In the latest edition of The Medium Newsletter, featured stories include:
• Abductive reasoning and the important discomfort of doubt, by Nate Sowder
• Managing #anxiety with awareness, by Jud Brewer
• Political messaging in the #JamesGunn reboot of #Superman, by @colehaddon
• Decline of motor skills in the #touchscreen era, by Amber Case
https://medium.com/blog/the-important-discomfort-of-doubt-7c5a4bf75d90
Welches Desktop Environment will eins denn unter Linux für einem #Touchscreen PC haben?
Habs mit dem von Pop_OS angepassten #Gnome probiert und es treibt mich in den Wahnsinn.
Gibts es da spezielle Anpassungen? Oder Distributionen?
Ich bin angenehm überrascht wie gut #Gnome mit #Touchscreen funktioniert!
War zwar schon ein bisschen gefrickel, bis es so war wie ich das haben will, aber letztlich alles in ner Stunde eingerichtet bekommen...
Mazda finally adopts touchscreens but hedges with "revolutionary" physical steering wheel buttons 
Last holdout caves to customer demand while maintaining "hands on wheel, eyes on road" philosophy. Sometimes the future means bringing back the past that actually worked.
Sadly, my parents have to replace their #car
What are the least bad options on the market for aging drivers? Are there any vehicles available in the US that...
1. Have knobs and buttons instead of #touchscreen-only controls?
2. Do not pretend to be "self-driving"?
3. Are not SUVs?
4. Cost less than $40k? (preferably far less)
Thanks in advance!
all caveats understood. all cars are bad. older adults should not drive. Yes, noted, regretted, and accepted.
The most "successful #9thGenConsole" is the #SteamDeck, because #Nintendo's #Switch2 is merely a "minor upgrade" compared to the #NintendoSwitch, to the point that I think it should've been called "Nintendo Switch Pro" instead of #NintendoSwitch2, tho some people would call the #WiiU an
#8thGenConsole when in fact it's just an overclocked #Wii with #BD-ROM drive and #Touchscreen #Controller, which in and of itself was just a #GameCube with an overclocked yet smaller size CPU and more RAM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_generation_of_video_game_consoles
Doing a bit of an explore of the desktop environments on the Toughpad to see what's out there that's touch friendly. This is on Debian 12. I'll probably re-visit this when I move to Debian 13 in a few months time.
- #Gnome : tried both #X11 and #Wayland versions, Classic and the present UI… quite inflexible and the UI elements are practically invisible for driving with a stylus. On-screen keyboard is next to useless as it puts digits and symbols on separate pages and does not implement function keys or modifiers.
- #MATE : Seems to have limited screen scaling options and appearance customisation making stylus/touch operation tricky… but at least Onboard keyboard works.
- #Cinnamon : has the best built-in on-screen keyboard seen so far, but summoning it is not obvious and the layout is still sub-optimal for passwords (but ESC, function keys and modifiers are there!). You lose ⅓ of the screen to the keyboard, even if you're not using it.
- #XFCE seems to work pretty well, I was able to bump the size of the panel up a bit, it uses Onboard for the on-screen keyboard, seems to be the best so far.
Just waiting on #LXQT to install… we'll see how that is.
@blog thx for the #HonestWords.
To me that touchscreen sounds awful.
Most 3rd party products that aim to compete with any established brand at least get the #price lower than the established players if they can't be assed to at least have the same level of #documentation, #quality or #support than i.e. #RaspberryPi.
For €100 I can get some 1080p screen if not a decent #touchscreen if I snipe the right corners and ain't afraid of returns and refurbished parts.
Got any recommendations for linux on an old windows tablet - Intel cpu - it’s low powered with 4GN ram, happily boots most things. My issue so far is finding a ui that works on a touchscreen only desktop. #linux #tablet #touchscreen
Mit diesem Film macht der Deutsche Blinden- und Sehbehindertenverband (DBSV) auf die Probleme aufmerksam, die viele Touchscreens für sehbehinderte Menschen verursachen.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b8uyxLtXhGo
Great little short about the impact of "modern design" on people with disabilities.
It's a facet of the overall #enshitification that I was properly aware.
#Touchscreen s are enshitification, they are a non-solution to a non-existent problem
Some more great progress by @tobykurien who is porting #FreeBSD to the #PinephonePro in the project sponsored by us:
After getting #X11 running a short while ago, he now implemented #touchscreen support. 
#Touchscreen im #Auto finde ich doof, Kippschalter und Knöpfe empfinde ich als viel angenehmer.
Was findet ihr besser?
First heard about this on TED-Ed, July 2022!
They note that a sausage is useful when you're in a pickle …
Link to TED-Ed:
https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_wallace_and_sajan_saini_why_a_sausage_can_do_what_your_gloves_cannot?language=en
Amazing what you can do with a sausage, and I won't mention the pickle.
Learned a little trick with `onboard` and using the Autoscrolling feature of Firefox.
Firefox, for those who don't know, supports a feature called autoscrolling… if you middle-click (click the scroll wheel down), a little circular icon appears in the spot where you clicked. Moving the mouse cursor up or down will scroll in that direction, with the speed determined by the distance from that icon.
Clicking again stops the scrolling.
On a graphics tablet with three buttons, this works great. At work I have a cheap Wacom, and I find this more comfortable than scrolling with an ordinary wheel mouse. Just click the middle mouse button, then swing the stylus up or down.
Turns out, you can do it on a touchscreen using Onboard. There are buttons on the virtual keyboard that affect the mouse: tapping one of these will make the next mouse click use the specified button (middle or right). So you can tap the middle mouse button on Onboard, tap somewhere on the webpage, and the autoscroll icon appears, then hold your finger or stylus on that icon: slide up to scroll up or down to go down. Very simple.
Dry hands and touchscreens don't go well together. Some days I have trouble operating our washing machine, that has a goddamn touchscreen for no good reason. I also almost never use my phone's fingerprint sensor, because it always takes it a few tries to recognise me #wewantbuttons #touchscreen
Welches #Linux eignet sich eigentlich am besten für ein #Touchscreen?
I recently drove a car whose whole control and entertainment system was a gigantic iPad-like thing mounted to the dash. It caused me to have a realisation about the #Ui and #UX of touch screens.
There is no way to touch a touchscreen without it treating that touch as intentional. What I mean is: without taking my eyes off the road, I can grope across the dashboard, find a knob or button—by touching it—without activating any function. Touching the volume button or temperature knob doesn’t DO anything until I do it with more force and intentionality. Not so for a #touchscreen.
My mobile #phone (an #iPhone 13) has no dead space in its face. There’s no part of the phone face I can touch without it assuming I meant to do that and I wanted to activate whatever was under my finger. Old iPhones that had physical home buttons also had dead space to either side: a safe space to hold the phone without DOING anything.
Computer keyboard have little raised pips on the F and J keys so you can find them by touch without looking. I do this all the time. But I don’t type the letters F or J. Touch screens have no such affordances.
I look at the #blackberry keyboard in this photo and I see a raised space bar. It’s an #affordance that lets you orient your fingers, and orient how you hold the phone, without looking.
I miss buttons.
https://mobilesyrup.com/2025/02/15/blackberrys-expired-keyboard-patent/
