• 4 posts
  • 16 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • This is a good point. I assumed here that FS advocates will be basically opposed to a technology that serves to incorporate their code into software that does not provide the fundamental freedoms to end users, more than those who license their work permissively. But yes you could imagine an FS advocate who is quite happy to use the tech themselves and churn out code with GPL attached.

As a grumpy old man who wishes his computer would stop changing I’ve been trying to get on board with XFCE for a while and the big blocker has been making things work well on my 4K screen. (For the record this post is based on Debian testing = trixie, X11, and nvidia proprietary drivers god have mercy on my soul.)

For a while XFCE only supported the type of scaling that makes things smaller. Understandably IMO this confused a few people and happily this has been upgraded and now it also makes things bigger. However in my experience this also makes things blurrier.

In my latest round of testing it appears that the situation can be fixed with a single setting: font DPI.

Settings Manager > Appearance > Fonts (tab) > Custom DPI setting > I chose 150, and logged out and in to have everything take effect.

From this single change everything is looking good in both GTK and Qt apps. I did also increase the size of my panel through the panel settings, and title bars are kind of tiny, but mostly I use maximised applications so I’m not stressing about this too much.

Hope this helps anyone else who is stuck in an “ohgod why couldn’t we just stop after Windows 2000” love-hate relationship with computers.

  • I have to assume that we’re in this situation because because the app does not exist in our distro’s repo (or homebrew or whatever else). So how do you go about this verification? You need a trusted public key, right? You wouldn’t happen to be downloading that from the same website that you’re worried might be sending you compromised scripts or binaries? You wouldn’t happen to be downloading the key from a public keyserver and assuming it belongs to the person whose name is on it?

    This is such a ridiculously high bar to avert a “security nightmare”. Regular users will be better off ignoring such esoteric suggestions and just looking for lots of stars on GitHub.

Martin Kleppmann sets out a vision: “In local-first software, the availability of another computer should never prevent you from working.”

He describes the evolution of how to classify local-first software, how it differs from offline-first, and proposes a bold future where data sync servers are a commodity working in tandem with peer-to-peer sync, freeing both developers and users from lock-in concerns.