I used to love Xfce, when KDE felt clunky to me and Gnome went in directions I found insane. Since then Gnome remains Gnome, but KDE has matured to a stage where most of the defaults feel like they were designed for me - and any that doesn't can be easily changed. After a period of using more and more K* applications, I realized I might as well switch desktop... Xfce is now a fond memory, and the times have moved on.
I want to like KDE, but it's just too unreliable for me. My last foray was about a year or two ago, I had to stop using it because an update something in KDE's power management broke and my laptop no longer reliably suspended when the battery was low (manually triggered suspends still worked fine.) I've been repeatedly having experiences like this with KDE, each time I fall back on LXQt with kwin and everything looks a bit uglier but just simply works.
I don't know what's going on in KDE, but I assume they've got too many software architects with their heads in the clouds, designing a byzantine mess of abstraction and indirection until even they lose track of where in the code the functionality actually lives. That's all just my assumption though, all I really know is that basic features keep breaking between releases.
I had a similar experience. I only moved from xfce when my nvidia board kept killing my X session in creative ways. I'm pleasantly satisfied with kde, but I only have high praise for xfce usability.
KDE 3.5 has been the best desktop environment for me (mainly due to its extreme customization facilities), far better than the contemporaneous Windows XP or Mac OS X, while the following KDE 4 was an unusable atrocious piece of garbage (despite having waited to make the transition to KDE 4 until it was claimed that all its initial bugs had been solved; when I tried it there were no bug problems, only bad design choices that could not be altered in any way).
For a few years I had kept the last KDE 3.5, but eventually I grew tired of solving compatibility problems with newer programs and I switched to XFCE.
I am still using it because I have never seen any reason to use anything else. There are a few KDE or Gnome applications that I use (for instance Okular or Kate), but I have not encountered yet any compatibility problem with them, so I have no need for one of the more bloated environment systems.
I have been using Linux on a variety of laptops and desktops, all with XFCE and without problems. XFCE does not do much, but I do not want it to do more, it allows my GUIs to be beautiful and to reach maximum speed and it has decent customization facilities, which is very important for me, as I have never encountered any desktop environment where I can be content with its default configuration.
Whenever I happen to temporarily use some Windows version for some work-related activity, I immediately feel constrained in a straitjacket by the rigidity of the desktop environment, which does not allow me to configure it in a way that would please me and would not interfere with my work.
On my main desktop, and also on my mobile workstation laptop, I have used only NVIDIA GPUs for the last 20 years and I have never encountered even the slightest problem with them, at least not with XFCE, so I am always surprised when other users mention such problems, like another poster near this message.
Perhaps my lack of problems with NVIDIA may be explained by the fact that I am using Gentoo, so I always have up-to-date NVIDIA drivers, while the users of other distributions mention having some problems with updating the drivers.
Only in my latest desktop, which was assembled this summer, I have installed an Intel Battlemage GPU, instead of an NVIDIA GPU, because the Intel GPU has increased its FP64 throughput, while the NVIDIA GPUs have decreased their FP64 throughput. Thus I hope that Intel will not abandon the GPU market, even if the intentions of their current CEO are extremely nebulous.
As an example of some very simple customizations, which are trivial on XFCE but surprisingly difficult on other desktop environments, I use a desktop with a completely blank, neutral grey background, without icons or any other visual clutter. I launch applications from a menu accessed with a right mouse click or with CTRL-ESC, and I have an auto-hiding taskbar for minimized applications and for a very small number of utilities, e.g. a clock/calendar and a clipboard manager. A few frequently used applications are bound to hot keys.
The European Union can't fight everyone at once - we need partners, hence trying to mend fences with MERCOSUR, toning down the struggle for human rights in China and tolerating India's authoritarian drift. For now the utmost priorities are defeating Russia and achieving actual strategic autonomy by decoupling from the traitorous USA. So yes, better BYD than Tesla.
Seems like there's an attitude of "If letting BYD sell in Eurozone hurts Tesla, it's good" because people hate Elon so much. However I think the loser from that is going to be all the European legacy automakers who will have to try and chase the high end market to survive.
If Russia wanted to invade Ukraine, it wouldn't matter. Ukraine isn't NATO.
US was involved in Bosnia and Kuwait. If they pleased they would be involved in Ukraine. But US got the fascist mind virus.
It WAS US policy to play the protector role for EU and other West Aligned nations. Such that they traded with US and bought weapons from the US. If US pulls out, they will be replaced by other players in the game.
What other players in the North American Treaty Organization are you thinking of that are waiting on the benches to pick up the slack? We're looking at the same world map, right?
As a European (but from Norway, so not entirely beholden to the unelected EU overlords) how in the _world_ do you get to the mindset that the _USA_ are traitorous!? How does this happen? Is it spending so much time online on social media in bubbles where you get convinced of drivel like this?
The actions and words of the current US Administration are explicitly anti-EU and anti-NATO.
The publicly released sections of the latest US National Security Strategy and sourced comments indicate that the US is looking to interfere in EU solidarity and its actions around Greenland are specifically anti-NATO, which is an alliance based on security of internationally recognized boundaries and resolution of disputes by peaceful means.
Members of NATO can't rely on the US commitment to the alliance, and members of the EU can't rely on the US commitment to their own political arrangements as democracies.
The trade war that the US has with its immediate neighbors also shows that even agreements made by the previous Trump administration (USMCA) are not binding on the US.
Why should anyone trust anything that the US says?
They’re anti-unelected tyrants in Brussels. So am I as a Norwegian, and we’re not full members. They’re anti-censorship, something that’s rampant in the UK and Germany among others. They’re for the _core_ principles of the EU
The trade “war” is pressuring without kinetic force, yes. And our populations need the help, because our governments are spineless.
InfoReseaux remarked that this data is suspicious, to say the least: CC BY-NC 4.0 but contains ODbL licensed data coming from Openstreetmap - but also from Microsoft.
Christian Quest sent the following message to the authors:
"I’m writing to you because I’m surprised by the choice of data license you’ve set on the GlobalBuildingAtlas dataset.
As mentioned and explained in your paper, at least two data sources you’ve been using to create this dataset are under the Open Database License (ODbL): OpenStreetMap and Microsoft building datasets.
I’ve downloaded the extract of data you’re proposing to have a look at the final dataset, and it confirms that building polygons from OSM (and Microsoft) are present in the resulting dataset in a substantial portion.
In such case, your dataset must be published under the ODbL licence (see 4.2), because it is a derivative database (see 1.0 of ODbL license for definition).
A copy of this message has also been sent to the Legal Working Group of the OSM Foundation.
Thanks in advance to fix quickly the license of the dataset you published. This will also allow OpenStreetMap contributors to use it to improve OpenStreetMap, which is not possible with the CC-BY-NC you choose."
Yes, the dataset also has three entries for Virginia Giuffre, "Virginia L. Giuffre", "Virginia Roberts Giuffre", and "Jane Doe Number 3 (Virginia Roberts)"
I read a recent observation that people subject to discovery are often making purposeful typos in key names in order for the communication to remain under the radar.
LLMs are awful for this. I've got a project that's doing structured extraction and half the work is deduplication.
I didn't go down the route of LLMs for the clean up, as you're getting into scale and context issues with larger datasets.
I got into semantic similarity networks for this use case. You can do efficient pairwise matching with Annoy, set a cutoff threshold, and your isolated subgraphs are merger candidates.
I wrapped up my code in a little library if you're into this sort of thing.
And in French the inhabitants of "les Etats-Unis" are "Etats-uniens". I've taken the habit of referring to them as USAians, which often gets negative reactionsand remains rare - but I find it is the most accurate demonym and I'll keep pushing it.
I look forward to the world inventing demonyms for the citizens of the European Union, because at least it will mean that our emerging national body is getting mindshare !
> I look forward to the world inventing demonyms for the citizens of the European Union, because at least it will mean that our emerging national body is getting mindshare !
The European Union is an emerging country - it is my country. For now, many don't yet understand how common necessity binds us, and some remain under the illusion that they can make it alone against China and the USA, but ever closer union is real and whoever has been on Erasmus student exchange knows we are one people. On my French passport, "Union Européenne" is written above "République Française" - that is the hierarchy. A nation is people who will to live together, and the European Union is that... The rest is a couple treaties and a few decades away !
