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I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

fireborn.mataroa.blog

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Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#31

As a non-blind user, I am struggling to understand why blind users would want a desktop session in the first place. Based on intuition I would think the pure text experience of using cli tools would be superior for blind users. And since there is usually a cli/tui version of every single gui app / use case, it is not like one would be missing out on availability. Or is it because terminal multiplexers like tmux and s…

You'd be cut off from nearly the entire CSS and JavaScript-using World Wide Web, for one.

There are many days I would say it isn't a bad thing, until I'd realize I can't fill some important form online so that I don't have to queue during office hours at a desk.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#32
post #5

As a non-blind user, the title expresses my feelings too. And I feel like it's getting worse over time, not better. From little things to kernel lockdown breaking hibernate on a fully encrypted system just because you should be happy to get your laptop battery killed by s2idle or disable secure boot. Yay, security. I can only imagine the pain of all the accessibility issues on top of what I experience.

I agree, all the modern technical additions over the years to operating systems have entirely been 2 steps forward, 3 steps back. It's always, "Oh, well, you can no longer run two or three monitors any more, but your primary display is higher resolution now!" Except DPI adjustments make it irrelevant and now my (i)GPU has a higher minimum load. Or, "Oh, well, we only give you 2 ports now, but they're all !" Great, bu…

Under Linux, you can still use the -dpi setting in xrandr (or in your x.conf). It sets the font bigger without blurring all the icons.

I prefer it over the replacement approach that modern desktop environments (and wayland) use. I've been exclusively using high-DPI displays for much longer than Mac OS or Windows have supported them, and the old approach was much better.

There's some argument that you need to blur everything badly (instead of setting a session-wide DPI) if the user is simultaneously using two displays with wildly different DPI's. That user is going to have a bad experience no matter what, so I've never understood that argument.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#33
There's a bunch of Linux distros made by/for the visually impaired, based on Ubuntu MATE, Fedora, or Debian.

I wonder what the author's take is on these. Presumably they'll have those pain points fixed out of the box?

Accessible Coconut, MATE based: https://zendalona.com/accessible-coconut/

Vojtux, Fedora based (you'll have to make your own image, don't see a prebuilt ISO): https://github.com/vojtapolasek/vojtux

Emmabuntus, Debian based and education-focused. Might be suitable for new Linux users: https://emmabuntus.org/

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#34
Unrelated, but playing around with Orca I can't help but notice how behind the times the speech synthesis is. The voice is incredibly distorted and robotic. I know the goal isn't to have a natural voice with human cadence, but there's little reason to have it sound like your speakers are dying. Maybe it's just the defaults that are bad?

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#35

Yeah have to agree with everything in this article, the state of audio on Linux! And Wayland also, "not there yet" for so many years. As a sighted person I can only imagine the frustration, I too find myself writing scripts to keep things working the way I want.

I find it ridiculous how "writing scripts to keep things working the way I want" can be a source of frustration. To me, that's a source of pleasure. I've never expected Windows or Mac to work exactly how I want them to. In fac, they can't. So given that, how can Linux be a poorer experience/ The truth is that for virtually everyone, Linux will be the absolute closest experience to having everything work exactly the w…

For you, it's writing scripts so that things work the way you want. For the author, it's writing scripts to be able to use the computer at all. And how would that work if you have to write the scripts in a state the computer doesn't work for you? That's the difference between being fun for you and being agonizing for someone who has to rely on it un order to use their computer.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#36
post #23
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article?

Ignoring the comment you replied to, I am curious about the claim that pipewire is incompatible with the audio card. I get that pulseaudio cannot default to using an output with speakers. This happened to me too on every single login, so I switched to pipewire, which is capable of saving settings between seessions (pulseaudio claims to support this, but it's been broken for over 10 years based on my internet searches…

I distinctly remember having to install a package before audio would work on my machine. Needless to say, that isn't the best option if you can't rely on your eyes to find out what's missing.

Unfortunately, I'm not knowledgeable enough about how audio is done in interaction with hardware to help satisfy your curiosity.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#37
post #5

As a non-blind user, the title expresses my feelings too. And I feel like it's getting worse over time, not better. From little things to kernel lockdown breaking hibernate on a fully encrypted system just because you should be happy to get your laptop battery killed by s2idle or disable secure boot. Yay, security. I can only imagine the pain of all the accessibility issues on top of what I experience.

Yeah, I got much peaceful experience after I started running it on VMs, as modern PCs got good enough virtualization hardware, and I have used enough distributions since that 1995's Summer, starting with Slackware 2.0.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#39

As a non-blind user, I am struggling to understand why blind users would want a desktop session in the first place. Based on intuition I would think the pure text experience of using cli tools would be superior for blind users. And since there is usually a cli/tui version of every single gui app / use case, it is not like one would be missing out on availability. Or is it because terminal multiplexers like tmux and s…

You'd be cut off from nearly the entire CSS and JavaScript-using World Wide Web, for one.

I can't remember the URL or name, but there was a Firefox fork or extension that made it work in a terminal, that could probably help here.

Re: I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back

#40
post #24
post #5

As a non-blind user, the title expresses my feelings too. And I feel like it's getting worse over time, not better. From little things to kernel lockdown breaking hibernate on a fully encrypted system just because you should be happy to get your laptop battery killed by s2idle or disable secure boot. Yay, security. I can only imagine the pain of all the accessibility issues on top of what I experience.

I noticed the one bright spot in the article is debian, though even that's broken for me thanks to systemd. I switched to devaun, and things are much better, for now. It's unclear how long new software will keep reliably working under X11 without systemd. Anyway, as a sighted user, my experience almost exactly matches the article, toned down about 10x. (Concretely, on the systemd side: I hit the same issues with puls…

GTK were talking about dropping X11 support at some point, so X11 folks using GTK apps would probably need to some sort of Wayland to X11 proxy, or to migrate from Xorg to some sort of multi-protocol display server that supports both X11 and Wayland, like Mir from Canonical/Ubuntu, or Arcan.

https://news.itsfoss.com/gtk-drops-x11/ https://arcan-fe.com/

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