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Re: [orca-list] favorite linux distros.

Well, the delay to find your app with the search indexer is minimal even on older machines with Gnome.  I 
have a workstation in the office which is an old pc given new life.  It's a core 2 duo from 2006 running 
Gnome 3.4 on Debian 7.  That's 8-year-old hardware and it runs just fine.  Don't know how often you find 
occasion to come to the States but, I'm quite sure it's not that hard to get your hands on something much 
more recent than that for like 150 bucks.  

I don't like the desktop window because it's one more thing to alt tab past that is unnecessary when you have 
the same functionality in the top bar with a Gnome Tweak.  

I don't have a lot of hotkeys to launch apps because I never felt the need with the search indexer.  As you 
may recall, I'm pretty comfy in the CLI.  That means I don't mind too much if I have to type out a string or 
two to get my pc to do x y or z.  The two or three letters I have to type in for it to find the app I want is 
truly trivial.  E.G.  wir, gives me writer, calc gives me, well calc. fir gives me firefox ban is for 
Banshee.  ETC. ETC. ETC.  Worst case scenario, I have to hit the arrow key once or twice to get to the app I 
want instead of the similarly-named one it landed on first.  No big deal.  This all means that, generally, 
I'm pretty happy with Gnome Shell.  Minimal menus don't bother me much either because the functionality I 
want is available in other parts of the screen in different methods.  Gedit is the biggest culprit.  If I get 
sick of it, I use Nano or Emacspeak and there's an end to it.  All in all, it's a nice trade off not to have 
to spend hours and hours customizing.  It works well enough out of the box to get me productive.  I just add 
my ppa's, upgrade what I want and I'm ready to go.  

Best regards,
Alex M



-----Original Message-----
From: B. Henry [mailto:burt1iband gmail com] 
Sent: Saturday, December 20, 2014 11:58 PM
To: Alex Midence; orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] favorite linux distros.

You make a compelling case for an interface I do not particularly care for myself. 
A few points, questions and a partial retraction disclaimer of my own words...lol First one can fall in to 
all three categories. Hotkeys, keybindings to launch programs!
This is my life's blood when it comes to efficient GUI use. I used to have a couple of groups of launchers on 
side panels back in gnome2daze, small and organized groups that I could get to very quickly. I had already 
started transitioning to keyboard shortcuts by the time I started using unity, and kept those and added to 
them as I went toawards lighter weight GUI environments. 
Of course one can't hav a keybinding to launch every GUI app that one will ever use, but I suspect most folks 
are more or less like me in that they  use 10% of their programs 90% of the time. That's a bit high perhaps, 
but not much. Do you not bother with setting up custom keybindings? 
The reason I'm not so in love with search-driven GUIs is that I've had limited to very limited hardware  most 
of the time. If I'd had a machine that would pretty much instantly give me my result from typing a few chars 
of an app name I'd certainly have spent more time using those searchboxes, but add in a second of delay and 
the speed advantageof typing a word instead of arrowing is gone. I'd really like to do a study to see just 
where the break points are. 
I know that the classic-menu indicator I tried with latest Ubuntu/Vinux made so damned many submenus with 
most apps showing up on two or three, some even more as I recall, that it was a nightmare to navigate, and 
that was on a heavy interface, so not the goodness of usilng something light like xfce or mate. 
I actually do not dislike gnome itself, but do very much dislike the way so many core gnome aps' menus have 
gone minimalist with missing functions or long lists for all but the ones that the powers that develop decide 
that I'll need that are not efficient to navigate at all. 
Why does a desktop window on screen bother you as a screenreader user? I can see that it can be either a 
comfort, or a distraction to a sighted user. 
For me it's just a relatively uncluttered little space where I keep one folder and a small handful of files 
at the moment, the kind of stuff I want to get at in a second or two when on the phone or  talking to someone 
who I'll only have a minute with that can't be wasted looking in a cluttered directory, and having it always 
there does save me another second or two. 
I use pcmanfm for most filemanagment because of it's impressive speed, even on low-end hardware, but don't 
always have a window open. 
In gnome's defense it's actually quite thrifty in memory usage compared with unity or win7, (or kde from what 
I read),  and doesn't compare that unfavorably to  Mate actually in my experience.  Of course it'll use a 
good bit more processor at times because of the indexing and searching. 
And as for what I use most of the time, even though I don't really have to any more, Fluxbox! Fluxbox mostly 
Rocks. I'm hoping to have something shareable so that others won't have to do much tinkering, and Linux 
novices won't have to wory about permissions and copying scripts and config files in to place. 
There are still a few bits that I do have to work around that really should be fixable, but once setup it's 
already a good enough system for a non power user to be productive on pretty slow-end hardware.
--
Burt
   
        
On Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 10:37:51PM -0600, Alex Midence wrote:

Forgot to mention what I use in my prior response:

I use Ubuntu 14.04 but with the gnome3 and Vinx PPA's enabled for the 
latest gnome and accessibilty experience.  I don't use Unity.  I use 
Gnome Shell
3.12 with Orca 3.14.  It works quite nicely.  Once you get used to it, 
you will find other desktops not as efficient or easy to use at times.  
For instance, I tried the Gnome-classic interface the oter day just to 
see if I still remembered how to use it and I absolutely hated it.  
Using an applications menu to find what you want and then having your 
system cluttered up with a desktop window is so last decade.  In 
shell, you hit the super key, type the name of what you want to launch 
and boom!, it finds it for you and you just hit enter and there you 
go.  Grab the gnome-tweaks package, enable the places menu in the top 
bar, get a prefered sound theme and you're all set.

Alex M

On 12/19/2014 06:48 PM, norman wrote:

Hello.
I'm wondering, What linux distros do people like and why?
I'd like to use the unity version of ubuntu 14.04 or 14.10 but 
apparently nobody knows when or even if we can expect a fix for the 
dash bug. I've used vinux 4.0 and like it for the most part but it is 
a little dated for me. I'd like to use vinux 5 but don't want a pre 
release version of any distro on that box. This brings me to the 
question of what else is out there? preferably something based on the 
ubuntu / debian archetecture. I'd like something that can run the 
latest versions of orca and firefox because i've found that the 
browsing experience is a little lacking on vinux.


Thoughts?






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Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out 
how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp


_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at 
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out 
how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp


--
B.H.
Registerd Linux User 521886
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