[OT] Granny-friendly Linux Distros?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, May 09, 2019 at 06:34:09AM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 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),

What, really?!  When did that happen? Back when I still actually used a
GUI, it was lazy focus (focus follows movement, no need to click).  But
mind you, my GUI days were long before KDE or GNOME, so my information
is very dated.  I tried to make Windows follow lazy focus once, and ...
as described above it was Not Nice(tm).  Just about *everything* started
acting funny. I beat a hasty retreat. Heaven forbid I actually *change*
a configuration option that the OS provides via a GUI menu to something
other than what Everyone Else is doing.

(As you can tell, this left an extremely strong distaste in my mouth for
anything that resembles the Windows philosophy of "do it our way, or
take the highway" aka programming by convention / anything by
convention, really. If something cannot be configured, I refuse to use
it.)


[...]
> 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.

IOW, the configuration "option" isn't really an option.  Not a viable
one, anyway.  The cynic in me wants to say that it's only there to
silence the complainers like me who clamor for configurability, but it
doesn't *actually* pan out in practice.


> 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.
[...]

Probably an effect of the unclean coupling between MS products, i.e.,
the public API that everyone else uses is different from the internal
APIs that MS products freely take advantage of, that competitors have no
access to.


T

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"You know, maybe we don't *need* enemies." "Yeah, best friends are about all I can take." -- Calvin & Hobbes