X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach

Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by simion314 on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @09:09AM (#22737109)

> or poorly designed desktops made by people who obviously don't use them.

Do you mean the design part or the coding part? From my limited experience desktops are made by contributors and volunteers work on whatever affects them the most or some might work on cool stuff. It is what it is, without someone with money hiring a large dev team and foucssing on user tickets it will never change. As a developer I prefer something customizable like KDE where I can fix a crash in an app if I hit it over a Windows like experience where important apps like the screen magnifier had hard coded shortcuts and you could not customize them.

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by MisterTea on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @09:51AM (#22737500)

Both. glibc... No. And without boring you with anecdote I can sum it up by saying: Linux DE's feel like cheap Windows XP or OSX knockoffs. What's worse is every DE and their forks have their own duplicate DE companion programs such as explorer and notepad clones. I liken them to a Potemkin village; well polished but once you start looking behind things...

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by cycloptic on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @10:58AM (#22738123)

If your complaint is that you dislike clones of Windows and Mac, then the combination of tiling window manager, shell, tmux, and vim/emacs is usable and provides an experience that is completely different from those other operating systems. That didn't go away on Linux. There is also plan9port too.

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by spease on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @10:31PM (#22745025)

No, the problem is that people keep reinventing the wheel over and over again, instead of picking one app and improving it so that their efforts are cumulative.

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @09:32AM (#22737341)

Being able to recompile from source to change hardcoded values isn't actually any better in my opinion. Especially given how much of a pain it can be to get a build environment set up for many projects.

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by simion314 on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:31AM (#22738475)

I know, but for me accessibility tools are a must, if needed I will compile, use wine or write my own because i need them. But from my experience (with KDE at least) you can customize every keyboard shortcut with a GUI and I could submit patches for issues I found and fixed. If you use a distribution like Debian or ubuntu then installing the required development libraries and rebuilding a package is simple enough in most cases.

I understand why compiling sucks though and this is why I am considering to use Python for a program I want to make and open source despite the fact I dislike it's syntax.

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by cycloptic on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @10:21AM (#22737760)

You might want to look at something like GNOME Builder, which is designed to make it easy to contribute to existing projects and will clone the project and setup the build environment for you.

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:02AM (#22738161)

I'd rather just use software that isn't so inept or controlling as to hardcode values in the first place. Probably why I don't use GNOME.

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by cycloptic on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:09AM (#22738233)

All software has to hardcode something at some point, this is unavoidable. I don't use GNOME either, but they do make it very easy for newcomers to contribute and to change anything they want. It's open source after all, the control is in the hands of the user.

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:27AM (#22738428)

> It's open source after all, the control is in the hands of the user.

That's true of proprietary software to roughly the same extent: if I don't like how things are I am free to make my own or just not use it.

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by cycloptic on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @11:41AM (#22738603)

I don't follow. In my experience setting up a build environment and changing a couple lines of code provides a lot more control (and is a lot easier) than rewriting the whole thing from scratch or ditching it entirely for something else. If your distro's package manager supports source builds then you probably don't even need to use tools like GNOME Builder to make quick modifications.

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @01:31PM (#22740006)

If you find setting up a build environment to change a few lines of code more reasonable than switching to software that wasn't so boneheaded as to hardcode the value in the first place, then good for you I guess. I personally don't have much patience for it.

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Re:X11 screen locking: a secure and modular approach by cycloptic on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @01:58PM (#22740384)

There is no need to set up a build environment. GNOME Builder does it for you, for GNOME packages. For other packages, on my distro (Debian) the package manager does it for you. It's 4-5 commands to download dependencies, download source, rebuild and reinstall ANY package. Comparatively, the cost of switching can vary wildly depending on the software and available alternatives.

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