[OT] Granny-friendly Linux Distros?

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 5/9/19 8:34 AM, Jonathan M Davis 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), 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.

OMG, that drove me absolutely up the wall as well, even when I was a 
Windows guy. Serious UI blunder: You can point-n-click, you can 
point-n-drag, but you can't point-n-scroll.

And it's not just the window that needs to be active, but often the 
specific control as well: For example, open the standard 2-panel Win 
Explorer (file manager, not IE), and try to scroll the left panel and 
then the right panel. Doesn't work. You have to click which panel you 
want to scroll. *Then* scroll wheel will work on it - until you want to 
go back to scrolling the other...

It's exactly the same as if you always needed to "activate" a button or 
hyperlink before you could click on it. It's just insane.

Luckily, there's this:
http://ehiti.de/katmouse/

I don't know how well it still works on the newer "Metro" versions of 
Windows though.

> 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.

Yea, see, what you and H.S. Teoh describe are exactly the sort of 
problems that happen when Unix Philosophy isn't used and software tries 
to pull that "vertical integration"[1] garbage instead.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration