Coming back to touchpads and mouse issues together with Linux, recalled from last year when I had to buy a new mouse for my desktop Linux machine but the one I selected worked terribly, on the package it was mentioned being compatible with Windows only, the cursor would barely move and if so quite erratically, not touching the mouse and the cursor would start to wander slowly upwards until hitting the upper edge where it would do some random bounces like a little bug wanting to get through the window.
Now, there are barely any mouse manufacturer mentioning Linux compatibility, but there are basically two compatibility groups to keep i mind, either it's Windows only and most probably these will not work well with Linux, the other group of mouses are triple OS (Windows, Mac and Android(or was it Chrome OS) ) compatible, these will have a much higher chance working with Linux.
I think the Windows only have a small driver that gets installed when plugged into the machine and may be the culprit causing Linux incompatibility.
As for touchpads and Linux, I had a little look around and it seems like those machines that wont work, usually don't seem to have any fix, the best is to be very cautious when buying a laptop to research thoroughly whether it will work with Linux, or resort to external mouse.
Now, there are barely any mouse manufacturer mentioning Linux compatibility, but there are basically two compatibility groups to keep i mind, either it's Windows only and most probably these will not work well with Linux, the other group of mouses are triple OS (Windows, Mac and Android(or was it Chrome OS) ) compatible, these will have a much higher chance working with Linux.
I think the Windows only have a small driver that gets installed when plugged into the machine and may be the culprit causing Linux incompatibility.
As for touchpads and Linux, I had a little look around and it seems like those machines that wont work, usually don't seem to have any fix, the best is to be very cautious when buying a laptop to research thoroughly whether it will work with Linux, or resort to external mouse.
The last days Linux is getting seriously on my nerves with their insistence on pushing those new-fangled things like systemd, pulseaudio, pipewire, wayland etc through my throat. New isn't better. Far from.
Using Linux since last century but each new iteration is pushing me away.
As for the poster above, I never had any issue with linux and mice or touchpads or those (what's the PC correct name for that rubber button between the keys?). Only the touchpad on my ancient Lenovo (the rough structured one) that was not nice to use. I have here a breeding colony of Logitech wireless usb mice (*) that work fine on any OS I plug them in.
(*) 3 working sets, 3 dongles without mice and 2 mice without dongle....
Using Linux since last century but each new iteration is pushing me away.
As for the poster above, I never had any issue with linux and mice or touchpads or those (what's the PC correct name for that rubber button between the keys?). Only the touchpad on my ancient Lenovo (the rough structured one) that was not nice to use. I have here a breeding colony of Logitech wireless usb mice (*) that work fine on any OS I plug them in.
(*) 3 working sets, 3 dongles without mice and 2 mice without dongle....
Now there's a picture that made me laugh!
I'm still having issues with the trackpad operation, having to resort to using the up/down arrow keys to get scrolling to behave in a tolerable way. It's approaching dealbreaker, but I suppose I shouldnt be so picayune, considering.
I hate it when I read stuff like Firefox is losing popularity. I guess in the limit as t -> infinity, it's bend the knee to the giants because of some little thing "Oh the scrolling doesnt work perfect - waaa!". Or you cant get any hardware that works at all, because it's impractical to manufacture anything that doesnt "kowtow" to the defacto standard.
I think Firefox has become such a giant blob of software that is has become more of a load for the pc than the original IE it meant to be a more functional replacement for. If you want to compile it on linux it has become a sort of benchmark for how good your pc can manage that. Together with OpenOffice and Rust.
pulseaudio is the only thing that really made me react this way, and it was easy enough to revert back to straight ALSA.
Wayland? I love it. The transition time has been a bit rocky, but now Wayland is solid, full-featured, modern, secure, etc. DE choice makes a big difference, of course. Gnome embraced Wayland pretty early, so they’ve got things working really well now. Speaking of Gnome, I hated it when they transitioned from Gnome 2 to 3, which is why MATE (based on Gnome 2) was my DE of choice for a really long time. Years later, here I am using Gnome 47 and loving it. I had to force myself through the discomfort of unfamiliarity and now I am glad I did.
Yesterday I was watching a series of YouTube videos on Hyprland, which looks to be a great tiling window manager. Admittedly, I find TWMs awkward but I understand why they are so efficient for a lot of people. I love how everything is so configurable/customizable in Hyprland, though. I might give it a shot.
For me, all the new things that come along are an opportunity to learn and find different ways to get things done.
I would too. Except it was a fill in pdf which had to be returned as a fill in pdf. The IRS provides a fillable pdf that works with evince. Why fincen opts to use one that requires adobe is baffling. And really, it could have been a bloody text file it was so simple.
If you are just filling in a PDF form for printing, the form can be rasterized and imported into Gimp. I have done this for two decades.
Tax Season
Ed
Tax Season
Ed
Nope, fincen wanted the pdf uploaded back to fulfill the rqmt. If your US and a small biz(S/LLC), you may want to check if you need to do it. It is stupid, but under the current admin, I don't trust I would not get with the fine of up to 600/day for not doing it.
Then I'd just use a Windoze box to get the job done. Life is too short to fight with software.
@jjasniew I neglected to recommend this before because it might be considered to be a bit advanced for a new Linux user, but you are obviously quite capable and you seem to have a very high level of attention to detail. I do not intend to condescend here. Heck, I could be completely wrong, right? 🤓
At some point you will re-install Linux from scratch, either to clean up the mess you’ve made or to simply try another distro. We’ve all been there. Anyone who says otherwise is fibbing. When you do, I recommend using btrfs file system and configuring snapshots. The big advantage of doing this is that you can roll back your system to an older snapshot if/when you (or a system update, or whatever) make a mess of things. Obviously, it would be undesirable to roll back any work you have done in the meantime, so this has to be set up in an intelligent way that only rolls back the system files.
I won’t pretend that I can configure all this from scratch . Some people here probably can. However, I found an excellent howto on the Debian forum. I followed it precisely and it works perfectly. It isn’t a substitute for redundant storage or backups, but it is amazingly powerful and convenient. Here is the howto, https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=781086&hilit=Btrfs+snapshots#p781086 Obviously this one is Debian-specific. Perhaps you’ll try Debian in the future. Any good distro can do this, though, and some will be easier (or more difficult) to configure. Just make sure whichever method you use has the attention to detail necessary to get it right, without any surprises (like rolling back and losing recent files/work from your home folder).
At some point you will re-install Linux from scratch, either to clean up the mess you’ve made or to simply try another distro. We’ve all been there. Anyone who says otherwise is fibbing. When you do, I recommend using btrfs file system and configuring snapshots. The big advantage of doing this is that you can roll back your system to an older snapshot if/when you (or a system update, or whatever) make a mess of things. Obviously, it would be undesirable to roll back any work you have done in the meantime, so this has to be set up in an intelligent way that only rolls back the system files.
I won’t pretend that I can configure all this from scratch . Some people here probably can. However, I found an excellent howto on the Debian forum. I followed it precisely and it works perfectly. It isn’t a substitute for redundant storage or backups, but it is amazingly powerful and convenient. Here is the howto, https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=781086&hilit=Btrfs+snapshots#p781086 Obviously this one is Debian-specific. Perhaps you’ll try Debian in the future. Any good distro can do this, though, and some will be easier (or more difficult) to configure. Just make sure whichever method you use has the attention to detail necessary to get it right, without any surprises (like rolling back and losing recent files/work from your home folder).
Thanks, I appreciate your reply! I'm sure this idea will benefit others as well.
I did. But I don't allow that box access to the internet, EVER. And it did not have adobe on it. So on Linux I downloaded the windows adobe acrobat sw (600MB which is absolutely insane) moved it to a thumbdrive, and installed it on the windows box. And glad I did it that way. Adobe's click thru license is the generic we can change the terms any time we want and we will connect to the internet when we want to do whatever we want. So after clicking ok, it threw up some ads, which explains the 600MB, complained a bit about no connection and I did my form. Saved the form to thumb drive, loaded onto linux and uploaded to fincen. The idea that people don't care that their privacy has been completely compromised by this stuff amazes me.
As we know, there's many kinds of people. I happened to work in the tech industry, where they eventually went to ridiculous lengths for "security", so that exposure could have thrown the context of it into some level of conscious awareness. Others work, as hard to believe, could not involve computers so much, where mine was all about computers for 37 years or so.
I thought I read a "Zuck" quote, maybe many years old by now, that went something like "People just submit it when asked. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb effs."
I'm sure many people are wholly unaware of that "attitude", as they enter information, click OK through setup pages of a product from one of these corps.
I remembered my mum's oldish Lenovo A6 AMD laptop.
Never got around to updating that to SSID.
It runs dog slow on W10.
She's happy with a Chromebook.
Will try Linux mint Cinnamon on it first.
Creating a Bootable USB as I write.
Will be good to try first, not on my main two usage laptops..
Never got around to updating that to SSID.
It runs dog slow on W10.
She's happy with a Chromebook.
Will try Linux mint Cinnamon on it first.
Creating a Bootable USB as I write.
Will be good to try first, not on my main two usage laptops..