[OT] Granny-friendly Linux Distros?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 06:00:04PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 5/7/19 1:05 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > 
> > I've been looking for a keyboard-driven, no-frills but functional
> > browser for a while now.
[...]
> Finally, I discovered Pale Moon just a few weeks ago. Managed to find
> (better!) alternatives to the add-ons that weren't compatible.

Glanced over it briefly.  Looks very promising indeed.  If it supports
the Vimperator plugin, I may very well switch to it, since luakit
appears to be only marginally maintained recently.


> It's been SOOOOO much better. Memory usage is still gigantic, but
> frankly I blame the web itself for that,
[...]

I've been entertaining the idea of writing my own browser just so I
don't have to deal with the crap anymore. It would be basically ELinks
with graphics, with no (or very restricted) animations, and highly
constrained scripting (I am very uncomfortable with the idea of
promiscuously executing any old Turing-complete code obtained from any
old random online source of unknown trustworthiness).

Except I doubt I have the time/energy it takes to implement an entire
browser on my own.

My latest pet peeve with web bloatedness is those awful completely
useless and pointless SVG/CSS spinners that soak up so much CPU that it
makes the browser run slower than my 1MHz Apple II from the 1980's. It
used to be that you could just block animated gifs or turn off JS, but
now it's embedded in the lousy *stylesheet* (or worse, SVG embedded in
HTML) so there's no sane way of turning it off. And it's sprouting up
everywhere like mushrooms, 'cos everybody and his neighbour's dog just
can't wait to see the world slow down to the bad ole pre-GHz days.


> Don't know whether it would meet your keyboard-driven requirements
> though.

If it supports Vimperator, I'm all set to go! :-P


[...]
> I pretty much hate notification systems period (at least on
> desktop/laptop).  I'm a KDE user and the biggest thing I hate about
> modern KDE vs KDE3, even moreso than bloat, is how it tries to use its
> smartphone-envy notification system for everything until you find the
> right hoops to jump through to turn that garbage off (especially for
> file copying). And...those hoops you have to jump through *keep
> changing*!!! Meh, but at least KDE *lets* you change things without
> needing poorly-maintained third party hacks...

Yep, that's pretty much why I ditched the whole desktop metaphor cliché
along with its rodent mascot, and embraced the pure simplicity of a
glorified 80x24 terminal in the form of Ratpoison. Throw out title bars
and other useless deco, junk useless overlapping windows that you have
to manually drag apart and maximize everything, and drive everything
from keyboard so my hands never have to waste time reaching for that
rodent.  My CPU and RAM are now freed up to do the *real* work of
computing solutions to real problems, rather than squandered on
rendering eye-candy that do nothing except hog resources from
computations that need it, and *man* is my computer responsive like
never before. I can Get Stuff Done in a fraction of the time spent
enduring the ritual of reaching for the rodent and manually dragging
overlapping windows apart -- when the computer is perfectly capable of
automatically solving the overlap problem in a miniscule fraction of the
time and energy. (Such things shouldn't even *be* a problem in the first
place -- the computer's job is to help me get stuff done, not to present
me with a poor-man's simulation of the physics of sorting paper on a
physical desk. It's supposed to get RID of the need to sort things on a
desk, not to replicate the tedium in a digital facsimile!!)


T

-- 
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. -- P. Erdos