Fwd: Iggdrasil, a new amazing screenreader
Sorry if anyone gets this message twice, I got tripped up by the
default reply to being a choice between the last respondant and
everyone instead of something sensible like "just the list".
I might have missed some details on account of several people quoting
huge chunks of the conversation and their short replies getting lost
in the quote walls(a string of natural 1s upon whoever thought quoting
the entirety of the last message should be the default when replying
to e-mail), but some of my thoughts on what has been said:
Jordan, I don't like to call people out by name, but while I feel like
everyone else in this thread has expressed their opinions in a way
that is respectful to others, your comments have come across as you
stating opinions as fact and that anyone who disagrees is an idiot. I
hope that isn't how you intended your comments to come across and have
just fallen into the trap of things sounding harsher in text than when
spoken, but please try to be more respectful to those who prefer a
different Linux setup from your own. And for the record, I'm a fan of
Debian as well, and if not for a few things, I'd happily switch to a
vanilla Debian setup instead of running a highly customized
derivative. That Debian "just works" for you is great, but it doesn't
"Just Work" for me and there are others in the same boat. And I don't
think anyone wants you to go back to Windows, we just don't want to
feel like we're being insulted for thinking Debian isn't perfect and
not all other distros are garbage. Again, I hope I just grossly
misreading your comments, but that's how you've been coming across and
I don't think I'm alone iin that.
As to the original topic, my only real complaint with Orca is that its
written in Python and the overhead that introduces, and Yggdrasil
being written in Rust doesn't really address that since it's trading
an interpreted language I'm at least somewhat familiar with with one I
know absolutely nothing about. Honestly, I'd be more interested in a
project to rewrite Orca in C++ with a goal of improving performance on
weak hardware, but I understand the reasons that is unlikely to ever
happen and that I'm unusual for being so young yet finding C++ less
frustrating to write code in than Python.
Also, isn't Debian 10.1 a very old version at this point? I don't
always keep the correspondence between version numbers and codenames
straight, but didn't Debian 11 become stable several months ago at
this point? And I thought the point releases for Debian 10 were at
least up to 10.6. Is whoever is having trouble with Debian sure they
are using the latest stable release? And since Debian 9 is working for
them, I'm curious if an upgrade breaks things...
As for secure boot... I might be misinformed, but I thought that was
just a Microsoft ploy to try and prevent people from nuking
preinstalled Windows they don't want but is nearly impossible to avoid
without paying extra in favor of installing Linux... Is there any
downside to disabling Secure Boot and using Legacy Boot if you aren't
planning a Linux/Windows Dual boot?
As for Slint, while I haven't tried it due to lack of spare hardware I
can easily setup to experiment with and reluctance to try anything
that requires me to learn a new package management system, I applaud
the efforts that have gone into it and wish there was a similar
project based on Debian(The Adriane component of Knoppix comes close,
and my system is customized from Adriane Knoppix, but Knoppix has
priorities aside from just making what its based on more accessible,
and its nature as a Live Distro makes it subpar as an installed system
running from hard drive) or if there was an effort to make the scripts
Slint uses to steamline installation of accessibility tools and easily
switch between them on the fly could be downloaded and run on a
variety of distros(imagine if Debian had a "reader-switcher" package
that recommended all the major console screen readers and then let you
switch between the installed ones on the fly, and because its in
Debian, it gets inherited by the umpteen dozen distros derived from
Debian... Because, as much as I love SBL and wish it was available on
a wider selection of distros, there is at least one case where I find
espeakup's "try to read everything as it appears on screen" behavior
beneficial instead of annoying, and I'm sure there are others who
spend substantial amounts of time in the console who would enjoy that
flexibility.
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