Linux. Runit. SwayWM. Colemak-CAWS. Espresso. Cycling. The list goes on; stop using so many god-damn periods!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 19th, 2024

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  • For a long time I used a super customized zsh setup. It was, unfortunately, crazy slow and regularly broke on updates. It had precisely all the features and behavior I wanted though. Like you say, zsh is very customizable.

    Then I switched to tiling window managers and with that to the alacritty terminal. This made me value start up times and performance, as I was constantly opening and closing terminals. So I spent a ridiculous amount of time optimizing my zsh config to be as fast as possible. This is also what I used for a long time before correcting my ways.

    When that device, my work laptop, failed, I had to set up my desktop for work. This involved setting up zsh, which I quickly realized was a lot of work. So, on a whim, I installed fish.

    Oh my god. Not only did fish have nearly all the features I wanted out of the box, but it was easy to add plugins (customizations) in a performant way. Fish even had default behavior I didn’t know I needed. And most importantly: it was crazy fast!

    Since then I have never left fish. It is so much better than anything I had imagined. At this point I use way more default features as well, so I pretty much only add the tide prompt and zoxide. I also have a functions and abbreviations folder which is essentially my zsh alias collection.

    The crazy part is really how much faster it is though. I really, really love it. And now they’re rewriting it in Rust as well!


  • Edit: my bad, seems like I misunderstood. PopOS used/is still using GNOME and has a Auto-Tiling plugin that behaves like i3wm (?). I guess this is what OP is talking about!

    Not entirely sure what you mean. PopOS, developed by System76, uses the Cosmic DE, which is itself also developed by System76.

    River is a dynamic tiling WM which is known for it’s customizability among Wayland WMs, as it doesn’t distinguish itself with it’s “layout generator” (though it does come with a very basic one), but instead let’s the user write their own or use an existing, third-party one. This way you can achieve essentially any dynamic tiling behavior with River.

    How does PopOS use a system like that? Or do you mean that Cosmic is DWM-style, i.e., dynamic and with tags?

    I do agree that River is wonderful though!


  • On that note also:

    • Alacritty: a minimalist Wayland GPU-accelerated terminal. Claims to be the fast currently available terminal. Also the coolest name ever. This is what I personally use, in combination with tmux.
    • Kitty: a more feature rich alternative, also Wayland, GPU-accelerated, and on par with alacritty for speed. Actually starts up a little faster but uses up more resources and sacrifices in other performance metrics (in my experience).
    • Foot: another minimalist Wayland alternative, but this time CPU driven. Despite this, the performance is still on par with the others. I think this is especially good for laptops and such that run on integrated graphics.

  • What do you mean? The article just points out that the show’s demographic may somewhat overlap with, for example, Rogan’s demographic:

    The show’s core demographic—predominantly men aged 18 to 49—overlaps meaningfully with the audiences of figures like Joe Rogan and, to a lesser extent, Andrew Tate.

    They are not saying that Rogan listeners also watch South Park, or that South Park is republican. The article is just pointing out that this demographic of men aged between 18 and 49 overlaps with “Joe Rogan[’s] and, to a lesser extent, Andrew Tate[’s demographic].”

    They even frame this as a potential advantage, saying that

    South Park holds a rare cultural position in that it can potentially speak directly to groups adjacent to the MAGA movement without preaching, pandering, or being immediately dismissed [emphasis added].

    I don’t know about you, but it didn’t feel like it was calling South Park fans like us Joe Rogan listeners. It felt more like the article was pointing out that some, maybe even a majority, of fans could also be Rogan fans, which would make the audiences that South Park reaches with this anti-Trump episode especially influential.

    Idk; I certainly didn’t feel offended or anything like that, but I might be misunderstanding you here.





  • I’ve actually done a little to combat this, in my personal life (apart from ordinary privacy stuff like librewolf und Linux). I got so sick of the majority of my friends expecting me to reply to every text message within 30 minutes, and then getting extremely offended when I didn’t (simply because I don’t look at my phone that often), that I turned off read-receipts on all my messaging apps, and set my notifications to only arrive in groups at specific times of day.

    Then I made a habit of not answering unimportant messages for a few days, until I got the reputation that I pretty much don’t use my phone (I also don’t use conventional social media, and none of my friends even know I’m in lemmy). This worked like a charm! My social life much, much less stressful.

    I’ve broken the absurd contract that so many people seem to think they have a right to. My time is now my own. I can highly recommend this system! Of course, I can’t do it for work-related stuff, but it still really has reduced my stress by a lot.


  • The Serval WS is also more than twice the price of my Pangolin… and I had a one year warranty, so I’m not sure what you mean with lifetime support. As for the specs (i.e. the screen etc.), yeah, they are great. But the case is very poorly designed on my pang12, and gets bent out of shape, which can cause mechanical failure in the hinge, quite frequently, despite the aluminum chassis. My complaint is just that it is far from rugged, which is problematic for me, as I travel a lot with it. But your mileage may vary.

    PS: one more thing that really bothers me is the known problem with the touchepad on the pang12, which regularly fails. Mine also came with a faulty motherboard, which suggest bad quality control. Over all, these issues have caused me to lose faith in System76 hardware.



  • I have a Pangolin 12. While it has great specs and software support, the build quality is horrible, and over the course of two years now, I have had to screw it open and bend the laptop case in position more often then I’m comfortable with. It is the far, far opposite of rugged, which is the main reason I want to replace it. Twice now, it has just randomly decided to not boot for one or two weeks…


  • MPD works pretty well for the music thing, and, I don’t know if this is would be an option for you, but I programmed my own smart-paylist-generator in rust as a hobby project to get control of my 500Gb (around 10,000 100% legally acquired tracks cough, cough) library. The additional control over the algo meant I got something that works waaaay better than pretty much anything else I’ve tried (including Spotify suggestions, etc. — the only thing I still use is Bandcamp for new artist suggestions); if you have the time, I highly recommend a homemade solution like that. It is a lot of work though.




  • If it’s a pure DAC, it’s default output will likely be between 1 to 2 Volts RMS. If your listening on iems or ~30 Ohm headphones that is gonna be crazy loud. It seems like you are using digital audio control to manage this (i.e., the audio level in your DE), which is possible, but certainly not ideal. It also is kinda bad for the audio quality, as you are digitally remixing it, and if you ever switch to high impedance headphones (or already have), the output current will be sub-ideal.

    If I’m assessing your situation correctly, then this is quite easy to solve though. You just need a preamp! This will give a nice knob to control audio with much more precision and finesse. I know that both JDS Labs and Schiit Audio offer headphone amps with built in preamps in the USA. I can highly recommend the JDS Labs Atom Amp 2. In Europe your a little more limited, but FiiO has some nice options I think.

    Of course none of this is necessary if you don’t want audiophile levels of quality, but it would boost the audio quality (presuming your DAC doesn’t have a proper preamp), and would certainly give you a tactile, wonderful knob.

    I can certainly attest that my HD600s sound quite a bit better out of a JDS Labs Atom Amp 2 than out of just my DAC or—god forbid—my Mobo audio… They sound even better out of my vintage 100W Onkyo amp, of course, but really not by much. I am really impressed by the Atom Amp. I initially just bought it for travelling, but it has now basically become my main amp lol.

    Okay, ramble over.


  • I had a 3060 Ti.

    I couldn’t game on Wayland for about 20% of my games (very frustrating), couldn’t use specific Window Managers like Sway, experience constant screen tearing on X11 (which I often had to use, because the game would crash on Wayland) when gaming, and had a significant performance hit in some games.

    CS:GO ran like a dream and actually better than on Windows, but with the release of CS2 my performance on Linux was about 20% worse than on Windows. My 1% lows were also crazy on Linux (median=190fps, %1=80fps). This meant, among others things, that I just couldn’t play death match anymore — my FPS would make it unplayable. This was largely an optimization issue and I think some of the 2025 Nvidia driver updates of improved the situation a little for CS2 specifically. The screen tearing on X and the buggyness on Wayland were enough for me to switch though, even if eventual improvements might come.

    I am now extremely happy with my 7900 XT, which I got for less than any available 9070 XT (in my region) and which amusingly actually has better performance in CS2 then then the 9070 XT on Linux. It’s massively overkill though, I could have just as well gotten a 7800 XT or 9070 (non-XT).

    I am still very, very pleased. Hopefully this will last me a few years, unlike the gosh darn 3060 Ti.

    Alright, I’m done with my huge block of text. Hopefully this was helpful.