I know about window managers and how using them will reduce the memory usage by system a lot because they are less bloated etc.

Ehhhh… I think it’s more “not using a curated general-purpose DE”, rather than “using a WM”. All graphical systems include a WM, and a DE in some senses is more of a concept or category than a concrete thing. The choice is whether it’s one you cobble a DE together yourself, or use a pre-configured, curated one.

Many people use stand-alone WMs and then create their own DE, but quite a few of us put the WM of our choice within existing DE because we want the WM but have no interest in re-inventing all those DE wheels (and/or have >4Gb memory so the “bloat” is not an issue). In my case it’s i3 on Gnome via gnome-flashback.

Curated DEs do tend to use more resources - typically mostly memory - partly because they tend to be comprehensive for diverse users. Rolling your own minimal DE for your personal needs can often be lighter weight. If you have a very constrained system then it can be beneficial, though that circumstance is more and more unusual these days when 8Gb of memory is often considered “minimal”.

The main reasons for making your own DE is to do things exactly the way you want, at the expense of having to do it. Beware though, there will be various helpful features of DEs you may not realize you appreciate until you have realize you don’t have them. E.g. what happens when you plug in a USB drive? Nothing, by default - a DE usually manages that. SSHing into servers a lot - a credentials agent is nice - better add one of those…

A lot of rolling your own DE is months or years of “oh yeah, that is a useful thing to have; I need to find tools and configure them to do that”. Conversely, dropping your WM of choice into another DE is often a case of “huh, that happens automagically; nice!”.

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I think that’s a slightly different animal. AFAIK it’s doesn’t switch config depending on the current focused window. E.g. for some programs I don’t want remapping.

I use a key remapper to give me the readline keys everywhere. Though I’ve used XKeysnail and xremap and they’re both a bit flakey, so if anyone has better recommendations that work on X11 and Wayland, I’m all ears.

I have decades as a SWE, including deep (but now out-of-date) C++ experience, a lot more recently in serious Python systems, and a fair amount of web UI dev on the side.

Now I have 1 year with Go. I came to it with an open mind having heard people sing its praises I thought it would be broadening to spend some time with a language new to me.

My advice now is do anything you can to avoid working in golang. Almost daily, I seriously contemplate whether it’d be worth quitting and being unemployed, even in this economy (US). It is a better C, but that’s a low, low bar at least for the project domains I ever work in. Where it’s an even plausible answer, Rust is probably a better one (I think? - haven’t used Rust for anything real).

That seems to be the Go way. Why put it in a library when everyone can just re-implement it themselves (and test and document it too, right? Right?).

E.g. There isn’t even a standard set object, everyone just implements it as a map pointing to empty structs, and you get familiar with that and just accept it and learn to understand what it means when someone added an empty struct to a map. And then people try to paint this as a virtue of the language.

That’s ironic. Few countries have less readable plates.

Excellent description of the zeitgeist.

Your portrait of before generative AI is a bit hard to square with the ad driven internet, but fits ever better the further back you go.

Yeah, we’re turning it all to shit in so many ways simultaneously, it’s truly something awful to behold. Maybe there is a singularity coming after all, but it’s not one like the credulous tech worshippers imagined.

ironically, I think whining about anticipated downvotes for expressing the most mainstream sentiment is worthy of downvotes

And it’s Wednesday, so it’s Bismuth Time

Chips every day!

It took me an embarrassing number of decades before I realized they were called (silicon) chips after American snack chips. I always thought it was a weird thing to call something that was plainly a carefully sliced thin sliver and not a piece chipped off anything.

As I did with potato chips too, but that was an established term in American English and it took me a very long time to realize one was named after the other.

I’ve used ThinkPads for ages and it’s very true they have become more and more ordinary as the years go by, but I recently got given a high spec Dell for a new job and it’s been very disappointing. In particular the keyboard is terrible to the point that on business trips I bring an external keyboard with me. I also sorely miss a trackpoint, but to many people that is not an issue.

I was also surprised that I miss the ThinkPad ability to open up 180°.

Though if you’re good with using Ubuntu then new ThinkPads and Dells and some others generally work well as you get the enablement patches before they’ve rippled through to the mainline kennel. However you still often have a happier time waiting for others to iron out the kinks, not to mention better hardware prices by getting clear out deals for outgoing generations.

After years of ThinkPads I joined a company that gave me a Dell Inspiron and I am unimpressed in various minor ways. Crap keyboard is the big one.

Gnome’s was very inferior last I looked. No brightness factor and it was sunset or fixed time.

Sharing your work without cost to people who need it is pretty solidly left. But it certainly isn’t red vs blue, not least because party political colors vary by country and in the US, neither refers to a left-wing party, and in most countries red aligns with left.

Reminds me how American English uses the verb “rent” for both sides of the transaction. If someone says “I rent this apartment”, you can only tell what they mean from context.

In British English, the landlord “lets” an apartment that the tenant “rents”, and that are advertised with signs “To let”.

Not at all. It allows you to install and use whole suites of tools and libraries without any pollution of or dependencies on your host system. It also allows you to define the whole setup in a file so it’s trivial to recreate on another machine

Is it though? I’ve found it rock solid for years on end - been using it for 14 years, and Debian before that.

I don’t recognize this myself. I’ve never had trouble with incompatibilities or degradation etc.,

Especially these days my OS can remain very vanilla, as many complex things can be containerized. E.g. I run syncthing and an nfs server and sometimes torrenting over vpn, through docker-compose; I’d never install all that on the host with all the extensive dependencies. Same with some heavyweight apps like darktable - spin them up from Flatpak.

Ubuntu does it very well with minimal fuss. I see little to dislike.