I worked at a place once that had a system that was all bash that would take hours to run. I rewrote it in Ruby and got the run down to about 10 minutes.

This was 2000; I don’t recall anymore how much of that was the runtime and got much was just refactoring and hindsight - god knows how old that jumble of bash scripts were. A lot must have been the interpreter; even just looping is far slower in bash than probably anything else.

Not a comment on your script; just remembering that win.

If you’ve never heard of ConnMan, yeah, I only know it from Enlightenment, too.

I used it for a while trying to wean myself off NetworkManager, which has a lot of optional dependencies that distributions tend to link in. So, you don’t want Gnome on your system, but you want NM? Too bad, you got Gnome.

Anyway, connman is pretty fussy and not very intuitive. I think it’s better for systems that are always on the same network; it’s a pain to travel and connect to open networks with.

Does that include network latency? Is it faster with install media?

Not Matrix itself, but the new call mechanism.

They’ve chosen Matrix; they’ve just chosen something else for the video calling. Maybe because the anonymous video call link feature is too recent an addition, and is unproven.

That’s one I don’t remember, but I probably wouldn’t have: the config file is in Lisp. Not only is Lisp something I never use anymore, which gives it a high cognitive load, but I don’t particularly care for Lisp-like syntax.

I’m certain there are several less common WMs that I haven’t tried. It’d probably be almost impossible to try every WM every written for X; it seems to be a common hobby project for folks interested in the X protocol.

I did say “almost every”, but perhaps even that was exaggeration. I do think I’ve tried the majority, though.

My differentiator for hlwm, the killer feature, shared by only two other projects that I’m aware of, is that hlwm has no configuration file. All configuration is performed through client commands. Every command interaction that can be performed by a user input - and much that can’t - can also be performed on the CLI. All (?) windowing events can also be monitored on the command line, and therefore scripted. The other two WMs that share at least some of these features are bspwm and river.

I didn’t know this.

Niri is interesting. It has a configuration file, and the config file is in yet another fairly complex config language: not toml, not yaml, not ini, not json. That’s something I’m avoiding.

It’s a novel and interesting approach.

Ah. Also, such a large organization probably doesn’t want to bet the farm on a relatively new and unproven feature.

I’m guessing they have some minimum standards for age and stability.

It’s unique only in the combination of features.

• No configuration file, at all. When hlwm starts, it runs ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/herbstluftwm/autostart, which can be anything but it’s usually a shell script making a lot of calls to herstclient which do all of the configuration. So there’s no configuration syntax, and all WM configuration and control can be done exactly the same on the command line. No exceptions. bspwm does the same; I think niri and river on Wayland do this, too
• It’s tiled and keyboard controllable is, again, a first-class citizen.
• It has a sane tree model, with no weird exceptions. This is one area bspwm fails, although I grant this is subjective.
• It’s stable.
• It’s fast and small. You never see it in top, sorting either by CPU or memory.
• It supports

It’s that hlwm has them all. Very subjectively, I find the client syntax to be intuitive, rich, and full featured. It has good and consistent monitor detection. It has a variety of common built-in layout, but custom layouts are easily scripted with bash (or anything that can call the client). It has an event listening model, for writing layouts, or anything else you might want to do - again, the interface to this is a command line client. I find not having bespoke languages, non-Turing-complete configs, or being forced into a specific language is increasingly important to me for things I rarely, but deeply when I do - change.

It does build-in hotkey configuration (via the command line), unlike bspwm which farms this out to something like sxhkd. There’s nothing forcing you to use the built-in hotkey management, and in fact when I first switched I from bspwm I used sxhkd. Doing it within hlwm did have the advantage of eliminating yet another configuration file (for sxhkd), and made hotkey configuration just another purely command-line operation. No multistep edit & reloading. When you have CLI-first, you can make changes without worrying that you’ll screw something up that prevents a clean reboot. You make changes, test then, and then if you like it you make a permanent change to autostart (or some subscript).

This is orthogonal to how I manage firewalls: I always make manual changes with nft on the cli and IFF everything works after extensive testing, then I persist the changes to the /etc/nftables.conf.

There are many tiling WMs, but far fewer that make command line C&C fully competent in all ways. It narrows down field considerably.

bspwm is a close second, but I have trouble with the bspwm tree model, and especially how monitors and tags are represented. There are also some extremely caustic prominent members of the bspwm community. But, really, it’s the model weirdness that had me switch.

River seems to be the closest in model, C&C, and capabilities to hlwm, and is probably where I’ll end up. I need to confirm that all of the DPI issues I last had with Wayland a few months ago are fixed, and that everything I need runs, and that I’m not adding a ton of overhead to run common things (extra layers, emulators, whatever). The gap between “can” and “does well”; between “possible” and “efficient” has IME been a Wayland weakness.

TL;DR: for features and idiom, on X bspwm has fair overlap with hlwm. For Wayland, River seems to be a good alternative.

Edit: Niri commentary removed; it does have configuration files, and they’re in kdl.

An external shareholder wouldn’t need to create a matrix account just to talk to you.

That’s a really good point. I have forgotten whether there are anonymous accounts in Matrix for rooms, but even if so it wouldn’t be the same as scheduling a meeting and sending a specific meeting link a-la Zoom.

Yeah, this is the reason.

It’s an interesting system; it does clutter your workspace with a lot of files, especially if you have a lot of rules. I use it in one project and came away with mixed feelings.

Lots of good, some noise.

No, I didn’t. I don’t use Pis, I have ODroids. Heck, they may sell batteries for ODroids, too.

For me, it wouldn’t have made much difference because I have UPSes around the house serving things like routers, modems, and switches. And I do care about size and energy use. I’m only saying there are advantages to using laptops.

You can get little integrated LCD cases for Pis too, can’t you? And maybe even a little fold-out keyboard. Congratulations! You’ve re-invented the laptop!

Thanks! That’s all great information.

I’d bet there are a bunch of college students involved in the implementation, too. I don’t see ongoing maintenance taking much more manpower than MS; we certainly had dedicated teams for it at my last company, so maybe that will be a budgetary wash, and what they save will be the probably significant licensing.

Thanks. I wonder why both jitsi and Matrix. Someone in the thread said it was too bad Matrix’s video conferencing wasn’t good enough that they had to add an extra software component, but I wonder what, exactly, the evaluation found wrong with it.

I have a lot of issues with Matrix, but the video conferencing didn’t seem worse than the horrible key management.

Every day?

• Herbstluftwm, the window manager. I used i3 for a decade, then bspwm for a few months, then landed on hlwm which I’ve been happily using for over a year. I don’t foresee changing until I’m forced to switch to Wayland. I’ve used almost every window manager and DE available for Linux and Solaris. Hlwm has things I can no longer live without:
  • It’s entirely configuration-file-less, which means the CLI client is the first class citizen for C&C.
  • It’s tiled and keyboard controllable is, again, a first-class citizen
  • It has a sane tree model, with no weird exceptions
  • It’s stable
  • It’s fast and small. You never see it in top, sorting either by CPU or memory
• Zsh, the shell, in which I run 90% of my applications (the regular exceptions being the Luakit browser and Factorio, the game. everything else is CLI or a TUI). Zsh is bash backwards compatible, and it has a bunch of extra convenience syntax that makes scripting more powerful, pushing out the border where switching to a real programming language is necessary. I have lived in sh, bash, and csh over my life, and I’ve tried fish and a number of others; the rich data model for process communication is compelling, but I’ve always discovered it lacking, so on zsh I remain.
• Tmux, the terminal multiplexer, which is (almost) invariably the first child of every terminal (rio -e 'tmux attach -t#'). Because terminals crash, because it survives session restarts, because it lets me log in remotely and continue what I started in my desktop, and because it works over ssh and having a consistent multiplexer environment across machines is nice. I used sceen for years before discovering tmux, and have tried almost every other terminal multiplexer; and none add any significant value for me over tmux.
• Helix, the editor in which I spend most of my time. Because I started with emacs and used it for years before switching to vim. Then I used vim for decades before switching to Kakoune. Then I used Kakoune for about 2 years before switching to helix. Kakoune was too much like Emacs for my taste: heavy on chording, light on modality. Helix is much more like vim: lighter on chording, more mode-driven. Chording aggravates my carpel tunnel, and I’m more comfortable in modal editors. I switched from vim because the plugins necessary to be a competent development environment got insane, and my vim was starting to take as long to start up as emacs, which was unacceptable. Also, LSP integration was super flaky and broke every six months; it’s what initially drove me to Kakoune.

I’m currently using Rio as my terminal. It has bugs, but it’s actively developed and regularly releases will fix one more thing. It has both ligature and sixel support, and it’s wildly fast and far, far less memory intensive than either kitty or ghostty, which are both pretty fat. I am not including it in “the list” because some remaining bugs are pretty big, like randomly crashing when it gets resized or sees some sequence of asci escape codes. It’s not much of an issue because I run everything in tmux, and it crashes less with every release, but I hesitate to recommend it until it’s more stable.

This is, in my mind, one of the benefits of laptops over micro computers: integrated UPS. Even an old, degraded battery will probably get you a couple of hours with the screen off.

IME, power consumption is going to be worse overall, for any laptop likely to be in the recycle bin, it’s probably double the consumption of an ARM SBC. The integrated UPS and usually decent power conditioning of the power supply saves you more money with a laptop. Plus, keyboard and screen for emergencies - I just generally expect that, over there life of a micro I’m going to have to drag out and plug in a spare keyboard, mouse, and monitor because something in a device, or an upgrade, or BIOS flash, is preventing a boot.

There are a lot of good reasons to use laptops instead of SBCs, if you don’t mind the extra power draw and (as she says) don’t have size requirements.

This article is terrible.

In less than three months’ time, almost no civil servant, police officer or judge in Schleswig-Holstein will be using any of Microsoft’s ubiquitous programs at work.

Instead, the northern state will turn to [an unnamed, gaping information hole] open-source software to “take back control” over data storage and ensure “digital sovereignty”, its digitalisation minister, Dirk Schroedter, told AFP.

“We’re done with Teams!” he said, referring to Microsoft’s messaging and collaboration tool and speaking on a video call – via an [unnamed, gaping information hole] open-source German program, of course.

What will they use instead? Who the fuck knows! The article omits this crucial piece of information.

And don’t say it’s TBD; they’re not going to say they’re “done with Teams” without knowing what they’re switching to. Or, even if they haven’t put the final nail in the decision, they have a short list.

I think there are several servers that don’t try to match any particular dominant player.

It’s really down to the follow-person or follow-community model. AP supports both, but I’ve seen few servers or clients that support both. Which should be possible; it’s something that frequently annoys me about every Lemmy client I’ve tried: sometimes, there are people I’d like to follow, and get everything they post, regardless of community, in my feed.

I have a GoToSocial server, which is pure AP, not Mastodon. Misskey is still a microblogging platform, right? One of the people I interacted with a lot when I was trying it ran a Misskey server, and she used it like a microblogging tool.

It’s the modality of it. There’s a category of servers that follow the Twitter model: people follow people, and posts are usually short and frequent throughout the day. Then there’s the Reddit model: people join communities, and tend to do more periodic binge browsing.

Misskey - as I understand it - is a follow-the-person, shorter post model; the Twitter model. Lemmy models after Reddit.

I prefer the community model.

I started AP with Mastodon (well, GoToSocial). Microblogging is not my thing. I’m more comfortable in long-form, conversation forum than ADHD spasm posting.