I use Starship

Do you have anything to check whether the current directory is under /media/ or /mnt/ so that you can change the drive letter according to a deterministic assignment?

/s

My conclusion after researching this a while ago is that the good options are Borg and Restic. Both give you incremental backups with cheap timewise snapshots. They are quite similar to each other, and I don’t know of a compelling reason to pick one over the other.

Are you using swayidle? It’s supposed to automatically keep the screen on when there is full-screen video playing. It’s the same in Gnome: you generally don’t need caffeine if a full-screen video is going.

How are you playing videos? Maybe the player doesn’t correctly implement the idle inhibit protocol. Or if you’re using sway bindings to make the window fullscreen instead of using the app’s own fullscreen mode then maybe the player doesn’t know it’s fullscreen, and doesn’t set up the idle inhibit.

If you do want manual idle inhibit control, if you use Waybar it has an idle inhibitor module that mimics caffeine. If you don’t use Waybar there is a little Python script you can run. Kill it when you want to stop inhibiting idle. actually wib looks like a better option

I’m gonna take a couple of stabs in the dark.

According to this Stack Overflow answer using tee can prevent the prompt from drawing which makes it appear that a script has not terminated. The answerer’s workaround is to put a very short sleep command after the tee command.

If this is what happened to you maybe the reason the script works in bash but not in zsh is because you have different prompts configured in those two shells.

Another idea is to replace tee with sponge from moreutils. The difference is that sponge waits for the end of stdin before it starts writing which can avoid problems in some situations.

Oh yeah, and Nix has the advantage that you don’t need containers. If you want to run a graphical app in a container it might be tricky to access the window manager on the host system. Maybe that’s why you were setting up i3? Yeah, containers are great and flexible, but they also have a variety of downsides so Nix is better ;)

I agree; and I wanted to mention that you don’t need NixOS which is a full distro. Nix the package manager can be installed on any Linux distro, on Macos, or on Windows with WSL. You can set up your reproducible environment by including a devenv config in your repo, or a Nix flake.

There is documentation available for flakes here: https://zero-to-nix.com/concepts/flakes/

My thinking is similar. I’ve seen this news story more than once:

laptop stolen containing customer data… hard drive was not encrypted

I don’t generally have customer data, but it can happen every once in a while.

Or enabling nix-ld can often get such binaries working.

I’m sorry, I wasn’t completely clear. Yes you can run games on ARM on any OS with an emulator. When I said “won’t run any better” I meant you’ll get the same emulation slowdown on Linux as on Windows.

The point of the article is that stuff runs faster on Linux because you don’t need an emulator, and it implies that that includes games. That’s disingenuous because any games that require emulation on Windows will also require emulation on Linux. If there’s no ARM build, there’s no ARM build.

It would be great if there were a way to translate x86 binaries for ARM without emulation. Has Valve found some way to do that? From a bit of searching I see they’ve been testing games on ARM, and that testing involves a version of Proton/Wine that runs on ARM. But it looks to me like they’re testing with ARM binaries for those games?

I’m as enthusiastic as anyone about more Linux usage, and I agree that Linux support for ARM is a good selling point. But the reason Linux works so well on ARM is that we use all this open-source software that anyone can compile for ARM. I don’t think it’s honest to point to closed-source software that we can’t recompile, and imply that it will work better on Linux because other software runs natively on ARM on Linux.

Yes, Microsoft now offers Windows on ARM (WoA). However, WoA is not a first-class citizen in the Windows world. Many Windows programs won’t run natively on WoA […]. In particular, Windows games run poorly on ARM.

Interesting news! Sadly I imagine Windows games on Linux on ARM won’t perform any better than on WoA. But maybe this will be more incentive for game developers to ship ARM builds.

You can do tag-based file management on Linux. Linux filesystems support “extended attributes” or “xattr”. There is some software out there that uses xattr for tagging. I don’t know what the best options are right now for tag-based file management, but I think it exists.

Looking at what’s out there I see there are also apps that each use their own out-of-band tagging schemes. There’s a CLI, tmsu, and a GUI, TagSpaces. I don’t think these interoperate with each other’s tags.

Of course those supplement instead of replacing hierarchical organization.

The talk of hypertext and “escaping paper” makes me think of Obsidian which embraces hyperlinking, tags, and mind mapping via its canvas feature.

And they’re still on Sourceforge!

I love Cartograph CF for the terminal and code editor. I like the handwriting-style italic variant, and it has programming ligatures. And of course I like the way the font looks.

There is an open-source font, Victor Mono, that also has a handwriting-style italic variant and programming ligatures. Otherwise its style is quite different.

I had that symptom, and I found that my laptop was using S2 idle (suspend to idle). I fixed it by switching to S3 sleep (suspend to RAM). I suggest following the instructions in section 3 in this page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate

Like many Arch Wiki guides, most of the information on that page is applicable to most Linux distros, not just Arch.

I’m wondering if Wayland support in Wine will encourage Valve to support Wayland in the Steam app too.

On my desktop I run a Wayland window manager that doesn’t implement XWayland so I can’t run Steam directly. So I’ve been running it in Gamescope in big picture mode - which is actually exactly what the Steam Deck does.

Nice! Thanks!

When I researched this previously I concluded that there are two very good options for regular backups: Borg and Restic. These are especially efficient at backing up a diff of what has changed since the last backup. So you get snapshots of your filesystem state at each backup point without using a huge amount of space. You can mount any snapshot as a virtual directory. After the initial backup, incremental backups take a minute or two.

I use Borg, and I back up to cloud storage on Borgbase. I use Vorta as a GUI for Borg. I have Vorta start automatically when I start my window manager, and I have it set up for daily backups. I set up the same thing on my kid’s computer.

I back up my home directory. I have some excluded directories like ~/.cache, and Steam’s data directory. I use Baobab to find large directories that I don’t want backed up.

I use the “exclude caches” option in the Borg “create archive” settings. That automatically excludes Rust target/ directories because they follow the Cache Directory Tagging Specification. Not all programming languages’ tooling follows that spec so I also use directory name pattern excludes. For example I have an exclude pattern for .*/node_modules/.*

I use NixOS, and I keep my system config in a git repo so I don’t need backups for anything outside my home directory.

NixOS and Home Manager config both ways to get rid of the same thing