my own UI entirely. Even Apple briefly considered the idea of building theme support right into the OS. But they didn’t, and the few quirky things tha…
You can read more about Eric Trout's extension here:
https://tidbits.com/1999/07/12/the-machack-hack-contest-1999...
Compiz was probably the single most impactful event for desktop linux of the mid 2000's. Not that it itself made much of a difference, but the ripples affect many areas we take for granted today. A few reasons: - it put linux ahead of windows and mac in terms of appearance; - it brought many new users and most were a good mix technical and enthusiasts; - it showed the advantages of modular software; - many plugins we…
Bunch of rose-tinted hogwash, this. > It pioneered useful things like selecting an area of the screen and saving it directly to a file Pioneered? This was a standard feature on Macs since January 1997. > It also showed how important compositing was on the desktop. No, that would be the Quartz and Quartz Extreme compositors released with Mac OSX 10.0-10.2 years prior. Compiz in the mid 2000s was a mixture of catching…
Similarly compiz was important for the world beyond MacOS, while being utterly useless it attracted the attention of lots of kids like myself while also producing useful side-effects in the Linux ecosystem, and no doubt pushing desktop's outside of Linux.
Compiz was indeed a pioneer, and also explored far more effects compared to MacOS X for better and worse - In fact I'm pretty sure Apple copied the 3D rotating desktop from compiz for a short time... not that it's a particularly imaginative effect, compiz just stumbled upon it first.
... so how about we stop being petty.
I wonder if it's possible to do things like this with Windows or MacOS. I love the idea of cool effects like this (even if the first thing I did after OSX introduced the genie effect was to turn it off—nowadays the hardware is fast enough for it to not be annoying and the split second of the window shrinking away is a nice visual cue as to what's happened especially if one accidentally hides the window via cmd-H).
I wish all desktop windows could have shaders applied.
I'm trying to convince myself to write one for a curved CRT look and one for phosphor persistence.
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/samples/Pixe...
The Windows Terminal team has a lot more fun than the others, it seems.
The emoji-commit-message spec absolutely drives me batty. Why. Just why.
Worse though is the dependence on the plain ASCII codes, limiting their utility (if you even call them that) to GitHub's display. On a terminal (at least where I'm likely to use "git log"), it's just a bunch of dumb ASCII codes taking up line space.
I don't really get it. Why not just use the real emoji? At least it'll display properly outside of GitHub.
Compiz was probably the single most impactful event for desktop linux of the mid 2000's. Not that it itself made much of a difference, but the ripples affect many areas we take for granted today. A few reasons: - it put linux ahead of windows and mac in terms of appearance; - it brought many new users and most were a good mix technical and enthusiasts; - it showed the advantages of modular software; - many plugins we…
Here's done even more amazing pie menu stuff since then, including Fly-Pie -- why don't all web browsers and window managers support this yet??? This stuff is extremely useful, practical, easy to use, and deeply customizable, not just beautiful window dressing, eye candy, and fancy effects.
More Fly-Pie Updates!
https://schneegans.github.io/news/2021/12/02/flypie10
Fly-Pie 8: New default dark theme and support for GNOME 3.36, 3.38, 40, and 41!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9t7hfkE_5w
Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1#ed08
>Spectacular Example: Simon Schneegans’ Gnome-Pie, the slick application launcher for Linux
>I can’t understate how much I like Simon Schneegans’ Gnome-Pie, as well as his bachelor thesis work on the Coral-Menu and the Trace-Menu. Not only is it all slick, beautiful, and elegantly animated, but it’s properly well designed in all the important ways that make it Fitts’s Law Friendly and easy to use, and totally deeply customizable by normal users! It’s a spectacularly useful tour-de-force that Linux desktop users can personalize to their heart’s content.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098179
Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look and Feel Free (medium.com/donhopkins)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106453
DonHopkins on May 19, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look an...
I'm very impressed by Simon Schneegans' work on Gnome-Pie:
http://simmesimme.github.io/gnome-pie.html
And especially his delightful thesis work:
Trace-Menu:
I really love how the little nubs preview the structure of the sub-menus, and how you can roll back to the parent menu because it reserves a slice in the sub-menu to go back, so you don't need to use another mouse button or shift key to browse the menus.
Coral-Menu:
That looks like a nice visual representation with a way to easily browse all around the tree, into and out of the submenus without clicking! I can't tell from the video if it's based on a click or a timeout. But it looks like it supports browsing and reselection and correcting errors pretty well! (That would be something interesting to measure!)
There's another useful law related to Fitts's law that applies to situations like this, called Steering Law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_law
The steering law in human–computer interaction and ergonomics is a predictive model of human movement that describes the time required to navigate, or steer, through a 2-dimensional tunnel. The tunnel can be thought of as a path or trajectory on a plane that has an associated thickness or width, where the width can vary along the tunnel. The goal of a steering task is to navigate from one end of the tunnel to the other as quickly as possible, without touching the boundaries of the tunnel. A real-world example that approximates this task is driving a car down a road that may have twists and turns, where the car must navigate the road as quickly as possible without touching the sides of the road. The steering law predicts both the instantaneous speed at which we may navigate the tunnel, and the total time required to navigate the entire tunnel.
The steering law has been independently discovered and studied three times (Rashevsky, 1959; Drury, 1971; Accot and Zhai, 1997). Its most recent discovery has been within the human–computer interaction community, which has resulted in the most general mathematical formulation of the law.
Also here's some interesting stuff about incompatibility with Wayland, and rewriting Gnome-Pie as an extension to the Gnome shell:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I switched to Linux full time before Compiz took off and did so for exactly the reasons you cited the other platforms were superior: Linux was more stable, easier to reason with (as it was doing less magic behind the scenes), components worked better with each other since POSIX is designed for interoperability. Driver support was patchy at times, but then it wasn’t exactly easy on OSX (Apple: “if we don’t support you…
>I switched to Linux full time before Compiz took off and did so for exactly the reasons you cited the other platforms were superior: Linux was more stable, easier to reason with (as it was doing less magic behind the scenes), components worked better with each other since POSIX is designed for interoperability. Good for you that you had this experience but this is the standard talking point I have been hearing for 1…
Which is entirely anecdotal.
I’ve done a considerable amount of research on this topic over the last 20 years and for the at least 10 years of it the actual main reason Windows users don’t like Linux is simply because it’s not like Windows. It doesn’t matter how much better Linux might be or how crappy Windows might get, if people are comfortable in one thing then they generally don’t like switching to another thing that behaves differently. And Linux behaves very differently.
This is the reason Microsoft practically gives Microsoft products away at schools. Get them comfortable at a young age and most of them will stick with you for life.
Just look at how successful Android, ChromeOS, Linux netbooks (before Microsoft subsidised XP on them) are/were. If a compelling platform comes with Linux pre-installed people manage just fine. But if you ask them to take a Windows machine, wipe it and install something alien the of course a lot of people with struggle. It’s no different to how few people install 3rd party firmware on smart TVs, routers or other consumer devices.
But I’m fine with that. I used to get wound up with tactics like MS subsidies 20 years ago but these days I’m very much more live and let live. As long as people don’t impose their preferences on me, I won’t be an arse about my preferences to them. Just don’t try to fob me off with pseudo-technical rubbish when it’s clearly just a subjective bias.
> Yes if you are willing to put in the work Linux is more powerful than a closed source OS.
Open source is only part of the equation. It’s that the whole OS is modular and easy to interface with. Whether it’s CLI components, common APIs or even just hot swappable services like desktop managers.
Windows has elements of this too but frankly Linux just does it better. And I say this as someone who use to author a competitor to Windows Blinds. I’ve done my fair amount of low level hacking on Windows, I’d even go as far as to say that Win32 APIs are fun. But Linux is just easier to mould into whatever vision you have. But that’s not a criticism of Windows, Windows caters for a different audience.
And it honestly doesn’t take any more effort to learn Linux than Windows. People just get a head start with Windows given that’s what you grow up with. However having taught computer literacy to old people, I can tell you that Windows can be just as alien if you haven’t already had that head start. Equally my wife has bought Linux laptops before (because they were cheap) and had zero issues with them. So the stories of Linux being anti-user are far overblown.
> However you forget that the primary job of the OS is to provide a stable platform to enable you to run applications.
I haven’t forgotten that. You just wrongly assume that only Windows can do that.
> Instead you are ignoring this and praising other aspects of the OS that do not directly correlate to improvements for regular non IT end users.
I did actually give examples. :) eg Linux being easier to install because there’s no googling around to find the correct drivers. They just get picked up by default from your install media.
Admittedly Windows has improved vastly in that area too but I think Microsoft had to borrow a lot of ideas from Apple and Linux to get there.
> If I do not want to spend time fixing a broken config caused but a bug, I am out of luck. If I do not want to deal with poorly made system utilities that do not correlate to what the config files do then I am out of luck.
That’s just as big a problem on Windows and macOS as it is any other operating system, Linux includes. Software breaks on any platform. Heck, I’ve had far more instances of Windows Server failing after a broken update than I have on Linux despite running 2 orders of magnitude more Linux servers. And we are talking severs! Never mind all the junk that slows desktop Windows down from a thousand different independent update managers to printer bloatware that isn’t an issue on Linux. And Windows itself isn’t exactly big free itself either.
> If I want different components of the OS to have a unified design language so they work together I am out of luck(ex. Even today GNOME bundles a bunch of old garbage tools and expect them to be equivalent to their Windows/Mac counterparts, no thought is put into the usability and uniformity of these tools).
That’s not really a fair comment when Windows has multiple different control panels (has the Font applet even been updated from Win 3.x yet?) that were designed for entirely different desktop paradigms. Each with slightly different functionality and thus finding the right option usually requires clicking around a dozen hyperlinks in different applications for 10 minutes until, by chance, you happen upon the right applet.
Honestly mate, I’ve got nothing against other peoples preferences. Maybe you should relax your outlook on others too. Or at least stop pretending your preferences are technical in nature because for the vast majority of peoples that’s really not the case. For most people, it’s far more down to familiarity than it is down to which platform is objectively better (not that a vague term like “better” can ever be an objective metric anyway)
Wow, that's really cool. I think I am going to use the Matrix shader on my private workstation. Will do a code check before I install it on my work laptop tho. TIL: Gnome Extensions can be written in JavaScript.