Yeah, you understood my comment entirely the wrong way around. When I say “dotfiles”, I mean the non-Nix way of managing application configurations. Nix Home-Manager happens to write to these dotfiles, but that means I don’t have to deal with the dotfiles myself.

I feel like setting up a new machine is just the easiest to explain.

Personally, I find dotfiles messy, as you often just want to change one or two settings, but you always carry along the whole file with all kinds of irrelevant other settings. This also makes it impractical to diff two versions of those dotfiles, especially when programs write semi-permanent settings into there.

I guess, your mileage will vary depending on what programs or desktop environment you use.
For example, I love KDE, but they really don’t do a good job keeping the config files clean. Nix Plasma-Manager generally fixes that, and for example allows defining the contents of the panel in a readable form.

Personally, the stepping stone I needed to know about is Nix Home-Manager, which basically allows you to manage your dotfiles independent of the distro. From what I understand, if I do switch to NixOS, I’ll continue using this code with just some minor tweaks.

But yeah, I agree with the verdict in the post. I like it a lot, but I would not have made it past the initial learning curve, if I didn’t happen to be a software engineer. Sysadmins will probably be able to figure out how to put it to use, too. But it’s just not for non-technical Linux users.

It looks like a guitar pick to me. 🙃

On KDE, I’d recommend getting a KWin Script for tiling. Krohnkite is what people use currently.

It’s not as buttery smooth as dedicated tiling window managers and it can be a bit glitchy at times, but it is better than one might expect and significantly easier (and likely less glitchy) than trying to get bspwm to work in Plasma.

Those Spectacle changes look good. The old UI made some amount of sense, if the primary use-case was taking complete screenshots, but even for that, there’s probably a single shortcut to do that directly.
And I do find, I generally want a smaller cutout these days, because you can just fit more stuff onto modern displays, some of which is going to irrelevant.

Yeah, the wording is confusing. A long time ago, there was no paid software, there was only software where you got the source code and other software where e.g. it was pre-installed on some hardware and the manufacturer didn’t want to give the source code.

In that time, a whole movement started fighting for software freedom, so they called their software “free”.

Well, it didn’t feel like I’m tweaking to my needs (that came afterwards on top), it rather felt like I’m just undoing design decisions that someone made to cater to their specific needs.

And I named the time mainly to give an idea of how much there was to tweak. My main problems were:

• That I could not undo some of those unusual design decisions.
• That it doesn’t exactly make the system more robust when you need lots of non-default settings.

Well, that was just kind of one example to illustrate that it isn’t just a static screenshot, you actually see what’s going on in real-time. It’s also useful when you’re running a longer operation, like OS updates or encoding a video, and want to see when it’s done or that it hasn’t failed. You can just tell when the command output has stopped moving or a popup has appeared…

But thanks for the recommendation anyways!

I certainly think that it has many eccentric design choices. It’s not going to be for everyone. Some parts of it, I also think just look bad, which I had to customize. Well, and openSUSE’s theming made a big difference, too: https://simotek.net/tech/projects/opensuse-e/enlightenment-on-opensuse-13-2/nggallery/thumbnails

“Retro” is also definitely a word I would use, though more positively connoted. It has *different* eye candy to the usual desktop designs, which is a big part of the charm. In a sea of flat designs and tiling window managers, it stands out as its own thing.

I tried it a few years ago. I was really impressed by how lightweight and gorgeous it is. In particular, I found it really cool and actually useful that you got a live view of your other workspaces on your panel. You could even fullscreen a video on your other workspace and then watch (a very small version of) it in your panel.

But yeah, even though I came back to it multiple times, I never ended up sticking around. It would crash regularly (not the worst thing, since recovery was generally seamless, but still meh), but in particular, it had some peculiar design decisions.

For example, if you double-click a window titlebar in virtually any window manager, it will maximize. In Enlightenment, I believe it got shaded (i.e. the contents of the window got hidden and only the titlebar was still visible).

Another prominent one was that its applet for connecting to WiFi and such didn’t support NetworkManager, but rather only ConnMan. If you’ve never heard of ConnMan, yeah, I only know it from Enlightenment, too. Similarly, my distro (openSUSE) didn’t package it either (and openSUSE was said to offer a relatively good Enlightenment experience). That’s something which should just work, because you can’t expect people to look up how they can connect to WiFi while they can’t reach the internet.

And yeah, these are just the big ones that stuck in my head. There were lots of smaller usability issues, too. Many things you could fix by changing the configuration, but we’re talking many in an absolute sense, too, i.e. you might spend an hour or more just tweaking things so that they behaved like you might expect.

I mean, to my knowledge, it’s still Rasterman keeping most of the development together. You don’t need a ton of adoption when one guy tirelessly works on it.

Although I’m guessing Samsung probably sponsors him, so that’s probably quite crucial for him to be able to put that much time into it.

Can that actually happen like this? If Windows killed the bootloader wouldn’t that mean that you couldn’t boot into Kubuntu either? Or can it somehow kill the bootloader when the PC is turned off?

It’s just the normal “Pager” widget, configured to show application icons.

I find “minimap” more descriptive for what I’m doing, because I don’t minimize, nor stack windows, so if a window exists, it has a location.
Which is also ultimately how I use this thing. Imagine a large desk where you need to jump between topics every so often. You’d put related sheets of paper next to each other and leave a bit of space between the groups. Sheets of paper are just application windows in my case (I will open one or more windows per task, I don’t mix tasks together based on application like people usually do). Well, and my desk also happens to be very long, so I can comfortably fit a minimap for it in my panel.

And because I really like multitasking, I’ve actually got multiple desks, in different colors:

For these, I use Plasma’s Activities. The different colors are done by having a transparent panel and then setting the wallpaper to different colors + telling Plasma to use the wallpaper for determining the accent color.

In this screenshot, you can also beautifully see a workspace with 5 Kate windows, which is genuinely where I shoved a bunch of notes, for me to sort through them later. 🙃

Not a piece of software I’d use voluntarily: The web version of MS Teams.

I get to use Linux at $DAYJOB and I have a rather customized KDE setup (basically window tiling, 20-80 workspaces, a workspace minimap in the panel).
Usually, I’m surrounded by other nerds, who’ll ask about it occasionally, but you know, they’ve heard of or used Linux before, they know that some crazy things can be done.

Now, yesterday, I was in a call with the legal department. I started sharing my screen and explaining my relatively simple problem. And the guy took longer than I expected to respond, which made me quite self-conscious, whether he needs time to process my explanation …or rather what in the fresh hell I did to my computer to make it look like that. 🙃

People here are saying that Waydroid works quite well for running Android apps on mobile Linux.

I tried postmarketOS a few months ago on my SHIFT6mq and for me, the dealbreaker was that I couldn’t get my SIM card to connect, so no mobile internet and no calls. As I understand, this strongly varies between phone models, though.
Aside from that, I did like what I saw a lot. I used Plasma Mobile and that was a more competent UI than stock Android, because well, it is essentially just Plasma with some tweaks. Felt a lot more like the pocket computer I never knew I wanted.

Also, bonus fun fact: “Alter!” as an exclamation probably comes from “Alter Schwede!”, which means “Old Swede!”.

According to Wikipedia, after the Thirty Years’ War, a German duke hired experienced Swedish soldiers to train new soldiers. And because they were experienced, they were also generally old. I have no idea, though, why that stuck around as an exclamation. 😅

Right, so presumably “Ålder” means “age”. In German, we have basically the same word, “Alter”, but we also use it as an exclamation, kind of like “Dude!”.

Now, if you want to exclaim “Alter!” with more disbelief, you say it with a long A and a D in place of the T, which one might write as “Alder”.
And for even more disbelief + almost anger, you can pronounce the “A” very strongly and kind of slur the rest of the word, which one might write as “Alla”.

So, this reads to me like someone exclaiming their growing disbelief. 🙃

(All of this is very informal. These are not official rules you’d find in a dictionary, but younger generations would probably interpret it as I described.)

Ålder: Alla

This tickles my German funny bone. 🙃