• 1 Post
  • 13 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: November 3rd, 2021

help-circle
  • Tiling widow managers are popular, but they’re definitely a taste.

    Oh, I refer to that in your post. To me all WMs/compositors are a matter of taste, including stacking ones (on wayland from the stacking ones I only like labwc though it’s xml config is not what I would prefer). And you already clarified, but it gave me the impression that it was implicit that tiling was a matter of taste, when those WMs/compositors also offer tabbed/stacked mode, which to me it’s not tiling at all, and offers something really appealing not so easily to achieve on any stacking WM/compositor.

    Regarding config, well yes, if one is looking for no config at all, and still get the WM/compositor to be useful and also to one’s liking, then that’s hard to find. But the config files once achieving what one likes and is productive with, then one barely looks at it again, and they are usually portable (usually not only across PCs, also across distros).

    But I got your point, sort of “plug and play” as they said before, just install it and without any config be productive with it… I can’t imagine that. I heard river is pretty close to dwm, but I can’t tell much about it. The river idea of dynamic tiling, which seems to be the default doesn’t really appeal to me, so I would need to do tabbed mode any ways, which doesn’t seem to be the default, so at least for me it wouldn’t be that configless… But maybe it would be to dynamic tiling people.





  • If you’re not into tiling, but still want several of the advantages of sway, it offers a couple of additional modes, stacked and tabbed. I really loved tabbed setting some things to be floating. It’s like it sounds, it offers a horizontal tab with all windows within per workspace, maximized below the tabs… Stacked is similar but it stacks the tabs vertically. If you’d tell me before a tiling compositor has such functionality I wouldn’t have believed it. I like it better than stacking compositors, :)


  • Both Tubular and Libretube support SponsorBlock, in that regard both are cool. I would use Libretube first, and if no piped site works then use Tubular, but Libretube itself allow for using local connection or it could be set to only work that way as NewPipe/Tubular do, so perhaps there wouldn’t be a need for two apps.

    The advantage to start with Libretube is a bit extra privacy by using a 3rd party piped site, so what youtube sees are requests from that site. But piped sites are more identifiable and therefore vulnerable to be rate limited or totally blocked. Though lately youtube has managed to block everything pretty close in time, Freetube, Pipeline, HarmonyMusic (a bit more resilient but also gets blocked), NewTube, Tubular, LibreTube, whatever.

    Google is shortening the periods on which any of these frontends can be used to access youtube. Sadly, as Google offers some profit depending on the visits (more adds) then people seems not to be interested on leaving youtube, :(

    uSo it doesn’t seem to be a frontend which is less prompt to functionality disruptions. Some times it takes less time and some times it takes long, but usually most if not all frontends get affected. In that regard I don’t see much difference, so that’s why I recommended Libretube first and then Tubular as an alternative. Given there’s not frontend supported by Google, in the end it’s almost a matter of taste, with any Piped solution offering a bit extra privacy if used with 3rd party piped sites, and if that site is blocked or rate limited, another one can be chosen, or even it can try on the run to connect locally, or you can actually stop using a 3rd party site at all and only connect locally. BTW, freetube can be set to use an invidio site as well, but there are way less invidio sites up and running that there are piped sites. One can self host, but then the requests to youtube will be yours any ways, though you get local subscription and nice stuff on all frontends.

    I like to have an alternative though in case at least for a little while one mechanism works but the other doesn’t.

    BTW, if interested on music, HarmonyMusic is a bit different frontend that can run on several platforms, gnu+linux, android and so on, and sometimes it keeps working while the other frontends don’t.


  • I guess there was an attempt to move away from the email flow, to allow more people to contribute (I read that was part of the motivation), perhaps that made sourcehut (although it’s in their plan, it hadn’t become their highest priority) not an option, however both can be self hosted (that’s what I would have expected from an organization as the Guix one, so that there’s no dependency on a cloud service, as good as it might be), and both have really good TOS and are non profit. But cloud services are still something its users/clients do not really own. Perhaps as I understood, savannah will still be used as a mirror, but not just temporally, rather for good, so that if something happens on the cloud, there’s plan B available… That’s why for such big and important project I would have preferred a self hosted service. But oh well, I’m not part of the decision, and not an user yet, hopefully to become one later on when getting some minimal understanding of both guile and guix configuration (still guile but I believe simpler), because no matter the distro I always have to write and maintain a few packages myself. Hopefully at some point doesn’t become never having the time to do so, hehe.

    So all in all yes, the two best cloud options by far, but I’m surprised a Guix instance was not chosen, not sure if even considered.



  • The battle is still there, and the GrapheneOS guy always bark at microG, like he really hates the whole concept of microG. What I have gotten from the discussion is that GrapheneOS is more secure, but although it sandboxes GPS denying some permissions, and some of those might be needed to be given away for some services any ways, it doesn’t try to fake anything, which microG does. In that sense my preference has been microG, and I don’t regret it.

    That said, what you mentioned is true, both still access google app store, and still have to give some minimal information to google.

    There’s a 3rd option the OP didn’t mentioned. If they are mainly interested in app store, and not the google services in general, there are a couple of somehow recognized 3rd party app store mirrors, which keep the same original signatures of the packages hosted by google app store, and they offer packages from other sources not provided by the google app store, in case interested on those packages: apkmirror and apkpure. From the two apkpure still allows to install and upgrade packages through FLOSS 3rd party apps like apkupdater, so that might be an option. For some months apkpure packages weren’t able to be installed through apkupdater, but it seems that got corrected already.

    But in general, the OP would benefit from always looking for FLOSS packages on the F-Droid repo, then other non official F-Droid repos which can be used through the F-Droid app, then see if they can be installed from their web site and updated without intevention of any installer, and then if there’s no option but using proprietary software maybe looking for them on the apkpure/apkmirror sites or on apkpure through apkupdater or similar, and then aurora store, or if using grapheneOS finally google play if anything else fails, :)

    I do understand the need for proprietary software, like bank OTP apps. It’s sad banks, governments, medical services and so on never look for FLOSS software, they always require users to get proprietary software. I don’t live in the EU, but I hope current hate/banning tendency ends up doing user a favor by starting to require banks, and the like to start using FLOSS apks, though doesn’t really helps me, I hope in the end it helps people in the EU.


  • I’m curious about which programs if you can share. I write few bash scripts which used to call sudo, and I replace sudo with doas in those. And in case of muscular memory I also added a bash alias so that if by mistake calling sudo in reality I’d be calling doas. So far no issues. O course I don’t use fancy args, and what I really needed from sudo I used to include it in /etc/sudoers and now on /etc/doas.conf, and I believe I couldn’t include a couple of options but they were not critical since I’ve lived without them so far. And it’s weird to find actual software that requires sudo, perhaps proprietary software. One can actually live without sudo and without doas, as long as there’s still su.

    Not judging, rather curious, actually I’ve met several guys who write scripts which would benefit from using sudo/doas, but they claim better call the scripts through sudo/doas rather than adding them as dependencies.