On Wed, Mar 25, 2026 at 18:35 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
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.
Let me know how that works out for you.
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.
I always assumed the decision to pretend every display is 96 DPI was some incompetent manager who wanted to exert his or her authority.
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.
Hard to imagine, but who's to say?
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.
I see you have 8 GB (according to the model number in your attachment). This would be enough if software developers were careful about memory usage, but I think there is a lot of evidence they aren't. Never write 5 lines of code yourself when you can link in some 100 MB library function. ;-)
The CPU in that machine isn't bad, but it is 6 years old now, and developers have had a lot of time to write programs requiring more memory and faster CPUs.
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.
Blowing a fuse shouldn't have affected your laptop. Perhaps he caused a huge voltage spike? Even then, it is curious that the SSD went kabloouie without your motherboard also being damaged.
Were both SSDs inside the laptop, or was one being used externally when your neighbour zapped you?
(If he is the habit of doing this, you really want to get yourself a surge protector, if you haven't already done so.)
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 am thinking this is your problem. By flash drive, do you mean -> USB "thumb drive" / USB "memory stick" -> a compact flash or SD memory card with a USB adapter? -> a NVM flash memory card in an enclosure with a USB adapter
Is it safe to assume you are using one of the USB 3.2 ports for your flash drive, as opposed to the much slower USB 2.0 port?
In any case, I am beginning to understand some of the issues on your system. If you are using a "thumb drive", your read speeds would be running around 1/20 the speed I get from the NVM drive in my (6 year old) laptop. And your write speed may be even a smaller fraction of what I get.
I keep everything worth keeping on external drives.
Having a backup on external drives (or on other computers you own) is an excellent idea.
But you are decimating the performance of your laptop using only external drives over USB, at least if they are "thumb drives". I have a couple of Raspberry Pis which have all their files on external SSDs. The disk performance there is quite acceptable (400 - 500 MB/sec?).
I know it is easy to spend other people's money, but if you want some of your frustrations with your laptop grinding to a halt to go away, you should really put a new SSD inside, or, at the minimum, use an SSD with a quality USB interface.
Unfortunately, the price of SSDs (e.g., Samsung 870 EVO 1TB) has gone way up in the last while. At least where I looked. Maybe there is some place local to you with better deals.
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.
That is weird of apt to do that. But, speaking of keeping one's life simple, I never try to rationalize anything Debian does.
<snip>
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.
TeX (and LaTeX and ConTeXt) are not wysiwyg systems... they intersperse commands, like
\chapter My Very First Chapter
Blah blah blah...
through the text. In this case, "\chapter" is a command which may do the following things -> start a new page -> increment the chapter number -> output the chapter number and chapter title in a different font, size or colour (as you told it to) -> leave some space above (if desired) the title and some space below (if desired) the title -> make an entry for the table of contents. And maybe other things, if you ask nicely.
Some of the systems (such as TeXworks, AIUI) have a "preview" window which shows what the final PDF will look like.
But a lot of people don't like the non-wysiwyg nature, and if you are such a person, it probably isn't for you.
I have considered buying an old printing press, but I think that's probably like grinding my own flour to bake bread.
Good analogy. But I think there is something much more charming about an old printing press than a mill stone.
Jim