XiJinpingStanAccount

What type of UI navigation do you prefer on a computer? So for a long time pretty much every computer used the traditional like windows layout with moveable windows that minimized or maximized and had a taskbar and start menu and whatnot. You had some minor changes with Mac and stuff, but now you can really have some radically different ways to use a computer. Personally I have differing preferences if I’m using a laptop or a desktop. On my desktop I prefer a dock and to use the mouse to click around. More of the windows style. Then on a laptop (which I use most often) I use a heavily gesture based navigation. Currently I have Gnome modified so that when I am in a program, like the web browser I’m in typing this, it is full screen. The top bar is hidden, and there’s no dock of any kind. Not even one that pops up when I move the mouse to the edge of the screen. Instead I have everything for navigation hidden inside the task view. I swipe up on the trackpad with 3 fingers to bring it up. That’s how I see time, battery life, and the other topbar stuff too. If switching quickly between two things I put one of them in a 2nd desktop and use a 3 finger side swipe to move back and forth. I’m curious to know what other unique or highly custom navigation methods people are using on Linux. I know tiling window managers are pretty popular. Is there a general consensus on what’s best these days? Or is everyone doing slightly different things?

I see what you mean. You get rid of the buttons so you can click and drag the window bar without accidentally clicking them right? I’ve got everything so smushed into one bar it’s like the opposite. Altho I really don’t USE the buttons since I have it in fullscreen all the time and just close things from the Gnome task switcher. So maybe I’ll remove my buttons too. Might be a good idea. This is what I mean by the bar being all smushed together: That’s the entire screen. I messed with the browser settings to make it so I had more screen space for the actual webpage.

It seems that hotkeys are very popular. I’ve got a few custom ones for media controls (shift+[ or ] for skip/go back, and insert for play/pause) How many different hotkeys are we talking?

With Gnome it’s the default to not have one on the desktop view. Then to remove the topbar you just use an extension. Just Perfection gives you a lot of UI tweak options.

You probably know a lot of the stuff just not the terms for it. If you are interested in like tiling or scrolling window managers you can look up videos on those terms and see them. The difference between them and a DE is that they are literally JUST a window manager. They don’t come with the other features of a DE. You basically won’t have a GUI unless you build one out. This gets you into the realm of like Linux ricing. Where people spend tons of effort and time making their computers look and function in a unique way.

You seem to have a ton of screen real estate to work with. Is your monitor really big? I feel like using a small laptop influences what I do a lot since I’m trying to maximize my screen space.

Do you use the terminal for launching other programs or are you doing things from inside the terminal itself?

The Latitude 7400 (Non 2-in-one version) is genuinely an amazing laptop if you underclock the CPU a bit so it doesn’t sound like a jet engine. I run Debian on it and the thing gets 12 hours of battery life, and does everything I need. Build quality is pretty good too. I got it for like 200$ refurbished.

Step 1: Abolish Government Step 2: Establish absolutely no institutional infrastucture to ensure nobody else makes a new government. Because that would be authoritatian. Step 3: Someone makes another government by establishing a monopoly on violence. Step 4: Abolish Government… wait what?

Specify how what I described is different than what you then. What mechanisms or institutions would you put in place to prevent step 3?

Say’s who? The community is supposed to just organically resist this? There’s no organizational structure? Because that would be a government.

The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile. The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them. I honestly think we should have a bot where anytime someone says the word authoritarian it just spits this out at them.

Yeah the Debian Project’s position makes a lot of sense to me. They’re basically saying that they won’t be wasting a bunch of resources trying to seek out LLM generated code and purge it and will instead just focus on making sure ALL the code is up to their quality standards. This will likely mean they spend a lot of time sifting out slop anyway, and will allow them to keep just focusing on making the project do what it’s always done. Ship a stable, usable, and free distro.

What do you actually know about soviet housing? I’ve done significant academic research on the topic. It’s not just a simple “they built a certain type of building”. The reason they all look so similar is that their construction method was pre-fab concrete panels. It was a revolutionary technology at the time, and allowed them to solve their housing crisis. They were called “Khrushchyovka” after whom you can guess. He made it his mission to solve the Soviet Housing crisis when he took over and was largely successful. You have to keep in mind the historical context. The people moving into these buildings were coming from a pre-industrial society where they commonly had so electricity, dirt floors, and no insulation. These were a significant upgrade from the pre-USSR constructions. They started construction in the 1940s, and really took off in the 50s. I think the main takeaways from them shouldn’t be “We should build these exact things”. and I don’t think that’s what people who support them are advocating for. I think what they are trying to point out is that if you standardize production, and use economies of scale, it is entirely possible to build tons of housing quickly and cheaply. And considering the way housing prices look these days I’d expect that to be an idea anyone can get behind. If you are interested here is an article about how modern China is using similar practices: www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/17/10695

Also something new people don’t realize is that Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. If you can’t solve your issue by searching for mint you can usually find a solution meant for Ubuntu or Debian that will work.

So what does “1.5mil$ in CPU/GPU time” mean then? It doesn’t make sense. That’s not a standardized unit of time. Are we talking tokens like with AI? Whatever SpaceX’s going rate is to use their servers? Some other commercial service? That’s why I don’t like it being used like this. It would be like me saying I am donating 1.5 million dollars of “food” to the homless. Like that’s great right, but what the fuck do I mean by food? I could be giving them rice and beans, caviar, or anything in between. Meal vouchers to mcdonalds, or working with soup kitchens. It’s just vague.

Ya the only thing that keeps me from being omega worried about it is that I use Debian and by the time code gets to me that shit has been tested to hell and back. So less likely some AI nonsense is going to break something.

I’d just put them in a different repo that can be toggled on and off by the user. If you don’t want slop you toggle off the slop repo and go about your day.

idk why you think Debian is AI nonsense but my point was that AI code tends to be shipped without actually being looked at or tested by a human being. Debian is known for being extremely slow to make changes. So by the time stuff gets to stable it has been around long enough that it’s been tested a lot.

This resolution therefore affirms that generative AI is neither exempt from nor subject to special rules beyond the standards already expected of Debian contributors. The responsibility for every contribution rests with the contributor who submits it, who remains accountable for its technical quality, legal acceptability, and suitability for inclusion in Debian. My desire is to have my system function. I like stability. If a project has tons of AI slop being thrown at it it takes time to sift through that and find code that’s not garbage. Debian takes the time to do that. Other distros are much faster paced and simply don’t have the time to do that properly before code shows up on your machine. That’s what I was talking about. The Debian Stable pipeline. I’m downstream so the AI slop should hopefully get noticed and patched out before it reaches me. So I don’t see Debian Stable as AI slop. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe AI will ruin the Debian Project. But I’m hopeful the project’s policies that have kept it going for decades will continue to keep things stable going forward.

Red Star OS

Xi Jinping for POTUS. If enough of us vote he can win!

Finally! I can download more RAM!

I hate the phrase “X$ in compute” so much. What does that even mean? It could mean a 1.5 million dollar value worth of donated time on one of their servers, or it could mean a hardware donation, or it could be a cash donation that is earmarked for server upgrades/chip purchases. Ever since AI took off it’s become such a common turn of phrase to use “compute” like this. As if the amount of money spent tells you anything useful about the amount of things they can “compute” now. Costs are so variable and spread out across many different areas that it changes day by day, and by which vendor you use, or what part of the world you are in, or all kinds of other things. Maybe I’m just behind the times and it has some specific meaning now I’m not aware of. Either way it annoys me.