Your friendly neighbourhood sh.it.head

Gamer, book and photography nerd, francophile // Gamer, geek des livres et de la photographie, francophile

  • 5 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Frankly the best solution i have seen is always a combination of things. At least in the city I live in, people can take bikes on buses and trains, many people walk, and for trips that require trunk space (e.g furniture, DIY supplies etc) there is a Car sharing service that is cheaper than owning a car, or using ride share / taxi.

    I don’t think waymo is a better option than a combination of what’s above, I think it can perhaps compliment it but it should not be the sole last-kilometre solution.

    I would like to see waymo-like tech provide better public transit for the disabled. As of now, people in my city with disabilities can book special routes which are serviced by specialized buses/ taxis, and existing lines are all wheelchair accessible as well.

    Self driving cars give the opportunity for those people to have even more freedom in booking, since as of now they can’t do last minute booking for the custom routes. It wouldn’t really create a traffic problem and massively would increase quality of life for those who are sadly disadvantages in society





  • Frankly I would like to not use Apple CarPlay / Android Auto — however, the built in software needs to actually usable and continuously updated.

    I particularly want to see better non-touch input. Rotary dial + buttons à la Mazda, and much better voice input. I live in a multilingual region, and it consequently renders most in-built navigation voice commands useless, as it won’t understand language switching. Even Google assitant has issues with this despite supporting multiple input languages, usually resulting in me saying the entire command in the same language as the address. (Or just giving up if the name and street are in two languages).

    But with built in systems that only support one language at a time, I just can’t say some of the addresses since I don’t know how it wants me to mispronounce them in English.

    I also have found media playback frustrating in any modern vehicle. This is likely a lot harder to solve, but the inability to switch playlists or change playback settings without my phone connected to Android Auto is frustrating when in vehicles without it.

    I know this is very ranty and not that big of a deal, it’s just frustrating seeing so little progress in the past decade on this front — and in some aspects like human interface design of vehicles, they have frankly regressed. If I look at the voice input systems on cars from 15-20 years ago there has been huge improvement, but even 10 years ago to now it doesn’t feel that different. Maybe a few new commands, but the quality of recognition / utility of the system is lacking.





  • I think it’s important to see these types of efforts, while I’ll never go out and buy a MacBook the effort isn’t wasted since it gives current users more freedom and future people buying used laptops more options for Linux compatible hardware.

    Without a project like this, that hardware will end up being e-waste a lot sooner than it should be, when Apple drops support. At least to me I see an ethical and moral imperative for projects like this, but I also understand people’s grievances with Apple.


  • The plugin that brings the “starter” / “welcome” screen when nvim is called without a file is mini.starter, a lua module of the mini plugin. My primary use case for neovim is closer to a feature complete text editor rather than a full fledged IDE, although there definitely is some overlap in my setup.

    My set of plugins are roughly as follows

    • vim-plug, I will likely replace this one with packer at some point
    • goyo.vim and limelight.vim for distraction free viewing and editing
    • nnn.nvim to integrate the nnn file manager into neovim
    • mini.nvim according to the Github, “Library of 35+ independent Lua modules improving overall Neovim (version 0.7 and higher) experience with minimal effort. They all share same configuration approaches and general design principles.”
      • mini.surround feature rich surround actions
      • mini.statusline a very simple no-frills statusline
      • mini.starter aformentioned start screen
      • mini.pairs inserts the paired character, e.g typing ( will automatically place ) behind the cursors
      • mini.move move selections
      • mini.map has a little map of the file similar to VScode among many other IDEs & text editors
    • barbar.nvim Tabbar plugin
    • a whole bunch of LSP / autocomplete engines / snippets / git commit messages & signs
    • nvim-treesitter for syntax highlighting

    And the remaining things in my init.lua file are just keybindings, setting up the plugins, and disabling the swapfile etc. when editing my password secrets in gopass among other ‘secret’ files


  • It definitely is rather reminiscent of older Windows versions with the seperate application launchers, fully expanded task bar entries that show the name of an app that are ungrouped (until necessary). And the widgets are very reminiscent of Rainmeter.

    But I also bring some things from macOS that I enjoyed such as the global menu on the top (sadly Firefox flatpak does not support), virtual desktops with the pager widget on the bottom, and I use Krunner a lot (plasma’s equivalent to macOS “Spotlight”)

    I hope your switch to Linux goes well if / when you switch!



  • I understand why they wouldn’t want to suddenly change the branding of existing projects though.

    I’m not sure if I agree, I feel like the long term damage of keeping the names is greater than changing them now to Fedora Plasma Atomic (Formerly Kinoite) / Fedora Atomic Workstation (Formerly Silverblue). Leaving them as is, is just going to create more confusion in the future to new users who won’t immediately understand why the naming convention is different for the other spins and will create more confusion for documentation / support threads online.



  • Thank you for the very thorough reply! For god knows what reason I get this error: error: app/org.mozilla.firefox/x86_64/stable not installed when running the xdg-open firefox-reader command, yet manually running flatpak run --user org.mozilla.firefox about:reader?url=https://example.com works just fine. I’ll have to troubleshoot it when I have a bit more time ;p

    Thanks again for your very thorough write up and the linked articles. Have a good day :)

    Update: It seems like on my system, the --user flag was the issue, removing it made the script function. I am using Fedora Kinoite (Immutable version of KDE Plasma), so perhaps it is just a difference in how flatpak is configured between distros? I’ll have to read into it more later.


  • I’ll keep my answer focused on KDE Connect as I no longer use a TWM. You can most definitely use KDE Connect in non-Plasma environments. For non-Plasma (and non-Gnome * ) environments you can just install the kdeconnectd package. Then, to start the KDE Connect daemon manually, execute /usr/lib/kdeconnectd. You can schedule this to autostart as a systemd unit, or in the config for your TWM (I know in sway/i3 you could start it, I’m assuming it is similar for many other options)

    If you use a firewall, you need to open UDP and TCP ports 1714 through 1764. If you use firewalld specifically, there’s an option to enable KDE Connect rather than manually specifying it. This also let’s you have it only work on private networks and not public if you so chose.

    See Arch wiki for more details

    *For gnome I would recommend using gs-connect even if you have a tiling extension

    £ KDE-Connect: does that work on TWMs? Is there a good implementation? Can I use GSConnect elsewhere too?