[earthtolazlo]

As someone with RSI who uses speech recognition to control most software on my desktop, X11 -> Wayland has been a massive roadblock. Ad-infested Windows isn’t great, but at least it doesn’t feel like I’m fighting any devs just to be able to use my computer in an accessible manner.

[guillermin]

Wayland is still very green, most distributions haven't switched yet, why did you? I can understand that you would want to try Wayland, but when you encountered problems why did you decide to move to Windows instead of going back to X11?

[jamesgeck0]

Wayland has been around for a decade and X.org is in maintenance mode. Linux users have to decide between barely maintained software with a problematic security model or an actively-maintained project that is still somewhat half-baked in places.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/30/x_server_lead_maintai...

[tmalsburg2]

What speech recognition system did you use on Linux? I'm interested in using speech recognition more after getting used to it on iOS devices (where it works amazingly well).

[earthtolazlo]

I had the most success using Dragonfly with the Kaldi engine, which handles the heavy lifting of speech recognition and provides a nice API on top of xdotool for desktop interaction. You can also check out Talon, although I think its Linux support is still somewhat experimental.

[tmalsburg2]

Thank you. These keywords (Kaldi, Dragonfly) put me on the right track and I found nerd-dictation [1] which is easy to use and hackable. Perhaps not useful for your programming purposes, but I need something for writing prose and it's a decent start for that.

[1] https://github.com/ideasman42/nerd-dictation

[nivenkos]

How is OS X for that sort of accessibility? It seems to be the best for accessibility in general.

[earthtolazlo]

I’ve only ever used Windows and Linux so I couldn’t say for sure, but my impression is that it’s pretty good. Talon or Dragonfly with the Kaldi backend handle speech recognition and provide nice Python APIs for controlling the keyboard, mouse, windows etc.

[after_care]

Apple products are very good for accessibility.

[LegitShady]

>Ad-infested Windows

I don't see any ads from windows. Not sure what you're talking about.

[ddek]

Windows ads are mainly confined to the default windows apps, like 'news' etc. Also Cortana I think, but I never use it.

[ajkjk]

Perhaps you disabled them all after you installed it?

[topbanana]

I don't see any either, maybe because its the Enterprise / Pro SKU?

[ajkjk]

Oh, yes, enterprise windows cuts out most of the ads. The personal additions fill the start menu with ads for various windows products (and paid placements, iirc? I can't remember, since them I disabled them all a long time ago).

[LegitShady]

no. Only thing I've done is remove widgets from UI - don't see cortana, etc. No special removals or disabling.