Thank you very much for Trisquel.
I have some feedback below, I hope some of it will be useful.
Overall and so far, I like Trisquel 9 much. No showstoppers for me. My
feedback below is only about those things that I do not like or that are
giving me some trouble. They are not representative of my opinion of Trisquel
as a whole.
The persistence in Trisquel 9 of some things that have bothered me in
Trisquel 7 makes me wonder if developers use Trisquel in a very different way
than I, using GUIs much less than I do, and possibly using the mouse much
more when they do use GUIs. Things still look and feel more mousy and
touch-screeny than desktop OSs of 15 to 20 years ago. I am glad to see that
in scroll bars, the bars themselves are easy to make out; I've seen worse in
recent distros which by default had very thin bars with poor contrast (the
intention was probably to visually stay out of the way) that would improve as
soon as you moved the mouse over them. I think such behaviour is not the best
choice as scroll bars are not just for scrolling but also indicate how far up
or down you are, something that was rendered difficult by the lack of
contrast.
If you want to reply, it may be useful for me and any other readers if you
include the numbers given. Also, it may help to know that I used the live USB
version (i.e. did not install Trisquel) and that I have poor IT skills and
mostly just use software without understanding it.
The order in which I am listing my issues is not by how much they bother me,
but aims to make this more readable. My worst headaches would be 1 · 9 · 15
· 17 · 22 · 23.
⸻
Visual accessibility:
Issue no. 1:
Control Center → Hardware → Displays → Monitor preferences →
"Monitor: Unknown", "Detect monitors" does not detect monitor. Resolution is
at 1280×1024 px and Trisquel doesn't let me increase the horizontal and
vertical pixel count over the values of 1280 and 1024, respectively. I was
using a 1680×1050 px monitor going by the name of "HP w2207h" when I tested
this. Trisquel 7 failed even worse in that it stretched a low resolution
across the width of the screen most of the time, very noticably distorting
the ratio; only rarely and seemingly randomly would it sacrifice screen real
estate in favour of a good ratio, the way Trisquel 9 seems to do.
For comparison, Tails detects everything just fine. I suspect HP is to blame.
Issue no. 2:
I think the system's failure to correctly detect my monitor's native
resolution results in a less than 100 % crisp display. This, coupled with
the more important factors of (1) fallback resolution still being fairly high
(which is otherwise a good thing) and (2) Trisquel's font size default
settings (Would it be possible to default to bigger font sizes on bigger
displays and smaller font sizes on smaller displays?), makes for poor
legibility of text, straining the user's eye. I wanted to remedy this. Alas:
Issue no. 3:
Control Center → Personal → AssTech → No "enlarge text" or some such.
In Trisquel 7 and others, it was easier to enlarge panel and desktop text.
The panel had an "assistive technologies" icon that lead to a list of on/off
switches, one of which was "Enlarge text", done. Now you have to go Control
Center → Appearance → Fonts → Application font etc. This makes it less
immediately accessible. In some distros, "enlarge text" is accessible even
from the login screen, but then you have to select it again upon logging in,
unless your preferences have been saved.
Issue no. 4:
After successfully making text appear bigger, the icons are still tiny. I
wanted to remedy this. Alas, I didn't find a way to embiggen all icons (1) in
Trisquel's panel at the bottom of the desktop,(have empty panel space,
right-click it, select "Properties", embiggen) (2) in Caja's sidebar for
folder navigation, nor (3) on the desktop.
Issue no. 5:
Control Center → Look and Feel → Appearance → After choosing "high
contrast" theme, look at the panel. Any applications that do not have the
focus are unreadable (black text on a black background, which is quite the
opposite of high contrast) until you first change the panel properties (by
right-clicking on the panel; haven't found any other way) from "solid color"
background to "none".
Issue no. 6:
I just noticed that switching back (?) from the "high contrast" theme to the
"Trisquel" theme makes the window top bars thin again, with tiny buttons for
minimizing/restoring/maximizing/closing. How do you change their size in any
theme? There is "Customize…" → "Window border", where some choices are
bigger by default, but is it not possible to adjust their size?
Issue no. 7:
Also, is it not possible to force three buttons on any theme instead of just
two that many choices seem to have there?
Issue no. 8:
Control Center → Appearance → Interface → uncheck "show icons in menus"
→ preview doesn't change, and I think neither do the interfaces.
⸻
Other accessibility and navigation:
Issue no. 9:
Trisquel 9, like many other systems, has one-click selection: If you
right-click somewhere, for example on the desktop, a menu opens, and whatever
menu item you happen to be hovering over will get selected as soon as you
release your right-click, just as if you had clicked on this item. I would
very much like an option to switch this off, because when I release my click,
I must be super careful not to inadvertently be hovering over something I
don't mean to select, like "delete", "wipe", "move to trash", "format",
"launch rockets" etc. I want the first click to just open the menu, and a
second click (or key press) required to select something from it.
Issue no. 10:
It would be nice if windows' non-top borders could be made thicker so they'd
respond to grabbing attempts in a slightly wider area. That way, it would
become less of a pixel hunt when you want to use the mouse to resize windows
in only one dimension, especially when mouse movement is set to fast and
screen resolution is high.
Issue no. 11:
Navigating Trisquel's main menu using the keyboard is still bothersome in
several ways:
Pressing "Alt+F1" opens the main menu.* In the English edition, out of the
box, if you look at / listen to / touch read the main menu's first level that
should now be open, it contains two items starting with the letter O, two
starting with G, three starting with S and two starting with L. If I press
"Alt+F1" and then "G" or another of those letters several times, focus cycles
through those items in a downward direction (i.e. not alphabetically which I
would find confusing, but in the order in which the items are listed), which
is fine. What irritates me is that the first time I hit that key each time I
open the main menu, instead of the expected behaviour of always bringing
focus to the topmost item that starts with that letter, the observed and most
counterintuitive behaviour seems to be that focus goes to the item (that
starts with the letter in question) coming after the item (starting with that
letter?) that last had the focus the previous time you used the main menu.
For the sub-menus, behaviour seems to be different; see for yourselves using
the "Office" category.
*) The key that many keyboard makers make with a logo ("super" key?) doesn't
by default seem to do anything, which is fine with me.
Issue no. 12:
Another main menu quirk: Pressing "Alt+F1" and then several times "O" works
as expected, cycling through all items that start with the letter O. But
press "Alt+F1" and then several times "S": Expected behaviour would be
cycling through items that start with the letter S. Observed behaviour: Once
focus goes to "System", it stays there, the cycling stalls. More fun: Press
"Alt+F1", then once press and hold "S": Rapid cycling without the "system"
stop.
Issue no. 13:
Yet another main menu quirk: If you use an English system, press "Alt+F1",
then press "P" once. This opens "Places", and focus has now shifted right,
into the next level, so that pressing "P" again will summon up the file
manager with a window of your Pictures folder. Because of this focus shifting
behaviour, the "Places" item behaves very different from other items like
"System" or "Other". I don't know if the reason for this behaviour is simply
that in the out-of-the-box English Trisquel which I am now testing, there
doesn't happen to be any other item starting with the letter "P" besides
"Places" in the main menu's top level (which means that there is nothing to
cycle through, so Trisquel assumes the user must be intending to access
"Places"), or if it is hard-coded specifically for this item. (It seems to be
the former of the two, as "Alt+F1", "I" also results in focus shifting to the
right, into the "Internet" category. So I guess this is not a bug.)
Issue no. 14:
Even without the quirks, cycling behaviour in the main menu differs from
keyboard navigation of folder content in Caja, the default file manager.
Suppose you have three items:
• Graphics
• Games
• Accessories
Suppose you want to select "Games".
In Trisquel's main menu, you would have to press "Alt+F1", "G", "G". (Then
Enter, Return or Space to shift focus into that category.) Pressing "Alt+F1",
"G", "A" would not select "Games".
In a Caja window of a folder containing the items "Graphics", "Games", and
"Accessories", you would have to press "G", "A" to select "Games". Pressing
"G", "G" would not select "Games".
This difference in behaviour seems counterintuitive and drains user
attention.
Issue no. 15:
When focus is on a window that has a text menu bar on top, pressing the "Alt"
key will show underlines under those letters whose keys can be used together
with the "Alt" key to select that menu item. (In languages that use the Latin
alphabet, the underlined letter is usually part of the menu label, i.e.
pressing "Alt" will result in an underline appearing under the letter H in
the menu item "Help", which means that you can press Alt+H to select the Help
menu. Non-Latin translations often have a separate Latin letter next to the
word for this purpose.) But the underlines only show when you press Alt; and
even then, they only show with a delay. This slows down the user. I would
like underlines to show permanently, either in whichever window currently has
focus, or in all windows, always.
Perhaps also implement such underlines for Trisquel's main menu. This could
be done either manually (only for the most common programs, e.g. in Main menu
→ Office, "LibreOffice Writer" gets the W, "LibreOffice Calc" gets the C
etc), either by you or by enabling each user to do this; or it could be
achieved by having Trisquel automatically assign each item a letter, not
necessarily the first letter but preferably one that hasn't been used in the
same menu to avoid having the same letter used three times like in
LibreOffice's English menus.
The trend of interfaces lacking or hiding away "navigation by underlines"
(because they're ugly and enigmatic to new users?) is near the top of what
bothers me in software generally. If you open about:preferences in Abrowser,
you get underlines which don't even work, at least for me they don't. They've
been sitting there for a long time, laughing at me. Vanilla Firefox also has
them. Oh, and the text doesn't wrap. I really want to trade away all the
forced eye candy (of software in general of the last 10 to 15 years), throw
in Mozilla's dumbed-down settings menus for good measure, for some
keyboard-friendliness and "overwhelming" settings menus.
⸻
L10n / language:
Issue no. 16:
Control Center → Language support → Regional formats → no options to
choose from
Issue no. 17:
It is not obvious to me how to enable non-Latin input** using a Latin-only
keyboard, something that just works out of the box in Tails, for example.
**) Using Trisquel 7, I managed to get an IME to work, I think it's Nabi, and
I used another one in an earlier Trisquel, but I don't know yet how all this
works, e.g. whether and how Nabi, SCIM, IBus etc. depend on each other or are
alternatives to each other. Settings menus felt unresponsive, so at times I
didn't know if a particular setting just didn't work (wouldn't be the first
time) or if I was in the settings of the completely wrong program. A Japanese
IME in particular was bothersome because depending on something, it would
either assume a Japanese QWERTY keyboard or support my Latin but non-QWERTY
keyboard, switching back and forth between the two in a seemingly random
fashion.
I tried all of the following, to no avail:
17 a
Control Center → Other → IBus Preferences → Input Method → Add
"Arabic", "Russian", "Japanese" or whatever suits you. (Is Korean not listed
because it's not supported?) → Nothing seems to happen.
17 b
Control Center → Other → IBus Preferences → General → Check "Show
icon on system tray". → Nothing seems to happen.
17 c
Control Center → Language support → Language → Keyboard method input
system → Choose anything. → Nothing seems to happen.
⸻
Others:
Issue no. 18:
Control Center → Language support: This immediately launches "Checking
available language support" every time. There should at the very least be a
button to cancel the check. The check should either (1) only start after
asking the user (but having to click through this question wastes the users'
time) or (2) should only start on demand. Just let me get to the options
already.
︵
The next two annoyances are not so much about Trisquel as they are about just
Abrowser:
Issue no. 19:
Abrowser → about:addons → Extensions → click "Find more extensions" →
Expected behaviour: Trisquel's Abrowser add-on repository opens, perhaps in a
new tab/window. Observed behaviour: Nothing seems to happen.
Issue no. 20:
Is there a browser that has makes it easy to switch javascript and images on
and off, and provides an indicator for the current status? I can use
about:config (which, by the way, should have a clue for how to get the focus
into its own search bar using the keyboard) to toggle "javascript.enabled",
but what can I use against images? Abrowser's repository of add-ons has
"Image Block" – "Image Block adds a button that allows you to easily toggle
images on and off in your browser." Like so many other popular and unpopular
add-ons (including EFF.org add-ons, Decentraleyes, and blockers for third
party requests), you cannot use it without granting it sweeping "access your
data for all websites", which according to Mozilla means "the extension can
read the content of any web page you visit as well as data you enter into
those web pages, such as usernames and passwords". Mozilla doesn't say
whether my permission technically (not legally) allows the add-on to then
phone home with this data; what does "read" even mean, why is it so vague,
and why does every add-on – even simple add-ons like an images toggler, and
even add-ons from seemingly trustworthy sources – need this to function?
Also, more (better yet: customizable) keyboard shortcuts for everything from
switching off page styles to toggling javascript.
︶
Issue no. 21:
Time & Date Settings… → Configuration: → Keep synchronized with
Internet servers → "NTP support is not installed", does not tell me how to
install NTP support
Issue no. 22:
"Lock screen" starts a nice screensaver but does not "lock" anything in the
sense of preventing access. Pressing any key or moving the mouse is enough to
"unlock" it.
Issue no. 23:
I have not checked how Trisquel 9 handles this, but in Trisquel 7:
Suppose Trisquel offers you some available updates. Three of them are urgent
security fixes that prevent your computer from exploding, while ninety-seven
others seem to be about localizations of LibreOffice that you will never use.
But all 100 come checked, and you must individually untick the checkbox next
to each item that you don't want. You cannot use "Ctrl+A, Space" to untick
all and then only tick wanted ones; and navigating and unticking individual
items by keyboard (arrow keys, space) is a hassle, because every (un)ticking
causes your system to have a very short unresponsiveness which means that
simply pressing "Space, ↓, Space, ↓, Space, ↓, Space, ↓, Space, ↓,
Space, ↓, Space" results in some items being skipped over and others
getting hit doubly. Fun!
⸻
I think some of the above may boil down to a case of me just not liking Mate
all that much, but perhaps some of it could be remedied by either shipping
Trisquel with other default settings or by allowing for easier adjustment by
users.
Again, thank you very much for Trisquel. And I thank the forum regulars for
being very helpful and friendly throughout the years.
A happy new year to all.
