Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • No. My distro still provides the latest release of the original GNOME system monitor.

    As time has gone on, GNOME have enforced more and more of their own look and feel, completely ignoring any styling that might be provided by other window managers. Some of those might even be using older GTK libraries, but that doesn’t matter.

    Basically if you run a modern GNOME app under KDE, MATE, Xfce, etc., it’s going to look like a GNOME app regardless of what the other windows look like. Very Henry Ford.

    The system monitor is no different. The new version works but the earlier version I found and installed also works fine and fits in. I suspect it’s GTK3 (old) versus GTK4 (new), but I can’t confirm. It’ll be something like that.

    The folks responsible for Linux Mint started the XApps project of GNOME forks to roll back some of GNOME’s nonsense, but I guess they haven’t got around to forking the system monitor yet.

    … and I’ve looked at both Resources and Mission Centre. Neither are to my taste (and are both Flatpaks).


  • That was the first one I tried, but it’s a fork from too far back.

    The two main issues I had with it were 1) It only reports CPU usage in multiples of X%, where X is the number of cores, which was a long-standing SNAFU in the original GNOME version and 2) the usage graphs on the performance screen are light-mode only, even in dark mode, and there’s no easy option to change it.


  • Well, I was going to say GNOME’s System Monitor which has always been the default GUI task manager on my distro, but it’s been getting steadily more and more GNOME-ified with every revision and frankly, I hate how it looks now.

    Might be time to shop for an alternative.

    Edit +44 mins: So, the immediate alternatives all have other things I don’t like about them, but an older version of GNOME System Monitor will still install and run, so I guess I’ll be using that for now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


  • Sounds like a perfect opportunity to bring the court case forward, and when he inevitably doesn’t turn up (not that he would have if everything ran to the original timetable), make the finding in absentia, presumably “guilty” but at least worse than it would be if he’d bothered to turn up, and then…

    Sanctions? Heck. What else do we have to hold him to account? An ever bigger tariffs war? Forcibly close US embassies and consulates? Seize US assets?

    It’d be a fine line to prevent the Big (cutter of) Cheese from bugging out and declaring war.


  • People with a serious criminal record. Murderers and worse. Those who leave their victims alive but scarred mentally or physically.

    Then those with less serious criminal records. Fraud. White collar crimes. That sort of thing.

    Then other “undesirables” depending on who isn’t liked by whoever’s in charge.

    And then the goalposts for what’s desirable will start to move.

    And the scope won’t just be limited to social media. Websites will be categorised further. Some might remain open access to all people (except the ever increasing list of those to be protected and those who shouldn’t have access) but others? No. Those sites themselves are undesirable.





  • Well, there was a period in the 90s through to the early 2000s where we had a centre-left party (New Labour) running the show and mostly improving things, but then 9/11 and the Iraq war happened and the country went scurrying back to the Conservatives again.

    The conspiracy nut that lives in my brain is convinced Putin’s taking control of Russia in 2000 has everything to do with every single bit of the above after “but then”.

    We currently have New Labour (now just “Labour”) in charge again, but politically they smell an awful lot like the pre-Thatcherite Conservatives.


  • They’ll find a way to launch it. They’ll go back into the old Soviet mindset of throwing blini at a wall until something sticks sending cosmonaut after cosmonaut until they have a success and then pretend the others didn’t exist.

    And they’ll fill the minds of young would-be cosmonauts full of propaganda and tell them that there was definitely no-one before them who died up there, especially not in pain or terror. Those were unmanned test missions. Strap yourself in, you’re going to space!



  • The on-board sound died on my old PC a while back. There was a free slot on the motherboard that looked like it might take an old sound card, so I found one for cheap online.

    Installed it. Fingers crossed. Linux (Mint in this case) didn’t bat an eye. It worked fine.

    My newer PC is budget and has barely any slots on the motherboard (pretty sure there isn’t one that supports the same card), so I’m hoping I won’t need to pull that trick a second time.

    Other potential solutions:

    Sound via USB or Bluetooth.

    HDMI and DisplayPort carry sound as well as video, and there are ways to tap into that.







  • I wouldn’t want to keep the 11 in there. The entire reason for (hypothetically) making this change is to get away from the old version number and any potential confusion it might cause.

    I also prefer smaller version numbers, so “subtract 2000 from year” works better for me (and there’s no better time to take advantage of the fact this produces sensible numbers), but I can see why the full year might be preferable for someone else.


  • Odd question: What would be the fallout from changing the version numbering to be more like the change recently made by LibreOffice? That is, making it be related to the year number rather than the current system.

    The reason I ask is that Linux has been and will be getting refugees from Windows 10 and 11, and the timing of the current version numbers is somewhat unfortunate and potentially confusing in that regard.

    I’m aware I may be imagining a problem that won’t actually exist in any meaningful amount.

    There’s also the potential problem of Microsoft following suit with whatever follows Windows 11 being “Windows 2029” or something, but it wouldn’t be too hard to deliberately throw in another jump if that were to happen at the loss of some synchronicity.

    Wine 49 certainly has a ring to it!