Tried Fedora with KDE Plasma. Much better than GNOME... And Chrome actually opens. There is even a setting for the mouse wheel. Changed it from 3 lines to 10 lines... And Chrome ignored it. How can the mouse wheel be so broken on Linux?!

It's a damn shame because there is now a way to do proper debugging of AVR devices on Linux. The mouse wheel is the only thing holding me back.

I've installed Fedora in a VM.

Fedora is the most broken distro so far. I installed Chrome x64 and it won't even open. Just hangs and then closes. I tried Chromium too, via Software Manager, and it does the same thing.

The software manager has lots of duplicate entries. It has "Recommended Graphics Applications" twice, and "Recommended Productivity Applications" twice.

The UI, GNOME 3, is batshit. There are no window controls except close! How do you minimize a window?

I'm starting to think that Linux is hopeless on the desktop. My various Pi servers are all great, Debian via SSH, but desktop... It's just broken.

Ask me if you have any questions, things you want to debate or just need to confirm your batshit assumption about me.

Reply here, or if you prefer formal debate I suggest debate.net or similar.

I already asked Mashiki, but for some reason he declined... Come at me.

Got Ubuntu working in a VM by setting it to UEFI mode and opting not to install updates during initial setup. Once it was going I set about getting it updated... But where is the updater?

You can configure updates in the system settings, but not actually start them. There doesn't seem to be a start menu or app draw, just a few random quick launch icons, including some Amazon spam. Eventually resorted to searching.

Mouse wheel is just as broken as Mint. Window controls on the wrong side and oddly placed in full screen mode, menus hidden by default. Apparently the window control position is now hard coded because... Fuck you I guess. Lost interest at that point, going back to Mint.

So, mouse wheel input is fucked in Linux.

There is no way to configure how much the wheel scrolls by. It's fixed. And it's incredibly slow in many apps, and inconsistent between apps because it's up to each one what it does with a single scroll "tick".

Some people have asked on forums and Stack Exchange how to fix it. Turns out, you can't. You can hack around with imwheel, but it translates the wheel into key presses and breaks some apps and is ignored by others. There is libinput, but when I tried it configuration changes had no effect in Cinnamon.

How can something so basic be so broken? It's actually better if you have a trackpad because at least that is configurable.

Chrome is more or less usable if you install an extension to speed up scrolling. Scrolling is not as smooth as Windows, but that could be cause it is running in a VM.

Found some instructions here: http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2014/07/29/japanese-input-on-linux-mint-17-qiana-cinnamon/

They are out of date though. Basically you need to install IBus and you chosen IME (I used mozc) and then add it to the list in the IBus preferences. It says "Japanese" in there by default, but that apparently doesn't do anything and you have to install the IME. I would have thought that the basic Japanese entry would have at least let you enter kana... Oh well.

Anyway, it now actually works better than Windows. The mode keys on the keyboard work, which is something that Windows can't handle apparently. At least not if your OS language is English, in which case you have to hack the registry just to get a working Japanese keyboard layout.

Speaking of layouts, I use a custom one on Windows that has extra alt keys for symbols like degrees, Pi, plus/minus and so on. Maybe I can do that under Linux too.

I'm trying to switch away from Windows 8.1 because Windows 10 is just too much. Decided to start with Linux Mint in a VM.

Installation was smooth and easy. Went for Cinnamon because it's the recommended one. Coped with having a Japanese keyboard and English (not American) locale. Installation was very quick. On first boot a window appeared with some info, one of which was drivers. That offered to install an Intel microcode update so I went for it.

Set screen resolution. Mouse wheel seems laggy, need to look for mouse options later. First thing is updates. The update icon is in the tray area it seems. At first it wasn't doing anything... The output window said that updates were inhibited for some reason. I refreshed it a few times and it found some updates. Selected a local mirror.

Updates installed quickly and relatively easily. Only hitch was when it asked about some Gnome config file that had apparently been changed and did I want to overwrite with the one from the update. I have no idea, the diff output didn't really help so I just went with the updated file. Looked like it was just resetting some default apps.

After that it says my system is up to date (no reboot, much better than Windows) but there are two updates marked as level 5 red security updates... So not up to date? For some reason I have to manually select them, because why wouldn't I want level 5 red security updates..

I seem to be getting asked for my password a lot. Isn't once when I open the update app enough? Reminds me of the bad old days of Windows Vista with UAC prompts every 5 seconds for fairly common tasks.

The font rendering in the little "details" terminal window is crap. Linux has historically had bad font rendering... But most of it looks good. The high DPI support is a bit limited (only 1x or 2x scaling, nothing in-between) but it does at least seem to work reliably in my limited testing. No support for monitors with different scaling settings though (e.g. you have a laptop with 4k display and plug in a 2k external monitor), and lots of stuff seems to use bitmap graphics that look bad zoomed in.

Installed open-vm-tools, not sure if it actually did anything. Clipboard sharing doesn't seem to work.

Trying to get Japanese input to work is a real pain. I installed it as an input language, but it seems that I need to manually start Ibus. Found some instructions but they were out of date. The Ubuntu wiki says load it and press CTRL+space to activate, but it doesn't work. Tried changing it to CTRL+space in the prefs, didn't work. The IME switching key and the kana/roma switching keys don't work. Found a forum post that detailed how to make the daemon auto-start and suggested a restart may be required to make it work. Still did not work.

Gave up with the IME for now, but I need to get it working.

The mouse wheel is very slow. Should be easy to fix... But apparently it needs some hacking around with the command line. Can't be bothered right now... I mean, it's a basic preference. Pick this up later.

Slashdot is finally back on Google+. Follow us if you're interested in keeping up with new posts via Google+. The old page was lost a couple of years ago by the previous ownership, but we are back and every post on Slashdot will appear on our Google+ page.

You can keep up with all our changes and improvements at the Slashdot blog.

http://perens.com/blog/2013/01/16/1/

IT Security is an ever-growing field. Every year more hackers and crackers try to steal you bank PIN number, mess up your nuclear fuel centrifuges, jam your attack dronesâ(TM) control signals, steal your company passwords an other secrets andâ¦. it goes on and on, to the point where, Hord says, over two million (2,000,000) new IT security people will be needed in the next few years. Should you be one of them? Do you have the skills to be one of them? If not, can you acquire those skills? Read the rest and see the video

As of 3:26 PM EST on Wednesday February 1st 2012, Slashdot is now running completely on its new platform!
There were a few rough and long days in the last week completing the final capacity testing and roll out procedure, but it is now complete, and (*knocks on wood*) running smoothly. I owe many thanks to my team of engineers and the site operations team for all their help and support. The Editors here at Slashdot also deserve thanks for their help in testing, and their patience with me as I worked through the more complex pieces of functionality in the site. Though this project took a lot of work, I honestly believe that it was needed in order to allow us to keep Slashdot running, as well as to provide us the structural support we will need to build new features that will allow us to better serve our community into the future.

This is a test journal entry. I am only writing it to validate a test I am running on the system.
Move along, nothing to see here...

Well its been a very long week. Last weekend's move of our back-end database on to a modern MySQL version, and totally updated hardware went very smoothly. I know the editors, my team, and even some of our readers have noticed the improvement in site performance and stability. Awesome.
This weekend we were going to push our luck and try for two in a row, but we have decided to back off slightly, and delay the Apache 2.2 upgrade until the beginning of next week (probably Monday). During the course of the last week we were hitting all of our milestones in getting prepped for the launch, and things were looking good. However our first attempt at putting a fully load of traffic through the new system yesterday uncovered a few minor issues. Some late night coding and lots of caffeine got us ready for a second round of load testing the new setup today. While today's test did show marked improvement over yesterday's, there were still a few issues I was not able to resolve with sufficient confidence today. Another late night and more caffeine, and I could probably have everything ready to launch tomorrow, but I think it is wise to back up a bit, take our time, and be 100% sure that when we roll this launch out it will be rock solid.
On a fun note:
I just loved Spark Fun's new product video for today. I grew up in Boulder, and seeing the fun it looks like these guys get to have at work, if I ever move back to Colorado, that's where I want to work.
But working for Slashdot can be pretty fun too... I'm hoping the coming weeks will include a few episodes of Slash TV that I'll be helping out with... Going to check out The Maker Works here in Ann Arbor, and perhaps some fun with Lasers in the Slashdot/SourceForge parking lot in Dexter.

This is a journal entry testing our first release moving Slashdot on to modern versions of apache and ModPerl. Though this test instance is not available to the public yet, it will be comming soon... (this weekend provided all tests go smoothly between now and then).
Horray for modern software!

Slashdot is now running on upgrade database backend software, and new hardware. Anecdotal evidence suggests improved performance. Was anybody worried? I wasn't. Next week, updated front end web servers!