Well I don’t think it’d paranoid but I have been meaning to run a scan with some apps I have just to see. But is Xiaomi one of the banned brands?I know Huawei, ZTE, and some others I’ve heard. Not sure about Xiaomi.

Anyway it’s a fairly good quality launcher. And it has one feature I love that Nova never implemented which is icon packs as in multiple. In order of preference.

Ahhhh okay. Cool.

Personally, I don’t see the appeal though. I am really happy to have left Windows in the trash.

Lawnchair is ok but I’ve been liking Poco. The thing is Nova is amazing at adapting icon packs to at least make stuff follow a motif. Nearly every other launcher just leaves icons looking out of place when there isn’t a themed one. I’m not talking about having an icon for all your apps within all your icon packs, but if the pack follows some shape or design, or maybe color affectation, Nova will generate for all others a complying effect. Hardly any other launchers will do this. I also use a widget called Launchy and the one thing it’s missing is it also won’t do this with some packs. Although some will. It’s weird.

But I’ve rambled. Yeah check out Poco AKA Global Launcher from Xiaomi I think.

I miss Win 3.11 using Dashboard. That app was the tits! Goodbye Program Manager always obstructing up the wallpaper.

Is there not already ReactOS? Or has that been abandoned?

Hah I literally did the exact same thing. When I bought my current laptop it came with Windows 11. When I powered it on while I was looking for my USB stick it started loading Windows, I restarted into the USB and installed my Linux distro. I mean, literally I have no use whatsoever for Windows even for a moment.

I wanted to go with raw Debian but at the time the audio device was very new on the market I think, or whatever the reason, I had to put Kubuntu which had all the necessary drivers to fully support all the hardware on the system. I’m very happy with it. It’s a kick ass laptop. Why would I want to infect a superb computer with Windows!

Don’t have to dump Windows 11, never had it to begin with. I been all Linux minus one special services machine Win 7 for years already.

When you feel that you can make money without innovating anymore, you just stop and collect your profits. Best thing about being open is that custom ROMs do some great shit for people who go that route.

You really can’t run it in Bottles, or a VM of Windows? I’ve managed the occasional peripheral using a VM.

Yes, I’m aware of the ability to manually hide a directory. Thank you anyway for making the suggestion. I do wish the app properly respected the .nomedia file. Ah well.

Meanwhile I have another crash Android dilemma going on as well. Most of the time Android is freaking amazing to me, and then there are times I wonder how something fundamental and basic has been overlooked.

I don’t see any setting that would affect it. Is it possible I have to enable some setting? No matter how I configure it, it’s displaying images within folders that have a .nomedia file.

I’d like also to ask is there any difference between Aves Libre and the Aves Gallery app in the Play store & Aurora store?

Well I don’t mean aesthetics, its just buttons and layout are a bit awkward. And other aspects. I can check and see what exactly bothers me so I can follow up with specifics.

I was pleasantly surprised they finally did some updating because damn, that app had been stagnant for years.

It’s an interesting app. I kinda like it a don’t at the same time. It has a lot to offer, but needs some polishing.

I’ve tried all the galleries and Aves Libre is the one I have consistently found superior to all others.

It is a little better, I’ll agree with this. I usually end up just using Droidify. I’ve tried pretty much all the variations eg: Foxy, Neo, Izzy (good repo, bad app; can’t shut off checking for updates), etc.

Material files is alright, but if you’re going to accept some serious limitations of under-developed features, I’d stick with Total Commander.

I’ve tried soooo many launchers. Absolutely nothing has equaled the total features and polish of Nova. Thus far the one I’m able to most tolerate is Poco, and on some devices I actually like Launch Time, which is a lot more visible a presence since it has a menu bar and background everything. It’s more like the old Program Manager in Windows 3.1. Poco is fairly simple but doesn’t support adaptive so when you apply an icon pack it won’t generate an approximation for ones that aren’t in the pack. On Nova most packs will at least encapsulate icons in their pack’s design shell. If Poco got a little more sophisticated I would like it.

And I also quite like the total simplicity of Neat Launcher, which is nice because it’s also open source.

I used to love making text adventure with AGT the Adventure Game Toolkit. I’ve wanted for some time already to learn to make stuff with still images and click zones which is essentially the evolution of the text adventure. The audience for this stuff is tiny, but I’d still love to get back into making text adventure. If there’s an easy to learn equivalent of AGT that can be made either web-hosted or somehow platform-independent I’d love to do that. AGT was a real breeze to learn and it’s a terrific creative outlet.

Anything more sophisticated is out of my league as I’m not a pro coder; my development experience is limited to an array of projects in VB6, the biggest of which was a companion software for Team Fortress Classic to customize scripts and per-class macros. It was called TFCompanion. Got 1,000 downloads roughly. But I digress.

Wanna dance?