"In regular prose, a semicolon is most commonly used between two independent clauses not joined by a conjunction to signal a closer connection between them than a period would." Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition, 407.
Or system tray icons or application menus. I have used GNOME since forever, but it became barely usable. You can bring back most functionality with extensions, but they are very buggy.
What you're talking here is what I mentioned: Gnome maybe goes too far with removing some functionality, but I personally haven't used desktop icons in like 10 years and, based on current macOS trend, neither does Apple bet on it. But I am talking about overcluttering and overcomplicating UX, not oversimplifying it. Both things can be true and my KDE complaints are about the former, because I was responding to someone else praising it.
I think you are correct to state that KDE can still improve in a lot of ways. Although I personally find the new screenshot tools to be great: I now use them a lot more than I used to, especially to annotate things.
I was responding to your belief that somehow Gnome is better or that "Gnome just works exactly like you'd expect it to," as you stated. My point is that it does not. And you might not find Desktop icons useful, but I (and millions of other people!) use them every day and have for decades. I could drag and drop icons on the desktop of my family's first computer, a Mac that ran System 7 in the early 1990s. And then our Windows 95 box. And then Windows 98, and 2000, and XP, and a laptop that ran Vista. And then that laptop running Ubuntu with Gnome 2, and then Ubuntu Unity, and then Gnome 3... until Gnome decided, nope, sorry!
You also couldn't modify it. I had previously customized Word to suit my needs. When the ribbon version came out I had a new laptop with that version of Word and was just starting grad school. I lasted a semester before it drove me mad just trying to write papers and I switched to OpenOffice (and I now use LibreOffice). I had some compatibility issues back then when sharing documents but I could write without getting angry. I'm thankful for the ribbon though, since it prompted that change and got me started using open source software.
I'm inclined to agree. Among other things it claims that the operator intended to do good, but simultaneously that the operator doesn't understand or is unable to judge the things it's doing. Certainly seemed like a fury-inducing response to me.
Probably just simple resistance to use of modifier keys in non-technical users, at least on the Windows side. A lot of users never touch a modifier except for Ctrl for copy/paste and maybe Windows for start menu search.
On the Mac side where key combos and modifier use is more widespread among users, it’s probably because there’s no intuitive visual that can be associated with the interaction.
It's not like Apple would frown about the idea of an action having "no intuitive visual associated with it". On iOS, you can scroll to the top by pressing on the status bar as one example.
I mean browser status bar (address bar, load progress etc.) and also you're wrong at least on new phones.
If you tap the island and if there's any activity there, it doesn't scroll up it switches to activity app. You need to hit the top edge of the screen not the island. And that is hit or miss, because 30% you hit the island and often there's activity there.
It was better before when it was not an island and activity was rare, only when you're navigating or on a call. Now every app and it's dog has a live activity in island.
Oh, I get having a visual way of doing it with just a mouse for sure. But for power users or even just-a-little-bit-of-knowledge users it's super quick and convenient. When I had to use Windows for work it drove me nuts that the option wasn't there (ended up finding AltDrag thankfully).
Virginia was a slave state at that time (I think it was 8 slave states to 5 non). The states that eventually joined the confederacy are different from those that had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed.
Indeed Virginia was a slave state at the time, and was later part of the Confederacy, and it was the most underrepresented state in the Senate and electoral college at the founding, since those bodies cause higher population states to be underrepresented relative to their population.
> The states that eventually joined the confederacy are different from those that had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed.
All of the states had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed. But it was already gathering detractors even then. The states that wanted to keep it the most were the ones that ended up in the Confederacy and they were both a minority of the original colonies and a minority of the states at the time of the civil war.
I find that view to be reductive and correspond to simplistic stereotypes of the European Middle Ages (e.g., calling them the "Dark Ages"). It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views, then blames the fact that their values are different then ours all on their religious beliefs (which, too, were varied).
This is not to say that tons of material was not lost, or only preserved in other places (e.g., Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East), but it ignores the learning and innovations of the medieval period (scientific, legal, theological, etc.), and of course the fact that so many classical texts were only preserved because of those monks copying them down.
I find that these reductive stereotypes are... actually true.
Not all the Middle Ages were really Dark, but some of them were.
> It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views
But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it.
And sure, the Reformation was made possible by internal forces within the religious institutions, slowly building ideological foundation for it.
>> It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views
> But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it.
1. Political, economic, cultural, and even religious systems would vary drastically by place and time in Europe. The lifestyle and thoughts of an English peasent in 600CE would be drastically different from the lifestyle of a Spanish or Frankish one, and would differ even more so between 600CE and 900CE.
2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell in 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of traditional Roman lands.
3. The Reformation didn't start until the 16th century, long after the Dark Ages are considered to have ended. Generously you could say it started with the Hussites in the 1400s but that's still skipping over the Renaissance entirely which is the absolute latest end for the Dark Ages since the whole point of it as a historical context is "rediscovering" the Classical works.
> 1. Political, economic, cultural, and even religious systems would vary drastically by place and time in Europe.
This is a non-answer. Yes, political systems were different. The ARE still different.
But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
> 2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell in 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of traditional Roman lands.
It should have started around the time of the move of the Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the fall of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.
If you want a precise date, I propose the date of murder of Hypatia in 415 AD.
It was probably the 540s and the subsequent century or so.
> there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
If you define ~800 AD as the end of the dark ages then yes. By Charlemagne’s time that had already changes.
It wasn’t exactly flourishing in Gaul, and Germany during the Roman times either. Those regions had arguably surpassed their Roman peak by the end of the dark ages.
And of course science and scholarship were preserved in Constantinople during the entire period (of course they had some very dark moments too)
> But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
Ireland is often cited as one such place, thanks to early Christian monasteries. The Carolingian Renaissance was significant in Central Europe, and there were important cultural developments in Slavic lands, though perhaps not involving 'science' as such.
> But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
That seems different from what you originally argued but either way, that's also not really accurate. I'm going to assume you're referring to "Western Europe" here since you're clearly aware of Eastern Roman/Byzantine empire still existing, but that still leaves Al-Andalus, the Carolingian Renaissance, agricultural advancements like the three-field system, wheelbarrows, multiple types of milling technology, and during the latter end you start getting advanced compasses, bells, mechnical watches, and other metallurgy.
Where all of these done in one or two specific places? No, continuing to ignore Byzantium here, but there was a still a variety of advancements happening all the time without which the Renaissance couldn't have happened.
> It should have started around the time of the move of the Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the fall of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.
I mean, you can think that but that's not how or what the term "The Dark Ages" usually refers to. It sounds like you have your own constructed time period in mind and I'm not interested in discussing something I'm not aware of.
> If you want a precise date, I propose the date of murder of Hypatia in 415 AD.
> But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe.
No, it is not. As Stryan noted in another response to your comment, the idea that medieval Europe was somehow one uniform culture is incorrect.
I would also add that the term "Dark Ages" is used in different ways by different people. People who don't know much about the Middle Ages often use that term to describe the whole of the Middle Ages, from roughly the fifth century to the end of the fifteenth (and Christianity had already spread around the Roman Empire by the fifth). Others just the early Medieval period (about 500 to 1000). Some limit the term to periods where we just don't have many sources, or it is perceived that we don't (e.g., I've heard it applied to Visigothic Spain).
Fourteenth-century Humanists (who lived at a time often considered to be part of those so called "Dark Ages"!) first used the term to contrast what they thought were the centuries between their lives and the classical period. They even went so far as to emulate the handwriting of the classical texts they favored, thinking they should because that's how the Romans wrote. They didn't realize they were copying eighth- and ninth-century Carolingian hands instead, texts copied by monks and clerics and court scribes because they valued them. (Lower case letters in modern languages that use the Latin characters, like English, are still based on Carolingian minuscule.)
I would agree that many people view the Middle Ages as a static time, though a point I was trying to make was that the "Dark Ages" can mean different things depending on the person and context.
But more importantly it wasn't static (or "almost entirely stopped")! It's an erroneous conception that, as I said, started with people who lived in the Middle Ages. People in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period would often repeat this, so now many people do too. That doesn't make it correct.
> social and scientific development almost entirely stopped
Well it did in fact sped to an almost unparalleled pace after 1000 AD or so. How much progress do you think there was before the dark ages? The Roman Empire was rather stagnant (especially technologically and there were significant advances in agriculture, metallurgy and industry in the dark ages even before even before 1000 AD
> The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe.
1000-1400s AD was a period of extremely rapid (by historical standards) economic, societal and technological progress. Just compare with the highly stagnant (in relative terms) Roman Empire between 0 AD and 400 AD. It was the opposite of the dark ages…
500-800s AD were not great, but plague, climate change and extreme political instability likely had a bigger impact on that than Christianity…
Honestly I’ve always separated the two in my brain but never really thought about it. Nil = 0 or the absence of a quantity, null = the absence of any value at all.
I know this isn't your main point but I was sadly laughing at that sentence. Pretty much anywhere I go in the U.S. there are giant SUVs. Plus crossovers and even sedans are just getting bigger, with smaller cars like subcompacts being phased out and compact cars growing in size.
"In regular prose, a semicolon is most commonly used between two independent clauses not joined by a conjunction to signal a closer connection between them than a period would." Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition, 407.
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