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For those interested in silent computing, the website Silent PC Review has a lively forum. Sadly, it has been years since the owner contributed any of his extensive reviews of CPUs, PSUs and cases.
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http://www.fanlesstech.com is another neat blog about silent computing.
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I use my own pw. Unixy and similar to pass (a wrapper over GPG), but with no information leaking and single-file DBs.
The global menu bar issue is something I deeply care about. Linux has a very good global menu bar, but people either are moving away from it or do not know that it is available. Just use Ubuntu 16.04 and see in action.
Since 2014 Ubuntu modified GTK and Qt so that all desktop applications made use of a global menu bar. Everything works now perfectly. Ubuntu 16.04 with the default Unity desktop is a very usable desktop. All my non-techy acquaintances like it. These modifications have, however been refused upstream, because they do not fit the GNOME 3 paradigm (most of which I like).
I really do not understand why people are against global menus. They are better, scientifically proven better. And they save a lot of vertical space, that in modern super-wide monitors is a precious resource.
Why doesn’t the global menu bar receive the love it deserves?
Citation needed
From Fitt’s law [1] and Steering Law [2] comes that global menu bars are much easier to access.
Fitt’s law tells you that global menu bars are better because they can be reached by moving the cursor to an infinitely big target [3]. In other words, you can throw your mouse pointer somewhere up and it will surely and easily reach global menu bar.
Steering Law tells you navigating along/inside a vertical or horizontal tunnel is hard if the tunnel is thin (hello badly implemented JS menus that disappear when you move to a submenu). In the case of a global menu bar navigating it is easy because it is infinitely tall, just push your cursor slightly up.
Global menu bars are easier to access, but are they faster to access? This a good question, because, on average, the global menu bar is farther away than the local menus. It turns out that, on average, they are equally fast to access. [4] Windows requires more aiming precision (slower) but less travel distance (faster). MacOS requires less aiming precision (faster) but more travel distance (slower).
All things being equal, simplicity should always preferred, because it means that more people can fruitfully use a system, for example people with disabilities.
This makes sense, thank you for the detailed response.
how does it play with focus modes other than click-to-focus? e.g. in focus-follows-mouse, if you have to move your cursor through another window en route to the global bar, it would rebind to the new application.
Focus-follows-mouse has a delay before switching applications. Move across fast, no app switching. Or go around (fairly easy with non-overlapping windows).
I haven’t tried these global menus in Linux, as an Enlightenment user, but how long ia the delay and is it configurable?
I’d tie it to motion, because I appreciate my desktop being fast and all kinds of stalls annoy me. I’d imagine this to be very true if I have to touch a pointer device.
It appears to be a hard-coded 25ms delay, at least in GNOME shell. Others may implement it differently.