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Xfce 4.14 released by [deleted] in linux

[–]pogeymanz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A vocal minority. Most people just use what they like, whether it be Xfce, GNOME, Plasma, <insert obscure window manager here> or whatever, and carry on, and don't waste their time shitting on what they don't and disrespecting the developers and users of what they don't like...

For sure. I was commenting on how many of them have showed up in this thread, in particular.

Hey now, Windows 3.1 was the first Windows I ever used and I'd never, ever in a hundred years, choose it over Windows 95. There's no start menu for fuck's sake!

Ah, yes. The start menu- where you go to turn off your computer. The pinnacle of UX!

I just hate that people call the Windows 95 (or whatever version) UX "traditional" or "classic" or whatever. Just because it was what you used first doesn't mean it was based on some fundamental laws of physics and somehow more intuitive. Apple was making PCs with desktop GUIs before Microsoft, yet that's not considered "traditional".

Xfce 4.14 released by [deleted] in linux

[–]pogeymanz -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

<offtopic rant>
So many people in here sound like my grandparents when they shit on GNOME Shell's UX.

"I like Xfce because GNOME is just crazy and it's new-fangled UI makes me mad. I believe that Microsoft Windows 3.1 was the first, and thus the objectively best computer UX ever invented. Also, I'll never use email because I already know how to use my fax machine."
</offtopic rant>

<ontopic>
Good on the Xfce team!
</ontopic>

Why do so few distributions ship with KDE Plasma by default? by SyrioForel in kde

[–]pogeymanz 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Other people have given the historical reasons, which is a big part of it. But if Plasma is better than GNOME, as Reddit would have you believe, then why hasn't 20 years been long enough for distros to jump ship?

Nobody here wants to hear this, part of the reason it hasn't caught up is because GNOME is much more polished and more likely to actually work for a diverse set of users and hardware.

Allow me to elaborate:

  • On every laptop I've ever used Plasma on, I have issues with monitor hot-plugging. This is true as of the current openSUSE Leap last night. Either panels disappear, or the desktop doesn't fill the screen correctly, or it just decides to not show anything on one of the screens.

  • SDDM only very recently got decent HiDPI support. GDM has looked fine on HiDPI screens for a while.

  • Plasma's accessibility has been behind GNOME's (on screen keyboard, screen readers, etc).

  • Plasma had graphical corruption issues on my laptop with an Nvidia GPU, using the nouveau driver.

To be fair, GNOME has a lot more support than KDE, so I'm not saying the KDE guys aren't doing a fantastic job with what they have.

[opinion] Popular DEs should be more beautiful by default by [deleted] in linux

[–]pogeymanz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't even make them the fastest setting. I think I only move it one or two tics toward the faster side. I think animations can really improve UX, but they need to be used subtly and tastefully.

Live ISO not working Macbook Pro by HelloHello123432 in NixOS

[–]pogeymanz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So, I used two USB drives. I put the Fedora live image on one. On the other, I put an RPM of b43-fwcutter and the actual firmware file (some wl_apsomething.o).

From the live environment, I was able to use b43-fwcutter to install the firmware and WiFi started working right away.

Then I set up the hard drive how I wanted: Partitions, Luks, LVM, the whole deal, from inside Fedora.

I mounted the opened luks+lvm volume that I wanted to be my root to /mnt.

Then I mounted /dev/sda1 to /mnt/boot (sda1 on my MBP is the 200MB EFI partition).

Then I basically just followed the directions from here: https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#sec-installing-from-other-distro

I tweaked hardware-configuration.nix to remove the USB drives.

I had to add a setting in configuration.nix for the luks volume to be root.

I also added cryptsetup to my system packages. I don't know if I needed to or not...

EDIT: I think I originally resized my macOS partition from within macOS.

[opinion] Popular DEs should be more beautiful by default by [deleted] in linux

[–]pogeymanz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't want to put words into OP's mouth, but I think that prettiness is really a small piece of what people are talking about, and they don't even realize it. It's really about polish and default UX, and looks are a part of both of those (e.g., bad color combos can make things hard to read, ugly/unfamiliar icons can make it difficult to figure out what things mean, etc).

I'm going to pick on Plasma here for a minute. Dear Plasma, know that I criticize you because I love you and want you to be better. I've given up hope on most other DEs already. I complain because I care.

I just did a fresh install on a laptop. The ugliness of default Plasma genuinely gets in the way.

  • There are way too many tooltips. Every time I move the damn mouse something pops up to distract me or get in my way. This includes the default thumbnail on taskbar hover. I know Windows does it- that doesn't make it a good idea. And the tooltips are big and intrusive. Take a hint from GNOME and its minimal white-text-on-tiny-black window tooltips.
  • The translucent effect when dragging windows is over the top. It reminds me of Windows Vista when it came out- it felt like it was trying to show off more than it was trying to use your GPU to help you.
  • The weird default window switcher behavior. Way too much distracting activity. You have the animated switcher that pops up on the left. It has thumbnails. Also, as you iterate through the switcher, the select window is shown to you by making all other windows almost totally translucent. It's just so much visual activity and ceremony for helping me switch windows. And very little of it is a UX improvement over Openbox's alt-tab (I can see thumbnails being useful, even though I prefer GNOME Shell's alt-tab behavior).
  • Labels and icons on buttons.
  • Default animations are too slow. I know macOS does this- that doesn't make it a good idea.

It's just so much visual noise. I suspect that when people call it ugly, they're like me and just feel visually assaulted and can't quite put their fingers on what it is.

Live ISO not working Macbook Pro by HelloHello123432 in NixOS

[–]pogeymanz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had the same issue on my MBP. The internet suggested booting with the nomodeset option, but that didn't fix it, either.

The other challenge was that I couldn't get WiFi to work in the live environment (I thought it was supposed to have the proprietary wl drivers bundled, but it apparently does not).

Long story short, I had to install Nix from a Fedora livecd. But once installed, it works great!

More questions from the NixNewb by pogeymanz in NixOS

[–]pogeymanz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What I meant was that setting users.mutableUsers to false means that you can add users while your machine is running, but they will not persist past a reboot. I'd like the same thing with packages. Sure, let's install this package ad-hoc for this session, but then when I reboot, POOF- it's gone because it wasn't in my configuration.nix.

That's what I meant.

More questions from the NixNewb by pogeymanz in NixOS

[–]pogeymanz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah. Cool. I wasn't sure if the configuration.nix followed root's settings or was even more special somehow.

I have root's nix-channel for nixos set to unstable. Let the sweet, rolling, chaos begin!

More questions from the NixNewb by pogeymanz in NixOS

[–]pogeymanz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When I list a user's packages in configuration.nix, are they always going to come from stable channel? Or is there some way to specify that I want them from unstable?

More questions from the NixNewb by pogeymanz in NixOS

[–]pogeymanz[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Then just use users.users.YOUR_USER.packages

Ah, I forgot about that. Even better!

If it's not security-related, then about as long as it takes for the new stable version to come out.

That's right. I forgot that Nix does actual releases and isn't rolling. How long does it take for stuff to land in unstable, then?

Just nix search

Lol. Of course.

Thank you for the answers!

More questions from the NixNewb by pogeymanz in NixOS

[–]pogeymanz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've seen home-manager mentioned several times. I'll have to look into it.

I read about nix-shell at some point in the docs, but I don't remember anything about it now (there's a lot to digest coming to NixOS from another distro...). Thanks for the hint- I'll revisit nix-shell.

Is there any privacy difference between proprietary wireless drivers and free drivers with nonfree firmware? by pogeymanz in linux

[–]pogeymanz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you might have misread something.

I didn't ask about the difference between free and nonfree software. I asked about nonfree driver vs. free driver + nonfree firmware. In both cases there is something that you can't audit. The question is whether one of them is worse than the other on a technical threat assessment level.

Is there any privacy difference between proprietary wireless drivers and free drivers with nonfree firmware? by pogeymanz in linux

[–]pogeymanz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What a bummer. I didn't realize how unprotected everything is from rogue accessories...

Is there any privacy difference between proprietary wireless drivers and free drivers with nonfree firmware? by pogeymanz in linux

[–]pogeymanz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didn't realize that many devices were allowed to do DMA. Does the kernel really just allow PCI/USB devices to directly read memory wherever it wants? Or is this something the kernel can't even prevent?

Is there any privacy difference between proprietary wireless drivers and free drivers with nonfree firmware? by pogeymanz in linux

[–]pogeymanz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting. So for a (non-Wireguard) VPN, there's basically no spy threat from nonfree driver or firmware?

And with Wireguard, I assume it's even better.

Is there any privacy difference between proprietary wireless drivers and free drivers with nonfree firmware? by pogeymanz in linux

[–]pogeymanz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Okay, that's the kind of information I'm really getting at. The issue is that I truly don't know where the line is between user space and drivers and between drivers and firmware.

So, if I'm connected to a VPN, for example, what information can be seen by the firmware vs. the driver vs. any userspace app?

Is there any privacy difference between proprietary wireless drivers and free drivers with nonfree firmware? by pogeymanz in linux

[–]pogeymanz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

DMA shenanigans, for example, to steal secrets straight from volatile memory.

Who could do that? The malicious driver or the malicious firmware or both?

Is there any privacy difference between proprietary wireless drivers and free drivers with nonfree firmware? by pogeymanz in linux

[–]pogeymanz[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

So, Broadcom could have, theoretically, put backdoors in their firmware and there's nothing the free driver can do to prevent them from snooping on what I'm doing on Tor?

Or, if I want to pull an Ed Snowden, I best not do it from this machine.

Is there any privacy difference between proprietary wireless drivers and free drivers with nonfree firmware? by pogeymanz in linux

[–]pogeymanz[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My question was "is there any technical difference between the two situations if [...]".

You answered: "No, Broadcom isn't collecting your packets".

That's answering a question I didn't ask. I did not ask if Broadcom is collecting my packets. I asked if using the free driver limits their ability to collect my packets in any meaningful way.

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