Good question. Docker can be used for orchestration which I‘m pretty sure is a lot more than flatpak is designed for. So if this interests you (I‘m fine with docker) feel free to try it out and update me.
Distro Hopping seems to be such a big part of the “Linux experience.”
It’s not, it’s just a way to find the distro that suits you best.
If you’re already satisfied with what you have, there’s no reason to change and you’re not missing out on anything. If you’re ever curious about other distros, install Virtualbox and try them in a VM.
I stopped distro hopping years ago when I started using Linux MX (Debian based), I’m so happy with it that I have no intention to change ever again.
The only other distro I really like is LMDE (Mint based on Debian instead of Ubuntu), so I put that one on my laptop (MX on my gaming desktop).
So does that mean they’re finally going to make clicking on the address bar compatible with the Linux method of doing things (a single click puts the cursor where you clicked, NOT highlight the entire address, which is completely different from every other application on the desktop)? Because this whole business of “we’re not going to fix this even though it previously worked correctly because we insist everyone should do things the Microsoft way” has been an annoyance for the past few years since they changed the basic function on that one thing.
I agree with you. There was a big outcry when they changed it, granted this was quite some time ago and the young ones here may not remember, but it’s still a break from the way everything else works.
But as usual, broken stuff becomes the new normal after a while.
So does that mean they’re finally going to make clicking on the address bar compatible with the Linux method of doing things (a single click puts the cursor where you clicked, NOT highlight the entire address, which is completely different from every other application on the desktop)?
I’ve never heard of this before, do you have a source for this? I got this same behaviour on Epiphany, Chrome, and Chromium, so it’s not just Firefox. Is there any web-browser that handles this the “correct” way?
I think it was around FF78 that they changed this behavior. Before that a single click just placed the cursor, double-click highlighted a word, and triple-click highlighted the entire address. This is the behavior for anything I click anywhere on my desktop (debian/mate) so I suspect what happened is the firefox devs decided to hard-code the behavior instead of letting the desktop handle it. I know there was a bug report for the issue which the devs repeatedly closed as won’t fix, at one point literally saying this was the way things worked in Windows and they were following that path for consistency across all operating systems, despite multiple examples given to show this was NOT the expected behavior on any Linux platform.
I’m not too surprised Chrome does this too, but it does make me wonder if Chrome following this path is the reason why the FF devs decided to copy it? Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean that is the correct or expected behavior. ;-)
Vivaldi does that crap too. I’m used to clicking the bar, and selecting from there. Vivaldi fucks it up by suddenly showing the “https://” part and shifting everything else to the right. So fucking annoying.
I found it annoying when FF no longer showed the http part of an address, but since nearly everything is on https these days it very rarely bounces back and forth for me any more.
Every browser I tried does that. They’d be inconsistent if adopting a different behavior.
Idk about others, but most times I click the address bar I want to either copy the address, change it entirely, or search for something. Selecting the entire text just makes sense, especially on mobile where selecting things sucks.
They all do it NOW. They did not always do it this way. Firefox is what I’ve always used, so I know they used to let the desktop handle how clicks were managed. Literally anything else on my desktop, if I click once it simply places the cursor where I clicked. And since I need to copy partial URLs multiple times a day, this change is something that constantly aggravates me. Now I have to click the address bar four times quickly in order for it to finally place the cursor where I’m clicking at. It’s not nitpicking if they intentionally changed an operation to no longer follow the rules of everything else on the desktop. Being inconsistent is not user-friendly.
If you hold down the mouse button while hovering over the address bar, that starts selecting stuff. Is there a reason your usecase isn’t covered by this?
Well, if they did it as you want it, a bunch of other people would complain they’re inconsistent because they’re the only browser that does that (today).
And what’s “everything else on the desktop”? I’m struggling to find more examples other than browsers and file managers. And a few popular file managers don’t even have editable text path inputs enabled by default, so you can’t even say this is a “rule”.
Open any document. Single click somewhere within that document. What do you expect to happen? Do you expect your cursor to be placed where you clicked, or do you expect the entire line to be highlighted? My guess is that you expect consistency in every application doing the same thing for a single click.
Just because one browser decided to change how they react, and everybody else copied that behavior, does not mean it is the correct or expected behavior. You’ve just gotten used to the difference that was forced on you, but imagine if every application on your desktop reacted differently depending on how many times you clicked a spot? What happens when they also start modifying the results of a right-click into something unexpected like clearing your cookies? Is that also OK just because one browser started doing it and every other browser copied that function?
The problem is you’re expecting consistency between elements that should not have consistent behavior for having completely different functions.
A line of text in a PDF, in a WYSIWYG editor, text in UI labels, and text in an address bar all have different roles and should be expected to behave differently, idk why you’re surprised for this “inconsistency”.
A single line text field in any interface doesn’t behave the same way as the single line text field in the address bar. It certainly does break conventions.
Maybe because it WAS consistent until the FF devs made the choice to change it? As I said before, if they decided to change the role of the right-click to no longer bring up a context menu, would you be ok with that as well? What about the difference between clicking on text in a browser article or clicking into a textarea? Those also have different roles, so if the devs decide that a user single-clicking into the textarea should automatically select the entire field, would that make sense to you? If I click on any text anywhere in any application, I expect to get the same results, and not have to remember how every application handles that click differently. Sure if I was clicking on something other than text then different actions might make sense in different applications, but the idea of a single click on the address bar selecting everything is akin to clicking an icon on my desktop and having all the surrounding icons also getting selected – it just doesn’t make sense and it’s not consistent with a single click in any other application.
So it’s ok that it works for your use-case and screw consistency? My point is that if you say it’s ok for one application to do things their own way, it basically invites every other app developer to ignore the standards and just do whatever they want. And no, single-click selecting the entire URL shouldn’t be considered a standard, it’s just something that changed in the last few years when one browser made the call and everyone else played follow-the-leader.
By the way, you mentioned that “all” of your browsers behave the same way . I’d like to remind you that Chrome, Chromium, and Safari all use the same engine so they’re basically the same thing. I think Opera stands alone but I don’t have that installed here so I can’t check it immediately. I’d ask if anyone had checked Exploder, but who in their right mind uses that except for work-related stuff where their developers can’t write HTML, and Microsoft is probably the ones who started this mess anything since they’re well know for ignoring standards. That really only leaves four unique browsers though. Not saying you didn’t consider this already, I just wanted to point it out in case you hadn’t.
If you want an example similar to an address bar, how about the current path in any file manager – I have Caja, Dolphin, and something called PCManFM here (not sure where that came from)? Once again, a single click does not select the entire path, it just places the cursor exactly where you clicked and nothing is selected. I can’t think of any other types of applications where you have some kind of a navigation bar, but that’s the closest example I know.
imagine if every application on your desktop reacted differently depending on how many times you clicked a spot
yeah, wow, imagine. different applications using different design patterns for different contexts. perish the thought!
Is that also OK just because one browser started doing it and every other browser copied that function?
one browser did an arguably useful thing, every other browser agreed it was arguably useful, and it became a widely adopted feature? sounds ok to me. gee, it’s almost like this is how standard patterns come to be, or something…
Dang, similar stuff happened to me on nixos. Had to instruct one of the relatives on how to reboot the machine and choose a previous generation in the boitloader 🤣
A few years ago i spent a lot of time converting .flac-files into .ogg-files in order to put on my oldschool iPod. As I did a lot of repetitive typing - entering $dir / for file in flac ; do convert etc / mkdir -p $somewhere/$artist/$album / mv $somewhere/.ogg->$new_dir/ and so on - I thought: “hm lets just write a loop over loops for all the artists here and then all the albums and at the same time create the nested directories somewhere else… hm actually in the home directory… and later love everything on the iPod at once.”
so i was in my music folder with the artists-folders i wanted to convert. i did something wrong
So i did my complicated script directly in the shell. I made something wrong and instead of creating a folder “/artist/album” I created 3 folders in my current working directory: “”, “artist” and “album”. hmph dammit gotta try again… but first : i have to clean up these useless folders in the current dir. so i type of course this: "$ rm -r ~ artist album " after about 5 seconds of wondering why it took so long i realized my error. o_O I stopped the running command, but it was (of course) too late and i bricked my current installation. All the half-deleted config files made or impossible to start normally and extremely tedious to repair it by hand, so i reinstalled.
This was pre-linux for me but something you can still do in most distros so I think it’s a valid story.
In 1999 I was using Napster on computer running MS-DOS. I was 12 years old and an aspiring open media enthusiast/stupid script kiddie. I was using the file explorer interface in Napster and accidentally gave access to my entire C drive. I also had opened ports to share certain media and to fuck with my friends using daemon tools (back then you could do stupid stuff like control a friend’s desktop with certain versions of daemon tools). Immediately I started receiving packages called things like “sleep.tight.tiny.mite” and I knew I was fucked so I clicked in the Napster interface and clicked “delete” and deleted my entire active drive.
I panicked and installed the only operating system we had which was a random copy of Red Hat. When my dad came home I pretended like it had always had Linux on it. I do think he was more impressed than mad.
I once deleted the network system in alpine. I’d been having some trouble with with the default one (I think wpa_supplicant) so I decided to try the other one (I think iwctl). But I thought that there might be problems with havung both of them so before I installed iwctl I deleted wpa_supplicant (thinking that it was more of a config utility than the whole network system), only to find that I couldn’t connect to the internet to install iwctl.
Oh, I just remembered another one or three. So, resizing the partitions. My install at the time had a swap partition that I didn’t need anymore. Should be simple, right? Remove the partition and the corresponding fstab entry, resize root, profit. Well, the superblock disagreed. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to be able to re-create the scheme as it was, and then take my time to read the wiki and do the procedure properly (e2fsck, resize2fs and all that stuff).
Some people I’ve met since, unfortunately, weren’t so lucky (as far as I remember, both tried to shrink and were past mkfs already) and had to reinstall. The moral is, one does simply mess with superblocks; read the wiki first!
You’re going to get a million answers, mostly people saying to use which distro they’re currently using. In my experience, KDE works just fine on any distro that allows you to install it out of the box, so I would choose based on other attributes of the distro, such as:
Package manager: which are you used to?
Update cycle: KDE 6 is out soon, so you want something which updates often enough to get it fairly quickly (at least semiannual).
Stability: unless you want to have to manually maintain your system and learn how it works, avoid arch and arch-based distros. I have run it, its fine, but it’s not “normie”, and unless you really know what you’re doing, daily driving it can be stressful. Manjaro has the same issues, but takes away some ability of the user to fix them.
For instance, I personally like Debian and apt, but I would not recommend base Debian right now, since KDE 6 is about to come out and Debian will take a loooong time to get it. I have not personally used Kubuntu, but if it gets rid of any the bloat canonical has been adding to Ubuntu lately, it sounds pretty good to me.
Yeah, Kubuntu’s fine. It has some of the Snap stuff, but the “minimal install” greatly strips down unnecessary bullshit to the point where I even find vanilla Debian Plasma to be more bloated in comparison.
I used Kubuntu for most of my time on Linux before switching to Debian. Still fully recommend it as a basically “plug and play” distro with a quick installer that works OOTB.
There’s also a KDE-specific backports PPA which gets you new Plasma and Qt stuff fairly quickly, but that works best on regular releases rather than LTS releases. (The only issue is that, because it uses Launchpad, the Plasma updates can be super fucking slow to download, regardless of your network speed).
Then again, if someone’s going to be using LTS versions only, there’s not really that much of a difference between it and Debian Stable in terms of DE updates.
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