The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Belisarius Cawl]

I like WM and TDE for their retro aesthetic out of the box, being much easier to theme by yourself than KDE, and being much lighter on resources since they're so old. TDE only requires a Pentium 3 class machine, and WM even less so. So I can take it with me onto any computer I want and it's a guaranteed smooth experience.

Hmm yes I used WindowMaker years ago in high school, pretty sure I had a Zhang Ziyi theme or the like. Any preferred way to handle tray icons? I see there are more than one dockapps for this. Also, any interest in the GNUstep project? It emulates NeXTSTEP and WindowMaker is of course the preferred window manager.

 

[The Anarki Main]

Hmm yes I used WindowMaker years ago in high school, pretty sure I had a Zhang Ziyi theme or the like. Any preferred way to handle tray icons? I see there are more than one dockapps for this. Also, any interest in the GNUstep project? It emulates NeXTSTEP and WindowMaker is of course the preferred window manager.

wmsystemtray seems to be the best solution, though the AUR package is broken and it's one of many dockapps that doesn't compile. Luckily there's a diff patch in the AUR package comments to fix it. I run it with two windows in vertical arrows mode and stack them so I have a total of 8 tray icons per page.

I'm looking into GNUstep documentation to learn how to make my own dockapps soon, I'm happy to see they have a Java wrapper

 

[Belisarius Cawl]

wmsystemtray seems to be the best solution, though the AUR package is broken and it's one of many dockapps that doesn't compile.

Would it compile OK on Mint do you think? (If you're familiar with Debian)

 

[jeff7989]

Finally managed to make clipboard work reliably on KDE Wayland, that was really pissing me off. How can you work without reliable copy and paste?
Here's the solution: https://github.com/Linus789/wl-clip-persist
Just start it at login, it may be in your distro's repo already.

When I had my Thinkpad I would use it as bluetooth speakers for my phone (phone -> laptop -> wired headphones). That way I could use both and not need to take my headphones off. Couple days ago I discovered that PipeWire supports it out of box, no need to change config files to advertise my computer as an audio sink. Now onto the fun part, there is no way to change audio profile, it's stuck on HSP, with shitty audio quality with no GUI way to force A2DP, plus it requires my PC to have microphone to answer calls properly.
I'll look into pipewire configuration to force A2DP, but this is so gay.

 

[TheDataHorder]

Do you have fractional scaling on?

i think so? I've got three monitors of different sizes, resolutions and dpi's all connected to my desktop. (the hp one, my old lg ultrawide and an old small Samsung lcd tv from 2007 that refuses to die dispite it being, more or less, constantly on for the past 5 or so years)
i wouldn't be surprised if my preferred scale was fractional on at least one monitor.
to be fair, at higher resolutions, interactable elements become so small you need a microscope to see them.
1080p is my sweet spot but the monitor looks a bit blurry at that resolution so it's at 1440p.
it's tolerable until i can get a replacement for my hdr lg display. (a 34WP500-B, worth the $400 AUD i love it, i was so devastated when it fell down)

 

[ghastlyretard]

Finally managed to make clipboard work reliably on KDE Wayland

Honest question - what drives you to use Wayland right now? Is there a feature or benefit you get from it, or is it more that your distro is pigeon holing you into it?

I was using X11 on my home PC because I have a 3080ti and didn't want to mess around with getting Wayland to work on proprietary drivers. When I got a laptop at work I threw Arch on there and was looking forward to seeing how Wayland was. I was inmediately frustrated by the fact I couldn't take screen shots with an app I use in my workflow, so I dropped back to X11.

 

[jeff7989]

There are regressions in X session introduced since Plasma 6, so I am testing viability of Wayland session.
It's doesn't run like shit on AMD, I had 2060 and 4060Ti and it couldn't even feed my 165Hz screen properly. Works fine on AMD.
Here's a list of things that piss me off which I noticed in around a month of using it::

• Clipboard is unreliable and makes me want to fedpost
• Clicking link from Thunderbird doesn't bring web browser to the top
• Opening file properties in Dolphin snaps both parent and child window to the center of screen
• Can't resize mpv window by dragging it away from maximized

Some of it may be for "muh security" and will never get fixed because why would an application need to know where it can position itself..., others may be typical KDE forever rewrites every 6-10 years
I will switch back to X once my patience runs out.
So far I am frustrated, because I can see squandered potential, it does feel smoother.

I was inmediately frustrated by the fact I couldn't take screen shots with an app I use in my workflow, so I dropped back to X11.

Don't you feel more secure? Why won't your app implement XDG Desktop Portal and Pipewire? Those Chuds!

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

I tried the Picom compositor on windowmaker, using the egl renderer it lags quite a lot (THE FINALS was so buggy with egl it was literally unplayable) but I get really nice performance in the older glx renderer. if you use a WM or older DE and you want some very rudimentary desktop effects it's worth looking into.

Do note that it does not play nice with the way tiled wallpapers are handled on most plain WMs, causing streaking effectsーsee attached image. Running feh --bg-tile image.tga while Picom is active seems to fix this. Turn VSYNC off, the input lag is atrocious on multi-monitor setups since it's synced to the XRandR virtual refresh much like Plasma KWin. The tearing isn't that bad so you don't need it. IDK why tearing is so important to people on window decorations but if you need low latency VSYNC you should have stuck to Soyland.

This is what my .xinitrc looks like, run the feh command to set wallpaper after starting picom in background mode if you use a tiled wallpaper.

# Global settings
xinput set-prop 'SteelSeries SteelSeries Rival 3' 'Coordinate Transformation Matrix' 0.430 0 0 0 0.430 0 0 0 1 &
sleep 1
kmix &

# Trinity desktop (disabled)
#yakuake & kmix & kmixctrl & xscreensaver

# Windowmaker
#   Screen, dockapps
xscreensaver & wmclock & wmsystemtray -w 2 --arrows vertical &
#   Compositor
picom -b &
feh --bg-tile ~/.wp_raccoons.jpg &
#   Programs
sleep 1; vesktop & steam & psi-plus & ckb-next -b & protonmail-bridge

feh will override whatever your WM sets at startup and be removed when you change themes so keep this in mind if you're the type to re-rice your desktop often.

Yeah I always use glx. When I tried other back ends I got pretty bad performance.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Honest question - what drives you to use Wayland right now? Is there a feature or benefit you get from it, or is it more that your distro is pigeon holing you into it?

I was using X11 on my home PC because I have a 3080ti and didn't want to mess around with getting Wayland to work on proprietary drivers. When I got a laptop at work I threw Arch on there and was looking forward to seeing how Wayland was. I was inmediately frustrated by the fact I couldn't take screen shots with an app I use in my workflow, so I dropped back to X11.

I like hyprland. It's really a pretty nice window manager with a lot of features built into it. Basically everything I would end up adding myself with an x11 wm like transparency and blur, scratchpad, you can set it up to use the master and stack layout, and it has all the variations of that I would use like the centered master, or use the default dwindle if you want.

Does effects which aren't super important to me, but it's nice to have it there. Though most of the time I have them disabled.

It gets a point taken off for anime. But other than that, it's a good enough window manager I would be happy if I had to stop using x11, and only use Wayland.

Right now I have a few things set for arch, just to continue using a bunch of different window managers and really decide what I like, so far my favorites have been qtile (also has an option for Wayland backend) awesomewm, i3, and dwm. And for Wayland compositors hyprland is by far the best I've tried. Niri is ok but not the same as a tiling wm, swayfx, and river are just alright.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I have use damage enabled, doesn't that help? I have a stupidly powerful machine for a WM this old so I'm not too concerned about excessive drawing if it's theoretically going to take less than a ms to draw each frame, but I could see it being a problem. I can always write my own xscreencomp fork as practice.

When I debugged it some months ago it'd tend to even redraw moving screen regions that were covered by windows with static content, damage or not. It just doesn't seem well written. Outside of some very specific circumstances, it'll basically always keep the GPU busy. I was not a fan. I'm not sure older compositors are any better though.

I used windowmaker for many years and I was happy to hear that it's still somewhat maintained when I checked back a few months ago. I use only HiDPI screens now though so it's more or less unusable on mine, especially the dockapps. This might be fixable by a very specific hack that targets a certain library to basically do everything at double the size, but I was too lazy to look into it. I'm using fvwm3 currently and themed everything like a CDE system because I just miss 3d windows that much. (It looka cool and pretty retro with the right programs) Kind of a culture shock coming from ratpoison though. It's good to throw your entire workflow into the trash once in a while, at least temporary. Gains perspectives.

 

[The Anarki Main]

Would it compile OK on Mint do you think? (If you're familiar with Debian)

It should, I don't think there's anything stopping you. I don't think the MAKEPKG on the AUR will be compatible though.

AFAIK, the Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware versions of the dockapps seem to be in better shape than the Arch ones.

 

[Precision Anal Strike]

usecase for foundation?

 

[The Anarki Main]

GNOMEchuds stay losing

 

[Rust Troony]

Honest question - what drives you to use Wayland right now? Is there a feature or benefit you get from it, or is it more that your distro is pigeon holing you into it?

I switched from xfce to hyprland about a month ago. One of the biggest things is having multimonitor support with different refresh rates out of the box. I know there some hacky way to do it on X11 but not having to deal with that is good.

usecase for foundation?

To pay retards to stop wayland from getting needed protocols merged

 

[Betonhaus]

I switched from xfce to hyprland about a month ago. One of the biggest things is having multimonitor support with different refresh rates out of the box. I know there some hacky way to do it on X11 but not having to deal with that is good.

what do you think is the timeline for something like Linux Mint and Cinnamon having hyprland?

 

[Rust Troony]

what do you think is the timeline for something like Linux Mint and Cinnamon having hyprland?

Hyprland is a window manager, and Cinnamon is a desktop environment, so these cannot used together, however you can install Hyprland and swap out using Cinnamon on Linux mint, but that's not really ideal since Hyprland is very bleeding edge and is only really recommended to be installed on bleeding edge distros like arch and NixOS.

 

[Betonhaus]

Hyprland is a window manager, and Cinnamon is a desktop environment, so these cannot used together, however you can install Hyprland and swap out using Cinnamon on Linux mint, but that's not really ideal since Hyprland is very bleeding edge and is only really recommended to be installed on bleeding edge distros like arch and NixOS.

Don't desktop environments run on top of window managers? Like the X11 window manager Cinnamon uses is Muffin or something?

 

[Rust Troony]

Don't desktop environments run on top of window managers? Like the X11 window manager Cinnamon uses is Muffin or something?

Yes, but i don't think Cinnamon makes it easy to change it. Also most base off a floating window manager instead of a tiling one.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Yes, but i don't think Cinnamon makes it easy to change it. Also most base off a floating window manager instead of a tiling one.

Idk about doing it with cinnamon in particular. But xfce does particularly well pairing with other window managers. In the past I have used it with i3, and I have been thinking about using it with dwm, to see how I liked that.

Bspwm could be nice with it also.

I could maybe mess around a little and see how hard swapping window managers is for cinnamon. I want to say it was either cinnamon or mate that gave options for changing your window manager and compositor in a GUI settings manager. I think it was cinnamon but I'm not positive.

It should, I don't think there's anything stopping you. I don't think the MAKEPKG on the AUR will be compatible though.

AFAIK, the Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware versions of the dockapps seem to be in better shape than the Arch ones.

Couldn't they just find whatever they want on whatever git site they are hosting it, and compile that from source?

The package just makes it more convenient to install dependencies most of the time. I mean obviously that's over simplifying it, but that's what I tend to do if I can't find the package on anything else for the distro I'm using.

 

[Moonglade Feral Druid]

Straight white men need not apply