I was a longtime KDE user, but the lack of reasonable trackpad gestures drove me up the wall on my laptop, so I’ve been using niri+noctalia for the last couple months. It just feels so right, it’s lovely. Still some edge cases, but overall just so good.

Consider me enlightened! The recontextualization of the statement makes it make a lot more sense. As with many things, being swept into the tech sphere robbed it of meaning. I also think that the sentiment of “the tools used to build something are not the same tools which can effectively dismantle it” is true in many senses, not just in the context of social/politiical/institutional change.

I was confused by the section “How Taking the ‘Master’s Tools’ Seriously Can Serve Enshittification”. It transitions from an argument that

The early internet was structured around the assumptions of its architects: predominantly white, male, Western, educated, and abled

(which is true), then links this group directly to Facebook. While these descriptors apply to both the founders of the internet and the founders of the tech giants, facebook is at least 15 years younger than the foundation of the public internet, and these two groups are both mutually exclusive and ideologically at odds. The author then goes on to use the social harms of big tech to push back against Doctorow’s first stage of enshittification, when the companies are “good”.

I think this is a fundamental misreading of Doctorow. He has spent his career as a free software advocate, and claiming that the first stage of corporate capture of the internet is the ideal would be anathemic to his more general arguments. What he means by “good” here – and he says this frequently in public discussions on enshittification – is that the product does what it says on the box, with no BS. That people are tempted to use it because it allows people to access the internet without coming up against the sharp edges of the technology itself, and that is a reasonable compromise for many people at first, because it allows more people to access the internet.

The article argues that in order to fully represent the experience of all stakeholders, the internet “getting worse” is an incomplete view, and to understand the impacts outside the white, male, etc. perspective, we should use the tools of decolonialism, which would be true if Doctorows project was a thorough sociological analysis of the impacts of technology. But it isn’t, it’s a rallying cry. The goal of his book is to make a coherent narative of the change in experience for consumers of technology over the era of Big Tech, and it does that. This is far from the only case where it leaves out strong tie-ins to other philosophical or sociological concepts, but there is a strength in a focused argument as well.

It’s unsurprising that Doctorow misappropriated Audre Lorde’s words in their meme form, becuase that’s what the book is – an abbreviated, digestible approach to the topic. However, I’m glad that someone made those connections.

Proton is still wine with extra sauce. It’s just that occasionally the sauce tastes bad :)

Ahhh got it. I thought it was a “I know this is inadvisable, but dammit I’m going to do it anyways” type of post :)

You can’t run steam with no compositor whatsoever, but you can use the steam deck’s solution of using their gamescope micro compositor for everything. You should be able to install gamescope and just run gamescope -e {other CLI options} steam (assuming you’re using the native Arch package and not the flatpak).

My experience using gamescope for steam has been very mixed, but I’ve seen a tutorial somewhere on doing exactly this.

Gamescope isn’t necessarily the best option for every game, and having a normal compositor (which, for now, must support XWayland) is just a much more flexible solution.

This may also be possible with something more general like xwayland-satellite, but frankly steam and all its games still run on the X11 protocol, so if you really don’t need a GUI you might be able to install a vanilla X11 instance and hook to that directly. I can’t speak to either of those options directly.

But is this worth it, in a practical sense? No. You have a reasonably powerful system, and the only performance you’d be saving is a few percent of a single core on the CPU, which in your config is absolutely not worth it.

The GNOME platform application is used by flatpaks. Basically, a flatpak can be built against/designed to be used with a specific visual toolkit. To do that, it needs to download specific parts of that toolkit, which is what you’re seeing.

I’m in the exact same position.

Just FYI, pipx does use a virtual environment behind the scenes. The idea with pipx or uvx is to install a python script as a standalone script.

Most likely an adapter issue, some failure in communicating the possible resolutions through the HDMI/DP conversion.

Can you find a flex io HDMI port on eBay? Just make sure you get the right version of the flex io card. That’s the most “supported” way to deal with ports, but it’s more expensive than a simple adapter cord.

I would say chocolatey and scoop are pretty much interchangeable. I don’t remember why I landed on scoop. Agreed that until recently there have been no package managers on Windows whatsoever.

I mean kinda. You have to use both WinGet and Scoop to cover all the use cases…

Well, in this case I think it’s a remnant of n++ predating any package manager on windows. I do think that an embedded self-updater is better than having to download a new version through the browser.

It wasn’t entirely clear to me if the compromise effects those of us who installed it though scoop/winget, as the package manager should pull directly from the correct source, so the compromised updater shouldnt matter. Reinstalled to be sure.

tl;dr (understandable, to be honest): on a technical level, modern GNOME prioritizes polish at the expense of flexibility, and COSMIC is focused on customizability. Bad communication aside, they have fundamentally different goals and audiences.

Acknowledging that this is a 4-year-old article, I think it’s important to read this as a very one-sided perspective. However, I am certainly not defending System76, as it does seem like some pretty poor behavior if the article is to be believed.

I’m going to look past the issues over communication and behavior, as others have already addressed that in this thread. Other than that, it seems that the main issue is arguing over the role of GNOME in the software ecosystem. How I see this is that:

• System76 is arguing for backwards compatibility and and more customizability.
• GNOME is arguing for “bulletproof” theming of apps by restricting user choice and modularity.

Honestly, I think this is pretty reflective of how the current state of the respective DEs.

GNOME is the cleanest, most polished Linux desktop environment, if you use it exactly as the designers of GNOME envision. If you want any options outside the extremely limited set GNOME provides by default, you need to rely on extensions, which are less stable and less polished, and may or may not be updated to new DE versions.

COSMIC is a clean-sheet implementation designed around modularity. It’s really the main thing they talk about. It has the advantage of being Wayland-only, and (supposedly) pretty much every element of the DE is modular, and there is a pretty substantial amount of customization available even in the fairly barebones 1.0 implementation.

In terms of COSMIC “just being GNOME with extra color options”, I disagree. I really like the UI design concept of GNOME, and ten versions ago I used it all the time. However, over the last few versions it’s become very locked-down into only supporting one narrow way of using the desktop, and I need features outside that (e.g. system tray, options for window tiling, etc.). Even with ten extensions modifying the behavior – which causes stability issues when I get a new GNOME version – I still find things which bother me and are only fixable with manual dconf editing, which means I just can’t daily-drive GNOME.

I think that’s who COSMIC is really for: someone who wants less windows-y, more intentional UI design than KDE, but with good customizability. It sucks if the creators of a pretty neat new DE were not effective participants in their previous DE, so I really hope they don’t make the same mistake with COSMIC, and manage it properly as an open source project.

FYI, OpenSuse maintains .rpm builds of the signal app in their repos, specifically targeted at OpenSuse Leap and Fedora. They work great for me.

Krohnkite is incredibly janky, I tried it recently and it made all the window animations lag. Also every third boot or so it would fully stop kwin from starting, and lead to a black screen on login.

Theres no equivalent to Windows Defender on Linux, because it’s like 14 tools in one, and Linux by nature is a lot more modular. If you want something whcch scans files for malware, the tool of choice would be ClamAV. By default it only scans files which you manually tell it to, but you can set it up to automatically scan any file when it’s downloaded. It’s a lot less sophisticated than Defender, but there’s also just not as much malware for Linux (yet), and if you stick to installing software through the package manager and never giving other files execution permission, you should be fine.

I would also add that the more you modify the system (PPAs, packages not installed via the package manager, nonstandard partition layouts) decreases the stability of your system and makes it harder to get back to your current system state if something goes wrong. I like to think about it like balancing a tower of blocks as a kid. Mint is the first block, and is very stable, but each additional block makes the system less and less stable. Mint itself is really stable, but if you do weird stuff the Mint devs can’t do anything about it, which puts you in a bad position until you really know what you’re doing.

The Snap store is intentionally left out by Mint, because they don’t like how Ubuntu manages it. This means that even though the Ubuntu version Mint is based on supports Snap, there’s no guarantee that snaps will work with the same stability which .deb/apt and flatpak packages will, because it hasn’t been tested in Mint. I would advise against using it.

I think what sem is talking about is that Bungie first made “Marathon” in 1994. The new game is a pretty much unrelated game, reusing the name.

Absolutely! I’m certainly not going to insist that things should only be published on RSS feeds! Anything is better than the authoritative source for evacuation warnings being a Twitter account. Every platform has its place, I’m just a big fan of always starting with an RSS feed for announcements as the “root source”, then pushing changes to the feed to all other platforms.

Not really. RSS feeds are better for announcements in my opinion, as there’s no account associated, and the ways of viewing them are even more flexible and simple than the Fedi infrastructure.