- cross-posted to:
- unixporn@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- unixporn@lemmy.ml
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Disabled users tend to customise a lot. Because no matter how well-intentioned the accessibility options may be. Most are actually unusable in real world situations.
Generally because developers are rarely disabled in the way being supported. And seem to assume full or 0 use. Never recognising we depend more on our limited abilities to see, hear or move than most able-bodied do. So options that try to replace 100% slow us down rather than making things easier. So we are forced to spend time trying to adapt colours fonts and sounds in ways they never consider. Just to be able to compete in any form of work.
Don’t get me wrong. Accessibility options are essential and more are needed. But for most disabled they are essential (when there at all) to allow us to access the device/software while we customise the displays and devices to actually be easy to use. Not for actually doing the work.
Desktops can be bad. Limited options for text on menus etc. But far far too much software seems to lock down layouts and forget that some users are unable to use it effectively without the ability to go in and customise everything.
(Today I’m looking at you guys, orca slicer. Cura is better but far from perfect, Blender developers. Please marry me. You guys are fantastic and getting better every release. )
Am disabled, though thankfully i mostly only need magnification and swapping colors around. Still, it’s me fiddling with UI element sizes, fonts, and colors to get a baseline i can live with so I only have to use zoom now and again as opposed to constantly.
Compare and contrast with how Windows has handled things since windows 8 in that theirs is a global percentage based scaling of EVERYTHING.
For that reason alone I’ve been pro-linux for the past decade. That I can game on linux? Means i have no want or reason to go backto windows. Is it perfect? Nope! There are always hiccups in everything. Yet it does most of what i want without complaint.
Grins Been non windows at home since the 90s. Lost my vision and mobility in the early 2000s. So really have not tried to use windows since.
But yeah I have 3 32-inch monitors, tend to have the magnifier on the alt key with the mouse to zoom. But only use it for setting up new software of the odd gnome menu stuff.
But every now and then you get some software that just refuses to follow the gui text hints and fails to give users any options. OS is way better than proprietary. But many developers just do not realise how little accessibility in the OS actually helps with workflow when they do not allow text customisation.
And what the F%$^ is it with pale grey on white text lately why the hell does anyone want that. Low contrast text and backgrounds seems to be a very annoying trend over the last 10 years.
I don’t have vision problems and I hate the low contrast text being shoved into everything. I’ve no idea how frustrating it must be if you have sight issues, but I can imagine.
Yep no one seems to like it. Yet it keeps getting implemented.
My current conspiracy. It my brothers guide dog controlling the world so she has a job.
I think that part of the issue is that every disability is unique to some degree. No two people who are blind have blindness to the same degree. Colorblind people have several variations they could be experiencing. Deafness also follows a similar pattern, whereby some people can’t hear well where others can’t hear at all; or in some cases have a constant sound in their ear that drowns out everything else. There are neurological disorders that range from not being able to read sentences normally because the words start to become jumbled to being unable to focus on large amounts of text. There are physical disabilities of all sorts that affect the arms and hands or even the ability to sit upright to look at the computer screen.
Because of that, there are two options:
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build a desktop environment custom-tailored to each individuals needs.
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build some general purpose accessibility options that can (and must) be adjusted to meet an individuals needs, which may or may not be able to meet them 100%.
Out of the two, the second one is far more feasible, and more possible to improve upon.
Well put. But yep, that pretty much somes it up.
The issue is how much stuff seems to just say. Let’s not bother at all. I will not the worst OS software for this has commercial names attached to it. Even when OS if some big company is responsible for funding. It’s down to the community to fight to get any decent support as a default. Capitalism really dose not want to care about disabled users unless forced. Or medical level profits are attached. But lets ;leave that mess out for now.
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i tend to want to customize a lil bit to my tastes, but not much.
linux ui is already good nowadays.
When I first started out, I used to customize my system constantly. Then I switched to KDE Plasma, and aside from a few minor configs, I’m completely satisfied with Breeze.
I pretty much just want a functioning vanilla Gnome desktop, remap caps lock to control, and I’m happy.
Not trying to yuck your yum, but what benefit for caps lock remap. Do you use caps lock that often?
I think they are saying the other way around, their caps lock activates Ctrl. I have mine set up as a left hand backspace. KDE has a number of built in options for this where you just need to tick a box to activate it. I miss it a lot on my work PC (windows)
Many people do. I’ve remapped caps lock as escape because I am a shitty vim user who trys to solve all problems by smashing that motherfucker into itself. I noticed my left pinky was getting unhappy with me, so I tried using caps lock for esc instead and haven’t gone back.
A key dedicated to SCREAMING just isn’t that useful IMO.
If someone has a script to set up HyprLand or Sway with all the necessary components and dotfiles I’m all ears because I just don’t have the patience to experiment myself so I’m still on GNOME.
Cosmic is really great if you want tiling similar to Hyprland or Sway without so much work. I used i3 then Hyprland for years, but have now been using Cosmic for months. Its the only DE that correctly does a tiling workflow imo, even considering extensions.
The problems with preconfigured configs is that they often aren’t very dynamic, as in they don’t adapt well to other PCs. Many of them will use stuff like CSS for widgets and bars that have stuff like specific pixel sizes, meaning you’ll often gave to make changes.
Hyprland has some premade configurations on their wiki if you’d like to try them. I’ve never tried one, if you do, let me know how it goes!
Another thing to remember is a lot of the stuff you take for granted in a DE don’t exist in a WM. Things like autostarts, envvars, background services, etc don’t work the same. Hyprland devs created UWSM which will help with all of this.
JaKooLit has a hyprland script for most distros. If you want to use sway just install from your package manager not much else you need to do. If you wanna use proprietary nvidia drivers with sway you have to install sway-nvidia as well
Just a warning if you’re gonna use the JaKooLit the uninstall script CAN brick your DE
At this point, most people are happy with Plasma, Cinnamon, or GNOME (whether that’s 2 or 3) and the default customization options.
I use Fluxbox and Conky and I love it, but it’s not for everyone. There’s no way my wife would enjoy the tinkering that I sometimes have to do to get a new Conky config to work properly, so she’s good with Cinnamon.
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I used to spend hours creating custom color schemes for my Plasma setup and installed a bunch of icons themes. Now I switch out my wallpaper every so often and let the highlight color auto-pull from the image.
When I’m bored, I change how my Plasma looks. Happens once in a while. I would not complain if it ever turns into a “choose global theme | apply global theme” workflow tho.
I mean, it is basically there, except you need to download and apply Kvantum themes.
I’m in the same boat. I have to change it every now and then to break the visual fatigue of staring at the same theme for weeks. I miss Compiz with Emerald and whatever we were using 5-10 years ago. Themes are less transformative nowadays. I used to have crazy themed and now it’s hard to find something that isn’t just a recolor of a fairly plain theme.
Having said that, someone shared this great theme roundup here on Lemmy a while back. I used the purple one and now the Solaris color one. https://quickfix.es/2023/10/going-off-theme-the-prologue/
Honestly KDE Plasma is pretty good for ne as it is. Sure a few settings here and there but not like with custom styles and scripts and such, so far
That’s the thing people don’t understand about ricing. It’s not about features, not even about functionality. It’s about aesthetics. Visually, but also how components interact and UX in general. It’s like making art. It’s emotional.
Maybe comparable to fancy mechanical keyboards. Am I more productive with mine? No, I could have grabbed any decent keyboard and it would have been the same. However, I like how mine looks, sounds, feels. It makes me happy. It is art I have created.
And that’s why customize your system. Not because it’s more efficient etc. Because it makes me feel goos like listening to music.
It all depends right? When I first setup Linux I spent hours tweaking the look of it in Plasma. Now that its coming up to 8 years on Linux, I just use GNOME desktop and don’t mother with customizations.
I’ve been using the same Arch/KDE box at work for the past 5 years. All default/stock. I have 1 system related issue every couple of months, usually a known issue i can quickly find the solution to. My “maintenance” routine is to update packages once per week. The less customization you do, the less obscure issues you will come across. Life is good.
I have a custom theme for Cinnamon/GTK… But they recently updated it and the new default theme doesn’t actually look that bad… But using the default theme will make me a sheep. ;_;
I used to rice a lot a swaywm/i3 panels, keybindings and menus but I’m tired now A basic Plasma with some minor tweaks switched to Breeza Dark is enough.
More customization = Higher chance something breaks.
Admittedly, chances are it’s just something minor like your icons looking weird or transparency breaking, and it’s not like it happens very often. However I have had it happen while I’m trying to focus on something and it’s definitely an annoyance I could do without.
I like that I can customize on the off chance that I need to fuck with something. But defaults have been getting better and better so i’ve done it less and less.
