This is FINALLY Getting Easier... Linux Challenge Part 3

[Ultraforce]

14 hours ago, Sho2048 said:

Unfortunately I feel that many of your points are related to being exposed to Windows first and then to other operating systems, especially the point about the refresh button being a default or where the progress bar should be. A bit like the Print Screen button being so evangelized in this thread, while it's an inferior experience all around. Having all progress being made on the PC in one place, once you get used to, is awesome; I lose those small popup things everyday and it's awful to have them show up on task switching (as you end up with so much noise). And while you have a point about being welcoming, no, I don't think catering to Windows in particular is a good idea.

 

(Casually I have seen this video moments ago.)

 

Worth repeating that overused Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

 

In particular, I have never used a refresh button in real life lol. That paradigm is absolutely only a Windows thing, or a browser one that is obsolete ("refresh" obscures what's actually happening, refetching a content that could've changed, and front end developers moved away from that almost a decade ago).

 

I don't think I'd agree with refresh being obselete, I actually refreshed the page since for whatever reason the youtube video you shared wasn't loading. I could see it being called refetching instead but sometimes refetching everything is useful.

[mamamia88]

On 12/10/2021 at 3:27 AM, Whiskers said:

 

The refresh button should be part of the GUI by default. Sure you can add it yourself, but it's completely hidden away beneath 3 submenu levels. I'd argue Linus' issues with handling the file are just as much a Dolphin / KDE issue as it is a Linus issue; imo the UX for this task is poor and you shouldn't use the notification centre for showing important info relating to your current task. There's a reason it's been standard across almost every popular OS going back decades to show a pop-up progress bar / info window prominently near where you are carrying out the related task. There are ways to design it to be less clunky and intrusive whilst still sufficiently informing the user of what's going on; Dolphin / KDE's approach doesn't satisfactorily do this imo.

 

 

You just said yourself that we all do things slightly differently and Linux is tailored for that. But then when Linus wants to do things differently on Linux, you're suggesting he's wrong to do so. I don't think that's entirely fair.  If Linux is supposed to be welcoming to users of different tastes, experiences, and needs, I don't see why that should exclude users with a Windows background. There's nothing wrong with a few accommodations here and there that make life a little easier for users transitioning to Linux, so long as they don't intrude on the experience for those who are already very familiar and confident with Linux. Even something as simple as adding in "snipping tool" as a search alias for a given screenshot utility can help.

 

 

That's a fair point. It can definitely be difficult to discern what's truly "intuitive" and what's just accommodating established expectations. And "intuitive design" has long been a bit of an empty buzzword in UI, UX design and related areas. I still think it's important to do what we can to make interfaces that make sense for new users though, whether they're new to computers entirely or just new to Linux. 

 

 

Good points. I hadn't even considered the desktop context menu example, I could indeed see that causing some confusion / frustration for ex-Windows users. That said it's very easy to find your way to the display settings so I don't think it's too inconvenient or confusing to people. It's also an instance, imo, of Windows having a bizarre and arbitrary way of doing something which wouldn't be intuitive at all unless you're already used to it.

 

Ultimately it's a matter of balance. I feel sometimes we're a bit too diametrically opposed to the idea of doing something "the Windows way", or even accommodating Windows users. But I also feel there are plenty of things in most Linux distros and software that are outright unintuitive, even to those who've never used Windows before. 

 

One important note though; research data from the Windows 95 era isn't guaranteed to be entirely relevant / accurate now. User familiarity with and expectations for computer programs and interfaces were vastly different then; computers were still relatively new to consumers, and they were yet to become entirely commonplace. And of course smartphones, which have had a massive impact on user familiarity and expectations with tech and software in general, didn't exist. The "baseline" expectation of users in 2021 isn't comparable to that of ~1995 because as a whole we're so much more intimately familiar with using computers.

 

To me, it seems more intuitive that a button meant to show you the desktop does so with as few catches as possible. By trying to pre-empt user intent, I think it risks confusing / frustrating users who don't use it as the designer expected. I mean that's kind of unavoidable to a point in UI design but hopefully you can see what I mean. Imo, it'd be better to have the Windows-like approach by default and allow users to choose the current approach if they prefer it.

 

It could be that I feel that way because of baby duck syndrome, but I've almost never used the button before so I don't think so.

 

I think optimally it should be designed to be accessible to both. Which is a bit hand-wavey I know, but I think it's important to not just copy Windows' way of doing something, or just design something to be intuitive to those who've never used a computer before. It's all about balance, again. And of course there's a third part to that balance; the existing Linux crowd. I'm not advocating for a paradigm shift in Linux UI and UX design which completely ignores current user expectations and preferences, just that it should be a little more cognisant of and accommodating to those who are new to Linux.

 

 

Absolutely. And it's only getting more difficult, as so many people's experiences and expectations are being shaped by daily interactions with their smartphone or tablet. There are kids and even teens now who've been using a smart device almost every day of their life. Leads to some interesting questions as to how things will further develop for desktop OS design I think.

That's just like your opinion man. Opinions are like assholes everybody has one. That's why you get to chose between file managers, desktops etc. It's not like it's difficult to enable it.  I don't ever remember needing to use the refresh button in my file browser. What utility does it serve? If I just added a new file to the folder it should be visible without refreshing or if I'm waiting for the file to move there should be a way to tell it's progress without constantly refreshing the file browser. Also I can see why kde made the choice for show desktop the way it did. For me personally that button is a quick way to hide everything in case someone walks in for whatever reason.  But, I might be in the middle of an important essay or something and need to get my thoughts on paper as quickly as possible before I lose that train of thought so having it all show up quickly is a good thing. And once again you can change it. If you try to predict what every user wants eventually you'll fail somebody. But, at least with linux a different project does it the way you want or the developer thought "i personally don't see the value in a refresh button but, if somebody is looking for it they add it".  It's kinda why I don't like KDE. They try to accomodate every possible use case scenario and settings just seem to get buried or hidden. It's just a rabbit hole I find too deep to go down without going crazy. 

[mamamia88]

On 12/8/2021 at 9:45 PM, finest feck fips said:

This is a bit of a Linux ecosystem pet peeve of mine. Let's see how I can handle it.

The AUR's eternally unofficial status would be fine if it weren't de facto required to get a decent user experience on Arch. The AUR is huge, but Arch itself provides packages for fewer than 10,000 software projects. For a sense of perspective: the biggest distro provides packages for over 58,000 projects, Debian over 25,000, and Fedora just under 20,000. In terms of projects packaged, Arch doesn't even crack the top ten (collapsing redundant distros from the same families above it into one, e.g., Ubuntu and Debian are together counted only once, under Debian, since Ubuntu is downstream of Debian). It's smaller than the ports systems for most major BSD distros as well (only OpenBSD's ports system is smaller than the Arch repos). At the same time, the AUR is widely hailed as one of the great benefits of Arch Linux; access to the AUR is supposed to be a reason to run Arch in the first place.

 

The end result is that a huge number of Arch users (most of them, I would guess) will end up installing and keeping at least a handful of things from the AUR at some point. And when they do, they'll discover that, as ‘foreign’ packages, those packages are second-class citizens on their system when it comes to dependency resolution in pacman. Integration problems ensue. Package quality on the AUR is extremely inconsistent, to the point that installing some AUR packages will do things like overwrite your glibc and break your whole system.

Arch maintainers assert that this isn't a problem essentially because the AUR is only for advanced users, you should always be reading any PKGBUILDs you get from it yourself, etc. But using the AUR is simultaneously so necessary and so cumbersome that there's a whole little ecosystem of ‘AUR helpers’ designed to paper over all of that and let users treat AUR packages as though they were natively part of the base system. Still, those are kept out of the Arch repositories, so users at least have to bootstrap their way into running them, right? Well, not really. All of the most popular Arch downstreams, including those that have been mentioned in LTT videos (Manjaro and EndeavourOS), include AUR helpers out of the box.

I'd write more but I'm falling asleep at this point (perhaps, reader, so are you). The point is:

The AUR is poorly integrated, and packages installed with it are poorly integrated with pacman unless you run local repositories to host them. This causes breakage. Arch users (and developers) pretend that the AUR is optional, while in fact, the distro depends on the AUR to be usable for many people, and most users include the AUR as part of their pitch for Arch. It's bad. It feels like using a distro whose core tooling is unfinished.

For you the AUR is essential. But, to the devs of arch it's a security/stability liablilty. Sure 99% of the stuff is probably safe and have at it. If you want to install something from there nobody is stopping you. If you don't like reading pkgbuilds maybe use a distro that uses ppas or flatpaks etc. All kinds of choices. Nobody is forcing you to use an arch based distro. 

[mamamia88]

On 12/8/2021 at 3:02 PM, Olgyd said:

Nothing wrong with seeing if your DE would alias them to the Linux equivalents rather than Googling "What's the equivalent of X on Linux" for every single program.

 

For the record, even one of the KDE devs admitted refreshing in Dolphin was rather buried. Besides, Linus's issue was more that he thought Dolphin/KDE was following Apple's "my way or the highway" (which, given their stance on running Dolphin as root, I don't blame him).

 

At what point did Linus blame Linux for that? He himself admitted it was on him for not noticing.

 

Linus elaborated on the WAN show; the reason he suggested Manjaro address it is because most tutorials online assume you're running Debian and tell you to run sudo apt-get install X, which was further complicated by his terminal trying to install apt and then failing which led him to incorrectly diagnose the issue (which, ahem, Google wouldn't have helped). No, Manjaro doesn't need to address it, but then again, they don't need to continue maintaining the distro either...

 

Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that there are better hills to die on. What do you have to lose by making the UI/UX better?

Did I say it was wrong to try it? No I was demonstrating my point that he was approaching it from a windows perspective. Snipping tool is a windows only tool for screenshots. It's a stupid name and you would never find if you didn't google "how to take a screenshot on windows". Most normal people would probably type screenshot or something into the search and find it in a few seconds. But, the fact that was his first instinct tells me alot. Then he criticizes dolphin for not having a refresh button, which it does if you look and it's just about as hidden as snipping tool btw. God the first time i took a screenshot on windows i needed to google how to do it. That's a ui failure right there. Meanwhile the refresh button on a file browser is something next to nobody ever needs and he's saying it's nescessary? At least it's an option

[finest feck fips]

2 hours ago, mamamia88 said:

For you the AUR is essential.

It's not essential for me, because I am comfortable packaging software myself, and that's what I do when a distro I've chosen doesn't have some software I want in the repos. For most actual Arch users in the real world, it is essential, and that's the issue.
 

2 hours ago, mamamia88 said:

But, to the devs of arch it's a security/stability liablilty. Sure 99% of the stuff is probably safe and have at it. If you want to install something from there nobody is stopping you.

This doesn't address the substance of my critique, which is that the meager offerings in the Arch repositories drive people to a situation in which they are ultimately managing a dual system. This remains true even if every package they install from the AUR is well-written, up-to-date, and works without issue, because compatibility with foreign packages is a consideration that pacman is not equipped to make when solving for dependencies. (And even if it could check that, not breaking them would require partial upgrades, which pacman lacks support for by design.) When the Arch wiki says

Quote

To simplify maintenance, limit the amount of unofficial packages used.

this has nothing to do with the quality of unofficial packages installed, but the fact that pacman will routinely break packages not currently in the Arch repos on install or update actions without so much as a warning. Because Arch is a rolling release, there's no guarantee of binary compatibility between library versions in the main repos, which means potentially anything that depends on them may need to be rebuilt after updates. This leads to kludges like the rebuild detector and it's the reason EndeavourOS has a separate ‘AUR Update’ function in its little GUI toolbox. It's a brittle system, and the workarounds for coping with it are cumbersome hacks.

 

2 hours ago, mamamia88 said:

If you don't like reading pkgbuilds maybe use a distro that uses ppas or flatpaks etc.

The issue is not that I mind reading package definitions. I frequently read and write package definitions on the distros that I use. The issue is that Arch's de facto reliance on the AUR is both real and a problem. (And that said reliance is problematic due to design flaws in Arch and in the AUR.)

 

2 hours ago, mamamia88 said:

All kinds of choices. Nobody is forcing you to use an arch based distro.

I don't use Arch.

The reason that I originally raised this point is that the unfortunate real function of the AUR in the communities of Arch Linux and Arch derivatives is one of the pain points Linus mentions in the video, and it makes him unsure about whether using an Arch-based Linux distro is a sound choice. By suggesting that users who find some of the packages they need missing from the Arch repositories but present in the AUR should simply choose not to use Arch in light of the inherent problems in supporting the AUR, you're just agreeing with Linus (and with me).

[mamamia88]

15 minutes ago, finest feck fips said:

It's not essential for me, because I am comfortable packaging software myself, and that's what I do when a distro I've chosen doesn't have some software I want in the repos. For most actual Arch users in the real world, it is essential, and that's the issue.
 

This doesn't address the substance of my critique, which is that the meager offerings in the Arch repositories drive people to a situation in which they are ultimately managing a dual system. This remains true even if every package they install from the AUR is well-written, up-to-date, and works without issue, because compatibility with foreign packages is a consideration that pacman is not equipped to make when solving for dependencies. (And even if it could check that, not breaking them would require partial upgrades, which pacman lacks support for by design.) When the Arch wiki says

this has nothing to do with the quality of unofficial packages installed, but the fact that pacman will routinely break packages not currently in the Arch repos on install or update actions without so much as a warning. Because Arch is a rolling release, there's no guarantee of binary compatibility between library versions in the main repos, which means potentially anything that depends on them may need to be rebuilt after updates. This leads to kludges like the rebuild detector and it's the reason EndeavourOS has a separate ‘AUR Update’ function in its little GUI toolbox. It's a brittle system, and the workarounds for coping with it are cumbersome hacks.

 

The issue is not that I mind reading package definitions. I frequently read and write package definitions on the distros that I use. The issue is that Arch's de facto reliance on the AUR is both real and a problem. (And that said reliance is problematic due to design flaws in Arch and in the AUR.)

 

I don't use Arch.

The reason that I originally raised this point is that the unfortunate real function of the AUR in the communities of Arch Linux and Arch derivatives is one of the pain points Linus mentions in the video, and it makes him unsure about whether using an Arch-based Linux distro is a sound choice. By suggesting that users who find some of the packages they need missing from the Arch repositories but present in the AUR should simply choose not to use Arch in light of the inherent problems in supporting the AUR, you're just agreeing with Linus (and with me).

Am I? I just think having access to stuff you wouldn't normally can never be a bad thing., I think it's better for something to be in the AUR than not at all. I personally use arch based distros. I use the AUR for chrome and maybe a random app every once in awhile. I just don't know how good of an idea enabling something with user submitted packages that are potentially harmful and run as root should be enabled by default and if it is at least understanding how to read what it does is a good idea. I don't feel like I'm managing a dual system like you said I just use yay instead of pacman cause it searches both. I kinda treat the AUR kinda like how I would treat adding a line to my sources.list file in debian. Just it's one line for every single piece of software in existence instead of needing to manually add a ppa every time i want new software. Maybe if something is really good in the AUR it can be moved to the repos or the maintainer of the package can be allowed to upload it to the official repos but, just don't really know how good of an idea it is to have stuff run as root that isn't vetted for. Imagine if micorsoft allowed anyone and everyone to distribute exes on a system that admin access is default with no barrier to entry. Oh wait that kind of exists which is why apple makes it so hard to install stuff not from the app store. It's a security risk. 

[finest feck fips]

33 minutes ago, mamamia88 said:

I just don't know how good of an idea enabling something with user submitted packages that are potentially harmful and run as root should be enabled by default

It definitely shouldn't be enabled by default.

 

35 minutes ago, mamamia88 said:

just don't really know how good of an idea it is to have stuff run as root that isn't vetted for

This is an Arch design issue, and to some extent an AUR wrapper design issue. More sophisticated build systems have every build run in a sandbox as an unprivileged user with no network access. Distros that want to have repositories like the AUR should use build systems with similar properties. There's no reason outside of makepkg's design that PKGBUILDs are allowed to run as root.

The same is true of potential security issues with package installation. Package installation doesn't have to be carried out as root (see Linuxbrew, Flatpak, Nix, Guix), and packages don't need to run hooks and triggers, either (see Distri). The security issues you're describing only occur when a package manager does both of those things, as pacman does.

This is what I mean about Arch users and developers ignoring or avoiding the fact that Arch's design and practices are factors in problems faced by users of the distro.

[bamiller1018]

UNIX Like Operating Systems can definitely be daunting for newcomers. Been using Linux since Kernel Version 2.0 back in the neolithic. Compiled a distro from scratch. That was fun. I love circular dependencies and waiting several days for my system to compile. Makes one question their own life choices in a hurry. The joy of being a system programmer at 13. "Programming is kind of like hitting yourself in the hand with a hammer. Because it feels so good when you stop" (Frank Lilja, 2006).

 

Anyway, Linus and company, happy computing.  Remember to hydrate regularly, and whatever you do, don't ever say the name of Linus Torvalds backwards. Rumor has it, that in doing so, you will summon the spirit of a 486DX system that died trying to run Vista, and it will devour your soul.

 

Shalom!

Edited December 12, 2021 by bamiller1018

[Olgyd]

On 12/12/2021 at 3:35 AM, mamamia88 said:

Did I say it was wrong to try it? No I was demonstrating my point that he was approaching it from a windows perspective. Snipping tool is a windows only tool for screenshots. It's a stupid name and you would never find if you didn't google "how to take a screenshot on windows". Most normal people would probably type screenshot or something into the search and find it in a few seconds.

https://imgur.com/a/efRomOe

 

Quote

But, the fact that was his first instinct tells me alot.

Who was it that said "there's a hundred ways to do something on Linux, and you'll get 99 people telling you why your way is wrong"?

 

(Seriously, I can't find the person to attribute that quote.)

 

Quote

Then he criticizes dolphin for not having a refresh button, which it does if you look and it's just about as hidden as snipping tool btw.

Beg to differ. "Reload" is hidden four menus down. "Snipping tool"... well, actually, it's apparently being deprecated () and replaced with something called "Snip & Sketch", but - you know, it's right there in the Start menu.

 

Quote

God the first time i took a screenshot on windows i needed to google how to do it. That's a ui failure right there.

Tu quoque.

 

Quote

Meanwhile the refresh button on a file browser is something next to nobody ever needs and he's saying it's nescessary? At least it's an option

No, he said that thinking it's NOT necessary is dumb, aka don't omit it with the assumption the file browser would auto-refresh like Apple does.

[mamamia88]

2 hours ago, Olgyd said:

https://imgur.com/a/efRomOe

 

Who was it that said "there's a hundred ways to do something on Linux, and you'll get 99 people telling you why your way is wrong"?

 

(Seriously, I can't find the person to attribute that quote.)

 

Beg to differ. "Reload" is hidden four menus down. "Snipping tool"... well, actually, it's apparently being deprecated () and replaced with something called "Snip & Sketch", but - you know, it's right there in the Start menu.

 

Tu quoque.

 

No, he said that thinking it's NOT necessary is dumb, aka don't omit it with the assumption the file browser would auto-refresh like Apple does.

Oh wow it's been awhile. I think I learned about it back in windows 7. Thanks for correcting me. I haven't used my windows 10 box much lately. Not that Linux is perfect. I just installed gnome and can't even get the screenshot extension to work. Just installed arch taking all the recommendations I've seen lately in these threads in mind. KDE lasted like 10 minutes on my pc. I can see why linus had some trouble. 

[bamiller1018]

Oy gevalt LnGents! Please keep it civil.

[syborg64]

On 12/10/2021 at 1:01 PM, Paul Bridges said:

Both contestants and a lot of react videos seems to think that "sign a PDF" is to put the image of a physical signature over the PDF, THAT IS NOT SIGNING.

 

An electronic signature is a criptography of the file hash done with your private key. If it's done with a key pair recognized by your government, this PDF will have legal value.

 

Maybe things are done differently on Canada?

 

My question wasn't about what is "to digitally sign" as clearly stated in it. It was the taskmaster's intentions. thank you for reminding me what a digital signature is.

And no, digital signature never have any legal value to them, because someone's digital identity is not yet part of any legislature. Documents are Sworn by your word/honor, and examined for forgery.
The specific phrase "Digitally sign a PDF" directly refers to the cryptography concept, but the context of 'basic things you can do on windows' implies that's not at all the task. I doubt any windows user (any user that's never used a *nix OS) could even generate the signature. comprehending a digital certificate is hard enough, window's lackluster support of them makes them basically reserved to servers running GNU/Linux

[calimorphos]

Making my first post on this topic might be a mistake but live and learn right?

I just wanted to share that I am using a Windows machine for the past week and have otherwise only used MacOS and Linux for the past 10 years.
Getting used to Windows 10 (my last experience was XP I believe) is about as hard as what Linus is experiencing with Dolfin... I did not manage to unzip files correctly at the beginning and I am still unsure of the procedure so I have to double check every time. I should probably invest the time to see if there is something that can show the name of the files being decompressed on the fly but I don't know which Windows app does that?

 

My point is, Windows makes as many assumptions as Linux does and they are probably just as flawed but more people are used to them and if you want these folks to use Linux you need to cater to them. Interestingly Linux is still by long miles the far better platform for programming and I think it would have been interesting to mention that somewhere?

 

Best,

Calimorphos