Disabled users tend to customise a lot. Because no matter how well-intentioned the accessibility options may be. Most are actually unusable in real world situations.
Generally because developers are rarely disabled in the way being supported. And seem to assume full or 0 use. Never recognising we depend more on our limited abilities to see, hear or move than most able-bodied do. So options that try to replace 100% slow us down rather than making things easier. So we are forced to spend time trying to adapt colours fonts and sounds in ways they never consider. Just to be able to compete in any form of work.
Am disabled, though thankfully i mostly only need magnification and swapping colors around. Still, it’s me fiddling with UI element sizes, fonts, and colors to get a baseline i can live with so I only have to use zoom now and again as opposed to constantly.
Compare and contrast with how Windows has handled things since windows 8 in that theirs is a global percentage based scaling of EVERYTHING.
For that reason alone I’ve been pro-linux for the past decade. That I can game on linux? Means i have no want or reason to go backto windows. Is it perfect? Nope! There are always hiccups in everything. Yet it does most of what i want without complaint.
Grins Been non windows at home since the 90s. Lost my vision and mobility in the early 2000s. So really have not tried to use windows since.
But yeah I have 3 32-inch monitors, tend to have the magnifier on the alt key with the mouse to zoom. But only use it for setting up new software of the odd gnome menu stuff.
But every now and then you get some software that just refuses to follow the gui text hints and fails to give users any options. OS is way better than proprietary. But many developers just do not realise how little accessibility in the OS actually helps with workflow when they do not allow text customisation.
And what the F%$^ is it with pale grey on white text lately why the hell does anyone want that. Low contrast text and backgrounds seems to be a very annoying trend over the last 10 years.
I don’t have vision problems and I hate the low contrast text being shoved into everything. I’ve no idea how frustrating it must be if you have sight issues, but I can imagine.
Yep no one seems to like it. Yet it keeps getting implemented.
My current conspiracy. It my brothers guide dog controlling the world so she has a job.
I think that part of the issue is that every disability is unique to some degree. No two people who are blind have blindness to the same degree. Colorblind people have several variations they could be experiencing. Deafness also follows a similar pattern, whereby some people can’t hear well where others can’t hear at all; or in some cases have a constant sound in their ear that drowns out everything else. There are neurological disorders that range from not being able to read sentences normally because the words start to become jumbled to being unable to focus on large amounts of text. There are physical disabilities of all sorts that affect the arms and hands or even the ability to sit upright to look at the computer screen.
Because of that, there are two options:
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build a desktop environment custom-tailored to each individuals needs.
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build some general purpose accessibility options that can (and must) be adjusted to meet an individuals needs, which may or may not be able to meet them 100%.
Out of the two, the second one is far more feasible, and more possible to improve upon.
Well put. But yep, that pretty much somes it up.
The issue is how much stuff seems to just say. Let’s not bother at all. I will not the worst OS software for this has commercial names attached to it. Even when OS if some big company is responsible for funding. It’s down to the community to fight to get any decent support as a default. Capitalism really dose not want to care about disabled users unless forced. Or medical level profits are attached. But lets ;leave that mess out for now.
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I’ve been using the same Arch/KDE box at work for the past 5 years. All default/stock. I have 1 system related issue every couple of months, usually a known issue i can quickly find the solution to. My “maintenance” routine is to update packages once per week. The less customization you do, the less obscure issues you will come across. Life is good.
i tend to want to customize a lil bit to my tastes, but not much.
linux ui is already good nowadays.
dark mode gnome is starting to look less than ideal to me these days. I’m currently on Pop! and it seems like most of the momentum is going toward COSMIC but I’m not sure that’s what I want anyway. I’ve installed a bunch of extensions and tweaks to get the system looking somewhat how I want, but the DE still looks clumsy to me. I guess what I might be saying is that I should try KDE? not sure.
When I’m bored, I change how my Plasma looks. Happens once in a while. I would not complain if it ever turns into a “choose global theme | apply global theme” workflow tho.
I mean, it is basically there, except you need to download and apply Kvantum themes.
I pretty much just want a functioning vanilla Gnome desktop, remap caps lock to control, and I’m happy.
Not trying to yuck your yum, but what benefit for caps lock remap. Do you use caps lock that often?
I think they are saying the other way around, their caps lock activates Ctrl. I have mine set up as a left hand backspace. KDE has a number of built in options for this where you just need to tick a box to activate it. I miss it a lot on my work PC (windows)
Many people do. I’ve remapped caps lock as escape because I am a shitty vim user who trys to solve all problems by smashing that motherfucker into itself. I noticed my left pinky was getting unhappy with me, so I tried using caps lock for esc instead and haven’t gone back.
A key dedicated to SCREAMING just isn’t that useful IMO.
It all depends right? When I first setup Linux I spent hours tweaking the look of it in Plasma. Now that its coming up to 8 years on Linux, I just use GNOME desktop and don’t mother with customizations.
When I first started out, I used to customize my system constantly. Then I switched to KDE Plasma, and aside from a few minor configs, I’m completely satisfied with Breeze.
Yeah, nowdays DEs embedded customisation options cover so must of their default user-base needs that they are basically fully automatic rice cookers.
And that is how open sauce works, it develops over time according to needs, not based on boardroom needs, monetization-focused panel research, and constant UI changes just for the sake of it.
And there are still the basically provided options for even any deep ricing needs if you want to do so.
Is no one going to comment on the racial slur that is “ricing”?
It is important to understand the context of a word. Many words and phrases have racist origins, including many words you likely use without knowing. Meanings change, and that’s not a bad thing. If people hurt by the term pushed for it to stop being used, I would of course respect this. I have never seen who could be targeted with the term be offended by its usage in the Linux community.
Currently, the majority of people who talk about Linux customization call it “ricing”, and none of them are doing it with ill intent. Look at the replies to your comment, most of them didn’t even know this until you brought it up. What is the point in holding onto the negative history of a word that is no longer used in that way?
You’ll have to excuse my ignorance, I’ve been a petrolhead all my life and the only context I’ve ever heard it used is to derogatorily describe modified Japanese cars. The people on the receiving end definitely took offense to it, because that was the intention.
it’s like the words picnic and thanksgiving in their american-specific contexts: with both words no longer carry the connotation that implies lynching black people or giving thanks to god for genociding native americans; the present day version of both of these words, along with ricing, is neutral now.
It just seems like it could have very easily been replaced with “customization” without the conflict.
it should have, but it wasn’t and now it’s part of modern pop culture lexicon and i’m 100% onboard with divorcing words from thier ugly, painful history.
for me; it’s like owning the word “queer”
We don’t consider it to be neutral, and we remove posts that use the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner
never heard that one before
The thing about picnics having their origin in lynchings is a myth.
Dude what??
What what?
ricing was a pejorative word that used to describe what people did to japanese & korean cars; but it’s stopped carrying that connotation in a similar manner to the words picnic and thanksgiving.
using linux is a slur now
Yes that’s definitely what I meant 🙄
my friend’s dad’s brother uses arch
The person you replied to isn’t entirely wrong, though.
“ricing” was a term in use in the car modding scene around the 80s and 90s especially, where among certain groups it was popular to modify Japanese import cars with kits and decals etc to mimic the look of the Japanese racing scene.
Some people considered these mods to be tacky and worthless because they usually tended to focus more on aesthetics than performance, purely tricking the car up visually with no other changes. Due to the Asian origin of these mods and the stereotype that Asians eat a lot.of rice, the cars were insultingly dubbed “rice burners” or " ricers" and the process of doing it “ricing”
It was intended 100% as an insult, basically meaning “Your car looks like shit because of all that Asian stuff you put on it”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner
Like many insults of course, the insult is often “reclaimed” by the group it targets, who begin to use it between themselves in a favourable way, without any insult or negative connotation.
Ricing in the context of computers where people are styling, theming and “tricking out” their desktop almost certainly was borrowed from the car scene.
By this point there is basically no negative intent around the term at all, and especially not racist, but the place the term came from was.
Ignore the braindead replies, this was really informative.
please take your racism elsewhere, sir
Exactly!
I own a computer to get computer things done, not pretend I’m a hacker from the Matrix. KDE Plasma is pretty much already set up to do exactly that. Only thing I do is switch it to the Breeze dark theme.
More customization = Higher chance something breaks.
Admittedly, chances are it’s just something minor like your icons looking weird or transparency breaking, and it’s not like it happens very often. However I have had it happen while I’m trying to focus on something and it’s definitely an annoyance I could do without.
I like that I can customize on the off chance that I need to fuck with something. But defaults have been getting better and better so i’ve done it less and less.
I have a custom theme for Cinnamon/GTK… But they recently updated it and the new default theme doesn’t actually look that bad… But using the default theme will make me a sheep. ;_;
If someone has a script to set up HyprLand or Sway with all the necessary components and dotfiles I’m all ears because I just don’t have the patience to experiment myself so I’m still on GNOME.
JaKooLit has a hyprland script for most distros. If you want to use sway just install from your package manager not much else you need to do. If you wanna use proprietary nvidia drivers with sway you have to install sway-nvidia as well
Cosmic is really great if you want tiling similar to Hyprland or Sway without so much work. I used i3 then Hyprland for years, but have now been using Cosmic for months. Its the only DE that correctly does a tiling workflow imo, even considering extensions.
The problems with preconfigured configs is that they often aren’t very dynamic, as in they don’t adapt well to other PCs. Many of them will use stuff like CSS for widgets and bars that have stuff like specific pixel sizes, meaning you’ll often gave to make changes.
Hyprland has some premade configurations on their wiki if you’d like to try them. I’ve never tried one, if you do, let me know how it goes!
Another thing to remember is a lot of the stuff you take for granted in a DE don’t exist in a WM. Things like autostarts, envvars, background services, etc don’t work the same. Hyprland devs created UWSM which will help with all of this.
I used to spend hours creating custom color schemes for my Plasma setup and installed a bunch of icons themes. Now I switch out my wallpaper every so often and let the highlight color auto-pull from the image.
