Hi all
I am using a X1 Thinkpad with 14 inch screen, LO installed in Ubuntu 24.04 or LO 25 installed directly from the libreoffice website faces the same problems.
The fonts in the menu entries and the formula bar for scalc are very small!
I cannot find a way to enhance these fonts.
When I try out the TDE Settings in Appearance-->Fonts
There are a couple of options, general, fixed with, Toolbar Menu Window title Taskbar and Desktop,
I set all to 12 but the LO menu fonts are still small.
Any ideas what to do and who is the culprit here.
Regards
Uwe Brauer
Hello,
AFAIK LibreOffice does not respect TDE font settings. You have to check which toolkit is used (in Help > About) -it may be Qt or GTK (or rarely generic)- and configure the relevant font options with the relevant tools (e.g. lxappearance for GTK and Qt[5|6]ct for Qt.
Regards, Philippe
Tuesday 24 March 2026 11:18:39 Uwe Brauer via tde-users написал(а):
Hi all
I am using a X1 Thinkpad with 14 inch screen, LO installed in Ubuntu 24.04 or LO 25 installed directly from the libreoffice website faces the same problems.
The fonts in the menu entries and the formula bar for scalc are very small!
I cannot find a way to enhance these fonts.
When I try out the TDE Settings in Appearance-->Fonts
There are a couple of options, general, fixed with, Toolbar Menu Window title Taskbar and Desktop,
I set all to 12 but the LO menu fonts are still small.
Any ideas what to do and who is the culprit here.
Regards
Uwe Brauer ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@trinitydesktop.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@trinitydesktop.org Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@trinitydeskt op.org
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 05:10:01 Philippe Mavridis via tde-users wrote:
Hello,
AFAIK LibreOffice does not respect TDE font settings. You have to check which toolkit is used (in Help > About) -it may be Qt or GTK (or rarely generic)- and configure the relevant font options with the relevant tools (e.g. lxappearance for GTK and Qt[5|6]ct for Qt.
Regards, Philippe
<snip>
I am using a X1 Thinkpad with 14 inch screen, LO installed in Ubuntu 24.04 or LO 25 installed directly from the libreoffice website faces the same problems.
The fonts in the menu entries and the formula bar for scalc are very small!
I cannot find a way to enhance these fonts.
When I try out the TDE Settings in Appearance-->Fonts
There are a couple of options, general, fixed with, Toolbar Menu Window title Taskbar and Desktop,
I set all to 12 but the LO menu fonts are still small.
Any ideas what to do and who is the culprit here.
Regards
Uwe Brauer
Long ago I tried to make peace with Libre Office, and it cannot be done. Maybe somebody out there knows how to get inside LO to change the interface, but I spent a couple years searching for such a solution.
Libre Office, as far as I am concerned, is practically useless. Not only is the interface unreadable, but also it is very slow, like pouring molasses on a cold day. It sometimes would take me 5-10 minutes just for it to appear on screen when I changed from one screen to another.
In the end, I went back to Open Office, which works better for me in every way, is faster, and also accepts TDE colors and fonts. The menu entries are not so much enlarged, but because OO accepts my TDE color scheme, I can make the GUI more legible.
To find the download links for the most recent OO takes a bit of searching, but it's worth the trouble. It is a little tricky, too, to get OO installed nowadays. Once installed, however, it works just fine, and is also very fast compared to LO.
Bill
On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 11:49 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
I am using a X1 Thinkpad with 14 inch screen, LO installed in Ubuntu 24.04 or LO 25 installed directly from the libreoffice website faces the same problems.
The fonts in the menu entries and the formula bar for scalc are very small!
I cannot find a way to enhance these fonts.
When I try out the TDE Settings in Appearance-->Fonts
There are a couple of options, general, fixed with, Toolbar Menu Window title Taskbar and Desktop,
I set all to 12 but the LO menu fonts are still small.
Any ideas what to do and who is the culprit here.
Have you tried starting soffice from the command line like this:
GDK_DPI_SCALE=2 soffice
On my system that makes the fonts ludicrously big. But you might be able to fine-tune the number (you can use decimal fractions like 1.2 or 1.7) and get something that works for you.
Long ago I tried to make peace with Libre Office, and it cannot be done.
Depending on what you mean by "make peace", that may not really be true.
Maybe somebody out there knows how to get inside LO to change the interface, but I spent a couple years searching for such a solution.
I am not a fan of either libre office or open office, so I don't use either except under extreme duress. But just out of curiosity, what is it about the interface you don't like? The icons? The fonts? The way the menus are arranged? Something else?
Libre Office, as far as I am concerned, is practically useless. Not only is the interface unreadable,
That's just plain not a valid complaint about libre office, that is a complaint about your config/system. The interface is very readable on my system, and I don't think there is anything magic about my system.
but also it is very slow, like pouring molasses on a cold day. It sometimes would take me 5-10 minutes just for it to appear on screen when I changed from one screen to another.
One of the reasons I don't like Libre office is because it is slow, I agree with you there.
I use gnumeric for spreadsheets, and it is way, way, way faster.
In the end, I went back to Open Office, which works better for me in every way, is faster, and also accepts TDE colors and fonts. The menu entries are not so much enlarged, but because OO accepts my TDE color scheme, I can make the GUI more legible.
Unfortunately there are a lot of thing in OO that need updating. I understand that it has considerably less capability with included images than LO. But if its image inclusion ability is all you need, I guess that wouldn't be an issue for you.
Cheers. Jim
APOLOGIES ... if anybody gets multiple copies of this email. Something very weird just happened here. Local network has been acting funky all day, since early this morning. (And I don't mean "funky" in good way.)
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 12:41:22 you wrote:
Have you tried starting soffice from the command line like this:
GDK_DPI_SCALE=2 soffice
On my system that makes the fonts ludicrously big. But you might be able to fine-tune the number (you can use decimal fractions like 1.2 or 1.7) and get something that works for you.
This (above) is an interesting idea, and I may give it a try, but for now, my OO works just fine.
Long ago I tried to make peace with Libre Office, and it cannot be done.
Depending on what you mean by "make peace", that may not really be true.
I mean, can I actually *use* Libre Office to write, to get anything done? The answer is, NO. It is not a problem of my own configuration, unless maybe you mean that I have multiple documents open at the same time.
Maybe somebody out there knows how to get inside LO to change the interface, but I spent a couple years searching for such a solution.
I am not a fan of either libre office or open office, so I don't use either except under extreme duress. But just out of curiosity, what is it about the interface you don't like? The icons? The fonts? The way the menus are arranged? Something else?
The fonts are so tiny that I literally cannot read them, not even if I get nose-close to the screen. The contrast between font color and background cannot be changed, and will only accept settings from KDE Plasma (or maybe, Gnome).
Libre Office, as far as I am concerned, is practically useless. Not only is the interface unreadable,
That's just plain not a valid complaint about libre office, that is a complaint about your config/system. The interface is very readable on my system,
But I thought that you just said, you don't use either Libre Office or Open Office? What do you use then, WordStar or WordPerfect or something other?
and I don't think there is anything magic about my system.
but also it is very slow, like pouring molasses on a cold day. It sometimes would take me 5-10 minutes just for it to appear on screen when I changed from one screen to another.
One of the reasons I don't like Libre office is because it is slow, I agree with you there.
I use gnumeric for spreadsheets, and it is way, way, way faster.
I don't do spreadsheets. That is for the numbers and money people; i.e., the ones who find ways not to pay me for work that I've done.
I use office programs to write. Last time I had to use a spreadsheet for anything was about 20 years ago, and I hope never to use one again.
In the end, I went back to Open Office, which works better for me in every way, is faster, and also accepts TDE colors and fonts. The menu entries are not so much enlarged, but because OO accepts my TDE color scheme, I can make the GUI more legible.
Unfortunately there are a lot of thing in OO that need updating. I understand that it has considerably less capability with included images than LO. But if its image inclusion ability is all you need, I guess that wouldn't be an issue for you.
Personally, I think that Open Office is still just the lesser of two evils; it works a lot better and faster (at least, for myself) than Libre Office. I really wish somebody would come out with a word processing program that actually just plain WORKS, the way they used to be.
I sort of miss Word Perfect, but if I recall, it's proprietary, and not free in any sense of the term.
Other people's results may vary. If others out there have somehow discovered a better word processor, I would give it a try. And if Libre Office works for you, I am glad for you. But for me, in my experience, Libre Office is far and away the worst, the slowest, the most frustrating word processor that I have ever used. And I am pretty sure it's not just my settings; unless you mean that I ought to organize my work in a manner completely different from how I written ever since I changed over from a typewriter to a desktop computer.
By the way, for what it's worth, I still remember when handwritten manuscripts were the norm, and typewriters were only starting to become necessary. This is from back in the Bible days, when I was younger.
Bill
On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 13:08 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 12:41:22 Jim wrote:
Have you tried starting soffice from the command line like this:
GDK_DPI_SCALE=2 soffice
On my system that makes the fonts ludicrously big. But you might be able to fine-tune the number (you can use decimal fractions like 1.2 or 1.7) and get something that works for you.
This (above) is an interesting idea, and I may give it a try, but for now, my OO works just fine.
That was actually directed at someone much further up-thread, whose comments have now been edited out.
Long ago I tried to make peace with Libre Office, and it cannot be done.
Depending on what you mean by "make peace", that may not really be true.
I mean, can I actually *use* Libre Office to write, to get anything done? The answer is, NO. It is not a problem of my own configuration, unless maybe you mean that I have multiple documents open at the same time.
No, I mean that (as I understand it) many people (I even know a few myself) successfully use LO to create, edit and read documents.
So I don't quite understand how you can say it isn't a "you" problem when other people are able to use it, but you say you can't get anything done with it.
Maybe somebody out there knows how to get inside LO to change the interface, but I spent a couple years searching for such a solution.
I am not a fan of either libre office or open office, so I don't use either except under extreme duress. But just out of curiosity, what is it about the interface you don't like? The icons? The fonts? The way the menus are arranged? Something else?
The fonts are so tiny that I literally cannot read them, not even if I get nose-close to the screen.
Configuration problem. A way to solve it is above.
The contrast between font color and background cannot be changed, and will only accept settings from KDE Plasma (or maybe, Gnome).
Are you talking about the document? I have black text on white background. I guess some people don't like that much contrast.
To make the background grey, in case you want black text on grey background:
Tools / Options / LibreOffice / Appearance uncheck "Use white document background" Customize background just below there.
I don't know why you think it can't be changed. It's right there in the menus on my system.
Libre Office, as far as I am concerned, is practically useless. Not only is the interface unreadable,
That's just plain not a valid complaint about libre office, that is a complaint about your config/system. The interface is very readable on my system,
But I thought that you just said, you don't use either Libre Office or Open Office? What do you use then, WordStar or WordPerfect or something other?
Not that it is relevant to making LO look how one wants, but... I use TeX or ConTeXt for writing documents and presentations. Gnumeric for spreadsheets. I don't tend to do the sort of drawings that (I imagine) you can do in LO.
and I don't think there is anything magic about my system.
but also it is very slow, like pouring molasses on a cold day. It sometimes would take me 5-10 minutes just for it to appear on screen when I changed from one screen to another.
One of the reasons I don't like Libre office is because it is slow, I agree with you there.
I should have said it is nowhere near as slow for me as for you. Maybe your system has (way) too much going on for the amount of RAM you have and/or the CPU you have.
For me, it takes about 3 seconds to start up. I think that is slow, but it isn't minutes.
I use gnumeric for spreadsheets, and it is way, way, way faster.
I don't do spreadsheets. That is for the numbers and money people; i.e., the ones who find ways not to pay me for work that I've done.
I use office programs to write. Last time I had to use a spreadsheet for anything was about 20 years ago, and I hope never to use one again.
Well, I find it handy for some things, but if you don't, that's fine.
In the end, I went back to Open Office, which works better for me in every way, is faster, and also accepts TDE colors and fonts. The menu entries are not so much enlarged, but because OO accepts my TDE color scheme, I can make the GUI more legible.
Unfortunately there are a lot of thing in OO that need updating. I understand that it has considerably less capability with included images than LO. But if its image inclusion ability is all you need, I guess that wouldn't be an issue for you.
Personally, I think that Open Office is still just the lesser of two evils; it works a lot better and faster (at least, for myself) than Libre Office. I really wish somebody would come out with a word processing program that actually just plain WORKS, the way they used to be.
I don't know how responsive the LO people are, but it is possible if you report some shortcomings with it that they might listen to you.
I started using ConTeXt a couple of years ago. There is a mailing list where the chief developers get back to questions often within an hour or two, and they were very patient with me when I was a complete n00b, and they are patient with other people too. This is a bit exceptional (in my experience), but maybe the LO people are helpful as well.
Other people's results may vary. If others out there have somehow discovered a better word processor, I would give it a try.
I suspect the problem is that better is in the eye of the beholder, and Bob's better isn't the same as your better.
And if Libre Office works for you, I am glad for you.
It works. I rarely use it.
But for me, in my experience, Libre Office is far and away the worst, the slowest, the most frustrating word processor that I have ever used.
I have never used a word processor that I didn't find annoying and frustrating, which is why I don't use them.
And I am pretty sure it's not just my settings;
I'm pretty sure some of your annoyance is with your settings.
unless you mean that I ought to organize my work in a manner completely different from how I written ever since I changed over from a typewriter to a desktop computer.
No, I mean that you can change the font size and you can change the colour of the background and various other things to suit yourself, which will make things less frustrating for you. If you refuse to do so, that is not a valid criticism of LO (or any other program).
I have no idea how you organize your work, and so I have no idea if that is part of the problem you are having.
By the way, for what it's worth, I still remember when handwritten manuscripts were the norm, and typewriters were only starting to become necessary. This is from back in the Bible days, when I was younger.
And the woolly mammoths roamed the earth.
Yeah, I used typewriters too.
Jim
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 13:44:53 Jim via tde-users wrote:
On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 13:08 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 12:41:22 Jim wrote:
Have you tried starting soffice from the command line like this:
GDK_DPI_SCALE=2 soffice
On my system that makes the fonts ludicrously big. But you might be able to fine-tune the number (you can use decimal fractions like 1.2 or 1.7) and get something that works for you.
This (above) is an interesting idea, and I may give it a try, but for now, my OO works just fine.
That was actually directed at someone much further up-thread, whose comments have now been edited out.
Yes, I gathered that your suggestion was intended for the original querent, that is, I believe, Uwe Brauer. I just presumed to respond.
It's a good suggestion, if it works. I haven't tested it yet, but I might try it with OO. However, if I start OO from command-line, then I get a plain white vanilla Gnomish interface, not my TDE colors.
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.
My TDE color scheme can be found on the screenshots page. And for my programs (both TDE and non-TDE), as well as for my settings on machines, devices, etc., I use a lighter font (usually yellow/gold/orange or green) on a dark background, as it is most visible for myself. Again, screenshots can be found on the TDE page.
As for the actual interface that I use for writing, I don't touch the menus; or, I ought to say, I haven't touched the menus since I started using OpenOffice back in the early 2000s sometime. Ever since, I have just copied over my settings, and it has worked, and still works in OO. When I changed to LO, everything got messed up. I did try, for a long time, to modify LO settings to work for me, but it was always just more of the same crap.
Once I got the new fork of OpenOffice to work (which also took some finagling), all my old settings also worked, by which I mean, the same settings that I have used since the early 2000s. And they still work now, with OpenOffice, but not with LibreOffice.
And, as I said, LibreOffice is S-L-O-W. Indeed, it is so slow that mere words cannot convey its sloth. And I am not talking about startup, etc., but about ordinary use, after it has already been started. But let me give an example:
I am working on a different screen; let's say that it is graphics in gimp, or that I am working with a plain text file, and now want to copy that content in my office program. When I try switching screens back to LibreOffice, I have to wait literally 5-10 minutes just for the interface to become visible. I am looking at a blank screen. I can switch back and forth between the screens, but the LO screen is just blank, and I must wait for it to catch up. By the time it actually appears, I have often completely forgotten whatever it was that I was going to insert / revise / whatever. Even then, after it appears, I often still could not actually use it, but just had to look at a frozen screen.
This is what I mean by LibreOffice being "useless"; and since OpenOffice accepts my settings -- the same settings that I have used since the early 2000s, and I don't have to wait for any lag, because I don't have some background processes that are hogging resources -- I use OpenOffice, and recommend it to anybody else who has similar problems.
Again, if you want to say that it is all due to my settings, then you will have to do more to convince me; because my settings work just fine for me, and OpenOffice, while not perfect, allows me to get some actual work done.
No, I mean that (as I understand it) many people (I even know a few myself) successfully use LO to create, edit and read documents.
So I don't quite understand how you can say it isn't a "you" problem when other people are able to use it, but you say you can't get anything done with it.
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.
I get into the same kind of discussions with other people about using apps on my phone. Everybody keeps telling me how convenient it will be for me to use their app; except that I use my phone pretty much just as a phone. Inconvenient in the short term, perhaps; but overall, I keep my life much less complicated by avoiding all those convenient solutions.
This may be a bad analogy, but I suspect that we might be having a similar kind of disagreement.
Maybe somebody out there knows how to get inside LO to change the interface, but I spent a couple years searching for such a solution.
I am not a fan of either libre office or open office, so I don't use either except under extreme duress. But just out of curiosity, what is it about the interface you don't like? The icons? The fonts? The way the menus are arranged? Something else?
The fonts are so tiny that I literally cannot read them, not even if I get nose-close to the screen.
Configuration problem. A way to solve it is above.
The contrast between font color and background cannot be changed, and will only accept settings from KDE Plasma (or maybe, Gnome).
Are you talking about the document? I have black text on white background. I guess some people don't like that much contrast.
No, lighter text on dark background. I have no problem at all getting that part right. It looks the same in both LibreOffice and OpenOffice. I mean the interface, menus, etc., are not visible.
but also it is very slow, like pouring molasses on a cold day. It sometimes would take me 5-10 minutes just for it to appear on screen when I changed from one screen to another.
One of the reasons I don't like Libre office is because it is slow, I agree with you there.
I should have said it is nowhere near as slow for me as for you. Maybe your system has (way) too much going on for the amount of RAM you have and/or the CPU you have.
I always have shells open that are running top and htop, and I keep a pretty close eye on resources, CPU usage, etc. It is rare that my system misbehaves.
For me, it takes about 3 seconds to start up. I think that is slow, but it isn't minutes.
When I say LibreOffice is slow, I don't mean startup. I mean, actual usage, in the moment.
Unfortunately there are a lot of thing in OO that need updating. I understand that it has considerably less capability with included images than LO. But if its image inclusion ability is all you need, I guess that wouldn't be an issue for you.
Yes, I have heard that about OO, and it is a concern of mine. I hear that maybe it's not as secure, etc., etc. But it doesn't concern me much, as I don't do anything with my office program that requires an internet connection.
And I don't need it so much for images, just for text. When I do need to insert an image, I usually wait until later, create a marker for where I want to insert it, and then I anchor it to a specific part of the page, to make sure it doesn't move around after changes or restarts.
As I said, OO is the lesser of two evils. I can either use LO, which everybody says is better, but which brings my machine to a halt; or I can use OO, which is supposed to be insecure, but at least it works, and doesn't freeze my machine, and after using it for over 20 years, I have yet to experience any bad effects.
While I have various kinds of texts that I might be working on, and so different problems, there is one long-term project that has taken up most of my adult life; since about 1983 or so. The texts for that project were started in manuscript and typewriter, and have gone through (let me count ...), I believe, 6 or 7 different word processing programs since then.
But for me, in my experience, Libre Office is far and away the worst, the slowest, the most frustrating word processor that I have ever used.
I have never used a word processor that I didn't find annoying and frustrating, which is why I don't use them.
No, I mean that you can change the font size and you can change the colour of the background and various other things to suit yourself, which will make things less frustrating for you. If you refuse to do so, that is not a valid criticism of LO (or any other program).
I can change all those things; it's the interface itself (surrounding the text part, the borders, menus, etc., and therein, the size and color of fonts).
I have no idea how you organize your work, and so I have no idea if that is part of the problem you are having.
By the way, for what it's worth, I still remember when handwritten manuscripts were the norm, and typewriters were only starting to become necessary. This is from back in the Bible days, when I was younger.
And the woolly mammoths roamed the earth.
I used to live by hunting woolly mammoths. I still have my old spears and atlatl (spear-thrower). I also like stone tools.
Yeah, I used typewriters too.
Jim
Anyway ... I think we have gone far enough off-topic on this matter, and nothing will get resolved by going round and round.
You like to have things your own way, and I am comfortable enough with where I am at this moment, using OpenOffice. It may be better or worse for others; I will let them decide for themselves.
As to the original question ... my answer was to Uwe or anybody else out there who is frustrated with LibreOffice.
Give OpenOffice a try. It works for me.
Bill
ср, 25 мар. 2026 г., 00:51 William Morder via tde-users < users@trinitydesktop.org>:
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 13:44:53 Jim via tde-users wrote:
On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 13:08 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users
wrote:
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 12:41:22 Jim wrote:
Have you tried starting soffice from the command line like this:
GDK_DPI_SCALE=2 soffice
On my system that makes the fonts ludicrously big. But you might be able to fine-tune the number (you can use decimal fractions like 1.2
or
1.7) and get something that works for you.
This (above) is an interesting idea, and I may give it a try, but for now, my OO works just fine.
That was actually directed at someone much further up-thread, whose comments have now been edited out.
Yes, I gathered that your suggestion was intended for the original querent, that is, I believe, Uwe Brauer. I just presumed to respond.
It's a good suggestion, if it works. I haven't tested it yet, but I might try it with OO. However, if I start OO from command-line, then I get a plain white vanilla Gnomish interface, not my TDE colors.
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.
My TDE color scheme can be found on the screenshots page. And for my programs (both TDE and non-TDE), as well as for my settings on machines, devices, etc., I use a lighter font (usually yellow/gold/orange or green) on a dark background, as it is most visible for myself. Again, screenshots can be found on the TDE page.
As for the actual interface that I use for writing, I don't touch the menus; or, I ought to say, I haven't touched the menus since I started using OpenOffice back in the early 2000s sometime. Ever since, I have just copied over my settings, and it has worked, and still works in OO. When I changed to LO, everything got messed up. I did try, for a long time, to modify LO settings to work for me, but it was always just more of the same crap.
Once I got the new fork of OpenOffice to work (which also took some finagling), all my old settings also worked, by which I mean, the same settings that I have used since the early 2000s. And they still work now, with OpenOffice, but not with LibreOffice.
And, as I said, LibreOffice is S-L-O-W. Indeed, it is so slow that mere words cannot convey its sloth. And I am not talking about startup, etc., but about ordinary use, after it has already been started. But let me give an example:
I am working on a different screen; let's say that it is graphics in gimp, or that I am working with a plain text file, and now want to copy that content in my office program. When I try switching screens back to LibreOffice, I have to wait literally 5-10 minutes just for the interface to become visible. I am looking at a blank screen. I can switch back and forth between the screens, but the LO screen is just blank,
Never saw anything like this for such long time (I think I sometimes get brief black flash) - but from what I recall both OO and LO try to use OpenGL by default, so may be turn this off or on in LO?
Also, abiword 3 does not work for your needs?
I recall some long time ago I abused Mozilla/Seamonkey's Composer for some formatted text drafts ... But obviously formatting us limited, and complex equations probably too much pain to do this way ...
and I must wait for it to catch up.
By the time it actually appears, I have often completely forgotten whatever it was that I was going to insert / revise / whatever. Even then, after it appears, I often still could not actually use it, but just had to look at a frozen screen.
This is what I mean by LibreOffice being "useless"; and since OpenOffice accepts my settings -- the same settings that I have used since the early 2000s, and I don't have to wait for any lag, because I don't have some background processes that are hogging resources -- I use OpenOffice, and recommend it to anybody else who has similar problems.
Again, if you want to say that it is all due to my settings, then you will have to do more to convince me; because my settings work just fine for me, and OpenOffice, while not perfect, allows me to get some actual work done.
No, I mean that (as I understand it) many people (I even know a few
myself)
successfully use LO to create, edit and read documents.
So I don't quite understand how you can say it isn't a "you" problem when other people are able to use it, but you say you can't get anything done with it.
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.
I get into the same kind of discussions with other people about using apps on my phone. Everybody keeps telling me how convenient it will be for me to use their app; except that I use my phone pretty much just as a phone. Inconvenient in the short term, perhaps; but overall, I keep my life much less complicated by avoiding all those convenient solutions.
This may be a bad analogy, but I suspect that we might be having a similar kind of disagreement.
Maybe somebody out there knows how to get inside LO to change the interface, but I spent a couple years searching for such a solution.
I am not a fan of either libre office or open office, so I don't use either except under extreme duress. But just out of curiosity, what
is
it about the interface you don't like? The icons? The fonts? The way the menus are arranged? Something else?
The fonts are so tiny that I literally cannot read them, not even if I get nose-close to the screen.
Configuration problem. A way to solve it is above.
The contrast between font color and background cannot be changed, and will only accept settings from KDE Plasma (or maybe, Gnome).
Are you talking about the document? I have black text on white
background.
I guess some people don't like that much contrast.
No, lighter text on dark background. I have no problem at all getting that part right. It looks the same in both LibreOffice and OpenOffice. I mean the interface, menus, etc., are not visible.
but also it is very slow, like pouring molasses on a cold day. It sometimes would take me 5-10 minutes just for it to appear on screen when I changed from one screen to another.
One of the reasons I don't like Libre office is because it is slow, I agree with you there.
I should have said it is nowhere near as slow for me as for you. Maybe your system has (way) too much going on for the amount of RAM you have and/or the CPU you have.
I always have shells open that are running top and htop, and I keep a pretty close eye on resources, CPU usage, etc. It is rare that my system misbehaves.
For me, it takes about 3 seconds to start up. I think that is slow, but
it
isn't minutes.
When I say LibreOffice is slow, I don't mean startup. I mean, actual usage, in the moment.
Unfortunately there are a lot of thing in OO that need updating. I understand that it has considerably less capability with included
images
than LO. But if its image inclusion ability is all you need, I guess that wouldn't be an issue for you.
Yes, I have heard that about OO, and it is a concern of mine. I hear that maybe it's not as secure, etc., etc. But it doesn't concern me much, as I don't do anything with my office program that requires an internet connection.
And I don't need it so much for images, just for text. When I do need to insert an image, I usually wait until later, create a marker for where I want to insert it, and then I anchor it to a specific part of the page, to make sure it doesn't move around after changes or restarts.
As I said, OO is the lesser of two evils. I can either use LO, which everybody says is better, but which brings my machine to a halt; or I can use OO, which is supposed to be insecure, but at least it works, and doesn't freeze my machine, and after using it for over 20 years, I have yet to experience any bad effects.
While I have various kinds of texts that I might be working on, and so different problems, there is one long-term project that has taken up most of my adult life; since about 1983 or so. The texts for that project were started in manuscript and typewriter, and have gone through (let me count ...), I believe, 6 or 7 different word processing programs since then.
But for me, in my experience, Libre Office is far and away the worst,
the
slowest, the most frustrating word processor that I have ever used.
I have never used a word processor that I didn't find annoying and frustrating, which is why I don't use them.
No, I mean that you can change the font size and you can change the
colour
of the background and various other things to suit yourself, which will make things less frustrating for you. If you refuse to do so, that is
not
a valid criticism of LO (or any other program).
I can change all those things; it's the interface itself (surrounding the text part, the borders, menus, etc., and therein, the size and color of fonts).
I have no idea how you organize your work, and so I have no idea if that
is
part of the problem you are having.
By the way, for what it's worth, I still remember when handwritten manuscripts were the norm, and typewriters were only starting to become necessary. This is from back in the Bible days, when I was younger.
And the woolly mammoths roamed the earth.
I used to live by hunting woolly mammoths. I still have my old spears and atlatl (spear-thrower). I also like stone tools.
Yeah, I used typewriters too.
JimAnyway ... I think we have gone far enough off-topic on this matter, and nothing will get resolved by going round and round.
You like to have things your own way, and I am comfortable enough with where I am at this moment, using OpenOffice. It may be better or worse for others; I will let them decide for themselves.
As to the original question ... my answer was to Uwe or anybody else out there who is frustrated with LibreOffice.
Give OpenOffice a try. It works for me.
Bill
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On Tuesday 24 March 2026 15:23:13 Andrew Randrianasulu via tde-users wrote:
ср, 25 мар. 2026 г., 00:51 William Morder via tde-users <
<snipping throughout ... >
And, as I said, LibreOffice is S-L-O-W. Indeed, it is so slow that mere words cannot convey its sloth. And I am not talking about startup, etc., but about ordinary use, after it has already been started. But let me give an example:
I am working on a different screen; let's say that it is graphics in gimp, or that I am working with a plain text file, and now want to copy that content in my office program. When I try switching screens back to LibreOffice, I have to wait literally 5-10 minutes just for the interface to become visible. I am looking at a blank screen. I can switch back and forth between the screens, but the LO screen is just blank,
Never saw anything like this for such long time (I think I sometimes get brief black flash) - but from what I recall both OO and LO try to use OpenGL by default, so may be turn this off or on in LO?
I went back and forth between LO and OO for a few months, but for myself, when using LibreOffice, this behavior is became the usual. I could go through days at a time, never getting anything at all done, just looking at blank screens. Then maybe, for a few brief minutes, remember to insert or change something, save that document, then wait another week or two to be able to do anything more. In the end, I could open documents in LibreOffice, look at them, but never actually work on them.
Also, abiword 3 does not work for your needs?
No, Abiword and TDE's word processor, Kword, and both too primitive for my needs. I do still need to be able to create some formatting. Also, when I convert from Abiword or Kword to another office program, OO or LO, things get messed up, and I see formatting marks in the text, etc.
Another complaint that I had about LibreOffice: its metrics are subtly different from OpenOffice. The change is very slight, only tiny fractions of an inch different; or maybe centimeters or pixels, I don't know. But it is enough that it messes up pages that I had thought that I had already set.
I am trying to make some of my pages as print-ready pdfs; not so much because I intend to make the final version as a pdf, but rather so that I can show a typesetter what are my intentions for how my pages ought to look.
I used to set type myself, for newspapers and little magazines, and I have created shorter documents as print-ready pdfs. But for this, if I can ever finish it, I believe I will need others (editors, typesetters) to help organize the materials and make them look right. But that's still a few years away.
I recall some long time ago I abused Mozilla/Seamonkey's Composer for some formatted text drafts ... But obviously formatting us limited, and complex equations probably too much pain to do this way ...
I still use Seamonkey as a browser. I never tried its other features, email, composer, etc.
I do sometimes try other word processors, just to see if there are any that might work better. I like the simplicity of some, but I still need features that only LO and OO seem to have.
Also, I imagine, there are proprietary word processors out there that have these features (e.g., Microsoft Word, and whatever Apple has to offer). But nowadays, I stick with free, as in free beer, as well as free as in freedom.
Bill
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 23:23:13 Andrew Randrianasulu via tde-users wrote:
or, I ought to say, I haven't touched the menus since I started using OpenOffice back in the early 2000s sometime. Ever since, I have just copied over my settings, and it has worked, and still works in OO. When I changed to LO, everything got messed up
And, as I said, LibreOffice is S-L-O-W. Indeed, it is so slow that mere words cannot convey its sloth.
When I try switching screens back to LibreOffice, I have to wait literally 5-10 minutes just for the interface to become visible.
Just to say: this is *your* local problem. Thousands of people around the world use LO, I've been using Star-, Open- and Libre Office since something like 1996 (Fisrt OS/2, then Linux). I am using it every day (MX Linux) and I see *none* of those horrors you discribe.
Which clearkly means: what's messed up is you settings, not LO (that does have it's faults, but not those you describe).
Thierry
On Wednesday 25 March 2026 02:13:13 Thierry de Coulon via tde-users wrote:
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 23:23:13 Andrew Randrianasulu via tde-users wrote:
or, I ought to say, I haven't touched the menus since I started using OpenOffice back in the early 2000s sometime. Ever since, I have just copied over my settings, and it has worked, and still works in OO. When I changed to LO, everything got messed up
And, as I said, LibreOffice is S-L-O-W. Indeed, it is so slow that mere words cannot convey its sloth.
When I try switching screens back to LibreOffice, I have to wait literally 5-10 minutes just for the interface to become visible.
Just to say: this is *your* local problem. Thousands of people around the world use LO, I've been using Star-, Open- and Libre Office since something like 1996 (Fisrt OS/2, then Linux). I am using it every day (MX Linux) and I see *none* of those horrors you discribe.
Which clearkly means: what's messed up is you settings, not LO (that does have it's faults, but not those you describe).
Thierry
And yet, I do not have this problem at all, ever, with OpenOffice. Very strange.
It's just not worth the trouble. Life is short. I have things to do. I will just keep using OpenOffice, thanks. Other people, however, must continue to insist that I am wrong, that it is my problem. It doesn't matter to me. I have better things to do with my time.
Bill
On Wednesday 25 March 2026 13:06:16 William Morder via tde-users wrote:
And yet, I do not have this problem at all, ever, with OpenOffice. Very strange.
It's just not worth the trouble. Life is short. I have things to do. I will just keep using OpenOffice, thanks. Other people, however, must continue to insist that I am wrong, that it is my problem. It doesn't matter to me. I have better things to do with my time.
Bill
I don't think that you are wrong.
a) If OpenOffice works for you, no reason to change
b) Obviously LibreOffice works for some but not for you. This must mean that there are special conditions on your machine that don't work well with LO. On my machines, LO behaves correctly, is fast, has normal fonts, normal colors. It does however often change the layout of a document when changing software version, which is annoying.
I don't upgrade LO so often - unless there is some new feature that I would use. Why people pretend that you *have* to update a working program because there *might* be some vulnerability they can't even name is a mystery to me.
Thierry
On Wednesday 25 March 2026 11:13:02 Thierry de Coulon via tde-users wrote:
I don't think that you are wrong.
a) If OpenOffice works for you, no reason to change
b) Obviously LibreOffice works for some but not for you. This must mean that there are special conditions on your machine that don't work well with LO. On my machines, LO behaves correctly, is fast, has normal fonts, normal colors. It does however often change the layout of a document when changing software version, which is annoying.
I don't upgrade LO so often - unless there is some new feature that I would use. Why people pretend that you *have* to update a working program because there *might* be some vulnerability they can't even name is a mystery to me.
Thierry
Thank you.
For what it's worth, I never said that everybody ought to give up LibreOffice and move over to OpenOffice. I only suggested -- for those rare individuals, such as myself -- that, if LibreOffice isn't working as desired, maybe give OpenOffice a try.
That was my original intention when responding to the thread. Also, I didn't catch that it was about scalc (due to my old eyes), which I don't use any more, but did see that it was about LibreOffice. Last time I used the spreadsheet, it was in the original OpenOffice, before it died and was resurrected by Apache. (We really ought to abbreviate it as AOO, rather than just OO.)
Nowadays I play for the other side (the creative people), and the spreadsheet-users (the money and numbers people) are the ones who owe me money (a lot of it), but manage to find excuses for not paying me. But anyway, that was years ago, and I hardly expect to recoup my losses after all this time.
I don't imagine that LibreOffice would work any better for me as a spreadsheet, though.
As for *why* LibreOffice doesn't work for me (my settings, or whatever), I have a feeling that it is something to do with security; for example, that I block most programs from connecting to the internet in the background. I want to know what programs are connecting, and why, so that I can approve it.
Sometimes I get emails -- mostly from big corporations -- that do similar things to my machine. Everything suddenly comes to a halt, or while I am listening to online radio, it begins to stutter, because I have just tried to download an email. There is a public radio station here that I once called, and they got my email address, and now send me emails sometimes. Every time I get one of their emails, the same thing happens: my machine freezes, and I usually have to do a hard shutdown, then reboot, and any unsaved work is lost. I have learned to avoid such mishaps by previewing my emails in kshowmail, deleting whatever isn't strictly necessary, then download using kmail.
My hunch is that LibreOffice misbehaves for me for similar reasons: that something is trying to connect to the internet in the background. Another possibility is that LibreOffice puts things into different folders than OpenOffice, so when I tried to copy over my settings, they were not an exact match.
Also there is that "little" problem, where LibreOffice changes my layout ever so slightly, due to some different page metrics. I never managed to track down the cause of this issue, but it messes up a lot of my pages. It may only be a fraction of an inch difference, but it is enough to change my layout, so that lines get broken up, or what fit onto a single page now suddenly spills over onto another page. (It seems that LibreOffice is makes everything slightly larger.) I don't know if this is intentional on the part of the developers, but it's a deal breaker for me.
Some of my pages were created decades ago, and I have no wish to go through all my materials and change the layout on over forty years of work.
Just to make clear why this is a problem for me: I collect a lot of materials of various kinds (texts, graphics, diagrams, charts, etc.) from many different sources. I can never use all these materials within a single book, or it would be unreadable; but I want to have them available, so that I can cut and paste what I want to use. My materials are already formatted, so that I don't have to keep redoing the same work, again and again. It may be, too, that I can publish my notes and these other research materials in separate volumes, for those who are interested. But to be practical, to get it published, to get people to read it, I must be selective.
As I said, if LibreOffice works for other people, that's good. I am glad that it works for somebody. Again, it may be that the size of my documents is part of the problem. Earlier in this thread, Jim said that his largest document was 57 pages (if I recall aright); I have many documents that run to hundreds of pages. These are not finished chapters, books, or anything like that; they are just for research: my collections of passages culled from various texts, together with commentaries and notes, by myself and others, but arranged under general headings. If it were just a matter of breaking up into chapters, that wouldn't be a problem; but to keep related materials grouped together, under a general heading, is the easiest way for me to keep things in order.
Not only do I have larger documents, but I also have more of them, usually fifty or so open at any one time. Not all of these are files like that, though, research materials, hundreds of pages each; I also have other, shorter miscellaneous documents that I am working on, which have nothing to do with those bigger files.
In any case, my system is pretty fast, and rarely misbehaves. Most of my problems come from outside; for example, network issues, which are beyond my control.
It's true, I would like to see some better word processor; something better than both LibreOffice and OpenOffice. But for now, OpenOffice does what I need, with the fewest complications or issues.
Bill
On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 14:50 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 13:44:53 Jim via tde-users wrote:
On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 13:08 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 12:41:22 Jim wrote:
Have you tried starting soffice from the command line like this:
GDK_DPI_SCALE=2 soffice
On my system that makes the fonts ludicrously big. But you might be able to fine-tune the number (you can use decimal fractions like 1.2 or 1.7) and get something that works for you.
This (above) is an interesting idea, and I may give it a try, but for now, my OO works just fine.
It's a good suggestion, if it works. I haven't tested it yet, but I might try it with OO.
I have no idea whether it will work with OO (I don't have OO on my system). It depends on whether OO uses the gnome GUI toolkit or now.
However, if I start OO from command-line, then I get a plain white vanilla Gnomish interface, not my TDE colors.
That's interesting. You might use ps -E to see whether there are any interesting command-line options or environment variables that are set when you run it from (presumably) some TDE menu.
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.
My TDE color scheme can be found on the screenshots page. <And for my programs (both TDE and non-TDE), as well as for my settings on machines, devices, etc., I use a lighter font (usually yellow/gold/orange or green) on a dark background, as it is most visible for myself. Again, screenshots can be found on the TDE page.
As for the actual interface that I use for writing, I don't touch the menus; or, I ought to say, I haven't touched the menus since I started using OpenOffice back in the early 2000s sometime. Ever since, I have just copied over my settings, and it has worked, and still works in OO. When I changed to LO, everything got messed up. I did try, for a long time, to modify LO settings to work for me, but it was always just more of the same crap.
Well, since I don't use either, I can't help you. But I'm willing to bet someone out there might be able to help you get things more to your liking.
Once I got the new fork of OpenOffice to work (which also took some finagling), all my old settings also worked, by which I mean, the same settings that I have used since the early 2000s. And they still work now, with OpenOffice, but not with LibreOffice.
And, as I said, LibreOffice is S-L-O-W. Indeed, it is so slow that mere words cannot convey its sloth. And I am not talking about startup, etc., but about ordinary use, after it has already been started. But let me give an example:
Dare I ask what CPU and how much RAM you have?
I am working on a different screen; let's say that it is graphics in gimp, or that I am working with a plain text file, and now want to copy that content in my office program. When I try switching screens back to LibreOffice, I have to wait literally 5-10 minutes just for the interface to become visible. I am looking at a blank screen. I can switch back and forth between the screens, but the LO screen is just blank, and I must wait for it to catch up. By the time it actually appears, I have often completely forgotten whatever it was that I was going to insert / revise / whatever. Even then, after it appears, I often still could not actually use it, but just had to look at a frozen screen.
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 what I mean by LibreOffice being "useless"; and since OpenOffice accepts my settings -- the same settings that I have used since the early 2000s, and I don't have to wait for any lag, because I don't have some background processes that are hogging resources -- I use OpenOffice, and recommend it to anybody else who has similar problems.
As I mentioned before, I do think LO is slow. But my experience is nothing like yours.
Again, if you want to say that it is all due to my settings, then you will have to do more to convince me; because my settings work just fine for me, and OpenOffice, while not perfect, allows me to get some actual work done.
When I was talking about your settings, I was referring to your GDK_DPI_SCALE and font/background colour choices, not about whatever other settings you have. Not using either LO or OO, I don't know what settings you have that could be making LO slow (assuming that there are such settings).
No, I mean that (as I understand it) many people (I even know a few myself) successfully use LO to create, edit and read documents.
So I don't quite understand how you can say it isn't a "you" problem when other people are able to use it, but you say you can't get anything done with it.
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. :-)
I get into the same kind of discussions with other people about using apps on my phone. Everybody keeps telling me how convenient it will be for me to use their app; except that I use my phone pretty much just as a phone. Inconvenient in the short term, perhaps; but overall, I keep my life much less complicated by avoiding all those convenient solutions.
This may be a bad analogy, but I suspect that we might be having a similar kind of disagreement.
I don't think so. I also don't bother with many phone apps; but I do have some which make my life more convenient. If an app can make my life less complicated by doing something for me, then I can compare the "cost" of learning and using the app to the "cost" of not using it.
Even with what you have said... you talked about having a bunch of "settings" (whatever specifically you are talking about). Presumably it took time and effort to figure those out and set things up how you like. And now (quite reasonably) you want some return on investment. And I think lots of things are like that... you can do without, or you can spend the time to acquire the knowledge about something and then hopefully make up the learning curve time with increased productivity.
Are you talking about the document? I have black text on white background. I guess some people don't like that much contrast.
No, lighter text on dark background. I have no problem at all getting that part right. It looks the same in both LibreOffice and OpenOffice. I mean the interface, menus, etc., are not visible.
I assume that when you say "are not visible" you mean "you can't see them well because they aren't in colours you find easy to see", as opposed to "they are actually not visible". (Or maybe "they are in a font size that is hard to see".)
I should have said it is nowhere near as slow for me as for you. Maybe your system has (way) too much going on for the amount of RAM you have and/or the CPU you have.
I always have shells open that are running top and htop, and I keep a pretty close eye on resources, CPU usage, etc. It is rare that my system misbehaves.
So what is your system doing when LO is taking 5 minutes to show up? It's not clear to me (might be wrong about this) that it's easy to see swapping/paging behaviour with either of those tools (even though when I run I see memory and swap availability, but that is different about whether swap is busily being read from).
For me, it takes about 3 seconds to start up. I think that is slow, but it isn't minutes.
When I say LibreOffice is slow, I don't mean startup. I mean, actual usage, in the moment.
The biggest .doc I have is 57 pages, a bit over 7 MB (including some photos, but mainly text). It seems quite quick to me.
I have a laptop with 32 GB of RAM and a Ryzen 4700U 8-core CPU. It is getting on 5 years old, but not counting gaming laptops, it was a pretty fast laptop at the time.
Unfortunately there are a lot of thing in OO that need updating. I understand that it has considerably less capability with included images than LO. But if its image inclusion ability is all you need, I guess that wouldn't be an issue for you.
Yes, I have heard that about OO, and it is a concern of mine. I hear that maybe it's not as secure, etc., etc. But it doesn't concern me much, as I don't do anything with my office program that requires an internet connection.
I have no idea about its security issues, and whether any security issues have anything to do with being on-line. (A long time ago some people I know got a "redacted" M$word doc from someone, but inside the doc was the redacted info, it was "conveniently" saved in the document file in case the user wanted to "undo" the redactions. That was a horrible security issue which had nothing to do with any network connections.)
And I don't need it so much for images, just for text. When I do need to insert an image, I usually wait until later, create a marker for where I want to insert it, and then I anchor it to a specific part of the page, to make sure it doesn't move around after changes or restarts.
As I said, OO is the lesser of two evils. I can either use LO, which everybody says is better, but which brings my machine to a halt; or I can use OO, which is supposed to be insecure, but at least it works, and doesn't freeze my machine, and after using it for over 20 years, I have yet to experience any bad effects.
While I have various kinds of texts that I might be working on, and so different problems, there is one long-term project that has taken up most of my adult life; since about 1983 or so. The texts for that project were started in manuscript and typewriter, and have gone through (let me count ...), I believe, 6 or 7 different word processing programs since then.
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).
No, I mean that you can change the font size and you can change the colour of the background and various other things to suit yourself, which will make things less frustrating for you. If you refuse to do so, that is not a valid criticism of LO (or any other program).
I can change all those things; it's the interface itself (surrounding the text part, the borders, menus, etc., and therein, the size and color of fonts).
I'm surprised you can change the font size, somewhat surprised you can't change the colour of the font, but not entirely surprised you can't change some of the other things you mention. These things don't bother me, but I know some people want all these things to be consistent.
And the woolly mammoths roamed the earth.
I used to live by hunting woolly mammoths. I still have my old spears and atlatl (spear-thrower). I also like stone tools.
Yeah, you can leave your stone tools outside and they don't rust.
Anyway ... I think we have gone far enough off-topic on this matter, and nothing will get resolved by going round and round.
Probably. Since I don't use LO or OO, I largely don't care to tweak anything. I guess the only thing left to do is for you to try some of these things if you feel so motivated. And if you just keep happily using OO, then you will be happy there.
As to the original question ... my answer was to Uwe or anybody else out there who is frustrated with LibreOffice.
Give OpenOffice a try. It works for me.
Or maybe they want to try TeXworks or something like that. ;-)
Jim
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
чт, 26 мар. 2026 г., 04:36 William Morder via tde-users < users@trinitydesktop.org>:
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.
Hm, may be your strange "LO is stuck for minutes" problem originates here. Cheap flash drives definitely failed to be fast enough for Slackware -current, even if different brand/type of usb flash drive worked.
You can try to boot small version of OS into ram (should work with 8 Gb ram) and see if hangs are gone.
Or play with mount settings for home/root partition.
Try zram/swap instead of raw swap partition on flash drive?
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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On Wednesday 25 March 2026 20:46:48 Andrew Randrianasulu via tde-users wrote:
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.
Hm, may be your strange "LO is stuck for minutes" problem originates here.
No. As I said, LO has *never* run on this machine. My experiences with LibreOffice happened on different machines. My machine has been running just fine like this for more than two years now.
Cheap flash drives definitely failed to be fast enough for Slackware -current, even if different brand/type of usb flash drive worked.
You can try to boot small version of OS into ram (should work with 8 Gb ram) and see if hangs are gone.
There are no hangs -- at least, not with LO. I sometimes get hangs when I download emails, or when I try to use yt-dlp to download videos; that kind of thing.
Aside from network issues, over which I have no control, my system at present runs as I want. I don't currently run LibreOffice, never ran it on this machine. I am recounting my experiences of a few years ago, before I figured out how to install the new Apache OpenOffice.
Or play with mount settings for home/root partition.
Try zram/swap instead of raw swap partition on flash drive?
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
On Thursday 26 March 2026 08:35:40 Jim via tde-users wrote: <snipping throughout>
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?
When my neighbor "blew the fuse", he also managed to kill the power in this entire wing of the building. At the time, I was transferring files between the two SSDs. I have a gadget (forget the term, now in storage) for connecting an SSD by a USB port. But it's not powered by an external source, just plugs into the USB port.
This happened a couple times with other hard drives and flash drives, too. Anyway, that neighbor died about six months ago. I won't say that I miss him.
(If he is the habit of doing this, you really want to get yourself a surge protector, if you haven't already done so.)
Yeah, I have been looking for a power supply backup; I used to be able to find them in most computer supply shops, but nowadays they seem to have gone out of fashion. I have my trusty Belkin surge protector which otherwise has served me reliably for years. But the problem seems to have been caused by the fact that I was transferring files at the time the power went out.
What I did instead was to get a YUGE 13-port USB hub, which I plug into my Belkin surge protector; this thing can manage all my needs. If the power does go out, it seems to delay the effects of a spikes and surges, so my drives don't get damaged.
Unfortunately, the electricity in this building will continue to be a problem, and my new neighbors also blow fuses all the time, and everything goes out for me, too; but these are minor, compared to the catastrophes that my old neighbor regularly brought upon us.
In the meanwhile, I have whittled down my working external drives to a few flash drives and one external hard drive; then everything is regularly backed up to other hard drives, using that 13-port hub. Otherwise, I have three 3.0 USB ports on my laptop, as well as a slot for an SD card, which I don't use regularly, mostly to copy music files to an SD card to put in my phone.
In the first of those USB port is plugged in the 128 gb flash drive that contains my entire operating system, partitioned into root, swap and home directories.
In the second USB port, I plug in a 1 tb hard drive that holds my music, films, tv shows, etc. ... all the mindless entertainment, since I don't have a television.
In the last USB port I plug in a small Belkin portable 7-port USB hub, which can be powered if I need, but which I generally just use with USB power from the machine. I usually have a 128 gb flash drive plugged in that contains tons of old radio shows, music shows that I like, so that I have radio even when there is no listenable radio. Also, I sometimes plug other flash drives into this portable hub, so that I can backup my personal business files. (This is the one that I take with me if I need to use a public computer, out there in the so-called real world; formatted to be readable on any machine.)
This way, if I have another such disaster, the laptop itself doesn't lose power, as it's got its own battery power, so those few hard drives and flash drives are generally safe, and won't get damaged. Everything is backed up on other hard drives, whenever I feel like pulling out that 13-port hub, and my bunches of external hard drives. And all of this, along with portable keyboard and mouse, Blue-Ray burner, fits into a laptop shoulder bag. I do have other stuff, used mostly with the laptop, that I keep in a separate bag, but I don't use it so much. And in fact, when I took a trip up north, I left it there, and now I need to fetch something back here when I make another trip. But *mostly* everything fits, so that I can pack up everything pretty quickly, get on a train or bus, or throw everything into a car.
Whenever I get settled somewhere, in a larger place, then I will be able to have a more permanent setup. I have been in the process of moving now for more than six months, and at present I live like I am camping out, getting everything pared down to the minimum.
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
No, this is not the problem with my machine. I do not have a problem with my machine; at least, not at present.
You are conflating three different series of events. This is partly due to my own fault, not making it clear that these things happened over some years on different machines.
The earliest series of events -- my suffering through tthe horrors of trying to use LibreOffice -- occurred on other machines, both desktops and laptops. I tried many times over about five years or more to get LibreOffice to work, until at last I discovered Apache's fork of OpenOffice.
In the middle series of events: My neighbor fried hard drives and flash drives when he blew out the power in an entire wing of this building. I was also transferring files from one to another when this happened. This was not just once, but maybe three or four times. However, these were not the SSDs that I mentioned. This happened on my desktop computer. I was using my Belkin surge protector, but did not have a backup power supply. So when the desktop lost power, everything stopped.
This is one of the reasons that I went out and bought a laptop a few years ago; because when the power goes out, I still have the internal battery power of the laptop.
In that third and last series of events -- my fried SSDs -- this happened when I was transferring files from the original 128 gb SSD connected by USB adaptor to an internal 1 tb SSD. Even though they were connected to the laptop, they both got damaged, and within a week or so both stopped working. However, I did manage to save everything from them before they died completely.
In any case, I am beginning to understand some of the issues on your system.
No, you are not understanding. The issues that I described all occurred on other machines, sometimes five years ago. Only my fried SSDs (the third series described above) occurred with this machine, the laptop.
After I had spent a good chunk of money for the best SSD I could find, only to have it go to waste. That's when I installed my operating system to a flash drive, and I have been using it ever since (about two years now?) with practically no issues that have to do with my own machine.
My only problems here are beyond my control: that is, the electricity in this building, and the network, which also comes with the building.
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.
Once I get out of here, and have reliable electricity like other people, and have my own network (or at least a better network), then I might spend money on another SSD, or maybe a new laptop. But for now, I want to keep everything as simple and portable as I can.
Also I am thinking of getting a Jackery power station, solar panels, etc. Not just for my machines, but for other projects (such as music) that I have going. The Jackery that I saw was about the size of a small suitcase, and could power an entire house ... at least, in theory. I hear that they are not quite so good as they promise, but I still think that something like this would be best for me. I don't know about brands, but so far the Jackery sounds like the top of the line.
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.>
Right now, the price in everything is going up. I am glad that I got all my stuff moved before fuel prices went up. All that I have left here is about a carload, and I can manage that.
Otherwise, I just have to finish up my remaining business here, tie up some loose ends, then I may travel for a bit before I return to settle down. I need to make some trips to visit people that I have not seen in a very long time.
Bill
On Thu, Mar 26, 2026 at 10:01 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
On Thursday 26 March 2026 08:35:40 Jim via tde-users wrote:
<snipping throughout> >>> 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?
When my neighbor "blew the fuse", he also managed to kill the power in this entire wing of the building.
Was he running his own power sub-station? That sounds like he was doing something very "interesting". (Or maybe the power distribution in your building is a bit on the sketchy side.)
At the time, I was transferring files between the two SSDs. I have a gadget (forget the term, now in storage) for connecting an SSD by a USB port. But it's not powered by an external source, just plugs into the USB port.
Yes, I have a couple of those for connecting SSDs to Raspberry Pis.
This happened a couple times with other hard drives and flash drives, too. Anyway, that neighbor died about six months ago. I won't say that I miss him.
Was there a big flash of light or an electrical storm when he passed away? :-)
(If he is the habit of doing this, you really want to get yourself a surge protector, if you haven't already done so.)
Yeah, I have been looking for a power supply backup; I used to be able to find them in most computer supply shops, but nowadays they seem to have gone out of fashion.
I suspect that with most people having laptops, as opposed to desktops, there is far less need for UPS power supplies. Of course, the people who want desktops might still want a UPS, but it is probably a supply and demand issue, like almost everything else.
I have my trusty Belkin surge protector which otherwise has served me reliably for years. But the problem seems to have been caused by the fact that I was transferring files at the time the power went out.
That is curious. Did you have anyone who is really skilled with those things look at the SSDs?
What I did instead was to get a YUGE 13-port USB hub, which I plug into my Belkin surge protector; this thing can manage all my needs. If the power does go out, it seems to delay the effects of a spikes and surges, so my drives don't get damaged.
Worth every penny!
Unfortunately, the electricity in this building will continue to be a problem, and my new neighbors also blow fuses all the time, and everything goes out for me, too; but these are minor, compared to the catastrophes that my old neighbor regularly brought upon us.
In the meanwhile, I have whittled down my working external drives to a few flash drives and one external hard drive; then everything is regularly backed up to other hard drives, using that 13-port hub. Otherwise, I have three 3.0 USB ports on my laptop,
Are you sure? The specs I saw said two were 3.x and the other was a 2.0.
as well as a slot for an SD card, which I don't use regularly, mostly to copy music files to an SD card to put in my phone.
In the first of those USB port is plugged in the 128 gb flash drive that contains my entire operating system, partitioned into root, swap and home directories.
Swapping to a flash drive is probably slowing you down big time. If/when you need to swap.
In the second USB port, I plug in a 1 tb hard drive that holds my music, films, tv shows, etc. ... all the mindless entertainment, since I don't have a television.
That shouldn't be a big problem for music. And on a USB 3.x, it should be good for video content as well.
In the last USB port I plug in a small Belkin portable 7-port USB hub, which can be powered if I need, but which I generally just use with USB power from the machine. I usually have a 128 gb flash drive plugged in that contains tons of old radio shows, music shows that I like, so that I have radio even when there is no listenable radio. Also, I sometimes plug other flash drives into this portable hub, so that I can backup my personal business files. (This is the one that I take with me if I need to use a public computer, out there in the so-called real world; formatted to be readable on any machine.)
Are you familiar with the hdparm command? For giggles you might do some performance testing. Running sudo hdparm -t /dev/<whatever> will run for a few seconds and give you an indication of what speed you can read from the device at. For example, on my laptop I do sudo hdparm -t /dev/nvme0n1 and it responds with /dev/nvme0n1: Timing buffered disk reads: 6330 MB in 3.00 seconds = 2109.97 MB/sec
The original disk in my wife's venerable 2009 laptop had this results sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 234 MB in 3.00 seconds = 77.96 MB/sec with its original disk, and after replacing with an SSD at some point, it went to /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 818 MB in 3.01 seconds = 272.01 MB/sec
The SATA bus in that computer maxed out at 280 MB/sec (or something around there) and so we didn't get the full benefit of the SSD's speed, but it gave the laptop a new lease on life. The increase in speed of the laptop was very dramatic.
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
No, this is not the problem with my machine. I do not have a problem with my machine; at least, not at present.
You are conflating three different series of events. This is partly due to my own fault, not making it clear that these things happened over some years on different machines.
Indeed, I did not realize you were talking about three different events.
<snip>
This is one of the reasons that I went out and bought a laptop a few years ago; because when the power goes out, I still have the internal battery power of the laptop.
Yup, it is very convenient to be able to just keep working away when the power goes away.
In that third and last series of events -- my fried SSDs -- this happened when I was transferring files from the original 128 gb SSD connected by USB adaptor to an internal 1 tb SSD. Even though they were connected to the laptop, they both got damaged, and within a week or so both stopped working. However, I did manage to save everything from them before they died completely.
That last part is good. Still, given that at least one was "hiding behind" your laptop power supply, I'm still a bit surprised.
The guy wasn't working on some military-grade electromagnetic pulse weapon by any chance?
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.
Once I get out of here, and have reliable electricity like other people, and have my own network (or at least a better network), then I might spend money on another SSD, or maybe a new laptop. But for now, I want to keep everything as simple and portable as I can.
Also I am thinking of getting a Jackery power station, solar panels, etc. Not just for my machines, but for other projects (such as music) that I have going. The Jackery that I saw was about the size of a small suitcase, and could power an entire house ... at least, in theory. I hear that they are not quite so good as they promise, but I still think that something like this would be best for me. I don't know about brands, but so far the Jackery sounds like the top of the line.
I have an Ecoflow. If you talk to any of the Ecoflow fan-bois, they will tell you that Ecoflows are the cat's meow. I don't have any real opinion myself (when I went to buy an Ecoflow, the reviews were as positive as any of the other brands, and I could buy one locally, so...). My experience with my Ecoflow (Delta 2 model + extra battery) is that it will give you something like 80% of the rated power. So I have (nominally) 2 kWh, which should run one 250-watt device for 8 hours. But I suspect I probably end up with about 6.5 hours (or so) of power. YMMV.
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.>
Right now, the price in everything is going up. I am glad that I got all my stuff moved before fuel prices went up. All that I have left here is about a carload, and I can manage that.
The recent gas price hikes have made me glad I don't have to drive a lot these days. Good profits for oil companies, though.
Otherwise, I just have to finish up my remaining business here, tie up some loose ends, then I may travel for a bit before I return to settle down. I need to make some trips to visit people that I have not seen in a very long time.
Start with the ones within walking distance. ;-)
Jim
On Thursday 26 March 2026 14:59:35 Jim via tde-users wrote:
<snipping away ...>
When my neighbor "blew the fuse", he also managed to kill the power in this entire wing of the building.
Was he running his own power sub-station? That sounds like he was doing something very "interesting". (Or maybe the power distribution in your building is a bit on the sketchy side.)
There was another incident that is almost beyond belief, and has nothing to do with any of my neighbors. That was when I lost my old desktop, which was nearly brand-new at the time. It had been in storage for over a year, and I got it out and brought it here.
Then there was, I thought, another fuse blown or something. I went out into the hall, and all the lights were off. I thought, Oh no, not again. But it gets worse.
It turned out, it was not only on this floor, or this wing of the building, but the whole neighborhood, something like a square mile. I forget now what happened, exactly, but the power went out everywhere for about 8 hours, just in this part of the city. This was back about 2014-2015 or so, maybe?
That killed my original desktop. I forget now what brand, but I bought it new with no OS, so that I could install Linux on a clean machine. And it ran well for the year or so that I actually got to use it.
After that died, I built my own machine, got an old desktop chassis, the old heavy metal kind that you can sit on. A smaller person could probably stand on it. Then I got a motherboard, and other parts that I needed, and built my own. I still have this machine, and intend to keep using it (though it needs some hardware upgrades by now); but it is waiting for me in storage.
Anyway, that neighbor died about six months ago. I won't say that I miss him.
Was there a big flash of light or an electrical storm when he passed away?
Well, he died of some kind of cancer in the head, face, mouth, etc. Odd that he didn't suspect anything until a few months before he actually died. It was only then that he was diagnosed, and it was far too late.
So I won't speak ill of him, aside from his knack for destroying other people's electronics. Oh, and also his love of opera music (see below).
:-) :
(If he is the habit of doing this, you really want to get yourself a surge protector, if you haven't already done so.)
Yeah, I have been looking for a power supply backup; I used to be able to find them in most computer supply shops, but nowadays they seem to have gone out of fashion.
I suspect that with most people having laptops, as opposed to desktops, there is far less need for UPS power supplies. Of course, the people who want desktops might still want a UPS, but it is probably a supply and demand issue, like almost everything else.
I have my trusty Belkin surge protector which otherwise has served me reliably for years. But the problem seems to have been caused by the fact that I was transferring files at the time the power went out.
That is curious. Did you have anyone who is really skilled with those things look at the SSDs?
No, and I do still have both SSDs, but I just don't have time or money to deal with them now.
In the meanwhile, I have whittled down my working external drives to a few flash drives and one external hard drive; then everything is regularly backed up to other hard drives, using that 13-port hub. Otherwise, I have three 3.0 USB ports on my laptop,
Are you sure? The specs I saw said two were 3.x and the other was a 2.0.
Well, it may be that mine is some slightly different model. When I got it, it said three 3.0 USB ports, an HDMI port, and a slot for SD card. You might be right, but I don't know how to check that.
All seem to work about the same, and I could use them interchangeably without any noticeable difference in performance. I only tend to choose to use them in the same way due to logistics; which is to say, space available on my desk, and what I can fit in, and where and how.
For example, I plug my operating system flash drive into the middle port, so that it stands less chance of getting jiggled. When that happens, then my system really does freeze up, but it's because the hardware got disturbed. But that has only happened twice in a couple years, then I got wise. Now the middle port is "protected" (so to speak) by the USB cords that are plugged into the ports on either side of it.
Are you familiar with the hdparm command? For giggles you might do some performance testing. Running sudo hdparm -t /dev/<whatever> will run for a few seconds and give you an indication of what speed you can read from the device at. For example, on my laptop I do sudo hdparm -t /dev/nvme0n1 and it responds with /dev/nvme0n1: Timing buffered disk reads: 6330 MB in 3.00 seconds = 2109.97 MB/sec
The original disk in my wife's venerable 2009 laptop had this results sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 234 MB in 3.00 seconds = 77.96 MB/sec with its original disk, and after replacing with an SSD at some point, it went to /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 818 MB in 3.01 seconds = 272.01 MB/sec
The SATA bus in that computer maxed out at 280 MB/sec (or something around there) and so we didn't get the full benefit of the SSD's speed, but it gave the laptop a new lease on life. The increase in speed of the laptop was very dramatic.
########## Here are my results.
running sudo hdparm -t
SanDisk flash drive 256 gb USB 3.0 root directory /dev/sda1: Timing buffered disk reads: 286 MB in 3.00 seconds = 95.25 MB/sec
swap /dev/sda2: Timing buffered disk reads: 412 MB in 3.00 seconds = 137.22 MB/sec
home directory /dev/sda3: Timing buffered disk reads: 344 MB in 3.01 seconds = 114.35 MB/sec
########## external drives
Unknown brand, found in garbage, has a big letter G on it. It may be some kind of Googlish thing, or it may indicate a conspiracy of Free-Masons. It connects with a USB-C to my 3.0 port. 1 tb hard drive (the films, tv, music, etc.) /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 122 MB in 3.05 seconds = 40.05 MB/sec
Another SanDisk flash drive 256 gb USB 3.0 /dev/sdc1: Timing buffered disk reads: 92 MB in 3.04 seconds = 30.30 MB/sec
##########
The guy wasn't working on some military-grade electromagnetic pulse weapon by any chance?
He was just a few years older than myself, but not at all technically-inclined, and was suspicious of my running Linux and talking about free software. He did not believe that there was such a thing as free software. He had a lot of appliances that required high voltage.
It is strange that he was not more adept at the new technology, as he was some kind of engineer and/or architect before he retired. He used to hang his degrees on the wall, from Harvard and elsewhere, sit alone and drink martinis and listen to opera music.
If I were to speak ill of him, I think it is the opera music that I really hated. Otherwise, he was just a bumbler, who didn't seem to understand that other people might be affected by what he did. But some of the power issues were not his fault, as my new neighbors also blow the fuse a lot.
And yes, the power in this building is very dodgy. It amazes me that the building inspectors have not shut this place down. Back in September just last year, I went through a period where I got flooded three times within a week. Fortunately, I had already moved out practically everything, and what was left just happened to be (by luck, not planning) above the water. So there was nothing important that got damaged, just stuff that I would probably have discarded, anyway. I had about six inches of water in my place each time. The sewer had backed up, and overflowed into people's apartments.
Then there was the day that the floor beneath my bathroom came crashing down, and I had a big gaping hole, looking into the lobby downstairs. I lived for four months without a toilet here, from mid-September until mid-January, and used to have rats, the size of dachshunds, coming in to visit me. I covered up the hole to keep out the rats, but I still lived for four months like that. Other times, I had to deal with repairs people going in and out of my place for days on end. About all I could do here was sleep and eat.
Before you ask, many people here have tried to sue for these matters, and we keep getting told that this company is too big to sue, and also that "they have no money"; which seems to me is beside the point, as well as a contradiction.
Anyway, these experiences will give me more to write about. (This is not the long-term project to which I referred elsewhere. That is more of a scholarly historical work, for lack of a better description.) Also, my tales of misadventures in California's dark underbelly ought to make for some pretty good reading, and I am more likely to make money from that than from my other work.
Also I am thinking of getting a Jackery power station. <...> I don't know about brands, but so far the Jackery sounds like the top of the line.
I have an Ecoflow. If you talk to any of the Ecoflow fan-bois, they will tell you that Ecoflows are the cat's meow. I don't have any real opinion myself (when I went to buy an Ecoflow, the reviews were as positive as any of the other brands, and I could buy one locally, so...). My experience with my Ecoflow (Delta 2 model + extra battery) is that it will give you something like 80% of the rated power. So I have (nominally) 2 kWh, which should run one 250-watt device for 8 hours. But I suspect I probably end up with about 6.5 hours (or so) of power. YMMV.
I will check out Ecoflow. Always good to shop around and do some research, before I go and blow my money on such a big purchase.
I had also heard of Rockpals, but was more impressed by the Jackery models. Ecoflow looks interesting, and the prices are too bad for the size I want.
Besides using it for my own household needs, I want something that is both portable, and big enough, to power several instruments and other equipment for a band. I have some people that I play with, and we are thinking of taking it on the road in a very modest way, just to have some fun. But sometimes available power is a problem, so I had already thought of a power station as a solution, because I saw some other musicians doing it. And they were using a small-medium Jackery unit.
Bill
On Thu, Mar 26, 2026 at 16:41 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
On Thursday 26 March 2026 14:59:35 Jim via tde-users wrote:
<snipping away ...>
<more snipping>
There was another incident that is almost beyond belief, and has nothing to do with any of my neighbors. That was when I lost my old desktop, which was nearly brand-new at the time. It had been in storage for over a year, and I got it out and brought it here.
Then there was, I thought, another fuse blown or something. I went out into the hall, and all the lights were off. I thought, Oh no, not again. But it gets worse.
It turned out, it was not only on this floor, or this wing of the building, but the whole neighborhood, something like a square mile. I forget now what happened, exactly, but the power went out everywhere for about 8 hours, just in this part of the city. This was back about 2014-2015 or so, maybe?
That killed my original desktop.
Your luck with things dying from electrical glitches is appalling. I've never heard of anyone having problems like this. By any chance, were your parents cursed by an angry witch before you were born?
I have my trusty Belkin surge protector which otherwise has served me reliably for years. But the problem seems to have been caused by the fact that I was transferring files at the time the power went out.
That is curious. Did you have anyone who is really skilled with those things look at the SSDs?
No, and I do still have both SSDs, but I just don't have time or money to deal with them now.
Well, maybe you know someone who will look at them for free. And given the price of them these days, maybe you can find someone who will look for a reasonable amount. Or, if there is nothing confidential on them, maybe there's an 8 year old whiz kid in your building.
Otherwise, I have three 3.0 USB ports on my laptop,
Are you sure? The specs I saw said two were 3.x and the other was a 2.0.
Well, it may be that mine is some slightly different model.
Maybe it is. And maybe the on-line specs I read are wrong.
When I got it, it said three 3.0 USB ports, an HDMI port, and a slot for SD card. You might be right, but I don't know how to check that.
Here is one way, that may require a little plugging and unplugging of flash drives. On my system, with nothing plugged in to any of the *external* USB ports, lsusb -v | grep -E "^Bus|bcdUSB" outputs Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub bcdUSB 3.10 Bus 003 Device 002: ID 8087:0029 Intel Corp. AX200 Bluetooth bcdUSB 2.01 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub bcdUSB 2.00 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub bcdUSB 3.10 Bus 001 Device 005: ID 04f2:b6b6 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd HP Wide Vision HD Camera bcdUSB 2.01 Bus 001 Device 002: ID 04f3:0c4c Elan Microelectronics Corp. ELAN:ARM-M4 bcdUSB 2.00 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub bcdUSB 2.00
(Apparently on my laptop the bluetooth and touchscreen interfaces and webcam are all connected via USB, so that complicates the output.)
Now when I plug in a USB 3.0 flash drive (using a USB 3.0 is needed to tell whether the port is 2.0 or 3.0) I get
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 0781:5581 SanDisk Corp. Ultra bcdUSB 3.20 Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub bcdUSB 3.10 Bus 003 Device 002: ID 8087:0029 Intel Corp. AX200 Bluetooth bcdUSB 2.01 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub bcdUSB 2.00 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub bcdUSB 3.10 Bus 001 Device 005: ID 04f2:b6b6 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd HP Wide Vision HD Camera bcdUSB 2.01 Bus 001 Device 002: ID 04f3:0c4c Elan Microelectronics Corp. ELAN:ARM-M4 bcdUSB 2.00 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub bcdUSB 2.00
At the very top you see "SanDisk Corp. Ultra", which is the type of flash drive I used. And you see the line below it says 3.20, meaning this is a USB 3 port.
If I plug it in the other USB-A port on my laptop, I now see these two lines which weren't in the first output:
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0781:5581 SanDisk Corp. Ultra bcdUSB 3.20
So it would appear on my laptop both my USB-A ports are USB 3. Who knew?
If I plug in a flash drive that only does USB 2 speeds, the above outputs are similar but say 2.00. For example
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 154b:00d4 PNY USB 2.0 FD bcdUSB 2.00
I guess I could use hdparm to test how fast it can actually read from these two flash drives. I'd expect a much higher read rate with the USB3 flash drive.
All seem to work about the same, and I could use them interchangeably without any noticeable difference in performance.
If your hub only does USB 2.0 speeds, or you use a USB2 flash drive, you wouldn't notice a difference anyway. But you should notice a difference with an external SSD or a USB3 flash drive. If you have a "hard drive" then depending on things, it might not be fast enough for you to see a difference.
I only tend to choose to use them in the same way due to logistics; which is to say, space available on my desk, and what I can fit in, and where and how.
Available space is an issue.
For example, I plug my operating system flash drive into the middle port, so that it stands less chance of getting jiggled. When that happens, then my system really does freeze up, but it's because the hardware got disturbed. But that has only happened twice in a couple years, then I got wise. Now the middle port is "protected" (so to speak) by the USB cords that are plugged into the ports on either side of it.
Are you familiar with the hdparm command? For giggles you might do some performance testing. Running sudo hdparm -t /dev/<whatever> will run for a few seconds and give you an indication of what speed you can read from the device at. For example, on my laptop I do sudo hdparm -t /dev/nvme0n1 and it responds with /dev/nvme0n1: Timing buffered disk reads: 6330 MB in 3.00 seconds = 2109.97 MB/sec
The original disk in my wife's venerable 2009 laptop had this results sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 234 MB in 3.00 seconds = 77.96 MB/sec with its original disk, and after replacing with an SSD at some point, it went to /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 818 MB in 3.01 seconds = 272.01 MB/sec
The SATA bus in that computer maxed out at 280 MB/sec (or something around there) and so we didn't get the full benefit of the SSD's speed, but it gave the laptop a new lease on life. The increase in speed of the laptop was very dramatic.
########## Here are my results.
running sudo hdparm -t
SanDisk flash drive 256 gb USB 3.0 root directory /dev/sda1: Timing buffered disk reads: 286 MB in 3.00 seconds = 95.25 MB/sec
swap /dev/sda2: Timing buffered disk reads: 412 MB in 3.00 seconds = 137.22 MB/sec
home directory /dev/sda3: Timing buffered disk reads: 344 MB in 3.01 seconds = 114.35 MB/sec
These numbers always move around a bit, but I am surprised by the variance you saw there. Unless your laptop got busy with something when you were doing sda1.
My USB3 flash drive got this in 4 more or less consecutive runs. Timing buffered disk reads: 444 MB in 3.00 seconds = 147.94 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 442 MB in 3.01 seconds = 146.97 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 442 MB in 3.01 seconds = 146.95 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 442 MB in 3.01 seconds = 146.94 MB/sec
In any case, that Sandisk flash drive seems to be in a USB 3 port. And lsusb -v | grep SanDisk outputs Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0781:5581 SanDisk Corp. Ultra idVendor 0x0781 SanDisk Corp. iProduct 2 SanDisk 3.2Gen1 and you can see the claim "3.2Gen1". I'm guessing yours would say something similar, if not identical.
########## external drives
Unknown brand, found in garbage, has a big letter G on it. It may be some kind of Googlish thing, or it may indicate a conspiracy of Free-Masons. It connects with a USB-C to my 3.0 port. 1 tb hard drive (the films, tv, music, etc.) /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 122 MB in 3.05 seconds = 40.05 MB/sec
That's slow, but maybe that is why it was in the garbage. Still, one shouldn't turn one's nose up at a free 1 TB disk.
Another SanDisk flash drive 256 gb USB 3.0 /dev/sdc1: Timing buffered disk reads: 92 MB in 3.04 seconds = 30.30 MB/sec
That is only 1/2 USB 2 (theoretical) speed. So either (a) something weird is going on, (b) someone sold you a counterfeit flash drive, and it is really only USB2, or (c) the USB port is only running at 2.0 speeds.
If you are still curious and don't mind wading through some more output, there is the command "lsusb -t" output for my system:
/: Bus 04.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/2p, 10000M /: Bus 03.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/4p, 480M |__ Port 1: Dev 2, If 0, Class=Wireless, Driver=btusb, 12M |__ Port 1: Dev 2, If 1, Class=Wireless, Driver=btusb, 12M /: Bus 02.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/2p, 10000M |__ Port 2: Dev 3, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=usb-storage, 5000M /: Bus 01.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/4p, 480M |__ Port 3: Dev 2, If 0, Class=Vendor Specific Class, Driver=, 12M |__ Port 4: Dev 5, If 1, Class=Video, Driver=uvcvideo, 480M |__ Port 4: Dev 5, If 0, Class=Video, Driver=uvcvideo, 480M
You can see I have some USB 3 (10000M), USB 2 (480M), and some sticky old USB 1 (12M). I assume the USB 1 is for the touchpad and keyboard. Maybe the touchscreen, I dunno.
The guy wasn't working on some military-grade electromagnetic pulse weapon by any chance?
He was just a few years older than myself, but not at all technically-inclined, and was suspicious of my running Linux and talking about free software.
Did he call you a commie pinko? ;-)
Maybe not being technically-inclined was just a cover story.
He did not believe that there was such a thing as free software. He had a lot of appliances that required high voltage.
See, that is intriguing. Maybe a particle accelerator? Ultra centrifuge for separating U235 from U238?
It is strange that he was not more adept at the new technology, as he was some kind of engineer and/or architect before he retired. He used to hang his degrees on the wall, from Harvard and elsewhere, sit alone and drink martinis and listen to opera music.
Sounds like a possibly interesting character. Maybe interesting in a way you didn't want to know.
If I were to speak ill of him, I think it is the opera music that I really hated.
All of it? I'm not an opera fan, but I have heard the odd piece that I thought was good. How can anyone not like "Largo al factotum" from The Marriage of Figaro? What would Bugs Bunny think?
And yes, the power in this building is very dodgy. It amazes me that the building inspectors have not shut this place down. Back in September just last year, I went through a period where I got flooded three times within a week. Fortunately, I had already moved out practically everything, and what was left just happened to be (by luck, not planning) above the water. So there was nothing important that got damaged, just stuff that I would probably have discarded, anyway. I had about six inches of water in my place each time. The sewer had backed up, and overflowed into people's apartments.
Yuk. I'm surprised you aren't moving faster, given (IIRC) you said you have another place.
Then there was the day that the floor beneath my bathroom came crashing down, and I had a big gaping hole, looking into the lobby downstairs. I lived for four months without a toilet here, from mid-September until mid-January, and used to have rats, the size of dachshunds, coming in to visit me. I covered up the hole to keep out the rats, but I still lived for four months like that. Other times, I had to deal with repairs people going in and out of my place for days on end. About all I could do here was sleep and eat.
I repeat my statement above!
Before you ask, many people here have tried to sue for these matters, and we keep getting told that this company is too big to sue, and also that "they have no money"; which seems to me is beside the point, as well as a contradiction.
David doesn't always beat Goliath.
Anyway, these experiences will give me more to write about. (This is not the long-term project to which I referred elsewhere. That is more of a scholarly historical work, for lack of a better description.) Also, my tales of misadventures in California's dark underbelly ought to make for some pretty good reading, and I am more likely to make money from that than from my other work.
Onward!
Also I am thinking of getting a Jackery power station. <...> I don't know about brands, but so far the Jackery sounds like the top of the line.
I have an Ecoflow. If you talk to any of the Ecoflow fan-bois, they will tell you that Ecoflows are the cat's meow. I don't have any real opinion myself (when I went to buy an Ecoflow, the reviews were as positive as any of the other brands, and I could buy one locally, so...). My experience with my Ecoflow (Delta 2 model + extra battery) is that it will give you something like 80% of the rated power. So I have (nominally) 2 kWh, which should run one 250-watt device for 8 hours. But I suspect I probably end up with about 6.5 hours (or so) of power. YMMV.
I will check out Ecoflow. Always good to shop around and do some research, before I go and blow my money on such a big purchase.
There is quite a price range of those things. I like the idea of the one which can power a house for a week or two, but the price tag on that model is a bit eye watering. :-)
I had also heard of Rockpals, but was more impressed by the Jackery models. Ecoflow looks interesting, and the prices are too bad for the size I want.
Besides using it for my own household needs, I want something that is both portable, and big enough, to power several instruments and other equipment for a band. I have some people that I play with, and we are thinking of taking it on the road in a very modest way, just to have some fun. But sometimes available power is a problem, so I had already thought of a power station as a solution, because I saw some other musicians doing it. And they were using a small-medium Jackery unit.
Unless you are trying to get your sound out to hundreds or thousands of people, I would imagine a relative affordable unit would keep you jamming for a reasonable time.
Jim
said Jim via tde-users:
| I always assumed the decision to pretend every display is 96 DPI was | some incompetent manager who wanted to exert his or her authority.
You assumed incorrectly. When GUIs came out, 96dpi was right for most monitors, which had been produced for use with text-mode consoles. Remember, VGA is 640x480 @ 16 colors. That's why GEM, GeoWorks, Windows, and OS/2 defaulted to it. It became the standard, and we were all amazed when we could get video cards and monitors of higher resolution. And even more amazed that there were places in config.sys or auteoexec.bat where we could change the dots per inch from the 96 standard. And pleased that when we pushed it beyond its limits after a few seconds it would revert to something visible.
| 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.
A brand new Crucial 1tb SSD died here last year due to a very brief power glitch. Didn't blow up the computer but did utterly destroy the SSD. Which Crucial kindly replaced. And I put a USB between the wall plug and the computer. SSDs are more delicate than you might suppose. The glitch did no harm to the machine.
| 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?).
It depends on numerous factors. Some, as you say, might be reduced in performance by one tenth.
| TeX (and LaTeX and ConTeXt) are not wysiwyg systems...
LyX: https://www.lyx.org/
Meant UPS, not USB. Sorry.
dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/
-------- Original Message -------- On Thursday, 03/26/26 at 14:44 dep via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org wrote: said Jim via tde-users:
| I always assumed the decision to pretend every display is 96 DPI was | some incompetent manager who wanted to exert his or her authority.
You assumed incorrectly. When GUIs came out, 96dpi was right for most monitors, which had been produced for use with text-mode consoles. Remember, VGA is 640x480 @ 16 colors. That's why GEM, GeoWorks, Windows, and OS/2 defaulted to it. It became the standard, and we were all amazed when we could get video cards and monitors of higher resolution. And even more amazed that there were places in config.sys or auteoexec.bat where we could change the dots per inch from the 96 standard. And pleased that when we pushed it beyond its limits after a few seconds it would revert to something visible.
| 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.
A brand new Crucial 1tb SSD died here last year due to a very brief power glitch. Didn't blow up the computer but did utterly destroy the SSD. Which Crucial kindly replaced. And I put a USB between the wall plug and the computer. SSDs are more delicate than you might suppose. The glitch did no harm to the machine.
| 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?).
It depends on numerous factors. Some, as you say, might be reduced in performance by one tenth.
| TeX (and LaTeX and ConTeXt) are not wysiwyg systems...
LyX: https://www.lyx.org/
-- dep
Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/
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On Thursday 26 March 2026 12:03:12 dep via tde-users wrote:
| TeX (and LaTeX and ConTeXt) are not wysiwyg systems...
This might be too much for me to get into right away, but maybe gradually, over time, I will move to something like this, at least for actual typesetting of my sample pages.
In the long run, though, I think this is a job for somebody with more experience setting type using this kind of software.
LyX: https://www.lyx.org/
This, however, looks interesting. I started it up and looked around, and the gui is helpful to make such a transition. I haven't quite got it set to where I can open my documents and read or work on them, and I need to adjust colors and such.
Nice to see that it accepts my TDE color scheme, and font sizes in the menus that I see. That was part of the problem with LibreOffice, that I just couldn't see the menus and headings sometimes.
Bill
On Thu, Mar 26, 2026 at 18:43 (+0000), dep via tde-users wrote:
said Jim via tde-users:
I always assumed the decision to pretend every display is 96 DPI was some incompetent manager who wanted to exert his or her authority.
You assumed incorrectly. When GUIs came out, 96dpi was right for most monitors, which had been produced for use with text-mode consoles. Remember, VGA is 640x480 @ 16 colors. That's why GEM, GeoWorks, Windows, and OS/2 defaulted to it. It became the standard, and we were all amazed when we could get video cards and monitors of higher resolution. And even more amazed that there were places in config.sys or auteoexec.bat where we could change the dots per inch from the 96 standard. And pleased that when we pushed it beyond its limits after a few seconds it would revert to something visible.
I was talking about when so-called "HiDPI" displays started becoming common, instead of doing The Right Thing and adapting software to recognize that different pixel densities existed, someone, somewhere decided to pretend that screens were still 96 DPI, and then to deal with that lie by inventing logical pixels and other such nonsense. This (I suppose) is a quick and dirty fix for people who specified their font sizes and other graphical features in pixels, instead of points (or some other measure independent of physical pixels). But that isn't the right solution.
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.
A brand new Crucial 1tb SSD died here last year due to a very brief power glitch. Didn't blow up the computer but did utterly destroy the SSD. Which Crucial kindly replaced. And I put a USB between the wall plug and the computer. SSDs are more delicate than you might suppose. The glitch did no harm to the machine.
Maybe they are more delicate than I imagine. But I have 4 of them running on RPis and those machines have had power glitches and power failures many times (the local power company isn't as big on preventative maintenance as they could be), and so far (crosses finger) I have never had a problem with any of them. Nor with SATA SSDs or NVM storage inside another 4 or 5 laptops. But perhaps some brands or models are more subject to power glitches than others.
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?).
It depends on numerous factors. Some, as you say, might be reduced in performance by one tenth.
TeX (and LaTeX and ConTeXt) are not wysiwyg systems...
LyX: https://www.lyx.org/
I didn't suggest that, because of one and only one observation. Specifically, I knew one person that used it, and it seemed to me (and maybe this was the person's fault in that they used it in an inefficient way) that Lyx' attempt to shield the person from actually having to know some LaTeX reduced the person's overall productivity considerably.
Jim
"Jvt" == Jim via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org writes:
On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 11:49 (-0700), William Morder via tde-users wrote:
GDK_DPI_SCALE=2 soffice
On my system that makes the fonts ludicrously big. But you might be able to fine-tune the number (you can use decimal fractions like 1.2 or 1.7) and get something that works for you.
Aha, thanks very much!
Playing around with this helps a lot, concerning the toolbar fonts, however the formula entry in scalc still is tiny .....
"WMvt" == William Morder via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org writes:
On Tuesday 24 March 2026 05:10:01 Philippe Mavridis via tde-users wrote:
Hello,
AFAIK LibreOffice does not respect TDE font settings. You have to check which toolkit is used (in Help > About) -it may be Qt or GTK (or rarely generic)- and configure the relevant font options with the relevant tools (e.g. lxappearance for GTK and Qt[5|6]ct for Qt.
Thanks, I am using the latest LO which in turn uses GTK, so I give lxappearance a try
On Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:10:01 +0200 Philippe Mavridis via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org wrote:
AFAIK LibreOffice does not respect TDE font settings. You have to check which toolkit is used (in Help > About) -it may be Qt or GTK (or rarely generic)- and configure the relevant font options with the relevant tools (e.g. lxappearance for GTK and Qt[5|6]ct for Qt.
In addition to this, LibreOffice has a "feature" to ignore system theming. Set Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Appearance > Options > Appearance (yes, really) to "System" or it will never, ever behave itself.
Preferences in writing software are pretty idiosyncratic. I have a very old version of Windows set up in a VM so that I can run a very old version of Word for the purpose. Everything else I've tried has added one or more "features" that get in the way of my just turning out minimally-formatted text.
E. Liddell
On Wednesday 25 March 2026 16:19:56 E. Liddell via tde-users wrote:
Preferences in writing software are pretty idiosyncratic. I have a very old version of Windows set up in a VM so that I can run a very old version of Word for the purpose.
Yeah, I can definitely relate to this part. I have considered rebuilding an old machine (I have a computer junkyard in storage), installing Windows 2000 or whatever was the last fairly usable version, keeping it offline, and just using it for writing. Or, better yet, find a copy of WordPerfect, which was my favorite word processor, and which I haven't seen in at least 25 years.
Bill
said E. Liddell via tde-users:
| Preferences in writing software are pretty idiosyncratic. I have a very | old version of Windows set up in a VM so that I can run a very old | version of Word for the purpose. Everything else I've tried has added | one or more "features" that get in the way of my just turning out | minimally-formatted text.
See you and raise you fifty -- in one of the DOS emulators I have Word for DOS 5.5 running happily. Microsoft is giving it away and it one of three DOS word processors I sometimes use, the other two being Xywrite and the last version of Textra. It works well and is more convenient for writing in that it is not a graphical word processor (which is to word processing what ANSI art was to graphics) but a wordical word processor.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/WIN98/EN-US/Wd55...
You can download it here if you want. Fun to play with, anyway, though I find it useful for work. IMPORTANT: If you use it, save your work in .rtf, because nothing reads Word for DOS files anymore, but .rtf still works anywhere.
On Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:11:35 +0000 dep via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org wrote:
said E. Liddell via tde-users:
| Preferences in writing software are pretty idiosyncratic. I have a very | old version of Windows set up in a VM so that I can run a very old | version of Word for the purpose. Everything else I've tried has added | one or more "features" that get in the way of my just turning out | minimally-formatted text.
See you and raise you fifty -- in one of the DOS emulators I have Word for DOS 5.5 running happily. Microsoft is giving it away and it one of three DOS word processors I sometimes use,
You're only raising me about 20—I'm running Word 6.0, the last 16-bit Windows version. I have an entire stack of install floppies (and it is a big stack) for that version of Office that I can wave at anyone questioning my licensing rights, although whether any of them still contain readable data is anyone's guess.
E. Liddell
said Uwe Brauer via tde-users:
| I am using a X1 Thinkpad with 14 inch screen, LO installed in Ubuntu | 24.04 or LO 25 installed directly from the libreoffice website faces the | same problems. | | The fonts in the menu entries and the formula bar for scalc are very | small! | | I cannot find a way to enhance these fonts.
The first possibility is to make sure you're running the latest LibreOffice. This sometimes fixes the problem.
The second is changing the screen's dpi value in XRandR.
A third, which I haven't tried but if it works in ingenious, is here:
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/currently-supported-releases/kubuntu-22-...
LibreOffice has in general waaaaay too many settings, but it makes up for this by making them almost impossible to find and inscrutable when you finally do find them. (My favorite example is from the RMB menu, "Insert Hyperlink," which used to produce a small box whence you could . . . insert a hyperlink. That being too obvious, they changed "Insert Hyperlink" so that it now does something, but inserting a hyperlink ain't it. I bitched endlessly and finally they made a RMB menu entry that says "Hyperlink," which produces now the box that "Insert Hyperlink" used to do. I do not remember how I got it to appear, but it was neither easy nor intuitive. I think that LibreOffice is now designed for European government offices.)
(Though I should note that none of the other Linux word processors or office suites, some of which, such as Abiword, are otherwise quite nice, has a simple way to insert hyperlinks, either. But I've digressed.)
| When I try out the TDE Settings in Appearance-->Fonts | | There are a couple of options, general, fixed with, Toolbar Menu Window | title Taskbar and Desktop, | | I set all to 12 but the LO menu fonts are still small. | | Any ideas what to do and who is the culprit here. | | Regards | | Uwe Brauer | ____________________________________________________ | tde-users mailing list -- users@trinitydesktop.org | To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@trinitydesktop.org | Web mail archive available at | https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@trinityde |sktop.org
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Andrew Randrianasulu -
dep -
E. Liddell -
Jim -
Philippe Mavridis -
Thierry de Coulon -
Uwe Brauer -
William Morder