> You learn a lot more by reading code than writing it.

Really? In my experience it's been the opposite. It's like how you can learn more about art by trying to recreate it than just looking.

a lot of people get stuck, or code up a naive brute force algorithm and call it a day, nothing intrinsically forces a coder that refuses to look at the work of others to write better code.

The range of formats it can play with extensions is so good I still use it, even on Linux. Nothing else can deal with all the old tracker formats.

Indeed, I have been hoovering up SACD rips, they sound great, and foobar is the one that can play em

I recommend XFCE. I used both for years and in my experience it's like KDE but stable.

Still no support for high resolution monitors though?

I love the hum of ozone in the morning.

>The historical implication: because there is a lot of it, I put a lot of thought and effort into writing it

Really? That must be some ancient history, because I've seen rambling walls of text on the internet derided for decades. I always appreciated the Feynmanian respect for economy of time over traditional formats, where if authors said their piece but still had space they'd damn well fill it.

(Of course, slide all the way down that slippery slope and you'll just hit Twitter.)

I understand what you mean and it’s not wrong, but still there is a contract that is being fulfilled: human in both ends. Whether it’s rambling or not, someone wrote it, and it represents a person’s idea of whatever is being discussed. That contract is now broken, but in an asymmetrical way, only one side gets to save time. My brain refuses to spend time reading crap that I don’t even know if someone even took time to prompt. Maybe they just wrote “give me something to post, whatever makes me look smart”. It’s just completely broke for me and makes me actually sick in the stomach when I read almost anything (textual uncanny valley?)

Depends on if it's a non-formatted rant or not. Generally, traditionally, long form non-rant responses have been more thoughtful than not. This can no longer be assumed

If you received an email at work that was three paragraphs, you wouldn't assume the author put in more work than a one-sentence reply?

Can you really take over a project anybody can fork? Freedom is just a name change away.

I'm pretty sure most "normies" who are at all aware of what MS Office is, and what, if any, of its alternatives are, still use OpenOffice and think that it is the no-cost office suite. LibreOffice already has problems with brand recognition, last thing we need is another fork.

LibreOffice is a pretty bad name, it is too clearly a spin-off of OpenOffice and never really gained its own identity. Being identifiable as a bad project’s better fork is kind of a weak starting position.

That's pointing the underlying cultural issue. Taking the name for the thing it provided at some point, and consider it as unquestionable proxy to world view expected to be itself eternally static.

Not only our representation of the world is wrong, but world evolves possibly faster than cognitive abilities can keep track of without the minimum effort which is driving out of comfort zone.

That will just create another dead fork that no one works on.

LibreOffice exists because the devs of OpenOffice forked it. If the project leadership now ejects the devs, I think that the new fork will be the living one.

Yep. Each screen is just a list of prebuilt columns reused over and over. Then they used a form of crude RLE on the lists.

There's other desktop environments. XFCE has worked flawlessly for me for years, though its Wayland support is still experimental.

I love XFCE but I've had a hell of a time getting it to work nicely with multiple high DPI monitors. I finally gave up and went to KDE which.. just works.

Unfortunate because the minimalism of XFCE is way more my style.

Yep. Unless you have really good eyes, XFCE is unusable on a 4K screen. On the same screen, KDE at 150-175% is glorious at providing both more real estate than 1920x1080 while being crispy.

Try LXQT :)

As long as it's not a proprietary horror dystopia.

I had to help someone elderly set up Windows 11 recently and it was monstrous. The error messages were useless and when we finally got it going, the UI was horribly sluggish. There was a time Windows was a solid default choice for the average consumer, but Windows 7 was 15 years ago.