On Tue, 14 May 2024 20:00:07 +0000, candycanearter07 wrote:

> Andrzej Matuch <andrzej@matu.ch> wrote at 12:52 this Tuesday (GMT):
>> On Tue, 14 May 2024 01:50:13 +0000, candycanearter07 wrote:
>>
>>> Andrzej Matuch <andrzej@matu.ch> wrote at 00:25 this Sunday (GMT):
>>>> On Sat, 11 May 2024 14:16:18 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Andrzej Matuch wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Fri, 10 May 2024 17:33:22 +0000, RonB wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 2024-05-09, Andrzej Matuch <andrzej@matu.ch> wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Thu, 09 May 2024 06:47:55 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> On Wed, 8 May 2024 08:27:04 -0400, Andrzej Matuch wrote:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> I think the most common complaint of people using Linux CLI or
>>>>>>>>>> GUI tools is that they look dated.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Are they taking Microsoft, of all people, as arbiters of good
>>>>>>>>> taste?
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> There are definitely more people out there who are fans of the
>>>>>>>> Microsoft aesthetics than there are people who appreciate the
>>>>>>>> dated interfaces of open-source software. All of them will admit
>>>>>>>> that the "ugly" software still does the job, but it appears that
>>>>>>>> the way a program looks is as important as whether it completes
>>>>>>>> the task.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I don't admit it. And I don't like the Windows "aesthetic." I do
>>>>>>> find it a bit amusing that Windows' users simultaneously claim
>>>>>>> that 1) Linux copies the Windows desktop and 2) It has a dated
>>>>>>> interface.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Both are true, 1) Linux indeed copies features and aesthetics of
>>>>>> both Windows and Mac OS but 2) does a very poor job of getting it
>>>>>> right, in my cases. The lack of consistency is very noticeable, and
>>>>>> you'll have something like the default desktop of Ubuntu which
>>>>>> looks incredible...
>>>>>> until you open up a program which doesn't fit with the overall look
>>>>>> at all.
>>>>>
>>>>> Like Microsoft's own system apps that revert to some old-style GUI
>>>>> rather than the flat-ass Win 10+ interface?
>>>>>
>>>>> Or applications that provide their own window decoration no matter
>>>>> what OS they're on?
>>>>
>>>> To be fair, no one uses Windows' system apps. WordPad's lack of use,
>>>> in particular, is a shame. It really was more than most people
>>>> needed.
>>>
>>> Notepad usually filled that need.. and it was the default. Though a
>>> random fun fact, WordPad is stored in Win32, making it technically a
>>> system-required app.
>>
>> Yet it is no longer going to be loaded onto computer using new Windows
>> 11 versions. I presure people will still be able to install it through
>> the Optional System Components or whatever it is called, but it won't
>> be there by default. You'll need to use the online office.com suite
>> instead. It is better, but your documents are stored on Microsoft's
>> servers, and you need to be online to use it... as far as I know.
>
>
> I'm sorry /what/.
> They're /removing notepad/?!
> That is the STUPIDEST THING THEY COULD DO!
> Absolutely ridiculous... how are you supposed to edit text files without
> wifi then??

WordPad, not Notepad. As limited as Notepad is, it's still useful enough
to be kept around. WordPad is useful too, but I guess the statisticians at
Microsoft noticed that most installations had either Microsoft Office or
LibreOffice installed, rendering WordPad useless.

Joel <joelcrump@gmail.com> wrote at 21:14 this Tuesday (GMT):
> candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid>
> wrote:
>>Andrzej Matuch <andrzej@matu.ch> wrote at 12:52 this Tuesday (GMT):
>>> On Tue, 14 May 2024 01:50:13 +0000, candycanearter07 wrote:
>>>> Andrzej Matuch <andrzej@matu.ch> wrote at 00:25 this Sunday (GMT):
>>>>>
>>>>> To be fair, no one uses Windows' system apps. WordPad's lack of use, in
>>>>> particular, is a shame. It really was more than most people needed.
>>>>
>>>> Notepad usually filled that need.. and it was the default. Though a
>>>> random fun fact, WordPad is stored in Win32, making it technically a
>>>> system-required app.
>>>
>>> Yet it is no longer going to be loaded onto computer using new Windows 11
>>> versions. I presure people will still be able to install it through the
>>> Optional System Components or whatever it is called, but it won't be there
>>> by default. You'll need to use the online office.com suite instead. It is
>>> better, but your documents are stored on Microsoft's servers, and you need
>>> to be online to use it... as far as I know.
>>
>>I'm sorry /what/.
>>They're /removing notepad/?!
>>That is the STUPIDEST THING THEY COULD DO!
>>Absolutely ridiculous... how are you supposed to edit text files without
>>wifi then??
>
>
> He was talking about WordPad, not Notepad, although the "new" version
> of the latter in Win11 is borked, I had to get a third party text
> editor that Chris V. recommended (which was better than the classic
> Notepad, I must say, more like what I have with Mint now). WordPad is
> a relic, to say the least, if one wants something more than a text
> editor, just get LO, I would say, that's all I ever used, regardless
> of OS, for 20 years.

OK, that's more reasonable.. still a bit sad to remove though.
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On 8 May 2024 15:13:19 GMT, rbowman wrote:
>
>> We heard that a lot from a VP who thought the Motif based producted
>> looked 'dated'.
>
> Motif was the one that pioneered multiple desktops. It became common very
> quickly on *nix GUIs (including e.g. KDE on Linux).
>
> The proprietary vendors like Microsoft and Apple took somewhat longer to
> get the idea.

To this day, Apple still hasn't produced a bug-free implementation of
multiple desktops. And in today's culture nobody dares to bring it up
because it might hurt somebody's feelings.

Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> wrote:
> rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:
>> A long time ago I did an inventory control system. I learned that the
>> people doing data entry hardly looked at the screen. I think I could have
>> put up a dialog saying 'Your pantyhose are on fire!' and the wouldn't
>> notice. What they did notice was anything that broke the pattern as they
>> tabbed between boxes and entered the data.
>
> Heh. On the classified-ad typesetting project I worked on, one of the
> developers shortened a particular key-sequence by one character.
>
> Hoo boy! The complaints were vociferous; the change was undone.

Imagine all the AutoHotKey scripts that would've had to have been
debugged and fixed if the change wasn't undone.

RonB <ronb02NOSPAM@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "Looks dated," seems like a superficial way to judge an application. But to
> each their own. I know slrn gets the job more quickly and efficiently than a
> GUI app would.

A colleague of mine wanted to introduce OAuth-based authentication to a system
that has been entirely a command-line affair up until now. "Just point the browser
at this URL and it magically redirects to http://localhost:8080/foo/bar/weirohn3qwo,
unless the tool is running remotely, in which case IDK you can copy and paste a URL
and then send the request to localhost with curl or something." NOPE.

Andrzej Matuch <andrzej@matu.ch> wrote:
> On Fri, 10 May 2024 05:42:15 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On 09 May 2024 12:12:21 GMT, Andrzej Matuch wrote:
>>
> And if an update goes wrong and locks you out of your system, it also
> locks you out of those preferences. If you can fix the system and restore
> everything, that's fine. A lot of us prefer to keep it on the cloud in
> case of a disaster, or simply because we want to have access to the same
> data through a variety of computers.

There are ways to access the data on a Linux server from a variety of
computers, but the one thing I find to be a real PITA is accessing such
data from a phone. There just don't seem to be apps that make it easy
to access files over protocols like SFTP and still work today after
years of neglect.

candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
> RonB <ronb02NOSPAM@gmail.com> wrote at 17:43 this Friday (GMT):
>> On 2024-05-10, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>> On Linux, many GUI programs save their user prefs in text files, which are
>>> easy to manage in this way.
>>
>> In slrn, for example, I can just copy my scorefile to another computer.
>> Quick an easy.
>
>
> And a .newsrc file!

Might as well just copy the whole $HOME directory. I've done that after every
new computer purchase since I originally installed Linux on a 486 in the 1990s.

On Thu, 16 May 2024 04:50:05 -0000 (UTC), Sebastian wrote:

> Imagine all the AutoHotKey scripts that would've had to have been
> debugged and fixed if the change wasn't undone.

GUIs are simply not designed for automation.

Sebastian wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> wrote:
>> rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:
>>> A long time ago I did an inventory control system. I learned that the
>>> people doing data entry hardly looked at the screen. I think I could have
>>> put up a dialog saying 'Your pantyhose are on fire!' and the wouldn't
>>> notice. What they did notice was anything that broke the pattern as they
>>> tabbed between boxes and entered the data.
>>
>> Heh. On the classified-ad typesetting project I worked on, one of the
>> developers shortened a particular key-sequence by one character.
>>
>> Hoo boy! The complaints were vociferous; the change was undone.
>
> Imagine all the AutoHotKey scripts that would've had to have been
> debugged and fixed if the change wasn't undone.

The app was a DOS app. Circa 1990.

--
Be careful! Is it classified?

Sebastian <sebastian@here.com> wrote at 05:34 this Thursday (GMT):
> candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
>> RonB <ronb02NOSPAM@gmail.com> wrote at 17:43 this Friday (GMT):
>>> On 2024-05-10, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>>> On Linux, many GUI programs save their user prefs in text files, which are
>>>> easy to manage in this way.
>>>
>>> In slrn, for example, I can just copy my scorefile to another computer.
>>> Quick an easy.
>>
>>
>> And a .newsrc file!
>
> Might as well just copy the whole $HOME directory. I've done that after every
> new computer purchase since I originally installed Linux on a 486 in the 1990s.

Fair, that's why putting /home on a different partition is so common.
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

On 5/8/2024 9:17 PM, Andrzej Matuch wrote:

> For what it's worth, I've just abandoned Betterbird and Thunderbird for
> Usenet since I am convinced that a bug in the software is responsible for
> the Usenet problems I've been having of late. Good old Pan works fine with
> Blocknews, but everything else seems to have trouble negotiating a
> connection.

The only connection problems I'm having lately are with Blocknews. It
drops connections, and then often won't accept reconnection requests
unless you restart Betterbird.

This never happens with eternal-september, but it's just so slow.

> I've decided to just use a web app for my e-mail (which gives
> me a more direct access to how the server will handle my e-mail anyway),
> and Pan for Usenet rather than bundle both services in one app.

I tried Pan Windows recently, but it wasn't long before a graphics
glitch ruined it: entire panels were replaced by all black overlays that
came and went. And it doesn't show the article number (order received
in TBird/BBird). And it doesn't have the 'vertical layout' I like. For
me it's way lacking compared to TBird/BBird.

On Sat, 18 May 2024 10:04:37 -0400, DFS wrote:

> On 5/8/2024 9:17 PM, Andrzej Matuch wrote:
>
>
>> For what it's worth, I've just abandoned Betterbird and Thunderbird for
>> Usenet since I am convinced that a bug in the software is responsible
>> for the Usenet problems I've been having of late. Good old Pan works
>> fine with Blocknews, but everything else seems to have trouble
>> negotiating a connection.
>
>
> The only connection problems I'm having lately are with Blocknews. It
> drops connections, and then often won't accept reconnection requests
> unless you restart Betterbird.
>
> This never happens with eternal-september, but it's just so slow.

It doesn't seem to be a problem with Blocknews as much as with Betterbird/
Thunderbird. If you use Pan, you'll notice that the server works as it
should whereas with the birds, whether in Linux or Windows, you get a ton
of problems.

>> I've decided to just use a web app for my e-mail (which gives me a more
>> direct access to how the server will handle my e-mail anyway), and Pan
>> for Usenet rather than bundle both services in one app.
>
> I tried Pan Windows recently, but it wasn't long before a graphics
> glitch ruined it: entire panels were replaced by all black overlays that
> came and went. And it doesn't show the article number (order received
> in TBird/BBird). And it doesn't have the 'vertical layout' I like. For
> me it's way lacking compared to TBird/BBird.

Yep, it's fast but full of bugs. However, it IS open-source and this kind
of stuff should be expected. It's also very dated compared to the latest
source. For all we know, the bugs are fixed by now.