Ephera

Statcounter relies on web tracking to try to estimate the usage shares. Theoretically, there could be millions of science PCs running Linux, but one guy is browsing the internet with a Windows PC. Basically, take this data with a massive grain of salt…

Sounds like it, yeah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType

Because for the longest time, we lived in tribes. If you got thrown out of your tribe, that was essentially a death sentence.

In my country, it’s pretty much mandatory to take a first-aid course, so hard to conceptualize that, but I do find it attractive when someone’s active in the Red Cross or a volunteer fire department, or heck, actually works in the medical field.

Yes? Again, I’m not saying there’s not going to be disagreements or politics, I’m just saying that it’s going to be less loaded than Linux kernel politics.

Yeah, I did read that, admittedly after making my comment, but thanks for pointing it out anyways. 🙂

You don’t need to always be of the same opinion for it to be much less loaded than Linux politics…

There’s Redox OS already headed in that general direction.

There’s also this tutorial: https://os.phil-opp.com

Uh, well, I kind of already wrote most of what there’s to say in the comment above, it hides your mouse pointer when you don’t move it for a few seconds.

In most distros, it’s available as the unclutter package, directly from the repos. On Debian-based systems, the package you want is called unclutter-xfixes.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unclutter

It is built for X11 and won’t work on Wayland.
But KDE recently shipped a built-in feature as part of Plasma 6.1 (a Desktop Effect called “Hide Cursor”), which also works very nicely. That one does not cause hover elements to disappear.

Normal users don’t have VM images…

The fun part is that as a dev, you don’t really know that either. It’s just the file name of the executable. Anyone can rename that.
And even if it’s not renamed, you still don’t know, if your users need to call it with just hx or with ./hx or some other path.

Obviously, you should mention somewhere that the executable is likely called hx, but because that requires an explanation, there’s certainly a tendency to not mention it very often…

Who pissed in your muesli?

I like to use unclutter to hide my mouse pointer after a few seconds without being moved.

Now, the thing is, it doesn’t just visually hide the cursor, it actually removes it, so UI elements triggered by hovering disappear. Sometimes that’s great, other times it’s infurriating, like when reading a tooltip or menu.

I mostly use a touchpad, and so I developed a habit to wiggle my finger while I’m intentionally hovering something, so that there was enough mouse movement for unclutter to not remove my pointer.

Then I found a setting for the jitter threshold of the touchpad. Basically, with the threshold on, it ignores tiny movements, because the hardware reports finger wiggling, even if you hold your finger perfectly still. Which is perfect for me to turn off.

Now when I have my finger on the touchpad, it automatically wiggles and allows me to read hover elements. If I take my finger off, it stops wiggling and removes the cursor.
It’s almost like someone designed an OS with touchpads in mind, rather than them being an afterthought.

3. Are there any distributions that come with the minimum pre-installed apps ? … I mean not even a video or music player

You would not believe the obsession the Linux community has with minimal distros. Yes, there are many variants of “nothing” pre-installed.

Problem is, that many of the minimal distributions are more difficult to use, because they might not have a GUI, for example. Or they don’t have handling for Bluetooth out of the box. Things like that.

For someone new to Linux, I would not recommend jumping straight to a minimal distro. The pre-installed apps are typically decent on Linux (like a recommendation by the folks who create the distro) and if you don’t know much of the ecosystem yet, it’s a good way to start learning about it.

If you do find, you really just don’t need any video or music player, you can also separately uninstall them. Which, again, is easier than installing missing things that you never heard of.

A local shop has these self-checkout registers on which I saw they’re running CentOS.

ein Bißchen Deutsch

BTW, this should be written as:

ein bisschen Deutsch

We switched from ß to ss in all words with a preceding short vowel in 1996: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschreibung_von_1996
So, it’s “Fuß” and “Maß”, because those are pronounced with a long vowel, but then “Fass” and “muss” and “Biss”, because those are pronounced with a short vowel.

And in this case, “bisschen” is spelled with a small “b” for reasons that I’m not entirely sure are logical. 😅
It would be spelled with a capital letter, if “Bisschen” was a unit of measurement here (i.e. a small bite), like a “Liter” is.
But because it was used so much and without really referring to a specific measurement, it eventually began being spelled lowercase, similar to “wenig” or “etwas” (“ein wenig Deutsch”, “etwas Deutsch”). Apparently, this kind of word is called an “Indefinitpronomen”.

https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/bisschen
vs.
https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bisschen (much rarer)

Well, if I were to post it to a community on e.g. feddit.org, I would write it as:

Welche Fremdsprachen sprecht ihr so?

“Fremdsprachen” just means “foreign languages”, since I know that responding folks speak German.

Then “sprecht ihr” rather than “sprechen Sie”, because addressing a group of people with direct pronoun is unusual in German.
As someone else already said, using “Sie” is also far too formal for this context. People refer to each other as “Du” on most of the internet.
But “Welche Sprachen sprichst Du?” still gives me vibes of a marketing firm hoping to drive engagement by referring to people directly.

And then the “so”, I have no idea what that is linguistically, but it basically makes the question more casual. It invites for people to tell a story or to have a chat.

More fries. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hmm, alright. It is still on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, so maybe some fixes to the runtime allow that on newer Ubuntu versions.

Personal main-complaint about Snaps is that they ship Firefox by default with it and some things in it are just broken:

• “Save Image As…” in the right-click menu would just fail to open the file dialog and therefore do nothing.
• It doesn’t use ~/Downloads/ for downloads, but rather some complex folder underneath ~/snap/. You can get to that folder from Firefox’s download list, I believe, but navigating there via file manager is tricky.

Thankfully, Mozilla now offers a DEB repo: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions

As for Kubuntu, it’s far from the greatest showing of KDE. They frequently have oddball KDE versions, e.g. not quite shipping the KDE LTS version in Ubuntu LTS, because releases didn’t line up, but also just in general weird instabilities and crashes which don’t happen on my openSUSE laptop (my workplace issues Ubuntu laptops).

Having said that, we gave some of our Linux newbie colleagues GNOME and they always seem to struggle more with it than the colleagues with KDE, because usability in GNOME is just whack.
Things like not being able to type a file path into the file manager (unless you know the magic shortcut Ctrl+L), or the file-open dialog highlighting the name field, but when you type into it, it starts searching files instead.
But also just the whole thing not behaving like Windows. I’ll be the last to praise Windows’ usability, but it is what many people know.