𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Calibre is one of the great pieces of FOSS software, and demonstrates everything good about FOSS: it has regular updates; it’s been around for simply ages; it works really, really well; it gets updates and new features and yet has never in my memory had a breaking, non-backwards-compatible release… it’s stable; and it resists - in its way - the attempt by publishers to steal our rights and ownerships of our media.

I contribute donate to Calibre. I hope that Goyal has a successor lined up to take the helm who can continue such an outstanding contribution when he finally retires from the project.

Edit: clarification

I know logind can’t easily be, because I ran Artix for a while and they were using a decoupled version of it, and there was a big discussion about swapping it for something else because it was so hard to maintain.

It is not modular. This is a lie Poettering keeps pushing to defend building a huge edifice of interdependent systems.

Look at the effort required to factor out logind. It can’t just be used in it’s own; it has a hard dependency on systemd and needs code changes to decouple.

I will repeat that journald is really bad at what it does, and further assert that you can not run systemd without journald, or vice versa. That you can not run systemd without getting timed job control. Even if you chose not to use it, it’s in there. And you can not get time job control without the init part. In most unix systems, init and cron are utterly decoupled and can be individually swapped with other systems.

Systemd is not modular if you can’t swap parts out for other software. Systemd’s modularity is a bald-faced lie.

The one exceptions are homed and resolvd, which are relatively new and were addedlong after systemd came under fire for being monolithic. And, ironically, they’re the components most distributions don’t use by default.

I’ve been using systemd on most of my systems since it was released; I was an early jumper to upstart as well.

The thing I don’t like about systemd is how pervasive in the OS it is. It violates the “do one thing, do it well” Unix philosophy, and when systemd went from an init system to starting to take everything over, I started liking it less.

My issues with systemd is that it isn’t an unmitigated success, for me. journald is horrible: it’s slow and doesn’t seem to catch everything (the latter is extremely rare, but that it happens occasionally makes me nervous). There are several gotchas in running user services, such as getting in-session services working correctly (so that user services can access the user session kernel keyring).

Recently I’ve been using dinit on a system, and I’m pretty happy with it. I may switch all of my systems over to it; I’m running Arch everywhere, and while migrating Arch to Artix was scary the first time, in the end it went fairly smoothly.

Fundamentally, systemd is a monolithic OS system. It make Linux into more of a Windows or MacOS, where a bunch of different systems are consolidated under a single piece of software. While it violates the Unix philosophy, it has been successful because monolithic systems tend to be easier to use: users really only have to learn two command-line tools, vs a dozen. Is it categorically better, just because the user interface is easier for new Linux users?

dinit also has the ability to run user services, FWIW.

The most popular Linux distros are binary based. Gentoo upgrades build all new software from source. If you don’t want long install times, don’t usr one of these compile-everything-from-source distros.

There’s no option to install Windows from source, and it doesn’t really come with anything more than the OS, anyway, so it’s apples yto oranges. Windows might not even be compilable on consumer hardware.

Yeah, I wasn’t saying it was bad; I meant only that Linux didn’t have to worry about device drivers for it, because the fob handles reading the fingerprint chip.

I dunno. I have a fair number of packages installed from AUR, and the Rust ones take forever to compile. CPUs may have gotten faster, but some popular languages have gotten much slower to compile.

Yup! It’s very much like mpd, except streaming without an additional component.

They use the SoundCloud API. You only need either gonic or Navidrome, plus a client (like ostui).

It’s not, really. All of those programs are Go, and single executables. There’s no “install” for either gonic or ostui (IIRC, also Navidrome): you download or compile the executable and run it, and you’re off and running.

Someone mentioned Docker; in this case it’s unnecessary unless you’re doing it for security. They’re just each a single binary. You’ll have to either create a config for gonic or Navidrome, or run them with commands telling them where your music lives, but that’s it. Running on the same machine, you don’t even have to open the ports on your firewall. However, if you do, Tempo for Android lets you stream the music to your phone from gonic or Navidrome, too.

These are very, very simple programs to run. ostui is a TUI, so if you prefer GUIs you’ll want a different client, but both of the servers are easy to run and nothing to install - just run them as you, not even root.

I think that’s because Yubikey handles the fingerprint reader part, not Linux, right? As far as Linux goes, it’s a black box security fob - but I might be wrong about that.

CUPs is simply ancient. It’s due for an overhaul; I keep expecting someone to come along and Poettering it, only I’d hope without also making it take over cron jobs and logging.

Herbstluftwm. It’s one of the main reasons I use it.

You can run commands on the command line to create your layouts for one or more desktop (tagged spaces), assign programs to appear on tagged spaces, and then run the programs. Put it all in a shell script and hlwm runs it when it starts.

I use xtoolwait for programs I want multiple windows on different desktops for, like terminals.

I have three monitors; one is a status window, and the other two are grouped together in 8 different tags. Mod4+9 focuses the status screen, Mod4+[1-8] switch the other two monitors in sync to the other workspaces. It’s all set up when I log in, including the creation of several terminals each running tmux from sessions restored by trum-session. The only thing I have to do is enter a password to unlock my secrets so background processes can start doing their thing.

That would make a huge difference.

I ran Gentoo back in the early aughts; it was hella better than Redhat, but it felt like I was constantly compiling stuff, and new installs and upgrades could sometimes take more than a day. I don’t remember what I jumped to after Gentoo, but I’ve never considered it again because of the lack of prehbuilt binaries. It seemed bitcoinish to have thousands of people wasting CPU cycles compiling the same package when it could be compiled once and redistributed.

Where Gentoo is nice is in the build flags: there’s really no way to get around compiling yourself if you want to exclude optional dependencies, and Gentoo had that in spades. I am just not sure how much that’s actually used anymore, but having binaries gives you the best of both worlds.

Thanks for posting that; I may have to re-investigate Gentoo.

An alternative would be to run gonic or Navidrome - both are OpenSubsonic servers, and provide synced lyrics support. Then use the ostui client which plays music and displays synchronized lyrics.

My experience with Brother was also good, until it got tipped during a move and came out simply covered in toner. We don’t really need a new printer, but I’d buy another Brother LaserJet in a heartbeat.

My Canon regularly gives me grief. My Epson Ecotank, OTOH, has been painless.

Broadcom, as you’ve discovered. That’s the one brand that I’ve always had trouble with; they go out of their way to be closed source: never publishing specs, never responding to developers. They’re horrible to the point where I will not buy any product that uses Broadcom chips. Which used to be a PITA because they were also common.

Fingerprint readers, in general, also widely seem to be poorly supported.

One of my computers has a MediaTek wireless chip where WiFi isn’t supported but Bluetooth does.

A lot of people have problems with NVidia cards; I’ve not had trouble with either AMD or Intel GPUs (although, I think all Intel GPUs are CPU integrated?).

Multifunction printers are still iffy, and even just plain printers can give grief; I’ve come to believe that this is simply because CUPS is ancient and due for a completely new, modern printing service. It’s an awful piece of software to have to work with.

I agree. Arch has been my current favorite distribution for several years now, but it’s almost impossible to maintain without having to drop into the shell occasionally. I have EndeavourOS installed on my wife’s laptop and she’s been happily using it for nearly a year; bauh helps with software installs, but I still generally drop into a shell for the full -Syu upgrades, and you have to use the shell at least once just to install bauh as it’s not a core package.

You might be able to avoid the shell to use bauh if you use the AppImage; I haven’t tried that. bauh can apparently do system upgrades, but I haven’t tried that yet and I need to see how it handles news; Arch is fairly cavalier about pushing out breaking changes that require extra user steps which need to be discovered by reading the news posts.

I agree that Arch isn’t the best “first linux” distribution.

Agree. Set my wife up on EndeavorOS on her laptop, and every time I go in to do something I’m impressed.

I’m a tiling, terminal, minimal mouse guy, so it isn’t for me, but what I’ve seen of KDE it’s leaps and bounds better than Gnome. Some of the minimal DEs are good if you want lightweight; Cinnamon (or whatever Gnome-on-GTK3 is called) is good, and better than current Gnome, but not in the same league as KDE.