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Linux system manufacturer System76 introduced a beautiful looking Linux distribution called Pop!_OS. But is Pop OS worth an install? Read the Pop OS review and find out yourself.
More at : https://itsfoss.com/pop-os-linux-review/
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Hands on With System76’s Beautiful Linux Distro Pop!_OS
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
The clothes have no emperor.
-- C. A. R. Hoare, commenting on ADA.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tibman on Tuesday January 16 2018, @12:33AM (21 children)
KDE 4 killed KDE for a long time. I still have doubts it has reached the usability of KDE 3.5.9, hah. On the bright side it drove a lot of people to XFCE and other minimal desktops/shells/WMs. Enlightenment looks like it's still a thing too.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday January 16 2018, @01:11AM (1 child)
Except that XFCE is now more bloated than the current KDE. It uses more memory, and still looks sort of duct taped together, and is starting to suffer from haphazard integration of packages. They aren't even chasing the light-weight image any more.
.
On the other hand.....
Some of the spinoffs fo XFCE, such as Manjaro's LXDE, and some LXQts are far far lighter and much more elegant.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:01PM
First of all, LXDE is not a spinoff from XFCE.
Second, i wonder how much of the observed bloat is inherited from Gnome-derived plumbing. Plumbing that XFCE has to adopt as they do not have the manpower to go it alone.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 16 2018, @01:44AM (10 children)
My 2 desktops are xfce and i3: i3 for when i need resources and quickness, xfce for when i can't remember how to do something (command i haven't written down, etc). I can remember stuff like 'palemoon' and 'smplayer', 'arandr' 'minecraft-launcher'...... but how to get my vpn going and getting to a settings manager/volume control(my one speaker vibrates unless it's volume level is lower than the other) etc: too much to remember without writing it down, and i have enough pieces of paper around. I'm expecting a paper tumbleweed to come blowing by any second. :(
Getting. old. sucks.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday January 16 2018, @02:28AM (9 children)
This is off topic and I deserve to be downvoted for it, I know, but I wanted to offer a suggestion: instead of keeping a bunch of paper with notes on how to do things, give Zim [zim-wiki.org] a look. It's a wiki-style notebook so you can have pages and sub-pages, plus some limited formatting and image insertion, which would let you keep all those commands in one place, organised, searchable, and pasteable. If you want to get fancy, you can even link to files, so you could most likely create one-liner scripts to tasks you want to do and link to them to execute, though you might have to make a .desktop file to act as a launcher first. Not sure since I haven't tried, only used links to URLs and media files in it.
You can also keep multiple notebooks in different locations, and the files are all plaintext-readable, so you don't have to worry about losing data to a binary format. Plus the multiple notebooks means, for example, I can keep a separate notebook stored on an encFS volume to store rarely-used but important information, so I can keep it encrypted without the other notebooks being affected.
Something else you might want to try is making a directory with executable scripts and just keeping a link to that somewhere, so you can open it in a file manager and fire off common command/argument combinations in a click.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 16 2018, @03:44AM (8 children)
I've tried 'organization' software like that before and just find I get lost with it, not sure why. So I stick with paper and keeping .txt files for some commands.
Of course, that means too many .txt files and too much paper, and.....I log into xfce and viola there it is, lol.
Old dog trying to live with a not so good laptop while, surprise, still saving for a good desktop.
I yam what I yam.....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday January 16 2018, @04:16AM (7 children)
Zim's not really intended to be organisation software, it's just a way to display text files with wiki formatting inside folders. If you use folders and text files you're most of the way there already, zim just lists them on the side and lets you put some formatting in. It's more like a writing aid, for keeping a bunch of notes, with no real pretense of being more. If you can make your way around wordpad or a similar lightweight editor, you can handle zim, because it's basically that plus a pane on the side that lists pages. The main benefits over plain text+folders is navigation and editing within a single application, linking to external files and resources more easily, formatting options, and embedding images or other files.
Not much of a learning curve to it either. I got my mother, who had similar note-keeping habits as you, to use it and she loved it as a replacement.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 16 2018, @12:53PM (6 children)
Just installed it. Will give it a try: from the initial instance it looks easier than some I've tried, thanks!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday January 16 2018, @02:04PM (5 children)
You're welcome, hope it works out for you. I friended you so if you have any questions or issues with it you can make a journal entry about it and I'll get notified. Or you can drop a note in the only journal entry I have, it's sort of a placeholder "drop a message here" post for that sort of thing. Either way, I'll try to help if you need to know anything or want other suggestions along those lines.
On a personal note, I still use zim for most of my own notes despite emacs taking over most other text editing tasks. I like org-mode well enough for one-off things, like a single-file outline, and sometimes I use asciidoc for project files (beats markdown handily), but zim still remains my catch-all note holder. It's the digital equivalent of a notebook stuffed with random scribblings, and covers that use for me perfectly; the only thing it's really missing is I can't add sketches and hand-written notes to it without creating them in another program first. (Probably something that could be added as a plugin but I never got around to exploring that possibility...)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:46AM (4 children)
How compatible is Zim with revision control? Most word processor file formats are terrible for it. A merge is a calamity.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:23AM
Zim notebooks consist of plain text files (.txt extension), with sub-pages stored in subdirectories. So, say you have a TODO page, and beneath that, "Work" and "Hhome" pages. On the filesystem you'll have "TODO.txt", "TODO/Work.txt" and "TODO/Home.txt", with each file being human-readable. Zim files have a 3 line header, similar to HTTP headers with three entries: Content-Type, Wiki-Format, and Creation-Date. After that is the file body, which is plaintext human-readable conventions for formatting, as documented here [zim-wiki.org] and also available within Zim itself.
Which is to say, it's very amenable to version control systems because it's all plaintext. The only exception is, if you choose to attach a binary file to a page (either by adding an image to a page or using the "attach external file" option), you get the usual caveats with binary files and VCS. That and the general human-readability of it make it appealing to me, because I hate locking important info into non-standard formats. If Zim ever breaks or stops being maintained, my data is still readable, and it should be simple enough to make a parser for it if I ever need. :D
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:25AM (2 children)
Double post because I just noticed after submitting that Zim itself ships with a version control plugin [zim-wiki.org] if you want to automate the process. That page also says basically what I did, and I could have saved myself some typing if I had known about it before posting.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:06AM (1 child)
I'll answer through to you THIS way: (my zim came with the version control already in action).
I'm using zim now: VERY NICE! Thanks for the info!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday January 25 2018, @10:01AM
Awesome, glad to hear it's working out for you. :D
It's amazing how useful it can be considering how simple the concept and execution is. Doesn't try to be super fancy, which I think works in its favour, at least for me.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday January 16 2018, @02:19AM (7 children)
Early adoption of KDE4 hurt KDE. Distros like Ubuntu ignored warnings from the devs and packaged up what was essentially a developer preview and shipped it to end users. By the time Debian adopted it, it was pretty well comparable to the 3.5 that replaced it and continued to improve from there. Now it's on version 5 and is polished, smooth, and like frojack said, lighter even than xfce these days. Plus you can strip it down even further by disabling components you don't use; the defaults are oriented toward giving non-tweakers the best experience possible, so there's still room for improvement if you're willing to poke around in the expansive systemsettings program and turn a few things off.
As for Enlightenment, it's lost most of its lustre now, because its claim to fame back in the day was desktop bling at a time when motif was still widely used. It was never my favourite, but now it looks dated and has a bunch of weird little issues. For an example, Terminology [wikipedia.org] is a terminal emulator using the toolkit Enlightenment uses, which makes it a clunky pile of shit any time you have to interact with the UI for anything. I gave it a try because of some interesting features (video and image viewing inside the term, for one) other terms don't do, but it just wasn't worth dealing with the quirks of EFL to use it. Speaking of EFL, this Daily WTF entry [thedailywtf.com] is a fun read on it. No thanks.
If I want a lighter option than KDE, I'll stick with WindowMaker or notion.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday January 16 2018, @02:42AM (5 children)
Nope. Not true.
I was using it at the time. Opensuse was one of the worst offenders. The made it the DEFAULT, then months later when it blew up in their face they tried to deny they even recommended it.
But NO, the KDE developers were NOT blameless. The actively pushed distros to do early releases, (more than half of the KDE developers and packagers were employed by distros at the time, and they REALLY really wanted kde4 to to get some testing, and in doing so they almost killed their brand. Then they refused to even handle security patches for 3.5x. Utterly and completely unprofessional.
Finally there was a few changes of leadership and slowly over a two year period it became stable. But it was shit until KDE/Plasma5 came out, which also had minor-ish problems.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday January 16 2018, @03:39PM (4 children)
Same experience here. Unfortunately, neither opensuse nor KDE have learned much since then. I filed some bugs with KDE only to get them closed or commented on derogatorily. If you watch a recent talk from a KDE maintainer given at a opensuse conference (on the opensuse youtube channel, sorry won't look it up) you will understand their disregard for the end user, testing, and software quality in general. That being said, I still prefer KDE over Gnome but I minimize my dependencies on programs my moving as much as possible to the command line. For example, I run my dovecot instance to manage, fetch and filter my email, so I can easily switch the client (Thunderbird at the moment) which will just connect to my localhost IMAP server.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @07:14PM (3 children)
None of the big name userspace projects have learned anything. It is the same behavior that can be observed with Mozilla, Gnome, the various stuff happening under the Freedesktop umbrella, etc etc etc.
It is basically the behavior observed by JWZ and summarized as CADT.
And these days it seems to have gotten even worse as FOSS has become fashionable. Thus we get a eternal september style scenario where the major projects constantly attract new programmers with little respect for what already exist, and lots of energy for barfing out code. And the project management can't say no, because then they get the SJWs breathing down their necks (and a worry number of them are hardline SJWs themselves, that is using their time managing said projects to pad their social resumes and virtue signal).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @08:04PM
thanks, this cracked me up and i love FOSS. virtue signal RELEASE!
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday January 16 2018, @08:05PM (1 child)
I general, I agree. However, there is one exception, namely Libreoffice. While far from perfect, the project actually improved software quality over the years going from unusable (like every new KDE series) to decent (hardly ever achieved by KDE). Also the project attracts a lot of non-technical people, has excellent funding and is well known in general. Quite some of their recipes could work for other projects such as KDE, IMO.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @09:21PM
Dunno. As long as Libreoffice was stuffing in the improvements that was held back by Openoffice mismanagement it was doing fine. But recently they held a mascot competition that turned into a right farce, suggesting that the "social" people are creeping in and taking over there as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @07:09PM
KDE4 also badly broke with KDE3, resulting in a software schism where programmers had to pick sides.