Of these, I would say that Cinnamon is one that could be comparable to XFCE or even GNOME and KDE. Seriously, it's good. The system settings menu has all of the options one could need and the look and feel of the dektop is very customizable.
I'm a KDE user, but if it ever stopped working/disappeared I would use Cinnamon. In fact I plan to use it whenever KDE Plasma 6 releases to wait out until the it becomes more stable.
> KDE Plasma 6 releases to wait out until the it becomes more stable.
IIRC KDE committed to never break users again like they did with the first releases of KDE 4. It's expect the first releases of Plasma 6 that the distros will actually ship to be stable, and to be mostly a Qt5 → Qt 6 upgrade. You should be able to run a stable version of Plasma (5 or 6) in any case during this period. KDE 3 to 4 was a disaster; last versions of KDE 4 were rock solid. First versions of Plasma 5 were a bit lacking but rapidly became very stable and usable, and you could actually keep using KDE 4 in the meantime. I expect the Plasma 6 transition to be even smoother. I hope I'm not wrong.
But otherwise I agree, Cinnamon seems very good and I tend to recommend it and pick it for people who I install Linux for.
Sorry, but as an early adopter of Plasma 5 (granted, maybe a bit too early), it was terribly broken for a couple of months. I took refuge in Awesome until things stabilized.
Huh. I started using Plasma 5 on a bleeding edge rolling distro and it was just fine. Everything was a mix of KDE4 and KDE5 apps for a while, but they all worked with minor quirks at worst.
I believe I was switching between Arch and OpenSUSE at the time, and I didn't note down specific issues, I seem to recall problems with kwin dying... maybe something to do with multihead? If I'm not mistaken I was still using a PC with a Radeon HD 7770 GPU at the time (for all the Catalyst issues I've had, still one of my favourite pieces of computer hardware I've ever owned), so it could have been iffy interactions between moving parts. I do seem to recall a period when I got many, many panics (or oopses, I dunno, screen went black and nothing reacted to anything), I think that was around the same time.
Forgive the vagueness, but I don't believe in memories and haven't kept a journal. Still, as completely unreliable and untrustworthy human memory is I am inclined to believe I had issues with Plasma 5 during the transition period.
Yeah, I'm sure you did run into real issues. I was trying to figure out if they were distro issues, or if issues that also affected me were more of a problem for your workflow than mine, etc.
Either way I think that still sounds better than the old 3->4 migration, and hopefully 5->6 can be better still!
I can see that. For me personally about a year~ish ago Plasma Wayland reached the point where it's good enough for me to use as a daily driver...
...though I do lament the loss of Desktop Cube.
Of course, coming from Awesome I am often annoyed at how Plasma doesn't have per-screen (X11 monitor, if I'm not mistaken) tags and per-X11-display workspaces don't really work that well.
I pretty much did this too but in Arch Linux. It's just a script[1] that I run and I have it working with the linux and the linux-lts kernels. It's pretty nifty. It just works on Arch Linux since kernels don't have version numbers on the name I never have to touch again after installation.
I've used Fish for about 2 years now. Before that I used ZSH for about 6 months. I'm relatively new daily driving Linux. About 3 years.
The thing about ZSH that made me jump ship was that even though you can customize it like fish (with Oh My ZSH plugins) ZSH was always slow or didn't display some things correctly. It was frustrating having to wait a few seconds for a command or having things just not work out correctly.
Fish, on the other hand, is fast and has a lot of quality of life features like typing part of a command and then serach with the up key. I didn't even install any plugins (I like to Fisher[1]).
Also, Fish has gotten me more and more into shell scripting. The docs for Fish are very clear and easy to navigate. I love how you can have custom scripts on the .config folder or abbreviations[2], which I think are superior to aliases since they expand into the command you're calling.
I was using it as the default shell for my user until recently and it was fine, but I have gone back to Bash as my default shell and just set my terminal emulator to start into Fish on startup. I didn't have any incident. I just wanted to avoid anything unexpected further down the line.
Let's add to that that both fish and zsh have excellent vi modes (unlike readline's half-assed one)
(If don't see the benefit of using a vim mode for the command line, you probably still reaching far out to the top left corner escape key in the rare occasions you do use vim, and dislike to use it.)
If you can remember which countries traditionally mostly speak English, and which mostly spoke a Romance language, you have a shot at getting it right.
The thing about Encarta to me is that it felt so much more interactive than what we have today.
Nowadays we read a Wikipedia article or watch a Youtube video on a topic but never interact with the content. It's all very passive. I was a child during the heyday of Encarta and I remember I had it and a few other specialized encyclopedias (one about animals, one about sea life, one about dinosaurs!!) and they were all interactive. I miss this about computers. Not all things have to be a game or passive which is what I see nowadays when a child has a screen in front of their face.
I never mess interactivity when browsing Wikipedia. I love that WP is text-based, so that I can read it in my own preferred tempo. I rarely watch videos since to me they always feel too slow compared to reading text. I understand on an intellectual level that Youtube is a great platform that provide lots of value and entertainment to lots of people, but I never feel that greatness since it’s not something that I personally appreciate. Oh well, to each their own :)
There is value in "all" information being text. However there's also value in having interactive elements. From the contextual fitting video to i.e. an embedded star map: Imagine reading the article about a solar eclipse and being able to navigate a 3D model of the stars. Imagine reading an article about the human body and having a 3D model right next to it: If you click on "heart" in the text it's being highlighted in the model.
Of course Encarta wasn't there, but we have 20 years of technological advance. But for hobbyist Wikipedia authors that's too much work and for a commercial Encarta Wikipedia is too strong.
Can you describe the ones you most remember? I see the image but I'm more interested in your (memory of your) subjective experience. What level of creative freedom did you have in the interactivity?
The most vivid memory I have of myself spending hours on Encarta as a child was with their "flight simulator" / bird's eye view. I will try to find a video of it but I am sure it will be disappointing in today's standards as well.
I’m the same way. Video is such a slow mechanism for consuming information, so unless it’s primary material to bear witness to something, it’s usually just a lot of overhead - slow talking intros, context setting, bias, association, etc.
My memories with Encarta aren’t that special - the searching was cool but I think I was jaded to the cdrom video thing already, wishing it could be better technically. Definitely gave you a sense of what could be possible with an endless source of material, irrespective of copyright.
...and in many cases, sufficient filler to tip the video over the 10 minute mark so that more adverts can be shown during it.
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I was randomly looking up prehistoric musical instruments the other day and I couldn't help but want to see the instruments and watch a video of them being played. It was not available on Wikipedia.
The one place where I found videos were hugely better was blender tutorial videos. The program has countless features and shortcuts and is hugely visual. The video just helps you capture as much of that information as possible as well as showing you the typical workflow of a pro.
What kinds of interactivity are you referring to? I didn't have Encarta. My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101 is largely about how interactivity is missing from Wikipedia articles and Kiwix.
The Guardian had a so-called Concrete Week[1] earlier this year when they published articles related to the concrete industry and its impact.
One of the articles [2] touched briefly on the corruption related to the building and concrete industry.
I assure you, these mafias exist in a lot of places. Odebrecht has entangled governments of Peru and Brazil with corruption here in South America. I would be interested where else has this happened.
Teh French cement company Lafarge did business with jihadis in Syria during the current civil war, including with the Islamic State [1]. That's corruption on a whole new level, as I'm 100% sure the decision to conduct this type of business was taken at the company's HQ in France.
Of these, I would say that Cinnamon is one that could be comparable to XFCE or even GNOME and KDE. Seriously, it's good. The system settings menu has all of the options one could need and the look and feel of the dektop is very customizable.
I'm a KDE user, but if it ever stopped working/disappeared I would use Cinnamon. In fact I plan to use it whenever KDE Plasma 6 releases to wait out until the it becomes more stable.