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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • Up to 2.x, GNOME used what was basically the MacOS philosophy: make things easy and simple and intuitive, but if the user wants finer control and power features, make sure it’s still possible somehow. GNOME 3 and later pretty much adopted the philosophy that there’s the GNOME path of simplicity and streamlining, and power user functionality is going to be removed from the core and relegated to extensions. And, of course, GNOME started requiring boatloads of memory to run, which to me didn’t go hand in hand with “simplicity”.

    I eventually settled on using XFCE, because it didn’t have the bloat and still had enough customisability. Really good environment for old and underperforming systems. If I’m using a modern high performance system, I’m actually pretty impressed by what KDE Plasma is doing these days.





  • When I was learning about GIMP key shortcuts I was like “Ctrl+A selects everything, Ctrl+Shift+A deselects everything. Makes sense.”

    And then I went to most of the other apps. “Ctrl+D? Well it’s one less keypress, but… WHY?”

    To be fair, I get it now, I’ve used plenty of image editors and I remember the keybinds wherever I am. Just that I sometimes find it annoying that The Other Software hasn’t adopted logical keybindings.

    (I find it particularly annoying that a lot of image editors try to be fancy and sophisticated and Photoshop-compatible and think it’s at all appropriate to use Ctrl+NumpadPlus and Ctrl+NumpadMinus for zooming. Just use what GIMP uses! NumpadPlus and NumpadMinus. It’s not hard! What are you using the plain plus and minus for, anyway? Absolutely nothing! I just checked, I need to use Ctrl in Affinity Photo. Plain plus and minus are useless. I see you. …oh I can just rebind these. Done.)


  • I’ve been using GIMP since the very dawn, I use plenty of other image editors for variety of reasons (Affinity Photo, DxO PhotoLab, ArtRage, Clip Studio), and I have no problems with the UIs in any of them.

    Yet every time I use Adobe software I’m like “why is it doing this? Why is it designed this way? Who thought that was a good idea? This is stupid.”









  • Actually this reminds me, what is the deal with tar command recommendations to use or not use dash? I know GNU tar accepts both (e.g.) tar xvf file.tar and tar -xvf file.tar, but at some points people were like “NO! Don’t use the dash! It’s going to maybe cause issues somewhere, who knows!” and I was like “OK”. Something to do with people up designing the Unix specs?




  • About 10 years ago I was like “FINE, clearly 512MB of memory isn’t enough to avoid swapping hell, I’ll get 1 GB of extra memory.” …and that was that!

    These days I’m like “4 GB on a single board computer? Oh that’s fine. You may need that much to run a browser. And who’s going to run a browser regularly on a SBC? …oh I’ve done it a lot of times and it’s… fine.”

    The thing I learned is that you can run a whole bunch of SHIT HOT server software on a system with less than a gigabyte of memory. The moment you run a web browser? FUCK ALL THAT.

    And that’s basically what I found out long ago. I had a laptop that had like 32 megs of memory. Could be a perfectly productive person with that. Emacs. Darcs. SSH over a weird USB Wi-Fi dongle. But running a web browser? Can’t do Firefox. Opera kinda worked. Wouldn’t work nowadays, no. But Emacs probably still would.



  • This actually gave me a pause. I guess a lot of marketing bullshit is actually about turning people into warring tribes. “This thing is trying to market X? Well damn you, I like Y! That is the best! Everyone, get Y!” …actually explains a lot about the perennial Console Wars: the companies like it as long as someone is winning. (…Jim Steph Sterling really was right, following game business for a moment is an easy way to become a critic of capitalism)


  • I actually really like the C64 keyboards - not perfect by any means, but they are some of the best keyboards in the 8-bit computers, really.

    Fun thing, I wrote one NaNoWriMo novel on a C64, so I don’t think the typing comfort is too much of an issue. Though for that experiment I actually used my C64C, because the low-profile case makes things a tiny bit more ergonomic. (I don’t use it that C64 specimen much for other purposes, because it has a busted/temperamental SID. The one in the picture is my C64G, which is one of the last models produced, basically C64C guts in a breadbin-style case.)