rozodru

since Plasma 6.5 I just daily drive it now. prior to that I was all about WM’s be it Herbstluftwm, Sway, Niri, whatever but after awhile I just got tired of configuring them or dealing with quirks about each one and what have you. Plasma just does everything I need and I don’t have to think about it. And you can even get it to tile now be it manual or dynamic. Plus you can theme the hell out of it. It just works. Plus Konsole has become my favourite terminal. just don’t see a point in using other stuff anymore.

yes I use DOOM Emacs and will never use another editor. It’s my IDE, my Email Client, my document writer, my File Manager, and my Terminal. don’t need anything else.

Nano or as I like to call it “The Sudo Editor”

there are a couple youtube channels I recently discovered that do just that. take REALLY old computers and parts and try to make them semi-viable for modern computing. and I’m talking stuff that is easily nearly 30+ years old.

BoomerTec and Action Retro. BoomerTec I really like as he’ll just pick up random old PCs and explain all the parts inside and even give a history on them. His vids are like really awesome relaxing sunday morning watches. He even finds FOSS stuff that will still work on really old pcs. because of his channel I even discovered forks of firefox that are still actively developed for 32bit or community builds of Windows XP that are still updated today. For example his recent vid he bought a PC from 1998 off Ebay and got Firefox, Photoshop, and OpenOffice working on it. even games.

Action Retro pretty much does the same thing but with a focus on Linux. He’s done videos of taking like old Compaqs from the 90s and getting linux running on them. Really impressive stuff.

Veronica Explains is also good for this. Her video of taking old chromebooks and getting linux working on them is very detailed and thorough. Extremely easy to follow even for first timers. Also what I like about Veronica Explains is her videos remind me of old TechTV Screen Savers and Call for Help.

honestly I just looked at what others have done with qobuz-player which is a TUI qobuz player and pretty much copied and pasted that.

yeah I recently built myself a music player because I was just so disappointed with all the available options on Linux. Nothing had EVERYTHING I wanted. Many had really crappy shuffles or just didn’t include one at all. many just wouldn’t play the entirety of your music collection and most simply wouldn’t do both online streaming and local music playback. So I built one that’s TUI based that does everything I want and it’s perfect. Allows me to play music from QoBuz, my Navidrome server, or just local music files OR I can play all three making a “SUPER” music library. Shuffle that ACTUALLY shuffles the ENTIRE collection. search feature, integration with soulseek to download music to either my local machine or navidrome and qobuz search to add to that playlist.

I’m not going to release it because A. like i said it’s perfect for me and B. I dont’ want to deal with users git issues or having to deal with other devs wanting to contribute. It works, it’s mine, and that’s that. will never see the light of day.

meanwhile me on NixOS-unstable: a single font and an image editing program has brought my system to its knees.

I like retro computing so I have one computer that has Niri themed like Windows 98, also have Plasma on it themed the same way. then I have another that has Sway themed like the Apple II.

sounds like me this past week when my external SSD decided to finally crap out on me. running around the house plugging it into multiple devices to make sure it was dead.

Plasma has improved A LOT in the past year. Like a year ago I hated it. now? I daily drive it. I hate to use this phrase but everything just works.

I was kinda disappointed with the 6.6 release as I really just want dedicated virtual desktops per monitor but their compromise actually isn’t that bad. I just had to turn off animation for changing workspaces and it’s fine. Even tiling works A LOT better on Plasma than it used to and dare I saw kinda works better/is more smooth than Sway and the like and I’m not even using krohnkite. you can quickly toggle the splits for windows and even do vim style navigation between windows. you can even do vim navigation with windows that aren’t tiled.

Plus the stuff they have packaged in is just better than most alternatives out there. I love Konsole. it has everything I need. and Kate is also a fantastic IDE you can REALLY customize that is slept on by many people. Dolphin is great too. It’s nice having a DE that just has all the stuff you need right out of the box and you don’t really have to change any of the defaults.

The ability to have virtual desktops only on the primary screen

sigh. I guess. I think I just need to settle on the fact KDE is never going to allow dedicated virtual desktops per monitor. I really want to use Plasma but this is a deal breaker for me.

it’s already available? CachyOS for example switched to using it as the default like a month or two ago. It’s already out there.

it’s just a wrapper for nix shell. so say you want to use firefox or neovim you’d just do “, firefox” and “, neovim” https://github.com/nix-community/comma

before I made the switch to Linux I never used a terminal. never. hell on Windows I even used a GUI for Git. I used sublime text as my IDE. if it wasn’t a GUI I was lost.

Then I switched to Linux and it forced me to actually sit down and learn the terminal and now…now I have a hard time using GUI’s. If something has a CLI or TUI option then I go for that over a GUI. like everything even my music player and video player. my IDE of choice now is DOOM Emacs. my file manager is Yazi. for Git I either use lazygit or just straight up the command line. but for everything else it’s just so much faster and in the long run easier to just use the terminal.

All that being said if you like GUI’s then hey more power to you and that’s fine. that’s the beauty of Linux. you run your system how you want to and don’t let others tell you otherwise. Hell I know a guy that uses NixOS and doesn’t have anything installed other than git and comma. he runs everything via comma. literally everything.

I’m currently using Niri and sure it’s not a DE it does an excellent job of workspaces. each monitor has its own set of workspaces by default, no configuration needed.

I don’t use Dank Material Shell or any of that but in all honesty if you wrap Niri in DMS or something like it then it actually becomes a near perfect DE. Even the Niri devs now suggest you install Niri with DMS.

All KDE has to do, literally all they have to do, is make dedicated virtual desktops/workspaces per monitor and i’d be happy. that’s it. I would daily drive Plasma if they just did that.