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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 5th, 2023

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  • I’ve been in love with the concept of ansible since I discovered it almost a decade ago, but I still hate how verbose it is, and how cumbersome the yaml based DSL is. You can have a role that basically does the job of 3 lines of bash and it’ll need 3 yaml files in 4 directories.

    About 3 years ago I wrote a big ansible playbook that would fully configure my home server, desktop and laptop from a minimal arch install. Then I used said playbook for my laptop and server.

    I just got a new laptop and went to look at the playbook but realised it probably needs to be updated in a few places. I got feelings of dread thinking about reading all that yaml and updating it.

    So instead I’m just gonna rewrite everything in simple python with a few helper functions. The few roles I rewrote are already so much cleaner and shorter. Should be way faster and more user friendly and maintainable.

    I’ll keep ansible for actual deployments.








  • I use gnome for the most part. I have been checking out kde recently to see how the newer versions stack up (gave up on it during the 4.0 days). As you mention kde supports dpms changes on wayland because they have their own protocol extension for that.

    That’s actually my biggest gripe with wayland - the huge amount of fragmentation it has caused. I’m pretty confident that almost all the missing features I talked about are possible on one or two of the compositors, but not all of them. And definitely not on the one I use. I’m sure once some pragmatism takes hold that all the issues will be ironed out, but my plan for now is to stick to X11 until that happens.





  • To be fair though, they just need to make everything USB-C anyhow.

    Careful what you wish for. Putting advanced electronics into very simple devices will just make them fail a lot faster.
    Some old device just needed 12V over a barrel jack to run some motor or light and charge the battery and it lasted a decade - only failed because the battery got old. New one now needs a state of the art power delivery chip to negotiate the right voltage and current, and all over a very fine pitch connector that will fail if you look at it wrong. Not looking good on the durability front at all.






  • I remember having this realisation about Mir, but only after we collectively ran it off the cliff wall. The main reason everyone piled on Mir was that it was thought that Canonical would be priming Linux desktop for fragmentation with two competing standards.

    But in fact, Mir was providing a solution to the fragmentation Wayland was bringing. Now we have 3, 4, 5 Mir-s, all with slight incompatibilities. Want a feature? Better hope all of them decide to implement the extension after someone proposes it. We know how well that worked in the past.

    This is also ironic because the detractors of Xorg constantly talked about the issues with Xorg extensions and how many of them there were. But I never really had to look up which extensions Xorg supported, while I have had to do that with Wayland compositors.


  • I remember some 10-15 years ago when I’d look at the y windows website every couple of months hoping for some news of progress, simply because I was sick of x11 being so crappy. I hated it, it was so fiddly, it didn’t work right, I just wanted something that worked.
    So you can imagine how happy I was when Wayland started taking off. Here was the promise of something better, something that just worked, it sounded amazing. And yet, today I’m still running xorg and I will be for the foreseeable future.

    The reason is simply that in the time passed xorg just became usable, I don’t have to think about it, it works reliability, it has all the features I need and I hardly ever have to touch it. Meanwhile, I log into my Wayland session and instantly 3 or 4 of the applications I use daily either don’t work or act weird. I go and try and fix the issues and I’m told to just accept it, or that I actually don’t exist because Wayland works perfectly for everyone. And I’m not even using an Nvidia card, just plain Radeon.

    So I quit and go back to what works. Maybe in a couple of years, until then: no thanks.