Linux has over 6% of the desktop market

[Moonchild]

The Slovenian translation they use for panel translates back to counter. Guess they didn't find more suitable word for it. IT and Slovenian is a strange combination. Even in cases where a word might be available, chances are the other person will look at you funny, puzzled by what you meant. While English word tends to be clear for everyone.

From personal experience being a professional translator it is always a rope pulling contest. Linguists want to translate everything, often leading to unintelligible translations that no techie native in the target language will get, while the English is understood broadly, but may be less intelligible for non-techies. I've always erred on the side if considering something terminology and keeping it English but I've got flak for it in the past.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

In Linux, it is called the Panel.

Hmm ... The Panel (all caps initials ? ). Which Linux flavour and which DE ? I suppose each one will use its own terms. For me "panel" is a generic term (mainly in Java Swing). In the fvwm I use, I wrote my own taskbar emulation (which I use very seldom), and I called it taskbar (even if it is ages I'm not using Windows even from afar).

[Night Wing]

In Linux, it is called the Panel.

Hmm ... The Panel (all caps initials ? ). Which Linux flavour and which DE ?

I am presently running two linux distros. MX Linux and Debian. Both of these distros offer the Xfce desktop environment (DE) which I prefer. And the panel in both of them is spelled "Panel" with a capital letter "P" with the rest of the letters in lower case.

BTW, the "flavor" (USA English) and the DE is both the same.

As an example. Linux Mint is Ubuntu based and it comes in three "flavors" (slang meaning) which means the same thing as the Desktop Environment (DE's). They are Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce.

Linux Mint has a fourth flavor (slang meaning again) and it is Debian based, LMDE. So it has one flavor (slang term) with it's one desktop environment, Debian Edition.

Hence, LMDE = Linux Mint Debian Edition.

[frostknight]

Maybe they should just settle on "plinth". It's what I would call it instead if a panel, which suggests a much more screen filling element.
But, nobody will ever listen to me anyway... 😉

I am not sure what you mean by plinth, so I don't know if I should listen to that or not.

What language is that a translation from?

Btw, until a few weeks ago, I didn't know you lived in sweden. You are in such better shape to live in a very civilized country than a place like usa, austraila, uk, or worse.

[Gemmaugr]

I am not sure what you mean by plinth, so I don't know if I should listen to that or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestal?useskin=vector

Off-topic:

Btw, until a few weeks ago, I didn't know you lived in sweden. You are in such better shape to live in a very civilized country than a place like usa, austraila, uk, or worse.

Sweden has its issues too, mostly from being in the EU, but not only. It also depends on what you mean by "civilized", but that's perhaps a topic for another place.

[Moonchild]

re: plinth, I was thinking more of the "baseboard" along the bottom edge of a wall, also seen in stone on the outside of buildings, not necessarily related to pedestals or columns.

Off-topic:
As for Sweden, it certainly is more of a mixed bag than what the brochures or general news suggests, but that is primarily because of people being people. Membership in the EU isn't particularly high up on the list of issues, but indeed that's better discussed elsewhere than this thread.
FTR: I have lived in the UK and Australia for a while, an briefly stayed in the USA (prior to 9/11) and they are (or were) quite civilized.

[Mæstro]

Even in cases where a [Slovenian] word might be available, chances are the other person will look at you funny, puzzled by what you meant. While English word tends to be clear for everyone.

Linguists want to translate everything, often leading to unintelligible translations that no techie native in the target language will get, while the English is understood broadly, but may be less intelligible for non-techies. I've always erred on the side [o}f considering something terminology and keeping it English…

I warn I am purist in my profile, and this is how I mean. When I want to see lots of English words, I just use English like I am doing now.
I am alert enough to such matters that, in German, I would rather use a native word, not a French or Latin one, but I would prefer older Romanic over younger English borrowings. The Great Vowel Shift and unadapted spellings influence my attitude. If I were Japanese, I would prefer native over Sino-Japanese words and exclude English altogether. If I were Korean, I would freely risk sounding like a northerner. Esperanto is the only language which I think has really got the right attitude towards latter-day Anglicism, but from what I could see in Montreal, French Canadians come close, and from what I hear, the Chinese do, too.

Off-topic:
Civilised tends to mean rich in these contexts. Exploring the World Inequality Database shows the median income in Scandinavia, Holland and Switzerland are the highest in the world; the rest of western Europe, Korea and most of the Anglo-Saxon countries a bit lower; Italy, Spain, Japan and New Zealand another grade below, etc. Income distribution can also reveal lifestyles hidden by averages. Hence, there are hundreds of millions of rich Chinese, Indians etc, who enjoy a Western standard of living among milliards of paupers.

Btw, until a few weeks ago, I didn't know you lived in sweden. You are in such better shape to live in a very civilized country than a place like usa, austraila, uk, or worse.

Every post he makes notes his location. Had you missed this?

[Gemmaugr]

Off-topic:

Civilised tends to mean rich in these contexts. Exploring the World Inequality Database shows the median income in Scandinavia, Holland and Switzerland are the highest in the world; the rest of western Europe, Korea and most of the Anglo-Saxon countries a bit lower; Italy, Spain, Japan and New Zealand another grade below, etc. Income distribution can also reveal lifestyles hidden by averages. Hence, there are hundreds of millions of rich Chinese, Indians etc, who enjoy a Western standard of living among milliards of paupers.

Swedish tax rates are also among the highest ones (52% for income, and 25% VAT for example; https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/per ... e-tax-rate), so that should be taken into account..

I also asked what was meant by civilized because it could mean manners/culture, technology, economics, legislation, freedoms, etc.We'll have to wait and see what it means to frostknight (to me it means freedoms).

[UCyborg]

Linux is a hot topic these days, no doubt due to Windows 11 going completely nuts. Still, would take a lot of work to have GUI for all things and other niceties we take for granted on Windows.

Banal example, watching video from YouTube in a dedicated media player and selecting desired video codec; on Windows, you may throw the URL into PotPlayer and have the ability to select the codec on the dropdown menu. Linux, throw it in something like Celluloid, then use some text command line parameter to select codec.

Apparently my issue on the laptop where Firefox manages to hang the entire machine when attempting to play the video with radeon driver active is one of those random issues you'll encounter sooner or later. Someone on another forum responded to my observation and found it odd considering regardless which kernel driver is used (radeon or amdgpu), user space radeonsi driver is used for submitting decoding commands.

And the reason radeon is loaded by default, apparently with amdgpu and certain integrated GPUs, analog video output is non-functional. I mean, so far, I didn't need VGA port on this laptop myself, but still, are they joking?

I read when Linux was brand new, it didn't support floppy drives. How much has changed since?

[Falna]

Off-topic:

re: plinth, I was thinking more of the "baseboard" along the bottom edge of a wall

Then I guess you're thinking in French; plinthe (French) = baseboard (US) = skirting board (UK)

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

Off-topic:

re: plinth, I was thinking more of the "baseboard" along the bottom edge of a wall

Then I guess you're thinking in French; plinthe (French) = baseboard (US) = skirting board (UK)

The same thing in English, though. Usually stone, not wood.
Either way, it would work in multiple languages, seems like. Anyway enough of that. Just a stray thought.

[Mæstro]

I recalled at last that I would ask my friend about why Pop and Zorix stood out to him. He did not recognise the names, so I must have garbled the memory. Sorry for anyone who hoped for a layman’s insight.

Linux is a hot topic these days, no doubt due to Windows 11 going completely nuts. Still, would take a lot of work to have GUI for all things and other niceties we take for granted on Windows.

Returning to XP in a virtual machine reminded me both of how slow various tasks were (eg eight minutes to compress ~300 MB into a 7zip file), but also how certain steps have become easier since. I want to say that Windows 7 and LMDE 4 are comparable in the amount of effort required to run tasks. If asked to name something which is definitely easier in Windows than Linux, I would say running executable files. I have grumbled before about their Linux equivalents.

[Mæstro]

I wish YouGov or some other survey organisation would call up a few thousand people in several Western countries to ask about their desktop habits. This alternative method to user agent-based accounting could give us better figures, even if it would be hard to apply in hindsight.

As it turns out, we have got some data for Britain, as far as browsers are concerned. It is not stated whether desktop or general usage is intended, but Statcounter’s desktop figures for early 2020 match closer (within a few percentage points) than amalgamated. Consilience like this assures me that the figures are about correct elsewhere also.

[UCyborg]

If asked to name something which is definitely easier in Windows than Linux, I would say running executable files. I have grumbled before about their Linux equivalents.

There's a lot noise about WINE / Proton. Somehow the platform with that much dependency on compatibility layers doesn't inspire confidence. Few years back at least when I messed these things more often, I noticed WINE even has quirks / inaccuracies when it comes to Win9x stuff. At some point, I pointed on their forum small flaw with inet_addr() function. Actual Windows XP or older would return INADDR_ANY (0x00000000) when passed "" while on WINE, regardless of compatibility mode, INADDR_NONE (0xFFFFFFFF) was always returned in that case. And my thread was locked.

[Mæstro]

When I was writing, I was not so much comparing running an .exe in Windows as opposed to Linux, but running an .exe in Windows as opposed to running an Appimage or similar in Linux. Comparing equivalents seemed more meaningful. Ironically, the only point which I have found at all difficult when running WIndows-native .exe in Linux has been creating shortcuts for them, so I do not need to open the directory in the terminal and type wine fumo.exe whenever i want to run it. The executables themselves, all from twenty years ago or so, have all run smoothly for me in Wine 4 (as is available for Debian 10) without extensions. I cannot speak for Proton.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

By "running an exe" you mean running a (C or Fortran or other compiled language) executable binary, the stuff which the command "file" identifies as "ELF 64-bit LSB executable etc. etc." ?
Well, simply you type its name in a terminal
For me, coming from pre-Unix mainframe and mini OSs world, that sounds pretty straighforward and natural.

Of course each window manager or desktop environment has its ways to add the executable to a menu and run it with a click (but running if from a terminal if it requires arguments is much better).

Possibly there are ways even to run it clicking on a icon on the root window, or in a graphical file manager. Personally I don't use the latter (stuff for quiche eaters ?) , and I never liked the idea that clicking on an icon on the root window will "open" or "execute" something, but simply "deiconifies" it.

[Mæstro]

Right, we were to have that conversation about GUI and terminals after it budded from the yeast for thought which is the Windows 11 thread, but it was never separated like the smartphone one. My post on the topic is here; I suppose it is relevant enough here to discuss. The short version is that I, a late Millennial by YouGov’s definitions, was of just the right age that I grew up to find powerful GUI interfaces, such as are found in Windows 2000 and XP, the natural way to interact with a computer. Navigating to the desired directory, opening the terminal and giving the command every time are quite monotonous to me.

I would love to find a way to run .exe files on click in the way you described. The terminal commands are monotonous for me, and I was never able to create working shortcuts myself in Cinnamon without getting help. Wine-binfmt seemed like it was the right package for the job in my repository, but when I installed it and tried clicking an executable with it, nothing happened, so the search goes on.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Yes, you are right, a separate thread on command line vs GUI should be the right place. But here is less off topic than on the Wndows 11 thread.

I guess it depends on what use you do of the computer. Given that in (Unix and) Linux there are no ".exe" files (I mean, the binary executables normally do not have any "file extension" .exe ... I guess the standard e.g. for a C program "pinco" you compile yourself is to start from a pinco.c source, generate an object relocatable pinco.o (may be transient) and link it into an executable "a.out" ... which is something nobody likes, so usually a makefile will call the executable "pinco>" without extension).

If you do not write your own programs, often the stuff you load from the net supplies a .desktop file (I guess for gnome-like DEs) with the stuff to provide a "click from menu". Sometimes this has complex calling sequences with arguments (I just loaded the ministerial s/w for our national identity card ... since I do not use any DE, I had to dig from the .desktop file the java command necesary to run such jar file ... I'll probably save it as a shell alias, in order to call it from the terminal

But the .desktop files or other DE-dependent ways should be available. With my WM (not DE) I have to append in the appropriate place of a single config file commands like these (one starts Pale Moon at login, the other is used to open a remote ssh connection

Code: Select all

Test (Init) Exec exec /usr/bin/palemoon http://myhomepage
Exec xterm -class XTermLin -T lucio@remotemachine -n lucio@remotemachine -e ${HOME}/bin/myscript

Of course there is no sense (for me) to have a clickable entry for any application, but just for those I use frequently.

Most DEs come with a "file manager" (thunar ? dolphin ? etc. etc.), alike to the Windows explorer or what is called nowadays, in which you can click on a file, and open it with the appropriate application (a pdf viewer for a .pdf, libreoffice for .ods etc.), And of course for files retrieved via the browser, Pale Moon itself can handle such association (and used as a file manager for local files via File->Open file !). But, unless the case of a pdf found occasionally, read once and then forgotten, for a file downloaded and stored somewhere, when I later want to read it again, I have no difficulty (instead of navigating a file manager to where it is and clicking) to go in one of the various terminal windows I keep always open, type "cd" to go to the directory, and then "atril file.pdf" or "acroread file.pdf". In rare case I could define a shell alias (for instance if in a terminal I type "micro" that will open the pdf manual of my microwave oven

As I said, terminal vs GUI is mainly a matter of personal preferences, but I am pretty sure that, with a more or less steep learning curve, one can force one's system to behave as one wants !

Incidentally (perhaps I said it already), in the 90s I had a MacII mainly for document production. It was an all-GUI system (I guess its file manager was called "the Finder") and I felt quite crippled in considering it a "real computer" ... just a "glorified typewriter". I never got/bought any compiler for it (although I bought a few terminal emulators !)

[Mæstro]

As I said, terminal vs GUI is mainly a matter of personal preferences, but I am pretty sure that, with a more or less steep learning curve, one can force one's system to behave as one wants !

Agreed, and this is something I am happy we both appreciate.

If you do not write your own programs…

Indeed, I cannot programme at all. Several attempts to begin to teach myself have all uniformly resulted in literal panic attacks, although I have no difficulty at all in studying subjects in theoretical informatics which do not actually require me to prepare software of my own.

But, unless the case of a pdf found occasionally, read once and then forgotten, for a file downloaded and stored somewhere, when I later want to read it again, I have no difficulty (instead of navigating a file manager to where it is and clicking) to go in one of the various terminal windows I keep always open, type "cd" to go to the directory, and then "atril file.pdf" or "acroread file.pdf". In rare case I could define a shell alias (for instance if in a terminal I type "micro" that will open the pdf manual of my microwave oven

During the phase when Cloudflare rejected Pale Moon, many temporary PDF which I would have opened (instead of saving) with Pale Moon, therefore saving into the temporary folder and deleting when I closed the browser, I needed instead access through Ungoogled Chromium, which dumps them into the downloads folder. This has turned my downloads folder into a job lot of unnamed PDF, sorted by age and recognised by thumbnail in the file manager. The habit extended to unnamed images sent by friends through Discord, likewise downloaded through UC. Once, I have gone back to rename those PDF which I still liked with sensible names and inducted them into my documents folder, but debris has built up again since. I have not yet done so with images, for my picture folder itself has collected scores of since-obsolete screenshots, folders of hundreds of pictures saved once and then forgotten etc, making the downloads folder ironically a neater place for them. Once I set my picture folder in order, I can go to the process of naming and transplanting these pictures. The moral of this story is that all browsers but Pale Moon leave your home directory in a jumble.

In the real world, I do not attempt to organise my books beyond keeping volumes of the same series (usually encyclopaedias) together. Books collect in stacks or heaps, often with the spines tilted away or whole piles hidden, but I just know where each book is, as a shepherd knows his flock. Perhaps this habit has carried over.

I felt quite crippled in considering it a "real computer" ... just a "glorified typewriter".

Despite my youth, my family kept a manual typewriter in the home, and I would keep using it for assignments well into my secondary school days. I appreciate the simplicity. It is true that QWERTZ (in Germany) and other keyboard designs were intended to slow down right-handers; I am left-handed and have always been a lightning typist, leaving me with many memories of jamming the keys by mistake. Computer keyboards are really the one common implement designed just for us.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

During the phase when Cloudflare rejected Pale Moon, many temporary PDF which I would have opened (instead of saving) with Pale Moon, therefore saving into the temporary folder and deleting when I closed the browser, I needed instead access through Ungoogled Chromium, which dumps them into the downloads folder. This has turned my downloads folder into a job lot of unnamed PDF, ... The moral of this story is that all browsers but Pale Moon leave your home directory in a jumble

I cannot comment on the behaviour of other browsers, I use only Pale Moon, and chrome as fallback for sites not working in Pale Moon, but not for "occasional navigation. Actually one of the things I hate in browsers, desktop environments or OSs is when they do too much coaching and insist in putting things in the place they think best, and not where I want them.
With Ubuntu when one creates a new account, it creates a number of empty directories Download, Music, Images etc. I remove most of them. I have my own folder arrangement, Home, Work, and project/topic folders ... and a huge ~/temp one with subfolders
Concerning the browser I set it to "ask me where to save files" so I do not use the Downloads folder.
Some of the pdf viewers (I tend to switch between atril and acroread), if one uses "Save as" (in the case I decide to save the document after a quick glance), may suggest as a start a Documents folder (which for me is silly) instead of the user home, so I have to go up one level, and then down where I want.