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P.A.G.A.N. - People Against Goodness And Normalcy

I was summoned to wife's computer to deal with a Bluetooth speaker pair whose right channel (the one with the power supply and on/off switch) was allegedly dead.

In tinkering around I opened the volume control on the screen. I was really trying to find a L-R balance control.

The volume control was MOVING ITSELF to the left. Like a poltergeist. If I held the mouse over the volume control it would move left until it went to 0 and an X appeared over the speaker icon.

What the fuck.

I plugged the mouse dongle into my PC and the mouse did nothing untoward. The scroll wheel was not stuck or broken and the mouse did not move anything w/o me moving it.

I Googled "windows 10 mouse scroll moves on its own" and got this citation.

There is actually a MOTHER FUCKING DEVICE SETTING for the Windows mouse that enables this exact behavior!

It's called literally "Scroll inactive windows when hovering over them.". It's at the bottom of the mouse's device page. It was ON on her system. NO IDEA.

So basically - you move the mouse over a window that does not have focus, and the system simulates a steady human scroll wheel down action. I tried it on a browser page and when I put the window in the back it scrolled downward by itself.

Of course I flipped the setting off and the behavior stopped entirely. I THOUGHT we had a broken mouse.

WHAT IN THE FUCKITY FUCK FUCK IS "feature" THIS USEFUL FOR?

Satan invented this setting. Microsoft is Satan.

That is all.

Standard behaviour for X windows (solaris etc). I prefer it but it is a bit non-intuitive at times.

The alternative is to click in the window before it will pay attention to you. More intuitive but a click that sometimes can feel unnecessary.

I don't want my f*cking UI moving around because I roam a mouse cursor.

All I want moving are things that by nature are designed to move on their own, like videos and animated controls designed for that.

All it means is who has the focus at a given time, the window the mouse cursor is hovering over currently or the window that was last clicked on. Both choices have their merits. When you want to scroll a window, the hover choice is more ergonomic.

edit: I just noticed a possible misunderstanding, the X windows behaviour is that scrolling the window is initiated by scrolling the scroll wheel, not by moving the cursor into the window.

That is so annoying! I had no idea there was a setting to get it to scroll inactive windows like that. That is the problem with Windows. There are so many ridiculous settings that are nonsensical I can't imagine who would find it useful to enable the mouse to scroll everything like that. All you need to do is hold the scroll button on the mouse down when you want to scroll.

Microsoft is bloatware. Some little nerd decided that functionality was needed when in reality its absurd. I don't know how you wife dealt with it before you turned it off.

I had a forced upgrade at work and that thing is a POS. Instead of opening a file in Notepad++ after right clicking a file, now you have to right click it and then click "more options" before you can select the application.

Also if Outlook opens an alert in the bottom right hand corner when an email comes in, you cannot just click it and open it like before. You have to go into Outlook and then double click the e-mails.

Fucking Microsoft.

I feel your pain. I worked on my mom's Amazon Fire recently and spent two hours trying to get it hooked up to a Wifi printer. What should have been a simple straightforward process was actually a PITA.

Is my workhorse for personal business as well as fucking around with code occasionally.

Linux is so God-Blessett PRACTICAL. Once you get used to controlling your system (IE, the settings stuff to tweak behaviors such as what "Control Panel" does in Windows is completely different) - it is lean and mean to do practical, simple things that a desktop person would want.

One example is local search, which is so valuable for looking up crap. Windows will index your system but I always turn off indexing on Windows because it chews so much CPU and churns the hard drive incessantly. So anything like a document search by keyword on my Windows system is always dog slow. Whereas Linux has a utility called "recoll", a local search engine. Its indexing is utterly unnoticeable. So like, I was reading about the federal BOI report and how it had to be completed by the end of the year under penalty of law. I thought I filed it... I tend to save everything I do online as copies on my system. So I searched recoll for BOI... found the receipt page indicating all of the ownership information the feds wanted, and the date of was in October. I've had many other experiences looking for tax info and in those cases it finds the PDF of my tax returns with the information I need. CANNOT do that in Windows anywhere near as easily.

Another example is screen shots. The Windows way is somewhat intuitive but you have to know about the specific strange directory you never go to anyway to find the screen shot. Linux's screen shot saves the image in ~/Pictures, period. And has a handy option to upload the image to Imgur, so I can create an instant image for posting here without dicking around with an upload, etc.

The updates are completely user-controlled. Of course, my browsers and other stuff that relies on outside infrastructure would bit-rot as new revisions of standard Linux libraries roll out. But I can forestall updates as long as possible to not make changes to my system.

UPDATES ARE PAINLESS, EASY, and QUICK. Windows updates are like a crying baby you don't want to hold shitting its diaper all over your shirt as you try to calm it.

I get into Windows to run Quicken, Turbotax and Quickbooks. Period. I get out ASAP.

Everything about Windows is normie city. You browse the bottom bar showing the local weather and you get a huge popup of curated news such as celebrating another Donald Trump failure or Syria's fall. It's like "The View"+Rachel Maddow controls Windows even down to suggested news items.

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