I find incrond works way better.

None.

Why? Erm, living by myself I don’t need to lock myself out ;)

Look up chroot

Mplayer can render to the terminal using aalib

Yes I have used that in the past but it’s way to finniky in operation as it sometimes registers a left or right click instead.

GNU Parallel

Unlock the power of multiple cores in your command lines!

Put your aliases in .bash_aliases

Make sure your .bashrc sources .bash_aliases like this:

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then . ~/.bash_aliases fi

I’ve tried hard to get libreoffice and dvddisaster to render in a terminal but for some reason it never works… 😏

Middle click in chrome…

If you want to use ctrl-v you need to the newer method of ctrl-shift-c first. It uses shift for the same reason windows does in a command prompt, ctrl-c is a reserved combination.

Not a Linux issue. Two different paradigms one older than the other, chose which is best to use.

On my laptop’s I use ctrl-shift-c and ctrl-shift-v due to not having a middle click. With a mouse I middle click instinctively.

Well if we think about the chronology, If GNU/Linux never existed I’d be using Windows still.

If however tomorrow it somehow became impossible to run Linux then I would probably switch to one of the BSD’s, as well as Risc OS Open. However, the method it becomes impossible to run Linux is important:

If it is merely illegal, I’ll just run GNU/Linux. If it is blocked by the TPM, I’ll just use old hardware which has no TPM or one that can be disabled. If it’s just the Linux kernel that the TPM stops running, I’ll finally install GNU/Hurd, or use the older hardware (seeing as my laptops were made in 2014 and my PC was built in 2016 I’m already there).

If I absolutely had to I would have no problems using much older hardware. I started on a 486 and can easily build that again, I have a few pentiums too. Obviously these systems won’t be doing web browsing but they can do everything else, document writing, email, IRC, and of course programming.

If I’m pushed hard enough I’d revert back to using my Risc PC and 8 bit computers.

So as far as your question is concerned, I was converted to the Free Software ideals when I found this “Linux thing” back in 1997. Nothing is stopping me from computing that way. Mac OS is obviously out of the question, even if I hadn’t discovered Linux it’s (MacOS) interface is terrible, the company is terrible, the hardware is overpriced and underpowered and unreliable. I also wouldn’t go back to windows for anything other than gaming which I do once in a while.

You will get an error

What? This crazyness is coming over from Windows?

All colours are and should be under the full control of the user, as it always has been so. So called “accent colours” removed critical functionality from Windows as well as breaking the UI since windows 8.

As a software tester of 10 years and a CS Degree holder, I certainly would have never passed software that didn’t meet these usability tests.

I’m colourblind. I must have full and unhindered colour modification options, the GUI will look the way I decide based on what I want and how my eyes perceive it. This especially means I must have full control over titlebar colours and any other colours that used to differ based on window focus.

At work in Win 10 I have chosen an “accent colour” which seems to me a massive limitation, having had used superior GUI’s since Win 3.1 where the user is able to chose and adjust anything from the colour of title bars when focused or unfocused to the font used on numerous UI elements and widgets.

The problem is simple. Windows 10 grants (I say that in a sarcastic way) the user have the option to chose a so called “accent colour”. This however fails to do two things. Firstly it forces the design choices of the development team onto every user, something that is clearly wrong for Linux as history shows it was a plus over windows. Secondly, the accent colour fails to address several UI modal changes, completely obliterating them yet the modal elements remain part of the UI!!!

How in windows 10 can I tell if a window has focus or not? In Win 3.1 to 7 and anything running on Linux it was easy: the title bar colour was different. But since Win 8 that was dropped, windows still have focus and modal dialogs but you, the user, can not determine which has what and when.

Now, like I said I’m colour blind which means maybe there is a difference but I can’t see it. So what do I do? Well I randomly start typing commands into the wrong powershell window, or I want to control the browser using the keyboard only to discover that Outlook has focus and has started doing things in response to me banging keys. I have two monitors at work and focus moves between them and windows gives me no indication what has focus at all. Nothing I can see, out of the corner of my eye that is.

Thing is there is just one difference, the focused window might have a bold titlebar text or not. Note I bolded that. But I can’t see this difference without pixel peeping.

Every day I have to put up with this in the windows world and it annoys the hell out of me because the essential functionality was always there and has been removed because someone tossed a coin*. Maybe GNOME won’t fall into the trap of preventing full customisation of the UI, I hope so, user accessibility needs require it. I moved away from GNOME when they moved away from the desktop metaphor as I thought the alternative was terrible, and it still is, so this won’t affect me but it will affect loads of new colourblind users from the start.

The user has the last say and should be able to override anything.

HCI (Human Computer Interaction) rules exist for a good reason, stop chucking them away and make them options if needed.

And finally, take it from an actual colourblind computer users and electronics geek. Colour blindness accessibility filters DO NOT WORK. They simply don’t because everyone has a different kind/degree/combination of colour blindness. Normal visioned people are easy to demonstrate to as all we have to do is apply such a filter in reverse and they are like “Whoa what the hell” yet they fail to see (pun intended) that it’s a simulation that barely represents our individual colour ranges. Windows 10 has a colourblind mode, does nothing. Android has one, which has me try and sort colours to determine my specific adjustments, works better but still barely is used by myself.

The only fix is to give the user full control over all colours because then they, they can adjust the UI for the way they see the universe.

Here is an example from the linked blog. See this GUI. Which window has focus? The one on top? Well if GNOME prevents windows from always remaining above others regardless of focus, yes that would be the case. But if GNOME does allow focus to windows beneath others, well, which has focus? I cant tell.

I had intended on uploading images but that seems to not be working with this post/lemmy instance at the moment. Basically if you look at the blog there are examples. First of all the “pink” example, well that shades of grey to my eyes as pink rarely is a colour I can notice, most pinks are grey. Further down are examples of a stop clock application. Looking at the image I see most of the clocks digits are disabled, thats what grey means, disabled elements. However it turns out that they may be pink? Only the seconds are enabled, this is highly confusing as why would anyone be allowed to think a clock has digits disabled? It makes no sense and has me figure out the answer, which is bad UI design from the start. All the digits should be the same colour. It’s basic HCI rules there.

Further down you see the screenshots of the entire desktop with a window above another. In none of those examples can I tell which has focus. I can not assume its the one on top, plenty of UI’s have “keep on top” functionality, if I’m coming from something else why would I assume GNOME to be different?

Accent colours are bad. They force users to use static themes and UI choices made by other people, that is bad UI design, really bad. Windows 10 is lambasted for it often. If you are going to do it, do it right. The “accent” feature should be part of a simple customisation mode, but it all gets overridden by the advanced tickbox.

I see so many confused here. Unsurprising considering so many have no idea what the GPL is, what Free Software is, why it’s different, very different from “Open Source” software due to copyleft.

Everyone should go read the GPL, read version 2 as it reads very well, version 3 just beefs up version 2 to handle certain situations but its a bit less of a nicer read.

Learn what Free Software is: https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

And listen to a few of Richard Stallmans speeches which he has to continue giving because of this “Open Source” thing that confused everything. Note that the FSF, Richard Stallman and the GPL have nothing to do with Open Source at all. It is the Open Source Initiative that accepts the GPL as a “Open Source” license but not all Open SOurce licenses are Free Software licenses.

Below is a link to the Software Freedom Conservancy who have been talking to Redhat / IBM for years about this very issue before RH/IBM turned tail and stabbed everyone in the back:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

Redhat dont have a legal leg to stand on however it will cost you to prove it. You should win, but it will cost you. I am happy to purge any RH software from my systems at work, I was doing that anyway due to what happened to Centos.

Redhat have become the new SCO in essence.

Incorrect, redhat are simply saying that to get any source you have to have a centos stream subscription, which would be correct as if you have centos stream binaries you need a subscription anyway, so basically you only get the centos stream source on request if you actually happened to be a centos stream customer.

Now, what happens to centos stream users who used to be subscribing, well they should still be able to get the source for a reasonable fee (to cover distribution costs) for the binary code they have to hand. That means that if they are on an old centos and they want the source for project X version 2.3, and project X v2.3 is under a copyleft license, legally RedHat have a requirement to provide it upon request, but they have no legal requirements to provide source for a version that is from a later version of centos if the customer doesn’t actually have the binaries.

So if they can somehow keep future binary versions of centos code out of the hands of non-paying users they don’t have to give source to versions they don’t have. I don’t think they can do that easily.

This is only for copyleft code. This only applies to code they applied (note I didn’t say contributed) to copyleft code. Thus if they modified GNU Grep, their modifications are under the GPL, thus the code must be provided to anyone who asks for it if they have the binary. But if it is code unique to centos or applied to a project that isn’t under a copyleft licence, or is a project under a copyleft licence that allows non-copyleft modules or linking etc, they don’t have to give any of that.

The GPL is pretty simple, I used to read V2 as a kid in the 90’s and saw it like a Bible lol. V3 is more thorough and not as nice a read but it’s still very clear. However, not all software in a Linux distribution is protected by a copyleft licence like the GPL, this is the line that separates Free Software from Open Source. Welcome to the big problem of Open Source. You all want source code? Well Free Software gives you the rights for it and uses copyright law to protect those rights. But Open Source came about because that idea was incompatible with business who wanted the opposite. So you should expect Redhat to honour their legal obligations under the GPL but you won’t get a source version of centos as not everything in centos is GPL, some will be MIT, or Apache or BSD, and they are not copyleft licences and they give you no right to the source code at all.

Seems to me that a lot of people need to brush up on their Free Software, Richard Stallman, FSF, GNU, Open Source history. Free Software is Open Source as defined by the OSI (you don’t know who they are? Brush up like I said) but much that is Open Source is not Free Software and even more is not copyleft.

If you think that copyleft ideology applies to anything considered as “Open Source”, well you don’t have a clue what anything is actually about and you need to do some reading and listening of some Richard Stallman speeches because this confusion is precisely what he and the FSF have been combatting for years only to get barely anywhere because of how marketable “Open Source” is.

So again remember, not all of centos is copyleft. What is copylefted is protected but you won’t get a buildable source version of Centos unless you are a subscriber as many of its parts are not legally available to you, you can get all the GPL copyleft code and centos specific modifications, but a working OS you won’t get.

The GPL is very simple and it simply makes it impossible to do what you suggest RHEL are trying to do.

The don’t have to allow you to download the source code without asking, but they must provide full source code when asked. The licence say’s it in very simple terms, the code must be provided when requested and a reasonable fee can be charged for covering distribution costs. Basically they can charge you for the cost of postage of a set of DVDs full of source code.

It’s all in the preamble. V3 is a bit more complicated to combat certain things like tivoisation that came about after gpl V2 came out but it doesn’t allow Redhat to avoid giving the source when asked, but they don’t have to give it when not asked.

I literally can not think of anything software wise, especially FOSS as I use the command line a lot and those tools and concepts go back decades. Being a retro computer geek I can list a ton of old proprietary systems or software that I consider perfectly usable.

Oh wait, I just thought of one: RiscOS Open. The best OS for ARM besides Linux, all my Pi’s run on it and it natively uses BBC BASIC, although not Free as in Freedom BBC BASIC, or even BASIC in general is a programming language that has a lot to offer.

Although not software I think the biggest thing I have in mind would be Optical Media. Most consider it obsolete, even against data tape, but I use it extensively precisely because it has features no other media possesses (ignoring LTO tape). Featurea such as many decades of longevity, cheapness (even today it’s cheaper than equivalent sized flash media) and above all it’s the only media that has read only properties.

SSD’s, HDD’s are not close to archival grade, only optical and tape (ignoring film and the ultimate archival media, vellum) are.

All my data that must be recovered at all costs is archived to BD-R, which in turn is backed up to LTO tape, which in turn is backed up into the cloud. Both the bd-r and LTO tape are written and finished days before the data has been uploaded to the cloud! Because my upload speed is 20Mb/s maximum the old SCSI LTO 4 drive writing to tape at 60MB/s wipes the floor with it, the bd-r records much slower than that but still is done in a fraction of the time.

Maybe if I’m ever able to get 1Gb upload bandwidth I’ll use the cloud more, but at the moment it’s running at a slower speed than my first 486 with it’s 210MB HDD!

Edit: Ah! Wait, I forgot to mention Window Maker. I use Window Maker as my window manager. Works like a charm and hasn’t changed in looks one bit since the 90’s

GNU Parallel can also run jobs across the network on other machines as well as the local CPUs

The man is my life lol.

I discovered GNU/Linux in school in the 90’s, then as I got better access to the internet at home and Linux magazines I learned everything about RMS and GNU and the FSF.

I latched on to it all. Apart from retro systems with their various proprietary operating systems I have no time for any proprietary software if I can help it.

The Retro systems get a pass because I’m interested in old computers.

Many like myself don’t like the old idea of downloading stuff that “just runs”. It’s too much going back to the old ways with windows where you randomly just downloaded a binary off a website and ran it.

Basically it’s the equivalent of sideloading apps on mobile devices. I won’t do that either unless it is required.

Now I do have one such app, in appimage which is my preference anyway. KDEnlive, which I run as an appimage Vs the Debian package only because I’m on Debian 10 on my main machine and have yet to pencil in the upgrade time.

Now, GNU Guix is interesting. Cryptographically secure and verified compilation (or pre-compilation) of source code straight from GitHub etc. Now, that will be more like it!

I have in 10 years of being on Signal never managed to get a single person to be upgraded from SMS to a proper Signal contact.

Plenty of WhatsApp contacts.

I was using Signal to replace the default SMS app on my phone specifically because it was Free Software and I trusted it more as the SMS app. It had nothing to do with privacy, you don’t get that on SMS, but to do with trusting the code.

Alas I’m now using the built in app and have uninstalled Signal.