I switched over from v4 a couple days ago, and its a nice upgrade.

Gotta make sure to disable any theme templates in v4 first though, or they’re permanently applied, can’t even get rid of them by deleting the files.

Don’t love this, DHH is a self-proclaimed Nazi

Yeah, LUKS or multiboot make things much more complicated. I think it’s well intentioned, but I’ve never had any stability issues skipping it, so it seems unnecessary for most folks. Also, snapper-boot is just a better solution to the upgrade stability problem.

Staying compatible with LTS releases should absolutely be the goal, but that takes work from both sides.

If Debian is applying backported patches to old software (I think the oldest version I saw was 6 years out of support) that generates a nightmare to support for package maintainers. If there are features which are not supported since the version is so old, but there are backported security patches which change the API, the developers would essentially have to maintain a specific version for each LTS distro’s specific set of patches, and the number of versions you have to maintain and the length of time you need to maintain them for quickly becomes impossible to manage.

Stable is nice, but you can have stability without being criminally outdated, as Trixie shows. The ideal is to have a stable and up to date distribution.

And yes, most users would be fine due to just being in the browser, but thats true of literally any OS or distro, not specific to this.

I got fed up with Discover’s whole reboot-to-update thing and just disabled it.

Eventually, I ended up just disabling updates through discover altogether, I’d rather just use my little bash script anyways.

Debian is nice & boring, but I have had issues with how old its kernel and software versions are. 6.12 isn’t too bad for Trixie, but previously it was really terrible. When I was running Bookworm, I ran into plenty of situations where software I was compiling or getting from outside the repos (for niche software), wasn’t backwards compatible to the library versions Debian provided.

No hate for Debian, but it just doesn’t work for a lot of people. However, these days I would go for Debian over Ubuntu 10 times out of 10.

Isn’t gnome the default DE on Fedora?

If you just want portability, then this could be useful. However, in my opinion a large part of why I use a shell script is to avoid compilation and just hack something together. If your goal is shell scripts that are easier to write you could also check out other shells:

• fish is the easiest to use in my opinion, but is not POSIX compliant so you do have to learn the syntax.
• zsh is a nice quality-of-life upgrade over BASH, tweaking the little things
• There are also things like xonsh which use Python syntax for shell scripting, but I dont have personal experience with them.

Yes, that’s the version I was using. And I was trying it this past February or March, so definitely after the switchover to Plasma 6

Vanilla KDE on desktop, Niri WM+Noctalia shell on laptop. Firstly, because for some reason I cannot get any touchpad gestures to work on KDE, and secondly because the niri paradigm of horizontal tiling is just perfect for a laptop. I tried to use Gnome for a while before landing on Niri, but the lack of configurability and the reliance on extensions for basic functionality drove me nuts.

Oh my god, Krohnkite was so unbelievably buggy for me, it kept fully crashing KDE. I tried to get it to work for like a week, but eventually I just had to give up.

My first experience with *nix was a professor leading me into a server room though two biometric locks and setting up the config files for a compute cluster faster than I would have been able to open the files.

He was using Vim, and though it took me a while to learn, the sheer speed with which he was able to get us out of that unbelievably noisy server room sold me for life.

Well, I use vim for text edits and nvim+extensions for an IDE. As close to a vim purist as is reasonable. But frankly, it’s the first one you learn to use well.

Yeah, this is the good argument against rust-coreutils. Caring what programming language your binaries are made with? That’s pretty out there.

In the announcement they say the resolution (2880x1920) was chosen to be used at 2x scaling for that reason.

I dont fully get that? Its not a multiple of 1920x1080, so thats unclear to me.

I was a longtime KDE user, but the lack of reasonable trackpad gestures drove me up the wall on my laptop, so I’ve been using niri+noctalia for the last couple months. It just feels so right, it’s lovely. Still some edge cases, but overall just so good.

Consider me enlightened! The recontextualization of the statement makes it make a lot more sense. As with many things, being swept into the tech sphere robbed it of meaning. I also think that the sentiment of “the tools used to build something are not the same tools which can effectively dismantle it” is true in many senses, not just in the context of social/politiical/institutional change.

I was confused by the section “How Taking the ‘Master’s Tools’ Seriously Can Serve Enshittification”. It transitions from an argument that

The early internet was structured around the assumptions of its architects: predominantly white, male, Western, educated, and abled

(which is true), then links this group directly to Facebook. While these descriptors apply to both the founders of the internet and the founders of the tech giants, facebook is at least 15 years younger than the foundation of the public internet, and these two groups are both mutually exclusive and ideologically at odds. The author then goes on to use the social harms of big tech to push back against Doctorow’s first stage of enshittification, when the companies are “good”.

I think this is a fundamental misreading of Doctorow. He has spent his career as a free software advocate, and claiming that the first stage of corporate capture of the internet is the ideal would be anathemic to his more general arguments. What he means by “good” here – and he says this frequently in public discussions on enshittification – is that the product does what it says on the box, with no BS. That people are tempted to use it because it allows people to access the internet without coming up against the sharp edges of the technology itself, and that is a reasonable compromise for many people at first, because it allows more people to access the internet.

The article argues that in order to fully represent the experience of all stakeholders, the internet “getting worse” is an incomplete view, and to understand the impacts outside the white, male, etc. perspective, we should use the tools of decolonialism, which would be true if Doctorows project was a thorough sociological analysis of the impacts of technology. But it isn’t, it’s a rallying cry. The goal of his book is to make a coherent narative of the change in experience for consumers of technology over the era of Big Tech, and it does that. This is far from the only case where it leaves out strong tie-ins to other philosophical or sociological concepts, but there is a strength in a focused argument as well.

It’s unsurprising that Doctorow misappropriated Audre Lorde’s words in their meme form, becuase that’s what the book is – an abbreviated, digestible approach to the topic. However, I’m glad that someone made those connections.

Proton is still wine with extra sauce. It’s just that occasionally the sauce tastes bad :)

Ahhh got it. I thought it was a “I know this is inadvisable, but dammit I’m going to do it anyways” type of post :)

You can’t run steam with no compositor whatsoever, but you can use the steam deck’s solution of using their gamescope micro compositor for everything. You should be able to install gamescope and just run gamescope -e {other CLI options} steam (assuming you’re using the native Arch package and not the flatpak).

My experience using gamescope for steam has been very mixed, but I’ve seen a tutorial somewhere on doing exactly this.

Gamescope isn’t necessarily the best option for every game, and having a normal compositor (which, for now, must support XWayland) is just a much more flexible solution.

This may also be possible with something more general like xwayland-satellite, but frankly steam and all its games still run on the X11 protocol, so if you really don’t need a GUI you might be able to install a vanilla X11 instance and hook to that directly. I can’t speak to either of those options directly.

But is this worth it, in a practical sense? No. You have a reasonably powerful system, and the only performance you’d be saving is a few percent of a single core on the CPU, which in your config is absolutely not worth it.

The GNOME platform application is used by flatpaks. Basically, a flatpak can be built against/designed to be used with a specific visual toolkit. To do that, it needs to download specific parts of that toolkit, which is what you’re seeing.