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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Its six years old, that’s starting to get on a bit now for a processor that was never anywhere near top of the line from AMD when it was new.

    I think if you are trying to bling our your desktop and not expecting it to impact performance from an older, less powerful setup then generally speaking you are going to have a bad time. You should be pitching your desktop experience based on what your hardware can handle, there are plenty of terminal options available depending on what you need, just like there are plenty of WM/DMs if you have a lower spec machine.

    Having said that, it was pretty damn obvious that there something wrong with ghostty on their setup, and its misleading to say that ghostly is just bad because of that.





  • If I am relying on it, I buy from brands I trust. No brand is going to be perfect but some are clearly going to be lower risk than randoms from aliexpress. Its as much to do with reliability, achievable duty cycle (rather than promises of duty cycle), support (especially how easy it is to get a replacement under warranty), how long they will push firmware updates for, than just security trustworthiness.

    Pretty much any device is going to have a vulnerability or potential for a back door at some point but the company being transparent about the issue and fixing it promptly is worth a lot. Its the same reason I would have a Google or (premium) Samsung phone, I trust that they will support the phone for the time period they say they will, something I would not do with say Oneplus based on my past experience of them.

    I buy electronics from aliexpress all the time, but nothing I rely on day to day like a router, simply because I am shit out of luck getting it replaced quickly if it goes wrong, even if I want to get a replacement. I have a cheap mikrotik hex I keep as a backup of a backup (my APs are my primary backup for my router), and this is fine for a week or so but I would not want to be out a month or more with it.

    I guess you could plan in proper redundancy as I have, or may be you can afford a an outage, so may be you don’t need that. If I cannot work, I cannot earn, so I have backup internet, routers, wifi etc. planned into my install.

    I think what someone else wrote about defense is depth is the real key here. I have my network divided into separate VLANs that are firewalled off from each other, so one for IoT, one for cameras, one for my TVs and other screens, one for my devices. This means if something is compromised they still have to get across the network and it simplifies my firewall rules as I am applying them to subnets rather than individual devices in a self maintained group. It makes it easier to say block external DNS queries and redirect to my pihole for my IoT and TVs but not my personal devices as I would have a good reason to go external.

    May be you do not have a lot of devices, I realize I am nearer the upper end of a home network with over 50 active devices and it will be over kill if you only have a laptop and a phone on your network.


  • If you are the person asking the floating window question from the other day as JustAnotherKay spotted, then this is how I set a window to floating in my config;

    for_window [title="www.youtube.com" app_id="firefox"] floating enable, resize set 1280 720 , opacity 1

    What this is doing is selecting any firefox app that has www.youtube.com anywhere in the title and make that floating, with a set size, and remove any opacity (transparency) that might be applied to the window.

    You can add move absolute position 0 0 on the end if you want to set the absolute location for the window.

    You can force a window to a particular workspace by:

    assign [class="discord"] workspace number $ws2

    and that workspace to a particular monitor with:

    workspace $ws2 output DP-1

    If I wanted to do this for all firefox windows I would just remove the title= part from the selection.

    How do you get the titles and other components? Using swaymsg as follows:

    swaymsg -t get_tree

    this will output all your open windows per monitor, for each app you want to manage you are looking for something like:

    #15: con "#tech-talk🖥 | 40% Keyboards - Discord" (xdg_shell, pid: 6260, app_id: "discord")

    from here you its simple to pick up what you can use for a unique select, so app_id:=“discord” in this case.

    If you reload your config file, then reopen the app, it should reflect the changes you made to the config file. Logging on and off in the worst case will restart it.


  • Yeah I added bluetooth in mine, it’ll show me whats connected on hover and just launch the gnome app for bluetooth if I click it, super lazy implementation. I don’t need brightness controls so never looked at them.

    EOS seems to use mako for notifications? I have never tried it.

    I use swaync, which once themed and the rights bits you want, added, is ok. I wanted something more like the Gnome notification drop down that had do not disturb, media player controls, extensible menus, etc. in it.



  • Never used hyprland but Sway you can use the mouse to move stuff around, resize windows, etc. just hold down you mod key, usually super/windows key. If you have a bar setup correctly you can even click between workspaces or have a task list like on windows that you can click on. Alt Tab needs some re-imagining as its now three dimensional, but that’s easy to tweak to how you want it with something like swayr. You can even add a start button equivalent if you wish.

    I use Sway on Tumbleweed, before that Sway on Ubuntu. I have six main workspaces defined, odd numbered workspaces on my left monitor and evens on my right monitor. Both monitors are 32"@4k so a ton of real estate, I can easy fit in four large tiles per monitor, eight is a stretch but if you use the option to make windows full screen then you can run stuff in the background and then flip between things that are running in the background.

    I use the layman add on to predefined layouts for my different workspaces, then bind apps on start up using my config to a particular workspace. I can still move them around, but automating as much as possible with a tiling windows manager is the secret IMO. Having everything just work and appear where I want with zero faffing around speeds up my workflow enormously. On Windows I use power-toys to provide a noddy version of tiling, but everything has to be done manually and its a complete PITA over a work day where I am opening and closing stuff.

    As an example, I have my third workspace as my main coding workspace. Its divided into 3/4 and 1/4. The larger part I lock VS Code to it, the smaller part is usually a Firefox tab for reviewing documentation. My second workspace is my social workspace, that’s divided into four long quarters, one for music, one for discord, one for signal, one for mail. All of this, including binding the apps to the workspace, are fully automatic.

    I use the keyboard for most things. I use QMK based keyboards (configured using Vial), so I can bind multi modifier shortcuts to just two keys either on a separate layer or a chord. Reducing the number of keys you press really helps the ergonomics of activating them, especially if you move them to the home row and away from the pink hell hole that is where the modifiers are on most standard keyboards.

    I think the biggest problem is that it requires work to get the right add ons and make it work the way you want to work, but get it right and the WM becomes transparent to how you work.



  • As this is for work you want reliability and as Microsoft have a habit of changing stuff so stuff breaks I would suggest the web apps or if you need advanced features from the apps, a Windows VM. The latter is what I do, admittedly I manage and develop for m365 so my needs are greater than someone just using Office.

    The web apps are pretty good, not a 100% feature match but good enough for most people, some things are actually better now in the web app. I would only write them off if you have really shitty unreliable internet or really need something not yet supported in the web app.

    Otherwise go with a VM, but it will push up the specs of your device as you will need a decent amount of RAM and cores that you can dedicate to the VM if you want responsive behavior from Office clients particularly with large files. I assign 16Gb RAM and 4 cores (I have a 8945HS) and its pretty snappy. I can run it in 8Gb but its a bit shit when working with large spreadsheets, power bi, or trying to multi task with multiple office apps open.

    You don’t say if you need to use Teams but there is a Linux port of Teams, which is ok, not great, just ok. Personally run the web app of teams for chat on my Linux host and use Teams on my phone for meetings. Works much better for me.

    Final thing to be aware of are the policies implemented by your company. Some require that your PC is “trusted” before you can fully connect to m365. This is far easier to work around with a Windows VM.



  • Mine is probably more of a combo of things to streamline my workflow than anything else.

    I use Sways multiple workspaces to segregate my apps into different workspaces for different tasks on startup of that app using the assign function in my Sway config. For example VS Code and one particular Firefox window always goes to Workspace 3.

    I use the Layman Sway scripts to force all my normal workspaces to different layouts that is appropriate for that function. So workspace 3 with VS Code and a Firefox window is set in a 75/25 split with VS Code set to always take the bigger share. I can switch the two sides from largest on the left to largest on the right, or swap the apps between the two splits, or make a window full-screen with simple keyboard shortcuts.

    Odd workspaces are on my left monitor, even ones on the right. This coupled with per workspace wall paper (all my windows are translucent, not for everybody I know) and particular tasks locked to predefined workspaces means I am never hunting around for something. Even if I did lose something I can use rofi to switch to it. If its an essential app I can use my keyboard shortcut that I use to launch the app, switch to it using swayr by activating the shortcut again.

    I have used QMK for my keyboard to reduce the number of keys I must use to activate most of my shortcuts, and move them to my number row and home row using layers, double taps, and holds. I try to layer up the same family of functions on the same key but on different layers, so for example, the VI arrow keys move between windows, resize windows, move windows, depending on which layer I have chosen.



  • I do something similar.

    I have a V4N4G0N that I use the top row (half the normal number row on a full sized board) for switching workspace or switching apps to another workspace, and doing other stuff like copy and paste on different layers for the keyboard.

    As its QMK (via VIAL) I have set all that up directly on the keyboard so its portable to any other PC I want to use. I have eight of these, mix of alu, acrylic and 3D printed, that I can choose from, all sharing the same map. I don’t like using anything else now as its become integral to my normal workflow.


  • I’ve been using it for a while now, its been robust and extensible. I think its only real downside is that its too extensible as out of the the box not much comes as standard that you might expect if you coming from something like gnome, such as a control panel, auto tiling, a lock screen, or screen capture (although this release seems to fix setting that up now). This should be expected as its a WM not a DE.


  • Long time Kodi user, since it first came out on the original xbox.

    Assuming you are a watch and delete person then for films you really do not need more that a seperate folder than you dump films AND only films into and make sure that the film name is correct AND it includes the accurate year for the film. Vast majority of downloads will already have this in place, I never have to bother to rename or move films about as they just go straight into my download folder that Kodi is looking for my watch and delete films. Older versions of Kodi used to be much more annoying for film scanning requiring proper spacing and so on. However its very very important that only films go into this directory otherwise it will fuck up if you start dumping TV programs into here.

    TV is much more complex if Kodi is doing the metadata scanning as it normally relies on the top level folder name, and a proper season and episode numbering scheme. If you watching TV I would just switch to a managed downloader like sonarr, its a PITA to manually manage weekly show downloads anyway and sonarr will sort everything out for you.


  • I greatly prefer Debian and run it on my home servers, but I want something more cutting edge than Debian for my work PCs but not quite as bleeding edge as Arch that I have to pay more attention to for my daily updates in case it breaks. I kind of end stuck at Ubuntu as I don’t want something obscure and harder for me to fix due to a smaller user base to crib solutions to common problems from.

    I just use it as a relatively up to date, tested and supported base as I run Sway instead of the packaged Gnome, I disable snaps and all the other Ubuntu pro type garbage, even my Firefox is via PPA. Could I roll my own or use something else? Sure, but would I have the same trust over its reliability on the PCs that I use to pay my bills?