On 2018-10-01 13:06:56 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote: Maybe I'm wrong, but I didn't think that Linux is a political system. Leslie

On Mon, 1 Oct 2018, J Leslie Turriff wrote: All of this "stuff" is Religion. Jonesy -- <pre> Marvin L Jones | Marvin | W3DHJ | linux Pueblo, Colorado | @ | Jonesy | FreeBSD __ 38.238N 104.547W | jonz.net | DM78rf | OS/2 SK

On Monday 01 October 2018 23:14:04 deloptes wrote: Almost any question can be turned into a tautology. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tautology I used to run into Marxists whose guanonian fundamentalist logic drove me crazy: "Every action (or even non-action) is a political action." In a way, though, they had a point: when you live in conditions where everything is regarded in terms of politics, everything is political. (Or substitute religion, or whatever.) In a broad universal "everything is love" sort of way, this isn't so bad, but when people try to apply it to individual actions at every moment, it gets tiresome, and ends up turning into some species of oppression. It's only because our notions of privacy and freedom have eroded that now it seems like a radical idea for users to be able (or even to want) to control their personal data, or to decide what their computers and phones can and cannot do, or even to imagine that they ought to be able to customize the look and feel of their desktops (that is, beyond the dozen or so boring templates offered by other DEs). If one is old enough to remember a time before this "new normal", then the present reality looks increasingly unreal and disturbing. But enough sermonizing! This is why I want to keep TDE alive and well: I can get my computer to do what I want. Bill

On Wed, 3 Oct 2018, Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote: however I'd warn against belittling ethical concerns as "religion, ideology, philosophy" in the pejorative sense of the words (even when we disagree). f. -- Felmon Davis Schenectady, NY

On Monday 01 October 2018 11:06:56 Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote: Sorry, my own previous post was intended for the Evil Mad Scientist group. I doubt we can really achieve total domination. A change of 2%, however, especially if we manage to get attention in the right places is viable and reasonable; and that is enough to change people's attitudes. As I've said before, I want to see TDE accepted into the general repositories (Debian, Devuan, Ubuntu, etc.), rather than put out there like some kind of weird off-brand. It would be the easiest desktop, too, for users who are switching from Microshaft or the rotten Apple. Seriously, though, I agree that TDE is the only desktop that can compete with Microshaft and the rotten Apple in terms of ease and usability and "eye-candy" - except that to create the eye-candy, one must build one's own candy factory. I believe that if we could present TDE on a level playing field, then Linuix people would come to see the Trinity desktop in a much better light; as it is, so many in the Linux community (probably, I think, because they have vested interests) insult TDE as "stuck in the past" and other such nonsense. (But then, if one is directly or indirectly involved in the development of one of those other desktops (e.g. KDE Plasma, LXDE, Mate, XFCE, etc.), then one obviously one necessarily must regard one's own project as the "best"; because any other reaction is like a confession of disloyalty, and seems to negate the value of one's own work. And TDE is so good (just like the old KDE3), that it invariably makes everything else look not just bad, but indeed ugly and stupid. Then again, it is just possible that some Linux people want to keep Linux users a minority, and to that degree also, user-unfriendly. And perhaps not without reason; because with more users, Linux will attract more viruses, trojans, malware, etc. However, that seems to be a self-defeating strategy, sort of like never leaving the house because one might get into an accident, or get robbed. I think the strength of genuine free/libre software and a community of users to examine the code is all we really need to protect us. As for Microshaft: I wouldn't trust anything coming from them, no matter how much they claim to love open-source; and the rotten Apple is no better. Again, their jobs and income depend on "growing their business" and burying the competition; so any apparent friendliness toward GNU/Linux or TDE is, in my opinion, not to be trusted. We need is just more press, written by people who know and like TDE; and for more people "out there" to hear about it and try it. I am willing to help, if I can be useful. But what I think we really need first ... is a PLAN. Bill

On Monday 01 October 2018 12:21:14 Kate Draven wrote: TDE is the truffles of all GUIs, because it takes somebody to "dig" it. Bill

On Monday 01 October 2018 22:16:37 Kate Draven wrote: There are still plenty of metaphors left for fanciful comparisons. Bill

On Thu, 4 Oct 2018, J Leslie Turriff wrote: not sure what counts as a 'driver' but I have had to install some package for Brother printers and 'firmware' for wifi (Intel). if this is just a matter of semantics then let's not fuss. the fact remains that for some it's not all "out of the box" or whatever to call it. f. -- Felmon Davis

On Fri, 5 Oct 2018 02:48:35 -0700 William Morder &lt;doctor_contendo(a)zoho.com&gt; wrote: Um, no, "driver"--a piece of software that makes it possible to communicate with a piece of hardware--is the correct term, and you're using them all the time in Linux, too. It's just that most of the more common ones are treated as part of the kernel (or of CUPS and its supporting packages), so you never notice them. There are a lot of drivers that are or have been maintained outside the kernel, though, and these often have to be installed separately. The printer drivers and the proprietary 3D acceleration drivers for nVidia and AMD are the most common, but there are others: drivers for network equipment, modems, smartcard readers, crypto dongles, game controllers, and other oddly specific hardware that most people never run into. They may or may not be in your distro's repositories, depending on who wrote the driver, what the distro's position on proprietary code is, and other factors. I'm currently running an externally packaged driver for my motherboard's internal sensor chip, because support for the it87 family of chips has been slow in reaching the kernel. TL;DR: drivers have always been in Linux, too, and they're not going anywhere. E. Liddell

On Fri, 5 Oct 2018, William Morder wrote: ok, so it just comes down to a matter of perception but we have agreement on what a 'driver' is (thanks, E. Liddel) and also that not everything is "out of the box" in Linux for some of us. E. Liddel's messages *always* go to spam in my case as well as one or two others. no loss since I regularly check and haul them out but then they are not in sequence. my address hides the fact it is a gmail system. I should write a filter. f. -- Felmon Davis

On 2018-10-05 02:19:47 Felmon Davis wrote: Yes, you're right about the Brother "driver," but AFAIK the only component that's used is the PPD file which describes the printer's capabilities. The only executable that's supplied (for my HL4150CDN, at least) is something called 'brprintconf_hl4150cdn', which I've never (knowingly) used. Leslie