jcarax @ jcarax @beehaw.org

Posts

3

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361

Joined

3 yr. ago

Yeah, it's never sat very well with me. I've gone through cycles where I'll use a good bit of AUR, to none at all. I had been using a handful of things, but realized that almost all of it was Python stuff that I could more safely install with pip or uv, so I've migrated all of that. The one thing left is Manuskript, and it hardly gets updates anyway.

Yeah, I have almost no apps on my phone now. Breezy Weather, Firefox Focus, Comaps, Stratum for MFA, Signal, and a few other things. I rarely use any of it, except I check Breezy Weather once a day (better than anything I've found on the web). Signal seems to finally be removing the phone requirement, and I could move MFA to my password manager. I rarely turn on mobile data, and I get 6-8 days battery on my Pixel 9a running Graphene.

But, it's really nice to have if I get lost when I'm in town. I can go from ruining my day, which being autistic, tends to snowball into a week or so, to pulling out my phone and getting everything back on track.

That said, I used to constantly have my face in a reddit app, have YNAB and all my banking apps, and rely on it for just about everything. I don't need all that. I take my receipts home, I bank from my laptop, I bought a DAP for my music, Pocketbook for reading, etc.

That said, I'd like to move music back to it once I get a phone with an SD card that will run an OS I'm happy with. I'm optimistic for the Motorola phone with Graphene support. And I'd like to use it to control MPD or Navidrome at home, start getting some Home Assistant stuff running with it for control, and spin up an open source alternative to YNAB that I can run an app for.

It took me years to get to this point where I feel like I can start using it for actually useful stuff, and not be tempted to have it take over my life. Of course, now RAM and disk are too expensive for me to build the little hyperconverged cluster I want to run those services.

I actually like Gnome's paradigm. But I also used CDE-style desktops for quite a long time, so I'm not really locked to the Windows ways. I would say Gnome is CDE inspired, but with the weird activities fuckery.

Ultimately, Gnome is just too lacking in customization. No panel, no notification area, window switching behavior... I have to install extensions for basic functionality. Which is fine at first glance, but then I have to be careful with updates when a new version is released, until the extensions update. Then I have to chase new extensions for the ones that are really lagging or cease development. Which happens a lot, because most people seem to get sick of dealing with that shit and stop using Gnome at some point.

Honestly, if Gnome would let me show the panel when docked and banish it to activities when undocked, I could probably live with all the rest. Also, have they fixed reversal of swipe gestures when you reverse scroll direction? That's just absurdly bad UX, which is actually out of character. We might disagree with a lot of UX decisions from the Gnome project, but they're usually refined and precise. The swipe gesture issues are just plain broken, or were, it's been a couple years since I've used it.

KDE is just too much, and there's quirky stuff I'm really not fond of. I'm using it now, have been for about 6 months now, which is by far the longest I have going back to trying it occasionally starting back in the late 90's.

I'm excited for Cosmic, I used that for a good stretch, and it might be time to give it another try soon. I'm also excited for my old friend XFCE, and some other mid-weight DEs, finally finding their way to Wayland.

This whole damned division is just trying to hang on for dear life.

I thought I was the only one, it's just so easy to use it as your base working folder. Things get organized out as whatever it is moves forward to some arbitrary point.

I absolutely adore being able to click into and between genres and artists to get to albums and songs instantly. I want to ultimately move back to MPD, maybe Navidrome or Subsonic, but... I just love Quod Libet.

Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of proprietary crap going on between Google/Apple and carriers. Maybe instead of dangerous age verification logs, our law makers could focus on untangling these messes into extensions of existing standards. Maybe throw a few new ones in, like for casting to car screens.

I was having problems with MMS on Graphene, but it was more related to Verizon than Quik. I'd been able to solve it in the past by limiting outbound MMS size, but on my Pixel 9a nothing worked besides switching carriers. Too bad, because there was some amount of visual voicemail support with Verizon.

Give me a Nexus S or Moto X 2013, but I'd probably be happier with a Nexus 5 for the extra screen size. But man, the Nexus S and Moto X (also the Palm Pre) were just so nice in the hand.

To be fair, the bezels were huge by today's standards, and one of the main (non-Apple) competitors had a hardware keyboard below the screen. Just think how much more usable these old smaller phones would be, if we had the screen to body ratio of the Pixel 9a.

Yup, I jumped around a lot early on, but Debian was home. It's hard to break if you follow the Debian way, and it's definitely stable. I still use it for server and lab stuff, because I can write a doc and come back in 18 months and is still largely reproducible.

I've used a LOT of distros over the years, and Arch is home now (technically Cachy at the moment), but Debian is probably my second favorite. Fedora is 3rd, for user friendly polish.

I believe the search term you're looking for is 'multi-seat'.

I just don't have my passwords on mobile, easy solution. Though I do have Stratum on there for 2FA.

Yes. Make sure you're installing the beta, they never really release stable anymore from what I can tall.

Unfortunately, that might just mean that this is when the truly scary part begins, as they start trying to keep a grasp on their dreams of absolute power.

I was thinking the same with my 7840u. Could try something a bit more cutting edge than Mint, though I will admit I have no idea how up to date they keep the kernel these days. Though if they live boot, they're removing the SSD and likely qtile from the equation, so it's a bit tricky to isolate.

I came up using primarily Fluxbox and XFCE, and could tolerate Gnome 2. Had a love/hate relationship with Gnome 3 for awhile. Never really liked any version of KDE, but...

I used Cosmic for about a year, just switched to KDE last weekend. For me, Cosmic is the first Wayland DE to hit that sweet spot of lightweight window manager feel, with a few conveniences like integrated panels, notification bus (which is bidirectional, unlike KDE's), small application suite, and some useful applets. I'm always tempted to go back and roll my own with LabWC and god knows what at this point, because it's not quite what I want ideally, but it's quite good.

It's still a bit buggy, recently I started having an issue where windows would lose their position and size after minimizing and restoring. I've long had that issue after unlock. Others feel differently, but tiling has never been great for me, I hope they rework it, or introduce more customizable snapping without the rigidity of full tiling.

But it's lightweight and clean, fairly customizable (compared to Gnome, not KDE), and generally sane. We'll see how Budgie and XFCE come along on Wayland, they both have a far more mature DE as a whole, but Cosmic does have a head start on Wayland, and has the benefit of being a fresh code base.

I'm hoping Cosmic, along with the lightweight DE ports (?) to Wayland, kick start development of more lighter weight, non-DE-centric applications with native Wayland support.

It just blows my mind that Gnome isn't good on a tablet, when the whole damned UI seems to make compromises with multi-monitor capability so that it can be consistent across tablet and desktop/laptop. Gnome has such a nice look and feel, too bad the devs are hell bent on making it unusable for the majority of users in an effort to make it suitable for a majority of users.

Yes, but CachyOS might not be, and while it does a bit to make things substantially easier for your friend, you'll have a lot of familiarity with it as an Arch user.

Source: An Arch user for 15 years who just installed CachyOS when I wanted to switch from Cosmic to KDE.

In my experience, it's usually power users or basic users with very specific application requirements, who have trouble moving between operating systems. There's usually a FOSS alternative to those applications, but often requires reworking a workflow or upskilling more than they want to. But they're still basic users so it's more a speed bump than a road block.

So yeah, most people can switch to MacOS without an issue, and the vast majority of those can switch to a distro like Fedora or Ubuntu and quickly feel comfortable.

Power users get stuck in this situation where they've learned how to do advanced things in Windows, have things tweaked to support more complex and peculiar workflows, but often don't understand the actual concepts behind them. And even if they do understand the concepts, they still have to learn the alternatives in a new OS, and rebuild their workflows. Now, there's a lot more ability to learn behind the scenes about the why and how with Linux and BSD, so I'd argue they'd be better off to just suck it up and get started, and they'll be better off before long.