SpaceCadet

I mean, that’s basically how I find the root cause of problems that occur in one environment but not the other.

Most recently was when a plasma desktop of any newly created user wouldn’t shut down properly, at logout it would hang for about a minute with an error in the logs stating that plasma-plasmashell.service was not responding to a sigterm, and was then ultimately force killed by systemd. On my main desktop, I didn’t have this issue.

By meticulously diffing plasma related config files, I found that the culprit was in ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc. Disabling a few system tray applets that I didn’t need (and that I indeed had already disabled on my main desktop) fixed the issue.

It’s not an ecosystem of one, though one is very dominant.

You can compare it to Linux. It’s not the only Unix-like kernel, but it’s similarly dominant. If you want to create a new distribution, it doesn’t make any sense to spend a decade trying to write your own kernel rather than just using the Linux kernel (insert GNU Hurd jokes here).

Is that an unhealthy ecosystem then? I don’t think it is.

What makes the chromium situation unhealthy is Google’s ownership and control, not that it’s the preferred engine for other browsers. I mean, even a company as large as Microsoft gave up trying to create their own engine.

Via is a very common tool to setup mechanical keyboards, customize the layout, the layers, the backlight,…

See: https://usevia.app/

Doesn’t work in Firefox because it simply does not support webhid.

Tip: if you install Firefox from scratch frequently, you should build a custom user.js where you disable all the stuff you don’t like, and then just drop the file in the profile directory with a script, instead of manually going through all the settings pages each time.

I mean, chromium iself isn’t a terrible browser engine. Building your own engine from scratch is Extremely Hard™ and it’s entirely possible to build a decent browser on top of it, so I can understand why most alternative projects have done just that.

It’s just… google’s control over chromium is concerning.

Fair enough, you do what works for you.

I checked it out like, mid 2025 or so? Thought it looked somewhat cool, but within a week I was already hit with a few breaking changes and just things being changed around in the UI for no good reason, and the dev seemed to be just implementing things on the whims of what people were saying in the r/zen_browser subreddit. Also it seemed to be making a lot of big promises, but the big change seemed to be that the tabs were now … on the left, and a couple of saner privacy presets in about:config that I was already setting in my user.js file.

Anyway, I do consider how a project is governed before I adopt an important piece of software. I’m fine with a one-man show for something as cute and small as a terminal emulator or an editor, but a browser is a different thing.

With it being a firefox fork, and not an independent project, and knowing that browser engines are complex things and that it is always going to be a constant struggle to keep it up-to-date and integrated with the changes pouring out of mozilla.org, the conclusion I drew was that it didn’t feel like the best run project, and that I probably shouldn’t put my eggs in that particular basket, waiting for the single dev to burn out or lose interest in it.

Firefox doesn’t support WebHID, so I can forget about configuring my custom keyboard with anything other than a Chromium based browser.

Commit history where you see the number of commits per developer tells a different story.

Zen Browser, which is a nice fork of Firefox

I wouldn’t trust something as important and complex as a browser to what’s essentially a 1 man project.

That’s not how things work.

It’s actually kind of annoying since you want to do something while waiting but it’s not long enough

You know you’re the boss of the car and not the other way around right? :p

You can add another one to the list then. I was forced to switch last year (regulation changes and end of lease on the ICE company car). I went from a BMW 3-series to a Polestar 2, and I was initially a bit reluctant and skeptical but quickly learned to love it.

I went basically like this:

Electric is just a superior drive train concept for daily driving. The instant torque, the smoothness of acceleration and lack of gear changes are so awesome, even passengers comment all the time about how nice it feels. And once you get used to the one-pedal drive, you don’t want anything else. Just lift the gas pedal to stop, and step on it to go… couldn’t be easier.

The only downside is that in terms of vehicle dynamics you do feel the added weight, you can’t really hide 500 kg extra. So when changing direction it doesn’t want to turn in as eagerly, and you feel a bit more roll and suspension travel in everything that it does, but the positives vastly outweigh this one negative.

an EV’s electric motor and (usually) single reduction gear means you get basically the same acceleration between 5 km/h and 120 km/h

Same torque, not same acceleration. Air and roll resistance have something to say too.

So why does that need a whole new clock app? That would just be an update to tzdata on a Linux system.