Linux has over 6% of the desktop market

[UCyborg]

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.

I don't know what I'd even write that someone else hasn't made yet that would be manageable, considering anything remotely interesting is insanely complex. Modifying existing ones is a struggle and I never get anywhere beyond shallow modifications.

[Mæstro]

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.["]

Likewise, I do not use other browsers for occasional navigation, as you say, but certain sites to which I require regular access fail in Pale Moon. They worked well enough in this browser five years ago, but my need for them has outlived their compatibility, despite my best efforts to jettison them (since even while they still worked).

[Ubuntu] creates a number of empty directories Download, Music, Images etc. I remove most of them.

I do not know how early Ubuntu or other general-use distros would create folders, but can speak for Windows, which might inform the practise. Windows 2000 would keep separate document and programme directories in C:¥, analogous to /home and /opt or /usr/share. My Pictures was a subdirectory within a user’s Documents. XP added Music as an additional branch, and Vista or 7 elevated these (and introduced My Videos and, optionally, Downloads) to separate folders on the same hierarchical level as My Documents. This made copying my personal files over when migrating to Linux straightforward. Before last year, when Cloudflare denied Pale Moon, I treated the Downloads folder rather as Miscellaneous: the place for installers, fonts etc which were literally downloaded, but not documents, images, films or music.

I have my own folder arrangement, Home, Work, and project/topic folders ... and a huge ~/temp one with subfolders

I like to run a file census from time to time using Baobab. Let us see what we have got now, out of 83·1 GB in all…

• 43·3 GB in film, generally in 360p, of which 29·5 GB belong to any of various collections in their own folders: archived educational websites from the 2000s or anime I have watched since 2021.
• 9·4 GB are in Templates (Vorlagen) devoted to my XP and W2000 virtual machines, unused until then.
• 7·8 GB are devoted to documents, mostly PDF. A few subdirectories exist with assets for saved webpages.
• 6·6 GB are presently in the Downloads folder as described. Directories include a collection of icons, the HTML manual for Clannad and an entire archived website (600 MB) which could be deleted.
• 6·1 GB are pictures, divided into 2·2 GB of a well curated map collection (everything titled descriptively and with the year of publication), 2·1 GB a job lot of bandori pictures I saw once on Pixiv and liked as well as three smaller, likewise seldom consulted categories (two as miscellaneous anime folders, one from up to 2021 and the other from 2021–24) and scores of pictures not further sorted, even if they could belong in one of the categories.
• 4·3 GB cached folders.
• 1·4 GB in the Wine directory, including visual novels, an Esperanto–German dictionary and a game for Windows 95–XP which lags in the VM.
• 650 MB in the Shared folder, in which I store files (mostly installers) other than ISO (which stay in Downloads) destined for the VM.
• Smaller, hidden subdomains for installed software like Pale Moon, Claws Mail and Linux-native visual novels, as well as Music, which has always gone rather with the films.

Reckoning like this points out items which I can delete or remove. Quarrying the half-abandoned directories would be rewarding. The real question would be where to put files meanwhile so things do not become even worse while under construction.

Concerning the browser I set it to "ask me where to save files" so I do not use the Downloads folder.

Despite having combed through the settings, I did not know until today it was possible to do this in Chromium. (I knew this could be done in Waterfox, and had set it accordingly after installing.) It attests to their bad user design that one is expected to navigate them with a search engine. In any case, the fact that the greatest source of new clutter for the Downloads folder has been suppressed means that I can begin cleaning up the mess an returning to the old order.
When writing above, I forgot there is one other source for items in the downloads folder: files, usually images, which my friends send me through Jabber in Pidgin, my preferred IM client.

[UCyborg]

I think I'm done with Linux for another decade. Doesn't seem any better than it was 10 years ago. Even ignoring driver bugs, unpolished / buggy software etc., I cannot ignore poor (to my eyes) font rendering. Tuned ClearType makes all the difference between pleasant reading experience and the one that's downright painful.

So if that jump in market share was caused by me, it won't last long.

[Moonchild]

I think I'm done with Linux for another decade. Doesn't seem any better than it was 10 years ago. Even ignoring driver bugs, unpolished / buggy software etc., I cannot ignore poor (to my eyes) font rendering. Tuned ClearType makes all the difference between pleasant reading experience and the one that's downright painful.

So if that jump in market share was caused by me, it won't last long.

Give it a few months.

[Mæstro]

I cannot ignore poor (to my eyes) font rendering. Tuned ClearType makes all the difference between pleasant reading experience and the one that's downright painful.

I agree to the principle that a user interface should not be literally painful to behold. I have noted elsewhere that this is among the many reasons why I cannot tolerate smartphones, and only barely tolerate flat design. But for my part, I cannot see any real difference between how Linux renders FreeSans today and how Mac rendered Helvetica in 2009, nor between how KDE displayed Arial in 2008 and how XP did the same. Oddly enough, I am happy with the early, low-resolution display of Arial, while its high-resolution counterpart from Windows 7 on looks like a bad Helvetica imitation, an irony given Arial’s reason to exist. Am I missing something that is apparent to you?

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Never considered fonts and fonts rendering as a main criterion to choose an OS (although I may do some tuning on a browser or window manager or for my favourite Hessling editor, for which I loaded .terminal_narrow14.pcf.gz .. for text processing I take what LaTeX or libreoffice offers ... but my main interaction with the computer occurs via an xterm or urxvt terminal window with nice old fonts).

On a disabled friend's Windows computer (managed by don't know who) somebody put evince as default pdf viewer ... and that version of evince generates what to me look "badly focused" fonts.

[Moonchild]

how KDE displayed Arial in 2008 and how XP did the same

Just glancing at hat screenshot makes my head hurt with how irregular it is displayed in terms of glyph weight. If fonts on XP would look that way I'd think something would be terribly wrong.

Kde43_plasmoid.png

I mean, just look at how irregular it is. the w, a, and s are considerably more heavy than other letters. kerning also looks off.

[Mæstro]

Just glancing at hat screenshot makes my head hurt[…] I mean, just look at how irregular it is.

It might be relevant that I am astigmatic, but do not wear spectacles. Justifying text with too few words a line tends to produce irregular spacing, which I agree is quite awkward, like in your example. For comparison, I have attached an example of Arial in XP from my virtual machine. To my eye, the font weight is somewhat heavier for the KDE sticky, but I do not feel sick the way you do. Am I just blind as a bat?

[F]or text processing I take what LaTeX or libreoffice offers ...

Speaking as a mathematician, I die inside whenever I see a preprint (or even a complete, published book!) in Modern Roman, akin to how I feel towards Calibri in the everyday world. I favour Pagella for mostly-prose works, or Termes for articles where more formulae are to be expected.

[Moonchild]

Justifying text with too few words a line tends to produce irregular spacing

That's completely beside the point. The word spacing being irregular, while annoying, doesn't impact letter kerning or glyph weight.

In comparison, your XP screenshot has no such issues, all letters have similar weight to them. While kerning there is also not perfect, it does look better. The two are miles apart and definitely do not look similar.
Maybe your brain compensates in light of your astigmatism (I have astigmatism too, so I know how it distorts) so you don't see it (or not well). I do recommend getting glasses to correct for it. Your brain will thank you.

[Gemmaugr]

images snipped

Your three examples are all totally different, and yet so equally flawed, to my eyes. The Mac one is very blurry. The KDE one is, as said, differently weighted (Especially S. Not to mention the weird spacing and glaring yellow background). The XP one is prefectly readable, but they feel... wiggly? ..Yeah, lets go with that. All Italics sort of way.

In my own controlled text areas, that I have to look at often, I prefer an almost glowing Green DejaVu Sans Mono font, on a Dark Grey background.

[Mæstro]

I approve all of my examples, but I dislike the DejaVu family. We are lucky that we can each select the fonts and styles we prefer, yes?

[UCyborg]

Most of my computer time is spent in a web browser. I specifically prefer the way ClearType is done since Win8. I guess it's fonts being thin that bothers me the most. Plus they look wrong in other ways on Linux that I'm not sure how to put into words...I did copy fonts over from Windows.

Oddly, fonts usually don't bother me on a smartphone, but I don't spend that much time on a phone. Although when I put Android on my laptop, that seemed worse than on the phone. Maybe something to do with screen density.

XP and web browsers...can't say I like that combination, also for reasons beyond fonts.

[Mæstro]

It was my dream for years while I was on Windows, before I knew about FreeSans, to obtain Helvetica for my system. I always preferred how it appeared over Windows 7’s Arial. This problem was magically solved for me when I switched to Linux. I have Pale Moon configured so it replaces any Latin, Cyrillic or Greek text with the appropriate FreeFont. I would like to impose this on non-European scripts also, but I have never bothered to change all the configuration settings manually.

[UCyborg]

I exaggerated when I said I'm done with Linux for a decade. Although it seems generally better in non-desktop applications.

[Mæstro]

[Linux] seems generally better in non-desktop applications.

Have you got servers in mind, or other use cases? I am curious to where you think Linux shines.

[Moonchild]

[Linux] seems generally better in non-desktop applications.

Have you got servers in mind, or other use cases? I am curious to where you think Linux shines.

Linux does shine as a server O.S., especially if you stick with the more enterprise-focused, less bleeding edge/gadgeteering distros, like AlmaLinux or plain Debian.

[frostknight]

Linux does shine as a server O.S., especially if you stick with the more enterprise-focused, less bleeding edge/gadgeteering distros, like AlmaLinux or plain Debian.

Devuan is better in my opinion. Then again, I don't know how systemd works, so... yeah.


I know openrc quite well though.

[UCyborg]

Servers too, though other devices that aren't personal computers come to mind first. Routers, smartphones, smart TVs (Samsung TVs have Tizen), car infotainment systems...these are the ones I came across.

[frostknight]

Servers too, though other devices that aren't personal computers come to mind first. Routers, smartphones, smart TVs (Samsung TVs have Tizen), car infotainment systems...these are the ones I came across.

Many tvs have webos.

[Mæstro]

Linux’s use for television antedates smart TV, now that you mention it. Tivo notoriously ran Linux twenty years ago, introducing many people to its potential without even knowing it. This was my first, blind taste of Linux, visiting family in the States as a child.