Also I remember seeing screenshots where PDFs looked transparent or matched the terminal colors. Is that actually a feature of some of these viewers ?

Zathura lets you recolour and theme pdfs, yes. See zathurarc(5). You can set alpha using "rgba(r, g, b, a)" when setting a colour, e.g. set to 0.8 for 0.8 opacity.

https://gitlab.com/Grazen0/river-shifttags

Not sure what ly is but basically I’m saying you should be using the dbus-run-session sway command to run sway instead of just sway. If dbus is installed and the daemon is running then this will allow you to e.g. open links in Discord.

The commenter talking about xdg desktop portal is correct for the file picker; you need to install a portal for that.

I can’t get links to open from discord

Are you using dbus? Display managers normally will launch graphical sessions with dbus for you, but if you’re manually launching from the tty, use dbus-run-session sway (or the name of the executable you want to run). dbus is used for applications to communicate with each other, e.g. Discord to communicate with your browser. And you need dbus installed and the daemon running, of course.

I think that’s a misunderstanding of how software works. More features != better. I’m aware that many users think that, but it’s not a common view in the foss community. People in the foss community largely hate corporate enshittified bloated software and won’t use a proprietary fork that some company has added an LLM to. A project doesn’t need mainstream appeal; think about all the foss utilities written for Linux and BSDs where the target audience is “nerds”/enthusiasts/etc. These projects maintain themselves and their popularity just fine with a limited target audience. Besides, most foss isn’t for the average computer user. There’s a lot of foss that isn’t user software (libraries and OS/kernelspace software), and then there’s software like curl which can be for end users but is mostly used as a library, and the end users who use curl directly are a more technical crowd who most likely care about foss. The mainstream crowd that wants their iPhones and copilots are not making decisions between a foss option and a proprietary option.

I understood what federation was just fine when I was a teenager. Again, projecting your own stupidity. Teenagers are perfectly capable of using email.

Are you joking or not? If you’re not joking, I think you may be projecting your own stupidity at that age onto everyone else. Teenagers are perfectly capable of signing up for an account on a social media website… In fact, they’re kind of notorious for doing so.

How does permissive licensing lead to corporate takeover? Companies can do proprietary forks of permissively licensed foss projects, but they can’t automatically take over the upstream.

Not “everything”, and I wouldn’t say there’s any distro that lets you “control everything”. e.g. look at Alpine Linux, which uses musl, busybox, and OpenRC, whereas Arch uses glibc, GNU coreutils, and systemd. These three choices are “locked in” for Alpine and Arch—you can’t change them. And it’s unlikely for any distro to let you choose all these things because that creates a lot of maintenance work for the distro maintainers.

I suppose Linux From Scratch lets you “control everything”, but I wouldn’t call it a distro (there’s nothing distributed except a book!), and hardly anyone daily drives it.

I use Artix (fork of Arch with init freedom)—the main reason why I prefer an Arch base specifically is for the AUR. The reason why I prefer a minimalistic distro in general, is because I want to be able to choose what software I install and how I set up my system. For example I don’t use a full DE so any distro that auto-installs a DE for me will install a bunch of software I won’t use. You also usually get a lot more control over partitioning etc with minimalistic distros—lets me fuck around with more weird setups if I want to try something out.

To be clear I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using distros that have more things “pre-packaged”. It’s a matter of personal preference. The category of “poweruser” makes sense—some users want more fine-grained control over their systems, whilst some users don’t care and want something that roughly works with minimal setup. Or perhaps you do care about fine-grained control over your system, but it just so happens that your ideal system is the same as what comes pre-installed with some distro. Do whatever works for you.

By hand. I don’t have a dishwasher. The place I rent didn’t come with one, and I don’t have the space for my own (plus no money). I think I’ve only ever met one person with a dishwasher, although I suppose I wouldn’t know if someone has one unless I either go to their house or they bring it up. I don’t see the issue with doing dishes by hand, and I pay a flat rate for water so water usage is not a concern to me.

I add it to soups. Sometimes I just have it raw as the vegetable side of a meal

Most popular VPNs have some form of obfuscation options in their apps. But if you’re using e.g. raw Wireguard you won’t be able to use their obfuscation function.

Btw technically they can’t really outlaw VPNs as a whole, only commercial/“privacy” VPNs. They couldn’t really tell if you’re e.g. using your friend’s PC as a VPN to access their LAN, since it’s a residential IP. Unless they’re looking for Wireguard packets, but that seems like an unlikely law since it’d piss off a lot of businesses that use VPNs to let their workers access the company intranet at home.

English is my third language, but I read a lot of English books as a kid and spent a lot of time in English-speaking circles. I don’t feel disadvantaged compared to a native speaker as I’m fluent and have been speaking English for a long time.

i3 doesn’t work with Wayland because it’s an X11 WM… You wouldn’t complain about X11 because Sway doesn’t work on it.

Btw, Sway is a drop-in Wayland replacement for i3 if you want to move to Wayland. i3 configs work with Sway; it’s an i3 clone.

If you mean political leaders targeted by imperialist propaganda, most of them have written books or other writings that you can read and get accounts from their own mouth. Mao probably fits your bill (vilified by Western media) and his writing is very accessible and easy to read (he wrote largely for illiterate peasants) so that might be something to interest you.

No but not due to hostility. We just don’t talk anymore the way you don’t talk to some old friends anymore, ie just drifted apart. All my breakups have luckily been amicable.

aerc+mbsync+notmuch

If you want a GUI, I was using Evolution before aerc and I was happy with it. I just prefer keyboard navigation which naturally is well supported by any TUI application.

I learnt to code before I was 10, why not? Also why not mention the word “syntax”? Kids are just less experienced, but they’re not stupid. They can understand a concept if you explain it to them.

Automatic daily updates for system packages. Automatic daily container updates with watchtower. I normally have things pinned to a reasonable major or minor release, so I do manual upgrades for new OS release branches and usually pin to a major version for Docker containers but depends on the container.