SleveMcDichael

u/SleveMcDichael@programming.dev
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I used KDE for my forays into Wayland.

Bear in mind that each desktop environment has its own implementation of Wayland, meaning each can offer vastly different user experiences

Funny you mention that, as that's (at least closely related to) one of the things I was alluding to when I mentioned design deficiencies in Wayland. The way I understand it is each individual Wayland compositor is free to create their own protocol for stuff like screenshots, and then the Wayland team will take the parts of those protocols and then combine them into the Wayland protocol for e.g. screenshots, which compositors then go back and replace their protocol with that one. Which sounds great on paper, but it leads to a problem I'll call Ecosystem Lock-in, I don't quite like that term, I don't think its fully accurate, but it's all I can think of for now. What happens is in order for a screenshot program to work on a given compositor they have to interface with that compositor's screenshot protocol, and it's a lot of work to support every compositor under the sun, so most devs just won't. (Which is fine, great even, I think devs these days try to support too much stuff). But say you don't like Spectacle (Spektacle? I don't remember), your options are limited to whatever supports KDE's screenshot protocol.

Or say you're just moving from an X11 based DE and giving Wayland a try. In the process of moving over you discover your nifty little scrot based screenshot script no longer works. After some research you discover that scrot is X11 only, and the Wayland equivalent is grim, so you get your scripts converted over but they still don't work. More research later you learn that grim doesn't support KDE's screenshot protocol, and Wayland compositors basically get to do whatever they want in terms of protocol design/implementation. This is what happened to me, and caused me to give up on Wayland.

Your use of Luddite as a pejorative outs you as willfully ignorant of both the matter at hand and the history of the Luddite movement. Your alignment with the corporate narrative here makes you sound like far more of a republican than any "AI" critic I've ever seen. Especially that "foreign operative" call out, that's peak republican right there.

Honestly, same. I initially dismissed Zig due to their insistence on making unused variables an error even in debug builds but if they keep this up I may have to just Get Over It.

on IBM 1979 variant · c/programmer_humor · 3 pts · 148d

Not necessarily, this only implies that computers are a part of a set of things that can be neither spiteful nor horny, and things that can be neither spiteful nor horny must never make art, not that all things that can be neither spiteful nor horny are computers.

I'm not too sure, I didn't look terribly deeply on that front since that's not something my group uses often, and its difficult to test on my own. That said, I believe Matrix does have some level of voice chat support, though AFAIK its more similar to Skype's calls than Discord's drop-in/drop-out voice channels. No idea about XMPP though.

From my digging on alternatives the main contenders are (in no particular order)

  • Stoat
    • Essentially 1:1 on discords format
    • UK based, so its future there is uncertain
    • Infrastructure is lacking, was crippled by the initial influx after discord's announcement.
    • Missing some minor UI and UX features, feels unpolished.
  • Spacebar
    • Reverse engineered discord
    • Greatest potential, IMO, but as of a few days ago all it has is potential.
    • lacks significant client development, relying on an external client named Fermi, which feels quite amateurish.
  • XMPP
    • Highly mature, looks very promising, but lacks any kind of guild/nested channel grouping support which makes it unsuitable for my group, so I didn't look too deep at it.
  • Matrix
    • IMO the most likely discord successor.
    • Minor functional hiccups, that vary from client to client
    • Of the clients I tested, Cinny is the most discord like, but I hear commet is closer.
    • Nested spaces provides the minimum format equivalence.
  • Fluxer
    • Slightly sus vibes
    • Lacks self hosting instructions
    • Media is non-permanent, which is I guess fair to keep infra costs down, but its unsuitable for my groups media usage habits.
    • Looks promising, but I've not actually tried it given the lack of self hosting instructions.

One thing that's wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I'd like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links, server side channel ordering, and space membership over channel membership. But that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

EDIT: Forgot Fluxer. Added.

on Webp · c/programmer_humor · 4 pts · 317d

Unfortunately most people don't really have a choice in the matter. It's sites like twitter that crunch images to hell and back on upload that choose for us.

on *Permanently Deleted* · c/games · 19 pts · 1y

They may not be de jure be public utilities but they are de facto public utilities. It is essentially impossible to live in society without them, and outside their collusionist cabal there are no real alternatives.

on *Permanently Deleted* · c/games · 18 pts · 1y

Agree it disagree with them, but don’t the payment processors get a say in what they do or do not want to process?

Absolutely not. Power companies don't get a say in what the power they supply their users with is used for, same for water companies and even ISPs. If they really, really want to enforce rules on what they will and will not process payments for, they can accept legal responsibility when they process a payment on a gun someone uses to shoot up a school or what have you. But they cant have it both ways.

IMO Arch's defaults (especially w.r.t. audio and fonts) are a little nicer than Gentoo's, but that's a pretty minor inconvenience all things considered.

There are valid criticism to be made about cosmic desktop, like

*Lists two positives*

If that's the best example of criticism to be had about COSMIC, then it's practically flawless. Except of course, though, it isn't. Aside from the general lack of polish, I'd argue that there's not enough customization. E.g. things that should really be a slider or spin control (or better yet multiple sliders/spin controls) like corner radii are multiple choice button things (not to mention that the 'square' style is anything but.) Some of the sliders that do exist (particularly the size ones) have very few set points that make them essentially disguised drop downs. I could probably find dozens more things to criticize if I cared to sit down and nitpick everything.