arglebargle

Yep, you gotta do what you gotta do. I could never blame anyone for that.

Then when you are your own boss you can do it your way!

It sure is a popular app regionally. Lots of people in different countries I know use it interchangeably at this point: when they say text, they mean whatsap. I get it.

But I will not support Meta, there is a line. I don’t need family or friends that cannot use open source alternative. Worse case, I just drop back to sms.

But work requires it? Or you happen to have work that needs to support many customers? I suppose I could see that, but work would then be a completely separate phone only for that purpose.

Life fair. It’s only trying to help you not have to use whatsapp.

Every single ununtu release since Warty has been trouble. Ubuntu breaks. Does wetid things. Makes weird choices. Upgrades often fail.

I am surprised it took you this long to run into issues.

No, it would be more like a poor craftsman who doesn’t recognize it when a tool is crappy. Ubuntu is always on the way to breaking, or is broken at the get go. I remember when they thought 4 was stable. It was not nearly compared to most anything else at the time.

Even recently I had to install Ubuntu for a project because that is what the vendor supported. Several things were broken post install. Default Ubuntu stuff that should have just worked. Par for the course. If you get past that, of course the mishmash of Snap management for feature incomplete software can be very trying for a new user, when other distros make it easy.

Most crashy breaky mainstream distro there is and always has been.

It’s barely tolerable.

But I did used to like the departure from blue themes like nearly everyone else.

I ran Sid for years, I knew what it was named for and that was cool.

Lately though I have been wondering if they are going to run out of characters? Maybe it’s time to latch onto something else? I don’t know…

Why didn’t you take the laptop out while you were still inside the pub? And typically wouldn’t you use directions to get to the pub, and getting back is just going the way you came?

No osm and on Linux?

Its just open street map data. Use the routing tool on their web page.

Or make your own if you want to using gis.

Or use the beta organic maps flatpak.

Or KDE Marble has OSM routing as well.

Thunderbird. It’s great

I am not sure how to make it look shitty like Gmail, maybe you could theme it to wast a ton of space.

Seriously, do you want a useful email client or not?

Strawberry or Clementine. I mean 100K entries in a database is nothing. Even for SQLite. You can add multiple library locations, this is no problem.

You probably want Strawberry as it is newer and maintained, but I still like Clementine for the extra features that Strawberry doesn’t have yet. For you probably, not a big deal - things like podcast support, cloud support etc.

At that point you might as well go with a steamdeck. Works with or without the mouse/keyboard/screen and can play games. The desktop environment is full kde and ready to go.

I am not a fan of emojis in online conversation, but this time it does change how I perceived what you wrote. You are not happy about this? I would be so pleased if my country got rid of the penny.

Please:

My windows laptop does not want to conserve the battery, or use an 80% charge. It instead relies on a third party piece of software - typically the manufactures - that drags in all sorts of crap I do not want, with Eula’s I do not agree with. Linux doesnt do that, and properly preserves my battery. I don’t know whats wrong with your Mint install or laptop, but I have a laptop I put linux on 10 years ago, and it still works great and the battery is still within 95% of new, which frankly is amazing. Never had windows on it. And of course you can configure all of that with a GUI.

My other laptop had windows on it, and the intel driver would turn off features in my wifi card because I had not paid for that version. In linux it was a full feature wifi card.

My printer wont work with windows, even though it is supposed to be a windows printer. The drivers, which won’t install, even if they did will pull in a bunch of crap, and Eulas that I do not agree with. On my linux machine it just works. No drivers needed.

In Windows, it nearly bricked my Video card trying to update firmware from a driver update I did not ask for. Had to force a new driver, which in turn updated firmware. And once again, said driver adds a ton of crap and services and a Eula I do not want. On my Linux machine, it just works, AND does not require me to manage drivers at all. AMD.

I am not sure what you are trying to say about Excel, that is just a confusing sentence.

For me the world is the opposite. Linux is easy and just works. Windows is the pain in my ass and always does something annoying (exactly like this article is saying).

I daily drive Linux. Have for years. I choose to only remote into widows, and that is only if someone will pay me to do it. I have an MSDN and all MS software available to me, and even when it is free to me, I would rather not use it.

I will not change on this: an official wiki (for example the arch wiki) or other documentation is still the best way to convey exact information. If a user absolutely never wants to use a command line, then they can use Android and a touch interface. Even Microsoft gives directions on how to fix things with a command line. This should be infrequent, but is a necessity for brevity and precision.

In any case we might as well put that to rest and move on.

When I have a working example that does at least something we can go from there. The bullet points are helpful, thank you.

It is not strange or difficult. I am not expecting them to know what to type, I am expecting to have clear instructions as to exactly what they need to type. Which is really hard to convey with a gui. Administration of a computer and sharing functions is so much faster by copy/paste exactly what you expect them to. It is the easiest, most concise method.

In any case: lets get back to the task at hand. I will make a simple GUI that creates the credentials file, the mount point file, the automount file, and finally restarts the system daemon.

I guess it needs to show any errors at that time.

The user will provide some info that I will gather as it goes along (like SMB credentials) and I guess I will include the ability to simply go on without mounting if the network mount point is not available (in case of laptop).

There are a few elevations of privileges to sort out, and to keep it simple I will use Kdialog (for the gui presentation) which will make the code very obvious as it is simply bash behind it all.

After that do you want me to share this with you? I am not sure when I will get it done, but it should be fairly easy. Then I can put it on github I guess.

Realistically, to make this functional, it should be able to ready your current mount points and allow the user to edit, doing error checking etc. That would be a future phase.

There is a reason Digikam can’t rely on the SMB connection that dolphin makes. I do the same with my Music library and make it permanent mount at boot.

The command line fails hugely on usability, learnability and familiarity.

No. It EXCELS at usability and learnability. Because it works the same every time. It is shareable, teachable, and precise. GUI’s are sloppy, difficult to explain and tell people what to click on. Difficult for them to explain how to get back to where they were if they get lost.

Repeatable is not what a GUI is good for.

I will say it might be nice if there was a pattern that could be reused, for example if a distro wanted to plan for it. Then again, you are connecting to SMB (windows) share, so the importance is fairly low.

I am looking at a mount now, and it is tempting to make a default file, walk through the questions necessary to create everything, and then execute it. It is only a handful of lines to make the mount point, and then a systemd command to mount with out needing to edit fstab.

So somehow they have created and managed SMB sharing in their local environment, but can’t figure this out?

Simply having a SMB share available is just a simple click in dolphin and then you can bookmark it. Easy enough.

For a permanent share (like with Digikam expects) takes a few extra steps, but they are not terribly hard.

I am a bit taken aback with the terms you use: “use some command line or other nerdy hack, with magic words…that shouldnt be necessary in the first place” is over the top annoying. Yes use the command line. That is the easiest way to explain and perform things. Dozens of pictures of clicking things, or a simple direct command that is copy able and repeatable. I will take the latter.

Why would you call telling you computer what to do a “nerdy hack”? This is not “broken usability”, it is efficient. Why do you have such a negative reaction to using a computer in an easy way?

I will say it is a few steps to mount at boot, as you will need to add to fstab, create a access file, and so on. Part of that is linux security. I am not sure how that could be wrapped into a gui, but I suppose it would not be too hard to do, with a need to elevate privileges. If you think this is a barrier to entry, would you be interested in writing this gui?

Ok so there isn’t a gui, but mounting a share at boot is not that hard… seems weird to say it can be done but not the way I want to do it, so I dont.

I find that Firefox manages tabs better. So eveb though i use side tabs on vivaldi, I prefer them on top in Firefox, and it’s just a keystroke away to see the list vertically, but not stay that way.