[HN Gopher] Cool Desktops Don't Change
___________________________________________________________________
Cool Desktops Don't Change
Author : thcipriani
Score : 163 points
Date : 2022-06-16 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tylercipriani.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tylercipriani.com)
| jmclnx wrote:
| Well I have three older objects, Slackware, xterm and fvwm, but
| who's counting :)
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This is very true, you get more out of honing a small set of
| useful tools that continue to operate year after year, than you
| do chasing the next cool thing in UX.
| _dave wrote:
| What's with the repost the day after you submitted it?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31761636
| rbanffy wrote:
| HN ignores dupes when the original got little traction.
| arm wrote:
| It may not even necessarily be the submitter themselves that
| has resubmitted it -- I've had posts I've submitted that have
| gotten low traction get resubmitted (not by me) hours later
| (but still with me listed as the submitter). Guessing it's
| something the moderation team does when they feel a submission
| didn't get enough traction the first time.
|
| Edit: Never mind, I see that's not the case here after looking
| at their submission history!
| [deleted]
| leephillips wrote:
| I learned from this that there's a Debian package that gives me
| definitions from the justly renowned 1913 Websters, and installed
| it right away! (The comment on the OA is correct: it's `dict-
| gcide`. This is great.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| jwz has a comment that addresses this:
|
| _Look, in the case of all other software, I believe strongly in
| "release early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it.
| But I think history has proven that UI is different than
| software. The Firefox crew believe otherwise. Good for them, and
| we'll see._
|
| HN-safe archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o...
|
| Software performance improvements tend to come from hardware
| (Moore's Law, still-ish), and software algorithm (in the old-
| school sense of how information is actually processed)
| improvements. Leaning on the UI for massive performance
| enhancement is a bit like expecting order-of-magnitude income
| improvements by increasing your working hours. There's only so
| much time in a day, and there is only a limited rate at which
| humans can interact with digitised information --- generally
| text, images, video, audio, and data.
|
| The Mother of All Demos was _fifty years ago_ ... four years ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676445
|
| And yet, it incorporated very nearly all the _basic human-
| computer interface principles still used today_.
|
| Apple's Macintosh has seen _two_ principle variants of its
| desktop UI in the 38 years of its existence. And the second, OSX
| / Aqua, is now older than Mac Classic was when OSX was introduced
| _by eight years_. Apple are _highly_ conservative in UI changes.
|
| I'm not principally an Apple user, or fan. But for my _desktop_ ,
| I use an environment inspired by the Mac's predecessor, NeXT,
| namely Windowmaker. There's been very little development in
| years, but the product is stable, and still works even on retina-
| class displays. The fact that I _don 't_ have to go hunting down
| new interactions every few months or years is a tremendous
| advantage. And if you want, twm is _still_ a serviceable window
| manager.
|
| My own tools collection strongly resembles Cipriani's.
| Applications and tools learned _decades_ ago still provide me
| regular use. I can _do what I intended_ when I want _without_
| being buffetted by constant winds of change and shifting
| fashions. And quite frankly, it 's awesome and a bit of a
| superpower.
| limpbizkitfan wrote:
| The Lindy effect is horseshit. Things that are good tend to be
| old because of infant death.
|
| There are plenty of old tools in consistent/present use that are
| cumbersome wrecks, too. Curating good things and calling them
| some buzzword is silly.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The Lindy effect is horseshit. Things that are good tend to
| be old because of infant death._
|
| The Lindy effect doesn't say that the things that have been
| around a long time have to be good. It just says that their
| expected lifespan is longer.
|
| _> There are plenty of old tools in consistent /present use_
|
| ...that are examples of the Lindy effect even though they are
| cumbersome wrecks. The point is that they are still in
| consistent/present use.
| jrm4 wrote:
| It's a heuristic, not a _rule._
| superkuh wrote:
| My strategy is to keep the software for a desktop computer stable
| and of it's era forever. If it gets so old that I'm having
| trouble compiling things because my glib and gcc are so old then
| I'll build an entirely new desktop with up to date OS and
| software. Then set it up and use it till it can't do new software
| again. This happens every 5 to 10 years. I never lose ability. I
| only gain it.
|
| There are many things my 2010 era Core2Duo running Ubuntu 10.04
| can do that my fancy new Ryzen desktop with Debian 11 can't and
| won't ever be able to do. Things I cannot give up because they're
| too important for my daily life.
|
| >And when Wayland finally happens? Well. I guess I'll have no
| choice but to stop using computers forever -\\_(tsu)_/
|
| Wayland isn't going to happen.
| https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-x...
| stinkytaco wrote:
| > Wayland isn't going to happen.
|
| I'd be very disappointed by this because I'm in a mixed DPI
| environment and I need its support.
|
| Seriously though, I find hostility toward Wayland so weird. I
| could kind of understand it with systemd, but X seems
| perpetually stuck in 2005.
| snerbles wrote:
| > Seriously though, I find hostility toward Wayland so weird.
|
| I felt the same way until I tried to get Chromium working
| without turning into a blurry pixelated XWayland mess. I
| still run Sway, but the hours I've spent pouring over smug
| "It's working as intended! X is soooo 2005 anyway" posts
| while troubleshooting my Wayland config has been absolutely
| infuriating.
|
| I've also had to pause updates from Visual Studio Code, while
| they have contributed a lot to Wayland support in Electron
| they sure do break it with regularity.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Seriously though, I find hostility toward Wayland so weird.
|
| I think the hostility towards Wayland is pretty justified.
| It's a backdoor power-grab by the GNOME foundation and Red
| Hat, much like Flatpak, Libadwaita, and to a limited extent,
| systemd. I, like many others, am totally exhausted of GNOME
| trying to be the center of the desktop universe. Every couple
| years, they decide to redouble their development efforts on
| some useless, stopgap tool that ultimately ends up being
| underdeveloped and redundant. Making matters worse, they
| announce $PROGRAM to be the next big feature of Linux, and
| anyone who's refusing to embrace it is a luddite. In reality,
| most people can't switch to these alternatives because
| they're niche, and don't provide the same degree of
| functionality as their favorite Window Manager.
|
| Furthermore, people don't hate the idea of something
| replacing X, people hate the fact that Wayland has been in
| development for more than a decade and is still considerably
| worse than Xorg with objectively less features and
| functionality. Adding insult to injury, a majority of these
| omissions are _deliberately removed_ by the maintainers
| because the GNOME desktop doesn 't need it, therefore
| everyone else doesn't. Take AppIndicator support, for
| example. Everyone has statusbar icons: Mac and Windows users
| alike deal with them daily. When developing Wayland though,
| AppIndicators were deliberately removed because GNOME didn't
| intend to use them. Worse yet, the maintainers refused to
| even support it in wlroots, their pittance of a cross-
| platform desktop library.
|
| > I could kind of understand it with systemd, but X seems
| perpetually stuck in 2005.
|
| X is indeed terrible software, and it's functionality is
| stuck not just in 2005, but rather the mid-90s. I really hate
| Xorg, which makes it even more infuriating that Wayland:
|
| a. Doesn't support my hardware
|
| b. Doesn't support my desktop environment
|
| c. Makes it harder for me to stream my display, take
| screengrabs, and use my webcam
|
| d. Deliberately removed functionality that I use on a daily
| basis, forcing _everyone adopting Wayland_ to write their own
| implementation of a basic feature.
|
| If I didn't know any better, I'd accuse Wayland of being a
| project deliberately designed to sabotage desktop Linux. It's
| a project with less ambition than Quartz, and less
| hardware/software support than x11. It has a weaker security
| model than the compositor in MacOS, and manages to have less
| features than even the compositor in Windows. How is that
| closer to "the future" than a feature-complete desktop from
| 30 years ago?
|
| The only truly excellent thing to come out of Wayland was
| PipeWire. But PipeWire works just fine on Xorg machines too,
| so I guess we're at an impasse. Wayland fractured the Linux
| desktop for good, there is no "way forward" anymore.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| Yet... it's still the only way I can use mixed DPI
| displays. I'm sure all of these concerns are justified in
| one way or the other, but no one's really given me a lot of
| other options. A quick environmental scan reveals two
| serious contenders: Xorg and Wayland. Open source precludes
| the idea of a grand conspiracy, so I'm not sure _why_ no
| one 's working on an alternative if it's as bad as you say.
|
| It's a bit like complaining about factory conditions in
| China. I'd sure like to buy a computer from somewhere else,
| but I'm sort of left without a bunch of options so I shrug
| my shoulders and hold my nose and hope the market sorts it
| out. Ironically, this is one of the issues that puts me off
| upgrading to another HiDPI display, thus necessitating my
| need for Wayland...
| syntheweave wrote:
| I don't think Wayland, or even GNOME is much of a
| conspiracy. The people who spearhead these kinds of
| consolidating efforts(udev, systemd were similar stories)
| are always going to fall more into the empire-builder
| category than most people. But it's open-source: to win
| the category you have to make a public good. So at the
| end of the process, you have working software and a
| standard. The standard has to be at least somewhat better
| for most people, or it falls into the bucket of dead
| standards.
|
| But Wayland's definitely a big one, touching really old
| assumptions around Linux desktops. There is plenty to
| start fights over. I still can't quite use it for all my
| apps because some stylus apps behave poorly. So I think
| I'll be in the latecomer camp. This is not a bad thing
| for me: it just means I've organized my life around using
| the tech to get a good result now, rather than putting my
| energy into developing the tech. I was on Windows for the
| longest time for the same reason.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'm not taking away any options from you, you're welcome
| to use whatever tools work for you. You shouldn't take it
| as a personal attack when someone suggests that one of
| your tools could use improvement, and by reaching
| consensus that Wayland needs more features and hardware
| support we can send a message to the community that work
| is far from done.
|
| Linux display servers need a lot of work. HDR content is
| right around the corner, and _nobody_ in the Linux video
| stack is prepared. Wayland spends too much time twiddling
| their thumbs and making life hard on the rest of the
| Linux community, and Xorg 's maintainers are gone. If
| you're going to use Linux, then by all means, use what
| works for _you_. That 's the benefit of modular OSes! But
| we still need to push for more active development in this
| space. If Xorg is dead, then a lot of work needs to be
| done on Wayland to get them up to speed. If Xorg is _not_
| dead, then we need to find someone to fix it 's
| longstanding issues.
|
| > It's a bit like complaining about factory conditions in
| China.
|
| Not really. It's more like complaining about a missing
| feature, say, thumbnails in the filepicker. At first it
| seems like such an egregious omission that it had to be a
| bug. But then people defend it, saying "it's not that big
| of a deal!" When you try to get people to corroborate
| your claims, people label it as hate speech. When users
| contribute code, fixes, patches and solutions, you see
| them all get turned down.
|
| The goals of commercial interests, Linux software
| developers and Linux desktop users have never been more
| at-odds. Without a clear path forwards, we can't expect
| _anything_ to get done. I think it 's okay to beat a drum
| about this stuff online, because it's completely germane
| on a subject like this.
| ews wrote:
| My desktop has been Wayland/sway for years and years, and it's
| incredibly stable (I am using Arch btw)
| horsawlarway wrote:
| lawl - wayland has _already_ happened.
|
| Also, and more seriously - I think I'm not going to take you at
| your word on this one:
|
| There are many things my 2010 era Core2Duo running Ubuntu 10.04
| can do that my fancy new Ryzen desktop with Debian 11 can't and
| won't ever be able to do. Things I cannot give up because
| they're too important for my daily life.
|
| I'd love to see a real example instead of this pithy line. My
| strong (STRONG) suspicion is that anything you can do on that
| old machine can be done on the new one just fine - although
| _you_ might have to adjust a bit or learn a new tool, and that
| can be painful and annoying.
| akagusu wrote:
| Wayland is at best a work in progress.
|
| And if you consider that they made Wayland default on GNOME
| to force adoption and users usually go to Internet seeking
| for advice on how to switch back to X11 on GNOME, we will
| probably wait a long time for Wayland happen.
| christophilus wrote:
| I've been using it happily for over a year with no real
| issues. But I do share your concern. I like the variety and
| choice of WMs on Linux and the Gnome / Wayland crowd do
| seem to add friction to the other contenders.
| hyperion2010 wrote:
| I love the point in there that it isn't actually xorg vs
| wayland, it is xorg vs dbus. Wayland is so deficient that
| basically everything has to depend on dbus if it doesn't want
| to use X. This framing clarifies the issue substantially,
| because whatever people think about wayland, they might have
| some slightly different opinions about dbus.
| rrix2 wrote:
| > slightly different opinions about dbus
|
| Recently i updated my machine and it would fail to boot
| because NetworkManager-wait-online.service's invocation of
| `nm-online -s` would fail even when NM was connected, even
| when `nm-online` _actual liveness check_ would succeed.
|
| I spent hours reading NM code, wading through auto-generated
| GObject introspections and their XML bullshit to try to
| figure out why org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.startup was
| true, what the magic numbers in
| org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Connection.Active.StateFlags
| meant, _why my desktop wouldn 't boot_ and couldn't even find
| what could _could_ cause the state to change before I finally
| gave up and patched nm-wait-online to just invoke the
| codepath which did an actual liveness check rather than
| bumble through a bunch of dbus interfaces.
|
| Gotta say I was missing the old KDE3 dcop after that... IPC
| is still such a PITA on linux.
| saati wrote:
| What do you mean Wayland isn't going to happen, I've been using
| it without major problems for years.
| cowtools wrote:
| Wayland doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to an
| improvement over Xorg, which is hampered by its complexity and
| reverse compatibility.
| uecker wrote:
| I do not think the criticism of Xorg is really correct. At
| its core, it is actually a nice and well-designed protocol.
| It is also rock-solid, works without any problem in all my
| configurations, and supports remote desktop.
| MarioMan wrote:
| >There are many things my 2010 era Core2Duo running Ubuntu
| 10.04 can do that my fancy new Ryzen desktop with Debian 11
| can't and won't ever be able to do. Things I cannot give up
| because they're too important for my daily life.
|
| This has me curious: What sorts of tasks are you doing that
| only work on a machine like this? I love finding new things to
| do with old hardware, so I'm interested in your insights.
| youngNed wrote:
| i'm going to guess its a Thinkpad, x200? t410? maybe even an
| x61. People (myself included) still use those, not because
| they _do_ anything more in particular, but they feel great to
| use, nicely weighted and a stunning[1] keyboard
|
| [1]ymmv, but personally the keyboard on an x61 is perfection,
| the screen however is very very very far from perfection
| chi42 wrote:
| Man I loved my x61. It was like the duracell bunny. It was
| in my apartment in 2011 when the building burned down. The
| roof collapsed on it and the only thing I had to fix was
| the screen backlight. I used that laptop until 2020.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| If it's the feeling of the hardware alone then the Thinkpad
| could be used as a thin client to access a modern, more
| powerful system. Personally I'm curious about the "many
| things" the C2D with Ubuntu 10 can do that the new one
| can't - is it some legacy software that can't run on a
| newer os, or something else?
| dsr_ wrote:
| Have you considered pulling your Ubuntu desktop into a VM
| running on the Ryzen? Let it transcend the mortal shell in
| which it was born.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Your now-immortal VM could run faster while using less power,
| even with the virtualization overhead.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| Most of the bigger distros have already switched to wayland.
| It's pretty much inevitable that the rest follow eventually.
|
| https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2021/10/distros-which-adopted-way...
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Well, most distros also ship X and allow you to choose at
| login. I'd imagine quite a lot of people are still running X
| since there's always something that does not play nice with
| Wayland.
|
| My favorite: drag-and-drop from file-roller into nautilus.
| [1]
|
| [1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4
| corrral wrote:
| Drag & Drop is an action I had to consciously work to start
| using when I switched to macOS, a little over a decade ago.
| Windows and Linux had trained me never to use it, aside
| from moving files around in Explorer or whatever, because
| it so often caused crashes, did the wrong thing, or made
| programs glitch out in weird ways (that last one was mostly
| Linux). Sure enough, I found a repeatable drag & drop
| application crash in KDE in my first few minutes of use,
| last time I poked my head into the desktop Linux world
| (Ubuntu, in this case) again, a couple years back.
| swayvil wrote:
| Debian with Mate. As familiar as the back of my hand. Dog simple.
| Can't recall the last time it broke (without me doing something
| dumb anyway).
|
| (But "pluma"? "Caja"? Wtf names?)
|
| And none of this "eternal improvements" bs. At least nothing
| visible in the ui or anything. For all intents and purposes it is
| evolutionarily flat. Which is exactly the way I like it.
|
| (Except, maybe there is something cleverer than just slapping
| windows on top of each other willy nilly. I know there are
| alternatives. I have not been driven to explore there much.)
|
| (Also, the Windows OS is flaming garbage. Possibly literally
| malicious. I don't know how they stay in business.)
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > Also, the Windows OS is flaming garbage. Possibly literally
| malicious. I don't know how they stay in business.
|
| You don't have to be best, just better than the alternative.
|
| MacOS comes with specialized set of hardware. So good luck
| tailoring Mac, without it costing like an average Ferrari.
|
| Linux is just worse for average user. Not average HN user, mind
| you. But people who struggle to figure out print screen.
|
| I fought with Linux in the past. It's death by thousand gremlin
| bites.
|
| Big part of that is lack of drivers, but there are also major
| fractures in the space: Gnome vs KDE, X.org vs Wayland, etc.
| pram wrote:
| IMO he should be using Xaw or Motif applications, the stuff on
| his desktop is a little too new and pretty. Your desktop should
| at least be an authentic recreation of the late-80s. Not a
| convincing act for performative oldness.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| WindowMaker enters the chat.
| sbf501 wrote:
| I've been using MWM and the same .mwmrc since AIX in 1991. Same
| palette, same decor, same .Xdefaults.
|
| I've yet to see a GUI (FVWM, KDE, Gnome) that offers something
| X/Athena/Motif didn't nail 30+ years ago.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Got a screenie?
| muhammadusman wrote:
| I would love to see more guides on how to make vim more like a
| knowledge/mind notes app like Notion/Roam. I've been on and off
| looking for something like that.
| wardedVibe wrote:
| Look into org-roam, which embeds roam in emacs org mode, and
| evil, which uses vim keybindings and modal editing in Emacs.
|
| Doom emacs has extremely easy ways of installing both of these
| packages in the setup.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| When Notion had a lot of outages in 2020, my entire
| 200-employee company stopped working hours at a time.
|
| I didn't even notice, happily using my markdown notes.
| machrider wrote:
| I'm liking vimwiki, for what it's worth. It feels like a pretty
| small set of changes to vim that make the wiki stuff "just
| work", and otherwise it's my regular ass plaintext world that I
| love.
| eternityforest wrote:
| The Lindy effect is a predictive tool. Whether something is good
| or not is much more complicated.
|
| For one thing, switching GUI tools has almost no cost, if that
| tool doesn't have a significant amount of non-ephemeral user
| content.
|
| It may be different for people with a strong muscle memory, but I
| can switch calculators or dictionary apps at any time. Basic GUI
| apps aren't skills you learn, they're things you get vaguely
| familiar with, the discoverable UIs guide you even if you don't
| know what you're doing. The learning time is minutes to days at
| most.
|
| If I have to learn a new app in 3 years, that's fine. It won't
| take me much more effort than it probably would to maintain the
| config for enough Vim plugins to get it to act somewhat like I
| want it to.
|
| I could probably even switch away from something as big as
| LibreOffice without trouble, if they used the same file formats
| and actually gave a reason I might want to switch.
|
| Plus, Android itself is still new, and for most things, Mobile is
| what really matters to me. Note taking is worthless if I can't
| access or write down the notes when I think of them or want to
| check them.
|
| Perhaps if I was doing more advanced programming, more of my
| notes would be taken at a keyboard?
|
| These simple old tools seem really use case specific. Like, speed
| of text editing is less critical if most of what you do is
| interact with modern frameworks, where things might change too
| fast and the projects might be too big to memorize, and you're
| relying much more on IDE features to help you, and spending 2x as
| much time researching as actually coding.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| The KDE enthusiast would probably note that KDE was originally
| called the "Kool Desktop Environment". But even the most ardent
| KDE enthusiast wouldn't argue that it does not change.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Shame on the OP. Emacs is 46 this year. As is vi (which is not
| Vim), but we all know Emacs is much better.
|
| OTOH, ed is 3 years older (Wow! 3 years between ed and Emacs!),
| and I'm very happy I don't use it today.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Interesting how you only see Vim as Vim but then treat all
| Emacs implementations as one unit. Emacs back then was probably
| very different from today's GNU Emacs too, considering it was
| originally just a set of macros for another editor.
| rbanffy wrote:
| GNU Emacs 1.0 was released in early 1985. Multics Emacs is
| from 1978 and, as a standalone editor written in Lisp, it can
| be called an ancestor of GNU Emacs and hints towards what its
| most illustrious descendant would be. You are right in that
| there are many Emacsen, the same way there is more than one
| Unix.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I love ed unsarcastically.
| rbanffy wrote:
| After all, ed is the standard text editor.
| xupybd wrote:
| I like this but find I'm more productive in Windows. For one
| reason Microsoft Office. I have to use to work with others and
| systems that rely on it. For years I struggled with work arounds.
| The amount of time and effort I wasted is insane.
| NonNefarious wrote:
| This article proposes that the user set up (and remember) a bunch
| of alternative utilities that are no better, or at least no less
| laborious, than a Web search.
|
| "I've combined XMonad and Chrome to get little floating web apps
| all over my desktop"
|
| WTF, that is the last thing I'd want. The world (even the Mac
| world) has finally moved away from the asinine floating-window
| fad.
| Zababa wrote:
| The correlary to that is that unless you go out of your way to
| create a "cool" desktop for yourself, the desktop you use will
| change every few years, usually breaking your habits and becoming
| less and less usable. For example, I've been using Pop!_OS for a
| while. It has the terrible GNOME flaw that you can't see
| thumbnails in the filepicker, you can only see a preview of the
| image you currently select. Or you could, a few months ago. Ever
| since a relatively recent update, I can't even see the preview
| anymore. They made something that was bad for years even worse.
| Same thing with Windows. I can't find my ways in the new options
| or settings or whatever that is.
|
| I'm trying to slowly move towards using software. I'm still
| relatively young, but I don't want to spend my whole life
| adjusting my habits to new random changes.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| The best desktop is the one I can customize however I want, and
| then run anywhere, without jumping through hoops. If I can untar
| some config files in my home dir and install a couple binaries,
| and have my desktop just appear the way I want it, that is the
| best desktop. It's not only portable and easier to set up, it's
| more likely to be both backwards and forwards compatible.
|
| If, on the other hand, a given desktop depends on some bizarro
| set of 20 different services, interfaces, libraries and apps
| which can only work in one way on one platform, and it's near-
| impossible to move the settings somewhere else, and most apps
| can't even use it, that desktop sucks.
|
| I don't want a cool desktop, I want a desktop that doesn't suck.
| zwieback wrote:
| I've been using PCs since before GUIs so some of my habits are
| probably too crusty at this point. However, I don't really mind
| so much how the graphical shell changes, the command shell in
| Windows 11 feels like the MS-DOS of my youth, the Linux shell
| feels like the old HP-UX or Xenix shells from my youth so I can
| get all the basics done quickly.
|
| Having said that, I do think that there's mostly improvement in
| our GUIs as well, bad ideas that crop up now and then usually
| disappear quickly.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| Haaa, the sweet comfort of having everything set up and humming.
| The sweet Debian stable way of nothing ever changing.
|
| It may not last forever, as kids, or new jobs or new hobbies come
| to disrupt the harmony, so enjoy your sweet time.
| swayvil wrote:
| Why would it change?
|
| The only reason I can see is if they outlaw general computing
| (including linux) and we're all stuck running Patriot Windows
| 3000.
|
| And even then it's gonna be underground.
| Etheryte wrote:
| The author makes a common statistical error in interpreting the
| Lindy effect. The Lindy effect proposes, simplified, that the
| longer something has been around, the longer it will probably
| stay around still. The author then makes a quick jump and posits
| that the opposite is also true, which it is not. Just because
| something has been around for a short time does not mean that its
| expected lifespan is somehow short. In other words, A implies B
| does not mean B implies A as well. All things that have been
| around for a long time had at one point only been around for a
| short time.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| That's not right. The Lindy argument holds in that case as
| well, it's just a different version of the doomsday argument.
|
| The basis for this kind of reasoning is essentially that, if
| you can assume that you are an 'average user' (and you don't
| have reason to believe you're especially late or early), the
| chance that your prediction about the longevity of the project
| is correct is most likely to be true if you 1/3 - 3x[1] the
| lifespan of the project currently.
|
| That is because if say, you predicted VsCode existed a hundred
| times longer than it currently did, that prediction is only
| true if you are indeed among the first 1%. 99% of VsCode users
| making that prediction will be wrong.
|
| [1]https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2VfpAbtj-
| yOq5gHhYIdgrAIdBuw=...
| jackpirate wrote:
| I believe you are incorrect. According to wikipedia:
|
| > The Lindy effect is a theorized phenomenon by which the
| future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a
| technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age.
|
| This implies that things that have been around for a short
| period of time do in fact have a short expected lifespan.
| You're correct that "A implies B does not mean B implies A as
| well", but that assumption is not needed.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| I think the Lindy effect can work in reverse. Like if you had a
| collection 1000 things that are all just invented, then the
| likelihood would be only a small percentage of them will be
| around and in use in 50 years. Compared with a collection of
| 1000 things that have all be in use for 100 years, the
| percentage of them that will be around in 50 years will be much
| greater.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, it seems that this 'effect' is simply extrapolating from
| randomness and averages.
|
| Take any random thing and random time (with zero knowledge of
| actual lifespan), and on average, you are in the middle of
| it's lifespan. Therefore, if Thing-A has existed for 28
| years, it is likely to last for another 28, if Thing-B has
| existed for 6 years, it's likely to exist for another 6, and
| so on.
|
| It may be somewhat informative for comparisons but not in
| real life.
|
| You are hiking away from a disaster with all your possessions
| and life's savings in your backpack, and are now at a muddy
| riverbank needing to cross. You ask me how deep the river is
| and I tell you the average depth is 6 inches. That sounds
| great, but I have most definitely NOT told you that you'll be
| able to get across without finding a deep spot and having to
| drop your backpack to survive.
|
| Using this effect to make judgements about product lifetime
| is similarly uninformative. It is a hint leading to only a
| possible inference, not data leading to a valid prediction.
| syntheweave wrote:
| With respect to software objects, the most likely reasons
| for their life to end are:
|
| 1. Not sufficiently useful relative to involved costs for
| most applications(data formats, configuration maintenance,
| etc.)
|
| 2. Disrupted by something that is "10x better" for the
| purpose(e.g. using a spreadsheet instead of a text editor
| for 2D, cell-oriented data)
|
| 3. Outside forces invading the ecosystem and obsoleting
| dependencies(new OS, hardware, etc.)
|
| So what the Lindy effect describes in long-lived software
| is just the software that is relatively cheap to keep
| around, is hard to greatly surpass and resists invasion -
| which describes a lot of "worse-is-better" software, where
| the UX kinda sucks, and it's actually a bit too
| unstructured for any particular application, but not enough
| of these things that anyone cares to address it in the
| relevant professional scenarios where it comes up: instead
| the user just girds themselves to fight it into submission
| because they can spend six hours fighting it and one week
| debugging it or two weeks making a Right Thing that is much
| less compatible.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It's not reversible, inasmuch as your first statement is
| correct, but cannot identify _the things_ that will be
| around.
| jinwoo68 wrote:
| A "logical" error rather than a statistical one :)
| feral wrote:
| Disagree: even in your formulation, no 'quick jump' is needed.
|
| Your statement A:"The longer something has been around, the
| longer it will be around" is not the opposite of B:"the shorter
| something has been around, the shorter it will be around".
|
| Rather they mean the same thing. 'longer' and 'shorter' here
| are just English language ways of referring to the same time t
| that an object has been around.
|
| If someone tells you "the longer a distance is, the more time
| it takes to walk it", that is exactly the same as "the shorter
| a distance is, the less time it takes to walk it"; there's no
| logical leap there.
|
| I could conceive a rule that says "archeological artefacts are
| likely to be around for a long time" and it'd be a mistake to
| conclude that this means that non-archelogical artefacts will
| only be around for a short time.
|
| But that doesn't seem to be how the Lindy effect is formulated,
| either on Wikipedia or on your post, so there doesn't seem to
| be an error in applying it to new things.
| jgtrosh wrote:
| The logical contrapositive to A is A' "if something dies off
| soon, there's a good chance it was a recent fad". A makes
| sense, and A' makes equal sense, but B is claiming stuff
| about new tools for which we have no way of guessing the
| future.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The real meaning of the Lindy effect is: the
| more something has been continued to be around due to be
| continuously and repeatedly selected from a pool of similar
| other somethings, the longer it will likely continue to be
| so.
|
| Because this is a statistical effect (longer lived things are
| drawn from a pool of things, some of which are not long
| lived), you cannot invert it trivially.
|
| If there is no selection process, then the Lindy effect is
| either meaningless, or decomposes to an assertion that the
| current thing is the only way to do something.
| feral wrote:
| Ok, so let's say discuss your formulation instead:
|
| Why can't we 'invert' it, just because it's statistical
| effect? Yes, in your formulation, some of the new things in
| the pool will go on to live a long time, while others will
| be selected out.
|
| But so what? We are talking about the _expected_ lifetime
| of an item in the pool, conditioned only on it 's age.
| There's no fundamental problem making a statement that this
| expected lifetime is short for new things, even if some
| fraction of those new things will last a long time, right?
|
| After all, we don't _know_ any one individual item that 's
| been around a long time will last a lot longer. We only
| know we _expect_ it to. Because even long lived items have
| finite lifetime, hence they 'll eventually die (and when
| they do it'll be really surprising, because they've been
| around so long; but it will happen eventually.)
|
| And so the statement is always talking about _expected
| lifetime_ , whether for items that have already lasted a
| long or short time.
|
| (Hence I still don't think there's really any logical
| 'inversion' here.)
| killjoywashere wrote:
| If you sampled from a pool of now defunct software
| projects, or all software projects that were made in some
| year, you could make some estimate of the survival
| probability of software projects that are current. But if
| you can't draw an Kaplan-Meier curve, it's unclear to me
| how you would assert there exists a survival function
| that could be inverted.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > There's no fundamental problem making a statement that
| this expected lifetime is short for new things, even if
| some fraction of those new things will last a long time,
| right?
|
| Everything that's new in the pool might be better than
| everything that's old.
|
| All you can say about the old stuff is that it was better
| (by some metric(s)) than anything it had to compete with
| so far.
|
| But you can't say anything about the new stuff. Sure,
| statistically it is likely that it will some blend of
| bad, middling and good, but you don't actually know the
| mix, or which term describes which items, until after the
| selection process (i.e. time) has taken place.
| kilobit wrote:
| Exactly. Suppose a piece of software remains around for
| another year with probability p, and for the sake of this
| example, that p is constant.
|
| Then if the software has been around for one year, the
| expected value of p is 50%. But if the software has been
| around for ten years, the expected value of p jumps to
| 0.5^(1/10) [?] 93.3%.
|
| In this way, if a piece of software has been around for
| longer, then it has a greater chance of sticking around. In
| fact, the expected number of years it has left is indeed
| equal to the number of years it has already been around, as
| stated in the article.
|
| In practice this mechanism is more complicated, as all
| software is influenced by a changing environment, but this
| same idea is still at the core.
| blowski wrote:
| I'd never heard of the Lindy effect!
|
| By the author's logic, COBOL programs still in use today will
| long outlive Linux. That could even be true.
| zwieback wrote:
| Very true but I think what's also implied in the article is
| that new tools (VS Code) that look very different from old
| tools (vi/emacs) will probably not last. So, if A is very old
| and B is very different from A then B is less likely to
| succeed.
|
| I don't believe that, btw, just guessing at the mindset of the
| author.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Even that's a fairly bad take.
|
| Visual Studio Code is based on a much older line (visual
| studio) which dates back to 1997.
|
| It's not nearly so new as it may seem, although I certainly
| appreciate the refresh from the older, more feature-filled
| (and feature slowed) visual studio proper.
|
| Not to mention - most of the "new stuff" in visual studio
| code is really just a nice UI layer that's built using mature
| and _incredibly_ battle tested tooling - HTML /CSS/JS.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Is VS Code actually based on Visual Studio? I thought it
| was purely a marketing-based connection like
| Java/Javascript.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Depends on how you define "based on", I suppose.
|
| It comes from the same parent company, with a lot of
| interest in solving many of the same challenges. The UI
| paradigms are obviously related, and if you've ever done
| any real VS project debugging, you'll find the structure
| of those configuration files very (very) similar to how
| tasks work in VSCode.
|
| I don't believe the VSCode codebase ever actually pulled
| anything from the original visual studio, but the roots
| of the application clearly come from the same place.
| pvg wrote:
| It's not meaningfully based on VS proper beside the name.
| The main difference is it lives in a very different
| ecological niche. Microsoft wouldn't have taken up its
| development if it didn't.
| zwieback wrote:
| Upvoted but disagree. VS Code and VS have totally different
| lineages and probably not much shared code under the hood.
| I've used VS for many years (best IDE bar none, in my
| opinion) and when I started playing with VS Code I couldn't
| help but think they should have chosen a different name.
|
| I appreciate what VSCode is achieving, though, I can run on
| my Linux host and remote into my microcontroller bare-bones
| OS for debugging and everything works nicely together but
| it ain't no Visual Studio.
| szundi wrote:
| These statements of "longer" and "shorter" actually refers to
| probabilities. So it makes sense to state when something is not
| "longer", then it is "shorter". So I disagree, OP's statements
| about the Lindy effect makes sense.
|
| Also someone commented about COBOL. Of course no one thinks
| COBOL "is around", what also means statistics about usage.
| COBOL is declining and almost no one uses it anymore, so it is
| safe to say "it is almost not around".
| tarboreus wrote:
| There are 220 billion lines of COBAL in production. Much of
| the most essential banking infrastructure in the world runs
| on COBAL, and is likely to indefinitely.
|
| https://www.bmc.com/blogs/cobol-
| trends/#:~:text=According%20....
|
| The only way we stop using COBAL in production this century
| is to have some kind of apocalypse, or maybe an apotheosis.
| yarg wrote:
| The Lindy effect states that the expected lifetime of a thing
| is proportional to its current age.
|
| That includes the expectation that something young will be (on
| average) half way through its lifespan.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Can it also apply to the time until an event which hasn't yet
| happened? Ie. a system you have never observed crashing
| before, has been running for T hours. So being on average
| half way through its lifespan, will probably run another T
| hours without incident.
| yarg wrote:
| Not quite.
|
| It works based upon the 100% certainty that whatever you
| are, at some point you will cease to be.
|
| On average, regardless of what you are, you are in the
| middle of your life or existence (some very high variance
| here).
|
| In order to generalise it to non-certain events, such as a
| program crash, you'd need to remove the certainty
| assumption and rejig the consequent statistics - it might
| be doable, but you wouldn't end up with something quite so
| clean and simple.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a running annoyance of Windows that they are always making
| small changes to the UI that don't really come across as an
| improvement or a deterioration but that force you to relearn
| things.
|
| It really drove me crazy when I went from being a linux partisan
| for being responsible for quite a few different Windows machines
| and on a given day I could be working with anything from Win 98
| to Win ME to Win NT to various editions of Win 2000 and XP and if
| you had to find something in the UI it would be slightly
| different in all of those which was a cognitive load. Contrast to
| to Linux where I did it all on the command line and it stayed the
| same in that time frame.
| Casteil wrote:
| Windows 11 had me feeling this quite a bit, particularly with
| settings and volume/network management.
|
| They attempted to make the new Settings panel the 'HQ' for
| everything, but in the process really buried some things (for
| technical people) under numerous additional clicks/sub-menus,
| if it's even there at all anymore. I think they've been
| addressing the concerns with new updates, but I still find
| myself floundering sometimes.
| hbn wrote:
| There's a bunch of UI/UX regressions in Windows 11. Examples
| off the top of my head:
|
| - After waking my computer from sleep, my last active window
| is not active any more. In fact, no window is active. I have
| to hit alt+tab to grab focus of the window again, or click
| the window (this probably wasn't caught because most people
| use their mouse for everything)
|
| - There's new animations for the basic native Windows menus,
| including the Win+X menu I use for sleeping my computer,
| shutting down, etc. When you navigate to a sub-menu with the
| arrow keys, you have to wait for the animation of the sub-
| menu sliding out before you can interact with it. I've had to
| slow down my muscle memory to sleep my computer because
| otherwise I'll hit random other menu items cause the child
| menu didn't slide out fast enough to keep up with my inputs.
|
| - I usually snap windows around with the Win+arrow keys
| shortcuts, but they added a new snap layout where sometimes
| when I do Win+up it brings the window to the top half of the
| screen. But that's also how you maximize a window, so I don't
| know how it decides which one it will do. In my experience it
| seems to be related to your key input speed.
|
| - Sometimes I'll crop and resize images in Paint. They redid
| a bunch of the UI in Windows 11, and now when I use the
| resize menu, I can't hit enter to confirm the size I input.
| Again, seemingly this UI was only tested by people who use
| the mouse for everything.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Surprisingly I find linux quite guilty of the neverending gui
| papercut too (it's a bazaar after all).
|
| Sadly Microsoft is kinda forced to follow the trends,
| everything moves in all direction (web, phones).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The first thing I do with a Linux install is uninstall X
| windows.
|
| I remember being excited when I saw the first beta test of
| KDE but it seemed each version got a little bit worse after
| that and that's been the trajectory of the Linux desktop
| since 1995 or so.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| How do you surf the web or use GUI programs?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I don't. I surf the web and use GUI programs on Windows
| or Mac OS. I have a Linux server that runs Jellyfin and
| my IoT devices.
|
| awk, grep, tail, nginx and all that kind of stuff is
| fine.
|
| (I tried taking the 1050 card from my media server I used
| for AI training long ago and put it in another cheap
| Linux box and put SteamOS on it. They claim it can run
| Windows games but it won't run anything out of my steam
| account including the games that the proton database
| claims works. That's the kind of brokenness as the
| expected condition that is endemic to the Linux GUI)
|
| If I found a GUI app worked on Linux I'd be so surprised
| I'd have to file a feature report with their feature
| tracker.
| [deleted]
| deadbunny wrote:
| No offense intended but it sounds like you don't know
| what you're doing.
|
| Xorg has worked for decades, a multitude of window
| managers and desktop environments have been perfectly
| usable for decades, and a couple of million people (going
| by Steam HW survey results) seem to be able to run games
| via proton perfectly fine.
| medeshago wrote:
| Do you realize that even if the marketshare for desktop
| linux is minimal, let's assume 0.5%, those are still
| millions of computers working using what you claim
| doesn't work under any condition?
| agumonkey wrote:
| I don't mind X, but I push i3 or xfce and nothing more. I
| tried bare console linux but there were too many keyboard
| mapping fu and a few web browsing facility I didn't bother
| to lose.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > Sadly Microsoft is kinda forced to follow the trends,
| everything moves in all direction (web, phones).
|
| Former Microsoftie here. While they are following trends, the
| actual impetus behind all the little changes you see all the
| time is that managers and ICs are incentivized to make
| "impactful" changes if they want good performance reviews. UI
| changes are a pretty easy way to have "impact". You can say
| something in your review like, "and X million users used the
| new taskbar that's in the middle of the screen".
| indrora wrote:
| This fucking reeks of Pressure to Publish in academia.
| enriquto wrote:
| Except that publishing stupid papers does not harm
| millions of users, but yes.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| I am reminded of a study where the hue of lights in a factory
| was changed, and the workers were reported happier and more
| productive. Then they changed it again (actually, to the
| original hue), and the workers reported being happier still and
| more productive!
|
| So what lighting hue was best? Irrelevant, the important thing
| was that workers perceived that management was paying attention
| to their wellbeing.
|
| I think something similar is happening in Windows (and Mac!)
| desktops, where they change small things "for productivity",
| and the majority of people will think it's an improvement, just
| because it's different.
|
| Bt a small subset of us opinionated people will be upset that
| our carefully tuned habits are disrupted.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| It's possible to recognize that mechanism and not mind being
| affected by it. There is nothing wrong with experiencing joy
| based on 'just' cosmetic changes. Indeed it's a direct effect
| of what's called 'novelty-seeking' behavior, a character
| trait associated with lots of positive things for the person
| and society, and only a few drug habits and untimely deaths
| in non-FAA-approved aircraft.
|
| Many of the possibly meaningless desktop changes are also
| meaningless in the sense that they won't affect any workflow,
| and are therefore benign.
| hbn wrote:
| > they change small things "for productivity", and the
| majority of people will think it's an improvement
|
| I feel like I've never talked to a person, techie or not, who
| didn't agree it was incredibly annoying to have UIs that
| they're used to change out under their feet.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I usually don't mind at all, it's a non-issue. Losing
| features suck, but a new UI, especially for tools that were
| legitimately dated, is something I like.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| How would you define "legitimately dated"?
|
| I'd say something like the "ribbon toolbar" upgrade of MS
| Office, which I think improved accessibility of
| functions, is one of the only examples I can think of.
| But then I'm not sure if that was just a case of getting
| used to the new layout.
|
| Windows "Settings" versus the Control Panel is a counter
| example. It was a downgrade, it still sucks now, years
| later, but the Control Panel could be argued as 'dated'
| by some definitions.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I'm not saying every UI update will be good, just that in
| a huge amount of cases, updates that actually do improve
| the UI will be placed in the same bucket as bad updates,
| just because "muh me no like change".
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| "dated" is not the issue, rather does it continue to be
| fit for purpose?
| Zababa wrote:
| > I am reminded of a study where the hue of lights in a
| factory was changed, and the workers were reported happier
| and more productive. Then they changed it again (actually, to
| the original hue), and the workers reported being happier
| still and more productive!
|
| > So what lighting hue was best? Irrelevant, the important
| thing was that workers perceived that management was paying
| attention to their wellbeing.
|
| I doubt it would work if they changed the place of tools, the
| layout of the factory, stuff like that.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| The trick on windows is pressing win+r, opening the run dialog.
| One keycombo works in all windows versions. It takes a real
| command or exe, not some simplified shell abomination. After
| learning a few .msc filenames, you can quickly get around the
| old advanced config screens. Most common tools havent changed
| their names since win95, e.g cmd winword excel calc. In fact, I
| paste and recut one liners in it to strip them from their
| formatting.
|
| Compare that with the start menu. I type something, and the
| chosen program changes every time. I type notepad++, it shows
| the correct program until I type the d, then decides I really
| want to open edge and search notepad++ on bing. Or it launches
| an uninstaller instead of the actual program.
|
| Now one of these days ms is going to optimize the win+r
| experience, so have fun while it lasts.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| haha, I did a brief presentation talking about this exact
| keyboard shortcut (among others) and why it was so useful for
| Windows admins back in my college or high school computer
| club. The feedback I got was the presentation was dry, but
| useful, but that's keyboard shortcuts for you... :D
| jrm4 wrote:
| Not enough attention is paid to the (perhaps now cargo-culting)
| cause of this mess, which is that we still have _companies_ that
| do something like "selling operating systems." This is a stupid
| idea that should have died a long time ago.
| 13415 wrote:
| I don't know, in the consumer market only Microsoft still sells
| an operating system but it's dirt cheap, you can get Windows
| licenses for a few bucks. The problem is perhaps rather that
| they don't sell operating systems and instead of building a
| good OS product sell their users' data or use the OS to lock
| costumers into their platform and hardware. There does not seem
| to be a competitive OS market at all (and probably there never
| was a healthy one to speak of).
| outworlder wrote:
| Lindy effect predicts that Lisp will be running on our
| civilization's future Dyson sphere.
| dangus wrote:
| Long-lived, stable tools are great things. However, it's also not
| great to be stuck in your ways and being unwilling to adapt.
|
| > The problem with most notetaking apps is editing text outside
| Vim breaks my brain.
|
| I see this as an unwillingness to learn. I felt like the tone of
| the article was of the sort where I was just there to be told
| that I'm inferior for using a mouse.
|
| Microsoft Word is actually an older program than vim (not older
| than vi), so _obviously_ the author should switch to Word to take
| notes instead of vim.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Also - as much as the Vim/Emacs folks love to bash on the
| mouse... it turns out a pointer is actually an incredibly good
| tool for doing most of the things you might want to do with one
| - like select some text, or change cursor position, or quickly
| and accurately select an item from a list of similar items.
|
| Having grown up with a mouse playing fps/rts games, I don't
| really get the hate. A mouse is an excellent tool.
| mrob wrote:
| I agree. But on the other hand, I expect you're using a good
| mouse, configured exactly to your preferences, on your
| favorite mousing surface, and you have opinions about all
| these things. Somebody using whatever mouse was cheapest
| directly on their desk is unlikely to become competitive with
| an expert keyboard user, who can get away with a cheap rubber
| dome keyboard.
| mustermannBB wrote:
| Agreed. I never understood this almost unnatural hate towards
| the mouse by some vim users.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Is "hatred" their language or yours?
|
| How would you distinguish an awareness of tool strengths,
| _and a recognition that for the specific use in question,
| keyboard is generally faster / easier / more reproducible_?
|
| Because really, that doesn't sound like hate to me. It
| sounds like proficiency.
|
| Or is there perhaps a hatered toward proficiency?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| On text selection and movement:
|
| - Repositioning the cursor _by incrementally searching for
| the word you want to move to_ is more accurate, _quite_ fast
| (3-4 letters is virtually always sufficient to find the word
| in question), _keeps you in the text / document "head"_, and
| leaves your hands on the keyboard.
|
| - Yank (y) + movement (w for word, ) for sentence, } for
| paragraph, 'yi<modifier>' for copy within marks (quotes,
| braces, angle-brackets, parenthesis, etc.) is also amazingly
| fast.
|
| - Visual mode can be used to select specific blocks of text
| where necessary.
|
| - If I want to select specific fields from a file, I'll
| usually either use tools for that purpose (cut, sed, awk), or
| read in the entire file and edit it down from within vim. The
| tools-based approach means I can reproduce the task readily
| if I need to do it repeatedly.
|
| And finally, where I'm dumping text from some GUI app to vim
| ... it's still usually easier, faster, less error-prone, and
| more reproducible to grab the entire screenful of text
| _without_ specifically selecting what I want (e.g., C-A or
| Cmd-A (Mac)), and then trim to size within vim. Again, vim 's
| tools permit working _with text as text_ rather than _with
| text as a GUI presentation_.
|
| I'm not saying I _never_ use the mouse for text selection,
| but it is _far_ less common than you might think, and much
| more cumbersome.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Cool! But that doesn't at all touch on my point. I'm not
| arguing you can't use vim keybinds, I'm saying the mouse is
| good at what it does.
|
| _You_ might struggle to use a mouse (lots of folks do) but
| for those of us that grew up using it as a much more
| accurate pointing tool... I 'd wager none of the things
| you've listed present much of a challenge or thought.
|
| Like this:
|
| >it's still usually easier, faster, less error-prone, and
| more reproducible to grab the entire screenful of text
| without specifically selecting what I want (e.g., C-A or
| Cmd-A (Mac)), and then trim to size within vim.
|
| That's funny - I found it incredibly quick and easy to
| simply select that portion of your comment with my mouse. I
| didn't have to trim, or take extra, or think about it. I
| just selected the content I wanted with the mouse in about
| a quarter of a second.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 1. I've been using computer mice for something north of
| 30 years. I'm reasonably proficient. I've used vi/vim for
| roughly as long.[1]
|
| 2. _Text-based selection and interaction work at the
| context of text._ It 's really hard to express how
| powerful this is if you've not internalised it.
|
| 3. On many GUI-based devices, the mouse is no longer the
| mouse, but the finger. This raises a whole host of
| additional issues:
|
| - You're now covering up what it is you want to select.
|
| - Your selection is no longer based on a single pixel
| (the apex of the pointer itself) but a _region_.
|
| - There's the inherent ambiguity between _selection_ and
| _movement_. That is, when, where I 'm touching the
| screen, do I intend to _scroll the display_ and when do I
| intend to _select or interact with elements on it_? In
| over a decade 's use of touch devices I've yet to see
| either hardware or software which isn't subject to this
| failure, constantly.
|
| - Hardware keyboards are highly effective for text input.
| (I'm writing this on an Android device with an external
| keyboard. Touch keyboards ... suck and blow, as the
| saying goes.)
|
| You might struggle to use vim (lots of folks do), but for
| those of us that grew up using it as a much more accurate
| text-manipulation tool ... I'd wager none of the things
| you've listed present much of a challenge or thought.
|
| The point of vim (or Emacs) is that those keystrokes
| _simply become internalised_. I don 't _think_ through
| actions, _they simply happen_.
|
| In a GUI, I'm constantly fighting the interface.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. Along with a whole host of other editors, virtually
| none of which are currently extant or readily available:
| Wordstar, Mac Edit, MacWrite, DOS Edit, WordPerfect,
| AmiPro, the TSO/ISPF editor, VAX EDT and EVE, emacs,
| multiple generations of MS Word, Notepad, MS Write, the
| whole StarOffice / OpenOffice / NeoOffice line, etc.
| Vi/vim's pretty much always present, always works, and
| has evolved _incrementally_ over the 30+ years I 've used
| it such that I'm never faced with the prospect of
| discarding accumulated technical-knowledge capital.
|
| Yes, the first few weeks were ugly. Steep learning curve.
| High payoff function.
| dangus wrote:
| It's as easy as memorizing a bunch of commands and key
| chords!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Are you commenting on the Emacs alternative?
|
| In which case I'd agree, if you've internalised _that_
| mechanism.
| Animats wrote:
| And get off my lawn!
|
| Counterexamples - technologies that lasted a long time, then hit
| a hard dead end.
|
| - NTSC / PAL video.
|
| - Audio on magnetic tape
|
| - Video on magnetic tape
|
| - Manual transmissions in cars
|
| - Daily newspapers
|
| - Mimeograph machines
|
| - Asbestos
| swayvil wrote:
| I like my manual ford f150 1995. Might retire it for a cheap
| minimal electric someday.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| You won't find a manual transmission in any electric car, for
| better or worse. At best they would make some fake lever in
| the console that just tells the ECU 'hrm it looks like the
| driver wants more torque right now, and maybe play some
| engine rev noises on the stereo'.
| swayvil wrote:
| Yes. I do not expect a manual transmission electric. That
| would be silly.
| dento wrote:
| > - Manual transmissions in cars
|
| Only in US, in EU about 80% of new cars have manual
| transmission.
| bsder wrote:
| This was driven by the cost of petrol rather than
| convenience.
|
| An automatic transmission is a non-trivial amount of weight--
| especially on the small cars present in the EU--and affects
| gas mileage tremendously.
|
| Driving a manual in heavy stop and go traffic, however, sucks
| rocks whether you are in LA or Palermo. You are continuously
| playing the "rolling game" in order to minimize stress on
| your clutch to avoid burning it up.
|
| I presume these same forces will be the ones that cause the
| EU to switch to electric cars first.
| tobylane wrote:
| Can't comment on weight, but on efficiency, automatics have
| better mpg than manual. Are clutch burns weight related?
| I've not heard of them coming from urban use, only track
| days. There was a small resistance to young people learning
| automatic as it would be a limit on their licence but that
| seems to have gone away in the last decade.
| outworlder wrote:
| > An automatic transmission is a non-trivial amount of
| weight--especially on the small cars present in the EU--and
| affects gas mileage tremendously.
|
| This is a case of 'citation needed'. It's not like manual
| gearboxes are weightless. Then there the likes of CVT.
|
| What do they add is to manufacturing costs. A simple manual
| transmission is, well, simple, and has looser tolerances
| (the driver compensates). Automatic transmissions require
| more exotic materials - in the past we had to use whale
| oil, which drove their costs to unsustainable prices in
| non-US markets.
| midasuni wrote:
| In the U.K. in the 00s and before automatic cars were really
| rare. Surprisingly though the last 10 years they've increased
| in popularity and have overtaken manuals for new
| registrations
|
| Not aware of any eu stats
|
| https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/analysis-are-
| man...
| midasuni wrote:
| I've used 4 of those in the last month, including two of them
| today
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Those are, respectively, transmission standards (1), storage
| media (2, 3, 4, 5), a power transmission mechanism (3), a data
| replication mechanism (6), and a material with various
| applications (7).
|
| Of the set the two that come closest to being _interfaces_ are
| 4 & 5, the daily newspaper and manual gearbox with its shift
| lever. In both cases, the actual _interface_ component ---
| articles written by reporters and published by a specific
| organisation, and a rod through which a vehicle 's drive mode
| is selected, are the parts _least_ changed.
|
| Even the mimeograph's _function_ still remains, though in most
| cases it 's either through a smartphone or tablet (which
| reproduces text ina mobile manner which can be shared with
| others) or a printer-copier of some sort, usually functioning
| on either a xerographic or wet-ink jet process. In the latter
| case, the output (print on paper) remains.
|
| In the cases of video formats, audio and video storage media,
| and structural materials, the _components_ of the end result
| (video streaming, on-demand audio and video playback, and
| various structural members and fabrics with specific
| properties) have changed, but their fundamental _functions_ and
| _perceived endpoints_ are ... largely ... what they were
| previously. Enough so that someone from an age in which the
| technologies you mention were in widespread use would recognise
| the current replacements.
|
| Interfaces _do_ tend to be exceedingly durable. In large part
| because they address not just _mechanism_ , but _human
| interactions_. The former may change rapidly, the latter not so
| much.
| ghusto wrote:
| Aaaargh, I can not help myself!
|
| * NTSC / PAL video, and audio / video tapes
|
| Better isn't always better. This is a philosophical point, so
| I'll just give the gist: I believe that advancing something,
| doesn't necessarily make things for the user better. For
| example, Netflix is by technical measure "better" than going
| all the way to a video shop with your friend, finding out they
| don't have what you really wanted, spending ages deciding on
| what to watch, going all the way back home, and sitting through
| the film in one sitting. Which experience did you prefer
| though, and more importantly, which one was better for you as a
| person?
|
| * Manual transmissions in cars
|
| What? I know in the U.S.A. most people drive automatic cars,
| but at least in Europe this isn't so. It's not because they're
| not available, it's just that nobody wants to drive them.
| Personally I find them boring and toyish, but I can't speak for
| the reasoning of others.
|
| * Daily newspapers
|
| There was _a lot_ wrong with newspapers back in the day. One
| huge thing they had going for them though (which nobody
| realised was even in question at the time) was that they were
| written by professional journalists, and they had standards.
| Now my "news" is given to me by half literate emotional
| reactionists.
| majewsky wrote:
| Re examples 1 and 3: Your judgment does not change the fact
| that those are, as GP put it, "technologies that lasted a
| long time, then hit a hard dead end".
| Findecanor wrote:
| News media hasn't deteriorated the same way everywhere.
|
| I live in Europe and still get most of my daily news from the
| morning paper - a paper with professional journalists and
| correspondents with standards. The articles are also
| available on their (paywalled) web site, but I prefer
| traditional paper.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| That's what I like about macos - no drastic changes in the 10+
| years that I've been using it. They've added some stuff - some of
| it I've absorbed into my workflow, some of it I haven't and it
| stays out of my way.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| If this is a real opinion - I don't think you're doing very
| much with macOS.
|
| Hell - just the KEXT changes break about 20 different things in
| my workflow.
|
| honestly, as someone who uses a mix of all three major OSes
| (Windows/Linux/Mac), Mac has been the least pleasant dealing
| with upgrades - they make as many breaking changes as linux,
| and they have dogshite docs.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| My machine only has kexts for Parallels (had? they switched
| to Virtualization Framework a while ago), and never had any
| issues as long as I was keeping Parallels up to date.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| markstos wrote:
| Wayland is viable. Time to try Sway!
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I've been using Sway, very happy - just prepare to do a fair
| bit of fiddling :)
|
| A quick tip, imitate this however you see fit -- setting
| `XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP`: $ cat
| ~/.config/environment.d/envvars.conf
| XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP="${XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP:-sway}"
|
| ... so that `xdg-desktop-portal-wlr` can share your screen by
| knowing the environment you're in
|
| For whatever reason this isn't set by Sway. This will only set
| it if another DE hasn't already
| Arnavion wrote:
| >~/.config/environment.d/envvars.conf
|
| Set it by exec'ing from your sway config instead. Otherwise
| every session under your user will think it's running in
| sway, even if it isn't.
|
| How to do that is explained in the xdpw wiki.
|
| >For whatever reason this isn't set by Sway.
|
| It's because sway generally doesn't do any kind of
| integration with anything not related to Wayland, which in
| this case is systemd and dbus. It gives you the tools to do
| it yourself.
|
| Distros that provide pre-configured packages of sway should
| ship such a config by default. Eg OpenSUSE has https://github
| .com/openSUSE/openSUSEway/blob/ee8fe750a843165... + https://g
| ithub.com/openSUSE/openSUSEway/blob/ee8fe750a843165...
| bravetraveler wrote:
| That's fair (RE: setting/sessions). The method I proposed
| relies on consistency everywhere else (defining that to
| _something_ ), and assumes Sway if not :P
|
| It looks like this (on Fedora) is generally dealt with by
| the ' _sway-systemd_ ' package.
|
| That provides a drop-in config ( _/
| etc/sway/config.d/10-systemd-session.conf_) that runs a
| script and prepares the environment for you (including this
| variable) $ dnf whatprovides
| /etc/sway/config.d/10-systemd-session.conf [...]
| sway-systemd-0.2.2-1.fc36.noarch : Systemd integration for
| Sway session Repo : @System Matched
| from: Filename : /etc/sway/config.d/10-systemd-
| session.conf
|
| It's rather similar to the openSUSE approach you shared,
| but seemingly a little more robust:
| https://github.com/alebastr/sway-
| systemd/blob/main/src/sessi...
|
| As long as you do this in your Sway config, it should be
| fine: include /etc/sway/config.d/*
|
| I forgot about that adventure until now -- with something
| like this, you don't need either 'manual declaration'
| approach really
|
| I initially missed it moving to Sway because I literally
| copied my i3 config and only changed it slightly
| deadbunny wrote:
| I was so close to switching from X/i3 to wayland/sway but I
| couldn't get drag and drop from Firefox to mpv to work. Maybe
| next reinstall.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| On linux, if you want a calculator, just type python.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And here I go again, recommending Qalculator and its CLI friend
| qalc.
|
| Python is a lousy calculator, unless you want to program it.
| throwaway742 wrote:
| >>> 1/3
|
| 0
| Macha wrote:
| $ python Python 3.10.5 (main, Jun 6 2022, 18:49:26)
| [GCC 12.1.0] on linux Type "help", "copyright",
| "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> 1/3
| 0.3333333333333333
|
| If you're going to keep using EOL versions, that's on you.
| jjice wrote:
| Hmmm, I got
|
| >>> 1/3 0.3333333333333333
|
| What version? $ python3 --version
| Python 3.9.9
|
| I'd expect your result with `1//3`.
| yellowapple wrote:
| I install Julia on my machines for this reason.
| Evidlo wrote:
| Octave is also nice as a calculator
| markstos wrote:
| I use Speedcrunch. Launches instantly, so not much time savings
| to use a CLI tool instead.
| hax0rbana wrote:
| gcide-dict doesn't exist in Debian (anymore?)
| hax0rbana wrote:
| The author's `spell` script doesn't work either. No suggestions
| appear, no definitions, and even entering "0" to get the
| original text does not copy the word to the clipboard despite
| the script claiming that is does. Tested on Debian 11.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-06-16 23:00 UTC)