[mythtv-users] UI myths

[James Linder]

> On 11 Aug 2019, at 8:00 pm, mythtv-users-request at mythtv.org wrote:
> 
>> Why do we do this
>> 
>> ?Do you really want to Exit Mythtv?
>> 
>> For the 1000s of times you say ?I do? surely the once you mean ?No? you could easily and cleanly restart mythfrontend.
>> If mythfrontend was running something eg mythcommflag (that?s a backend task, but just say) there is no frontend indication to say ?busy now? ?try in a while?. 
>> Seems like an irritatation based on what MS thinks is good UI design.
>> 
>> James 
> 
> For you that may be the case, but for people like my mother, she is
> completely unable to restart mythfrontend.  And she often manages to
> bounce the Back button on her remote and get that message.  And my
> mother sometimes gets it when she uses her heat pump remote - the
> MythTV IR picks up some of the heat pump signal and sees what it
> thinks is a Back button.  I manage to get it accidentally myself
> sometimes too - I would not want to exit mythfrontend accidentally
> when that happened.  So, no it has nothing to do with MS design
> principles, it is just sensible for a lot of MythTV users.
> 
> In your case, do you really need to be shutting down mythfrontend?
> Would using Alt-Tab to go to something else that was running be a
> better alternative?  I always have a three terminals that get started
> automatically when the GUI starts, so if I have nothing else running
> Alt-Tab will switch me to one of them and put mythfrontend into the
> background out of the way, and then I have the normal desktop
> available without having to shut down mythfrontend.

Fair enought, I did say why.

I use a mac frontend and I’ve waxed lyrical in the past about apple: They are evil, they make nice hardware.

even mythbackend (over several weeks, stating with 0k swap used)

top - 08:23:52 up 44 days, 18:58,  2 users,  load average: 0.03, 0.03, 0.00
Tasks: 211 total,   1 running, 210 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.7 us,  1.1 sy,  0.0 ni, 98.2 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem : 3812.555 total, 1041.844 free, 2472.867 used,  297.844 buff/cache
MiB Swap: 4095.996 total, 2566.660 free, 1529.336 used. 1070.387 avail Mem

but many osx apps too waste memory, so a restart every week or so is good. (other funnies manifest themselves)
OSX won’t restart if mythfrontend is running, so I *must* exit it.

The 29-fixes mac build frontend I found gets its knickers in a knot, core dumps on edit and needs a system reboot to work again.
(that sounds bizare: it does not happen often enough to warrant investigation and the ‘crash report’ delves into QT)

OT but of interest I recently played with (did some work on) widows 10. Their multiple desktop implementation is aweful. At least macs version is reasonable.

James