So, I was thinking. Everybody is making their DE or WM as user friendly as possible. Unfortunately, there’s not an option for the masochistically inclined. Hence, I was thinking of collecting ideas for the development of such a sadistic DE that it is only usable by the most patient, persevering, and masochistic sentient creature on the planet.
Here are some sample ideas:
Whenever an event happens, be it a keypress or mouse click, a window pops up which asks the user whether they are sure. The only options are “No” and “Maybe”, placed in a random order.
There’s only low contrast and no contrast modes available.
Character sizes can only be 1 and 1.5 points.
Whenever you press a key or click a mouse button, it’s replaced by a random scancode or other mouse click or wheel movement.
Every random period of time a sound of a dentist drill is played.
Every keypress or mouse click produces a random sound downloaded from soundcloud. Yes, there’s a delay. No, they are not cleaned up after usage.
Every single event produces a notification saying “an event happened”. It does not disappear on its own and needs to be closed manually, with password entry required before the notification is closed.
This ought to be adequately frustrating. However, I’m hoping for more ideas or amendments to some of these ideas.
EDIT:
There’s a constant sound of a baby crying at such a low volume that it can just be heard.
The screen has a resolution of 160×100, while there is a virtual screen of 4096×1536. The mouse does not scroll the screen automatically, for that you also need a key-combo .
Random icons and menu entries do not function. A pop up windows will appear with an elaborate explanation when such an menu entry/icon is clicked.
Most of your unusable features are examples of “overkill syndrome”
There are also “underdone” features like menu entries that do not start anything because development is incomplete.
Having a low resolution because of problems with graphics card drivers, makes a DE very difficult to use
Having a virtual screen larger than the physical screen means you can scroll the background. I get dizzy doing that.
What an excellent idea. How about having an mp4 of approximately 90 minutes of this playing in a loop just loud enough to be heard?
What a great idea. Allow me to expand on this. Why limit this to menu entries? Menu entries and icons should randomly not function, because of reasons. Better yet, instead of not functioning, a window could pop up (along with the notification) explaining in excruciating detail why the feature is currently not available or not implemented.
Fantastic! How about making the DE have a resolution of 160×100? That should be enough for anything.
Nausea inducing functions are just perfect. In combination with low or no contrast (which can be headache inducing), do you think the resolution of 160×100, while having a virtual screen size of 2048×1536, is low enough? It does allow for letters to appear on screen. What if we let the mouse pointer not scroll the screen on its own (the user needs to press a key-combo for that (triggering a whole bunch of notifications and a stream of profanity as the keys are repeatedly interpreted as something else)).
Place dialog buttons inconsistently, sometimes at the bottom of the dialog, but sometimes in the most upper position possible, even in the title bar (actually implemented by Gnome)
Make sure system modal dialogs appear always-on-bottom (instead always on top), so the user can’t click anything until finds this window with alt-Tab and brings to front with a special keyboard shortcut, something like Ctrl-Shift-Alt-F1-F12-Space-Tab
A moving background image may help.
Colors that colorblind victims can not distinguish… like red text on green background.
All text should be acronyms
I dont want to use your DE thank you.
Perfect! This’ll help with making the DE inaccessible for low spec systems, especially when it’s rendered as the system runs. Of course the DE waits for rendering the background image.
There would be a no contrast option to maximize the torture. How about yellow text on a white background?
This is going to be problematic. How about have all text in legalese, as we’re already at 1pt size for text?
I actually get a bunch of those due to me doing something “ridiculous” like having mutliple monitors but stacked vertically, not horizontally…
Citrix ALWAYS starts up full screen on both monitors - and when I tell it to “not fullscreen” it disappears the Citrix window to a location off screen - i.e. neither of my screens - some limbo phantom screen… Lucky I remember “Alt + Spacebar” then down arrow 3 times then enter to get “move” window…
And when I drag the cursor back down (from #2 to #1) through the top status bar, on the bottom screen (it’s the main display or #1) it lags the cursor and slows it down or grabs it and refuses to release it…
And if I use Shotwell’s tools, e.g. “crop” - it places the “crop” button UNDER the top status bar on Monitor #1…
And in another thread - the USELESS POP UP to tell me that I’d fired up a terminal window from Nautilus! THANKS! I need to be reminded of what I did 0.5 seconds ago!
But you know what - after all that and other glitches and annoyances - I’d 10,000 x rather use this than MS Windows
I do not think any DE copes with multiple monitors in the manner that I would want… ie a large virtual screen split between 2 monitors and the mouse able to move between them. I think workspaces are more usable than multiple screens. I can only focus on one thing at a time.
First setup - a blank screen. You need to open a terminal config for allowing the Gui tonload with a combination like Super-Alt-Shift-C-F4-Caps-Left Ctrl. And the config is in multiple languages and you have no idea what to put in what language such as: {(Menü{Préferences{Items{να φαίνονται{sí}}}})}
And make the whole thing propertiary. No one can look into the code to learn about it.
