> Just in case you want an even more vintage experience.
Just to clarify, it's not about "vintage experience". Xfce is deceptively simple - it gets out of your way and let you do whatever you wish. The original settings are sensible as they are, but you also can customize it as you wish. It is pretty un-opinionated.
What are you talking about? Author is talking about user experience, they way changes (as far as user is concerned) Do Not Happen (much), how they don't try to invent new UI paradigm (cough Gnome cough) and are Not Fucking It Up (cough KDE4 cough).
As a user I don't care about X11 / Wayland. I mean I do, from the security viewpoint, but not otherwise. Xfce could port itself to Wayland and (if done properly) I wouldn't even notice. It is nice to know that on any Linux machine I can install UI desktop environment which is usable, dependable and... complete.
I love Xfce and hope they never change. Kudos to everyone involved!
It's not that I don't have my own set of gripes about linux, but this wishlist is weird, at least to me:
- There is nothing wrong with sudo - or to be precise, it is good thing that administrative operations are explicit. And sudo is still less annoying than Windows "admin prompt" anyway.
- Why do you care? Use apt install, yum install or apk add, whatever your distro supports.
- It is not required, there are GUI managers, but again - why?
- Got me there. I don't use pen.
- Used touch on ThinkPad some years ago, it just worked, maybe depends on the laptop?
- Until 15 years ago this was true, but I haven't seen this happen since then. Debian here if it matters.
- I'm typing this on a 15 years old desktop (with NVME, admittedly) and it boots and feels faster than a new MacBook Pro I am testing. Linux accumulated much less, if any, performance losses. I agree that Windows and Mac both became bloated.
- I think doubleclick is the default way, at least in xfce? Or I might be missing what you mean. That said, I use keyboard shortcuts mostly as I try to avoid mouse for this.
With all that said, of course it will not look and feel the same as Windows. It is a different OS, with different priorities. I like it better than both Windows and MacOS, but maybe it's because I found the combination that fits me (Debian + XFCE). Maybe take a look at KDE and XFCE?
I think I can summarize this: In life and devices, I often find processes I find are high-friction, or have room for user interface or other improvements. There is a guarantee that there will be people who will tell me these concerns are invalid.
In the case of Linux usability desires, I will make the cautious conclusion that there is a group of people who consider Linux part of their identity, and any desire for improvement or shortcoming is mentally a personal challenge. I am just a human using computers as a tool, and don't have a desire to play politics on this subject.
I think the "it's fine" / "works for me" / "Actually this is a good thing" / "Why don't you just" replies like this are an obstacle to improvement, but is often overcome.
Sure. Or we could say that when someone is used to the way things work, one is reluctant to change and will find all kinds of "faults" to keep them from taking the plunge.
As I said, I have my own list of things with linux I would like to see different, it's just that they are different. And they are not big enough to keep me in MS-land. But to each their (our) own, I guess.
So how do you validate the data? You can apply all the changes to existing record and validate the result, but then you need to put everything in memory. Verifying the operations however sounds dangerous... Any pointers?
Also, if someone is using this in production: any gotchas?
If you are using Java, you may want to check out the library I created for American Express and open sourced, unify-jdocs - it provides for working with JSON documents outside of POJOLand. For validations, it also has the concept of "typed" document using which you can create a document structure against which all read / writes will be validated. Far simpler and in my opinion as powerful as JSONSchema. https://github.com/americanexpress/unify-jdocs.
The approach I've generally seen used is that you have a set of validation that you apply to the JSON and apply that to the results of the patch operation.
You probably want to have some constraints on the kinds of patch objects you apply to avoid simple attacks (e.g. a really large patch, or overly complex patches). But you can probably come up with a set of rules to apply generally to the patch without trying to validate that the patch value for the address meets some business logic. Just do that at the end.
Sure and people fearful of horseless carriages in the 1890s are rightfully fearful of dying since:
* horseless carriages won't avoid running into things whereas horses can see and instinctively won't run into a wall
* the greater speed of horseless carriages in the 1890s without modern safety infrastructure like signs and traffic lights does greatly increase the risk of injury
True, every bad technology is just ford's car, wright brother's plane, more than 256MB of RAM, and the internet. From blockchain to generative ai to FSD. No don't think about all the other bad technologies that have a similar profile to these and never went anywhere (or worse), only think about the extreme edge cases that don't have a similar profile.
Not sure what the point is here? My point is that OP is not afraid of new tech per-se, but instead doesn't like where it is now and finds it dangerous.
I'm sure in time the technology will evolve and there won't be a new car on the road that wouldn't support FSD - just like it did with "horseless carriages". It will take some more time though and not all companies will be equally advanced. From what I've heard (from other sources too) I wouldn't want to be driven by a Tesla FSD at the moment.
> * horseless carriages won't avoid running into things whereas horses can see and instinctively won't run into a wall
Off topic, but interesting - if you think about it, we actually already had mostly-FSD in the 1890s. It just ate a whole lot of grass.
My point is that OP's post which espouses a common fear, even if it may be justified for some, is not really interesting. I don't want to gatekeep HN, but personally I do not enjoy this type of content.
A secondary implied point is that new technologies which may seem dangerous can still be safe and useful when used properly, such as driving horseless carriages carefully in the 1890s or using FSD (Supervised) with proper supervision as directed.
Actually you can override it, but they made the process so convoluted and privacy breaking that I would guess not many people use it. So yes, effectively they blocked it.
> ...for various reasons, including security concerns.
Security is just a red herring.
Who wins with this move? The cynic in me (who is usually annoyingly right) says Google. Mozilla loses even more trust from its users and Firefox now has a tool to disable ad blockers on websites of their biggest competitor^Wsponsor if they reach a suitable mutual agreement (read: G pays enough for it). Win-win for all the parties that have a say in this. Not users of course, but that's life.
Just to clarify, it's not about "vintage experience". Xfce is deceptively simple - it gets out of your way and let you do whatever you wish. The original settings are sensible as they are, but you also can customize it as you wish. It is pretty un-opinionated.
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