I think Inkscape 1.4 doesn’t bring any fancy features, but rather makes what already works better. The inconspicous releases are just as important.

While I use river as daily driver and am very happy with it, I feel people who like Hyprland will find river to be rather limited and barren in terms of looks and availability of plugins.

Does it support any DE other than Gnome? For the rest, looks cool!

Sadly, not officially (atm). I think you need to use a custom image and I don’t know how well those work.

See https://old.reddit.com/r/vanillaos/comments/1d69jn0/want_to_run_vanilla_os_but_no_gnome_de/

Governance leaves a lot to be desired.

Genuine question from somebody who’s out of the loop and doesn’t use NixOS: How does this affect your day to day using the distro?

I’ve heard good things about VanillaOS. Not used it myself though.

With their package manager apx, you can use software from pretty much any distro in VanillaOS (copied from link above):

Apx is a tool that allows you to generate work environments based on any Linux distribution and seamlessly integrates them with the system in a convenient way …

You will also know nothing and be happy.

Ignorance is bliss after all

I don’t have anything useful to say but that sounds fixing dystopian.

I clearly didn’t read it.

I love the honesty. It’s really refreshing to see someone take accountability instead of becoming defensive.

Looking back on my career, submitting your first merge/pull request can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks (we’re talking about 8+ hour work days). And that’s at companies that have an onboarding process and coworkers you can ask for help and explanations about the code base, architecture etc.

Getting into someone else’s code (this may include your past self) is almost never easy and often feels convoluted, because it’s very difficult to see the context that existed at the time when the code was written. And by context I mean everything that influenced the decision to write lines the way they were written, including undocumented discussions, necessary but non-obvious workarounds, understanding of the problem and solution space by the dev, general state of mind of the person writing the code and more.

Don’t beat yourself up because you couldn’t contribute in just a few hours.

I would first reach out to the devs on IRC/Discord/Matrix and express interest to contribute and see how they react. You don’t know if they would even accept your PR, so I wouldn’t do too much work upfront.

Then, when they are open to work with you, find out if they are willing to help you ease into the code. What files should you study to implement the changes that you’ve discussed earlier, any considerations that are not obvious, is there legacy code that you shouldn’t touch etc.

It’s important to keep in mind that (collaborative) software development is more than just being able to write code. And a lot of the surrounding work is not very glamorous or fun.

I hope that helps and wish you good luck! 🤞

Oh thank you for that link. I knew I’ve heard him take about his plans in some talk he gave, but didn’t know he write them down.

I am on the same page as you. River works for me well enough, but the vision is what keeps me excited.

What exactly was the problem with not being able to configure CSD/SSD? I’ve not run into any issues but that has probably more to do with the applications I run.

I’m sorry to hear that you’re having a hard time getting the software running. I understand that this can be very frustrating.

As others have said, making yourself the owner of everything can cause numerous issues in the long run and there’s a reason why most distributions DON’T make you root.

Why are you using Linux in the first place? I think sonarr and jackett both run on Windows as well.

Don’t let the frustration get the best of you. If you really want to run those tools yourself, then dive into it (and all the technical issues that are part of it), but if you only want to have access to the functionality, you might want to look into a service that takes care of all the technical burden.

Good luck

You’re welcome. I’ve been using it as my daily driver for over a year now and it works for that, but don’t expect any bells and whistles.

I think the biggest difference is dynamic (river) vs manual tiling (sway). Other than that, I feel sway is much more mature and there’s a proper community surrounding it that had written scripts and tools that work with sway. Many of which you are probably gonna use with river as well (swaylock, swaybg, swayidle).

One thing that’s pretty cool about river (at least in theory) is that the tiling algorithm is not part of the compositor itself. Instead, you can run any river tiling program and have that part be completely custom if you wish. Also configuration is done via commands instead of a config language (you usually run a bash script at start).

From what I remember, the vision of Isaac Freund (main developer) is, that river will become more of a tiling compositor base, that others can then use to create their own distributions. I heard that in some talk he gave. You should be able to find that on YouTube.

However, there’s still a long way to go.

In it’s current state, river reminds me of spectrwm. Very simple, with some cool, but ultimately non-essential, ideas that you probably won’t find anywhere else.

Given these trends, what might a post-piracy world entail?

Assuming you are right with this:

For media: Buy in or consume less. If piracy will really become less prevalent you don’t really have much choice, do you? I don’t think everyone has to live like I do, but my media consumption in the past few years has shrunk more and more (for various reasons) and maybe that’s something other people may gravitate towards as well. Life has a lot to offer beyond screens.

For software it’s trickier. Maybe you find an open source project that suits your needs or maybe there’s a competitor that hasn’t (yet) enshittified their product. Unfortunately, if you really need a specific piece of software I think you might just be SOL 🤷‍♂️

Just my two cents

I would have written that comment if you hadn’t already done it.

I don’t know exactly why people think that we can “just” do whatever they ask for.

Maybe it has something to do with how invisible software is to the tech-illiterate person but I’m not convinced. I’m sure there are other professions that get similar treatment.

I see you already have a solution but someone else might find this interesting: keyd is a pretty powerful keyboard remapping utility that works everywhere (X11, Wayland and VTs). Think QMK but done on the OS.

I do have Ctrl under ä (which would be the semicolon key on US layout, I think). Interestingly, on Mac (with Karabiner) it caused regular mistypes when typing fast, even after a year. On my 12 year old Thinkpad (Linux with keyd) however, I’ve never found the overloading to be an issue.

I’ll probably give the layout in the article a shot. It sounds interesting.

While you make many valid points, I think it’s not reasonable to assume that OP could have avoided all the struggles they had, if they just had informed himself prior to installing. Especially since many of them problems described were probably caused by an unfortunate combination of software/driver issues, a specific hardware setup and certain user expectations.

I doubt that watching tech YouTubers or similar would have helped much.

Maybe Elm? It was the result of Evan Czaplicki’s thesis.

I think it heavily depends on the size and (management) culture of your employer. My most recent gig had me sit in way too many meetings that were way too long (1hr daily anyone?), dealing with a lot of tooling issues and touching legacy code as little as possible while still adding new features to our main product on a daily basis. Obviously “we don’t need a clean solution. We’re going to replace that codebase anyways, next year™”.

The job before that had me actually code for about 80% of the time, but writing tests is annoying and slows you down and we don’t have time for that. Odd how there was always time for fixing the regressions later.