noughtnaut

Really, you’ll get proficient in no time. The trick is to go all in with touch typing, no hint and peck!

When I was in my late 20s I spent one low-activity work week transitioning to Dvorak. I have used it for 20+ years now (although it’s a bitch to get working on subpar OS’es).

You can maintain both skills, but I chose to let my qwerty skills fade - now I only use it on mobile (because, I loathe typing on glass and so swipe whenever I can - and swiping is hilariously useless with Dvorak because it’s so well laid out).

I’m not sure if I posted this, but I figured out they have seeing 50k users, and 1:10 gender ratio - although that doesn’t say how many are real people.

Futo is great unless you constantly switch between several languages. 🥲

SwiftKey also does this!

I really, really want to switch to a less, uh, commercial keyboard but none of the ones typically praised here (for good reason) support multilingual swiping.

My father, who worked for a huge computer manufacturer, was once approached by two young dudes asking for a server for their new startup. He listened to their proposition but couldn’t see how they were going to stay in business, so he turned them down and they went elsewhere for their hardware.

This was the two founders of Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, some 20 years ago.

That was one of Law’s finer appearances, oddly.

flicks neck, music starts playing

The trouble is that with this sort of thing you really do need some form of moderation or quality control (of the users, not (only) the platform) because it will be inundated by fake profiles and nasty content.

As much as I’m cheering for Alovoa I don’t see how this is solveable. 🥲

Even if you only tinker with OS installation occasionally, Ventoy is a damn godsend!

Forget about “burning” ISO files to a usb stick, just put a bunch of raw ISO files on the stick and Ventoy will give you a nice boot menu to select from them - and a separate USB partition for user data as well. It’s glorious.

I would recommend you visit distrowatch.org as they have reviews of a great many distros over a long period. That would prepare you to form an opinion on what kind of experience you want to have.

Example - UI, ie. Desktop Environment: chose Gnome if you like Apples way of making things very polished and giving the user few (visible) options to tinker. Choose KDE if you like a “busy” UI with *all* the options exposed and a ton of desktop widgets. Choose MATE or LXDE if you like a snappy and minimalist approach.

Possibly the biggest differentiator between distros is their native package manager. You can take any distro and swap out eg. KDE for Gnome, but the package manager is fundamental and probably(?) impossible to replace fully.

Example: All the Debian based distros use DEB packages. You’ll find a ton, though dine distros lag behind the most recent versions. Others use Redhat’s RPM system, while still others build everything from source (which is slow as fuck but gets you to the cutting edge with all the knobs and dials). There’s also the Snap and Flatpak systems which strive to supply platform agnostic packages, but do so with very different approaches.

Good luck!

A phone with the charging port on the upper side instead of the bottom

Why don’t you simply allow your phone to rotate 180° by sensor? Granted, the camera and speakers might be at odd positions but that’s still closer to your goal right?

Yes, it was even perfectly official. Unfortunately, Android changed from under it and they never bother to update it so these days it will just fail to start.

I used to be an avid TealScript user, which allowed you to tweak recognition of individual characters and even create entirely new gestures. It was magnificent.

Went through a lot of Palm devices, from a Palm III to a V to a Tungsten T3 (the most elegantly designed device ever, perhaps save the Mac SE) and eventually a Treo 680. It was a sad day when the ecosystem shut down and I had to downgrade to an Android phone.

I still miss so many features of those older devices. In fact, I still keep a Palm V in my nightstand because of its comfortably backlog screen and flawless handwriting recognition for those midnight thoughts.

Wow, you are the first person I’ve “met” who even knows about that book. Fistbump. I have a copy (since my dad used to work as an Apple distributor back then, this was way before they had retail stores like they do now).

While I can see that a good bit of that relatively slim book is (now) less than ideal, it still hurts to see how much UI and UX across all platforms is going downhill. I don’t even recognise a “for the sake of X” because there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it (other than “it’s different and therefore more better. Also, I made this”).

Because 12pt text becomes 8pt text and it’s a hassle to scale the entire UI… for the apps that even a allow that. Imagine playing Quake (why the hell not) at a gajillion by bajillion pixels: glorious resolution, but what’s my health again? Better to stay in the original SVGA or whatever it was. Exaggerating, but I’m sure you follow.

I’m glad you ask about things you don’t know. You’re a smart person.

A dead name is a person’s given name, in the context of a person having transitioned to a different gender and also changing their name to match the gender they identify as. It is bad form to then continue to call them by their birth name.

A more ethical approach then: put the person in a room together with an adhd’er and see how quickly they bond. Seriously, it’s like there’s a hidden kinship, shit just works.