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    Posted on 19-05-25, 15:20
    Dinosaur

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    https://stopthemingmy.app/
    (wow, a sponsored TLD - how fancy of them)

    In another chapter of "UXtards disregarding the wishes of end users", GNOMEs want to pretend that their UI/UX abominations are pixel-perfect, and therefore are planning to rip out app theme support completely. To distract people while they achieve their goals, they came up with this tirade highlighting the "risks" of themes, why downstream should not have the freedom to picking their own visual identity (which can be easily overridden by the end user!), and claiming that anyone that DARES deviating from the Adwaita Way™ should be eaten by a grue, no matter if the blame resides on GTK+ (which 90% of the times, it is) due to intentional sabotage from another art school dropout too poor for affording a iDevice.

    They're welcoming feedback, but we know that their echo chamber is already at full throttle, as can be seen here: https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/issues/3 - most comments are being flagged as off-topic (mine was even flagged as "disruptive", and not in the "Silly Valley sharing economy" meaning of the word). Sounds familiar? It's because it is! Everybody and his dog has been engaging in the same bullshit since the dawn of the smartdevice age.

    Looks like those guy actually don't want to develop FOSS anymore (or they conveniently forgot what was the meaning of "free software licenses"), and instead are itching to make the jump to Mac/cellphone apps, where they follow the Henry Ford School of Design: "you can have your app in any theme you want, as long as it is Adwaita with our pixel-perfect icons". Really, this is the kind of crap you would listen from anyone deep hard into that design school thought, where "hamburger menus", "mystery meat navigation" and "shareable design" are core design principles to fight for to death, and anyone that doesn't like them should be barred from using their bloatware.

    Man, fuck GNOME. I'm glad that I stopped using GNOME "apps" years ago... too bad I still have to endure the UI/theme breakages on other GTK apps: just ask the Clearlooks-Phenix theme developer, which ragequitted last time the UXtards at GNOME broke themes for the millionth time (and now I have to live with horrendous status bars on Pluma, for example. Still beats Adwaita, I guess)

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 19-05-25, 16:35

    Post: #83 of 175
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    As a GTK app developer:
    "Please theme my apps. The Adwaita theme uses too much whitespace for no reason, preventing programs from being information-dense. Also, I want you to feel comfortable using your computer. Thanks.'
    Posted on 19-05-25, 20:30
    Stirrer of Shit
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    "Please sign in to view"
    What the fuck, GitHub? It's one thing to hide it, another entirely to require me to make an account (with your "secure" e-mails) to view it.

    I suppose it's part of their "diversity and inclusion" initiative - of course we have to enable developers to hide all criticism because this is a fundamental human right. (no, I'm not making this up, they did actually do the censorship stuff because of the so-called women developers)

    But I digress. That's for Politics!.

    Anyway, the comments are still there in the source. .unminimized-comment {display: block;}. Or for the lazy:

    oyvinds commented a day ago

    I'd like to add to this, please leave GTK themes alone. They are important to us who use Xfce.

    I'm personally fine with GNOME and those apps listed on stopthemeing dropping support for themes, GNOME's a horrible joke of a desktop and so are every app listed on that site as well. Let's be real, if a piece of software breaks when the theme's changed then that's a problem with the piece of software. Themes have been a thing for two decades now and there's never been a problem until now and there's only a problem with some poorly written GNOME software. Gee, could it be that this isn't a theme problem but a GNOME developer problem?

    GaugeK commented 20 hours ago

    A big pro to themes is someone can get a consistent theming experience. The same colours in every app.

    > GTK Stylesheets can make applications look broken, and even unusable

    you could just use the colours from the gtk theme

    > Icon Themes can change icon metaphors, leading to interfaces with icons that don’t express what the developer intended.

    Then maybe use normal icons?

    > App Icons are the identity of an app. Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand.

    What if someone wants the same style for every icon?


    edwinfoss commented 2 hours ago

    Well, sorry devs, but for me it seems a lost battle, I love Arc Theme and with Kvantum and Qt5ct, I've got an uniform looks on Gnome with KDE apps.
    IMHO this kind of actions will just push people like me to uninstall your app and find an alternative even the app being far below your quality standards, my eyes is more important ATM.
    Also I have to say that Gnome standard theme is horrible, I don't know why but the Gnome dark theme gives me headache and light one has a bad contrast.
    About the Gnome standard icons, same as the window theming with bad design, Papirus icon theme is more memorable and less distracting.


    dilworks commented an hour ago

    @Exalm: Too late, I don't care who wrote the letter, if it's official GNOME Policy or just a bunch of devs telling people to not mess with their toys.

    This is matter of trust. Trust has been breached multiple times IN THE PAST. This is yet another episode of the same, and I see no intention to find consensus between developers, distros, and end users.

    Come up with a SANE theme API and we'll talk. Until then, we're out of this.


    I... I don't get why these comments are 'disruptive'. They're not even rude. They have constructive and calm feedback.

    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-05-25, 20:47
    It's made of the crew's shit, y'know?

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    When you have an agenda, no matter if you have good intentions behind it or not, and you're fierce enough about it, calm and constructive feedback can quickly look like disruptive rudeness.
    Posted on 19-05-25, 21:05
    Stirrer of Shit
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    None of these comments were very fierce though.

    oyvinds expresses some minor dislike for the GNOME project and implies their developers are incompetent, GaugeK suggests using irrelevant icons is abnormal, edwinfoss describes the standard theme as "horrible", and dilworks (tomman) implies their API isn't sane.

    And they were all removed for being off-topic, except for tomman's. GaugeK's is literally a direct response to article, for crying out loud! How on earth ccould it possibly be off-topic?

    I get that you might want to hide oyvinds' if you're running an extremely formal issue tracker (the kind where you get permabanned for using contractions or the word 'you'), but the rest I can find absolutely nothing wrong or irrelevant with. "Sane" has a very specific meaning within software development, the "horrible" gets substantiated in the same sentence, and "normal icons" are what the developers are suggesting people use.

    As always, The Onion predicted this.
    Posted by https://www.theonion.com/college-encourages-lively-exchange-of-idea-1819577755
    College Encourages Lively Exchange Of Idea
    4/27/15 1:27pm

    Students, Faculty Invited To Freely Express Single Viewpoint

    BOSTON—Saying that such a dialogue was essential to the college’s academic mission, Trescott University president Kevin Abrams confirmed Monday that the school encourages a lively exchange of one idea. “As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion,” said Abrams, adding that no matter the subject, anyone on campus is always welcome to add their support to the accepted consensus. “Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.” Abrams told reporters that counseling resources were available for any student made uncomfortable by the viewpoint.


    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-05-25, 21:39
    Better than Blackhole

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    Posted by sureanem
    None of these comments were very fierce though.
    I meant the devs, actually.
    Posted on 19-05-26, 00:28
    Custom title here

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    Posted by tomman


    Looks like those guy actually don't want to develop FOSS anymore (or they conveniently forgot what was the meaning of "free software licenses"), and instead are itching to make the jump to Mac/cellphone apps, where they follow the Henry Ford School of Design: "you can have your app in any theme you want, as long as it is Adwaita with our pixel-perfect icons".
    I thought this had been the Gnome way for years now.

    I find the whole thing hilarious, mostly. But I have a perverse sense of humor.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-05-27, 08:49
    Full mod

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    Posted by sureanem
    "Please sign in to view"
    What the fuck, GitHub? It's one thing to hide it, another entirely to require me to make an account (with your "secure" e-mails) to view it.

    I don't really understand what the sign-in restriction is about. I can understand preventing *comments* without an account, but preventing *views* is a bit weird.

    My only guess is that GitHub are somehow afraid that somebody will post something horribly offensive, and then post the link to Twitter so that people who don't know what a GitHub is can click the it and be outraged; forcing people to create an account in order to be outraged is more work than most people are willing to do. Of course, there's a bunch of reasons why that's a weird thing to defend against, so maybe it's something else.

    I suppose it's part of their "diversity and inclusion" initiative - of course we have to enable developers to hide all criticism because this is a fundamental human right.

    Sometimes criticism can be helpful and constructive, but 90% of the time it's just noise from entitled assholes, and that's even more true on the Internet. In an ideal world, this would all be federated, and each person could configure their user-agent to silently drop as much or as little incoming traffic as they wished. As it is, for economic reasons people are stuck using centralised systems like GitHub and GMail, so it's nice that those systems allow *some* level of filtering control instead of locking everybody together in the same echo chamber.

    I... I don't get why these comments are 'disruptive'. They're not even rude. They have constructive and calm feedback.

    They're generally calm, but I wouldn't call them "constructive", "GNOME's a horrible joke of a desktop", "Gnome standard theme is horrible", "Come up with a SANE theme API and we'll talk", these are not the words of people who are approaching a problem with an open mind, they're the words of people who have an axe to grind. Their concerns may be quite pressing and legitimate, but ultimately not relevant to the topic at hand.

    ------

    A graphical user interface is like any other language - there's a vocabulary (buttons, text fields, sliders, ...) and a grammar (buttons on the bottom, things above and to the left affect things below and to the right), and sometimes the best way to effectively and efficiently communicate a new idea involves a new word or a new pattern. Unfortunately, although the language of GUIs is written and read by humans with general intelligence, sometimes it's rewritten by a theme engine with no intelligence at all, just global search/replace rules, and that can make quite a mess (as any Google Translate user will tell you).


    The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.
    Posted on 19-05-27, 11:00
    Stirrer of Shit
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    Hmm, you only need email verification to post stuff, which is disgusting in and of itself, but I guess it's okay. Typing asdasd@gmail.com (imagine the poor guy who owns that email) in all fields and furiously clicking "skip" is not really that much effort.

    In an ideal world, people would be running their own git front-end instances. In a realistic world, at least they could have the sense not to delete criticism, and Git could stop interfering in projects' internal affairs. Even inane criticism/death threats still reflects a dissatisfaction with your actions and should be taken seriously, if not at face value.

    The quotes are out of context - "GNOME's a horrible joke of a desktop" in the context of asking them to not bother users of other DE's, "Gnome standard theme is horrible" in the context of not forcing people to use it, and "Come up with a SANE theme API and we'll talk" in response to GNOME inching towards removing theming support. I'd definitely argue they're constructive. A non-constructive comment would contain only the first or second quote, and then a few curse words and/or personal attacks against the author(s).

    I don't know what kind of theme engine you use. If I open my xfce settings right now and select random styles, none of them make any mess. Some of them look butt-ugly, sure, but that's par for the course. It's definitely possible you could make a theme that broke everything, but that can be dealt with in accordance with the old adage "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". No need to prohibit it explicitly.

    So either, GNOME's theming engine is horribly broken (wouldn't know, never used it), or the real concern is as they say: "Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand."

    I really don't like the soulless approach of "contribute to FOSS projects because it looks good on your resumé". Clearly, the goal is to increase the amount of such developers, but it causes lots of trouble for everyone else. I don't think contributions from people looking to pad their CVs are that great in number anyway, just like nobody would edit Wikipedia for that purpose. In other words, the only reason you'd want to do it is to "attract new developers," which is code-word for something else, that so far has never been shown to give any value to anyone whatsoever, except possibly for said "new developers".

    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-05-27, 13:50
    Full mod

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    > Even inane criticism/death threats still reflects a dissatisfaction with your actions and should be taken seriously, if not at face value.

    Let's say you have a goal you'd very much like to achieve, so you carefully plan out a course to get you there. When you mention your plan publicly for the first time, you discover a million anonymous Internet users are very unhappy with you. What do you do about it? Are they annoyed about your goal? Are they happy with your goal but annoyed about your plan? Are they pointing out a problem with your reasoning, or just disputing your basic assumptions? Maybe they just misunderstood something? Perhaps there's different factions who each have different concerns, but how many people are in each faction? What if different factions disagree with each other as well as with you?

    There *is* positive information content in such comments, but I would estimate their total worth as:

    - Ctrl-F, "Comment deleted by moderator"
    - Count number of matches
    - Divide by two

    > I'd definitely argue they're constructive.

    The point is that there's a conflict between the idea of theming, which requires a rigidly-defined list of standard widgets, and the idea that application authors should be allowed to customise widgets or invent new ones if they think it's appropriate. The design of GNOME's desktop (or any desktop) or GNOME's default theme (or any theme) or GNOME's theme API (or any theme API) are not relevant to the discussion, because this conflict has affected every desktop based on every GUI toolkit.

    > It's definitely possible you could make a theme that broke everything, but that can be dealt with in accordance with the old adage "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". No need to prohibit it explicitly.

    The actual claim is that certain Linux distros are shipping with a non-Adwaita theme that breaks third-party applications in various subtle ways. Sure, end-users can set up whatever crazy theme they like, and if they break things they get to keep both pieces, but Linux distros should be more responsible than that. If you'd written application and got regular "bug" reports from users of Distro X because of Distro X's custom theme, you'd be annoyed too.

    The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.
    Posted on 19-05-27, 15:12
    Stirrer of Shit
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    Posted by Screwtape
    Let's say you have a goal you'd very much like to achieve, so you carefully plan out a course to get you there. When you mention your plan publicly for the first time, you discover a million anonymous Internet users are very unhappy with you. What do you do about it? Are they annoyed about your goal? Are they happy with your goal but annoyed about your plan? Are they pointing out a problem with your reasoning, or just disputing your basic assumptions? Maybe they just misunderstood something?

    All of the above, of course. The peanut gallery speaks in tongues.

    Perhaps there's different factions who each have different concerns, but how many people are in each faction? What if different factions disagree with each other as well as with you?

    Well, then you listen to them and see if any of them have reasonable opinions. I mean, you'd have to read through them to censor them anyway, and after you've done that there isn't really much of a point to deleting them.
    Also, I've never seen this happen in real life. This is the first time I've seen a project run by people with so thin skin that they had to delete any and all criticism of them (except for projects run by legit insane people, but not even all of them). Other, serious, projects just have a few issues for it and if the discussion gets too inane they just lock it to contributors/stop reading it.
    Even madmen projects like TempleOS got their fair share of positive feedback, despite even the author agreeing that the practical utility was absolutely zero. So I'd have to say I doubt the practical value of echo chambers.

    There *is* positive information content in such comments, but I would estimate their total worth as:

    - Ctrl-F, "Comment deleted by moderator"
    - Count number of matches
    - Divide by two

    Huh, what do you mean? They only have a value if they get deleted?

    The point is that there's a conflict between the idea of theming, which requires a rigidly-defined list of standard widgets, and the idea that application authors should be allowed to customise widgets or invent new ones if they think it's appropriate. The design of GNOME's desktop (or any desktop) or GNOME's default theme (or any theme) or GNOME's theme API (or any theme API) are not relevant to the discussion, because this conflict has affected every desktop based on every GUI toolkit.

    It is, though. If GNOME would have a default theme designed by, say, God, that everyone found completely perfect there would be no need to have theming support at all. If the default theme was something like the default iOS or Mac OS X theme, people would find it acceptable. And if the default theme was butt-ugly, it would be imperative to have theming support.

    So of course it plays a role. "We want theming support because X" is a fundamentally stronger position than "We want theming support". And likewise, "we don't want theming support because the API doesn't support creating applications that theme consistently" is a stronger position than "we don't want theming support because 'brand damage'"

    My personal position is that authors ought to be able to ship whatever they want and end users ought to be able to do whatever they want with it. If I'd write GUI software I'd probably opt for something that always looked native (like hiro/libui/Tk) or something that had virtually no modes of failure (nuklear/imgui).

    I think even without theming, it's a good idea to have a rigidly defined set of widgets for consistency. I don't want to have to guess at what stuff does, that is the whole point of GUIs.

    >The actual claim is that certain Linux distros are shipping with a non-Adwaita theme that breaks third-party applications in various subtle ways. Sure, end-users can set up whatever crazy theme they like, and if they break things they get to keep both pieces, but Linux distros should be more responsible than that. If you'd written application and got regular "bug" reports from users of Distro X because of Distro X's custom theme, you'd be annoyed too.

    Which makes sense, but ultimately it's the developers' fault. It's like making an application for en-US Windows 7 on 1920x1080x24 that breaks horribly on anything else, claiming it's the standard (which it is), and then claiming that using it on anything else is UB.

    Which would be a reasonable position to take, but then you should standardize on something reasonable and universal and not a specific GNOME theme.

    I'm guessing that the distros' default themes aren't exactly crazy, just making shoddy applications look a bit wonkier than on the dev's machine. On sane DEs like Xfce, I have zero issues of this kind, which makes me think the real issue is that they don't want users to be able to "damage" their precious branding. I mean, they had to dig out absurd strawmen for their website, so I'd wager there's an about 70% chance they have some ulterior motive that isn't exactly "getting less bug reports".

    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-05-27, 19:12 (revision 1)
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    if bad theming is such an issue for these apps, they could just force theming to be opt in, with a passive aggressive pop-up on first launch stating why theming is disabled.

    then again, maybe the theming implementation needs a re-think.
    Posted on 19-05-27, 19:53
    Stirrer of Shit
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    Agreed.
    What themes I use has absolutely no bearing on Telegram Desktop, which looks like a bigger version of the Android app no matter what my settings are. This goes for all the minimalist GUI toolkits like nuklear and imgui too. If they're so concerned about their so-called brands getting superfluous bug reports for their so-called apps, then why implement support for it in the first place?

    There's absolutely no need to start whining about this, when you could just not implement the feature if it breaks your obscure widgets.

    Another tangentially related gripe I have is the constant localization of everything. You're installing, forget to set the language to English, and suddenly you're getting a disgusting mix of English and the local language.

    e.g. "Would you like to save?": "Да"/"Нет"

    And that's not getting into whenever websites/smartphone apps feel like it would be better to give you poorly Google Translated content instead of regular English content, although that's not so common anymore. Except for Android apps, which get compulsively "localized".

    Unicode was a mistake, and it just keeps getting worse and worse (emoji, RTL, Chinese characters breaking BMP). The Europeans already had ISO 8859-1, the Russians KOI8-R, and for the web there was HTML entities. Since everyone who uses the Internet speaks English anyway, computer localization is just a waste of time and money and unpleasant for generally everybody. It would be far easier if you knew that everything everywhere would be en-US, no surprises.

    Windows is a notable exception. That's actually very well done. I wouldn't use non-English Windows for the aforementioned reasons, but the OS itself sounds completely natural.

    I can't remember a single time I have ever had any use for "localized" software, I can remember dozens of times it has been awkward to use. Oftentimes it just seems completely incomprehensible why anyone would even want to localize software. For instance, Microsoft localizing Windows into Simplified Chinese. Why? Them supporting China has resulted in a net gain of $0 and a net loss of whatever they lost from them going postal at them after they dropped XP.

    /rant

    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-05-27, 22:11
    Dinosaur

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    > Unicode was a mistake, and it just keeps getting worse and worse (emoji, RTL, Chinese characters breaking BMP). The Europeans already had ISO 8859-1, the Russians KOI8-R, and for the web there was HTML entities.
    Classic feature creep, but I'll still take Unicode over Shit-JIS or mojibake or other borken legacy encodings any day of the week. Still, not every character ever made doesn't NEED to be in a codemap (case in point: EMOJI, a disease that should have never left Japan)

    > Since everyone who uses the Internet speaks English anyway, computer localization is just a waste of time and money and unpleasant for generally everybody. It would be far easier if you knew that everything everywhere would be en-US, no surprises.
    Fuck you.

    No, serously, fuck anyone that says that "en-US is the only locale ever", that's so shortsighted like the Adwaita Defense League.
    If your software is intended for a GLOBAL audience (like any serious non-CLI application should be), it MUST be localized. No "ifs", no "buts". If you intend that I interact with your user interface everyday, it must speak the same language as me - computers are intended to serve my needs, not the reverse! I say this as someone that has actually contributed localizations for several open source and proprietary applications in the past.
    (I set CLI aside as those are intended for a more technical audience, but then there are some specific applications that really benefit from localized UIs: text editors being a good example)

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 19-05-27, 22:40
    Custom title here

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    Back in the 80s, there were even localized versions of BASIC on some home computers, with translated PRINTs and GOTOs and all those other keywords we love.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-05-28, 01:01
    Custom title here

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    Posted by Screwtape

    > I'd definitely argue they're constructive.

    The point is that there's a conflict between the idea of theming, which requires a rigidly-defined list of standard widgets, and the idea that application authors should be allowed to customise widgets or invent new ones if they think it's appropriate. The design of GNOME's desktop (or any desktop) or GNOME's default theme (or any theme) or GNOME's theme API (or any theme API) are not relevant to the discussion, because this conflict has affected every desktop based on every GUI toolkit.

    > It's definitely possible you could make a theme that broke everything, but that can be dealt with in accordance with the old adage "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". No need to prohibit it explicitly.

    The actual claim is that certain Linux distros are shipping with a non-Adwaita theme that breaks third-party applications in various subtle ways. Sure, end-users can set up whatever crazy theme they like, and if they break things they get to keep both pieces, but Linux distros should be more responsible than that. If you'd written application and got regular "bug" reports from users of Distro X because of Distro X's custom theme, you'd be annoyed too.
    As I understand it, the ACTUAL problem is that their applications require certain special behaviors(custom widgets, invented widgets, and just unusual behaviors).
    And rather than build these behaviors into their software like everyone else on Earth does, they're baking them into the Adwaita theme. So their software breaks when a non-Gnome theme is used because a lot of other themes don't have all the single-use rules from Adwaita implemented.
    ...
    And Gnome team is claiming Adwaita is a defined API instead of a theme, they shouldn't have to include fallbacks because people aren't supposed to change their API. No, they literally called Adwaita an API.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-05-28, 10:32
    Stirrer of Shit
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    Posted by tomman
    Classic feature creep, but I'll still take Unicode over Shit-JIS or mojibake or other borken legacy encodings any day of the week. Still, not every character ever made doesn't NEED to be in a codemap (case in point: EMOJI, a disease that should have never left Japan)

    Emoji is not _that_ bad. Far worse are RTL languages. ‮For instance, this sentence is completely incomprehensible because of a stray U+202e.

    It's completely pointless. What share of Arabs have computers? Probably the same share as speak English anyway. Couldn't they at least have gone with a compromise? Implement the Arabic alphabet, but LTR, and then their input methods could transform it.

    e.g. instead of "بسم الله‎", Bismillah, write "‭ه‎للا مسب", which is the exact same text but now works normally in a text editor.

    It's a moot point since for informal purposes they'd just use ad-hoc transcription, and for formal purposes HTML entities/Office internal representation would do just fine.

    Fuck you.

    No, serously, fuck anyone that says that "en-US is the only locale ever", that's so shortsighted like the Adwaita Defense League.

    I'm not saying en-US is the only locale, I'm saying it should be, and that using anything else should be UB. If people would settle on one platform (e.g. Windows 7 1080p en-US), software would be much more reliable. Localization is to introduce very painful edge cases out of a misguided sense of political correctness.
    If your software is intended for a GLOBAL audience (like any serious non-CLI application should be), it MUST be localized. No "ifs", no "buts". If you intend that I interact with your user interface everyday, it must speak the same language as me - computers are intended to serve my needs, not the reverse! I say this as someone that has actually contributed localizations for several open source and proprietary applications in the past.
    (I set CLI aside as those are intended for a more technical audience, but then there are some specific applications that really benefit from localized UIs: text editors being a good example)

    But who exactly is this global audience? I mean, are you trying to make the case that you don't speak English? I'd have a hard time believing you. Basically everyone in the first world (with the notable exception of Japan) speaks English.

    It's just a nuisance. Look at all the locale shit, timezones, etc in your install of Linux. It's an endless source of pain, causing lots of bloat in all the C libraries dumb enough to implement it. And it doesn't work, either. You still need to speak English to operate a computer. So why bother?

    What do you mean by text editors? I use vim, and I've never felt it would be any better if it were localized. LibreOffice can have separate UI and content languages. I have the UI set to English and the content to whatever the document I'm editing is in. Never bothered me. However, I can be pretty sure the translation of LibreOffice (if there even is one) is utter rubbish.

    Posted by CaptainJistuce
    Back in the 80s, there were even localized versions of BASIC on some home computers, with translated PRINTs and GOTOs and all those other keywords we love.

    And we don't have these anymore, since we realized that everyone speaks English anyway.

    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-05-28, 11:46

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    Posted by sureanem
    You still need to speak English to operate a computer.

    +1

    My current setup: Super Famicom ("2/1/3" SNS-CPU-1CHIP-02) → SCART → OSSC → StarTech USB3HDCAP → AmaRecTV 3.10
    Posted on 19-05-28, 12:30
    Stirrer of Shit
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    No, I'm not trolling.
    Sure, people who don't speak English can "operate" computers, but so can most four-year-olds, simply by virtue of memorizing the positions of the buttons they want to press in the games they like to play. It's actually quite impressive. I saw someone of around that age playing some iPhone game - don't remember which - and it was in Italian or something like that. And I asked, "wow, does he speak Italian?" (I don't live in Italy). No, they replied, he's just accidentally set it to that.
    For anything advanced you still need to actually speak English. Even with perfect localization of everything, the resources online in your native language are extremely limited if they even exist, depriving you of the ability to use Google efficiently.
    Can't even imagine using localized GCC/Visual Studio/Clang. What do you do, translate the error messages in your head into English before searching for them? And this is somehow easier than using normal software?

    No, localization is as ass-backward as using comma signs as thousand separators (for decimals they're fine, as are periods), some obscure m/d/yy format that has you guessing at whether it's the fourth of January or the first of April, or DST. It all needs to die, and it never will.

    There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
    Posted on 19-05-28, 14:00 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

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    You're clinically insane.

    "English is the only language that matters". Got it.

    Next time you're going to suggest to do away with media dubs and subs for any language that it is not English because "fuck your cultural heritage, you're an animal if you insist on speaking that arcane non-English language".

    And FYI, VS/GCC do have localized error messages. In the case of VS, it's pretty easy as each error message also has a error code associated to it, so you just look for the error code. In the case of GCC it's always tricky because they're *NIX graybeards that hate error codes for whatever reason, but Google often helps in that case.

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