The History of X11

Lichtblitz@discuss.tchncs.de to Linux@lemmy.ml – 130 points – The History of X11
youtu.be

With Wayland becoming more and more popular, it's interesting to look at the around 40 year history of X.

22

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

I really like this guy's content, but his way of speaking is somehow extremely hard for me to follow. Maybe it's because I'm not a native, but I really have to focus on listening, otherwise it's just a blur.

I hate the number of people teaching useful things using videos instead of writing articles.

I'd disagree regarding such vids: these are more of a time fillers (how exactly is it useful to know the history of x11?). Hence, it's more convenient to listen to them as a podcast (e.g. via newpipe or mpv).

It's actually a good thing that visual learners get a chance to learn useful stuff by watching videos. Not everyone has the attention span required to read through a Wikipedia page.

You aren't wrong. But, this format is taking over and I hate having to watch a video for information that I can parse easier when it's text based. Everytime I've looked for schematics and a teardown of a laptop or other hardware all I find is videos that I have to scrub through looking for exactly what I need.

Yup. Paraphrasing an old IT saying, you cannot grep Youtube videos.

...unless the videos have captions, in which case you absolutely can.

View the transcript, search for something, click what you found and boom: You're at that precise moment in the video.

For literal grep, use something like NewPipe to download the subtitle file.

Today I was looking up how to do something in a game I'm playing, there were some videos about it, usual formula starting with "Sup guys!", intros, ads for the channel, and fluff, "remember to press like", oh and a bunch of videos that may or may not contain the answer.

The answer could be written in 5 words, basically what key to press.

The days of text based walk throughs are sadly behind us.

Once upon a time, I totally would have agreed with you. But I have increasingly severe Memory and Cognitive Impairment that now makes comprehending text based instructive really difficult. I can however pick up demonstrated instructions very easily which means I'm now mostly reliant on these sorts of videos.
So while it may be annoying or not useful to you, it's essential to folks like me.

Did you not read the first sentence I wrote?

There is a place for all kinds of media for people to digest. My problem is with there not being text versions of most things anymore especially for those of us who aren't actually looking to learn something new, we just want to know how many and locations of screws to take a laptop apart so we can fix it. Or which settings screen on a routers firmware does a specific thing. These days I have to watch someone go through the entire tear down or all of the settings and watch carefully for what I'm looking for.

For the record I went to a Montessori school and my mother taught it for decades. I am aware and open to various ways to learn new things.

Not everyone has the attention span required to read through a Wikipedia page.

I contend that such lack of attention span makes difficult to learn anything in any way.

I agree but I doubt if this were a well written article it would get anywhere near the exposure it'll get on YouTube.

One can debate if is better to create good, indexable articles that can reach a moderate number of people, or run-of-the-mill videos that reach millions but are less useful.

It's his accent. He's British, but quite plainly spoken. There's quite a lot of "-ink" instead of "-ing" and "-ff-" instead of "-th-" (e. g. "nuffink" instead of "nothing"). The softer constanants are just characteristics of certain regions in the UK, but they can cause the sounds at the start/end of words to blur into each other.

To my ear, a fellow Brit, he's perfectly clear, but I can see how it could be slightly tricky for a non-native.

Yeah, it's the same for me. The content is awesome but requires a lot of concentration.