[OT] Granny-friendly Linux Distros?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 1:11:22 PM MDT H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> The best part about Linux is that I can configure the heck out of it
> until it resembles nothing like what a default installation would give
> you, and things will still Just Work(tm).  Tried that with Windows once,
> and man... you wouldn't believe how many things stop working as soon as
> you change a minor option, like lazy mouse focus.  The option is *there*
> but nobody uses it, nobody supports it, and random programs randomly
> fail to work or start exhibiting pathological behaviour. You end up in
> the middle of Unsupported Territory, and there be dragons there. Good
> luck should you dare to venture in.  I backed off and sailed back to
> Linux-land the very next day.  Never again, I say!

On Linux, whet you normally get is focus follows click (like Windows), but
the scroll wheel on the mouse typically scrolls whatever windown it's over
regardless of the focus. However, on Windows, it normally scrolls whichever
window has focus. This drives me nuts. So, at one point, I switched Windows
to focus follows mouse (which requires that you then make it not bring the
window to the front when it gets focus, or it becomes unusable). And while
this wasn't great, it was generally better with non-MS applications. _They_
did the right thing. However, applications from MS (such as visual studio)
ignored the setting about not bring the window to the front when it got
focus, making it a royal pain when visual studio did something like pop up a
modal window. Similarly, when I messed with the color scheme, non-MS
applications did the right thing, but MS applications ended up with the
colors being applied in weird ways as if they didn't use the normal building
blocks when putting their GUIs together. So, my experience has been that
non-MS applications tend to behave properly when you muck with Windows
settings, but MS applications do not. It's really quite weird.

- Jonathan M Davis