she/they

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • No C program is written to satisfy a borrow checker and most wouldn’t compile with one, so adding it would require rewriting the world anyways. At that point why not choose a language that, in addition to being memory safe, also drastically cuts down on other kinds of UB, has sum types, sane error handling, a (mostly) thread safe standard library, etc.?




  • Another alternative approach would be to add a duplicate desktop file, but to write it declaratively using Home Manager:

    # in home.nix
    home.file.".local/share/applications/firefox.desktop".source =
      pkgs.runCommand "firefox-desktop" { } ''
        cp "${pkgs.firefox}/share/applications/firefox.desktop" "$out"
        substituteInPlace "$out" \
          --replace-fail "Terminal=false" "Terminal=true"
      '';
    
    # - or -
    home.file.".local/share/applications/firefox.desktop".text = ''
      [Desktop Entry]
      Name=Firefox
      Icon=firefox
      Exec=firefox --name firefox %U
    '';
    

    It would be possible to DIY this with user activation scripts, but I don’t really see a value in doing that over the symlinkJoin.


  • Since the desktop files come directly from a package you’ll need to change the package you’re installing. This works best if you use the postPatch phase of symlinkJoin:

    pkgs.symlinkJoin {
      inherit (pkgs.firefox) pname version;
      paths = [ pkgs.firefox ];
      postPatch = ''
        # String replacement example - will run the app in a terminal
        substituteInPlace "$out/share/applications/firefox.desktop" \
          --replace-fail "Terminal=false" "Terminal=true"
      '';
    }
    

    The reason for using symlinkJoin here is that it creates a package with the same outputs as the original Firefox, but with this bash script having run. You can use this like any other package:

    let
      firefox' = <...>
    in
    {
      environment.systemPackages = [ firefox' ];
      # - or -
      programs.firefox.package = firefox';
    }
    

    Note that symlinkJoin has special handling for postPatch, but ignores all other stdenv phases, so you need to do everything in one bash script. You can use all the parameters for runCommand though, such as buildInputs and nativeBuildInputs - e.g. for compiling sass in a wrapper derivation.

    In some cases it’s useful to also inherit meta or passthru because it’s used in some nixpkgs/nixos sanity checks, but it’s usually not required.

    Another approach would be to use overrideAttrs, which will also work but will cause Nix to rebuild the package from scratch. This might be fine or even desired in some cases, but you probably don’t want to do that in this case.





  • In this case it’s more of a switch away from the last cool new thing. Totem (like Music) was built around a media library navigated from within the app. By default Totem doesn’t even support opening videos from the file manager, which is something you would probably expect of a video player. It also crashed for me when I tried using it as intended so I’m not surprised to see it replaced by an app that really is just a video player.

    That said many apps get replaced not for feature reasons but just by being GTK3, and they tend to get replaced by their own forks to GTK4 (such as the upcoming replacement of Evince). Why their devs choose to upgrade toolkits this way I cannot say.



  • It’s prettier than a TTY and you can pick whether you want a Wayland or an X11 session without having to know the correct startup commands. You can pick between different desktops too. And a Display Manager can offer on-screen keyboard and touchscreen support while a TTY can’t (at least GDM does, I’m not sure about SDDM off the top of my head).

    Aside from that whatever command you are using in the TTY to launch Plasma might or might not be the same commands SDDM uses, which might or might not lead to issues in setting up the environment. If your environment is fine and you don’t care about having to use a physical keyboard then of course you can remove it. It’s not exactly load bearing.





  • Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoLinux@programming.devThe Wizard and His Shell
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    4 months ago

    GUIs do have advantages in things like discoverability. Honestly the 1983s Apple Lisa nailed this with the idea of having clickable menus annotated with keyboard shortcuts, so users could do the same thing faster next time. For some reason we stopped doing this (especially in web apps), but that’s a reason to make better GUIs, not to RETVRN to the feature set of a VT100.

    I don’t know why we have to go on nonsensical diatribes about “UNIX wizards” though when we’re fundamentally talking about a handful of minor UI improvements to things that already exist.


  • It depends a lot on which specific GPU you have and whether it’s a laptop.

    New-ish GPU in a desktop with the monitor plugged directly into the GPU? Easy to get working, literally a checkbox on most distros.

    1000 series GPU or older in a laptop and you need reasonable battery life and/or some “advanced” features like DP Alt-Mode? Good luck.

    Edit: Also, no Wayland until very recently. Possibly never, depending on the age of the GPU.


  • It’s wild how on the orange website I can read entirely sensible discussions about tricky Bash semantics or whatever, while people in a parallel thread are seriously arguing the Trump admin’s repressions are dwarfed by… whatever “repressions” they think happened during Covid. And I don’t even click on the threads about disabilities (especially autism) anymore because it’s so predictably sad.


  • Yeah some people seem to have this expectation that there should just magically be a button to unbreak the PC. They talk about their personal pain points when using Linux as if there’s a conspiracy of devs to hide the unbreak buttons for the sake of elitism, but that… just isn’t a thing? If it was that easy to fix an issue, you probably wouldn’t need to fix it because the system would already come unbroken by default. I sympathize with everyone’s Bluetooth configuration woes but mostly it’s a pain in the ass because Bluetooth, in general, is a pain in the ass, not because of elitist devs (who I should mention are doing this in their free time for no pay. There’s almost no money in desktop Linux, unlike in servers).


  • kwriteconfig6 is barely documented because you’re not really supposed to use it. All of the settings that users are expected to change are in the nice settings app that Plasma ships with. Using kwriteconfig (or equivalently a dconf editor on GNOME) is like editing the registry on Windows; you are implicitly opting into more power, out of most guardrails and into potential breakage. The UX being a bit questionable (though honestly it’s really not as bad as you’re saying, it does exactly what it sounds like it will do?) is to a degree intentional, because you’re not supposed to be using this unless you know what you are doing.


  • To be fair that’s not the entire story, since you need to actually resolve the conflicts first, which is slightly scary since your worktree will be broken while you do it and your Linter will be shouting at you.

    You may also want a dedicated merge tool that warns you before accidentally commiting a conflict and creating a broken commit.

    Oh and non trivial resolutions may or may not create an evil merge which may or may not be desirable depending on which subset of git automation features you use.

    Using git status often is definitely good advice though.