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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Power users love to bash accessibility features like this. Its a classic case of “I don’t need a wheelchair ramp so i dont know why the library added one!”

    Accessibility is way more than screen readers. It’s more than specific disability-minded modes. The web needs to be friendly to everyone, including people who may not know they could benefit from accessibility features. Everyone benefits from this type of work.

    There are definitely some legit feature concerns and priorities being called out here. Mozilla has left a lot to be desired of late on that front. But a power user is more than capable of jumping into settings or about:config to turn things like this off, or finding an extension to get by for now.

    Also the firefox dev team isn’t tiny. This isn’t blocking other work or anything in a substantial way, it’s a fairly isolated piece of UI, and there’s no guarantee that skipping this would change the timeline on anything else.






  • not seeing all my open apps is weird, also not being able to open or close from the panel is weird

    The extensions that enable this are so simple too. Its a real shame its not built into the settings out of the box, even if they want that to be the default. I wish they made extensions more discoverable too, since you kinda need to know they exist in order to go get them, and easier discoverability would help people solve tbose problems faster.

    UIs need to be compact when needed. Not everyone is a child and settings are not that simple.

    I really wish these things were built in settings. Thunderbird Supernova’s setting for this is a fantastic example of how much of a difference it makes. Yeah, it’s a bit spacious by default. But once you drop the spacing to medium or small based on your needs and dpi, it feels great. Opinionated design done well makes for great consistency and feel, but it also needs to have some room for adjustments without needing to install stuff.


  • I’ve also been a Gnome user for a while, but i am looking forward to plasma 6 as well. I highly doubt I’ll make any sort of switch, but I’ve never had a good time running plasma 5 so i would love to like kde more. Wayland by default is going to benefit gnome too since it’ll put more priority on bugs and lack of support that is still somewhat common among the less desktop-tied apps.

    (My Plasma 5 woes have been on multiple devices, multiple times over multiple years, with and without basic customization. i was basically never able to go a day without some sort of major shell crash. I got way too familiar the the command sequence to restart the desktop ui)

    I do find KDE to be a bit info dense and it doesn’t look like 6 is changing that aspect of things (at least by default), but it does look a bit less busy at least. I also never like basically anything about classic windows UI, layout, or task flows so KDE leaning into those just doesn’t work well for me. That said, while i like gnome being more minimal, i do wish it had a bit more capability to expose hidden/nested options more easily than requiring extension installs.

    I’m similarly excited about cinnamon 6. A bit unfortunate (and understandable given its goals and usage share) it is still X11, but there’s a lot about it that demonstrates a solid middle ground between gnome and KDE.


  • No specific rust experience with either, but some thoughts on the popularity reasons outside of the language:

    I suspect a bit part of this difference in framework popularity may be due to GTK being more attached to gnome and friends, and by extension, Ubuntu (for better or worse, the most used desktop distro for quite a while) Most of the time that’ll be mainline Ubuntu which has always been GTK.

    So if a developer or company is going to target something, then it may come down to “what is the ideal platform to build on for Ubuntu as our main target? GTK? Cool, that’s what we will use.” Of course, either framework is just fine, and either framework targets other OSs as well. I don’t have any experience with either, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the choice of GTK more often is akin to Swift + Apple’s toolkits for iphone development being more popular by a large margin than Ionic/Capacitor, React Native, Xamarin, etc, even though the others provide some benefits (and some significant context-dependent downsides, of course)

    If i remember correctly, Qt was not fully FOSS for a while, so GTK was much more widely adopted and recommended early on. But that was pre-2005, I think.


  • Manjaro can be a real pain depending on your hardware setup. They make a lot of choices that are difficult to work around when you need to (for better or worse) which kinda defeats the whole point of arch (to not be opinionated)

    I have the same setup of packages on a few computers. 0 issues on one, plagued with boot issues on another. And unfortunately, the attitude of the devs and forum is that if you have boot issues its obviously your fault.

    It was definitely a good first arch distro for me, but pacman, aur, and everything else work just as great on Endeavour and all my devices are far more stable than when they were on Manjaro.


  • I’m switching from manjaro to endeavour atm, and i am liking endeavour a lot. I kept having issues with manjaro boot after every kernel update, but otherwise didnt mind it. Probably whatever manjaros build chain for boot is just wasn’t working with my hardware, but also the attitude on the forum is that you are stupid if you have to roll the kernel back.

    Endeavour really just provides you arch with some maintenance utilities and otherwise lets you do your thing.

    No more firefox home page getting constantly reset to the manajro home page so they can market you their laptop partnerships either 😉


  • I haven’t tried v1 yet, but i am really looking forward to their v2 release. Really glad to see they are swapping from ubuntu-based to debian-based. Tons of really neat features in their roadmap too.

    I’ve been on an arch kick recently, but i like the idea of immutable for my laptop which i don’t use as often as my desktop, but when i do use it i need it to just work and not have to be as proactive about the rolling release schedule. Honestly it becomes a good secondary device OS since it’ll likely support whatever package manager you use on your main to make installing all the same things the same way easy.


  • I spent a weekend configuring a gpu passthrough setup to run windows on my arch machine. I haven’t needed it yet.

    Generally any popular distro should be fine. SteamOS is arch (btw) but that doesn’t mean its necessary.

    That said, i don’t play a ton of FPS, and when I do I have 0 interest in being competitive. Right now i don’t really play any games with anti-cheat for online play. When i do play shooters i tend to play on xbox anyway, so if you also have a console you should be covered for any edge cases, esp when cross-play is available.

    Once you pick the right proton version for a particular game things tend to just work. Protondb usually has enough info for solving any annoyances. ProtonTricks is helpful for annoyances.

    For anything non-steam, Bottles is excellent. Bottles can also run games with Proton, but also supports wine (which as an upstream to proton gets many of the features of proton anyway). Bottles is also great for running windows programs.


  • Without those things open source would slowly die. All of those are about getting more users for products, getting funding to make them happen, but more importantly, inspiring the next group of contributors.

    Open source doesn’t just appear out of thin air. It costs money and time. People need to care about it.

    Without users, a project is just a hobby and unlikely to persist long term. Without funding, contributors are forced to abandon for jobs to out food on the table. Without the next group of contributors to pass the torch onto, projects die.


  • So you want software developers to spend less time building the software so they can run a nonprofit too? Do you think all the conferences, sites, fundraising, marketing, extensive help docs, bug processing, and community engagement is all something that can just be done on the side?

    Just ask any software dev working st any of these foundations. They don’t want to do any of the business-side work. Or, if they do, they certainly don’t want to do it alone. If they were alone in it, they wouldn’t have time to write code.