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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • I tried it a few years ago. I was really impressed by how lightweight and gorgeous it is. In particular, I found it really cool and actually useful that you got a live view of your other workspaces on your panel. You could even fullscreen a video on your other workspace and then watch (a very small version of) it in your panel.

    But yeah, even though I came back to it multiple times, I never ended up sticking around. It would crash regularly (not the worst thing, since recovery was generally seamless, but still meh), but in particular, it had some peculiar design decisions.

    For example, if you double-click a window titlebar in virtually any window manager, it will maximize. In Enlightenment, I believe it got shaded (i.e. the contents of the window got hidden and only the titlebar was still visible).

    Another prominent one was that its applet for connecting to WiFi and such didn’t support NetworkManager, but rather only ConnMan. If you’ve never heard of ConnMan, yeah, I only know it from Enlightenment, too. Similarly, my distro (openSUSE) didn’t package it either (and openSUSE was said to offer a relatively good Enlightenment experience). That’s something which should just work, because you can’t expect people to look up how they can connect to WiFi while they can’t reach the internet.

    And yeah, these are just the big ones that stuck in my head. There were lots of smaller usability issues, too. Many things you could fix by changing the configuration, but we’re talking many in an absolute sense, too, i.e. you might spend an hour or more just tweaking things so that they behaved like you might expect.




  • The concern is that if lots of softwares get rewritten and some of those softwares switch from a copyleft license to a permissive license, then things might stop being open-source sooner or later, because companies are not anymore forced to open-source.

    Yes, in the case of sudo-rs, this concern is silly. But for example, the uutils coreutils are under MIT license, when the GNU coreutils were under GPL-3.0.






  • It’s just the normal “Pager” widget, configured to show application icons.

    I find “minimap” more descriptive for what I’m doing, because I don’t minimize, nor stack windows, so if a window exists, it has a location.
    Which is also ultimately how I use this thing. Imagine a large desk where you need to jump between topics every so often. You’d put related sheets of paper next to each other and leave a bit of space between the groups. Sheets of paper are just application windows in my case (I will open one or more windows per task, I don’t mix tasks together based on application like people usually do). Well, and my desk also happens to be very long, so I can comfortably fit a minimap for it in my panel.

    And because I really like multitasking, I’ve actually got multiple desks, in different colors:

    For these, I use Plasma’s Activities. The different colors are done by having a transparent panel and then setting the wallpaper to different colors + telling Plasma to use the wallpaper for determining the accent color.

    In this screenshot, you can also beautifully see a workspace with 5 Kate windows, which is genuinely where I shoved a bunch of notes, for me to sort through them later. 🙃






  • I get to use Linux at $DAYJOB and I have a rather customized KDE setup (basically window tiling, 20-80 workspaces, a workspace minimap in the panel).
    Usually, I’m surrounded by other nerds, who’ll ask about it occasionally, but you know, they’ve heard of or used Linux before, they know that some crazy things can be done.

    Now, yesterday, I was in a call with the legal department. I started sharing my screen and explaining my relatively simple problem. And the guy took longer than I expected to respond, which made me quite self-conscious, whether he needs time to process my explanation …or rather what in the fresh hell I did to my computer to make it look like that. 🙃