I was completely confused when I recently discovered this behavior. I've been using middle-click to open tabs in macOS and Windows for years, and I could not understand why it automatically pasted whatever was in my clipboard.
I think it makes total sense to change the default to be aligned with the other platforms, and leave power-users the choice to keep it enabled if they wish.
Why would middle click not open tabs? You middle click a link to open it in a new tab, you middle click a text box to paste into it. Neither interfere with the other. On windows, you can middle click anywhere on the page (except links, ofc) to go into a scrolling mode where dragging your mouse around changes the scrolling direction. I don't think many people use that feature, but it's there, and doesn't work on linux.
> I think it makes total sense to change the default to be aligned with the other platforms
I have been using Linux for 20 years, and I don't remember a time where this did not exist. I don't see a reason to change it now "to be aligned with the other platforms".
If I wanted to run on Windows or macOS, I would run on Windows or macOS. No reason to try to get Linux to become Windows or macOS IMO.
> I think it makes total sense to change the default to be aligned with the other platforms, and leave power-users the choice to keep it enabled if they wish.
If you want to use another platform, use another platform. Desktop Linux doesn't need to conform to them.
> I think it makes total sense to change the default to be aligned with the other platforms, and leave power-users the choice to keep it enabled if they wish.
I think it makes total sense to not use cmd-c/cmd-v in Firefox on mac to be aligned with the other platforms, and leave power-users the choice to keep it enabled if they wish.
Keep in mind the desktop env knows when you are left clicking a link or middle clicking. So on linux, usually it's left click to go to a link or middle click to open link in a new tab.
Middle click to open new tabs is compatible with middle click to paste.
I'm a big lover of Kotlin Multiplatform, but I think this is pretty cool anyway. I could imagine making a native Swift library shared between the platforms for memory-sensitive work. I'm not sure about using it to write an app's entire business logic, KMP is going to be more mature for a while for this.
I want to know this as well. My only interaction with a Kotlin Multiplatform app is Jetbrains Toolbox, and it's slow to start, has a lot of input lag and overall feels sluggish.
Jvm desktop is honestly the target with the best support. I always build on desktop during mobile dev first because I don't need to deal with connecting a phone or emulator. Second resizable windows by default is so helpful when building for many screen sizes. Also it has hot-reload now
I can easily see a novice user coming from Windows accidentally getting into the edit mode of Plasma and being completely confused. I like KDE as an advanced user but I wouldn't install it on my grandma's laptop.
I agree that it would be great to have it as a first-class citizen in more distros, but I guess the maintenance burden is not negligible. I'm glad Fedora promoted it though.
The average Linux user is not your grandma and lets not overstate how easy it is to mess up your KDE config. Most of the config ui in KDE is delightful compared to other desktop environments, and most non-technical users would shy away from even trying to fiddle with technical stuff. And those that do fiddle and mess up are likely to have a technical person at hand to help them, because someone had to install Linux for them in the first place.
KDE is a much more sensible default for the highly technical person who is likely to install Linux themselves. There are other great options if you want something more locked down and noob proof. KDE really is the most relevant choice for default for most distros atm.
Playing devil's advocate, KDE settings are clear but there might be a possibility for a "Advanced Mode" button (with a first-time click warning) on the top-right of the "Quick Settings" screen that opens up when we launch the Settings. That can hide the "risky" stuff (e.g. "Window Management" etc). There might be value in adding a "Lock Panels" options to handle accidental modifications/removal etc.
I agree with the “Advanced Mode” button. That’d solve a great deal of the issues that KDE Settings suffers.
On the other hand I think it could use a fair deal of work on the clarity front. There are a number of settings that are confusing or ambiguous even for some technical users.
The problem with advanced modes is that it is easy for a chaos monkey to get into them, and at scale that will happen all the time.
A mitigation for advanced modes is to have a big bright red "get me the hell out of this to a normal state" button. Making it easy for a human to get back to the normal steady-state reduces the risk of an advanced mode and gently encourages exploration and experimentation, if it is always trivial to get back to what you're used to. This means that configuration changes can't ever be fully destructive though, which requires quite a bit of design and engineering.
I've had the opposite experience. I installed KDE on a new desktop I built for my mom, and outside of a handful of growing pains (mainly things Windoze had vendor locked), she's been happy as a lark with it. She hasn't gone very far off the beaten path and really doesn't have too much of a need to.
For novice users there's already other more opinionated environments anyway. I get KDE because it's powerful not because I want my grandma to use it.
In fact I don't understand why people are rooting for Linux on the desktop. I personally don't even want that to happen because it would quickly become so dumbed down and commercialised that it would become the same trash that is windows and mac. Because normal users just want to pay someone to take care of things for them and that someone will want to make ever more money. Meaning app stores, services, lock-in, advertising and such crap. So what you get is basically like ChromeOS. Easy mode for users, totally locked in to their warm and fuzzy walled garden, total corporate surveillance and completely evil to power users like you and me.
I'm very happy if the majority of consumers stays away because their wants and needs are completely opposite to ours. All the things that make Linux great will not apply to whatever they will use.
20 years ago, my late dad (then aged 69) had a desktop PC that couldn't run Windows anymore in his store business.
Problem solved: Installed the latest Slackware stable (with yours truly as root for essential maintenance) equipped with the latest KDE 3.x environment.
Had no complaints.
I assume that Locale.ROOT will stay backwards-compatible, whereas theoretically Locale.US could change. What if it changes its currency in the future, for example, or its date format?
Yup. This is a common pattern for official EU pages to link to the various translations of the actual text using the country code. Another example: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2022/2380/oj
Nor does Y-bar's example from EUR-Lex, where the language list is below the catalogue information. It being right at the top in a banner of hyperlinks with 2-letter codes is not actually a part of the pattern. The E.U. Parliament and E.U. Court of Justice use drop-down menus with the full language names, for example.
Well one is a random directive from 2022 about radio equipment marketing; and the other, hyperlinked by outadoc in the first place, was the very text of the European Union Public Licence version 1.2 as PDF and text/plain formats in 23 languages, with the EUPL version 1.1 as PDF in 22 languages at the bottom of the page.
If you wanted an apt one, instead of a random radio equipment marketing directive, that was specifically EUR-Lex, there's https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dec_impl/2017/863/oj which is the E.U. Commission decision promulgating version 1.2 of the EUPL.
As noted elsethread, neither one, nor the E.U. Parliament nor E.U. Court of Justice, does things exactly the way that Javier Casares does them.
Also note that outadoc wasn't actually asking how to read the text, in the first place. outadoc was pointing out that Javier Casares's unofficial copy here does not anywhere hyperlink (in order to provide a source) to the official europa.eu. WWW site, which outadoc then pointed to. Nor does it hyperlink to the aforelinked E.U. Journal entry.
That one's cool. It started out wrong, so I just kept asking it "You sure?" until it decide to break out the calculator (Python). After that it's answer didn't change anymore and it was very sure.
I tried again, in another chat with different numbers. And got the same pattern, and a message that my data analysis limit was exceeded. I guess that's why it doesn't always break out the calculator.
In very limited testing (due to the limit) telling it to use the calculator for difficult calculations works fine. I guess OpenAI could use that in their student mode.
Out of curiosity I went a bit deeper on this. I didn't expect it could do this without a calculator, because of the nature of the technology. But I still wanted to see what it would do. So I asked it:
> Me: I have these two numbers: 3452346 and 343424. Can you multiply them exactly, but without using Python or another calculator?
I proceeded to breakdown the smaller number in 300,000 + 40,000 + 3,000 + 400 + 20 + 4 and doing each step as follows:
> Calculate each partial product:
> 3,452,346 × 300,000 = ?
> Multiply 3,452,346 × 3 = 10,357,038
> Then multiply by 100,000 = 1,035,703,800,000
I checked each step, and it got those correct. It then added the partial results together.
> Final result: 1,185,618,472,704
> So: 3,452,346 × 343,424 = 1,185,618,472,704
> No Python, no calculator — just a bit of patience and the power of breakdown.
(That answer is correct.)
I am honestly surprised that it got that right. A teacher would need to break it down a bit further, both to calculate and to explain, but it's pretty much there. (I also didn't ask it to teach, just to do a calculation.)
Both humans and LLMs fail to multiply those numbers in their heads.
Some people can multiply them using a special algorithm. Either for mind or for pen and paper. Your example shows that LLM knows some of those tricks and can carry out the task using "pen and paper" (context in this case).
Both humans and LLMs are able to do that multiplication correctly using a calculator.
Information is never 100% reliable no matter the source, but for LLMs certain types of information is less reliable than other types. Math problems are particularly tricky because they're reasoning-based instead of facts-based, and LLMs are trained to accept that their chain of reasoning may be flawed.
My takeaway is that if you just need to do calculations, use a calculator.
ChapGPT and company (currently) have an inherent disability dealing with mathematics as they are a language based models. So in a way, this is an unfair test.
I think it makes total sense to change the default to be aligned with the other platforms, and leave power-users the choice to keep it enabled if they wish.