this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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:( sadness. I'm pathologically opposed to software complexity (I mean pathologically, it hurts me) and have a really nice rice set up with dwm.
GNOME's new mosaic layout project which is a few years down the pipeline looks like it might solve the problem of tiling vs teenager's desk windows management so maybe I should switch.
I actually do like the patching thing, prefer it to xmonad which needs recompiling every day that ends in Y or i3 which is about as fun to configure as fellating one of those tubular cheese graters.
Taking suggestions on fast minimalist launchers and windows managers tiling ideally (and terminals with Unicode support rxvt suuuuuuuuuuucks) if anyone has them.
I've been happy with awesomewm for years now. Maybe one day I'll enshrine my current config in dwm or something from scratch in Rust and XCB, but so far it has not been the time.
As for terminal emulators, alacritty has been comfy for me. It's not the most minimalist thing out there but whatever promises it makes in relative complexity, it delivers in performance and features.
oh hey, i love awesomewm! i'm much less amenable to fiddling with annoying linux config than I used to be, but the lua-scriptability is just appealing enough that I don't mind messing with it a bit to do silly things
I just use xfce4-terminal though lol
sidenote, I went to edit this post and accidentally deleted it instead. Would it be so hard for lemmy to use words instead of a million cryptic icons....
I just lost a long post cause upvoting the post you’re replying to causes lemmy to remove the reply box, losing its contents, without any confirmation. lemmy sure is an approach to a UI
oh hey, i love awesomewm! i'm much less amenable to fiddling with annoying linux config than I used to be, but the lua-scriptability is just appealing enough that I don't mind messing with it a bit to do silly things
the one nice thing is that the suckless ecosystem’s simplicity means that forking these things should be fairly easy for a dev or group with the time and spoons to handle maintenance, and might even provide a new direction for features that suckless would never consider
unfortunately, the only thing I use is emacs (exwm as a tiling window manager, emacs itself as a process launcher, vterm for a mostly not terrible somewhat high performance terminal, a pile of Lisp that keeps growing as I patch things live, all tied into the system with a bunch of Nix)
TIL about exwm, seems fun!
(I'm bitextual, I use both emacs and vim, though I'm more on the vim side of the scale)
Emacs was the best os except for the text editor until you could run vim on it
oh I am also bitextual as fuck (I’m immediately stealing this) so I highly recommend running exwm under Doom Emacs or Spacemacs, both of which have modules for it (and you can also do a fully custom minimal evil layer for it by just importing exwm from elpa and writing a little bit of config, which I prefer)
Ah, you started learning org mode didn't you?
You've seen this yeah? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc
has me in stitches. Browsing Wikipedia from within emacs is so convenient though
What a poser. What self-respecting Emacs fanatic doesn't know about Project MAC?
Or I would accept trying something a bit chubby if people have reasons to recommend it. Like sure it slows down the hellbox but it detects when your concentration is flagging and makes you a coffee type shit. Just no transparency effects, Jesus fuck I hate transparency effects. It's like "hey want to spend more power rendering something that's harder to parse visually?" umm no? who wants that? why would you want that?
Because it looks cool. That's seriously the only reason.
And it does look cool, although yeah, it is also harder to parse visually, which I suppose is why CSS has a media query specifically for asking whether the user wants reduced transparency.
As for suckless, the biggest target of their hate seems to be systemd, and there are quite a lot of reasons to recommend it. A few off the top of my head (all but one of which I have used at one point or another):
systemctl --failed)systemctl status)systemd-cgls) and optionally cleaning up (KillUserProcessesinlogind.conf) user sessionsloginctl enable-linger)ProtectHome,InaccessiblePaths,SystemCallFilter,CapabilityBoundingSet, etc)Requisite=sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan.device+WantedBy=sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan.device= “don't starthostapdunless the Wi-Fi dongle is plugged in, and stop it if the dongle is unplugged”)journalctl -p warning -b -u smbd= “give me all log entries made bysmbd, of warning level or higher, since the last reboot”)it has to be said that a lot of systemd’s features are broken if you’re operating a system without a dbus-enabled desktop manager or are running in an embedded environment. that describes all my systems except my Steam Deck, where I’m thankful for the parts of its game console-like features that systemd enables, though I do wish there were a good alternative that did not (via network effects) give firm control over a big portion of the Linux userland to a big corporation like IBM and its associated development practices
with all that said, suckless init ain’t it. it’s an extremely simple init that reminds me of the deterministic init systems you’d usually see in something like an android phone — ideal if you need to work around broken hardware with a strict boot order, but awful for almost everything else. there are much better options for an alternative init out there, and I’d prefer to use any of them
Huh? Most of systemd's features, including all in the above list, work even if you have no GUI installed at all.
I'm not seeing it. This isn't Chromium, where it takes an army of world-class developers just to keep it up-to-date enough to be fit for its purpose. If systemd were hard-forked right now, and the new maintainer did little more than the occasional bug fix, systemd would still be useful for the foreseeable future.
user session features don’t work properly unless your DE sends session start/end information to systemd (and when I found this out, only gnome, kde, and enlightenment did). this breaks various systemd features in surprising ways; I found out about this when my user services wouldn’t work, but I stopped keeping track of what was broken when I realized it was all WONTFIX anyway
historically, hard forking systemd has gone about as well as hard forking bitcoin, for very similar reasons. technologically, systemd forks tend to accumulate compatibility issues with the rest of userland very quickly due to breaking API and functionality changes in the interdependent systemd process ecosystem (and these breakages can very quickly propagate to downstream programs — a breakage in logind can be expected to be catastrophic for auth in general, for example). note too that breaking changes in the systemd API are rarely signposted in advance, which makes the job of a systemd fork and its dependent distros even harder. practically speaking, this means that a systemd fork must either excise the service ecosystem entirely (and would probably be better off just being a completely different init system at that point) or must have the wealth and support of a very large corporation behind it. this is similar to the technological means by which cryptocurrency projects maintain control: in a fork, the chain with more wealth behind it quickly becomes the longer one, and the shorter chain is extremely vulnerable to various attacks.
socially, both cryptocurrency projects and systemd possess notably toxic communities which severely punish forks and dissent, which is also used as a mechanism by which control over the project is maintained. the upshot to this is an additional high cost to the morale and community resources of a fork, which particularly harshly punishes forks run by individuals and small teams.
Which features, exactly? I just tried IceWM, which has no systemd-related dependencies and vastly predates systemd, and the session appears correctly on
loginctland disappears from there a few seconds after logging out, same as logging in and out of Plasma. Seems like it works fine.I did notice that
loginctl lock-sessiondoesn't work with IceWM, and presumably neither does anything else that involves sending D-Bus messages to the process controlling the session, but that's not the end of the world.I definitely have not observed this issue. I have
loginctl enable-lingered myself, so my user services start during boot, before any desktop environment is loaded. I haven't tested whether user services work in IceWM without that, but as far as I know, user service managers are started and stopped by logind in response to session start/stop, and logind gets notified of session start by the PAM modulepam_systemd, not by the desktop environment.Breaking changes affecting programs outside of the systemd suite? Can you give me some concrete examples of such breaking changes and the problems they caused? I wasn't aware there were any. I would have expected to see some serious fireworks if such a thing ever happened.
We're discussing a community hard fork that leaves IBM behind, like what happened with XFree86. What IBM says or does after that is irrelevant, I would think.
not gonna dig around in the source to my distro for examples, but here’s the hack NixOS uses to make
graphical-session.targetrun with WMs that aren’t Gnome or KDE. since a lot of the session management stuff I want to do relies on being able to sensibly handle both text and graphical sessions (and the NixOS hack wasn’t too reliable the last time I tried it), this was one of the factors that pushed me towards using Shepherd to manage the session process tree on my systemsthis is a really weird question to ask, given that the context is a hypothetical systemd fork running into breaking changes in the systemd API. maybe look up a postmortem for
uselessdor any of the other dead systemd forks?leveraging an existing toxic community against a newer, smaller one is very much a way to retain control after a fork; again, this is pretty much a known quantity, and there are a bunch of examples of it happening in cryptocurrency projects
If you're pathologically opposed to software complexity, you probably shouldn't be using a GUI at all. Many millions of lines of code are involved in turning UTF-8 into pixels on your screen, laying out widgets, driving a GPU, and so forth.
Oh come off it. You know what I mean, I'm already mocking myself you don't need to hit me in the kidneys.
I ran headless for a while but security risls
I will say that it's impressive that modern GUIs, as staggeringly complex as they are, work as well and as quickly as they do, not to mention how ridiculously fast the hardware is. That's quality engineering right there.