Posts by Liam Proven 3806 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jan 2008
> I can foresee absolutely no problem with feeding someone else's proprietary and copyrighted code into an "AI" LLM, trusting that it will remove anything problematic, and not use any of the copyrighted material for its own training model.
Excellent plan. I endorse this.
Let's do it with Windows 95 and see what comes out the end.
Unless of course the answer to that is "Windows ME".
> They showed that they included GPL2 code
Er, no.
They included GPL2 code in the stuff they uploaded; that does NOT prove that WinAmp contained GPL2 code.
They accidentally included the source code of their proprietary audio streaming server as well. It is I think reasonably safe to conclude that did not form part of WinAmp.
> Otherwise why would the code have been in the zip file or whatever?
Um. Look, I try to avoid saying "have you read the article?" -- but: have you?
Do you think every copy of WinAmp included the Shoutcast _server_ in it? Hint: no, it didn't.
The whole point of the article is that what they shared _was not just the source of WinAmp_. That is what the article is about: that they mistakenly shared lots of other stuff that wasn't in fact part of the source code they were in fact _trying_ to share.
> So, then, what's the point?
The point is you don't get taken down or banned from GitHub.
A bit academic in hindsight, but there you go.
When I wrote this, the repo and the code was still there, making it easy to find the (literally) thousands of forks.
> Are they afraid somebody might take their baby and make a better version than they ever did?
Yes, I think exactly that.
Now, of course, legions of copies of the code are out there and perhaps new versions and ports will appear after all. With the names and serial numbers filed off.
[Author here]
> If so much 3rd party code was in the repository
Hang on. I think you're making a big assumption here which for me ruins the joke. (It was a joke, right?)
"In the repository" -- *what* repository? What makes you think that they had a repository? Source repos are an element of a version control system. What makes you think they had one of those?
I think they probably had a big ol' Zip file, or a backup disk, or tape, or something like that, and some rookie staff member who doesn't know how Git works was told "put the source code on Github" and they tried.
Look, Microsoft *owns* GitHub, and when some staffer uploaded the rediscovered MS-DOS 4 source code:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/26/ms_dos_4_open_source/
... they screwed it up and did rookie mistakes like mixing up CR/LF versus LF line endings.
Git is horribly complicated, more than it needs to be for 99% of its users. Github adds an extra layer. It doesn't just need training: it needs deep knowledge and understanding. Most people using it do not have that.
Me included, and I did daily for over 4 years.
I strongly suspect a 20th century freeware proprietary Windows app had nothing like that. Maybe a shared network drive on an in-house server.
> it seems more natural to have my xfce4 panel on the right edge.
The trouble is that's where most GUIs place scrollbars.
(However unfashionable scrollbars are now.)
NeXTstep put scrollbars on the left. So did some other tools in the xterm era, I think.
Functional separation is good. Having a mouse movement in one direction for one function, and a different one for another unrelated one, works for me. YMMV.
> Perhaps it is time to move on from the rpm vs apt wars?
I think you are not considering the context here. I was trying to explain why Ubuntu did so well, and what the key weak point of its biggest commercial rivals (the 2 big players in the RPM camp: Red Hat and SUSE) _at the time_ -- that being 20Y ago.
Bare `dpkg` wasn't much better.
But the point here is that when SUSE and Red Hat Linux (_not_ RHEL or Fedora, their forerunner) were pre-eminent, the companies didn't offer any wrappers or higher-level tools. RPM was all you got.
It was a disaster, but it was the norm and they and their corporate sponsors did not consider it a problem.
Today, tools like Btrfs and Flatpak and GNOME and Wayland, and arguably systemd, have comparably severe issues, but again, the companies still retain the same attitude: flat, adamant denial.
When someone reminds the world of how bad it was before, look: "isn't it time to let that lie? Why dig up the past?"
Because the companies refused to admit there were problems then, and their fans supported them.
Then something better came along and showed it wasn't an inherent problem.
They _had_ to catch up, and they did.
Now, they are pushing new flawed tools and the fans still angrily defend them.
> Ubuntu: Swahili for "I failed to install Debian"
Excu-hu-se me.
The word "ùbúntù" is from isiXhosa and isiZulu, many thousands of kilometres away from East Africa where kiSwahili hails from. *Way* more different than English and Czech, say.
I take pride in my ability to pronounce the word "isiXhosa". :-P
And I quoted that gag over 2 years ago:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/31/the_cynics_guide_to_linux/
«
2. Ubuntu
"Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means *I can't configure Debian.*"
Ubuntu started out as an effort to displace Windows from the number one consumer OS spot by making a Linux that was easier to install and run. It worked. So Microsoft threatened to sue because it looked a bit like Windows if you squinted, and the whole thing fell apart. Ubuntu decided that if it was dodgy to look Windows-like, it would look like Mac OS X instead. Then it went back to GNOME again.
»
And I discussed the real meaning in a bootnote, because respect is due.
So there. :-P
> ... oh, oh, I expect Debian lovers to comment!
Oh, I so hope so. :-D
There was a wonderful editorial in one of the early UK Linux mags about the giant-brained Debianisti who were so horribly patronising because they'd been through the baptism of fire of getting the damned thing working.
They're not that much better now, mind you.
> (Brazilian distro which was eventually bought by Red Hat and became their Brazilian offices).
Nope. Conectiva was bought by Mandrake and is why the combined company was renamed Mandriva.
El Reg covered it at the time:
https://www.theregister.com/2005/02/24/mandrakesoft_connectiva/
I linked to it when I tried the modern descendants a couple of years ago:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/15/comparing_the_descendants_of_mandrake/
[Author here]
> True but you missed out Mandrake.
I did, you're right.
It was _much_ easier, to the extent that circa 2003, my lodger borrowed what she thought was a blank CD from the spindle in my office while I was at work and _accidentally_ installed Mandrake on her PC.
But I was never a big fan.
The early versions were just Red Hat Linux with KDE, with all the nastiness of original RPM.
The GUI tools weren't all that. The first time I tried a full install on a testbed PC, DiskDrake nuked 9 partitions and erased about half a dozen other OSes on my PC. (I think it was for a group test of Linux distros I wrote for PCW in about 2000.) I was _livid._
APT-RPM was promising but the trouble is that on distros not designed with it in mind, while it made _installing a new package_ easier, it became unreliable _upgrading_ existing packages.
If you tried to upgrade something present on your computer that APT-RPM did not install itself, the chances were high you'd nuke your PC. There were 3 likely outcomes:
* At best, that app stopped working and you had an even more painful session of dependency-chasing.
* More often, multiple other apps stopped working because their dependencies suddenly didn't match. (No overall dependency tree, no testing for overlaps etc.) Not only that but there was a fair chance your desired app _also_ stopped working.
* Worst case: your PC no longer boots, or it does but there's no desktop or something.
Ask me how I know. Go on.
I was experimenting with APT-RPM on SUSE Pro when Ubuntu arrived, and that is one reason I switched so fast. I'd had to reinstall SUSE multiple times because of APT-RPM-inflicted damage already.
So, yes, true, not all end-user-targeting distros were paid-for, but the free options, while better than, say, Debian or Slackware, were -- shall I be diplomatic and say "flawed"?
> Icon: blue trousers, green jumper and greyblueish fleece jacket. No black.
:-D
I'm still learning my way around it, and sadly there's only so much time I can devote to something so niche. I am also learning my way around NetBSD and FreeBSD and Alpine Linux and others as well.
Part of the thing is that given I only, or mainly, get to play each time there's a new release of these projects, that means that they have time to improve fairly significantly between releases. So sometimes, I get blocked by some feature or lack thereof, set it aside for six months or a year, and then I come back and find that the feature's been fixed now and I no longer _need_ to find a way around it.
But I am trying to avoid being totally focussed on Linux and nothing else.
> Linux older than BSD?
No. Again, no: older than NetBSD, which is the oldest of the *FOSS* BSD projects that originated on x86, and also older than its direct ancestor, 386BSD.
When I wrote that FreeBSD was the oldest of the modern living BSD family, we got angry comments and emails that NetBSD was older. It is, by 6 months.
Same year, different month.
Apparently, this really matters to some people.
If 6 months is our base unit of time here:
Well, then, Linux is three times older than NetBSD (one year and eight months), and it as much older than 386BSD as NetBSD is older than FreeBSD.
> FreeBSD is just a name, the original code was simply BSD
It was, but I think it's important to distinguish the projects, with names and communities of contributors and codebases of their own, from their ancestors.
BSD -> 386BSD (and lots of others) -> NetBSD _and_ FreeBSD
It's not a line. It's a tree, with many branches, and the key points are that certain branches are in the open air, and continued and still do, while most of the others sprouted within the walls of companies and when the companies collapsed those branches died.
NetBSD is not the same OS as FreeBSD. They have different commands and different abilities. The packaging and updating commands and so on are more different than 2 related Linux distros. FreeBSD is deeply integrated with ZFS, but it's an optional extra on NetBSD and it doesn't exist on OpenBSD.
All of them have influence from GNU and each other, and from the dead commercial ones now too.
It's disingenuous to airily proclaim "oh well they're all just BSD really!"
I'm a white Brit. Maybe you, "Arthur the cat", are a white Brit too. Or a white American or other Anglophone. If so, we're probably related. We're probably descended from Charlemagne. We're family! We're as good as brothers. Pop us an SMS with your bank details and PIN, will you? I could use a couple of spare grand. I mean, by your argument, we're the same person really...
> Liam, not directly related to this thread, but I must say that it's really great that you always read and liase with the comments on all your articles.
Why, thank you!
I do try to. Once they spill over onto a few pages, though, usually I am too busy with the article after the article after next or something...
That's my story and I'm sticking to it. ;-)
> Docker is basically "Linux containers on Linux or run Linux on non-Linux platforms using a VM". You can do that on BSD just like any non-Linux platform.
Sure, we know that. You're missing the point though -- although I think there is a bigger overarching point that you do make successfully.
Docker is a layer in a stack now. It's not just a tool any more.
I recently wrote about Virter:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/20/virter_simpler_test_vms/
Its creators say it's "docker for VMs" with the point that it's both got a Docker-like syntax and also composition of VM images that works like composing Docker templates.
Lots of people are using Docker tools and Docker commands to create, develop, test, and deploy server stacks _without actually having any Docker itself anywhere in the whole stack_.
Docker is a standard for images, it's a standard for repositories holding them, it's a standard for commands and scripts to pull those images, combine them, and instantiate them, and it's also, almost entirely separately, a standard for deploying, running, and managing them.
All without using Docker itself. Docker itself as a daemon-based container runtime is a bit outmoded and old fashioned.
You can use Podman to develop them, containerd or something to run and test them, CRIO to host them, all without ever having Docker itself anywhere.
Whether {some other containerisation tool} is better or worse is irrelevant, I'm afraid. It's not really about the strengths of the original implementation any more. Now it's the standard format, and nobody cares if your alternative standard is better or worse.
https://xkcd.com/927/
Now another and totally different argument would be: Should FreeBSD adopt Docker syntax for its jail-management commands? Yes, this would make them more familiar and accessible for new migrants from Linux, but OTOH, unless FreeBSD *also* implemented template-based Jail image handling, and a compatible system of repositories, then there's no point -- and I do not see that happening.
> Perhaps I'm missing something here.
From this and several other comments in other places, I am guessing people did not watch the talk or read the blog post.
The customer changed their firewall so the box became internal-only. Having not heard from them in years, Marinelli changed his VPN appliance and that severed the remote-management connection he'd had, so it was not contactable from the outside world even by its sysadmin any more.
[Author here]
> IIRC, it was before Linux appeared on the scene
I am afraid you recall wrongly.
386BSD 0.1 -- July 1992:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.bsd/c/zA8Jl89HSRo/m/DqMzaUUZ7wYJ
Linux 0.97 followed days later:
https://github.com/oldlinux-web/oldlinux-files/blob/master/Linux-0.97/docs/CHANGES-0.97
In other words Linux had moved beyond the early experimental 0.0x releases and was counting down to 1.0.
I wasn't using Linux then. I was aware of it and was tracking the project but frankly it was when kernel 2.0 appeared in 1996 that I felt it was useful and usable.
https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9606.1/0056.html
> FreeBSD originated in 1993.
Hi, Graham!
FreeBSD arrived 5 years after NeXTstep was first shown publicly.
NeXTstep was first publicly demonstrated, as version 0.8, in 1988.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92NNyd3m79I
NeXTstep 1.0 was released in 1989.
https://betawiki.net/wiki/NeXTStep_1.0
NeXTstep got to version 3.3 (1995) and was in the process of being replaced by version 4, renamed OPENSTEP, when Apple acquired the company in 1997, and it was renamed Mac OS X. OPENSTEP 4.2 (1997) was the final release.
https://betawiki.net/wiki/OPENSTEP_4.2
Rhapsody, later sold in limited numbers as Mac OS X Server, was effectively NeXTstep 5.
NeXTstep → OPENSTEP → Rhapsody → Mac OS X Server → Mac OS X → OS X → macOS.
The branding changes but the OS is the same.
I stand by it. The first commercial released version of the OS that is now called macOS predates Windows 3.0 by a year, Linux by two years, 32-bit OS/2 by three years, and FreeBSD/NetBSD/Windows NT by 4 years.
> I take it "seats" doesn't include all the users of world-facing web servers.
Several possible answers here. :-)
* Do they have accounts on the server? Are they licensed users? If not, then no, it doesn't.
* How much of the WWW was served from proprietary UNIX after its first few years, do you think?
The Web and FOSS xNix have grown hand-in-hand. Proprietary UNIX wasn't much involved since its invention -- on NeXTstep, of course.
[Author here]
> but BSD as a gamer system?
As @andy 103 says, no, that is not what I meant or said.
As per Stefano Marinelli's presentation, the NetBSD box he set up in under 48h that ran for 12Y with an over 9Y uptime was not built on server-grade kit, it was built from gamer components that the customer already had available.
That's what the reference to gamer-grade kit meant.
[Author here]
> Lots and lots of niggling little differences that totally bugger up Unix admin
I have been reading comments like this since I was running Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah" on a heavily-hacked PowerMac 7600 via XPostFacto.
Yes, it is based on some Unix code. Yes, it passes compatibility testing. It is a UNIX™.
But no, it is not like any other Unix, and if you try to treat it like one, you will have a bad time. It's a hybrid OS with a Unix-derived userland that enabled NeXT and Apple to get to market with a multitasking GUI OS years earlier than just about anyone else.
It predates Windows NT, Linux, FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD, and was demonstrated in public the same month that OS/2 1.1 was released, the first version of OS/2 with a GUI. (And a fairly ugly GUI it was, especially compared to the beauty of NeXTstep.)
The *only* other GUI OS that is still maintained from the same codebase that survives that is contemporary with what's now called macOS is RISC OS. Windows has been replaced with a rewrite. OS/2 was replaced with a rewrite. All modern FOSS Unixes date from the decade after NeXTstep.
It's _old_. And it's a pure play GUI workstation OS. Its creators cheerfully tore up the rule book and ripped out all the existing plumbing meant for workstations.
The result has been a product with sales in the billions: iOS and all other Apple OSes are based on OS X. I think it is fair and accurate to say that sales of the Apple OS family exceed _all_ sales of *all other proprietary and licensed Unix of any form PUT TOGETHER.* That's every proprietary/commercial Unix, counting seats not CPUs, and I strongly suspect all sales of all commercially licensed Linux (SLE, RHEL etc.) put together, don't even make a dent in the comparison... and Apple is 1 box = 1 user.
(And yes, I am also counting the weird things that passed Unix certification like z/OS and OpenVMS. And by seat for them too, not by processor, which boosts their numbers by at least an order of magnitude.)
Few Macs run anything except macOS, just a tiny rounding error, and macOS runs on nothing but Macs, except for a tiny rounding error.
No, it is not like other Unixes.
And the most important way? Unlike other Unixes, it's commercially successful.
> Will K9 update to TB?
The official statement is that, for now, the older branded app will remain available, with its own look/logo/theme etc., and you will be able to choose it instead.
Whether they will stay in feature parity and K9 will be updated I don't know. My guess is: probably not.
[Author here]
> I am not the only one that prefers to operate this way: https://forum.k9mail.app/t/why-was-the-account-overview-screen-useful/1573/31
Please *please* go sign into the Mozilla Bugzilla and _tell them_. If they know, they may fix it. If they don't, they definitely won't.
> That said, why is XFCE (and MATE?) taking over those kind of duties for the toolkit they rely on characterized as a "concern"?
This is solely me expressing my concern.
Gtk 1 and Gtk 2 are, AFAIK, basically dead now.
MATE and Xfce moved to Gtk 3 a few versions ago, at considerable effort over a period of years.
MATE, of course, is a fork of GNOME 2.32 released in 2010.
By the time they moved to Gtk 3, the Gtk maintainers had moved on to Gtk 4.
The small MATE team is trying to maintain the entire codebase of a desktop all of whose original developers (that is, doing it as their day job) have moved on to a new version. It is literal abandonware.
MATE could potentially drop all the accessory apps and just maintain the panel, file manager etc. because there are replacements for all the other bits from other projects.
This is what is happening to Unity in Ubuntu Unity these days. Ironically in quite a few cases by moving to MATE accessories.
But Gtk has moved on and the price of moving to Gtk 4 is pretty high. No more themes for instance. Decreasing or no support for accessibility (currently anyway) and I would guess no support for title bars, menu trees, and so on as GNOME is dropping all that stuff. Gtk is discussing dropping X11 support at some point soon, too.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/05/gtk_5_might_drop_x11/
It leaves them in a bit of a pickle, but right now, with efforts to adopt Wayland and so on nobody much is discussing this.
> which has been FOSS for over a decade now
That's very debatable indeed.
You know I wrote about the FOSS release, right?
https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/09/cde_goes_opensource/
But it wasn't FOSS for, what, 30 years? It only became FOSS once it was already an irrelevance, a historical artifact.
Whereas XFCE 1 and 2 were the little-known niche versions, and it is only with version 3 that it became a significant player -- but, sadly, after KDE 1 was out and thus deprived it of its rightful place as the pre-eminent FOSS xNix desktop.
Also, v3 was the first FOSS release, which abandoned XForms and thus changed its name from XFCE to Xfce because the XF didn't stand for the same thing any more.
So, yes, both proprietary early on, and both FOSS now, but one achieved fame and domination of its segment as a proprietary tool and only went FOSS after it was all over, whereas the other achieved greatness only as a FOSS tool.
Comparison: Linux was not originally GPL. It was released under its own licence:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/Linux_0.01
Only 0.12 went GPL:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110721105526/https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12
Do we talk about the great Torvalds-licensed project? No. We talk about the GPL kernel that arguably made the GPL world-significant.
[Author here]
> Does the new XFCE default theme still have default 1 pixel to resize the window?
I didn't mention a new Xfce default theme. (I mentioned a Cinnamon one.)
I am not sure if it will have one. In fact I am not sure Xfce _has_ a default theme it passesg to distros. Let's have a look...
OK, possibly it's Greybird (as used in Xubuntu).
https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1016618/
This is an actual FAQ.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/156435/how-can-i-make-windows-easier-to-resize-in-xfce
MX Linux defaults to Xfce and offers themes with thicker borders. You just need to change the _window manager theme_ and not the whole desktop's theme.
Or, you can edit the theme, or pick a different WM theme leaving the overall theme alone, which reduces the visual impact.
> But it can actually be used with FreeBSD (at least) and possibly Hurd (or port abandoned?) as well.
Huh. OK then. My bad; not only did I not know that, I read a comment elsewhere that strongly implied that it _was_ just a Linux thing and xBSD didn't directly have anything like it, and I did not follow that up and investigate.
I defer.
[Author here]
> Also, you seem to be saying that % doesn't matter so much, but when talking market share as Liam is, it's exactly what matters.
Thanks. Yes, that's right.
The thing is that it's the sales volume that influences the direction of R&D.
The result is visible in the new Apple Mac Pros: they are built from the same tech as the laptops. Which are in some ways more like iPads with a keyboard and trackpad, but minus the touchscreen.
So, you have a desktop computer with a highly-integrated SOC, with expansion slots that can't take GPUs. It doesn't need them, but it says something that you can't. And it is very selective about what storage devices you can bung into it, and you can't boot from them or from removable media. No booting off a USB key here to recover your data if your OS crashes, or if you need to reformat and reinstall.
Looks like a desktop, but in some important ways, it's not. It doesn't do things we expect desktop computers to do.
it's not meaningfully expandable or upgradable at all.
Which defeats the point of desktops, as other comments note. That was always true of desktop Macs to some degree, but where Apple goes first the industry tends to follow. GUIs, USB, closed boxes with no slots, RISC chips... all first seen on mass-market kit from Apple, even if they originated from other companies.
This is probably the way the PC industry is going.
In other words, 5Y or so, you may still have things that *look* like desktops, but in fact, they're sealed boxes, non-expandable... but you can use your own keyboard and mouse and screens. Which is still worth having, but it's only a small part of what's worth having.
[Author here]
> The "standard" GUI for Python is Tcl/Tk.
I am not a Python person at all, but I think, according to my limited understanding, that `tkinter` is a wrapper around Tk, but that not much Tcl is involved.
As Wikipedia puts it:
«
Tkinter is a Python binding to the Tk GUI toolkit.
»
It's the Tk half, not the whole thing. Tk without its native programming language. Its package page on python.org says:
«
Tkinter is not a thin wrapper, but adds a fair amount of its own logic to make the experience more pythonic.
»
[Author here]
> it will only work if doing things in FreeBSD comes as easy as in Windows to the masses,
Yeah, no.
FreeBSD is a niche OS compared to Linux, just as desktop Linux is a niche compared to Windows.
This is not an effort to make FreeBSD into a better desktop than Linux. It is an effort to make FreeBSD a better desktop, full stop.
FreeBSD is a highly capable Unix-like OS in its own terms and in its own space, but it is predominantly a server OS. I was invited to the EuroBSDCon by the FreeBSD project and talking to multiple BSD developers there, quite a few of them told me that they actually ran Linux for desktop use -- not because they lack the skills to get FreeBSD working. They don't. But because it's easier and it works better. Better drivers, better power management, more apps, etc.
But FreeBSD can be used as a desktop and if it had better power management, some faster wifi drivers, and a few other things, it'd be a pretty good one. And much of that would benefit servers, too.
[Author here]
> That's just trolling, and make you look stupid
Why is it that in the 21st century people interpret "I do not agree with this person" as "this person is an evil troll"?
> but apart from that, DMA was a lot of help with DOS, including with disk access.
Sure, it helped a little bit. A device doing DMA to or from RAM in hardware is quicker than PIO, even in an optimised loop. Generally, if double-buffering isn't required, and if there's no IRQ line clash, and subject to various other factors.
But that is not the point here.
The point is that when the Win95 or Win98 kernel said "load the file at block 0xDEADBEEF into RAM at 0xCAFE01" then the disk controller could take over and do it... but Windows then sat there and waited until it was done.
When WinNT did it, it issued the same instruction and then that thread paused and the kernel scheduled other threads in its place and the OS kept on working. Disk access might be stalled but there was also a global cache and accesses to the cache continued.
This had 2 visible side effects.
[1] If you hit Ctrl+Alt+Esc and watched task manager, as soon as the Intel PIIX driver (or whatever) loaded, you could immediately _see_ CPU usage on heavy disk activity fall from 90+% to 5-10%
[2] Not so much during OS boot because that is by nature disk bound, but if you loaded a big image file or an AVI file into a video editor, _that app_ stalled waiting for I/O to complete but _the rest of the OS kept working_.
These were true even on a uniprocessor PC but the effect was more pronounced on an SMP machine.
And DOS and Win9x could never ever do that. No kernel threads.
I have been mulling over an article provisionally entitled "Why I don't like KDE".
The snag is, to explain why its keyboard UI is broken, first I need to explain...
* How the Windows keyboard UI works, and why everyone should know it, and why while it is very important to people with multiple types of disabilities, it's valuable for all computer users to learn.
* How the Windows explorer works, how it evolved from Windows 95 to 98 to NT 4 to Win2K (and arguably the downwards slide since then), and then how to do basic customisations to do, which then illustrates how all the dozen+ FOSS copies of it all get it wrong to a greater or lesser extent.
That is a big list. It's _at least_ 4 articles' worth.
However it's becoming clear to me that most sighted users with good motor skills _do not know how to use it well_ and this very clearly includes inside Microsoft itself these days.
[Author here]
Regarding...
> "Professionalism" != "Anal-retentive control freakery"
I think you misread or misunderstand me.
I am talking *ONLY* about themes here. Skins or whatever you prefer to call them.
What this sentence means is: I don't download or apply or customise or tweak or otherwise mess around WITH THEMES. I tend to leave them on default. What that, in turn, means is that I don't really much care about themes and skins, so long as they aren't actively ugly.
KDE's are usually actively ugly and its themes are one of the things that puts me off KDE.
I do not like or use GNOME and only run it for testing purposes. I find it crippled and very confining as a desktop. But it *looks* great. Lovely plumage.
Outside of Unity I usually use Xfce. I often read complaint that it looks boring or dull or old-fashioned. I don't care.
Themes for me should be like incidental and soundtrack music in a film: if you notice it, it's bad. It should amplify emotion and set tone and if you consciously register it then the composer has failed. Source: a friend of mine, David Julyan, a soundtrack composer who worked a lot with Christopher Nolan.
I mention GNOME's looks because I do not like the functionality.
I mention KDE's because they distract me with their horrid jarring mix of RANDOMLY big BOLD _black_ fonts *WHICH* serve _no_ apparent purpose, combined with silly cartoonish icons at random, sometimes animé themed and sometimes not, something dull and grey and then SUDDENLY SCREAMING IN YOUR FACE IN TECHNOCOLOUR.
Oh, and two Help/About boxes, unrelated, and, you know, 5 start menus and 3 taskbar button tools and 76 options to tweak in 42 dialog boxes, but no, you can't have a panel spanning 2 screens, we took that out.
Don't misconstrue me. I am trying to be polite and positive about GNOME because lots of people use it. That doesn't mean I like it. Instead you need to think about why I feel the need to call out something relatively minor like wallpapers.
> Hit the meta key and type the name of what you want to open
Frankly that is trivial in KDE, Xfce, and the default in Windows and macOS.
That is not being keyboard-accessible. That is bare minimum acceptable functionality for 202x.
Being keyboard-accessible is supporting at least 80-90% of CUA.
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