On Tuesday 24 March 2026 16:21:56 Jim via tde-users wrote:
<snipping throughout>
> In any case, this is a hack; and if it works, yes, it's a really good
> hack.  I will try it sometime.  But ordinary users ought not to be
> expected to have to hack their programs just to make things work.

>You should find the people who decided that all screens are 96 DPI, even
>when they aren't.  In my opinion that was the real hack (to make up for
>people who stupidly assumed all computer screens would always be 96 DPI),
>and setting GDK_DPI_SCALE is a counter-measure against that brain-damaged
>decision.

This is actually on my to-do list: to create a working time-machine, and then
go back and stop these people before they can decide that 96 dpi is a good
idea. In order to accomplish this, I decided that it would be best if I can
interfere with their parents' lives, so that they can never meet, and then
these developers were never born.

This runs into that old time-travel paradox, though. It turns out that the
people who replace them in the space-time continuum are not nearly so
far-seeing, and that they would decide that 32 dpi is good enough.

> Dare I ask what CPU and how much RAM you have?

I don't have my specs ready at hand. However, I attached a jpeg of the
manufacturer's description. It's not a super-duper gaming machine, but for a
basic laptop, not bad.

However, I ought to say that I have hacked it extensively, although that has
nothing to do with LibreOffice, which has never run at all on this machine.
At present, my machine has no hard drive at all, as both the original 128 gb
SSD, *and* the brand-new 2 tb SSD which I bought, both got fried when my
neighbor blew the fuse for everybody in this part of my building.

So my entire operating system dwells on a flash drive, which is partitioned
with root, swap and home directories.

I got rid of (or at least, bypassed)
UEFI and boot using grub.

I keep everything worth keeping on external drives.
>
> It sounds to me like you are desperately out of memory and that you are
> furiously paging.  I also wonder whether you have an SSD (on SATA), a NVM
> disk, or a good old spinning platters disk.

This is a question to ask my old desktop machine, which was the last on which
I tried running LibreOffice. Nowadays, LO only gets installed sometimes by
mistake, when I am doing an upgrade or something, and somehow apt manages to
interfere with my wishes. But I just purge everything right away, and
reinstall OO.

> >
> > It may be in the same way that other people prefer convenience over
> > simplicity.  Myself, I keep things as simple as I can, not only on my
> > machines, but also in my own life in general.  However, this simplicity
> > often takes a lot of effort.
>
> That almost sounds self-contradictory.  :-)

This is me doing my impression of Henry David Thoreau. To live simply is not
the same as having it easy or convenient. Stone tools are simple. You don't
have to haul them around with you, but whenever you get to a new place, you
have to make a whole new set of tools with the stones that you find there.

Having an app on your phone that does things for you might be easy, but if you
find your life keeps going in directions different from what you intended,
you may find that those apps are interfering with your wishes, because the
algorithms have caught you.

By the way, I also build a lot of things myself; not just my machines, but
many other things that I use. I also bake my own bread, when I have the right
place in which I can do it. If I could, I would probably grow my own wheat,
and build a mill to grind it; but that might be going too far.

You get the idea. Simple, but not necessarily easy or convenient, and that
simplicity often takes a lot of work. In the long run, though, my life is
much less complicated than other people's, I have more leisure time, and --
another rarity in the modern world -- while far from rich, I have no debts.
And I have no health problems, aside from needing to get more exercise and to
live in a better environment. But I am almost done with moving; just another
step or two, and I am moved to the edge of the wilderness.

> I started using TeX in 1983.  And my original TeX files are still 100%
> compatible with the TeX of 1983.  This "archival" nature is one of the
> reasons I continue to use TeX (and have started using ConTeXt).
>
I might look into this TeXworks or another like it. Don't know much about them
at present, but if it is more like just setting type, like it used to be,
that might suit me.

I have considered buying an old printing press, but I think that's probably
like grinding my own flour to bake bread.

Bill

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