Gargron (the Masto lead dev)'s been trying to kill it because he doesn’t want us to have nice things.

– Frost

That’s a really good way to end up with fake meaningless “alt text” that’s only put there to get around the restrictions.

Caring about meaningful image descriptions is a cultural thing.

– Frost

There’s Matrix which is selfhostable but “good” is pushing it and the cryptography is a bit iffy (probably more incompetence than malice). Though selfhosting it means you don’t need the end to end encryption quite as much… until the court gets involved of course.

– Frost

“Eh, tired.”, usually.

People tend to get it. They’re probably tired too.

– Frost

Oh heh, yeah, o’course! I wasn’t really meaning that seriously, more just riffing off the thread of silly $HOME expansions. :3

Probably good to mention that in case someone comes along and thinks /home/$(whoami) is actually a good idea though, hah.

(Mac has normal users’ homes in /Users!!)

/home/$(whoami)

– Frost

Psst… KDE’s launcher search is the same search as KRunner, just in the launcher! So you don’t need to make any changes at all for a “hit command, start typing” workflow.

(yeah we call it the command key, we come from Mac, but I like ‘command’/｢⌘｣ and it doesn’t have to be apple-specific :3)

– Frost

Bit specific, but for opening an audio device other than default, you should use the API of a sound server. Pulseaudio’s for instance. The new hotness is Pipewire, and it has its own API, but it also supports the Pulseaudio API and AFAWK most clients (apps and things) are still using that.

The sound server sits on top of ALSA and handles all the routing and mixing and shit. ALSA is lower level than what you need as an app/user program dev.

(Pipewire also supports the JACK API. Music apps and such used to use JACK because it was lower latency than Pulseaudio. Which meant you had to stop Pulse and start JACK and lose all sound from your other apps and it was a right pain. Pipewire just does both.)

– Frost

(*wags tail at both PJ and Sam!!* =^.^=)

yeah! Terminal’s super useful but also kind of daunting.

If y’all haven’t seen the man pages, they make an excellent reference. Honestly, they’re basically written more as reference than as tutorial type stuff most of the time. So that’s there whenever your cheatsheet doesn’t cover something.

Also we use zsh (without plugins, you don’t need plugins) and it’s got really fancy autocomplete. We can just type - and hit tab and get a list of all the options for that command (that zsh knows about; I don’t think it goes and reads man pages for you or anything like that). I can’t remember how you turn that on but I think it’s something you can do from zsh’s initial setup wizard. I don’t know if bash can do the same thing or not, I think probably not (but we’re not super up to date on bash).

(I’d avoid fish, which you might also run into if you go looking for fancy features. It’s known for really fancy features but it’s also not compatible with normal shell scripts, which’ll screw you up if you ever want to get into scripting. zsh does normal shell script syntax (with the exception of protecting you if you forget to quote your variables) and also has really nice fancy features like the autocomplete.)

– Frost

Yeahhhh

We use Debian and ripped out systemd (replaced it with openrc) a bit before all this happened. Feeling really good about that choice now.

(unrelated: plural gang! :3)

– Frost

But it runs a real operating system! which is a pretty big deal actually.

– Frost

Email might actually be one of the easiest to move off of, thankfully!

There’s plenty of stuff out there, both free and paid. You can even use your own domain if you have an extra $15 or so a year. A lot of the paid options let you use your domain with them (and then if you ever need to change providers, you can keep your email address). And you can use both webmail and actual mail apps.

Youtube though… yeah, there aren’t really any good alternatives for that.

– Frost

Psst, you can keep your /home. Copy /home/username to a new partition before the install (just the username folder in the root of the new partition), do the install, and point it at your new partition as /home. Bam, it’s your new home.

Or you could copy out/copy back.

You’ll need to reinstall your apps, but you won’t need to redo all your settings for them.

– Frost

I’m a wolf (furry + therian) and I use the wolf emoji a lot! ✨🐺✨

But… I’m really lucky that there even IS one. A lot of people aren’t so lucky.

So yeah. More emoji is a good thing, particularly more animal emoji. We really need emoji for more species.

– Frost

But also more generally, the whole attitude of “you’re just a Luddite who’s HOLDING US BACK!!” that people do. See also systemd.

(I don’t like systemd for completely different reasons (political rather than technical) but the very similar “you just need to get with the times!!!” attitude is also a massive turnoff for basically the same reason.)

(Also see also Rust. Ditto.)

By contrast, Pipewire? Legitimate improvement. It’s not just a “change bad” thing. There’s a reason Wayland/systemd/rust are controversial and Pipewire isn’t. A lot of it is the attitude, I think. People aren’t forcing Pipewire, either, and on the app side most stuff seems to still be the Pulseaudio API which is completely fine and means you can use either.

Hah, yeah, you probably don’t have a CRT monitor!

Having custom resolution support is INCREDIBLY important for them, because they have no native resolution and you can just throw pretty much anything at them and it looks fantastic. It’s great for getting high refresh rates in games, especially since decreasing the resolution means you don’t have to work as hard for that framerate, without the nastiness of upscaling.

And also our monitor reports 1280x1024 as the highest resolution. Which… is the wrong aspect ratio. ??? So we NEED custom resolutions to even have a usable monitor.

KDE finally came out with support for this… in a version that’s not in Debian yet… like, one major release before dropping X11 support completely. And pretty much every other desktop on the planet is just out in the cold (except for all the window managers that base off of wlroots or something, I think it has an equivalent). Gnome? Good fucking luck.

Oh and screenshot tools. Those are tied to the DE now! Want to use a competing screenshot tool? You just… uh… can’t. I mean we’re on KDE and Spectacle is pretty great so it doesn’t really affect us, but if we didn’t like Spectacle, we’d be more or less screwed under Wayland.

Also scaling the screen. I don’t mean widget toolkit scaling. I mean e.g. integer scaling the screen pixels from 1920x1080 to 4K, a simple 2x2 for 4K TVs, or what-have-you. (Because 4K TVs don’t do this themselves even though they really should.) Or going the other way, rendering at 1280x960 and then downscaling to 640x480 so our CRT can get 120Hz. Easy on X11. Straight-up impossible on Wayland.

Oh yeah, and did I mention temporarily (not as default) disabling our PS4 controller’s trackpad from working as a mouse, without disabling any other trackpad on the system, without disabling its ability to work as a button or whatever in Steam Input? That too.

Stuff like that.

I don’t think anything defaulting to Wayland is guaranteed trash, but I also think there should be way more X11 pitchfork people. Or at least less hatred directed at them when they pop up.

“just get with the times it’s THE FUTURE and you’re not allowed to say no!” is… not cool. Especially when Wayland is unusable for anything outside of “the ordinary”, by design.

– Frost

It’d be really nice if it was like Wii, where you can have the emulated console do an online system update and bang, there’s your whole OS… or failing that, the entire system is on every game disc, just in case… but nooo can’t have that.

And honestly, in the coming age of “OSes that don’t spy on you will be illegal!!”, I’m really, really glad for that. We’ve got the entire 27-ISO set of Debian 13.0.0 squirreled away. There’s even more discs for the sources, and they go to great lengths to ensure that everything can be built with no external dependencies that aren’t available in the archive.

Debian: It’s Apocalypse-Proof.™

– Frost

Haha yeah! :3 I uh, misread the critter I replied to as saying “I don’t get it” rather than “I’m not even interested in getting it”. Cue the massive infodump. >,,>

I’m not that sorry, though. It’s still fun to talk about and also kinda hilarious that it happened.

– Frost