ah definitely. I haven’t tried it out yet but I think they improved that in plasma 6.1. although that’s absolutely the point you were making: lots of things that used to work fine on X11 that Wayland just doesn’t have yet.

yeah with the exception of krita (which runs fine on xwayland, even with a tablet) I’ve been able to run 100% Wayland, with sway for work and KDE for home, but my needs aren’t too wild. I’m sure a lot of users feel like the rug was unnecessarily pulled out from under them; change that feels like a regression even for very good reason will almost never feel like reason enough if it’s your shit that gets worse, definitely.

still, I think you’ve got to get people using the thing if you want the thing to get better. probably more casual users didn’t even notice when gnome moved over, for example. but probably even the most casual user ran into some problem, and that’s a bummer.

out of curiosity what use cases/software has stopped you from running Wayland? I do miss the magic of tunneling an X session over SSH, that felt like dang magic in the early 2000s.

I mean that’s a fair question, because I feel like mostly the advantages are, hm, not “theoretical” because it’s an actual advantage, but not something you’ll really encounter day-to-day. better security for example. but generally who cares because if I interact with something malicious I’m probably owned anyway.

originally I was interested in it because of fractional scaling, but I think that works in X11 for the most part now?

at this point it’s mostly about using the bleeding edge stuff so I can help find problems. I do find that when it works it works very well, and the experience of using a Wayland desktop is less wonky: fewer weird rendering glitches when dealing with multiple monitors, connecting and disconnecting my laptop from a dock, etc. I find this works better with Wayland, but I wouldn’t say “so much better that you must move to it today” if you’re happy with what you have.

similarly full-system stability has been better, and I have fewer crashes that take down everything, I feel. it’s perhaps subjective though: I’ve been running it for so many years maybe all I’m experiencing is that the software I run has become better in general.

so: I don’t think it’s a night-and-day life-changing experience or anything, but it does feel modern and stable, and it’s definitely where things are heading so why not get used to it now, and help to improve it, is my thinking.

I’ll check that out, thanks for the recommendation. as for it defaulting to X11, it’s no issue because the Wayland session is also available and has been absolutely solid for me, I was just surprised that it wasn’t the preferred session by the distro.

I can’t speak to MicroOS but I have been running Tumbleweed for about a month. normally I run arch.l, but wanted to try something new for a change, and I was interested in trying out a full DE as I typically run sway.

I’ve been extremely impressed with KDE; I assume you feel the same if you’re looking at Kinoite, but feels worth saying out loud for other readers.

Tumbleweed, for an Arch user, is fine. it installed fine, was reasonably sane out of the box (although defaults to X11, not Wayland) and it’s been perfectly stable for the month I’ve run it. Doing development on it is very easy, and it comes with a non-root docker setup script out of the box which is nice, and I’ve had no issue building software on it. YaST is powerful but has an awful UI.

However: it has the same problem as Ubuntu for me, which is that if you want software from outside the repos you have to trust other repositories and trust their keys, and they often want to replace packages, and finding out if they are built safely can be quite challenging. compare this to Arch, where you can easily read a PKGBUILD and they almost always download sources direct from the developer/vendor, and they very rarely replace other packages. So I find it hard to trust this system’s integrity over time; where are my packages coming from? So in the end I’ll probably go back to Arch, or maybe try out Endeavour, but if this doesn’t concern you then I think Tumbleweed is a capable distro that’s easy to get up and running.

A lot of decent ones have been mentioned so I’ll add a few I didn’t see:

• Keep your hands off Eizouken: I can’t express my love for this one enough; it’s beautiful, touching, funny, and just one of the most lovely things I’ve ever seen.
• Bocchi the Rock: very funny, and extremely uncomfortable for introverts but in a good way
• Delicious in Dungeon: extraordinarily good adaptation of the manga; this one isn’t done yet so who knows but it’s wonderful so far, and Studio Trigger’s animation won’t disappoint
• BNA: another Studio Trigger, lovely animation. I love how this one almost makes a point several times and then just glances off of it; it’s a bizarre one

thank you for the reminder to rewatch north by northwest

you were cool the whole time

yes, things like Midwest emo are seeing a resurgence, see Origami Angel or Arcadia Grey for instance; or things that blend hyperpop with more pop/punk sensibilities like Dynastic. there’s a lot of it out there, it’s just not what’s mainstream.

find a hobby and join up with folks that do the same locally. join a gym. go to a local pub and watch some sports. I find this far better than social media, however I also live in a (small) city; i don’t know how people manage in rural areas.

I think Google Fi works like you describe.

well now I’ll be expecting it

https://phixel.bandcamp.com/track/lemonade-2 or https://dynastic.bandcamp.com/track/caldecott

neither of these were in a genre I’d usually consider, but they got me into it. still when I listen to either, they’re in my head all day.

like most things, some of it is very good but the vast majority of it is extremely poor. I wouldn’t say I like or dislike it as a rule but I’d say on average I dislike it by far, and when it’s bad it has a way of being very intolerably bad.

not an issue if you live in a city centre where you won’t need to drive, or on the outskirts of somewhere that has good public transit. hard to say what your requirements are though; if you’re planning to have to commute or otherwise.

humanscale makes lovely stuff. I have some of their monitor arms and cable management and they’re top notch.

lol, that’s a huge bummer though. when I picked up this chair I lived in a fairly major city, and it was during the “we’re not doing return-to-office” times so I might’ve gotten lucky with what was being liquidated.

I have a sit/stand desk and so I spend about half the day in my chair. I use a Steelcase Think; I like how it’s relatively simple but still has a lot of articulation in its armrests, which makes it easy to get decent arm support where you need it. It’s very sturdy and of nice quality. my only complaint is that I wish its back didn’t have an inch of give before it hits the lock point at the furthest forward point, but this is really very minor.

if you live somewhere that you can go to an office surplus store, I’d super recommend doing that. I picked out this chair after trying a bunch out, and it was much cheaper than MSRP since it was used. they had like 20 different models and perhaps 5 of this one, and I picked out the nicest of the bunch.

I walk into my home office, as my company like many went fully remote during COVID and stayed that way. However prior to that I had two options:

I could bike, it was about 5.5 miles with bike lanes the whole way (until downtown, where the roads were shared but marked for bike traffic). I think it took me about 20 or 30 minutes, but honestly I don’t remember anymore. Going home took longer as it was uphill compared to the way in.

The other option was I could take public transit; there were both buses and a light rail and I greatly preferred the latter. When I did that, it was a 5 minute walk to the light rail, about a 20 minute ride, and then a 10 minute walk to the office.

At the time I lived in a decent sized US city, but since going remote I’ve moved somewhere smaller. However I really loved having good public transit, and if I ever had to go into an office again either being able to bike or public transit in is a big requirement for me; I can’t stand car commuting: it’s stressful and wasteful, and has a very negative impact on cities for those that live there.

smoking: I decided it was disgusting. it was like a switch flipped and I had no desire to do it anymore.

and it helps that it actually is super nasty (I can only imagine how I used to smell), and ruins everything; I just had to realize it.