Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux

[Benjamin Tayehanpour <benjamin@example.com>]

On 30 December 2013 01:23, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
> Dunno, haven't looked closely at it.  X clearly needs to go; the
> underlying architecture is too hard to secure and the division of
> labor is somewhat wrong.

Do you have any tips on recommended reading if I want to know more
about why X is the way it is?

> But the potential replacements are, well,
> "plural" and it's been a year since I've had time to play with that
> kind of stuff.

Wayland seems to be the only "X-killer" project which is actually
going places. At least as far as I know. First off, the alternatives
are few to begin with; of these, many seem to have stalled in
development since they depend on library versions way past the sell-by
date in most popular distributions. MicroXWin has some impressive
benchmarks, but wants to handle graphics in the kernel (ew) with a
closed-source kernel module (triple-ew and a stomp). I do keep an eye
on directfb, though.

> Well, sometimes humans can do a better job of cramming content into
> tight spaces and the like.  Eg, when I'm writing an exam, TeX often
> makes bad decisions about where to put lines, dividing 4 line
> paragraphs in the middle, or separating part e from parts a, b, c, and
> d of a problem.  But in general I agree with you, and certainly when
> you've got a 500-row Excel spreadsheet that you want to divide into
> pages sanely, it's a real PITA to have to redo everything from p1 when
> you've got 5 rows of slop on the last page, and Excel keeps reducing
> the the magnification, and ....  You really just want to type
> \nopagebreak and get on with your life!

You're preaching to the choir. :-)

I just wish I could *get* TeX. My résumé is written in XeTeX, and I
use (and like) Lilypond for my music engraving needs which is
essentially TeX for sheet music, but with TeX (et al.) I haven't yet
reached the place where I think it all makes sense. It's probably due
to lack of time or dedication on my part, but hitherto most tutorials
(and even some documentation) too often state "we'll ignore what this
actually means and move on for now". I don't like that.