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Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

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Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#291

Post by haswell »

dpflug wrote: post #285
haswell wrote: post #141

Lately I've been strongly considering helping migrate my parents to Linux. Their needs are primarily web-based with some basic productivity tools mixed in, and Windows has just been getting more and more hostile. On top of this, they're at an age where they're now more susceptible than ever to various scams/attacks, and shutting down an entire category of problems by removing Windows from the picture is increasingly…

IMHO, Fedora's Atomic Desktops[^1] are the way to go for that. Automatic upgrades you can roll back if something breaks? Yes, please. Universal Blue[^2] has some spins that got a glow up, but their dev team gives a bit of the "everything old is bad" vibe. OpenSUSE's MicroOS[^3] desktops aren't ready for nontechnical people, but their atomic upgrade strategy is much faster and simpler (btrfs snapshots). I'm keeping an…

Good call on Fedora's Atomic options.

My daily driver is NixOS and part of me really wants that level of predictability and rollback for them. For a brief period, I had started thinking through what it might look like to remotely manage this for them. But my ultimately goal is to help them achieve autonomy, and only step in when necessary.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#292

Post by thoughtpalette »

veqq wrote: post #220
arcmechanica wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents run linux because mom likes coupon websites and I can't repair the thing every week

What are coupon websites / you can get free coupons from them(?)

retailmenot, etc. There's some pretty dubious ones that come up in search results, e.g. try searching "levis.com coupon codes" or something.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#293

Post by burnte »

girvo wrote: post #177
burnte wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability. This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But th…

Having worked with amazing HCI experts over the years, you've hit the nail on the head. It's wild how much design is done for designs sake at my work, with nary a nod to HCI given. The a11y team try to patch over it as best as possible, but we end up with a mess, and I'm treated like a pariah for pushing back on some of it

I'm glad to hear my suspicions and impressions are accurate. I have a number of friends who have gone into UI over the past 20 years and while they're all very smart people, In my opinion exactly 1 of them has what it takes to work in UI/UX. The rest are mediocre graphic designers with average to no training in graphic design, and zero experience in anything technical. Only one knew what Fitts law was, or what HCI meant, or what GUI meant

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#294

Post by burnte »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #152
burnte wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability. This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But th…

>This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it. In 2000s the web enabled more sophisticated presentation designs and there was a push from client-server to web-based applications using incredibly strange technologies for building UIs — HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which gave the rise to UX design as a interdisciplinary job (HCI+digital graphics design). By 20…

> „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it.

I agree. It's a UI Engineer. User Experience is just the fluffification of the title to something that sounds expansive and nebulous when it's actually pretty focused and critical.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#295

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #155
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are outsourcing testing. I'm not surprised that they get rid of UI testing. Back in the day companies used to invite people to sit down and use their software. Nowadays they just push out whatever they have and then start collecting bug tickets. Then they let the community to vote on the tickets. It's basically a huge "pay for being a beta tester" scheme.

UX testing is not UI testing and it is not QA.

You are probably right, just saying in general...

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#296

Post by m463 »

LoganDark wrote: post #202
overgard wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has kind of made things worse in the recent macOS, where my phone's notifications show up on the desktop now. Like, man, I was already drowning in them before anyway, I don't want them on two screens now.

You probably already know this if it was bothering you, but just in case: System Settings -> Notifications -> toggle off "Allow notifications from iPhone".

I'm reminded of the aircraft crash investigations where the pilots would have a frequent warning, learn to ignore it, then miss the important one.

unnecessary notifications hurt us all. Wonder how many people have turned off the emergency/amber alerts because of non-critical use of the system?

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#297

Post by m463 »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #209
LoganDark wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably already know this if it was bothering you, but just in case: System Settings -> Notifications -> toggle off "Allow notifications from iPhone".

I would also argue, regardless of what mobile OS you're on, quieting, delaying, or disabling notifications on a regular basis (and taking stock of what you let through) is prudent.

do you turn off amber alerts? emergency alerts?

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#299

Post by mrehler »

LoganDark wrote: post #239
ascagnel_ wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also argue, regardless of what mobile OS you're on, quieting, delaying, or disabling notifications on a regular basis (and taking stock of what you let through) is prudent.

I'm always shocked whenever I see someone having hundreds or even thousands of unread notifications. It pains me to see that instead of controlling their feed to only what interests them, they've just let everything pile up forever, completely unread. For example, on Discord, I sometimes see people with unreads for every server, and dozens to hundreds of completely unread DMs, just because they don't know that you ca…

Discord is really awful about this, and that's one of the many reasons I dislike it. Its defaults are bad. I should be able to set, at the account level, the default that servers don't send me notifications. I believe by default, I only get @everyone and @role notifications, which is only a few taps per server. But every time I join a new server, I have to remember to do it. If I didn't actively care about notifications from one particular server, I'd just block Discord notifications entirely and stop managing them in their app at all.

Re: Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

#300

Post by flas9sd »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #247
flas9sd wrote: post #135

seen the win32 aesthetic used for higher-order reasons: separating "work mode" from playtime. An extra user to do so on the same machine helps. Connect the dots reading https://www.marginalia.nu/log/99_context/ and seeing the ui change in old vs new screencasts https://www.youtube.com/@ViktorLofgren/videos

> I get significantly more work done when I unplug my computer from the Internet. I tried this, but documentation is often a huge problem. Increasing amounts of it are primarily online and not particularly straightforward to mirror locally.

you could try Zealdocs - it was a reason to go reading more of the projects own documentation pages. There are converters for whatever-doc/ssg-framework a project uses to Docset, the packaged format it relies on. Though ignoring that, how approachable the docs are to different levels of experience is another thing.

I learned heaps from treating a REPL as an (offline) escape room, in terms of how to get inline help, variable introspection and debugging tricks. Not every language offers a convenient one though.

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