I used Audacity every now and then and while I wasn’t very good at it before either, the changes over time, ended up jarring me now and then. Only after watching this, do I realise what was going on:

• They removed the easily visible audio device selection
  • Instead of going into audio setup, I ended up right-clicking the thingy in the left of audio track and checking out the arrow-like buttons, hoping for some menu item to pop-up that would give per-track I/O device selection
• They broke stuff down into clips
  • I was looking for how to “flatten” those things, because I wanted to select past the boundaries. After a while of trying, I realised I could just do so as-is

Those were my faults as a user, coming up from the changes.

Now come my little thoughts on Tantacrul’s ideas:

Modes

They are not a real problem as long as the user knows what to expect. You just need to implement some basics:

• These will apply to both, Audacity and a 2D + 3D CAD software
  • Have a default mode, that would be mostly about selection and moving around the viewport.
    • In this mode, right-clicking on a viewport item can open a menu showing options to show item properties of actions that would work on that specific item (the actions might change the mode).
    • Note that in this mode, accidental click and drag should not cause any change that would require the user to Ctrl+Z.
  • Always start the program with the default mode active
  • Whenever the user presses Esc with the viewport in focus, switch to the default mode.
    • If some extra (non-permanent) side-panel (or bottom panel) was opened, or if some object was selected in this mode, Esc should do these in order:
      1. Close side-panels, one for every Esc key pressed
      2. Deselect all objects on one Esc
      3. Switch to the default mode on the last Esc
      4. In case the user has made an unconfirmed change, that might be lost (or implicitly applied) on exiting the other mode, prompt.
    • This should give the user a feeling that no matter what state they are in, as long as the press Esc enough times, they will find themselves in the base state of whichever view they are in.
      • And since I don’t have a degree in UI/UX design, to prove that I’m not pulling this out of a faecal dump, here are some examples that do similar stuff: Qt Creator, Inkscape, AutoCAD (ok I’m not sure if this one does, I just vaguely remember), Kate (the side/bottom-panel stuff). Oh, and vim
• For the zoom behaviour, this should work specifically for Audacity:
  • Use scroll-wheel with keyboard modifiers (that is what I originally tried to use when I first used Audacity)
    • Normal scroll wheel to just scrolls through the track
    • Ctrl+Scroll for horizontal Zoom
    • Shift+Scroll for vertical pan (in case the vertical zoom has caused exceeding of bounds)
    • Ctrl+Shift+Scroll for vertical Zoom
  • Alternative zoom mode which just scales the track using mouse click-grab + drag
    1. User clicks on a position in the track-viewport | Set that position as an anchor point. If the position is close enough (upto 5 pixels maybe) to the vertical centre, set the centre as the anchor point.
    2. User drags the mouse horizontally | horizontal zoom, the anchor point as the centre
    3. User drags the mouse vertically | vertical zoom, the anchor point as the centre
    • You may call this mode, “Scale Viewport” or sth similar.

Audio setup

If Audacity can end up with functionality to record multiple tracks at once, then put the audio setup in a menu connected to each track.

Of course I haven’t used Audacity 4 yet and I’m just on whatever Arch is shipping rn. So maybe they already have something better.
But relative to what I see, the above UX would be more desirable.

Yes, but it is also good to know why it is recommended.

Yeah, that kind of a condition would require the maintainer to patch the source of the non-updated program.
And that would be fine if there is just a little change, with an alternate function available but if the change requires changing the logic of the application, you are essentially expecting the package maintainer to do the software developer’s work.

The deprecation process is a good way to prevent this.

No, pacman -S firefox will not update your firefox.

pacman -Sy firefox will update your firefox and nothing else.

If you have done pacman -Sy once, then your list of packages and their versions gets updated.
From then on, using pacman -S <package> on any package, whether or not it was already installed, will now get the new version of it.

On the other hand, if you have not updated for long, then if you run pacman -Su to update, it will update nothing, because it looks at the old package list and compares it to installed packages and all of them match.
If you were to use pacman -Sy and then pacman -Su, then it would do the update, similar to pacman -Syu.
If you did pacman -Sy yesterday and then do pacman -Su today, then it will update up to yesterday’s packages and will ignore any updates from that point to today.

This can be considered analogous to apt update and apt upgrade.
If you run apt upgrade without apt update, you only upgrade upto the packages that you got until the last apt update.

If arch used apt, then in this case, the recommendation would be to never use apt update without using apt upgrade right after it.

I am comparing a 10 year old version of Office on Windows 10 with a version of LibreOffice I used in the same week on that same computer on Linux.

My conclusion of “Office has gotten worse” comes from comparing the ability of MS Office 2015 on Win 10 on a Laptop with Core i7 6700H with 8GB DDR4 RAM vs MS Office 2007 on Windows 7 on a Core2Quad with 4GB DDR2 RAM (oh and an old SATA2 HDD here vs SATA3 7200RPM HDD on the laptop) and observing that they are able to open about the same amount of files before starting to hang.
In fact, at that time, I decided to use the old Desktop PC for that particular work, because it was working better in general and was more productive despite me having to keep it off the internet.

I am no longer making that comparison, because I don’t use MS Office on my PC any more.

But I can say this, if I were making that comparison of LibreOffice of that time with MS Office 2007 (which would actually be much older), then LibreOffice would have lost.

No one should have 8GB of RAM in their pc in 2025 either

And guess what saved my old 4GB DDR2 computer from becoming e-waste, making me still be able to use it when I want?
KDE Plasma. Yes, it works well on a system which I wouldn’t even dare try installing Windows 10.

No, LibreOffice is way better nowadays.

And that is mainly thanks to MS Office having gotten way worse than before.

There is a long standing problem where LibreOffice becomes very slow when adding images. That hasn’t been fixed, last I checked.
But thanks to MS Office now being slow all the time and also taking up way too much RAM, meaning that opening 4-5 Word+Excel documents on 8GB RAM means you are constantly using the page file (my exp. with Office 2015 back then), LibreOffice’s problem is not a big deal any more.

Your experience might not match what I am saying, because I am comparing MS Office on Windows vs LibreOffice on Linux.

a lot in garbage bin

Looks like the use-and-throw cartridges philosophy of companies is backfiring, making it easier to make an Open Source one.
They’ll probably try to sue for reusing their stuff.

But I guess, now I get another reason why picking out of trash is criminalised in the US.

As JustEnoughDucks said, this is pretty “cheated”.
Specially the cartridge part, which I considered to be the main barrier to entry.
In fact, the main reason I went through the article was to find out how they managed ink delivery. Hopefully someone tries that part too.

It can sometimes be hard to pick out a single sheet even by hand.
Having to do that with something having a much lower sensitivity definitely has quite a few challenges.

So, if I take an old CRT, fill the tube with ink and squint outward, will I get an inkjet printer?

playable

as in “it does not work on Win 10”?
Because I found it playable, myself. It was on Win 7, if I remember correctly.

better specs to run it than Mankind Divided

Guess I’ll stay content with the old one.

Where, were, we’re.

I never had a problem with those, until I started with stuff like Reddit.

Now, I find myself making the mistake and catching it in proofreading.
Guess my brain is starting to age too.

I am going to refute you over here.
I can’t seem afford a Linux phone (or any mobile device really), simply because they tend to be made by labour in high-pay countries, while I am in a low pay country (which means I am not paid as much either).

And then I can’t afford to try any possibly existing Linux ROMs on my phone, because I can’t afford to brick it at all.

Yeah, really a lot of components in calculation of work.
And every component can be a separate research paper.
Good that I didn’t try to articulate all of them.

That’s only going to affect me if I am reading something particularly boring and don’t really want to read it.
But if that were the case, I wouldn’t be reading it in the first place.

I don’t feel the need to rid myself of distractions, because when I am not in the mood to read a book, I don’t read it.

Also, this “distracted by functionality” logic is what parents seem to use to get rid of stuff with a screen.
I can say for sure, that people being loud in another room is a much bigger distraction.
If your OS is distracting you, you have installed the wrong one.

I really like being able to Ctrl+F through my book.
But there just seems to be some kind of feel to flipping a page that makes me feel more focussed.

Considering that
Power = WorkDone / TimeTaken
and lets just say for this instance that WorkDone is same for the jet and for the teleporter^[1], which is kinda wrong, but won’t matter anyway as you see further.

Then,
Power_teleporter = Power_jet × TimeTaken_jet / TimeTaken_teleporter

then going with “instantaneous”

With limit(TimeTaken_teleporter ⟶ 0)

Power_teleporter ⟶ ∞

Now, someone will ask, what if WorkDone in case of teleportation is actually close to 0.
But that won’t happen, simply because the minimum value for WorkDone in that case would be equivalent to the change in gravitational potential, making it a significant amount as compared to the other limits.

Oh and digital goods do have an energy cost, btw.

Yeh, then it would be teleportation costs.

To advertising companies, maybe yes.
But to the ones making the advertisement, we are the wall between them and their money, which just needs to be gotten out of the way.

Yeah, when I first got a link to a whitepaper in the newsletter, I expected it to be a… a whitepaper (I read the meaning it had back then).
After reading it properly, as if I would an academic paper, I thought it was weird that I didn’t feel like I learnt anything useful.

It would take a while (and a few other whitepapers) for me to realise what it had become.