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Well I'm glad it's useful to some, and it's not hard to remove & comment out from autostart. Or just comment out of autostart.. it's not big in terms of hard drive space, just memory and CPU cycles I don't need to use.
Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed...
If there's an obscure or silly way to break it, but you don't know what.. Just ask me
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The pipemenus are often mentioned. (It's easy to remove them of course.) What is it that annoys people?
I agree that the pipemenus have gone overboard. This however is just a personal opinion.
A simple menu:
Graphics
» GIMP
» Mirage
would be 'perfect'
- people who are not computer graphics talented don't need inkscape, blender et al in a pipemenu always there in their face.
- people that are computer graphics competent know where/how to get them
or the pipemenus for:
Network
WHOA!!!! I ripped all of those out - Again people that need something other than Network Manager or WICD etc usually have a pretty good idea where/how to get them. I have no idea what SSH is and therefore don't need to see it in a pipemenu, Again, people that know what it is, will probably know how to get it and use it.
if not: that's where the friendliness of the #! forums came in - not a RTFM manual type forum - people answered questions from other users in a polite respectable manner, mostly. And for the most part, those people helped others in turn.
Anyway, I think all the dev team regard BL as a continuation of where #! might have gone, and as a reasonable substitution for it. Most reviewers seemed to recognize that of course, but this impression of heavy and bloated that some get does bother me a bit.
I added bold italics to the most important part of that statement, and for the most part I could not agree more with it.
How did I word that way back when, it went something like this:
BunsenLabs, it's lifetime mission,
To boldly go where CrunchBang was heading!
Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er
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Negative reviews can serve the purpose of allowing us to review our direction and allow us to improve things that seem obvious to us but that might not be so obvious to a new user. For instance, I have yet to see one reviewer make mention of the bl-alternatives system, which extends debian's alternatives system and allows us to specify defaults for editors, multimedia, etc. The reason it is never covered is because it is "under the hood" type stuff. It is also true that the pipe menus can get in the way at times, and configuring them may not necessarily be obvious to a new user. However, does that mean we should ditch the pipe menus? Or do we need to consider ways to streamline them and get then out of people's way?
I think another thing to understand is that we understand our niche in the market well and we do not try to be everything to everyone. If we wanted to be everything to everyone, then I can think of any number of Ubuntu spins, where default app selection is never even considered. Everything gets tossed in and it's up to the user to sort the mess out.
I don't think it is necessary to cater to the type of individual that expects a Linux Mint or Ubuntu Studio out of Bunsenlabs because that was never our aim or focus. Nor are we required to adhere to the Crunchbang aesthetic out of nostalgia. As was mentioned before, one look through a monthly screenshots thread shows the mind-boggling number of ways that people take the base, Bunsenlabs, and build it into something that suits their needs.
There are arguments that the massive number of distrolets takes away from Linux as a whole but I would argue that the real innovation is happening in these quiet little backwater channels. If there is one thing that Bunsenlabs tries to do, it is to respect your right to choose. Do you think Gnome developers, with their backing from Redhat, really care about user choice? I think not so much. And I am not attempting to disparage Redhat at all. It just seems that a lot of the big name and big money developers have a sense of arrogance that they know better than you what should go on your machine.
We are always going to get negative reviews because we don't really try to appeal to everyone. The Browser | Editor | File Manager | Terminal launchers came about as an understanding that these 4 things are what is required to build any Linux system. There were some of us in the early days of building and testing the successor to #!, that never really saw a mature desktop. So they are kind of up there as a reminder that we expect you to open some files and make some changes. I personally like them up there in most contexts.
And therein lies the kicker....I can understand and accept that my tastes sometimes vary with my fellow nixers on these forums and that is ok. If I want a distribution that adheres 100% to my tastes, then I need to go back to doing Live Builds. I would rather spend the free time that I have writing small, modular programs, that serve various purposes. If they stick, then great but if not, that's ok too because mostly my Bunsenlabs installs are a giant experiment anyway.
I would like to make one final point: I have been coding off and on since the days of the Commodore 64. I have seen pretty much everything there is to see in terms of interface design (up to now. I really want to see some gesture support). And I can honestly say that nothing does a better job of just getting out of your way while you work than Openbox. Bunsenlabs on three monitors is just the bees knees. One monitor is typically tiled out in terminals: one terminal follows journalctl -xf, one tails ~/.xsession-errors. And one terminal usually holds music via mocp. The other monitor is used for the browser, and the final monitor is the work space with file managers, editors and the like. Now that I am in college and doing a variety of tasks from writing papers to programming, I can say that my productivity is about 3x higher on my desktop than on either my Windows installs or my Surface Book running BL in a virtual machine. Openbox just seems purpose built to allow for complex workflows while getting out of the way. Now it could be argued that having to open up menu.xml to make a change every time I install a program is a real drag but geany can remember opened tabs, so usually it is just a click away to edit.
In the final analysis, we should not be offended by those who don't get it. That is ok. I don't get Ubuntu Studio. It is just way too much bloat for my tastes. The best thing about Linux is that there is literally something for everyone out there. And if not, then that just means it has likely not been built yet (I'm looking at you gesture support).
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To boldly go where CrunchBang was heading!
Can't help that it's an age/gender thing 8o
I'd be in favour of moving a ton of the pipe-menu stuff into bl-welcome, especially if it's annoying people, thing is there you only see it the once, not every time you visit the appropriate section of the menu. If you want that stuff without configuring it manually, well typing bl-welcome in a terminal and re answering some questions isn't hard.
Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed...
If there's an obscure or silly way to break it, but you don't know what.. Just ask me
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tknomanzr's post!
↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ →→→ standing ovation!
Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er
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I consider Linux desktop 10x less ergonomic without clipboard manager software.
never thought i'd ever see it printed out like that.
it's true. without my clipit, syncing primary & secondary clipboard with a convenient hotkey, i'd be lost as in windwos.
I agree that the pipemenus have gone overboard.
i think we have a contender here!
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Wow - great comments from everyone!
To expand a tiny bit on the bl-* alternatives: the advantage of having these is if you change, for example, your text editor to medit, then all you have to do is either uninstall geany, or go to menu>system>Edit Debian Alternatives and change bl-text-editor to medit, and now all the menu entries will go on working with medit instead of geany opening those config files, clicking text files in your file manager will open them in medit...
Imagine, without that you'd have to go through your whole desktop replacing every ocurrence of geany with medit! And, what if you then wanted to change back?
If the majority of our users were for a cutting-down on the pipemenus then I think we should consider it. However, in their defence, I might mention that the default OOTB menus are now pretty sparse - all the apps you never heard of and don't want to see are hidden away in an "install" sub-menu, eg "Graphics":
"Network" isn't a pipemenu - it's a regular static openbox menu. It does however contain 4 pipemenus as sub-menus: Browsers, VNC, SSH and Dropbox. I don't use those myself (Dropbox's systray icon is enough), but imagine some people might find them useful. They're not recent additions by the BL team, but have existed since CrunchBang. Any of them could be removed...
Also, the discussion of pipemenus vs bl-welcome has gone both ways. Some people didn't want to go through a long list of options in bl-welcome, and a year or so ago we decided to move some things - that people didn't necessarily want to install as soon as they opened their new distro - out of bl-welcome and into the pipemenus, where they would be easily accessible later.
Last edited by johnraff (2017-10-13 02:48:28)
...elevator in the Brain Hotel, broken down but just as well...
( a boring Japan blog (currently paused), now on Bluesky, there's also some GitStuff )
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If the majority of our users were for a cutting-down on the pipemenus then I think we should consider it. However, in their defence, I might mention that the default OOTB menus are now pretty sparse - all the apps you never heard of and don't want to see are hidden away in an "install" sub-menu, eg "Graphics":
https://i.imgur.com/aE74vEdm.png
If you ever consider doing so, maybe a compromise would be putting all the pipes under System, together with Synaptic Package Manager. That way we would keep clean limited defaults and still have functional installation scripts that are only few clicks away. You could name it Quick Install, or whatever better comes to mind, and those would nest menu items in their respected subcategory.
Señor Chang, why do you teach Spanish?
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Yes, fair enough, but the main point of the current pipemenus is that after you install an app it appears there in its category for use. Putting the "install" options under System would mean having two pipemenus instead of one: one for install, one for launching.
...elevator in the Brain Hotel, broken down but just as well...
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Dropbox. I don't use those myself (Dropbox's systray icon is enough)
I never understood why Dropbox is in the menu. One thing is: It's a proprietary service - not really compatible with the general "linux/foss" philosophy (and there are pretty good open source alternatives for this service too, so why promote it?). The other thing is: I'm not sure that sooo many users need it. If some of them do, it's easy enough to make an entry - which might not even be necessary because of the systray icon.
I'm not saying that it's a bad thing to use it (although: there is no cloud, only other people's computers ) and I do not intend to convince anyone not to use it, I just think that it does not deserve an out-of-the-box menu-entry.
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I dropped dropbox a while back when they close the public access to files if the person had the link I gave them.
Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er
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^martix, I tend to agree with you (although I use Dropbox myself).
Anyway, I've started a discussion in the Dev section: https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=4272
...elevator in the Brain Hotel, broken down but just as well...
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...they close the public access to files if the person had the link I gave them.
I think that still works. Please see my reply here: https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic … 190#p62190
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My two-cents. I'd take out the launchers.
I know they can be easily taken out by the user, but that's not the point. When BunsenLabs fires up the very first time in front of some distro explorer's eye balls, it's the first impression that is important. BunsenLabs fills a very unique niche that way - no start button and a very minimalist appearance. A small number of people will really like that, like me. And others. Those launchers suggest some kind of hybrid that tries to please everyone. Go with the Steve Job's approach - try to take stuff out...
Last edited by MsMattie (2017-10-14 17:37:00)
...
Linux in the backwoods of the Rocky Mountains...
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I don't actually use dropbox. I use ssh and sshfs for practically everything these days and push stuff to my file server.
The reason is:
rsync piggybacks over ssh
git piggybacks over ssh for my local git storage
sshfs ...you guessed it.
I actually have no opinion either way on dropbox.
I think the issue with the pipe menus is going to be more in not understanding how to use pipemenus.rc to add custom entries to the pipe menus. I know at one point, I ran into a stubborn error with Makemkv. The version in the respositories was not available, so I had to build it from source. Pipemenus.rc refused to acknowledge the version built from source, so it kept the install link. Manually editing the entry in would not work as well. Eventually, I had to give up and build a menu entry for From Source, that held the makemkv entry. Helium-dev has since removed the entry from the multimedia install pipemenu.
In a similar vein, the ssh entry under network is cool in that it reads my ~/.ssh/config and puts entries in for each entry in the config. However, the links for Start Terminal Session and Browse with File Manager do not work correctly. Additionally, the Install ssh server and client entry remains. Perhaps some additional script logic that detects if ~/.ssh/config exists and is not blank would remove the install entry from the pipe menu. That then leaves me to wonder why the additional two links don't work, however. I know my NAS's sshd config, expects a password. I can change that but it does not survive across reboots, so perhaps expect with a password entry would solve the issue? <-- I haven't read the source on these so am not sure what they are actually doing.
If we choose to keep the pipemenus, then we should definitely be vigilant that things work. I like the semi-automation, but even going back and reading the source does not always reveal to me how to fix the errors.
In essence, either we keep the semi-automation and beat on things until they break to ensure that things work correctly, or we ditch the semi-automation.
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Never used Dropbox, I wouldn't personally miss the entry, I guess it's about an assessment of if new users would want it or not.
Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed...
If there's an obscure or silly way to break it, but you don't know what.. Just ask me
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90% of dedoimedo's reviews are like that.
the sheer fact that bunsenlabs showed up on their radar should be a good thing.
the rest is just... well, dedoimedo. ripping apart everything for the entertainment of the masses. ha, ha.
Lol. I actually enjoy Dedoimedo's reviews even though it seems that he dislikes all of my favorite distros (especially Debian and Arch) and my favorite window manager (Openbox). More than a few times now he's ripped a release and gave it low marks and yet I could tell from what he wrote that I'd like the release so I went ahead and installed it, with good results.
Sometimes any press is good press. In fact, I'd been sticking with Hydrogen on one computer, waiting for the Helium release, but I decided to do a fresh installation with Deuterium yesterday after reading Dedoimedo's review of it. 9/10. Excellent job by the BL devs!
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maybe a compromise would be putting all the pipes under System, together with Synaptic Package Manager. That way we would keep clean limited defaults and still have functional installation scripts that are only few clicks away. You could name it Quick Install, or whatever better comes to mind, and those would nest menu items in their respected subcategory.
Yes, fair enough, but the main point of the current pipemenus is that after you install an app it appears there in its category for use. Putting the "install" options under System would mean having two pipemenus instead of one: one for install, one for launching.
Actually, maybe the same scripts could handle both menus, just being called with an --install-menu option to display the menu that goes in the System section. So it would be doable.
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Dedoimedo never liked (debian based) crunchbang either so take that as a sign you are doing something right.
Here's something to cheer you all up even though most of what this guy writes is complete fluff
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Late to commenting, but my 2 cents...
He struggled with grokking BL, so the review is negative.
I just don't understand how he struggled so much (he's reviewed every DE available), and why he didn't use the forums. Most of his questions could have been easily answered.
No, he can't sleep on the floor. What do you think I'm yelling for?!!!
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