I know submissions are not meant to contain modifications to article titles, but would it be so bad to have added "at 6mph" and/or "minor injuries" to the title?
For desktop use? Windows XP. It's got the right balance of aesthetics and practicality. Windows ME also works, but is more utilitarian. Anything after 7 is just absolute garbage.
I feel like the true scandal beneath all of these big government contracts is not necessarily the money spent, but actually how poor the services received are.
I have worked with many "big agency" developers and can tell you categorically that they are more often than not absolutely terrible at their jobs.
If we're talking about mass adoption of Linux then there really has to be no concept of even "picking a camp". The vast majority of users - even techy people - will not understand what a window manager is, never mind be capable of choosing one.
Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
Hard disagree. You can run the same programs on any DE or Window Manager or even without one (on pure X11 for example). That's not a hurdle it's a feature.
Users who don't know about the feature can just use a pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these things.
Linux user for decades, but headless since the early aughts. Decided to dip my toes back into the desktop space with Mint Cinnamon.
I can mirror or run lots of phone apps on Windows or macOS, but ironically, not Linux. I decide to run an Android emulator so I can use some phone-only apps.
I read up on reviews, then download and install Waydroid as the top contender.
Does Waydroid work? No. It fails silently launching from the shortcut after the install. Run it from the command line, and, nope, it's a window manager issue. Mint Cinnamon uses X11, not Wayland, and Waydroid apparently needs... Wayland support.
OK, I log out, log into Mint with Wayland support, then re-launch Waydroid. My screen goes into a fugue state where it randomly alternates between black and the desktop. Try a variety of things, and I guess this is just how it is. Google and try any number of fixes, end up giving up.
Yes, that's my old pal Linux on the Desktop. Older, faster and wiser, but still flaky in precisely the same ways.
You can't run X11 programs on Wayland without Xwayland.
Likewise you cannot run Wayland programs on X11 without a wayland compositor like Cage (a wayland kiosk) or Weston. Both run as a window on X11 inside of which Waydroid works just fine.
It's an odd complaint that incompatible software is incompatible.
I did. I agree it's not obvious.
But you cannot run OpenGL, Vulkan, Glide or DirectX on Windows either without having the proper hardware and software installed.
So yeah. Waydroid needs wayland. Anbox runs on X11.
> OpenGL, Vulkan, Glide or DirectX on Windows either without having the proper hardware and software installed
Windows will run at least basic OpenGL and DirectX in software if you don't have hardware to accelerate that, and those software renderers are included as part of the OS. It'll run like garbage, but it will run.
Bluestacks works fine for this on PC and Mac, and I've seen casuals use that because they want to play their gacha game on a bigger screen.
Waydroid compleatly fails in comparison, while giving you no pointers on what the problem might be or how to solve it unless you're already a Linux power user.
Headless daily driver? Hardcore. What do you use for a browser?
I've tried it as a challenge for a couple of days (lynx, mutt, some other TUI stuff) and it made some things like Vim stick (although that may have as much to do with that challenge as Tridactyl did). But I couldn't last longer than a week. It does free you from the burden of system requirements. CPU: Optional.
w3m can even display images in a linux console if you have the proper drivers or use KMSCON. It unwieldy but surprisingly usable. And my laptop battery runs for 8 hours which is quite amazing for a Zen1.
I imagine your display is almost entirely black for the majority of the time, with your (most probably) LCD backlight blasting away, trying its hardest to get a few thousandths of its light output through the few pixels on the screen that it can escape! XD
Brightness down, LAN card disabled (the media sense on RTL cards sucks about 1.5W with no cable plugged in, wtf? Thats more than the Wifi needs)
And powertop (great piece of software, thanks Intel) tuned to the max + powersave scheduler.
All that on Windows or KDE results in about 4-5h of battery though. So fbdev must be somehow really frugal.
> That's cause you're using a distro like mint which is using older builds of stuff.
The context here is that I was commenting on the parent's assertion that one "can just use a pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these things." Nope!
> It will continue to degrade for you unless you fully switch to a Wayland DM. Anything built on X11 is basically deprecated now and no one is building on it anymore.
That's my impression as well, and again, with the 2nd most popular Linux distro using X11 by default and with "experimental" Wayland support, that only reinforces my rebuttal of parent's claim.
> Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
Just like Linux. You can run most if not all apps in any DE. Yes gnome will look ugly, but that's gnome's way of doing things. If you pick a decent DE, you will have most basic apps using the same styling, and the rest have CSD anyway.
Each GUI toolkit has its own specialties, but you'll use at most two of them, and they will be kept in separate apps. (Apart from flatpak portals which use gtk instead of the system's).
Windows has 3-5 different UI/UX layers within the same application ... And the rest have CSD anyway, so they look the same no matter the OS.
> Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
I mean this is a solved problem on linux using modern distributions like NixOS or even 'normal' distros with flatpak, appimage, etc. I haven't had to deal with anything like this in years.
The windows UIs are way more different than linux was. There was a time in the 90s where UIs were expected to follow platform specifics. These days, most UIs don't and they're almost kind of like the branding. Thus, this is not as big a deal as you're making it out to be. If anything, things like the gnome apps and gtk4 are more consistent than any windows app.
No, it's not about users picking a camp, it's about developers.
It's been a long, long time since I've seen an application utterly fail to load because it's a GTK/QT/etc framework running under a totally different DE.
Gnome apps look ugly as hell under KDE[0], but they still work. As a user, you don't need to know or care in any way. It'll run on your machine.
[0]I don't know if they're ugly because of incompatibility or if that's just How Gnome Is. I suspect the latter
> Generator 5kw - you want something with a higher duty cycle than you need so it can run for extended periods
Note that fossil fuel can age out, even with stabilizer.
There are dual- and tri-fuel generators out there that can use natural/methane gas and/or propane. Consider propane as you can get pretty big bottles and it does not expire so can sit around for long periods of time.
yeah used to manage data centers, diesel breaks down after a while, petrol even faster.
you can put in additives to extend the life, and specialized storage can squeak even more out, but ultimately you can't plan on it being good past 12 months, maybe as low as 5-6 if conditions aren't great.
we ran / tested the generators weekly, both just to exercise them and confirm they're good, but also just to burn off old fuel.
If you have a solar panels, a battery, and generator, it would be good idea to figure out how to hook them all together. Using the generator near its full output, to charge the battery, will use far less fuel than idling it all day.
Even if things are bad enough for iodine pills, they are only really needed for children. Once you hit your mid teens, your thyroid is fully developed and not pulling in enough iodine to worry about radioactive isotopes.
I presume that radiation is why the Ukrainian brought it up.
The article did mention using it for treating water, but it's not very good at that, and it tastes awful. Reverse osmosis works much, much better and it doesn't need to be a large permanently installed system; portable gravity-fed versions readily available.
I was thinking the other day that ALL drones SHOULD be considered LIVE explosives. It's probably never a good idea to handle one if you're not trained.
Last march i was at SxSw and the police drones over head were a first for me. I was in this large crowd of people, and thought "yeah i dont like this". How do i know they're not just some bad actors drone with red and blue lights?
I think my exposure to casual discussions of how to arm drones with my Ukrainian friend, and the videos we've all seen on Reddit about drones in Ukraine, have really made their presence feel unwelcome.
It depends on a number of factors about legality, but the hardware to make a drone that doesn't have software forcing it to follow the law is cheap and plentiful. Its not particularly hard to get either, even with the drone ban.
For ~$200 you can build a very good FPV drone that can carry a dangerous payload and travel at highway speeds. Another ~$200 buys you the video receiver and a controller.
Warfare yes, but that's all warfare that's terrifying. Similarly you can make a point that for $10 you can buy a knife that can be used in all different morbid crimes.
FPV drones as a fun hobby in the rest of the world has had, in the last 10 years since it became somewhat popular, a total of zero fatalities or serious injuries. Don't let the irrational fear guide you towards further unnecessary regulation that makes others' lives worse.
A toddler lost an eye, several hospitalizations of unrelated bystanders, multiple aircraft damaged in midair collisions, and an attempted assassination of a world leader are some of the highlights. Not exactly a squeaky clean record with no “serious injuries”, even if you ignore the intentional assassination attempt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_aerial_vehicl...
I think FPV and drones are awesome, and have built several myself. It is pretty hard to argue that they are not also very dangerous in the wrong hands. Are there more dangerous things in the world? Sure, but that doesn’t mean people should ignore an easy attack vector. Given the temperature of things currently, I would be incredibly nervous to hear a drone at a protest or political event.
Regulations are coming whether regular Joe wants them or not. Drones had moved from toy hobby to dealing with weapons and explosives level of scrutiny and this is not reverting anytime soon.
I saw writing on the wall and donated in 2022 my dji drone to Ukrainian army, hopefully it was used well for defense of their homeland. I don't want to have a hobby that I need to do covertly and illegally, and last thing I want to do during vacations is dealing with bureaucracy.
is the last point correct?
"Get familiar with remote detonation with drones, these are what we use to set off the molotovs:"
seems off for this list, like way off and more on military/offence side of type of thing?
and why would you need a 300m+ ethernet cable in a disaster?
Totally valid use case for sure, and we discussed this because I do have a Starlink dish, but honestly, in a conflict with the US...I don't think a) I'd want to use starlink and b) i'd expect it to work.
Ethernet cable is a high quality cable usable for various other purposes. That includes low voltage power line, such as 12V from the car to phone charger in the house, solar panel wiring, basic tripwire alarms, command relays in the yard from the house, basic audio intercom with your neighbors when phone lines are down, etc.
Plus the obvious ethernet repairs: lines broken by fallen trees/branches in a storm, video camera cables cut by thieves, install new survillance cameras, move existing ones.
Self-supporting ethernet cable is also a decent clothesline when your dryer is not working.
In his case i didn't actually bother asking about the cat6 because i already had a huge reel in my garage, but I can think of cases such a remotely mounting satellite dish' and maybe connecting buildings to each other.
The molotov didn't seem out of range for me honestly. Firstly because I know he was one of the first people flying drones for defence, and now they've been mass producing their own for a few years. I have to admit, it seems pretty rational to want to fight back in any way possible.
Funny, not funny, this friend and I met up in early 2020 and had a beer down the road. He was telling me he'd rented his apartment in Liviv and was moving here next week. He had to go home to get some things, hand over the unit, and then he'd be back.
Next week was the pandemic, borders closed. He never left, and now he /still/ cant.
Let politicians fight and die in their own wars. If russia "visited" my country, I'd follow it with a drink in my hand from the bahamas. No piece of dirt or earth is worth dying for, ever.
> No piece of dirt or earth is worth dying for, ever.
If no one ever defends the dirt, the pieces of earth where you can enjoy a drink in peace and freedom will shrink over time as the aggressors will continue to gobble up land because of the lack of defending.
They keep moving forward, you keep moving back, until you have no where to retreat to.
Come back to this comment in a few years and think about whether something significant has changed for those people who did not sacrifice their lives for a meaningless battle.
People are more important than the state. If they are not ready to defend him, why should they be forced? You can offer money or other valuables in return, such as fame, a pension, or a position, but if a person doesn't want to, why should they do it?
> Come back to this comment in a few years and think about whether something significant has changed for those people who did not sacrifice their lives for a meaningless battle.
My family is from Eastern Europe: if people had not fought "meaningless" battles then the land would have been ruled by genocidal maniacs. As it stand my grandmother almost ended up in an oven.
My very existence is the result of the battles having meaning, that people fighting matters.
At that time, the Genplan OST implied the almost complete extermination and the enslavement of a small number of the remaining people.
And also going back to the second part of the top commentary. At that time, people had a great motivation to defend their homeland and their loved ones. The survival of the country and the survival of the people in it were inextricably linked.
The current conflict has no such connection. The existence or cessation of the existence of the state is not related to the existence of people in it. Many of whom found life in a completely different country.
There were already volunteers, mercenaries, those who fell for a good salary. Why force those who actively avoid it?
Russia doesn't just "visit" your country. Lookup what Ruskiy Mir (Russian world) really means, basically your country gets subjugated by the Russians and I'm not talking about civilized or professional Russian forces - I'm talking about drunk and poor 20yo boys from a remote Russian villages that are now seeing the spoils of western civilization for the first time (do lookup what happened in Bucha, Kyiv suburbs in 2022 at the onset of invasion). Then of course the refusal of the Russians to recognize any other culture or language...the list goes on and on. So - yes, you could escape with a drink but then "If Not Me, Then Who"?
This is a lie, please stop spreading those. There are no "all barbed wire" borders, no anti-personnel mines, "guards with automatic weapons" sounds like some meme from 80s video games (which border guards anywhere in the world don't have some rifle with automatic fire mode?). Young people from Ukraine can currently travel free as far as I know.
You were thinking about russia, weren't you. Its not true even for that shithole, but much closer.
Very unlikely. Men of ages 18-60 are forbidden to leave Ukraine since February 27 or 28 of 2022. Women cannot cross the border since 2023.
Of course, there should be some exceptions. For example, some people need to go abroad to bring Western supplied munitions, officials can leave to visit other countries, etc.
But almost 100% of the population cannot leave Ukraine under any circumstances.
I have spoken with several Ukrainian women who have crossed the border several times since 2023. They live and work in Poland or Czechia, but go visit Ukraine once or twice a year. Note they're Ukrainian citizens, and do not have Czech nor Polish citizenship.
I don't follow Ukrainian laws closely. I remember they allowed young men of ages 18-22 to cross the border in August 2025 (!). That caused enormous lines on the borders as the first day after this law 11,000 young men fled the country.
But that only about men of age 18-22. Men of age 22-60 still cannot leave the country. And 18-22 couldn't leave the country for three years.
Honest question: why do you comment when you clearly have no idea what you are talking about? You make all kinds of false claims, and then people who actually know have to correct you.
You skipped the part where I said I work with Ukrainians? I work with them on a weekly basis for 13 years.
> Can you show an Ukrainian law that allows men to freely cross the border?
Did I say he crossed it legally? He crossed it illegally of course, which according to you was impossible due to guards with automatic rifles, drones and anti-personnel mines.
> half of my family lives in Ukraine.
My bet: You haven't spoken with them in years, because they cut connections due to your political views. Just as I will now.
The world we're headed for there is no "other place" to escape to. Many people's view of survival during collapse ultimately assumes the existence of a fairly large "safe haven" space for which they just need to survive until they get there.
That depends on a lot of personal things. I remember a Ukrainian I personally know, leaving after the 2014 invasion.
When Russia was doing "exercises" at their border in 2022, I asked them in a meeting what they felt (guys living in Lviv). Most of them thought Russia would have done it in 2014 already, and now it didn't make much sense. Only 1 person responded he filled up his gas tank. But in the end, nobody left Lviv right after the invasion.
> The top Stack Overflow answer on robots.txt has a discussion about Allow: / not being valid according to the spec. The only date for the comments is "Over a year ago" but given that the question is from 2010 the comments are probably from around that time.
Firstly, I detest that stupid "feature" of showing only relative dates. It makes screenshots impossible to date, and it's frankly useless for humans as proven by OP's article.
Secondly, you can hover over the relative date string to see the actual date. But don't let that stop you from hating it.
It wouldn't be so bad if it was in addition to absolute dates and times, but that doesn't look as pretty. There is some value in highlighting that something happened within a few seconds/minutes/hours/days although the switchover points should be chosen carefully as to not have huge relative differences between start and end of the range.
> Everything one sees on Windows can be stripped out and reverted to Windows 2000 mode. That grey boxy UI is literally still there.
Can the horrendous W11 taskbar be reverted to the classic taskbar, with full support for changing its size and screen position etc?
Can classic Explorer, without any OneDrive/Copilot nonsense, be restored?
Can the new "Settings" (*excuse me while I vomit) layouts be junked in favour of the Control Panel, along with all the associated modals such as the WiFi selection sidebar etc.?
To my knowledge, it's not possible to achieve anything like this layout on Windows 11, Linux or Mac. I did try it in various Linux distros a few times but frankly got sick of navigating the maze of window managers et cetera. I think something like XFCE came close to providing a Windows-like taskbar but it was still far, far behind what Windows NT can offer.
Took me about 2 minutes to replicate on KDE Plasma[0][1]. I have a lot more things in my taskbar that I don't want to remove for this test, so it looks a little more crammed up.
I obsess somewhat about my computer's UI, but not to this degree. I want to maximize usable screen space, so just want the status bars slim and out of the way. I want to see the cpu/memory/swap/network/disk usage, which is easy. Lucky me!
However, if status bars are what you obsess about, Linux would love to have you! Many status bars are available[0], most of them open source and wildly customizable. You can configure one of the existing ones, fork an existing one, or write your own.
The parent comment shows two rows of different types - the upper row consists of the taskbar, and the lower row has the quick launch icons, drive links, and a music bar.
It's not. You can add quick launch icons and drive shortcuts natively (right click > Toolbars > New Toolbar). I only use Taskbar Tweaker to replace the Windows Aero-style tooltip with the standard jump list right click menu.
The media taskbar player can be added natively from older versions of iTunes, Windows Media Player, or others.
I haven’t used KDE in more than a decade, but I remember it being irrationally funny to me that I could rotate the desktop icons to any weird angle.
I have no idea why anyone would do that, but it was really fun to make my desktop look like it was arranged by someone who hadn’t developed motor skills yet.
Windows user and developer for nearly 30 years and migrated my thinkpad from windows 11 to Kubuntu a few days ago with almost zero friction and got my desktop exactly as I had it on windows, did a lazy write up here => https://rodyne.com/?p=3486 - I wont be going back even if Microsoft does release "Lindoze"
You can also configure it to keep open window buttons separate from the launcher icons, but with the lack of double stacking I rather have it "take over" the launcher.
The way I've set it up it will also only show the open windows for the virtual desktop or screen the bar being shown at, which helps alleviate the crowding issue of only having one row.
> I'll also create a feature request for resizing/stacking of rows.
That's the spirit! Please do file feature requests with the docks that you think might be close to what you want. A lot of foss projects are pretty receptive to feature requests.
Keep in mind that in the foss world you're not a customer - the people doing the work will be donating their free time to build a feature you're asking for, so please be nice and polite to them - the worst thing you can do on a feature request is have an entitled tone, or insinuate that their software is crap because it doesn't quite do what you want :)
Someone else suggested that adding 2 xfce panels might accomplish something pretty close to what you're after. I had a bit of a play around and agree with that. I didn't replicate your request exactly (because my panel is very different and I didn't want to break my setup too much) but depending on where your priorities lie I think you could probably get something pretty close.
Options that are similar:
a) If you really want the 'start menu' button to span both rows, use a single panel and set "row size" to e.g 48px and "number of rows" to 2. The con of this method is that the task list (list of programs) will span both rows, which is not what you have.
b) If you want to replicate your preferred setup more closely, you might not be able to have the 'start menu' button span both rows. To accomplish this I would add 2 panels of e.g 24px and put them both at the bottom of the screen. In one you'll have the task list and in another you'll have icons.
The media player controls might be an issue in xfce. I'm not sure if anything like that exists. However you definitely can have a systray icon for your media player which pops up media controls when you click on it.
There are other docks with more customisable widgets that will give you media controls like those, but I can't really make a solid recommendation for you unfortunately. The one I used to use was called cairo-dock, but I think that might be dead. Before that I used one called avant-window-navigator. There's also a couple of others that I'm aware of, e.g tint2 and wbar.
I'd be a little bit surprised if there are zero docks out there that can do what you want. The thing is you might have to try screwing around with the config for 20 different ones if you insist on replicating that layout exactly :/
I'm pretty sure, you can do this stacking 2 panels in XFCE4. Maybe except the multi row start button but if you really need that, you could even create a 3rd panel.
It's not the only thing, although it is a big one. Honestly Windows just feels better to me and works the way I want it to. It might help that I've always used enterprise versions so I've never had to deal with the awful bloatware. The few things I do want to disable are pretty painless to remove through the group policy editor or one of many freeware GUI tweaker programs.
yeah, fair. There is a big learning curve for an entire desktop environment. And that's before you start getting into trying to do super-custom things and replicate exactly what you had on windows.
I've always held that switching to Linux is hardest for the most technical people, because you know how to do everything already - figuring out how to do X in Linux might take you literally hours, or you can just reboot into windows, where you know how to do it and it will take 5 minutes. It's hard to make that investment in learning the new stuff when you just want to get stuff done.
(But IMHO it's well worth it - For >15 years I've always been appalled every time I've used windows about how inflexible and unconfigurable it is. There's a thousand things that I've been doing forever that I'm just so used to, e.g the ability to make any window always on top, or to use my mouse wheel to roll them up so that only the titlebar shows. There's lots of things like that that I use every day without thinking about it, and the lack of those things makes windows extremely frustrating for me)
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