The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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It's always galling to admit that a gay jew like jwz is so often right about technology (and also admiring him for following his stupid dream of running an independent nightspot in San Francisco and somehow hanging on for more than a decade for much longer than his .dot millions should have lasted through good business management and just loving the scene). He's certainly right about what tends to happen with KDE and GNOME development, at least since KDE 3 and Gnome 2 were unceremoniously chucked in the trash for no reason.
Jwz is such a terrible faggot politically, but when he's right about something technical, he's fantastically right. I read the writings on his site for years.

This one that really stuck with me. Also non-technically, this is a good bit about how to approach cycling as a practical commuter option, but from the perspective of a normal person and not a bike faggot.
I believe it's universally agreed that KDE 3's AmaroK was the best iTunes style music jukebox player ever created.
Oh I forgot about Amarok. I used like fluxbox or some shit but always loved Amarok.
 
I've been trying out qutebrowser for the last two days, after I got really into the various keyboard-only navigation plugins for firefox (e.g. vimium-c) but was not impressed with their inconsistency because of inherent plugin limitations. It's based on QtWebEngine which itself is based on chromium and gets updates from chromium pushed in a six month cycle (except security fixes which get pushed asap) so websites work like you'd expect them to in a modern browser and it's quite a comfortable and very customizable browser which is intended to be very minimal in interface and keyboard-centric. It also supports greasemonkey-like scripts, a command mode, stylesheets, aliases and all the other good stuff. The biggest downsides are no ublock and no automatic tab unloading. I ended up disabling javascript globally and whitelisting it for websites I trust (all possible with on-board options) which is probably the best solution anyways. I only access "the big websites" via "privacy" 3rd party frontends and these usually don't expect javascript or have any ads for that matter. That said, it does have rudimentary DNS based adblocking and also whatever it is that brave does. It feels snappy and is defintively easier on my CPU time than Firefox, although I think it uses somewhat more memory. Typing this on my system with all programs running I have usually running consumes around ~1.8 GB of RAM so I guess I can't really complain either way. Github also seems active enough and there's enough talk about it and people involved with it that I feel safe enough in trusting it.

I'll not uninstall firefox yet but I can imagine using this as daily driver for my regular (non-important accounts) browsing so far.

I also tried nyxt, a lisp-based browser with a very pretentious description (so right up my alley) and based on apple's webkit2. It locked up after trying to open an URL in a way where I had to SIGKILL (no, a TERM did nothing) it. This had an about 50/50 chance to happen on running the command to open up an URL and happened several times. I gave up. lol.
Thanks for the recommendation, it's very fun to use
 
Are you sure it isn't a 4k120 display? Mine is, and that's one of the first 4k OLEDs LG made.
It seems you are right. This thing is supposed to be capable of 4k120 and I was not aware of that. I don't think my source can do 4k120 though.
 
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How is it holding up these years later?
Perfectly well! 40% brightness most of the time (I turn it up to 100% for games and films), and just about no visible burn-in even if I display a pure white image and actually look for it. It runs the automatic cleaning thing each night when I turn it off, so that probably helps.

Best monitor I’ve ever had, just wish it had displayport.
 
I don't think that it would make a difference since HDR is not supported on X11 and Wayland (for now) even though, ironically enough, Nvidia did propose a deep color extension for X11. Guess what happened with it.
The TV is retarded.

If you have HDR turned off, it sends EDID for 4k30 maximum.

If you turn HDR on, it will send a different EDID which allows 4k60 on my source, and supposedly 4k120 as well.

It took me a long time to figure that out.
 
Mac OS style global menu bars
MLVWM (which is a fork of fvwm) can do this:
1707939014901.png

It basically emulates the classic Mac System enviroment as far as it can. It's actually pretty old (forked in the late 90s from fvwm, so when System 8 actually wasn't really "retro") and I didn't know it was still used anywhere but apparently it is. Makes me think of fvwm2, the meta window manager that can just do about anything. I have to revisit some day to rice it, for old times sake. Nothing you couldn't do with it and still more lightweight than your average ubuntu default install while doing it. Nobody's that creative anymore. You will eat ze bugs. You will use ze same desktop enviroment as everyone else.

My LG 4k OLED TV

For integer scaling to be truly sharp you have to set the scaling to nearest neighbor instead of bilinear. You can do that with xrandr. I'm not sure all GPU drivers support it though. I use it as a tweak to play pixel art games on my Thinkpotato. Run them at a very low resolution and then just scale everything up, looks identical, saves bandwidth and also helps with games that don't deal with hidpi screens well. For non-pixel content this will only work partitally and especially not with aliased pixel fonts. (things will look more pixelated)

The rest you describe sounds at least partitally like something in the layers above X fucking up, which was my guess. But yeah, it doesn't handle multiscreens well if they're different.

Thanks for the recommendation, it's very fun to use
I've also been trying Luakit and Surf. Luakit is very similar to qutebrowser but with lua instead of python, with less bizarre limitations and built on Webkit2. (Engine behind Apple's Safari etc.) Sadly it's more rough around the edges and the original maintainer seemed to literally have stepped down last week. The documentation is useless and you can basically only figure out how to do things by browsing the source which is not a good sign. Surf also uses Webkit2 but is very minimal, not even tabbing is supported. I feel it could be good as a wrapper around specific websites you want to run like an "App" but completely isolate from everything else otherwise (with own storage, cookies etc. as start parameter) similar to kiosk mode in e.g. firefox but a lot more lightweight. Sadly no keyboard hinting/navigation AFAIK. Both more or less have qutebrowsers feature set with rudimentary adblocking, userscripts etc..

That all said, these exotic browsers are reasonable to use from a safety standpoint because the underlying engines have corpo interest behind them and get constant updates. These browsers are basically just wrappers around them. (Not saying they can't have exploits because that totally has happened for both qutebrowser and luakit in the past) Disabling javascript in places you don't trust and DNS based blocking of ad networks is probably good enough tho, I can't imagine there's a lot of interest going on in e.g. finding 0days for luakit. What all these alternatives had in common is that they felt a lot snappier and better to use than Firefox, while also being quite noticeably easier on the resources, which is wild considering python isn't exactly known for it's performance. Firefox truly is crap. Their biggest and almost fatal flaw is the lack of uBlock Origin. I basically don't use youtube (and when I do, via 3rd party) and absolutely don't use websites like twitter or tiktok or twitch or facebook etc. but I guess many do and lacking uBlock there probably hurts.
 
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It basically emulates the classic Mac System enviroment as far as it can. It's actually pretty old (forked in the late 90s from fvwm, so when System 8 actually wasn't really "retro") and I didn't know it was still used anywhere but apparently it is. Makes me think of fvwm2, the meta window manager that can just do about anything. I have to revisit some day to rice it, for old times sake. Nothing you couldn't do with it and still more lightweight than your average ubuntu default install while doing it. Nobody's that creative anymore. You will eat ze bugs. You will use ze same desktop enviroment as everyone else.
Oh damn, that is perfect, will get right on that. I have been using XFCE with Chicago95 lately but either the System 7/Mac OS 8 (or System 7 riced out with Kaleidoscope) were great times for UI design.
 
I don't understand why the GNOME devs removed the global menu and kept the top bar, that thing serves no purpose and takes too much space.

Because Wayland fucked up the workflow of common window interfacing elements that have been included with other OS's, including niche corporate UNIX-likes outside the scope of everyday computing, for decades on end without issue. Apparently windows cannot interface with panels like this in the sane, simple matter like on X.

That, and some software is just lackluster in design to ever honor that feature anyways.
 
Wayland is the perfect example of the CADT model of software development.
That was a great read, thanks for sharing. I wasn't expecting it to link to his site.
t's always galling to admit that a gay jew like jwz is so often right about technology (and also admiring him for following his stupid dream of running an independent nightspot in San Francisco and somehow hanging on for more than a decade for much longer than his .dot millions should have lasted through good business management and just loving the scene). He's certainly right about what tends to happen with KDE and GNOME development, at least since KDE 3 and Gnome 2 were unceremoniously chucked in the trash for no reason.
I have always had a love for his X11 "screensavers" aka demo hacks. He is a gay Jew San Franian that I could actually see myself having a beer bullshiting with.

I used GNOME 2 extensively in my early days of Linux. It was the hot shit coupled with Compiz-Fusion. Way better than Aero Glass. I'm aware of MATE and I've used that a bit too, but I'm more of a "Classic Windows" kinda guy.
Compiz-Fusion/Knoppix was completely stunning (fucking 3D Exploding windows!) on my old Pentium 4 laptops when my girlfriends brand new Win7 desktop with Aero was pretty lackluster. It was a real eye opener for me and the start of my migration to Linux.
Also, I'm a "Classic Windows" kinda guy too. I still prefer LXDE in 2024.

Yeah, Amarok was great. I have a soft spot for XMMS as well (possibly showing my age there).
Amarok was coolest thing since WinAmp when I saw it. I remember some program called Banshee(?) that I used to load my girlfriend's ipod up with pirate music, a thing we didn't think was possible before then. She uninstalled itunes the next day. lol
 
That page has a link to this page which I'm not sure what it's for

edit never mind it's just a needlessly weird title page.
It's not "needlessly weird" at all. lol That's his home page which is awesome. It looks like the old MSDOS "debug" hex editor with that Apple2/Matrix green monochrome. If you scroll down then you can see the site links. It's a really clever demo hack. :)

And MSDOS...imagine an OS that actually includes a hex editor (debug) and a powerful version of BASIC that has C-like additions (QBASIC). You'll never see that again.
 
It's not "needlessly weird" at all. lol That's his home page which is awesome. It looks like the old MSDOS "debug" hex editor with that Apple2/Matrix green monochrome. If you scroll down then you can see the site links. It's a really clever demo hack. :)

And MSDOS...imagine an OS that actually includes a hex editor (debug) and a powerful version of BASIC that has C-like additions (QBASIC). You'll never see that again.
So needlessly abstract
 
So needlessly abstract
Well, if you scroll down past where it looks like you have reached the end then swipe left-left-right you will get a page with recipes for poisoning trolls. It mostly involves making AI shART though.
 
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