Yukinu's Forum

by **Crystepsi** » Mon Sep 16, 2024 5:30 pm

hihihi i love your site and this forum sm

by **schnellonline** » Thu Sep 05, 2024 12:26 am

just passing by, i like this page a lot!
when i finish mine ill send you an e-mail to get into the webring

by **amby** » Tue Jul 23, 2024 5:50 am

hello, just passing by. this is a very beautiful website

do you happen to be a lainchanner, i found your forum on a comment someone posted here, apparently you created their webring: https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/forum-list.html

i'm currently planning to move off the gird into the mountains soon, i see no other way to deeply nurture my passions unless i go down that path. i'll look back here one day

by **Leva** » Wed Jan 10, 2024 10:25 am

Yukinu wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 3:47 am It's interesting, there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. TDE needs more developers across the entire stack (from documentation to code changes), but it's difficult to attract more people without frequent marketing of the DE, and it's difficult to market the DE without a flagship distro that is well known and frequently in the press. Quite the predicament for such and ambitious project.

Another problem is also just that a vast majority of people, including skilled developers, actively dislike or ridicule more traditional desktops and their designs. They want and enjoy the modern minimalist low-information-density design choices and would be much more likely and willing to throw their money, attention and contributions at something like a Wayland compositor with flat dark neon design than some traditional KDE 3.5 continuation.

In mainstream web spaces, I have been laughed at or even attacked for liking TDE (when I wasn't even being negative about modern desktops, but just showing off my own). "Oh god is it 1999 still", "My eyes are bleeding", "this is the ugliest window manager i have ever seen".

We're a dying breed.

by **Yukinu** » Wed Jan 10, 2024 3:47 am

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Jan 05, 2024 11:07 pm and how modern distributions' standard program stacks are moving faster than we can keep up.

That will definitely be a compounding problem over time. As more of their dependencies are dropped from package repos, they'll start having to pull and maintain an ever increasing nubmer of packages into their repo just to build everything. Given enough churn, at some point it would make be less work to maintain an entire distro that functions properly with TDE and simply backport patches and packages than it would be to bring TDE forward.

On that note, I would love to see a distro that has a completely frozen software stack and only provides security updates and new packages (so no breaking API changes by replacing existing packages). I suppose Ubuntu with ELTS support is good enough, since you get 10 years of security updates, although this wouldn't solve the breaking API problem, just delay it for a while (and at a financial cost as well). Perhaps OpenBSD with Perl 5 scripts and C89 programs is the current best shot at having a longterm API stable *nix system.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Jan 05, 2024 11:07 pm To speak the unspeakable: I think TDE as a project is genuinely dying, dying from a lack of skilled contributors willing and able to take on more than the very very basic necessary tasks to keep it booting. The TQt move was very cool, necessary and a long time in the making, but a lot of the more peripheral programs of TDE are abandoned. New features are very rare, and if they do come, they get added to the main components such as the recent window snapping update, but definitely not to the side programs. There is simply not enough skilled people in the TDE community.

...

It's on life support.

It's interesting, there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. TDE needs more developers across the entire stack (from documentation to code changes), but it's difficult to attract more people without frequent marketing of the DE, and it's difficult to market the DE without a flagship distro that is well known and frequently in the press. Quite the predicament for such and ambitious project.

by **Leva** » Fri Jan 05, 2024 11:07 pm

Yukinu wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:47 am Do you by any chance know what ever happened to the Ubuntu releases that were bundled with TDE? Recently Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Cinnamon have been accepted as official Ubuntu flavors, it makes me wonder if anyone has attempted to submit Ubuntu with TDE as a flavor, considering there were already downloadable Ubuntu ISOs. My guess is that there are already too many resource constraints as is.

Unfortunately not. But if I had to make a guess; TDE itself is hanging onto its last threads. It admittedly is full of bugs and little paper cuts simply owing to its age and how modern distributions' standard program stacks are moving faster than we can keep up. It's a massive technological debt issue.

There are already a few distributions that focus on coming with TDE out of the box and providing a good (i. e. not constantly crashing repeatedly) experience by default, like EXE GNU/Linux, or Q4OS. Those are about the extents that community resources go, and it's better to focus on a few things and do them well rather than spreading wide and thin. I don't have any concrete information, but I can assume that the TDE Ubuntu spin was cancelled due to such a lack of interest and resources.

I feel like with the limited resources we have, even keeping it operating is straining the limits. We still haven't gotten around to changing each piece of branding from K-something to T-something, even! Some of the documentation is a decade old or doesn't exist at all anymore. Most of the desktop's programs are entirely unmaintained or maintained by a person who also "maintains" like twelve others at best.

To speak the unspeakable: I think TDE as a project is genuinely dying, dying from a lack of skilled contributors willing and able to take on more than the very very basic necessary tasks to keep it booting. The TQt move was very cool, necessary and a long time in the making, but a lot of the more peripheral programs of TDE are abandoned. New features are very rare, and if they do come, they get added to the main components such as the recent window snapping update, but definitely not to the side programs. There is simply not enough skilled people in the TDE community.

Konqueror is practically unusable on the modern internet, for example, because writing a browser is a task of Lovecraftian dimensions these days and would probably need a dozen full time developers (just look at how much community power Firefox needs to make a serviceable browser).
Not even to mention the massive looming clouds on the horizon, like most of the multimedia and office programs having no support for contemporary document formats, that nobody is documenting how everything works, that standard system components of GNU/Linux desktops are being phased out as we speak leading to random crashes on some distributions like Arch, that someone has to go through all the super obscure TDE programs to make sure every even more obscure feature works...

As long as most TDE programs have no active specialized maintainers, they will rot. Something like KOffice or Kate will get updated to new Qt versions alright, but that's like maintenance work. But is there anyone really focusing on KOffice or Kate, trying to implement new features, or fix old bugs? No. And that's sad. It's on life support.

It's not the maintainers' fault. It's a manpower thing. But who with the relevant skills wants to put their hearts and time into maintaining a program that perhaps 20 people globally are using on a regular basis?

Yukinu wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:47 am Interesting, never really looked into Enlightenment. Only time I've used it was when I tested out Bhodi Linux in a VM a couple of years ago.

I feel like Bodhi/Moksha is actually the best way to experience an Enlightenment desktop anyway these days. Enlightenment itself feels eerily abandoned from its community, even though the developers still exist. I have not even seen a single fan-made theme for the newest versions, and older themes are not supported fully... so it's default theme or bust.
Moksha is at least a fully featured, surprisingly amazingly polished experience. It's my secret tip-off for people looking for a cool GNU/Linux desktop that nobody outside its bubble knows.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:47 am It's quite difficult to find useful info and guides for creating desktop themes these days. I've gotten used to GTK themeing a bit, but it took a lot of greps, digging through source of other themes, using the GTK inspector, and a lot of trial and error to figure out the pieces. The amount of work to get into themeing is enough to deter most casual themers from making any changes to themes that are not provided through GUI options.

Yeah, me too. The only thing I ever got close to finishing was a scene girl/emo theme for IceWM, but that was a huge hassle to do too.
There's just so many interlocking parts (FreeDesktop standards, different standards for how icons are supposed to be named, ...) that it's daunting to start.

by **Yukinu** » Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:47 am

Leva wrote: ↑Sun Dec 31, 2023 7:14 pm Hah! You're running in open doors. I'm a TDE contributor.
... I just admittedly don't use it in my day-to-day because there's still so... many... bugs. And no support for hi-dpi monitors.

Nice, definitely a worthwhile project to contribute to! Maintaining both the DE, the version of Qt used to build it, and the applications seems like quite a monumental task.

Do you by any chance know what ever happened to the Ubuntu releases that were bundled with TDE? Recently Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Cinnamon have been accepted as official Ubuntu flavors, it makes me wonder if anyone has attempted to submit Ubuntu with TDE as a flavor, considering there were already downloadable Ubuntu ISOs. My guess is that there are already too many resource constraints as is.

Leva wrote: ↑Sun Dec 31, 2023 7:14 pm I personally use Librewolf, because I value free software and I also sadly need to use web applications for university. Some academic programs are web-only... ugh. Let alone DRM for online scientific literature.

One solution for a bit of isolation is to use separate Librewolf profiles (in about:profiles), one with DRM plugins installed and the other without it.

Do we really need DRM for everything? There was a recent proposal for a "web integrity" API for chromium that would essentially enable a form of DRM on every single site, *sigh*.

Leva wrote: ↑Sun Dec 31, 2023 7:14 pm Absolutely, yeah!!!
One window manager you missed for crazy themes: Enlightenment. Those were always the coolest.

Interesting, never really looked into Enlightenment. Only time I've used it was when I tested out Bhodi Linux in a VM a couple of years ago.

Leva wrote: ↑Sun Dec 31, 2023 7:14 pm Sadly the theming subculture died entirely. It's all just neon dark mode anime minimalism now.

It's quite difficult to find useful info and guides for creating desktop themes these days. I've gotten used to GTK themeing a bit, but it took a lot of greps, digging through source of other themes, using the GTK inspector, and a lot of trial and error to figure out the pieces. The amount of work to get into themeing is enough to deter most casual themers from making any changes to themes that are not provided through GUI options.

by **Leva** » Sun Dec 31, 2023 7:14 pm

Yukinu wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 8:43 pm Many years ago I used to play a lot of MMOs, and have seen quite a few of them go from vibrant communities to mostly idle powergamers that don't interact with anyone outside of a few other powergamers. I've thought about ways a developer may implement their game mechanics such that it encourages more interaction. For example, using logarithmic progression on each individual player, but a more linear progression among groups of players (as opposed to the single player exponential progression found in many MMOs) would encourage more community activity and community building.

The best MMO-ish experiences I have had were in heavily manually moderated roleplaying environments where playing to win was explicitly against the rules, and where the "gameplay mechanics" were limited to a minimum in order to focus on realism. Everything was played out narratively. Winning or losing was not really a thing, because even getting kidnapped and beaten up or something was an interesting scene to roleplay and had effects on the overarching society - it might provoke an in-character response from the agencies and public services, from rival organizations, civilians, the news, ...

I remember being a realty owner and having to push down my prices on a sale I almost had pushed through because someone ended up having a gunfight in the neighborhood. Turns out it was the buyer conspiring with another guy specifically to drive down prices, and a news intern who drove by saw them exchange words on the way to the scene! So it was all over the tabloids the next day (of course, an actual news page existed for the project), and the police started a formal investigation (with a dozen players or so involved, some of who literally only played that game to do office work in a custom 3D modelled office interior... lol), and a neighbors' committee formed... and all of these people were real players, and that just felt like such a wow moment!

I feel like as soon as there is a tangible way to "win" or "lose" a game, to get more or less loot, to progress through levels, the fun in multiplayer games gets lost to an extent, no matter how good the algorithms for XP.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 8:43 pm The Trinity Desktop team actually still maintains a KDE3 fork. It's installable on Ubuntu 10.04-23.10, Debian 6-12, Fedora, and presumably future versions of these OS's as well (assuming the teams continues the project). Here are a few screenshots of TDE:

Hah! You're running in open doors. I'm a TDE contributor.
... I just admittedly don't use it in my day-to-day because there's still so... many... bugs. And no support for hi-dpi monitors.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 8:43 pm It's unfortunate. Firefox used to have much more powerful extensions, but switched to the WebExtension format and it caused the extension ecosystem to stagnate. This is one of the reasons I use Palemoon to browse, since it still supports the old extensions, and for the most part I only use the browser for browsing hypertext documents. In cases when I need a web app, I either look for a native application or use a Firefox or Chromium fork temporarily.

Yeah, I thought it was just me seeing all those cool expansions disappear practically overnight. I thought it was a design trend thing like the disappearance of web badges and banners.
I personally use Librewolf, because I value free software and I also sadly need to use web applications for university. Some academic programs are web-only... ugh. Let alone DRM for online scientific literature.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 8:43 pm Agree 100%, these days when I see desktop screenshots, it's usually a decorationless desktop with a few color changes, and an often generic looking background image. Where are all of the fun, crazy desktop themes that you used to see on Windows XP, GNOME 2, and KDE 3? I use GTK, and have been a bit concerned that themeing will no longer be supported in the future, given how themeing was broke with every GTK 3 update.

Absolutely, yeah!!!
One window manager you missed for crazy themes: Enlightenment. Those were always the coolest. Sadly the theming subculture died entirely. It's all just neon dark mode anime minimalism now.

by **Yukinu** » Sat Dec 30, 2023 8:43 pm

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm but honestly I think not all that shines is gold; it's probably pretty empty and lifeless unless you interact with the big cliques. And as in any niche online community, there will be a lot of creepy abusers and strange bigots.

Many years ago I used to play a lot of MMOs, and have seen quite a few of them go from vibrant communities to mostly idle powergamers that don't interact with anyone outside of a few other powergamers. I've thought about ways a developer may implement their game mechanics such that it encourages more interaction. For example, using logarithmic progression on each individual player, but a more linear progression among groups of players (as opposed to the single player exponential progression found in many MMOs) would encourage more community activity and community building.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm Holy crap, that's super cool! I can't believe I was interested in the semantic web forever but completely passed by the microformats thing. That's just what we need to build a data-connecting web! Are you aware of any projects/communities actually using microformat data, like a search engine or an automated directory or something? I should contact the Marginalia guy to add support if it doesn't have it already.
I think I'll go through my entire site adding appropriate microformat information wherever it fits. There should be a webring for people using them. Damn.

Some Wordpress sites have microformats embedded into them (I've primarily seen h-feed). Likely most of the adoption of microformats, outside of enthusiasts, has been through CMS plugins that include microformat capabilities out of the box.

I also had wrote a microformat specification for webrings called h-webring. The idea was that the spec would include all of the necessary information for webring traversal, such that a browser or browser extension could parse the webring from the page and provide a UI for traversal without the need of a central server managing the actual ring. A while ago, I had spoken to some of the microformats people on IRC to see if h-webring could be included on the microformats wiki, but I don't think there was anyone online at the time that was maintaining the wiki. I should try contacting them again and see what they think.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm Oh that's crazy! Thanks for the CSS snippet. I'll implement it ASAP. I only knew about how to turn off image smoothing so that pixel art is actually crisp, had no idea how to fix the fonts. On my screens I don't see the smoothing since they're either high-res enough to not care or low-res enough for me to chalk it up to bad quality.

Unfortunately disabling the smoothing is not as well supported anymore in most browsers, it's one of those things I wish more browsers still supported (never-the-less, still useful to add it for the WebKit users and people using older browsers). Every once in a while I'll disabling the font smoothing and antialiasing on my machine, since I like how pixelated and bitmapped fonts look in general.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm Even the default designs these days try to imitate corporate minimalism. And the applications that ship with desktop environments are often not as expansive and crazy as they used to be either; I fondly remember KDE3 and its file-manager-and-web-browser combination Konqueror, its expansive personal identification management software, all the economic management programs, and the super specific applications!

The Trinity Desktop team actually still maintains a KDE3 fork. It's installable on Ubuntu 10.04-23.10, Debian 6-12, Fedora, and presumably future versions of these OS's as well (assuming the teams continues the project). Here are a few screenshots of TDE:

: tde3-0.png (227.31 KiB) Viewed 2679 times

: tde3-1.jpg (201.5 KiB) Viewed 2679 times

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm Nowadays it's all the same no matter what you install: Firefox or Chromium. Two boring browser genders you can choose from.

It's unfortunate. Firefox used to have much more powerful extensions, but switched to the WebExtension format and it caused the extension ecosystem to stagnate. This is one of the reasons I use Palemoon to browse, since it still supports the old extensions, and for the most part I only use the browser for browsing hypertext documents. In cases when I need a web app, I either look for a native application or use a Firefox or Chromium fork temporarily.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm In general, I don't only like "industrial" UIUX design like Redmond97, I also like the opposite direction, super overdesigned stimulating design, like what you'd get in old video games. Even video games these days get super generic minimalist default-font background-shadow UIs. Does noone remember those old RPG interface designs that were totally themed, animated and full of SFX and GFX? I love those. When I work, I like my computers industrial and brutalist. When I am trying to have fun surfing or gaming, computing should be fun. I wish there were more totally overdesigned crazy themes for desktops like there were in the early 2000s. Vertical window decoration with dragons and fire? Why not!

Agree 100%, these days when I see desktop screenshots, it's usually a decorationless desktop with a few color changes, and an often generic looking background image. Where are all of the fun, crazy desktop themes that you used to see on Windows XP, GNOME 2, and KDE 3? I use GTK, and have been a bit concerned that themeing will no longer be supported in the future, given how themeing was broke with every GTK 3 update.

by **Leva** » Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm

Yukinu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 4:48 am Haha, same here. I'd be lying if I said I didn't sometimes choose a less-popular technology due to a bit of contrarianism.

*looks nervously at my diskman, portable cassette player, record player, pocket calculator, Nokia phone, ...*
*looks even more nervously at my character and species choices in every single video game ever made*

Couldn't be me. x)

Yukinu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 4:48 am That's a good point. From what I've heard, Second Life had a lot of enterprising going on, and too much emphasis on economics can detract from a virtual world and turn it more into a business rather than a place you actually want to spend time in.

Absolutely, yes. Second Life is insane actually. I never actively played it although I really wanted to, mostly because getting started was so daunting: learning how this virtual world really worked was basically a full time job, let alone the financial investment into getting off the ground.
But reading about it was always absolutely crazy. There are political parties within the world that bleed into real life elections, business advertisements (with real money transactions of course), actual real life businesses that operate solely inside Second Life such as an actual real world lawyer firm with a virtual office, famous musicians held concerts there. People make their entire real-life livelihoods by running a business in the game such as being a good 3D modeller and selling your work in an in-game boutique.

It's Ready Player One with ugly graphics and an enormous learning curve. I wish I could be part of it, especially since I no-lifed online roleplaying life simulations such as the old serious heavy roleplaying servers on older GTA games (not those terrible voice chat versions trending on Twitch, the literary style text-based ones), but honestly I think not all that shines is gold; it's probably pretty empty and lifeless unless you interact with the big cliques. And as in any niche online community, there will be a lot of creepy abusers and strange bigots.

But god damn it, I want to roleplay having a taxi company again and just spending hours driving around a virtual city as a sleazy taxi driver taking calls from real people chauffeuring them around and listening to whatever they're up to. "Follow that car!" happened two times and it was an adrenaline rush unlike any other game! Some of my best memories in video games were just walking around in slow-walk mode in a busy roleplaying city people-watching.

... God damn it.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 4:48 am Nice site! I like the overall design. The first thing I looked at was actually the recipe section, since I recently wrote a blog post with one of my basic noodle recipes. Also, just a few days ago I was exchanging a few emails with a friend from the web, and we briefly spoke about data formats for representing recipes. You may be interested in the h-recipe microformat (https://microformats.org/wiki/h-recipe). It's not quite as semantic as using proper <recipe></recipe> XML tags, since it's class-attribute based, but similar in scope.

Holy crap, that's super cool! I can't believe I was interested in the semantic web forever but completely passed by the microformats thing. That's just what we need to build a data-connecting web! Are you aware of any projects/communities actually using microformat data, like a search engine or an automated directory or something? I should contact the Marginalia guy to add support if it doesn't have it already.
I think I'll go through my entire site adding appropriate microformat information wherever it fits. There should be a webring for people using them. Damn.

... I will also add more recipes soon. It's just that I have so many WIP categories on my page it's hard to fill them all with content.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 4:48 am Also, One CSS trick, you can give pixel fonts crisper rendering by disabling font smoothing (code snippet below). Unfortunately it only really works on Webkit-based browsers these days, and results can vary considerably depending on the font and the size.
Code: Select all
* {
    -webkit-font-smoothing: none;
    -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
    font-smooth: never;
}
Here's how it looks with and without smoothing on Midori (Webkit-based GTK browser):

Oh that's crazy! Thanks for the CSS snippet. I'll implement it ASAP. I only knew about how to turn off image smoothing so that pixel art is actually crisp, had no idea how to fix the fonts. On my screens I don't see the smoothing since they're either high-res enough to not care or low-res enough for me to chalk it up to bad quality.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 4:48 am I know what you mean, I can really appreciate older UI design. The limited hardware at the time necessitated very functional designs that are still difficult to surpass even to this day.

Yeah, and I also feel like it was more creative. These days, most desktop environments either model themselves entirely after Windows or after macOS with barely any innovation or crazy new ideas. KDE is basically Windows, elementaryOS' desktop is basically macOS, Xfce and LXQt are a bit more unique but in the end also follow the taskbar-bottom-desktop-icons mantra.
With less popular WMs and DEs such as Window Maker, you get cool features such as dockapps that really are a unique way of controlling your desktop; not even to mention all of those snazzy 3D desktop environments that existed way back when, UI sound design (clicks and clacks and swooshes), radial menus, keyboard driven window managers and so on. Much more variety and risk taking.

Even the default designs these days try to imitate corporate minimalism. And the applications that ship with desktop environments are often not as expansive and crazy as they used to be either; I fondly remember KDE3 and its file-manager-and-web-browser combination Konqueror, its expansive personal identification management software, all the economic management programs, and the super specific applications! Nowadays it's all the same no matter what you install: Firefox or Chromium. Two boring browser genders you can choose from.

In general, I don't only like "industrial" UIUX design like Redmond97, I also like the opposite direction, super overdesigned stimulating design, like what you'd get in old video games. Even video games these days get super generic minimalist default-font background-shadow UIs. Does noone remember those old RPG interface designs that were totally themed, animated and full of SFX and GFX? I love those. When I work, I like my computers industrial and brutalist. When I am trying to have fun surfing or gaming, computing should be fun. I wish there were more totally overdesigned crazy themes for desktops like there were in the early 2000s. Vertical window decoration with dragons and fire? Why not!

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