Breaking backwards compatiblity

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 03:20:34PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[...]
> 'Course, I'm more than ready to give up KDE itself now. Move to
> something like Trinity or LXDE or XFCE.

Way ahead of you there. ;-) I'm already using a mouseless WM, and
thinking of replacing ratpoison with something even more radical.
Something that not only doesn't need the mouse, but *eradicates* all
need for the mouse on virtually all applications. Something that maps
keystrokes to geometry, so that you point using your keyboard. The
screen would divide into regions mapped to certain keys, and certain key
sequences would subdivide regions, so you can virtually point at
anything just by hitting 3-4 keys.  Furthermore, due to X11's root
window allowing the WM to scan pixels, the region subdivisions can
auto-snap to high-contrast boundaries, so you're actually subdividing
based on visually distinct regions like text lines or buttons, etc.,
rather than just a blind coordinates subdivision (which will require
unreasonable amounts of keystrokes to point accurately).

(Though at the rate I'm going, I don't know when I'm ever going to have
the time to actually sit down and write a WM. So maybe this is just a
really wild impractical pipe dream. :-P)

The mouse still has its place, of course, for when you *actually* need
it, like drawing free-hand curves and stuff like that.


> And Debian 6. Canonincal just keeps getting crazier and crazier. I
> don't want their new Linux-based iOS of an operating system. OTOH,
> Debian's "versioning" system is irritationly moroninc.  Squeeze,
> wheeze, wtf? They don't even have any natural ordering for god's sake!
> At least Ubuntu's moronic names have *that* much going for them! I
> don't care what Pixar character my OS is pretending to be, and I don't
> *want* to care.

I'm a Debian developer, actually. Though I've been so busy with other
stuff that I haven't really done anything worth mentioning for the last
long while. To me, Debian only ever has 3 versions, oldstable, stable,
and unstable. Every Debian "release" is really just a rollover of
unstable into stable, and stable into oldstable. I don't even remember
those silly Pixar names or their correlation with actual version numbers
(actually, I find the version numbers quite meaningless).

"Unstable" is really a misnomer... it's generally a lot more stable
than, say, your typical Windows XP installation. (But YMMV... remember I
don't use a real desktop environment or any of the stuff that "common
people" use.) I see it more as "current release" than "unstable",
actually. The *real* unstable is "experimental", which only fools who
like crashing their system every other month would run. Stable is for
those freaks who run mission-critical servers, whose life depends on the
servers being almost impossible to crash. So really, for PCs, most
people just run "unstable".

So in my mind, I never even think about "Debian 6" or "Debian 5" or
whatever arbitrary number they want to call it. I run "unstable" at home
and "stable" on a remote server, and it's as simple as that.


T

-- 
If it tastes good, it's probably bad for you.