Your battery drains more the more you activity use the device. Shocking…

If it is your phone just uninstall those apps, then you cannot use them. If the devices main point is those apps like gaming on the switch what do you expect? I think the only real problem here is the switch’s lack of customizability so you have no trade off between game quality and battery life like you can on something like the steam deck.

Except desktop environments - they are far from a simple loosely collection of simple stuff. They coordinate your whole desktop experience. Apps need to talk to them a lot and often in ways specific to a single DE. Theming applications is done differently for every toolkit there is, startup applications (before systemd) is configured differently, global shortcuts are configured differently by each one… If anything it is something you interact with far more than systemd and has far more inconsistencies between each one. Yet few people complain about this as much as they complain about systemd.

Systemd is a giant mess of weirdly interdependent things that used to be simple things.

They used to be simple things back when hardware and the way we use computers were much simpler. Nowadays hardware and computers are much more dynamic and hotplugable and handle a lot more state that needs to persist and be kept track of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo is a great talk on the subject and talks about why systemd does what it does.

What standards? The old init systems were a loose collection of shell scripts that were wildly different on every distro. Other tools like sudo also broke the established standards of the time, before it you had to login as root with the root password.

Even gnome and KDE have their own themeing standards as well as other ways of doing things. Even network manager is its own standard not following things that came before it. Then there are flatpack, snaps and app images. Not to mention deb vs rpm vs pacman vs nix package formats. Loads of things in Linux userland have broken or evolved the standards of oldern times.

Systemd does a lot of things that could probably be separate projects,

I dont get the hate for this - Linux is full of projects that do the same thing: coreutils, busybox, kde, gnome, different office suites, even the kernel itself. It is very common for different related projects to be maintained together under the same project/branding with various different levels of integration between them. But people really seem to only hate on systemd for this…

And undermine their own ai offering

They do mention it on that page:

However, if presented with a valid order from a Swiss court involving a case of criminal activity that is against Swiss law, Proton Mail can be compelled to share account metadata (but not message contents or attachments) with law enforcement.

The only ever claim to encrypt message contents and attachments. And explicitly call out account meta data here as something they can hand over if requested by law enforcement. They also mention they are not good vs targeted and governmental level attacks:

There are, however, some risks for users facing a strong adversary, such as a government focusing all its resources on a very specific target.

And explicitly mention they might be compelled to log and give up information like ip adresses:

if you are breaking Swiss law, a law-abiding company such as Proton Mail can be legally compelled to log your IP address.

Not technically. unetbootin and some similar tools like rufus take the USB, partition it, and copy the contents of the disk to it after manually setting up a bootloader on it. This is not required for most Linux ISOs though where you can just cp or dd the image directly to the USB as they are already setup with all that on the image. But other ISOs, like I believe Windows ones have a filesystem on them that is not vfat so cannot be directly copied. Although these days for windows you just need to format the USB as vfat and copy the contents of the windows ISO (aka the files inside it, not the iso filesystem) to the filesystem.

I tend to find unetbootin and rufus break more ISOs then they actually help with though. Personally I find ventoy is the better approach overall, just copy the ISO as a file to the USB filesystem (and you can copy multiple ones as well).

Ubuntu is a fork of unstable Debian packages. You don’t want unstable on your server!

Unstable does not mean crashes all the time. What makes them unstable on Debian is they can change and break API completely. But guess what, Ubuntu freezes the versions for their release and maintains their own security patches, completely mitigating that issue.

There are other reasons you might not want to use Ubuntu on a server but package version stability is not one of them.

How do we know these are the AI chatbots instructions and not just instructions it made up? They make things up all the time, why do we trust it in this instance?

How the hell is arch so large? My laptop is only 27GB and that includes all user data and several years of crap being installed as well as several docker images. A fresh install should rival that fedora install.

Oh, just invest in adobe and get it developed for Linux - easy, why didnt anyone think of this before. And better yet, if they do invest they could make it a PopOS exclusive!!?!?!! \s

It wont work because Adobe does not care and there is not enough market share in Linux for them to bother with it. No amount of money that PopOS has will be able to convince Adobe to develop it for Linux and there is no way in hell Adobe will give them access to their source to develop it for Linux. That whole argument is just a non-starter.

Additionally any application using a GUI toolkit (like kde, qt or gtk etc) only needs to to update to a version that has native Wayland support. Which means most applications already support it. At least if they don’t use any X11 APIs directly (which is not that common).

Applications needs some coordination between each other in order to act like you would expect - things like one window at a time having focus and thus getting all keyboard and mouse inputs. As well as things like positioning on the screen and which screen to render to, the clipboard, and various others things.

X is a server and set of protocols that applications can implement to allow all this behaviour. X11 is the 11th version of the server and protocols. But X was also first created in 1984, and X11 since around 1987. Small changes have been made to X11 over the years but the last was in 2012.

Which makes it a very old protocol - and one which is showing its age. Advances in hardware since then and the way we use devices have left a lot to be desired in the protocol and while it has adapted a bit to keep up with modern tech it has not done so in the best of ways. I also believe its codebase is quite complex and hard to work with so changes are hard to do.

Thus is has quite a lot of limitations that modern systems are rubbing up against - for instance it does not really support multi cursors or input that is not a mouse and keyboard. So things like touch screens or pen/tablets tend to emulate a mouse and thus affect the only pointer X has. It is also not great at touchpads and things like touch pad gestures - while they do work, they are often clunky or not as flexible as some applications need.

It is also very insecure and has no real security measures in place - any GUI application has far more access to the system and input then it really requires. For instance; any application can screen grab the screen at any point in time - not something you really want when you have a banking web page open.

Wayland is basically a new set of protocols that takes more modern hardware and security practices in mind. It does the same fundamental job as X11, but without the same limitations X11 has and to fix a lot of the security issues with X.

One big difference with X though is that Wayland is just a protocol, and not a protocol and server like X. Instead it shifts the responsibilities of the X server into the window manager/compositor (which used to manage window placement and window borders as well as global effects such as any animations or transparency). It also has better controls over things like screen grabs so not every application can just grab a screen shot at once or register global shortcut keys or various things like that. Which for a while was a problem as screen sharing applications or even screenshot tools did not work - but over time these limitations have been added back in more secure ways than how X11 did them.

Have you tried updating and rebooting your system? I have had this happen a few times and almost always that is what fixes it for me (more so the rebooting but it is generally good to have your system up to date). Other times it is typically something missing on your host system (like properly installed drivers), though if the game was running before then this is less likely to be the issue and a reboot is typically enough - so start with that.

From the article:

A quick Microsoft demo video shows the Copilot key in between the cluster of arrow keys and the right Alt button, a place where many keyboards usually put a menu button, a right Ctrl key, another Windows key, or something similar. The exact positioning, and the key being replaced, may vary depending on the size and layout of the keyboard.

Anything is possible with sockets… and that is a meaningless statement. It is like saying you can build anything with bricks. Technically true, but missing all the important details of how.

In an alternative universe we could have done so many things differently to solve the same problems. But we don’t live there and in our universe dbus was the attempt to solve that problem among others. And yes you can create a standardization for music players easily enough - but what about notifications, and everything else? DBus tries to be a generic interface anything can talk over at a logical level - rather that just being the basic way two process can physically send bytes between each other.

Sockets are just streams of bytes - no defined structure to them at all. Dbus is about defining a common interface that everything can talk. That means when writing a program you don’t need to learn how every program you want to talk to talks over its own socket - just can just use a dbus library and query what is available on the system.

At least that is the idea - IMO its implementation has a lot to be desired but a central event bus IMO is a good idea. Just needs to be easy to integrate with which I think is what dbus fails at.

A great example is music player software - rather than every music player software creating its own socket and each having its own API to basically all do the same operations. So anything that want to just play/pause some music would need to understand all the differences between all the various different music applications. Instead with a central event bus system each music app could integrate with that and each application that wants to talk to a music app would just need to talk to the event bus and not need to understand every single music app out there.

I shouldn’t expect remote accessing some random server will allow me to use Helix, right? Is there any other way to make this work? Or…, should I just learn both Vim and Helix’ Vim + Kakoune amalgamation?

That all depends on the server in question and if you can install things onto it or not. Some points to consider though:

• If the server is restrictive on what you can install then you likely are stuck with basic vim or worst only vi - and without all your configs it is a very different beast of an editor anyway and something you will need to get used to everytime you jump on the server.
• If you can install stuff to your home drive then it is quite easy to get helix running - it is a single binary with some language assets (requires one env var to point to them). So is trivial to get working from your home dir without a package manager.
• IMO you should not be editing things on a server often enough to worry too much about what editors it has on it. Ideally with things like ansible you should not need an editor on it at all.

Vim is literally ubiquitous and plugins that enable its features can be found on almost any ‘platform’. It’s unrealistic to expect Helix’ adoption to be at that rate (yet). However, would you happen to know if at least the likes of VS Code and/or Jetbrains’ IDEs support it? And if so, how good their support/implementation is?

Do you mean vi input mode in other editors? That is one downside - you wont find it anywhere yet. Though since learning it I have not needed to go back to other IDEs like VS Code or Jetbrains, WIth inbuilt LSP support its language integration is just as good as VS Codes as it is working off the same essential language servers. Though it does seem that at least vscode has a plugin for kakoune keybindings which are more similar to helixs.

Though what you will find is a lot of the keys are very similar between vi and helix, so apart from the big action > movement vs selection > action and a few other things they dont feel too dissimilar from each other (things like basic movement, ie w for word, e for end of word, or text objects are essentially the same).

deleted by creator

Interesting. Though I can definitely see where you’re coming from. Uhmm…, have you used any of the Neovim distributions to make maintenance easier?

I have, but dont like them. They all have weird install processes and need to manage their own set of configs on top of vim in your home dir. This makes them very hard to properly package or integrate with config management tools and require a different flow to keep them up to date from the rest of your system. They combine sometimes hundreds of plugins, of which only a few are designed to work together and while a lot don’t try to step on each others toes that many I often find issues in niche use cases. And when you do find an issue, or something you want to tweak you have 100s of plugin configurations that you need to learn about to figure out just what is doing what and which options you need to tweak.

It is all just far more hassle then I want out of my editor these days. Helix just works out the box and has basically everything I want from a editor nicely integrated into it.

As you’ve touched upon it; Helix’ keybindings and ‘sentence-structures’ are different to those found on Vi(m).

They are a little different and take a bit to get used to. But IMO I find them far nicer way to work. It is very nice being able to see what your action is going to effect before you do it - unlike in vim when you just hope you have hit the right movement keys. And it also pops up a small window for leader keys (like space) which show you what you can do with it making it far more discoverable then vim/neovim without needing to pour though hundreds of pages of manuals to even get a glimpse of what it can do or needing to go back to them to remember something that you dont use very often. It is not trying to be a 100% vim compatible layer, it is trying to give you the best experience it can out the box. And I think it does that quite well (at least once you get used to the new way of working - which does not take that long).

Furthermore, neither of the two have existed long enough to be able to profess any statement regarding their longevity. Like, there’s no guarantee that I can keep using either of the two 20 years into the future.

20 years is a long time. I can see it existing for the next 5 years at least, and looks to be on the trajectory to be a long lasting product. Though no one can say for sure. But, the more people using it the more likely it is to stick around for the long term. Just about everyone that I have seen use it over vim have highly praised it and it has quite a few contributors already (700+ on github), which is very impressive compared to vim (about 300), and neovim (more then 1100).

And keep in mind that vim has been around so long thanks to a single maintainer, Bram Moolenaar, who passed away this year. Which is not a great sign for vims future for the next 20 years.

I appreciate the input, but I simply don’t want to invest in a program whose future is very unclear to me at this point in time.

The investment in helix is far less then that you need to put into vim/neovim due to all the configuration you need for them. Well worth it for how active it currently is and how many people are putting effort into it.