There is this massive myth on a global scale, almost like a huge conspiracy, that humans are predisposed to being like this or like that. Predisposed to becoming depressed, ADHD is an illness, sexual orientation is inborn, violence can be detected in one's brain, and so forth.

This notion that humans have a certain biology and their behavior is based on that.

False.

From sexuality to mental disorders, violence or anything else. There are no genes, no chemicals, nothing biological that can predict any such behaviors. None.

We should start to abolish this mentality. This approach is succulently pushed by companies who sell the "miracle" drugs, and everyone is hypnotized by the cattle-society practice: treat humans like they are on a conveyor belt. Feel angry, sad, and all that? Well probably you have a "disease". Take this pill! Bye!

Anyway. Here is a recent publication by Joanna Moncrieff that debunks the myth of the "chemical imbalance" of depression. And here a more general overview of how depression cannot be linked to any bio-chemical marker.

Some very important quotes from this group of proper scientists that have the dignity and courage to remain scientists:

I have shown that family, twin, adoption, and molecular genetic studies have failed to provide scientifically valid evidence that genes play a role in causing depression. Combined with the recent findings by Moncrieff and colleagues that serotonin is not associated with depression, the idea of MD as a medical condition is in serious trouble.

To understand the true causes of depression, we must focus on family (including abuse and trauma), social, and political environments, including racial, gender, class, and other types of oppression/discrimination. We must address people’s increasing social isolation and disconnection from each other, lack of meaning and purpose, consumerism, and fears of present or future calamities such as pandemics, climate change, and nuclear war. The idea of depression as a medical/genetic condition must be reevaluated, and non-medical prevention and intervention strategies should be promoted.

And

“suffering as being rooted in individual rather than social causes, leading individuals to think that it is them rather than the economic and social system in which they live that is at fault and in need of reform.

It is this trade-based society that makes humans sad, depressed, angry, demotivated and so forth. FIX SOCIETY!

#tromlive
#TradeRuinsEverything

Here's another example of how people are entirely confused about what is free and what is not, and why our trade-free approach makes so much sense.

We have added this peer to peer file sharing app to TROMjaro's Library: SoulSeek. This app is great. It allows you to connect with others directly, and share files with them. No server involved. We wanted to share our VideoNeat library on the network. However if you look closely they limit your experience. And if you donate currency to them you get this:

So, it is free, but you have to pay to unlock certain features....makes so much sense indeed!

Actually they call those trades, donations. And the word and concept of "donation" got ruined alongside that of "free". Donations should be voluntary and not used for the purpose of trade. If you "donate" currency to me in return for some features, then that is a trade. You are buying from me. As simple as that.

Therefore our concept of trade free is so simple and destroys all of these nonsensicalities: What Am I Trading? Ask that. And if you do, then you realize that you need to trade currency for Soulseek to give you more features. Therefore this app is not trade-free.

The reason it was added to our TROMjaro library is that either we could not detect this trade since they are charlatan enough to hide them well, or it was not present when the app was added. Needless to say it was immediately removed.

We need more than ever this "trade as the original of most problems" approach and the "trade-free" antidote. Without them we are going into a deep and ugly confusion. A black hole of that! #tromlive

Reading this article about libadwaita and how pity the arguments are in favor of using it. I was expecting more.

Basically they argue that they use libadwaita since custom themes were not always perfect and people were reporting issues with apps because of that, and the devs were annoyed because these were issues with the themes and not the app itself. That’s the main idea. Such a weak argument. Let me explain.

1. Linux is variety and it will continue to be. Get used to it, Gnome!

We are talking about Linux here. Multiple kernels, multiple distros, multiple desktop environments. This is a world of variety so of course there will be some sort of inconsistency in some regards. If I use theme A and 1 out of 10 apps doesn’t look that good, then I think that’s acceptable considering this huge variety in the Linux world. So Gnome seems to not understand that this is the nature of Linux. And they won’t change it. What now, make the Gnome apps not run on XFCE, Mate, Arch, kernel 5.4 just because they are not the official Gnome + whatever kernel they use, and they may not be 100% looking and behaving like on the original gnomiverse?!

Friends, the gnome extensions also break the gnome desktop here and there, from theme to functionality. I’ve used it. We all know that. You wanna bet their next move is to not officially support any extensions?

Soon Gnome won’t support anything but Gnome. Just so that 100% of their few apps look as they want them to look. Good luck with that!

2. They create more complaints than before.

It is ridiculous to argue that users were seeing apps that look broken and they reported that to the devs, while not realizing that now they create an even bigger issue: gnome is a small part of the linux world, and if gnome enforces certain themes for their gnome apps, then users will see that these apps do not respect the system’s themes and…guess what…report that to the devs! You ain’t solving anything, you create more problems.

3. The problem is not as huge as they make it look like.

With some tweaks you can make the GTK and QT apps sync in terms of theming, plus force flatpaks to respect the system’s theme too, at least for some of them. In this way most apps look as they should. I have tested thousands of apps so far for our TROMjaro Linux, and we have implemented a robust theming system, granted hacky when it comes to, you guessed it, libadwaita.

image1901×915 63.1 KB

There, some 700 apps are published (I test more than I publish). I’d say 98% look great. With a custom theme. You can find screenshots for all apps posted there, from TROMjaro.

As an example, they showcase how PoP OS and Ubuntu fail with the theming. They say look at Ubuntu how badly it deals with the default Gnome Fonts app:

image1920×1080 246 KB

Bad contrast, black font preview with a dark theme. Guess how the same app looks on TROMjaro?

image1832×990 75.1 KB

See? Theming done right. On Ubuntu is not that bad either, but how come TROMjaro, a 1.5 men team, does it better than Ubuntu!? Because we care about theming! It is not that difficult.

Here it is with a light theme in TROMjaro:

image1839×969 76.2 KB

Looks Perfect!

Another example they show us: look at the Characters Gnome app in PoP OS, again poor contrast and they said misplaced characters - I suppose they are referring to the dividing lines and how characters overlap:

image852×660 42.1 KB

I agree. Poor contrast. Not in TROMjaro:

image1594×998 70.5 KB

You could say characters misplaced too…but then I installed the “pure” Gnome Characters with Libadwaira and guess what? Yeah…characters misplaced:

image1491×994 67 KB

Speaking of that, if I see this app in libadwaita form on my System, not respecting the theme (buttons, top bar, dark mode, font) then I will send a message to the devs. Just saying!

Lastly they show us the app Contrast in PoP OS, and they say " White background in Contrast":

What do they want to say, that the color pick boxes are white on a Dark theme? If so, not in TROMjaro:

image1630×751 64.8 KB

They exaggerate the issue by showcasing some PoPular OSes that do a bad job at implementing a proper theme. But I bet they do a bad job ALSO because Gnome or others, are very unfriendly at letting others theme their apps. So you have to kinda find hacky solutions like we did. The irony…if they made it easier for developers to theme their apps, then there will be less inconsistencies…

4. Gnome could still fix this nonsense.

So they show us OBS as an example of how some QT apps are also an issue when it comes to custom theming. And this gives birth to two main issues with Gnome. First, they say look at OBS it looks like so on any system regardless of the theme:

image2050×1166 99.8 KB

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And I agree. It looks like that. That’s because OBS enforces their own theme, but in settings one can choose the system theme. And they say if you do that in KDE it still doesn’t look that good:

image2050×1166 106 KB

image1111×885 81.3 KB

Poor contrast: dark button icons on a dark theme. And TROMjaro suffers from this too:

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image1550×921 96.9 KB

But let’s be honest, it is not that fuckin’ bad. I’ll put up with this for a very very few apps, and have a consistent desktop experience overall, rather than having 100 apps with 100 different themes. Any-day! On top of this I’d report this to the theme dev and icon dev, so they can fix these. Am sure they can. If not, it is ok. Relax Gnome!

But the core point here is that some apps respect the users and give them this option. If I dislike this “baaad” contrast in OBS I will select one of their built-in themes. They allow it. So why not is Gnome doing the same? Be friendly with the theme developers and make libadwaita easily themable, and also add an option to let users select a system’s theme. This way you can have your favorite libadwaita theme for any Gnome apps, plus a “broken” (as you think) system theme that the users can choose. See? Solution!

Second point about their QT example: is the Gnome team realizing the irony here? You show me a QT app that looks a little bit bad, a little bit, when themed in KDE with the system’s theme. But if OBS was GTK + Libadwaita it would not respect the theme at all! And no way to even let you select the system’s theme. Which one is better? Are these people blind, or am I going crazy?

Final thoughts:

Gnome sees itself as an isolated thing. Like a cult almost. As if you use Gnome only with the Gnome apps, preferably with Debian and only install the Gnome Apps from flatpak. This way you get the “pure” Gnome experience. But people on Arch + XFCE also wanna use the Gnome Apps, They have no freakin’ Gnome control center to change the theme to dark/light mode or select a highlight color. Gnome does not think about anyone but the devoted gnome users it seems.

They removed the top bar from the GTK apps, disabling a plethora of features for many systems, such as minimizing to the top bar a window, better integration with whatever desktop you are using, right click options in some cases, top panel integration, and more. Now the top bar in gnome apps looks huge and has no functionality other than saving a tiny bit of vertical space, as if that was important. They also killed the global menus…and now they wanna kill the theming.

But the thing is that they kill themselves. They might be cocky as to how big Gnome is, but Linux is far bigger. TROMjaro still have a proper theming, even for the libadwaita apps via a hack, and still has a top pannel integration with the windows, and global menus. There are only a few apps, the Gnome ones, that ruin a bit the user experience: no global menus for them and no proper integration with the top bar.

Gnome does not care about the users if they remove features that are useful and necessary. They fantasize to become the Mac of Linux. And they may achieve their dream. And we should not care. Linux is much bigger.

Think about this:

If you use Debian + Pure Gnome + apps from their official repos, then at best your experience is limited. Gnome has a few apps compared to the vast universe of the Linux apps. And any other app that you install on this config, and is not a GTK LIbadwaita app, will look different on your desktop. No light/dark mode will work via the Gnome Control center…no highlight color…the window buttons will be different, the font may be different, the icon set for these other apps may be different. IN-CON-SIS-TEN-CY. So Gnome is a failure if they wanna be so purists. It only makes it a bit more annoying for some Linux users, and is breaking things on the desktop.

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Here's a post Kostas, an old friend of TROM, sent to us for reshare:

What if we treated everyone like they were babies?

When someone suggests that the goal of our society should be to offer everything to everyone for free, no matter if they work or if they offer something to society, no matter if they are "good" persons or not, usually the reaction by other people is strongly against this opinion and that's probably "normal".

Because, you see, in our lives we are used to something a bit different: a few things are earned without effort. So, it's probably "normal" to view such ideas at first as "extreme" and reject them as something "utopian", "unachievable" or "very distant from our times".

Nevertheless, how many of you have thought about the following?

There's truly a certain period in the lives of all of us (at least in what we call the "Western world"), which is very similar to such an "utopia".

When we are fetuses in the womb of our mother, we get our food literally without doing anything. Just because we exist. Noone has anything to expect from us and we have no responsibilities whatsoever. And when we are born, all people around us care for us, so that we live as comfortably as possible.

Usually, the first years of our lives are the best, happiest and the most carefree. We haven't been, yet, inside the awful trade game, so everyone is trying to make our lives as pleasant as possible, without the need to offer something in order to earn this privilege. Food, clothing, education, entertainment are all offered abundantly by our caregivers.

I already hear some voices complaining: "Yes, but babies and children are unable to offer anything, that's why we offer them all they need! They can't go to work!"

Yes, that's correct! If babies could work we would send them to make some profits for the privileged, super-rich people... And maybe they could keep something for themselves: A small glass of milk per day perhaps?? :)

The truth is that we care for them because, indeed, they can't help themselves yet. And of course, it's the right thing to do.

In contrast, of course, to what happens later in our lives, where, even to be able to eat, we are forced to work, or have income from somewhere. With adulthood, we suddenly lose the privilege of being cared for and we need to "earn our living", so that we fulfill our assigned role as a well-tuned cog in the trade system.

But why would it be "bad"? What would we have to lose if we continued to care for all the people of the Earth, of all ages, as if they were incapable of providing something in return? Like they were babies for all their lives?

Honestly, I cannot think of a convincing answer. Every argument against it, sounds in my ears like the old, outdated opinion some "kid-experts" expressed in the past: "Don't give too many hugs to the child because you will spoil it!"

A real civilized society should generously offer everything to all its people, without asking for anything in return. With our material needs covered, we would contribute to society out of selfless love for our fellow man and out of optimism for the evolution of our species, but also of ourselves.

We know that it can happen if we really want to make it true. Humankind is capable of miracles if we work all together and we've proven that in the past.

Civilization Type One

Original article, in Greek, here.

--------

You know, there are others who fight the same fight, that you may not have heard of. And that's encouraging! #tromlive

This is the first image released by the James Webb Telescope:

Imagine how small we are, yet how big our eyes have become. Imagine how further we can see from one dim pebble. All of those ellipses of light and little dots, are galaxies. Billions of stars each, trillions of planets. Not enough grains of sand on Earth to match the number of planets in our Universe.

Such revelations should shake our species; our values should be reevaluated. Our priorities re-organized.

And yet, such astonishing truths, are a mere excitement for a select few; such images will become one of the trillions of images in the digital universe. On par with any other. Our society will fail to be moved in any direction; our values seem set in stone; our priorities will follow the same mindless and insignificant profits.

We have created a society of idiots. But we should know the cause by now. It is because humans ended up with a society that is based on trade. Trade this, trade that. You cannot survive if you cannot trade. And so, all of the humans are trapped in a nightmare. We can only wake them up, if we take care of them. Feed them, treat them, give them a shelter, a life. Only then we can hope to see them being curious about themselves and the world they live in. To focus on significant endeavors; to discover the universe, to understand their connection with nature, to protect what needs to be protected, to explore what is unexplored. To become a human species that has grandiose goals, and saner wants.

This is the only path forward. We have to march on the streets, we have to scream online, to provide humans with access to their needs, as trade-free. To decouple them from this hamster wheel, this nightmare. To give them back their brains. No change in politics or policies will do anything if all humans are consumed on a daily basis, for mindless trades.

Provide humans with their needs, as trade-free. Do it!

TROM is marching for this for at least a decade now. What are you doing? Where are you? We need you! #tromlive

Usual Manjaro updates plus:

Improving the Theme Switcher code

We have improved the code a bit and added new options. Now, when you select a Light theme you’ll be asked if you want to make the panels light or dark too:

image1174×719 59.2 KB

This can be useful for those who may want a light theme, but may not want the panels to be light too. To update the code go to .local/bin/ in your home folder and edit the file theme-switcher. Remove what is in that file and replace with:
<pre><code class="lang-auto">#!/bin/bash
icons="$HOME"/.local/share/Theme-Switcher

set_theme() {
# Check for Zafiro icon pack, icon packs won't be changed if Zafiro is not in use
current_icon_theme=$(xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName)
[ "${current_icon_theme%-Icons-Light-Black-f}" = 'Zafiro' ] && Zafiro='True'

if [ "${1##*-}" = 'Light' ]; then
yad --image "dialog-question" --title '' --button='DARK':1 --button='LIGHT':0 --text 'Select the panels theme:'
case $? in
1)
# Enable dark panels
xfconf-query -c xfce4-panel -p /panels/dark-mode -n -t bool -s true
# Use the dark icon pack
[ "$Zafiro" = 'True' ] && xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName -n -t string -s Zafiro
;;
0)
# Disable dark panels
xfconf-query -c xfce4-panel -p /panels/dark-mode -n -t bool -s false
# Use the light icon pack
[ "$Zafiro" = 'True' ] && xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName -n -t string -s Zafiro-Icons-Light-Black-f
;;
*) exit ;;
esac
else
# Use the dark icon pack
[ "$Zafiro" = 'True' ] && xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/IconThemeName -n -t string -s Zafiro
fi
# Change the main theme to the chosen one
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/ThemeName -n -t string -s "Skeuos-$1"
xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/theme -n -t string -s "Skeuos-$1-XFWM"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme "Skeuos-$1"
notify-send "Skeuos-$1 theme was enabled"
}
export -f set_theme

yad --no-buttons --center --keep-icon-size --use-interp --title 'Theme Switcher' --text-align=center --text "A Theme Switcher for TROMjaro's default theme-set (Skeuos)" --form --columns 5 \
--field=!"$icons/Blue-Dark.png"!'Blue-Dark':FBTN "set_theme 'Blue-Dark'" \
--field=!"$icons/Violet-Dark.png"!'Violet-Dark':FBTN "set_theme 'Violet-Dark'" \
--field=!"$icons/Blue-Light.png"!'Blue-Light':FBTN "set_theme 'Blue-Light'" \
--field=!"$icons/Violet-Light.png"!'Violet-Light':FBTN "set_theme 'Violet-Light'" \
--field=!"$icons/Teal-Dark.png"!'Teal-Dark':FBTN "set_theme 'Teal-Dark'" \
--field=!"$icons/Orange-Dark.png"!'Orange-Dark':FBTN "set_theme 'Orange-Dark'" \
--field=!"$icons/Teal-Light.png"!'Teal-Light':FBTN "set_theme 'Teal-Light'" \
--field=!"$icons/Orange-Light.png"!'Orange-Light':FBTN "set_theme 'Orange-Light'" \
--field=!"$icons/Green-Dark.png"!'Green-Dark (default)':FBTN "set_theme 'Green-Dark'" \
--field=!"$icons/Brown-Dark.png"!'Brown-Dark':FBTN "set_theme 'Brown-Dark'" \
--field=!"$icons/Green-Light.png"!'Green-Light':FBTN "set_theme 'Green-Light'" \
--field=!"$icons/Brown-Light.png"!'Brown-Light':FBTN "set_theme 'Brown-Light'" \
--field=!"$icons/Magenta-Dark.png"!'Magenta-Dark':FBTN "set_theme 'Magenta-Dark'" \
--field=!"$icons/Yellow-Dark.png"!'Yellow-Dark':FBTN "set_theme 'Yellow-Dark'" \
--field=!"$icons/Magenta-Light.png"!'Magenta-Light':FBTN "set_theme 'Magenta-Light'" \
--field=!"$icons/Yellow-Light.png"!'Yellow-Light':FBTN "set_theme 'Yellow-Light'" \
--field=!"$icons/Red-Dark.png"!'Red-Dark':FBTN "set_theme 'Red-Dark'" \
--field=!"$icons/Grey-Dark.png"!'Grey-Dark':FBTN "set_theme 'Grey-Dark'" \
--field=!"$icons/Red-Light.png"!'Red-Light':FBTN "set_theme 'Red-Light'" \
--field=!"$icons/Grey-Light.png"!'Grey-Light':FBTN "set_theme 'Grey-Light'"
</code></pre>
We’ve also fix something in that before the theme switcher also changed our TROMjaro icon pack from dark to light and vice-versa, in order to have a better consistency and integration with the selected theme. But what if people use their own icon themes? Now we won’t touch that!

All in all, some new improvements to the Theme Switcher.

Replace the Send app

The Send app used to be called warp-share-files but now it is called warp. Please remove the warp-share-files package from Add/Remove software and install the warp one. You can also install it from here.

That’s mainly it.

Grab it from here.

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