Possibly add a link to the following YouTube video to help introduce and explain Xob to new users

[Raytle]

Possibly add a link to the following YouTube video Xob - Bar Overlays Add Extra Flair To Any Linux Desktop to help introduce and explain Xob to new users.

Also, after significant changes have been made to Xob, perhaps you might contact reviewers on YouTube (such as Brodie Robertson) so that they will make a new video about those changes which, of course, could be linked to from this site. As a result, Xob would have something akin to "incomplete yet helpful screencasts" that would function as a supplement to—not a replacement for—the corpus of xob documentation (that is, xob's "written" or text documentation).

[florentc]

Not a bad idea indeed. This video actually brought quite a few new xob users when it came out.

[Raytle]

The sheer chaos and general lack of marketing related to even remarkably useful free and open source project projects—such as xob—never ceases to astound me. If Jonas Salk had been an indie FOSS developer, then I suppose polio would still be rampant.

By the way, according to the Center for Disease Control—as tragic and unbelievable as it might seem—as recently as 1988 (not 1958, not 1968, not even 1978, but 1988!!!) there were 350,000 cases of polio worldwide. When the USA was saving the world from being overrun by communism by, for example, fighting wars in Northeast and Southeast Asia, it seems that many millions of people around the world were stricken with polio. "Alex, I'd like how the US bungled foreign policy in the 1950's and 1960's for what would be billions of US dollars in 2021, for $500 please." (That's a bad reference to the US television game show called Jeopardy which was hosted for several decades by a man named Alex Trebek).

I suggest you look at...

1. https://lubuntu.me/
2. https://phab.lubuntu.me/

Tell the Lubuntu devs that by default Lubuntu should bind...

1. Decrease brightness + xob to the F6 key.
2. Increase brightness + xob to the F7 key.
3. Mute + xob to the F8 key.
4. Decrease volume + xob to the F9 key.
5. Increase volume + xob to the F10 key.

I realize these are not technically daunting challenges. But. Well. See. Here's the thing: ordinary people want to be able to press the key with an icon on their keyboard that looks like, for example, volume down and–I know, I know, it sounds utterly crazy–see a visual indicator appear on their screen (such as the ones provided byxob) as their volume decreases on step. I'm being facetious. This stuff irks me. Most of the user interface design for desktop and laptop computer has been standardized for 30 to 40 years. It is 2021. If I remember correctly, back in the desktop computer "Bronze Age" of 1984 the newly introduced Apple Macintosh, had a volume and a brightness overlay bar.

I realize that some wealthy men have spent many millions of dollars so that they can blast off into space. That's merely an extremely expensive hobby. On the other hand, at least a billion people on this planet where we live don't have simple and inexpensive yet extremely valuable technologies such as indoor plumbing.

Please see the colors at...https://lubuntu.me/

I suggest an xob overlay volume and xob brightness bar be created that match that color scheme. Ordinary users don't need to be able to customize overlay bars. Have you ever heard a user complain they can't customize their over bars for the Android or iPhone? I doubt at least 99% of users have ever even considered the possibility.

Sometimes less is more. For ordinary users, unless you want to create a GUI so that they can very easily customize their xob overlay bars, I suggest overlay brightness and volume bars simply appear in Lubuntu by default without an obvious way to customize them.

Of course for the, I would guess, fewer than 1% of Lubuntu users who actually read the manual, sure, yeah, of course, there would be instructions for customizing xob overlay bars in
https://manual.lubuntu.me/stable/

For more on the subject please see Design for the Novice, Configure for the Pro.

No. xob is not as important as Salk's polio vaccine. But xob could help tens of thousands of people more comfortably use Lubuntu. By the way, Ubuntu has so much bloat it's absurd. It's a classic case of endless "scope creep" because, well, because engineers feel like they have to keep adding stuff. Lubuntu LXQt is, by far, the most stable desktop version of Linux I have ever run. With a few tweaks here and there (such as the ones mentioned above) Lubuntu can and should become an extremely popular distro for millions of people around the world.

I guesstimate that for over 90% of ordinary users, a cheap laptop with a 11.6 inch screen—which currently cost no more than 200 US dollars in the USA—with 4 gigs of RAM and a 32 gig SSD running Lubuntu will do everything they need. For under 100 US dollars they can buy an external 24 inch monitor. The only other thing they need to do is they back up their data up to the cloud and/or store their data the cloud and back it up to their local SSD.

If the Lubuntu devs wanted to do a better job of helping ordinary users they would explain all of this and provide some simple tools for doing this. Generally I end up at loggerheads when dealing with engineers. See, I'm essentially a salesman. Therefore, I tend to focus on trying to help users get what they need. Engineers, by contrast, tend to focus on creating technologies they enjoy. Maybe you will be able to convince the Lubuntu devs to incorporate some of my suggestions.The sheer chaos and general lack of marketing related to even remarkably useful free and open source project projects—such as xob—never ceases to astound me. If Jonas Salk had been an indie FOSS developer, then I suppose polio would still be rampant.

Sure. Of course. Within another decade wearable computers (such as headset computers) seem likely to displace laptop and desktop computers (as well as smartphones) as the primary "real computer" owned by ordinary users. But, of course, presumably Linux OSes on wearable computers will be able to do what Linux OSes have done on desktop computers.

[Raytle]

I just edited the penultimate comment because it contained a huge amount of duplicate information because I had chosen Select All and pasted almost all of it, into itself.