Hacker News: lunar_rover

New comment by lunar_rover in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

lunar_rover — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 02:08:18 +0000

Sadly, even interfaces that do support keyboard navigation tend to implement it poorly. Microsoft Office is probably the gold standard here, almost everything can be navigated using mnemonics, all keypresses are buffered and the user seldom needs more than 5 presses to get anywhere.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak"

lunar_rover — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:26:54 +0000

Tech debt, primarily. Flatpak is designed to be able to package apps not designed with it in mind.

If neither compatibility nor resources are of concern then integrating true Mandatory Access Control into both the UX and the entire tech stack would be the best way forward.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Half-Life 2 running natively on HaikuOS"

lunar_rover — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:12:45 +0000

Source uses licenced middleware such as Havok so SDKs are likely all we're going to get officially. Source 2 might be a different story if HL3 releases one day since Valve replaced audio and physics with in-house technologies.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Free the Icons"

lunar_rover — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:23:50 +0000

It's part of "What's been keeping Linux from having good UX up to this point?"

Making good products means lots and lots of drudgery, just for fun volunteers aren't going to touch that, and the stereotypical FOSS contributor is the type that's clueless about UX and puts stability above everything else.

Have fun convincing someone feature x is too overengineered to be usable by anyone who's not an alpha geek and should be simplified to a single switch. Not to mention proper large scale usability testing likely being unaffordable.

So designers stayed far, far away.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Free the Icons"

lunar_rover — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:09:27 +0000

Windows Vista primarily suffers from technical issues. Aero is virtually unchanged in 7.

New comment by lunar_rover in "F* file system – file search that reads SSD directly bypassing OS kernel"

lunar_rover — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 23:47:25 +0000

The repo summary has multiple typos.

New comment by lunar_rover in "The Traditional Vi (2007)"

lunar_rover — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:04:58 +0000

This only works on large enough tablets. On phones the page isn't readable without a 3x zoom.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Steam Machine"

lunar_rover — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:14:30 +0000

At best it'll take over Steam hardware survey as the standard spec of PC gaming.

I can't see anyone other than enthusiasts buying it over a normal console or Windows laptop.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Loupe – A iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see"

lunar_rover — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:56:46 +0000

It's likely allowed in some miscellaneous permissions file from a bygone era. The lines are probably over a decade old now.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file"

lunar_rover — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:16:24 +0000

> One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"

You click the previous folder in the navigation bar.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file"

lunar_rover — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:12:57 +0000

Most works GNOME did are somewhat invisible to users. GNOME is the main driving force behind immutable OS and containerised sandboxed apps, both are intended to make the OS maintain itself and simplify software management to single/zero click.

Valve adopted them afterwards and now everyone in the KDE team wants to join the ride.

New comment by lunar_rover in "VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'"

lunar_rover — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 17:19:19 +0000

If you ban IPsec ESP people will start using WireGuard on random ports.

If you ban WireGuard using DPI people will start using SSL VPNs.

If you ban SSL you ban the entire internet.

New comment by lunar_rover in "A Wayland Compositor in Minecraft"

lunar_rover — Sat, 23 May 2026 03:31:35 +0000

Wayland is a bunch of amateurs trying to be strict and secure and the end result is everyone opening their own security holes to make it usable. It's working now, mostly.

KDE got some kind of video bridge recently which is an insane workaround for something that should've just worked.

New comment by lunar_rover in "1024000^2 Blocks, 2B2T Minecraft Server World Download Project, and Discoveries"

lunar_rover — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:33:04 +0000

> I'm so continuously confused why Minecraft doesn't have a show-off mode where a team of people can build something, and then someone else can spectate it, without causing undue server load.

You'll be confused by Minecraft in general then. Mojang's core team seems like they never changed a bit in all these years despite becoming a billion dollar studio, for better or for worse. Last time I played it, mods can still make the game run twice as fast.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features"

lunar_rover — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:36:59 +0000

It might be the year of Linux gaming systems. The desktop went from terrible to bad and is still at least a decade behind unless some organisation invests dozens of millions and gets themselves an actual professional dev team.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features"

lunar_rover — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:07:40 +0000

Right now AMD is the better choice due to support from Valve. It might change in the future due to Red Hat's effort.

New comment by lunar_rover in "50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers"

lunar_rover — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:07:08 +0000

On mobile the map prevents the user from scrolling down, you need to drag the padding area instead. Google maps embed doesn't have this issue as it requires two fingers to pan.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Dirtyfrag: Universal Linux LPE"

lunar_rover — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:26:43 +0000

To solve the issue from the source, you need to enforce security through means like mandatory access control. The problem is that existing desktop and server systems are too mature for that to be practical, you'll have to rework almost everything and users will certainly reject it violently due to the breakages.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Dirty Frag: Universal Linux LPE"

lunar_rover — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:15:11 +0000

In many ways non mobile computers are very much still stuck in 1999. Android is significantly more secure than other Linux systems because it's much younger and had the chance to integrate mandatory access control into the entire stack.

New comment by lunar_rover in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"

lunar_rover — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:50:56 +0000

> What should Google do when a change they are making to protect regular less-technical users breaks functionality needed by more advanced users?

Put it behind an USB ADB only toggle and be more transparent to avoid slippery slope?