jw13 @ jw13 @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I use KeePassium on iOS, it uses the same file format so it works very well together with KeePassXC.

I regularly use an 11” laptop and I appreciate how much screen space GNOME allows for my applications. The interface is very keyboard-friendly as well, so launching apps is just one keypress away.

This is so cool! I love the theme.

You have good taste in DOS games as well. Is the “CAT” folder the 1984 game “Alley Cat”?

Are you sure it wasn’t Xandros OS?

Nice!

You can use spaces in the title. This isn’t reddit.

Large batteries are a must-have to get anywhere near a comfortable range.

I wonder if larger battery packs fit in small cars. And it would also push the price beyond the level that people expect to pay for smaller cars.

Auto-type not working.

Yeah, that one is annoying.

The probability of abuse is much higher with closed-source applications though. Almost all popular games are closed-source, and many are riddled with ads and spyware.

It's a valid concern IMO. Any application on X11 can install a key logger, record your screen, and influence other applications in a myriad of ways. With open source software from a trusted repository, this is not an issue, but an increasing number of people run random binary blobs from Steam, the Snap Store and Flathub. I am 100% certain that some less-conscientious publishers are already using X11 features to build ad profiles of their users; it's a matter of time before the first ransomware will appear. The only sensible way to prevent this, is to confine applications to their own space.

But ok, more security isn't a bad thing. But why not make it an option, like SELinux for example? That way users can choose a degree on a scale between security and convenience that suits their use case and circumstances. Why make it all or nothing?

Wayland simply doesn't have protocols for most of this stuff. (Applications are supposed to use D-Bus and portals.) Developing new protocols that offer X11-like functionality is a large investment and will also need changes in the toolkits and apps to make it work.

That is a serious problem, but advocating X11 will not solve anything. Wayland is being improved every day, while X.org is in deep maintenance mode.

And let's not pretend that X.org is perfect. Race conditions at least can be fixed, even if it takes a lot of time and effort. Worst case, someone will rewrite wlroots in Rust. But in X11 any application can kill other applications, install a key logger, pin itself to the foreground, etcetera. This is by design: it's what makes window managers, xkill and xeyes work. It's also a huge security flaw that can never be fixed.

Most of the post is an "argument from authority": Trust me, I have a PhD and maintain my own X server, and I assure you that Wayland is a pile of shit!

OP claims that "actually nothing will actually run" because the stable Wayland protocols lack so much important functionality. In reality, many people use Wayland every day, and multiple large distributions use it as the default display server. This doesn't inspire confidence in OP's knowledge.

Admittedly, the first bug they linked is a real issue and it should be fixed, but it's not a Wayland design flaw. It's an (arguably important) feature that hasn't been implemented by all compositors yet. With the second bug OP laments that Wayland compositors are implemented in C, an unsafe language. This is true about X.org too, so I don't really see the point. Arguably Wayland improves on X11 here, because someone could develop a new Wayland compositor in Rust, while in X11 this is a core part of the display server.

It’s not even a license, just an abbreviation that people may, or may not, be familiar with.

As a GNOME user:

A lot of development is ongoing in GNOME thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund. I’m curious what that will bring.

Also hoping that the proposed tiling functionality will be implemented.

Chromium and Firefox are web browsers, of course they only support HTML+JS. That’s what they were designed for.

This was posted on r/Catholicism, one of the many subreddits where people discuss niche topics with likeminded people. If this bothers you, then don’t subscribe to r/Catholicism…

Maybe Midnight Commander? I know it’s text based, but it’s really good.

Nemo can open a second pane. Never tried it myself though.

I think you're judging a bit too harsh. Elementary has it's faults, but it is (was) an interesting OS with a lot of unique ideas:

• The UI was gorgeous for its time, and in my opinion, their theme still looks better today than Adwaita and Breeze. They were among the first to offer global settings for light/dark modes, accent colors, and night light. It's very consistent between applications, with a lot of attention to detail. Like they even had a custom icon theme for LibreOffice, just so it would fit in. In short, Elementary is much more than a simple "MacOS copycat". This took a LOT of effort and it shows.
• The "pay what you want" appstore was a novel idea, and I am sad that it didn't work out.
• The developer experience was quite good. They have excellent documentation that's very accessible for newcomers, and for a while there were a number of interesting 3rd-party applications developed specifically for Elementary OS.
• They cooperated with competing and upstream projects, mostly through freedesktop.org, and heavily invested in Vala. They maintained the GNOME email app when upstream lost interest, and contributed to Gnome Web.
• Their included applications were really not that bad, and offered some unique features. For example, the file manager is probably the only one on Linux with Miller columns. And the terminal app is smart about CTRL+C, copying text when you want to copy text, and terminating the running process when that's what you intended. I'm not exactly sure how it decides this, but it works perfectly.

They ran out of funding last year, and their lead developer left. I think that explains the drop in quality that you encountered. Elementary used to be a coherent and polished OS, in a time when most Linux distributions were still a bit messy. I was a happy user for quite a while. Sadly, many of their innovations turned out to be a dead end. Their appstore mostly contains toy apps that nobody wants to pay for, Vala has lost traction, their "Code" IDE lacks LSP integration, and GNOME or KDE apps look out of place, and it's impossible to upgrade to new releases. I wouldn't recommend it anymore, but I hope that they will find their way back up again.

I beg to differ. Fedora Linux worked out of the box on my current Dell laptop, on the previous (Acer) laptop, and the previous pc too (I think it was a Lenovo). No problems whatsoever.

Meanwhile, it took multiple hours to disable the various ads, pulp news, and trackers on the Windows pc that I use for work.