- This topic has 62 replies, 13 voices, and was last updated Apr 22-3:42 am by BobC.
-
Posts
-
Brian Masinick
@calciumsodium: Great suggestion!
Keep it simple, yet if anyone does want information, provide an easy mechanism to find it.
--
Brian MasinickModdIt
re post from calciumsodium, pretty much the cheatsheet method mentioned in an earlier post.
Another name is a quick reference card. We have several, common gimp usage, Libeoffice calc,
one for writer. One in work for ytfzf.
Personal cheat sheet is made however a user feels like. For a while I made some A3 size, still
make flip reference mouse pads for calc and writer.@marcellocripe, please never think I am knocking you when I post. We are all trying to find
solutions which will work and not make things worse for local users. As i already wrote mentality
of users in different countrys has to be respected. personaly I am troubled by my lack of knowledge
about the harsch realitys of life in present day Brazil.
christophe
Is antiX for people using this operating system or is it for reviewers who don’t use antiX and also don’t frequent this important forum?
I think that’s the bottom line. Other opinions don’t matter.
Dont know what arandr does? Too afraid to open it? Do an online search. Or just open it and its pretty obvious what its for. If you completely cater to the “I dont know anything and cant be bothered to find out” beginner you’ll alienate the more experienced crowd.
confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019
BobC
I fixed the Internet menu in an hour. I tried to make the menu options easier for reviewers to follow. I copied the .desktop files I fixed to the antix sub sub-folder where Refresh Menu find my copies first. No code was changed. If I missed any or my wording can be improved, please suggest.
It took some time to research some programs I didn’t know. Would anyone offer to translate the Name= field for another language to test the difficulty and amount of effort needed? I could upload a zip of the files?
If liked, we could do more, else stop.
Attachments:
Robin
Hello BobC,
glad to see here some advance, many thanks for your approach.It is crucial to understand for native English speakers, that it is often quite difficult for non-native speakers to guess what is meant by many of the English descriptions in case these are kept very short, omitting important pieces of contextual information needed to understand (and also translate) the entries correctly. So best is always to add at least one word describing what a program mainly does, right as you did in your screenshot. Moreover we should take into account, many program descriptions are available only in English language in Internet. So in many cases for people not speaking English language, there is literally no chance to research online for a menu entry we use.
We have set up exactly for this purpose a resource at transifex, antiX community contributions some time ago. Even when this transifex site is meant originally for foreign language translations, we have set up in a way also the English original texts of resources (UI of programs, Desktop files, Video subtitles) can be fixed by English native speakers without need of touching the original source code of a program or its package.
Please check out the English language section of the resource »antix desktop files« (antiX-community-contributions at transifex) to edit these strings displayed in antiX. (Joining as a so called »translator« is always for free, and needed to access the English language strings as well.)
So we plan to create an apt installable debian package for antiX from all these improved desktop files. A user can install it, and re-installing it after any system updates will bring back all the specially antiX adapted desktop files in a single shot, which get overwritten by system updates as long they are not accepted by the upstream source packages.
For sure, we do our very best to upstream the results to the original program authors and maintainers so the improvements and translations might find their way into the original package one day, but this is second only when it’s about how antiX should look and feel, in English and in foreign languages.
This approach would enable us also to provide different flavours of the antiX desktop files set, by simply creating two different packages: One with short entries, and one other containing entries providing a bit more information. (By now we have set up only one file set at transifex, and in case you consider this as being advantageous, I’ll set up the second package, so we have one for long entries, and one for short entries.)
Marcelo did a good job correcting the files coming back from transifex manually, since the script I’ve set up still fails in specific cases to build up a desktop file correctly. In these cases the file needs manual fixing by now, until I have managed to fix the script lines which harvest the improved entries from transifex.
Due to the fail of both my Live USB sticks recently I had no time to proceed with this project, but it will go on now soon, I have fixed the system meanwhile.See request at IceWM https://github.com/bbidulock/icewm/issues/646
As BobC pointed out by linking to the IceWM site, it is obviously not possible to have Mouse-over tooltip functionality in the menus in IceWM. This is very sad, since this would be the most easy way to transport the information the user needs in the very moment he needs it, without widening the menu itself unnecessarily. Not looking up some crazy word-creation in a long list file, no research in internet before being able to make something of the entries. For sure, it should have been de-/activable in control center if the tooltip way would have worked.
Biggest real world example an android phone, like being thrown in to deep water. Crazy app names,
no handbook worth reading. And we all manage.That’s not a worthwhile example, I believe. Firstly, what you can learn from the simplification of the smartphone user interface is: You never find straight away what you are looking for. Sure, you can experiment hours and hours again, try and error, only to notice in the end: It’s not there, since some manufacturer didn’t want you to see or access it. Or because it is well hidden behind a super-simplified surface. I believe this concept is nothing we want to copy in antiX. It’s enough most of recent web pages suffer from this super-simplifying malady.
Keep it simple, yet if anyone does want information, provide an easy mechanism to find it.
This Idea I support, but I attach importance to the question, for whom it should be easy. Easy for the creators, or easy for the users? Providing e.g. only a list file containing hundreds of entries to the user is actually easy — for the one who creates it. But it is quite circuitous for users, having constantly to look up something stupid what could be self-explaining at first sight as well.
Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.
Thanks, Robin. I agree with all you said. I tried a distro that was in Russian, once, because it had an app I wanted to copy. I never was able to understand enough to get it to work at all. I try to imagine myself speaking another language and trying just to USE a computer to do basic tasks. I see many here trying, and they are not lazy people, but I can read between the lines and see they struggle, but yet they are undaunted. I hope this might help them as well.
If the reviewer who speaks perfect English and is familiar with Gnome based Linux is having trouble figuring out what the Cherrytree app is for, what chance do other non-English speaking people have? So if I take 5 or 10 minutes to figure it out enough to add a few words to the menu that give an idea of what its for, it saves everyone else that same effort, and gives the reviewer some words to read that help people, rather than showing them a screen and providing no information other than its name.
Progress can be made a little at a time, if one is willing to try…
PPC
@BobC – I haven’t yet tried your improved .desktop files, but I liked your idea of having “more descriptive” names for antiX applications.
To me, the almost perfect solution to have identifiable menu entries is something like jgmenu does – Always show the localized “Name” for an app. If “Name” and “GenericName” are different then also show GenericNameIf more applications have very descriptive names, then there’s no need to use GenericName on the .desktop file- ex: “antiX Updater” has no need for a GenericName “Updater antiX OS” (or something similar)… But “Debinstaller”, for most people, will be better if they also see something like “Install .deb packages”
So: ideally – for antiX exclusive apps – have a descriptive Name field (and then there’s no need for a GenericName field in the .desktop file). For all other apps, it would be better if antiX’s menu, by default, displayed also a GenericName (if it exists and is different from the Name). I agree with anticapitalista: displaying “Description” on the menu would be overkill.
I took a look at IceWM’s git and saw the talk about displaying “Name (GenericName)” – I think it’s a great option – useful and does not treat users like they are dumb.A “database” of all applications included in antiX would be a great idea – even better would be if app-select was patched to also display and search in the “GenericName” field- it would be a self updating application database, no further work needed (well other than modifying app-select itself), once the “updated” .desktop packages are made available under antiX.
On the idea of having a .deb package that would install over the “default” .desktop files, replacing them with ones with (localized) Name and/or GenericName – it’s a nice idea, I thought about that myself. But it requires a script, to only replace .desktop files that exist in the /usr/share/applications folder- so we have 2 choices if we go that path:
– add that script to antiX’s post .deb installation process or
– change the update menu script to run that script and “fix” any changed menu entries (whose .desktop files got replaced when they were updated, for example).P.
anticapitalista
Any deb package that overwrites .desktop files must make sure that conflicts are avoided.
It is not enough to just overwrite the existing .desktop file. apt will complain about .desktop already existing in another deb package and will fail when installing the package leaving apt in an unstable state.Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.
antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.
@anticapitalista- I think that the .deb package I suggested does not conflict with installed packages. To clarify, I was thinking about this: the proposed .deb package installs the costumized .desktop files on a certain folder, say ~/.antix-descriptive-desktops. The script it self would read the /usr/share/applications folder and check each entry, one by one. If a .desktop file exists in both the ~/.antix-descriptive-desktop and /usr/share/application folders then copy it from the first folder to the second, overwriting it… I can’t, right now write that script, but I think it would not be particularly complex and would not risk breaking the management of packages by apt…
P.
Edit: I just found an example (here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53577193/check-if-same-file-exists-in-another-directory-using-bash ) of how to do part of what I propose, but I did not test it:
for file in "$firstPath"/*; do if [[ -f "$secondPath/${file##*/}" ]]; then # file exists, do something- (PPC: copy file from firstPath to secondPath with something like cp -R "$firstPath/$file" "$secondPath/$file") fi done- This reply was modified 1 year ago by PPC.
- This reply was modified 1 year ago by PPC.
- This reply was modified 1 year ago by PPC.
It is not enough to just overwrite the existing .desktop file. apt will complain about .desktop already existing in another deb package and will fail when installing the package leaving apt in an unstable state.
Many thanks, anticapitalista, for this hint. I am not familiar with building apt packages by now, just managed to create my very first one manually for the hexchat-encrypt-translate plugin only. So it’s a long way for me still . But luckily this is antiX community. And I’m sure we’ll see some more helping hands to make the desktop file package work in the end. I believe a postinstall script should be able to handle this problem you describe, if I am not mistaken. Then we only have to make sure the projected desktop file package is installed and configured as the very last one always. Not sure whether or how this could be achieved.
Update: (since PPC’s reply wasn’t visible to me still when writing)
There it is already, the first approach how to overcome the problem… Many thanks PPC!the proposed .deb package installs the costumized .desktop files on a certain folder,
That sounds promising to me. Let’s write this script together, once you have some spare time again. No need to hurry. We’ll do it once we have time for it.
- This reply was modified 1 year ago by Robin.
Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.
anticapitalista
You also need to take care of what might happen the other way round ie if there is an upstream upgrade of a deb package overwriting any changes made by an antiX package
Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.
antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.
@anticapitalista The trick is probably: The apt package doesn’t have to make the changes itself, but the postinstall script will have to do this. So apt doesn’t know the files have been replaced by our package. Consequently the update of regular packages will work flawlessly, simply overwriting our replaced files. So all we have to do is to run the desktop file package as the very last one when performing a system update.
I checked already when writing aCMSTS scipt any replaced desktop files will remain until next system (or package) update, and the updated packages will overwrite the replaced files without notice. No problem here.@PPC Its actually not difficult to set up some regex to grep for the files and copy them in place by a simple bash script. Probably we can do it as a postinstall script already.
Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.
@PPC Its actually not difficult to set up some regex to grep for the files and copy them in place by a simple bash script. Probably we can do it as a postinstall script already.
Yes – please check the example script I edited to my previous post. Probably it’s very near to a working version – simply comment out everything except the “cp” command and add, at the start of it something like this (please double check everything, I tend to make lots of typos):
firstPath=”$HOME/.antix-descriptive-desktops”
secondPath=”/usr/share/applications”
blur13
Any desktop files placed in ~/.local/share/applications/ take precedence over the system-wide files so those that wish to have a modified menu could simply put their modified desktop files there.
@blur13- very nice tip- so the proposed script only has to copy the adapted .desktop files over to ~/.local/share/applications, and there probably won’t be any need to worry about an application update writing over the changes!…
…But I’m wondering – is there no application that installs it’s .desktop file there? My local applications folder is pretty packed…
P.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
