Nameless Voice on 10/8/2020 at 15:27
You should be able to install the Cinnamon desktop on Ubuntu as well. It should offer you the choice of which installed desktop to use during login, if you have multiple installed.
(I haven't actually tried that with Ubuntu, but I have done it with a Fedora in the past and it was easy to switch between the two.)
Lockups in Linux are a huge pain, that's true. You usually have to switch to a terminal session (Ctrl+Alt+F2), then use terminal commands to kill the offending program, before switching back to your desktop session (normally Ctrl+Alt+F7.)
heywood on 10/8/2020 at 16:06
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop, that's the way to go. Very much like Windows, only it does it better than any modern Windows does. Probably better than even the "good" Windowses like 7.
There are other parts of Linux which are still terrible, but the desktop interface no longer is.
I haven't used Cinnamon in years. Is it finally able to handle a vertical panel properly, with adjustable width and clock and widgets properly drawn? That's been a pet peeve I've had about Linux desktops ever since we went from 4:3 monitors to 16:9. KDE was one of the first to support vertical panels, but it took them years to get it right, and KDE still feels clunky to me.
I'm so tired of the old Windows 95 and MacOS idioms that most Linux desktops stick with. Worse yet are the desktops that mix the two, like GNOME 2 (and derivatives) with it's Windows 95 taskbar on the bottom and MacOS-inspired menu bar that actually isn't a menu bar on top. And one feature that has almost disappeared from Linux desktops is the multi-desktop pager that displayed thumbnail images of each virtual desktop. I miss those.
We use Red Hat at work and I haven't suffered a lockup in a long time. We're still on RHEL 7 and we're stuck with that awful old desktop which I hate.
Quote Posted by icemann
I can't stand the file sorting system in Windows Explorer. In Windows 7 it would remember my viewing/sorting choices, with only on the rare occasion it reverting back and needing to be changed again. Ever since moving to Win 10, it reverts back daily. Grrrrr. Only a minor inconvenience yes I know, but it's the little things that all add up for a combined overall experience.
Yeah, that drives me nuts too, but I was having the same problem in Windows 7. In my case, it's not a daily occurrence, but it happens often enough to be annoying. And I haven't quite figured out the pattern of it; sometimes it seems random. Windows also forgets my folder type/template settings (General, Pictures, Music, etc.). You can set a default view for all folders of the same type/template, which gets stored in the registry. But it seems like per-folder preferences are not permanently stored, only cached, kind of like thumbnails. If so, a simple solution for that would be for Windows to store folder metadata in hidden files, rather than caching it.
MacOS is better in this regard. Ever since the beginning, remembering folder views was a sacrosanct principle of Finder.
Nameless Voice on 10/8/2020 at 17:07
I tried playing around with vertical panels, seems pretty awful. You only get the program icons, no titles, and are very limited to how wide you can make it (max 64 pixels.)
Might be able to get a custom panel applet that works better, I guess?
Yeah, the MacOS-inspired bar is the what I was talking about, that's awful. Gnome 3 tries to "fix" this by just now showing a taskbar at all, rather than getting rid of the useless MacBar.
You used to be able to get a fancy workspace switcher that displayed each workspace on different sides of a cube or other layouts. But the taskbar ones just show a "has windows" icon, they don't show a preview of what's actually on the desktop.
bobbyrfletc on 5/4/2021 at 23:15
Speaking about new and old technologies I would like to highlight phones. When I've got my first smartphone with a lot of apps and games, social platforms, and internet connection, I've thought that it is an incredible thing in my arms. But, when I saw that there are such apps that can be harmful to you or apps that can (
https://celltrackingapps.com/how-to-get-text-messages-from-another-phone-sent-to-mine/) get messages from your phone and send them to another one I realized that old cell phones gave us more privacy and we spent less time on different apps.
Jason Moyer on 6/4/2021 at 11:05
There are a couple I can think of off the top of my head, although they have significant "buts" attached to them.
Synthesizers are an obvious one, given the massive analog (and modular) resurgence of the past 10 years. The "but" to this, of course, is that many aspects of the construction of new synths has improved massively since they were last manufactured on a "large" scale in the 70's. Keybeds are significantly higher quality, construction methods are more efficient, circuitry is smaller and more durable, the microprocessors handling storage and CV control and such are infinitely cheaper/smaller/faster and enable DSP to be integrated in new ways, etc. Still, the basic circuit designs and ideas are 50 years old and were viewed as obsolete nearly 40 years ago so it's interesting to see manufacturers suddenly bringing back old/updated tech en masse. It's probably 30 years later than it should have been, although I suppose the cost of manufacturing this stuff and being able to sell it at a reasonable price/volume is a relatively new phenomenon.
Console TV's! Now, I'm not arguing for literal analog CRT console TV's (although I'd love it if someone would make CRT's again for retro gaming and video art people), but I absolutely miss having a TV that was basically a piece of furniture that you could set your cable boxes, vcr's, flowers (:cheeky:), etc. on top of. I'd absolutely buy a 40 or 50 inch LED that came in a thick, carved wooden frame, and with the weight/size savings you could add media storage into the console itself (hell, even just shelves on the sides of it would be cool). I'm probably the only person who would buy this but I still think it's a good idea.
For an old tech that has come back even though it's awful: vinyl records. I don't mean collecting stuff from the 60's or 70's or whatever, where the mixing and mastering was different, but rather the pressing of new LP's that are just digital recordings pressed into an environmentally unfriendly (and toxic to humans) material. I'm all for analog recording (a'la Steve Albini) because the results speak for themselves, and because it's a way of preserving the original sessions without having to worry about being able to access them 20 years from now. Seriously, good luck opening something that was done in a DAW more than 10 years ago, or getting all of the plugins used in the signal chain working, or having any automation or whatever working. But yeah, vinyl as a current medium is just awful on every level. If I were releasing music in a physical format, and it wasn't CD, I'd make a vinyl-style gatefold but include the music as a download or on a copy protection-free USB stick or something in a lossless format.
heywood on 6/4/2021 at 22:39
Plenty of older audiophiles stuck with vinyl records as their format of choice all the way through the CD years. But the vinyl resurgence started as sort of a hipster thing. If you live in a small city apartment, what can you collect and show off that doesn't take much space? Records.
I don't buy the argument that analog tape is a good way of preserving the original sessions. Not at all. For one thing, it degrades. But also, the availability of well functioning equipment to play multi-track tapes declines over time as well. With digital recordings, you really only need to worry about proprietary file formats. If the recordings are stored in an open format with a public specification, you can always recover them with no loss, even if it takes some work.
I definitely see the appeal of analog synths. There is something about playing with physical pots, switches, and patch cords that makes experimenting fun. I've tried playing with software synths and they just don't make me want to doodle with them for some reason.
Console TVs? Now that's something I didn't expect to hear. The obvious problem with integrating the TV into a piece of furniture is that you're coupling two different needs. That and people like to keep furniture around longer because it fits the room, but tend to change TVs more often as technology advances. I do think a panel that's integrated into a room design feature would be more aesthetically appealing than the usual black screen with black plastic border stuck on the wall or on a stand. But a console? I think I'll pass.
Aja on 6/4/2021 at 22:43
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
For an old tech that has come back even though it's awful: vinyl records. I don't mean collecting stuff from the 60's or 70's or whatever, where the mixing and mastering was different, but rather the pressing of new LP's that are just digital recordings pressed into an environmentally unfriendly (and toxic to humans) material.
Are you referring to that Benn Jordan video where he put an air quality meter next to his turntable and it went off when he pulled the record out of its sleeve? It seemed suspect to me. Not to mention that he starts nearly all of his videos with "I have no financial incentive for saying this; in fact, it could get me in trouble with [whoever in big industry]".
Anyway, I kind of agree with you, but the problem with purely digital music is that digital files degrade (like, a number of MP3s from when I ripped my entire CD collection no longer play) and even if you have a complicated RAID storage setup (which I don't), it's still not easy to find a simple, high-quality playback device. So you need a media computer or an expensive DAP or I don't even really know because every time I do the research, it seems there's no great single solution. So I'd rather have physical media of some kind.
I like CDs and actually own a dedicated CD player, but CDs can degrade too (I have some that have developed little holes in the reflective coating, that makes them unplayable). Vinyl is too big and too fragile and certainly doesn't sound better than digital although some vinyl versions have better mixes. But it does kind of force you to engage with the music in a way that other mediums don't. Really, I just wish that it wasn't the norm to charge $40 for a record. I blame the fact that every popular album from the 70s apparently needs to be repressed on 180 gram vinyl.
Nameless Voice on 7/4/2021 at 00:29
Quote Posted by Aja
digital files degrade
Wait, what?
No, they most certainly do not.
You might lose them if the physical media that you keep them on degrades - especially if you keep them on cheap burned CDs, or on old hard drives - but since they're just 1s and 0s, you can easily make perfect copies before that happens.
The only way that digital music might be considered to "degrade" is when technology marches on, and you realise you that didn't preserve the audio in good-enough quality - but keeping your audio in a lossless format like FLAC or WAVE avoids that problem. (Though, honestly, even with my semi-fancy headphones, I can't really hear the quality loss of e.g. 128kbps MP3, let alone anything higher.)
Aja on 7/4/2021 at 01:06
I dunno! I ripped my entire music collection years ago using EAC with error correction, and later on some of the files that used to play fine stopped working. I’d be glad to be proven wrong because it’s discouraged me from keeping a proper digital archive. I never really investigated what actually happened to the files. Maybe it was a different issue.
Kolya on 7/4/2021 at 08:28
Might have been harddrive corruption or a problem with the player software. Relevant XKCD: (
https://xkcd.com/1683/)