This is much better than the default TkInter file dialog... I wonder if it would work on a MacOS... (the documenation only mentions Linux distros and Windows)
v1.0 then:
“Perl is kind of designed to make #awk and #sed semi-obsolete […] The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).” https://github.com/Perl/perl5/releases/tag/perl-1.0
What was it like to work at Xerox PARC at its peak?
This guide for newcomers to the lab, published 40 years ago in 1983, introduces the computing and social environment of PARC. Lots of quirky systems and obscure lore.
@amoroso while I am too young to have worked at Xerox Parc back it's revolutionary times, it is in no small part that I do what I do now due to their ground breaking work on user interfaces. The desktop #gui is old hat now but was the gateway to computers for many. A certain Mr Jobs owed Parc a bit too :)
A Linux distribution is a similar concept to a phone’s app store. It allows you to download software that’s pre-vetted. This reduces the chance that it’s malware and allows the different dependencies to work together to reduce redundancy. However, you MAY optionally get software OUTSIDE of the package manager and directly from the software’s developer, through universal systems such as Flatpak, AppImage, or Snaps.
If you get software from OUTSIDE the package manager, then you’ll have double dependencies which takes up space and causes some minor delay in starting up the program. Many in the Linux community argue and debate over if the delay, space, and security issues matter, or if it’s more important to have software that works across distributions and is released faster. The delay on Snaps is worse than others, leading SOME to criticize Ubuntu which heavily uses them. This is why Mint is a fork of Ubuntu but WITHOUT Snaps. Others point out that without universal package managers, it can take YEARS for new software to make it to distributions with slower release cycles such as Ubuntu and Mint.
A Linux distribution is NOT the way Linux LOOKS. That’s the desktop environment! So if you like a distro’s software, you can swap it for any other desktop environment than the default. For example Linux Mint’s “Cinnamon flavor” look, could be put on Debian or anything else! At the end of the day, distros DON’T matter that much and anything is better than Windows… even snaps =)
>"At the end of the day, distros DON’T matter that much and anything is better than Windows… even snaps =)"
That having been said, I'm a firm believer that "Friends don't let friends run ewb00ntew!" Yah, that's kinda a little disparaging tagline I came up with a decade or so ago. I think it's cute, but it does express my sentiments.
I was sooooooooo tired of answering the same question for about twenty years, searching for new ways to say it, and shifting from one fav distro of mine to another, and then back again. But I really failed to acknowledge the need for #n00bs to experience instant gratification to hold their interests long enough to just ditch the #Satan of Redmond (Windows) for that of freedom and privacy in the form of one of the most incredibly steep learning curves I was actually expecting those people to climb after having their questions answered.
#Slackware still tops the list to this day - it is so powerful and.... yes, simple - but that's what us sysadmin's say. Concepts like sbin/lilo and fdisk partitioning or manually editing etc/fstab real quick coz I know what I want as special mountpoints over NFS or whatev.... "OH the Horrror!", is prolly what any of those n00bs seeking to escape the apron strings of #Microsoft likely said, right before making a pinata in my effagy to bludgeon.
#Debian, and I am a proud and self-described Debiantard, isn't (wasn't) really much better back in the day, even with auto provisioning of partitions and the #GUI based install it sported... "non-free-firmware... huh? Why am I looking at a blank terminal with a command prompt's blinking cursor, instead of pretty little windows with a mouse pointer?"
#Arch_Linux, #Gentoo, and others not historically worth mentioning at this time weren't any better, because they were better, and far superior to the semi-n00b-friendly distros at the time. #Redhat 5.0 - 7.22 weren't that bad actually, the newcomer could actually fumble their way past the installation (and even choose the Redneck language for foshizzles and giggles), but like you mention above, obsolescence loomed imminently with gobs of #RPM Hell, especially if you went out to somewhere like RPMfind.net or another place where you could do an rpm -ivf <packagename> and then discover you broke your google... (prolly Alta Vista back in those days), but you could seriously want a really good application and find out that you have to put the lotion on its skin - or at least have a current copy of the AutoTrader to take your mind off the predicament that landed you in the bottom of a pit.
Enter #LMDE... Lemme say that again: Enter LMDE!!!
Now I had something I could recommend to n00bs that split the difference between a rolling distro and a plug & pray installation! All that non-free firmware that was so confusing for so many back then (can't get your display to work, can't this or that and aaarrrrgggghhhhh).
LMDE tracked Debian Testing but installation was as easy as just installing Mint with all of the firmware you needed - people started thanking me twice (they always thanked me once, and then a week later swore to unleash painful, bloody vengeance upon me for burying them in documentation that they could in no way comprehend). The problem, previously, was one of the tenants of my religion - "You can do it right.... Or you can do it twice!"
The truth was, they couldn't even do it AT ALL the first time, and I'm telling them to use a simple distro like Slackware or Debian - nevermind the the 3 stages of Gentoo (They don't even offer those staged platforms anymore, it was too involved for even seasoned aficionados of source based distros).
There was SuSE, but it was as ephemeral as Redhat, and for a while in those early days, I was able to wholeheartedly recommend Mandrake Linux, which had a beautiful DE and easy install, but they went public just prior to that big "POP" of the dotcom bubble and were vaporized.
Yes, When Mint came along I was elated. I could recommend LMDE, and the user could install and easily manage their desktop - and it was a rolling distro too!
Then came the realization by Clément Lefèbvre that without considerable funding there was no way the team could even have a life of their own or watch their kids grow up if they continued to support what was almost effectively two separate, but equally in appearance, distros. I must applaud the Mint team because they did gracefully migrate the LMDE folks back into the mainline Mint over a period of a couple of years.
Then I stopped recommending Linux Mint - "Friends don't let friends run ewb00ntew!"; Remember? Then, a couple of versions back, I caved with the announcement that Clément had decreed those evil "Snaps" would be disabled (If you tell me what you want what you really really want... as the Spice Girls said...). Yes, of course, you could manually enable it - just like Shuttleworth hiimself defended the Shopping Lens malware because the users could simply disable it - Huh? Disable shopping Lens? How in tarnation could a n00bie even know what to look for in the package manager to make that malware go away????
But I digress. If you really wanted to, you can enable Snaps in Linux Mint, but it's disabled by default - and for good reason, as you pointed out. Now, it's been a couple of years since I've looked, coz I no longer can be persuaded to answer that question anymore (um.... Okay, I'm back to recommending Slackware, Debian, or Arch again, but prefer to just set up a laptop for friends and say, "see? Just like Windows, huh?"). But here's what I would really like to see.
Now that non-free-firmware (since the pre-Bookworm vote in the community) is a very easy option in Debian proper, I would really like to see Linux Mint migrate back to a Slick Debian and just fricken' ditch Ubuntu altogether. My thoughts have always been that the firmware was the major issue that prevented them from getting 100% behind the upstream in the first place (I could very well be wrong about that).
Things I like about Ubuntu??? Um..... gimme a sec... Lemme think... Errr...
Byobu
That's it. #Byobu. And IMNSHO, that's really just a pretty skin over #tmux anyway, but it's got some kewl status widgets you can embed at the bottom of the screen. Speaking of #screen, Byobu IS NOT screen - it's tmux underneath, but it does default to ^A instead of the tmux default of ^B, but that's easy enough to change. What I really like about it is that it's a bit more user friendly in that you can customize it for your users and have it AutoStart sessions as soon as they log in - but there I go again, imposing what I think is kewl on people who really just need things as close to point and click on next ==> next ==> next ==> next as we can get it for them.
You see it wasn't all that long ago that even Windows needed an occasion tuning from your local PC Field Tech, much like our pianos do. I see no reason why we can't at least instill the responsibility for having a third party on retainer for quarterly or bi-annual maintenance of our Linux laptops either - I mean, just look how assimilated everyone still running Windows has become since Windows is free to pillage your privacy in the wake of Win10 forced updates?
Well, I'll close now, but did want to mention that your profile's stated mission sounds really refreshing to me - and I might just doing a copypasta of the link to your profile the next time someone asks that age old question.... Which Linux distro should I start off with?.
Even when development started in summer '79 it took twice as long as Apple expected, not only because they had to get rid of Jobs first. So LISA wasn't launched earlier than 1983 with 1Mb RAM for almost U$D 10K. The project was a $50 million investment for Apple Inc., and kept losses low since it sold almost 5K units annually. After 27 months it was in-house competition that buried the Lisa computers, litterally. In the end it was a zero sum game for Apple, but a huge step for modern graphic user-interfaces and more personal computers.
Just a reminder that today — December 9, 2023 — is the 55th anniversary of “The Mother of All Demos,” the 1968 demonstration of technology that we all use today, but must have seemed like pure science fiction back then.
Perl Advent Calendar 2023 - Who's That Clicking At The Window?
"Life at the Grotto has finally joined the modern age. Santa has got a new Laptop. The clacketty clack of his previous rather large steam powered workstation, a keyboard and a green phosphor terminal, replaced by a sleek portable device that could easily be carried on the sleigh. But some of the elves were mystified..." https://perladvent.org/2023/2023-12-08.html #Perl#PerlAdventCalendar
Consider: #Linux desktop environment that captures the terminal output of every #GUI app it launches, so when you click "detect device" in Pulseview and nothing happens because you forgot to add the udev rules you have something to go on, instead of angrily clicking on a button again and again.
Honestly, it's so dumb that you have to launch things from a terminal to debug them.
There are so many interesting things happening in the intersection of #rust and #gui right now. It is so much fun to follow what everyone does and try to understand their perspective on the problem space.
I've been working on my third take on Gooey, my GUI framework for Rust. I'm really excited about how this iteration is shaping up, so I threw together a video to show off the bi-directional bindings I have hooked up as of today. #RustLang#Gooey#GUIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GrJwDtyD2g
If you had the pleasure if seeing #Outlook crash and die once the Inbox reaches 2 GiB you'll beg for @thunderbird - espechally since the only #GUI-based #eMail Client that does #PGP/MIME out of tue box and just works noob-proof in that regard.
I'll grant that most of the time admin stuff should be done from the shell, just like Unix first intended. But there are some cases where GUI programs are just way too convenient to use something else. For those specific cases, I hacked it my way :)
This 1989 retrospective of Xerox Star written by its designers and developers is fascinating. It explains the design decisions, tells the history of the system, and candidly admits the technological and business mistakes.
Already gave a glimpse of this yesterday[1]. This example uses the new StackedLayout generator to create random multi-column base layouts and allocate cells of varying sizes (column/row spans). Depending on size, each cell also has a probability to produce nested child layouts in its place (up to 4 levels). The example also shows how the layout gen can be queried to determine & allocate any remaining empty space(s) at the bottom of each nesting level (since it's highly likely that there's such)... The result is a completely space-filling grid layout (which the new thi.ng website will likely be based on too, obviously with some of the more sane/usable/responsive configurations...)
How, after over 30 years of graphical user interfaces, have we not managed to stop modal dialog boxes from popping up and intercepting keyboard strokes while in the middle of typing a sentence?
boxcars (code.rocket9labs.com)
Graphical client for bgammon.org...