I wouldn’t recommend sway to someone who isn’t actively looking for a tiling WM, I would recommend finding a good spotlight equivalent to use on KDE as that will still be less customization work than it would require on barebones sway (which is hardly usable).
It’s not as bad nowadays that apps yielded to GNOME’s bullshit. Back when GTK2 apps were still common… Urgh. Plenty of apps were broken without it for no good reason.
I like opinionated UX - I use sway - but GNOME’s approach is incompatible with “general use” and only works (for now) because of canonical’s weight and ability to impose their vision as the only vision.
Also they didn’t replace the tray with a better way to manage background apps, so they can suck a dick on the UX front.
The fucking system tray. Which literally every other DE and mainstream OS out there supports because some apps depend on it and break if it doesn’t exist.
Last I checked GNOME devs said “no, we will never support it, because we’ve DePRecATeD the tray in GTK”.
It’s functionality so basic I have 3-6 apps which depend on it at any time on my work machine. Anyone saying it doesn’t fall under “basic functionality” is either a GNOME dev or a troll.
The kind of farming that makes any money isn’t slow work.
It is, however, tangible work with tangible results. Unlike spending months changing the polarity of nanoscopic silicon structure for the non-appreciation of an utterly clueless salesperson whose braindead ideas will have left the world in a worse state than you found it despite anyone’s best efforts.
I should seriously get into woodworking. Kidding. Sorta.
I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.
What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.
Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.
In formal language are those kinda similar the same way je vais manger and je mangerai are at least mostly the same thing
I think I confused myself lol. Explaining intuitive grammar rules formally is surprisingly hard. You are right, “Je mangerais” == I would eat, “J’aurais mangé” == I would have eaten. Very bad example on my part because the conditional tense is actually one that escapes the general tendency of modern French to slowly move away from those simple past/future tenses which have a formal connotation. It’s very much not a complete transition, but “vous allez manger” and “vous mangerez” are semantically equivalent but the former would be used in a lot of (but not all) day-to-day situations, even though the more formal future tense would probably used in an equivalent but formal or literary context.
To say “you will do as I say”, an angry mother will say to her kid “tu vas faire c’que j’te dis!” but an angry boss will say “vous ferez ce que je vous dis”. Completely different tenses, exact same meaning.
Whereas English generally only changes tenses to imply a change in habituality/causality. “You will have done as I say” implies another causal event between “now” and “you will have done”, and French doesn’t have a clean way to convey that from conjugation alone.
Even in English, without that level of cultural baggage or institutional oversight, there have been many proposals for spelling reform, none of which ever go anywhere.
I would say that reforming English would be counter-intuitively harder than reforming French. French spelling is rather orthodox, and getting rid of exceptions + simplifying orthographic rules would be pretty straightforward and could be done incrementally (it was supposed to be the job of the Académie before they turned conservative; they weren’t always which explains how they survived the French Revolution!). English spelling is so inconsistent, if you were to make up strict pronunciation rules, adhering to them would require a completely new vocabulary and you might as well switch to Hangul (which would admittedly be pretty dope).
What’s wrong with je mange, il mange, ils mange‽
Nothing in theory, but my native ass recoiled in horror at “ils mange”. I know it’s literally equivalent and I shouldn’t care, but French is culturally very attached to its written form, even moreso than English (the reasons why being outlined at the end of my comment).
But yeah, I thought that apart from the passé simple my examples were pretty standard. Is that not so?
In the written form, yes. In the oral form, it depends. Futur proche has evolved to be used quite generally.
French conjugation is incredibly complex by any standard, and especially compared to English. There are tenses (e.g. imparfait du subjonctif) that are so archaic they’re a complete meme and they shouldn’t be used even in the most formal literary setting.
Sarkozy (well-known for being a feisty classist right-wing money-laundering asshole) using it as an obvious flex made the news at the time and everyone made fun of him. To this day I’m not even sure if he actually conjugated that correctly (and neither are the people in the comments lmao). That video is absolute gold, the eyebrow raise he does as if to say “and there” tells you everything you need to know about his character.
That is fun! My favourite fun French dialect fact is about septante, nonante, and huitante/octante being used in Swiss French and maybe Belgian and non-Quebec Canadian French instead of soixante-dix, quatre-vingt-dix, and quatre-vingt. I’m not sure of the history there, but I like it.
The Celts! No, seriously. They used a vigidecimal (base 20) system and since they counted in “twenties”, “four twenties” is an artifact of that. So are ‘single digit’ numbers up to 20 (quatorze/quinze/etc). In that way “Quatre-ving-quatorze” is arguably correct base-20, but “quatre-ving-dix-huit” is not (because there is no dedicated number for 18 anymore so the whole thing is clunky, but “quatre-ving huitorze” would be fine conceptually).
I wonder if the germanic “eleven/twelve” is related or if it’s an equivalent but unrelated evolution for counting scores.
Regarding the history of the language and its lack of reform, I am not a specialist but this guy and his colleagues are (if you’re willing to go through half an hour of French with admittedly very good auto-generated English captions). But generally the idea is that the Académie and the system which created it have worked together since the early 19th century (which not uncoincidentally had the last major reform of the French language) to turn language into a very strong marker of social status. Like, very.
French people (and esp. Parisians) have a reputation for being assholes who will get mad at foreigners for mispronouncing words or using the wrong grammatical gender. That’s asshole behavior but there are assholes everywhere, so why the French in particular? Because the French are taught from the age of 5 that their mastery of the French language (both written and spoken) will be the main thing for which they will be judged in life. As the middle class rose in the 19th/early 20th century, they got access to more/longer education where grammar/spelling was very heavily emphasized. Proper grammar/spelling then became a huge indicator of a good education and predictor of social mobility.
This fundamentally classist idea persisted well beyond the industrial revolution and it remains a very big talking point. “Young people can’t write anymore” is probably the most common/recurring moral panic, and the idea that children age 6-12 should do mandatory daily (!!) graded spelling bees again is a regular conservative talking point because that’s how they grew up (and it’s still the policy with more… catholic-conservative teachers, I had some of those).
We don’t usually even have spelling bee competitions (in all my schooling there was only ever one that I knew of), because stellar spelling is the expectation, not the over-achievement.
I’m sure that happens to a lesser degrees for English speakers, but now consider how much harder French is to write. I hope I got across how incredibly neurotic the French are over these matters.
Silent letters make boys grow into men! Or something. You can know how to pronounce those if you read them, but you definitely can’t know how to write those if you hear them.
Thankfully informal French gets rid of a few of the examples you gave by always using the composed form. Je mange, j’ai mangé, je vais manger, ils auraient mangé. All the tenses you actually need (don’t mind the irregular forms of être/avoir). And we still fuck up and write mangé and manger interchangeably anyways.
Fun socio-linguistic fact: Mangerai and mangerais are distinct in Belgian (and I think Swiss?) French (é vs è ending) but not in France French (è in either case). There are a few other archaisms like this such as the Belgian/Swiss distinction between the pronunciation of “brun” and “brin” that the French don’t make either.
French is definitely way more complex than English grammatically which is comparatively dead simple. Although things get deceptively hard at more advanced levels (get up/to/at/through/off all mean wildly different things for instance and that’s just crazy).
Where learning English actually gets tricky is the unpredictable pronunciation with zero rules. Through/Thorough/Thought/Cough/Geoff? Read/read? French has some exceptions when it comes to pronunciation but mostly follows a standard (albeit complex) set of rules that lets a native speaker approach an unknown new word with relative confidence. When I learned how y’all pronounce “Hermione” my eyes just about popped out of their sockets, why tf does “ione” have as many syllables as “secretary”?
En France, Au Canada, À New-York, Aux Seychelles, À Cuba.
Don’t try to find a logic, there literally is none and anyone who tells you otherwise is just retrofitting rules to chaotic data and will inevitably have a list of exceptions longer than a French politician’s criminal record. Half of it is literally just “what was grammatically fashionable at the time this toponym was discovered/imported/created”.
This does not excuse English’s abuse of prepositions though. Why do I get on the bus but in the car? Why, English?
I would be very surprised if it wasn’t voluntary, as far as I know each Wiki is maintained independently with very little oversight.
I remember when “new” Wikipedia came out with big press I was confused because it had already been in use on the French wiki for months.
My guess is as the biggest wiki, the English wiki is naturally more conservative on the rollout of new features.
You don’t need a data plan to call emergency services. Any protocol-compatible device can dial 911/112/etc. for free.
This is why in remote areas your phone may say “Emergency Calls Only”. Your carrier isn’t available, but someone else’s is and they are legally obligated to route emergency calls.
Of course if your car has a modem and a computer, adding a data plan isn’t a huge leap. But it’s a recurring expense and plenty of cars sold today do not have internet connectivity, at least on the cheaper side.
IIRC Joanne stated in interviews that she intentionally made the game beyond uselessly broken on purpose, to spite football fans or whatever. She is, very fundamentally to her person, a spiteful bitch.
Further proof to the stupidity of this: in the recent video game, ya can’t even play quidditch. The feature doesn’t exist, because the game would be literally unplayable.
I’ve read the exact same comment a year ago, and the year before, and probably the year before that tbh.
So I’ll say what I always say; I’ll believe it when I see it.
“Color terminal” isn’t a thing. Applications can choose to output ANSI escape codes which most terminal emulators will render as color changes. Whether and which colors get used depends on the value of $TERM, which informs the application of the capabilities of the terminal emulator.
So if your remote servers don’t have color, either $TERM isn’t being set or its value is unknown to the server. Most modern terminal emulators support at least the same escape codes as xterm-256color though so you can always try to export that.
I’m just surprised the purists aren’t all up in arms that this isn’t KISS and that it doesn’t fit in their 80x24 teletype.
… sorry, guess I’m not over that whole systemd “debate”.
That statement ITSELF is American cultural Imperialism. There are a bunch of languages other than English on Wikipedia…
Also [citation needed].
Anyone can fork at any time. The US gov could theoretically hold Wikipedia’s brand and servers hostage, but the actually valuable stuff is already mirrored in a decentralized fashion that is completely unrestricted under US and international law.
EDIT: Maybe you meant that the US could covertly vandalize Wikipedia? Maybe, if they keep it very low-key. Editors are used to this kind of stuff though, it happens all the time from all governments since they can just, y’know, edit it. Anything actually impactful will be noticed by the editors which will just cause a fork.
I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).
So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.