Oh heh, yeah, o’course! I wasn’t really meaning that seriously, more just riffing off the thread of silly $HOME expansions. :3
Probably good to mention that in case someone comes along and thinks /home/$(whoami) is actually a good idea though, hah.
(Mac has normal users’ homes in /Users!!)
/home/$(whoami)
– Frost
Psst… KDE’s launcher search is the same search as KRunner, just in the launcher! So you don’t need to make any changes at all for a “hit command, start typing” workflow.
(yeah we call it the command key, we come from Mac, but I like ‘command’/｢⌘｣ and it doesn’t have to be apple-specific :3)
– Frost
Bit specific, but for opening an audio device other than default, you should use the API of a sound server. Pulseaudio’s for instance. The new hotness is Pipewire, and it has its own API, but it also supports the Pulseaudio API and AFAWK most clients (apps and things) are still using that.
The sound server sits on top of ALSA and handles all the routing and mixing and shit. ALSA is lower level than what you need as an app/user program dev.
(Pipewire also supports the JACK API. Music apps and such used to use JACK because it was lower latency than Pulseaudio. Which meant you had to stop Pulse and start JACK and lose all sound from your other apps and it was a right pain. Pipewire just does both.)
– Frost
Debian.
It’s pretty great for desktop stuff these days. Basically Ubuntu minus the shit. Any desktop you want, it’s got live installers now (several different ones with different desktops), it’s got nonfree firmware on the disc, they’ve really upped their game.
(And if the recent systemd stuff skeeves you out, you can toss out systemd, even. It’s not for the faint of heart though.)
– Frost
(*wags tail at both PJ and Sam!!* =.=)
yeah! Terminal’s super useful but also kind of daunting.
If y’all haven’t seen the man pages, they make an excellent reference. Honestly, they’re basically written more as reference than as tutorial type stuff most of the time. So that’s there whenever your cheatsheet doesn’t cover something.
Also we use zsh (without plugins, you don’t need plugins) and it’s got really fancy autocomplete. We can just type - and hit tab and get a list of all the options for that command (that zsh knows about; I don’t think it goes and reads man pages for you or anything like that). I can’t remember how you turn that on but I think it’s something you can do from zsh’s initial setup wizard. I don’t know if bash can do the same thing or not, I think probably not (but we’re not super up to date on bash).
(I’d avoid fish, which you might also run into if you go looking for fancy features. It’s known for really fancy features but it’s also not compatible with normal shell scripts, which’ll screw you up if you ever want to get into scripting. zsh does normal shell script syntax (with the exception of protecting you if you forget to quote your variables) and also has really nice fancy features like the autocomplete.)
– Frost
Yeahhhh
We use Debian and ripped out systemd (replaced it with openrc) a bit before all this happened. Feeling really good about that choice now.
(unrelated: plural gang! :3)
– Frost
Zelda Ocarina of Time is probably a solid contender.
Played it on our 3DS and it just felt like a worse Twilight Princess.
– Frost
yes please! We’re using OpenRC on Debian right now, it’s very nice. Way less annoying than systemd.
– Frost
Email might actually be one of the easiest to move off of, thankfully!
There’s plenty of stuff out there, both free and paid. You can even use your own domain if you have an extra $15 or so a year. A lot of the paid options let you use your domain with them (and then if you ever need to change providers, you can keep your email address). And you can use both webmail and actual mail apps.
Youtube though… yeah, there aren’t really any good alternatives for that.
– Frost
Psst, you can keep your /home. Copy /home/username to a new partition before the install (just the username folder in the root of the new partition), do the install, and point it at your new partition as /home. Bam, it’s your new home.
Or you could copy out/copy back.
You’ll need to reinstall your apps, but you won’t need to redo all your settings for them.
– Frost
It totally does! We used to use it on Mac, back before we switched to Linux.
– Frost
Ah yes, the literal embodiment of “announcing the new OpenTormentNexus!”.
But also more generally, the whole attitude of “you’re just a Luddite who’s HOLDING US BACK!!” that people do. See also systemd.
(I don’t like systemd for completely different reasons (political rather than technical) but the very similar “you just need to get with the times!!!” attitude is also a massive turnoff for basically the same reason.)
(Also see also Rust. Ditto.)
By contrast, Pipewire? Legitimate improvement. It’s not just a “change bad” thing. There’s a reason Wayland/systemd/rust are controversial and Pipewire isn’t. A lot of it is the attitude, I think. People aren’t forcing Pipewire, either, and on the app side most stuff seems to still be the Pulseaudio API which is completely fine and means you can use either.
Hah, yeah, you probably don’t have a CRT monitor!
Having custom resolution support is INCREDIBLY important for them, because they have no native resolution and you can just throw pretty much anything at them and it looks fantastic. It’s great for getting high refresh rates in games, especially since decreasing the resolution means you don’t have to work as hard for that framerate, without the nastiness of upscaling.
And also our monitor reports 1280x1024 as the highest resolution. Which… is the wrong aspect ratio. ??? So we NEED custom resolutions to even have a usable monitor.
KDE finally came out with support for this… in a version that’s not in Debian yet… like, one major release before dropping X11 support completely. And pretty much every other desktop on the planet is just out in the cold (except for all the window managers that base off of wlroots or something, I think it has an equivalent). Gnome? Good fucking luck.
Oh and screenshot tools. Those are tied to the DE now! Want to use a competing screenshot tool? You just… uh… can’t. I mean we’re on KDE and Spectacle is pretty great so it doesn’t really affect us, but if we didn’t like Spectacle, we’d be more or less screwed under Wayland.
Also scaling the screen. I don’t mean widget toolkit scaling. I mean e.g. integer scaling the screen pixels from 1920x1080 to 4K, a simple 2x2 for 4K TVs, or what-have-you. (Because 4K TVs don’t do this themselves even though they really should.) Or going the other way, rendering at 1280x960 and then downscaling to 640x480 so our CRT can get 120Hz. Easy on X11. Straight-up impossible on Wayland.
Oh yeah, and did I mention temporarily (not as default) disabling our PS4 controller’s trackpad from working as a mouse, without disabling any other trackpad on the system, without disabling its ability to work as a button or whatever in Steam Input? That too.
Stuff like that.
I don’t think anything defaulting to Wayland is guaranteed trash, but I also think there should be way more X11 pitchfork people. Or at least less hatred directed at them when they pop up.
“just get with the times it’s THE FUTURE and you’re not allowed to say no!” is… not cool. Especially when Wayland is unusable for anything outside of “the ordinary”, by design.
– Frost
It’d be really nice if it was like Wii, where you can have the emulated console do an online system update and bang, there’s your whole OS… or failing that, the entire system is on every game disc, just in case… but nooo can’t have that.
Funnily enough, Gajim from Flatpak (1.9.5) does drag and drop just fine!
I can’t remember what version we’ve got on our laptop– [can’t we just check packages.debian.org?] right! It’s 2.1.1-2, apparently. Good to hear that 2.2.0 is non-adwaitified, that sounds like a good place to fork from.
– Frost
We were homeschooled.
Not the “religious nut” kind of homeschooling though. I wasn’t even aware that was a thing growing up. Our parents actually raised us totally atheist, so almost the opposite!
Personally I’m glad we were homeschooled, our parents actually did teach us well and we learned all the academic stuff you’d expect us to learn. (The state we grew up in also has a system of “you take yearly state-run standardized tests to make sure you’re actually being taught stuff”, which probably helps. But like, I don’t think that was the only reason our parents taught us well, I’m pretty sure they actually cared, too.)
The downside of all that is that it helped our parents keep us isolated. But honestly, I’ll take that over the bullying (and indoctrination) we’ve heard of public school having. Public school sounds like hell.
– Frost
There’s Matrix which is selfhostable but “good” is pushing it and the cryptography is a bit iffy (probably more incompetence than malice). Though selfhosting it means you don’t need the end to end encryption quite as much… until the court gets involved of course.
– Frost