{"id":1254,"date":"2010-07-12T19:16:43","date_gmt":"2010-07-13T01:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=1254"},"modified":"2010-07-18T12:34:04","modified_gmt":"2010-07-18T18:34:04","slug":"a-short-rant-about-something-that-really-bugs-me-about-linux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=1254","title":{"rendered":"A short rant about something that really bugs me about Linux"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay.\u00a0 Back in the days of Windows 95 and 98, I learned how to customize my setup as best as I could.\u00a0 This included changing desktop wallpaper, the window buttons and title bars, the Start Menu, the sounds, and the mouse cursors.\u00a0 I customized other things too, but let’s not get carried away here.\u00a0 This blog is nothing if not a paragon of cohesive discourse.<\/p>\n

So when I started using Linux in June of 2007, I immediately went off in search of the methods, means and monkeys of customization.\u00a0 How does one change the way the GUI looks and acts in Linux.\u00a0 I discovered that, as a consequence of the open nature of Linux and the apps that make up the rest of any given distro,\u00a0 there are many ways of doing things.\u00a0 This is freedom, but this is also confusion.<\/p>\n

How things get changed depends a lot on which desktop environment you use.\u00a0 For most new Linux desktop users out there, the way GNOME does things is the way things are done.\u00a0 But there are also KDE, Xfce, LXDE and many others to consider.\u00a0 I for one welcome our new ant overlords<\/span> am fond of LXDE simply because it is full-featured, fast and funky.\u00a0 By funky, I mean that it doesn’t cause the bugs with VirtualBox that I experienced with Xfce.\u00a0 I just wanted that last word to start with an “f”.<\/p>\n

So LXDE has an easy way of changing the desktop wallpaper, though it doesn’t allow to “zoom” an image to full size… it only allows to “stretch” it.\u00a0 No biggie.\u00a0 I can crop images myself.\u00a0 With LXDE installed over top of Ubuntu or Xubuntu, I have access to other customization applets that come with those distros.\u00a0 And for the most part they work.\u00a0 But I had recently found myself flummoxed by the inability to choose a non-animated mouse cursor.<\/p>\n

The only options in the GUI mouse cursor selector applet are animated.\u00a0 This was no freakin good for my very first PC, which has specs that are laughable and pathetic today.\u00a0 12 years ago, it was a kick-ass machine, but that’s another rant.\u00a0 Animated cursors on such a machine slow it down noticeably.\u00a0 So when I finally figured out how to get static cursors in my Xubuntu\/LXDE setup, I saw another huge boost in speed.<\/p>\n

Now…. that was on a 12 year old machine.\u00a0 I next tried – just for kicks – the same tweak on my main internet PC.\u00a0 That machine is about 6 years old now.\u00a0 And I noticed another relatively huge boost in speed.\u00a0 This should not have been the case, my logical mind tells me.\u00a0 So I tried it on my parents’ laptop.\u00a0 That’s a low-spec machine I bought them so they could see the wonders of the internet.\u00a0 On that laptop, I saw the same kind of huge boost in speed.<\/p>\n

There’s obviously something else going on here.\u00a0 For me to see the same kind of speed boost on newer machines as on old machines tells me it’s not merely the change in cursor graphics that’s speeding things up.<\/p>\n

What I’m about to say may be wrong, and I ask now that my readers (I think I can safely use plural here) correct me on some points.\u00a0 But here goes.\u00a0 The static mouse cursor that speeds things up so much is “drawn” by X-11, which is the basic software layer between the user and the hardware.\u00a0 This diagram shows what I’m talking about:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nIt’s my belief that those dumbass, cartoony looking puffy animated mouse cursors that come with Ubuntu are drawn by something layered on top of X-11.\u00a0 This would mean that not only does the system have to work harder in making the actual constant animations to the cursor, it has to go through two different software sets to make the ugly puffy cartoony mouse cursors appear in the first place.<\/p>\n

So help me out here.\u00a0 Did I get it right or am I off on a wild tangent of stupid?\u00a0 Either is possible.<\/p>\n

Whatever caused the big speed boost I saw on all machines, it reveals to me a problem with the way the mouse cursor situation is handled in Linux.\u00a0 If I had the smarts to program code, I’d take a closer look at it all and try to come up with a solution myself.\u00a0 But I don’t and I can’t, so I’ll just bitch and whine.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay.\u00a0 Back in the days of Windows 95 and 98, I learned how to customize my setup as best as I could.\u00a0 This included changing desktop wallpaper, the window buttons and title bars, the Start Menu, the sounds, and the mouse cursors.\u00a0 I customized other things too, but let’s not get carried away here.\u00a0 This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,7,6,26],"tags":[86,361],"class_list":["post-1254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-linux","category-lxde","category-ubuntu","category-windows","tag-complaining","tag-mouse-cursors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1254"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1258,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1254\/revisions\/1258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}