I once watched a co-worker completely bork a customer system by accidentally middle-clicking while moving his mouse after copying an ls -l of /usr/bin (where pretty much everything was a symlink to the real executables in /bin).

Yeah, he shouldn't have been logged in as root, but the point remains that middle-mouse paste can be extremely dangerous and fat-finger-prone.

That problem has been solved by terminals whose readline awaits actual user input (actual enter from the keyboard) even when you paste a command with single line break or a multiline command. Most linux terminals do that nowadays, and it's also great for giving you a chance to review that oneliner you've copied from the browser, which could contain something different than what was shown.

It’s a right pain reverting that on modern desktops.

Shift+Insert has always been my preferred method of pasting into a terminal after too many mishaps with right-click or middle-click paste.

I love Linux, but the cut and paste situation is really terrible. The middle mouse paste isn't a problem for me--it's that there are two separate "clipboard" buffers, which just causes all sorts of problems.

Having two separate clipboard buffers is a feature I intentionally use.

Yup, both have their uses. If you use a clipboard manager or have the clipboard synchronized between devices/remote desktops/VMs, the primary selection comes in handy for stuff you don't exactly want saved to disk, crossing VM boundaries, or transmitted over the network. I use middle-click pasting primarily for its separate buffer.

You and I both.

Except it's not a bug that found use. It's intentional behavior. From https://specifications.freedesktop.org/clipboard/latest/:

> The rationale for this behavior is mostly that [having a unified clipboard] has a lot of problems, namely:

> - inconsistent with Mac/Windows

> - confusingly, selecting anything overwrites the clipboard

> - not efficient with a tool such as xclipboard [(tool that maintains a history of specifically CLIPBOARD; it would be messy to keep a history of all selections)]

> - you should be able to select text, then paste the clipboard over it, but that doesn’t work if the selection and clipboard are the same

> - the Copy menu item is useless and does nothing, which is confusing

> - if you think of PRIMARY as the current selection, Cut doesn’t make any sense since the selection simultaneously disappears and becomes the current selection

The selection buffer is easier to understand if thought about more simply. Middle click to “put my selection here”.

The actual clipboard is a separate feature in my mind.

You can unify the middle mouse selection and the regular clipboard in KDE if you wish. Personally I find keeping them separate very convenient.

There are a number of DE-independent clipboard managers that can do that as well as other features, like keeping a clipboard history so you can copy in series then paste in series, or having keyboard shortcuts transform the clipboard contents by way of a command, so you can e.g. copy some multi-line text then paste it as a single line joined by spaces.

I use "autocutsel" to synchronize the cut buffer and clipboard in X. Not sure what Wayland might need to do this or if it even has a similar concept.

I love select to copy and middle-click to paste.

https://www.nongnu.org/autocutsel/

In Japan it's pretty much an institution that shops play an instrumental version of Hotaru no Hikari (which is basically Auld Lang Syne with different lyrics) when they're closing.

Most Japanese know it as "the closing song"

What's scary is that Russia plans to do this again.

But not that surprising when you look at Russian history.

Collectivism: Ideas so good, they’re mandatory

Political buzzword du jour: every dictatorship ever.

You know there isn't an ideology called collectivism, right?

Greek yogurt is super easy (and cheap) to make yourself if you have an instant pot:

Put 3L of milk and some starter from your last yogurt batch in the instant pot and press the "yogurt" button. Set an alarm for 10h.

Pour the yogurt into a strainer lined with a cheese cloth, and a capture vessel underneath for the whey, then put it in the fridge overnight.

You now have 1.5L of Greek yogurt that tastes head and shoulders better than anything you'd get at the supermarket. Takes me about a week to eat it all.

If you're worried about a spoiled batch ruining your next starter, you can take the whey from the straining step, pour it into an ice cube tray, and keep it in the freezer. 2 cubes is plenty for 3L of milk and can keep for 6 months.

Even easier is to do it in quart mason jars imo after heating the milk to 190f for 30 mins in a pot and allowing to cool to 110f before seeding with bacteria. No need to strain with cheesecloth after incubation, just pour out off the top if desired. 12hrs incubation seems to work best for me. Going from frozen definitely needs 12hr as the bacteria will be slower starting than unfrozen source. You can get away with merely some scrapings off a yogurt ice cube as sufficient for seeding. Seems it can keep for a lot longer than 6 months in freezer fwiw; my freezeback is probably over two years old and still just as viable.

I really wanted to like XFCE, but the tiny tiny window grab area for resizing is just too damn frustrating.

You can configure a window resize hotkey. I use Win+(drag the window with right mouse) and it resizes it i the way you expect, moving the corner closest to the cursor. Left click would move the window instead of resizing.

This is by far my favorite way to resize and I don't know why it's not an industry standard.

The default config for this is to use Alt+(right-click drag) to resize and Alt+(left-click drag) to move.

I use this so much once I found it, this solved my frustration with the tiny resize border on the window itself.

This setting can be found in Settings > Window Manager Tweaks > Accessibility > Key used to grab and move windows: Alt

I have deleted all window decorations and use F... keys to manipulate resize/move. But you could totally increase the height instead of deleting them

Yup, there are hacky workarounds, but what I'm after is the industry standard of grab areas that extend beyond the visible borders of the windows (which became more popular as high DPI monitors became the norm - and then Apple recently took to excess). And this is something the XFCE team have expressly said that they will NOT do.

And so I moved on to Mate.

I installed Fedora + gnome onnmy new Framework, it definitely works better out of the box, but i dislike the design :/

Should be easy to correct the default behavior for the next release if the issue is reported.

I learned to grab to resize windows in XFCE from upper right corner exactly because of this

It is configurable by theme or by changing something like bottom-active.xpm size.

alt-rightclick anywhere in the vague vicinity of a corner and you've grabbed it.

The fact that Amazon even allows vendors to request de-listing (and the fact that Amazon does it promptly) would suggest that Amazon's lawyers have recommended that they do this (and that it's likely for a good reason).

We, as non-lawyers, may never know. But they obviously know something... Enough to spook them.

I'd love to hear stories about Psygnosis or DMA Design. To this day my favorite game of theirs is Walker, followed closely by Infestation.

Kubuntu. I wanted the compatibility of Ubuntu, but not the horrible UI.

It's not without its problems, though:

Snaps completely bork the system, so you need to remove snap entirely on Kubuntu (good riddance anyway - snaps are a plague).

Idle suspend is flaky. Sometimes it won't come back. Better to just disable it.

Sometimes the machine just freezes up. Either it completely freezes, or the mouse slows down to 1fps with the entire movement queued up (move the mouse and it'll go exactly where you told it to, over 2-3 minutes).

WIFI was a nightmare, but I switched to ethernet so it's not an issue for me anymore (desktop machine).

Bluetooth is iffy. I just switched to wired speakers.

On the plus side, AI works great!

Whether it's a minority opinion or not, I really can't see the difference. Even when he posted highly zoomed images of VS Code ("Visual Studio Code does a wonderful job demonstrating this problem"), the only thing I noticed is that the image on the right looks slightly brighter than the image on the left.

Then as I went back to where he was describing the problem ("fringing"), I kept forgetting when I scrolled back to the images which was which (and which image was supposed to be "worse").

I'm on a 2025 Macbook, so maybe the laptop's monitor masks the issue?

(Author here.)

That's an interesting point you mention about not seeing it, because prior to buying an OLED I'd read a bunch about fringing and in many articles I just... couldn't see it. I couldn't tell what was being illustrated in the images.

It wasn't until I sat in front of one for a few hours, in my room and lighting and with my apps and had funny-feeling eyes and a this-seems-off feeling that I decided to investigate. And yes, those macro photos show fringing, but it /is/ hard to understand how the subpixel pattern translates to on-screen weirdness until you've seen it for yourself.

I'm on a M4 Macbook, and I can see it. I'm inclined to totally accept the blog author's experience as true for them, I'd probably experience the same thing.

The image on the right was also out of focus which hides color fringing on the LCD

Wow! Wasn't expecting this to be on HN.

So here's the backstory:

I'd just graduated from BCIT a year before. A friend invited me to visit Japan, so I got a working holiday visa, hopped on a plane, and there I was in a 1K apartment with 2 other people. I had one whole square meter of floor space for my computer (which I'd packed with me) and a donated monitor.

While looking for tech work, I fiddled around with MAME, doing small fixes to drivers and such, but I'd always had a love for the 68000 chip (from my Amiga days), so I looked at what MAME was doing and saw that its 68k emulator was written in assembler.

So I set a goal: Can I outperform the current assembler core with one written in portable C? Spoiler: Yes.

I spent 2 months sitting Buddha-like on the tiny square of floor in between job interviews, writing (and leveraging MAME's debugger). My proudest moment was when I finally saw the title screen for Rastan Saga pop up! (of course it crashed on launch, but still)

I named it Musashi, after Shinmen Musashi-no-Kami Fujiwara no Harunobu (新免武蔵守藤原玄信), commonly known as Miyamoto Musashi, who wrote the Book of Five Rings - a book that had a huge effect on me.

Also the book simply named “Musashi” is amazing and tells the ‘story’ of his life. It has arguably the best ending of any book I’ve ever read where the lead up builds for 1000+ pages ending in a crescendo.

Great story. It is interesting how being stranded in some place with a computer and some skills always results in the most fantastic projects.

> Great story. It is interesting how being stranded in some place with a computer and some skills always results in the most fantastic projects.

TLDR: IME, solitude is required for clear thinking.

-----------------------------------

Long ago, I used to drive 600km (one-way) twice a month . Kept it up for 4 years or so. As I drive with the radio off, I had much time alone with my thoughts.

Now, I wonder if always reading is having a negative effect: we're constantly bombarded with content all the time, and even though I never doomscroll (no tiktok account, no FB account, no instagram, etc), I think sometimes that enforced solitude might do wonders for my problem-solving.

I wonder how people who are on all those social networks ever find time to just ruminate.

Heh, that's a very timely comment. I just drove up and down to Berlin through absolutely crap weather and still figured something out I'd been struggling with for weeks.

Very true. Had a somewhat similar experience while being offline in trains for some hours at a time.