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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 10th, 2023

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  • KDE offers a better user experience than MacOS or Windows (haven’t used 11 though). It really took off in the last years.

    By default it’s similar to Windows but you can completely customize the look and feel without touching a terminal/console. It has inbuilt stores with user contributed themes, icons, backgrounds, widgets and extensions. Some of those can make KDE really shiny.

    Then you can completley change the layout of the Desktop. Add panels (alias taskbars), add different buttons and functions to the panels change their positions. The widgets KDE comes with are very nice too. Especially the hardware monitor ones. I use HW-mon widgets for temperatures, diskspace, ram, network-activity e.g.

    You can add as much virtual desktops as you want. You can activate desktop animations for things like switching between virtual desktops or window overviews. With an extension like Krohnkite you can automatically arrange your windows. You can change most keyboard combos for the various functions of the desktop.

    KDE is based on the superior Qt programming framework and is therefore pretty optimized and most of the apps are pretty consistent in their design language unless they’re written for the concurrent desktop environment Gnome whose apps can also be run under KDE.

    Alt+F2 opens a KRunner overlay which is KDEs universal search for applications documents, web, even open tabs in browsers. You could also open the Kickstarter (Startmenu) via the Windows-key and enter the application name right away.

    Browsernames are the same. Just search them via KRunner. The best way to install software for newbies is a package manager which is included on user-friendly distros like Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE, Kububtu. You open the package-manager/appstore search for the application you want to install and click install. Huge Advantage: With every OS-Update all the software you installed via a package manager gets automatically updated along with the OS packages.

    Generally if you come from Windows use KDE. There other desktop environments like Cinnamon or Mate similar to Windows but none come close to KDE. If you feel adventureous and want to learn a completely new desktop workflow use Gnome.

    The first and most important choice is to choose a good Distribution. I’m using EndeavourOS and Arch. They are extremely good distros but maybe not the best for beginners (although Endeavour is not too bad with onboarding).

    Fedora or OpenSUSE could ease the learning curve.




  • I just yesterday tried Wayland under Arch with a 1070 after a long time. Single WQHD monitor though. Although X11 is really performant, Wayland was more smooth regarding KDE desktop effects. Witcher 3 (via Heroic) showed fewer microstutters and I will try some more proton games and other applications over the weekend.

    I recently had to downgrade nvidia drivers from 560 to 550 because wakeup from sleep and hibernate would coredump. I read that this is fixed with 560 but only under Wayland. The developers definitely progressed on the nvidia front.







  • And it’s more ethical and environmentally friendlier than Lithium-Ion, right?

    Norway has just started a deep sea excavation for cobalt and copper which as I understand (I’m clueless) can be omitted from sodium-ion batteries. The excavation is roughly of the size of equador and will take place in an area that may contain previously unknown lifeforms and critically endangered eco-system.

    A paragraph of an article seems to show their non-chalance regarding the ecosystem impacts and unknown side-effects:

    “The Norwegian government recognizes that it can’t be sure any mining would be sustainable—it’s not been able to determine the likely environmental impact of extracting minerals in its waters, nor exactly what minerals are there to be found. “We do not currently have the knowledge needed to extract minerals from the seabed in the manner required,” says Næss.”

    These are the guys whose grid runs on 99% hydropower but they keep drilling for fossile fuels and now rare earths to export them and in addition are still hunting wales.

    So to summarise: I’m very happy that there seems to be an eco friendly battery where its main component is the overambundantly availabe sodium. And the short wikipedia entry seems to reflect, that it’s a more simple tech.


  • It is day and night. Svelte is nearly vanilla JS/TS. No quirks and surprising side-effects like in React. No shadow DOM. With the new rune system in the next version it will even be better. For me it had the best DX of all frameworks I tried.

    I suppose OP is frustrated because the business world hasn’t catched up and most of them still only search for React devs, which is in my opinion very stupid, because React can be so frustrating for devs. The reddit sub for svelte has ever so often posts by them praising the sanity of Svelte.

    But it would be a valid point by OP if that is their reason when their income depends on it. We can only hope Svelte catches up in that regard.




  • It’s been nearly 4 years since I last used Manjaro and I had that error quite often around ever ½-¼ a year in my 2 years of Manjaro. iirc to resolve it I had to uninstall the current nvidia driver > restart without driver > install supported kernel > install driver. Don’t know what I did wrong tho.

    Manjaro did otherwise a good job to keep the sys together.

    What bugged me a bit was the painfully long retention of the big KDE updates. At that time KDE was making big QOL leaps and quite a few distros had those updates already. But I could also live with that.

    In the last month of my time with Manjaro a few Proton games dropped frames heavily and that’s the end of the story. Made the switch to Arch and never had probs with nvidia again, apart from when new Steam UI came out.



  • yay SEARCHTERM

    It spits out all the packages with SEARCHTERM in its name or description. The packages are listed like “REPO/PACKAGE” , where REPO tells you if it’s from the official repos (core/extra/multilib) or from the AUR.

    Then pick the number of the package from the list and that’s it.

    If you want to update all your packages, even the AUR ones just enter yay and press enter on the follow-up questions. If you update with pacman -Syu then AUR packages won’t get updated.

    Also Octopi is a nice frontend for yay and pacman. Not as fancy as Discover or Pamac but it does its job well.


  • I just installed Nextcloud on Arch and the official packages caused the most headaches I ever had within my 3 years of arch. In contrast I installed the official Jellyfin and Prometheus Server packages and they ran OOTB.

    I ended up with not using the official packages but extracting the tar.bz2 into /var/www/nextcloud and slightly modifying the nginx config from their site. I had to move the inclusion of the MIME-Types file to a different block for nextcloud to deliver its CSS, SVGs and images. It wasn’t exactly straight-forward too considering permissions. I found it a beast compared to many other server software.