- The compose key. It’s a godsend in all kinds of situations. Need an arrow, press + - + > and you get →. Need em-dash? press + - + - + - and you get —. All of these are really nice! Do you know of other nice stuff hiding under the compose key? Ok, ok… This is basically for xorg and wayland, but still. It’s always installed as soon as you have xorg or wayland.
- The filesystem layout. Everything has a clear place where it belongs. The FHS really is a great idea. The XDG specification also has some nice stuff for the home directory; everything nice and organized. Even better; it’s because of public specifications.
- Everything is a file, this makes things REALLY clear and simple. I still remember being in aww because of its simplicity when I first investigated it.
- File ownership and privilege system is really simple.
- Documentation of the various parts of the system is readily available. Wonder what a particular command does? man is your friend.
- CHOICE. I can choose to run whatever I want. Want KDE/Plasma? Fine. GNOME? Fine. Systemd or s6? Fine (well, in most cases you’d need to switch distribution in this case, but in essence there’s nothing stopping you). Want a different filesystem? Fine. Want to strip down your kernel, or do you need the experimental kernel module? Fine.
- I NEVER had any real problems with Linux.
- The package managers are miracles. They are robust and keep track of everything what’s installed on the system. They can even take care of cleaning up dependencies when they’re no longer needed.
- The astonishing amount of distributions. For everyone there’s something. I wouldn’t be amazed if somebody is still maintaining Yggdrasil Linux (the first distribution there ever was), but just isn’t making any noise about it.
- The community. We always end up figuring out a solution to some problem. There are some amazing people out there doing amazing stuff and helping people out with some real problems. Don’t be amazed if the developer of the software you’re having issues with joins the conversation and releases a patch for your problem in 24 hours, and the patch is in the next release.
- The users of the software can contribute themselves. Be it documentation, bug hunting, triage, advocacy, etc. Point is: it’s always the community which is passionate about a piece of software.
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Its free
It runs on older, slower computers with limited resources
Has a wide selection of software tools
Virus free (desktop versions)
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Installs fast and has a small footprint. (Does not take a large part of the disk)
You control updates / upgrades.
Fast to boot / runs fast.
Does not break often and when it does the user usually caused it.
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That’s a great list. For me, I’m a tinkerer and have used alternative operating systems for decades, going back to coding in the late 70s and playing with BSD in the 80s. I wasn’t initially a fan of Linux. It took me a few years to get used to it (this was back when installation was truly a pain [in the 90s]), but over time I fell in love with it and would not want to use anything else.
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Never heard of it.
Yes. A good portion of our affection for Linux relies on the support our decisions get from the rest of the community. We can even root for the Arch users…not that we’d ever use it ourselves.
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It is fun.
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Its fun and i learn new stuff its fast and boots fast and its free and more privacy then other non Linux os
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Which key is the composd key?
Do you have to set some shortcut?
The most important feature.
You have my history … did you use mainframes?
My own likes:
- the utilities
- the shell
- I can write and compile my own software where needed.
- there is always someone to talk to about linux issues.
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This key is alt gr, alt, cmd, depending on your keyboard version and is used to access letters that may have several values. Such as on a french azert keyboard there @ sign, on a std english querty keyboard its on the number 2. On some languages to get an accent èéê etc you may have to use alt e.
Before you reply and say my keyboard does not have that, or I have to press … Every country has a different keyboard layout. On some older systems to get a accent you would have typed alt 123 to get an accent, using the ASCII characterset as 123 was a accent of xxxx as an example
Ok thats for a mac but you get the general idea.
Actually, it’s quite a different key. The compose key is usually set by the user, because it can lead to confusion. By default (at least in Cinnamon) it’s off. I configured it to be on capslock.
By pressing and holding the compose key, and tapping another key combination, you can get various characters and special symbols which do not occur on your keyboard layout.
I happen to have the us-international with dead keys keyboard layout and have access to a third and fourth layer by typing ralt+key or ralt+shift+key. The “dead keys”, such as " and ’ and ` allow me to create characters like á and ë, which is really handy.
The compose key, on the other hand allows me to create symbols like → and ↑ , but also em-dash (—) and en-dash (–), which are different than - .
On the other hand, the degree symbol is a fourth level symbol for me (altgr+shift+') °. altgr is not the compose key for me.
Here you can find a fairly complete list of them (but there are more).
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Altgr is just a way of referring to it … nothing to do with the Alt key …very confusing.
To set it in Xfce you have to edit /etc/default/user
Can it be set in a Qt based DE or in a WM?
It seems like a lot of fiddling around. Why not use Latex if you want special symbols?
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At the university research level, yes. The old IBMs. They were locked away. We had to use portals. It was a learning experience, if not always fun. You really had no choice in those days.
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We used punched cards. I used a ibm 1620 and a 360. Also CD3600.
The only way to use those computers was to write a program, compile, debug, and finally run with real data.
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I wrote Cobol programs for the old IBM 360/30.
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I used punched cards at Iowa State University running Pascal on a PDP-11.
I wrote COBOL programs for the IBM 4341 and 4381. Insurance programs, for just short of 4 years. Then I wrote COBOL programs for the PC for the next 8 or 9 years. We ran Microfocus COBOL.
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Punched cards were fine. It slowed everything down and made you think carefully about every line of code. I think there were less mistakes then, it was a careful regulated world.
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Yes and no, depends on your keyboard type. Older keyboard had this but more modern European no.
Why? What is it used for? What part of the GUI experience does it belong to?
Almost non, if you are in gui and wordprocessing there is usually a insertion spécial caractères option.. unless you programmed it to do something else such as run a macro or a command, but again most gui environments have an icon or menu.