Count Regal Inkwell

Nerd|Furry|Linux User|Ace|BiRomantic|Taken <3

Leftist with an incorrigible love for fancy aesthetics (mostly Renaissance Italy/Victorian England) that might be incorrectly read as a monarchist because of that.

en.pronouns.page/@vinesnfluff

Unicorn, but also occasionally gryphon.

  • 5 Posts
  • 103 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • As long as we’re being arm-chair-y – At the core of being into FOSS is the following thought: “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do” – Getting into Linux means going out and exploring, deliberately learning something, and all because you don’t want your computer to decide things for you.

    … Transgender individuals are similarly breaking out of the “conventional” and making themselves “outsiders”.

    It’s not causation, but correlation. Anyone who’s into FOSS will most definitely not be one for conforming to social standards, and transpeople are not people who are conforming to social standards.














  • Digimon Tamers implies that Digimons evolve from clusters of loose data in much the same way as lifeforms evolved from chemical matter, and since they can apparently interface with those little handheld devices (probably running on z80 or 6502-esque processors with only a simple kernel by way of an “OS” given it was still the early aughts and ARM had a long way to go) as well as PCs (most likely Windows 98, because early aughts Japan), they seem to be platform-agnostic, able to adapt to any machine in much the same way animals adapt to different biomes.


  • I already mentioned the System Tray, back then I used MegaSync for cloud backups and that app was completely broken due to the lack of a Tray. (I have since switched to using Syncthing and an old laptop with a USB HDD as a ghetto “”“”“NAS”“”“” solution… Which would probably work quite well on Gnome actually, as Syncthing is a service and is controlled through a web interface)

    Wine stuff was janky as hell. As were Qt apps. For one thing wine applications, too, expected a Tray, and would instead spawn a tiny window at the corner for tray stuff. Plus there was weird behaviour with some windows and the way they layered. As for Qt apps? Gnome offered no features for setting the look of Qt apps, so if I set Gnome to dark mode (by the way, very neat feature how Gnome’s default theme deals with that, no joke here, very seamless and elegant, even if I’d never use light mode willingly), Qt apps would still be bright and I had to just install a third-party application for it (qt5ct) and set something in my /etc/environment.

    All of these things had solutions, to be sure, an extension for the tray, a third-party application for the Qt apps, etc. But then I did an apt upgrade and literally all the extensions broke. So I had to spend an extra hour that day figuring out what I’d do about that. Joy of joys.

    Then there is the Gnome File Manager.
    Why in the name of all that is unholy did it not let one type in the addresses of folders? Or copy them or… ? Sure, icons and breadcrumbs are nice, but being able to type in an address when you know it saves a ton of time. And maybe I want to copy a location to use it on the terminal? That should have been one of the first things to be implemented. Apparently a recent patch to Gnome has added the address bar “feature” (which has been part of Windows Explorer since 1994 and of every Linux File Manager I’ve known since forever–), but like. Bruh.

    So I installed Thunar, the File Manager from XFCE, but now I was using a separate file manager entirely and having to deal with everything that comes with switching file managers from the DE’s default. Like. WOW.


  • As I said – Same reason I love it.

    That system control panel app with all its billions of options and everything being customizable and change-able is very good if you are a user who a. WANTS to customize everything b. Either knows how or is willing to learn.

    Most beginners aren’t after that. They want something that is somewhat familiar and that works well. And while, sure, Plasma’s defaults are pretty good… I can totally see a newbie user opening up KCM and immediately becoming overwhelmed. Another user here even mentioned how much time they wasted because all those choices actually got in the way of them getting stuff done




  • See, while I understand that the “the system should be invisible and get out of the way so people can do things with their computers” philosophy isn’t for me, I entirely understand it as not only valid, but preferred by most people. –

    – It’s just that Gnome’s approach to “getting out of the way” is at best counterproductive? I used Gnome for like 3 months in 2022, figured I’d give it a try, I’m always down to try new stuff. And I felt like I was just constantly fighting against it, having to do configuration stuff and install third-party addons not as a funtime activity because I like to make my computer look prettier, but because if I didn’t, shit just refused to work. It was only much later that I learned that the reason I had to keep wrestling Gnome is because the peeps behind it had actively decided that the things I needed to do were stupid and didn’t need doing.

    You’ll see me praising Cinnamon in a different comment. Cinnamon, a cousin of Gnome’s born of Gnome 2, is what I’d call a DE that gets out of the way. It doesn’t have all the moving parts that KDE does, and that is to its credit. Because it has everything it needs to have and no more but also no less.