Since I work with LFS, I need a DE, that would have a self-destruct warning message, if I even approach LFS!!!
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How about having only one language and it’s something no one knows except the system?
Edit: Neville already had this idea..
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The computer language from LFS, is enough to confuse me!!!
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I also use LFS! Why not mess up /etc/osrelease file to show up as “Microsoft Win****”?
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There are still priests (older ones) who speak Latin, but yes, all parish masses are in English in Australia. There are occasional Latin (Tridentine) rite masses, and occasional masses in other languages for migrants.
I can remember Mass books with Latin on one page and English on the facing page.
There was a famous debate in British parliament during WW2 , about why it was necessary to provide Catholic chaplains to the armed services, in addition to Anglican chaplains. One MP apparently thought that all sacraments (including confessions and last anointings) had to be in Latin.
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Big difference between compiling LFS and using LFS!!!
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Pretty sure they were still reading mass in Latin later than 1965 in Australia…
When I was 3 or 4 - I used to play “priests saying mass” with my younger brother and babble out some gobbledy-gook made up words - thinking that’s what the priests were doing!
I guess it could have been '65, when I was 3… But I’m sure I was 4 when I used to play priests :
Me and my younger brother Ben (RIP) playing priests :
By the time I was 11 - my dad was still dragging us to mass every sunday… One morning we missed the English service in our neighbourhood, so my dad dragged us to a Catholic church with a mostly Italian congregation and the mass was in Italian…
An another idea for an unusable DE ? You have to say the lords prayer in latin into the microphone (the DE won’t load without a microphone) a random number of times each time you load the DE… e nomini patri…
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Yes, it took time for Vatican II to reach the Southern Hemisphere.
There were still joint Latin/English Mass books around in 1970.
People cant make such a drastic change overnight
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Perhaps a great starting point would be to model it after Microsoft Windows, because it limits how much users can customize it, and give it a User’s Manual that’s so detailed, disorganized, and written in the most convoluted geek-speak that even the greatest Computer Scientists on the planet can’t comprehend or follow it. Finally, hide the system’s APIs
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Some users seem to think the most unusable DE is the CLI.
To experience CLI fully, try using the console login, without doing startx, for a while.
You get no windows, no text scrollback… just like Unix in the 1980’s.
Use a text based mailer and browser. Edit with vi or emacs. Transmit files with ftp.
People lived with it and thought it was a great advance.
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I believe I’d sooner light what’s left of my hair on fire and put it out with a tack hammer, Neville, if it’s all the same to you.
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Well the alternative was a teletype. At least there you could scroll back thru the paper and trace your mistakes.
A teletype was the DE used to develop Unix. I think Linux was probably developed on a screen, maybe not graphic screen?.. I looked it up… Linus used MS-DOS on a 386 to develop Linux kernel… so a non-graphic screen… he did not light his hair but he may have grayed it.
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I used to do IT support for a museum - there were about 30 Wyse or DEC serial terminals around the various buildings that multiplexed to a Sun box running UNIX (can’t remember if it was Solaris [SysV] or SunOS [BSD]).
The Sun box used to dial up some ISP service 4 times a day and use UUCP to get emails, send emails, and get newgroups…
I think you could scroll up and down in Pine and/or Elm email clients, and I think you could use either of those for Newsgroups too…
I actually hit something similar from time to time, NO SCROLLBACK on the “virtual” console for a Linux system accessed remotely - either VMware Linux TTY console in a browser, or via an iDRAC or iLOM - with the Linux TTY… In Vmware I’ve never found a way to Ctrl+Alt+F1 - but - it is possible on Dell server iDrac - but NEITHER of them offer any sort of scrollback…
Linux servers hosted in AWS EC2 have a virtual serial TTY - but - it’s so flaky - you can’t even run TUI / ncurses applications…
Heck - these days - you could run tmux, and get scrollback (using vi keys to navigate - but it’s not intuitive)…
I think you could do some primitive sort of scrollback with “screen” multiplexer too…
Man - using an ASCII terminal on a UNIX server could be painful… you’d have to carry your notepad with you to remember various obscure things like “set TERM=VT100”… and “stty erase ^H” to get backspace! And heaps more… One time I couldn’t get “vi” to behave (you could scroll down, but not back up again!) on a misbehaving Solaris server in an ASCII terminal, and I ended up renaming the file I wanted to change - and then a series of “echo STRING >> outputfile”… Kinda reminded me of MS-DOS “edlin” - what a HORRIBLE piece of crap that was - 10,000x worse than “vi”…
I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere - in another conversation - the time my VGA monitor died - but I had to get a Uni assignment off my HDD onto a floppy… I had a dot matrix printer - I had to blindly type in the MS-DOS commands to make ALL output echo to LPT1 - it was do-able… and once I’d got that working (blindly) - I could then use MS-DOS to eyeball commands echo’d onto my dot matrix printer to copy the files to a floppy disk…
From a geek perspective - the manuals for MS DOS were pretty exhaustive - and - useful…
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I still have a dos manual.
Where are the manuals for todays DE’s?
I remember dumb terminals on a server. We had heaps of trouble which ended up being electrical… the earth pins at wallsockets around our building varied in voltage… it affected rs232 links because my terminal’s earth was not the same as the server’s earth.
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Instead of having minimum requirements, it will have maximum requirements. If it’s more than the maximum, upon login, it closes itself and runs rm -rf /.
The requirements will be:
128 KB of RAM
1MB of total disk space
Using a floppy disk on a laptop
(On a desktop, a CD)
Never, ever connected the system to the internet
Selected language is NOT defined in /etc/locales
Speaker volume is set to min 500%
Battery level is less than 1%
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Wouldn’t survive at least 1 day… spend most of my time as a distrohopper over manpages and trial and error.
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To confirm the mouse scroll enablement, the user must select a button with the mouse.
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So if the user of this DE were AI driven, and, lets say you started with some normal DE and then gradually added our unusability features, would the AI-user be able to cope?
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Reminds me of this shonky Computer Based Training I’m having to do for my employer - the subject is something I don’t care the least bit about - I have zero interest in, and zero motivation to understand - and I’ve failed the assessment 3 times already - and each time - they make me do it again (the WHOLE course)… I don’t think I’ll ever get through it - but the deadline for completion is EOM October 2025!
And worst? I’m not allowed to bill ANY of my time to any learning activities - I have to be 100% billable to customers! I’ve probably WASTED about 3 hours trying to get through this… And I know I’m “on the spectrum” (i.e. neurodivergent - i.e. a bit of ADHD, and a bit on the autism spectrum) - so easily distracted and extra zero motivation…
Ain’t capitalism great?
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