Our just run sync, which isn’t as completely foolproof, but is easy.

No they are not. That’s not what it means.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(mathematics)

should be proportional to the weight of the system

It’s that really true? Wear to the roads is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight so I would never have predicted a linear relationship.

Yes of course that’s exactly what it is. A DE is just a collection of daemons and tools. None of it’s rocket science but a lot of it is unclear unless you dig in deeper. And it’s work that someone has already done.

(BTW… Intents and purposes)

Gnome-flashback by default is an old-school Gnome DE (Desktop Environment) that comes with a simple, conventional WM but allows you to swap in any WM you like while it operates in the background. Mainstream Gnome Shell DE is inextricably tied to its WM so you can’t swap into that. So with Gnome-flashback you can swap in i3 and get a curated Gnome DE with your own (i3) WM.

It means you don’t have to reinvent everything that makes a DE just to use i3 WM. You get things like the Gnome settings GUI including monitor configuration and restoration on hotplug; clipboard manager; theming; audio/brightness hotkeys just work; USB drives automount, and more. Lots of convenience and utility you want and need but otherwise have to identify, install, configure and set up manually. Without using an already curated DE you have to reinvent one, or at least reinvent the parts of one you can’t live without.

Gnome-flashback is not the only DE that allows swapping in a different WM. My own experience has found it a bit of a PITA every time I try to use it on an OS with an updated Gnome version, requiring poking around, searching and debugging. Sadly, there seem to be limited options for low effort, well polished, curated i3/sway DE.

I like to use i3 in a desktop environment so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel of sundry support details like hotkeys and monitor behavior, automounting USB drives.

I’ve used gnome flashback with i3, just like regolith, and decided to try using regolith to get the full curated environment but I found their obfuscation of what’s going on impossible to deal with. Just working out how to change configuration was a huge pain in the ass and had to be done the regolith way.

But every new OS release with a new version of flashback etc. doesn’t seem to work right, so I am contemplating giving up and just going direct window manager and accumulating all those sundry details of a DE manually.

And yet wasn’t it central to the last ipcc report, that we could hold to 1.5C of we stopped all carbon emissions dead and came up with as yet not invented ways for carbon capture. And everyone said “sounds great someone should totally get on that”

But most of the world did not have the US education system. I’d say only some Americans have heard of Oregon City, and very few non Americans.

It’s hilarious how fracking is not seen as the junkie desperation it plainly is, hunting round their body to get the needle into a usable vein. Pumping in shit to eke out another hit even though it poisons the land.

It didn’t mention halving a third.

The issue is it’s an LLM. It puts words in an order that’s statistically plausible but has no reasoning power.

And there is ever decreasing need for cutting edge with containers and sandboxing. And hardware improvement is no longer so rapid so buying the hotness of 2+ years ago is cheap and effective and well supported.

Hilarious to have to look this low for it, but who want to stand up and declare themselves mainstream.

Polished, reliable, and solid, and snaps are not a big deal or an insidious evil, and neither is Canonical. They make missteps for sure. But with containers etc stability is more important than immediate updates and it’s excellent about kernel updates for new hardware. It’s slick Debian, and if the fuckery ever gets real switching to Debian is easy.

I’m still on i3 as it’s been convenient, but this:

this has all become very specialized over the past decade

resonates. I keep incrementally adding personal tweaks and hotkeys to my setup, and I have all my dotfiles in a repo so it’s persistent across installations.

One example was I made my headphone button pause/play videos with i3’s config:

bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause

But then I adopted a script to toggle mic mute on work Zoom meetings, so I combined it with the above - if I’m in a meeting it toggles mute, otherwise it play-pauses any current video. The script, for now:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Handler script for hitting mute on the headphone.
#

CURRENT_WINDOW=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)

# convoluted command to find the intersection of two searches
ZOOM_WINDOW=$(comm -12 \
  <(xdotool search --name  'Meeting' | sort) \
  <(xdotool search --class 'zoom'    | sort))

if [[ -n "$ZOOM_WINDOW" ]]; then
    # if zoom is active, toggle mic mute
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${ZOOM_WINDOW}
    xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT_WINDOW}
else
    # otherwise do play/pause
    playerctl play-pause # will fail if no player found
fi

and of course I altered the i3 config to launch that script rather than playerctl directly.

[EDIT: Updated script as Zoom updated its window identities]

Yeah. Heaviest awk I’ve ever done is extracting a value to a variable from a line with one pattern and using it to populate output from later lines matching another pattern.

Great, cause we haven’t been burning enough energy jetting around the globe up to now. Glad they found a way to burn a whole lot more.

I’m not surprised Emacs users would be seeking them out

They aren’t. Someone did it, probably more than one person, but if you look hard enough you can find people who do all sorts of weird stuff. It’s not an “Emacs thing” at all.

This and the joke itself really make me wonder about bizarre Emacs (and Emacs users) that exists in people’s heads.

I see you use capital letters in your post, so you presumably used a modifier key (shift) - unless you do modal caps with CapsLock all the time. I don’t know why people find that normal and easy, but as soon as it’s Ctrl or Alt they get in a tizzy and start talking about RSI.

Funny how over the decades I’ve known many Emacs users, and many RSI sufferers, but the overlap in my Venn diagram of that is exactly one person.

Must have been the 323, before they rebranded to 3 in the early 2000s. Shame for you it was broken, they were good drivers’ cars in a modest way

It’s obviously trivial energy waste in the big picture, but it’s 100% waste if you don’t need it. Like turning on lights in empty rooms.

wasting energy to somehow stick it to the man?

Exhibit 56845 why humanity is fucking doomed.