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    Posted on 19-10-02, 00:18
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    Post: #353 of 443
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 863 days
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    Recently, Debian Testing finally updated to gnome-terminal 3.34, in which they finally got around to making all the various menu-options accessible from title-bar controls, so you can use them even when the menu-bar is hidden. For a straight-up GNOME 3 desktop, that's an improvement.

    For people using gnome-terminal on a non-GNOME 3 desktop, it can be a drawback. Title-bar controls mean a client-drawn title-bar, so window-managers that actually manage windows (like i3, dwm or awesome) now have extra, redundant title-bars hanging around eating up space.

    I'm not angry, because it's reasonable for the GNOME people to make gnome-terminal better for GNOME at the expense of other environments, but I'm now in the market for an alternative, visually-lighter-weight terminal emulator. Unfortunately, it seems that gnome-terminal is absolutely the most polished terminal emulator around, and everything else is a step down.

    My current shortlist of alternatives is:

    - xterm is a bit primitive, but rock-solid, and I already have it configured to my liking.
    - pterm is a straight-up port of PuTTY to POSIX, and it feels a bit weird to use it as a local terminal
    - QTerminal feels weird because it's Qt-based, and sometimes it lays out Unicode text oddly

    I'm definitely not interested in:

    - st, because I don't want anything to do with the suckless "community"
    - kitty, because I'm not interested in managing Yet Another Config File
    - alacritty, ditto

    The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.
    Posted on 19-10-02, 04:04 (revision 1)
    Custom title here

    Post: #722 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Xterm also has ths advantage of trying to actually emulate the terminals it claims to emulate, instead of claiming to be a specific DEC terminal and then behaving wildly diffrently.

    On the other hand, something libvte-based will probably be better-behaved with newer software because of the nesticle effect.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-10-02, 04:14
    Dinosaur

    Post: #566 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 3 days
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    Been using xterm since I got bored of konsole/gnome-terminal (too much stuff for my liking), even back when DEs weren't braindamaged. Normally I dislike minimalism, but come on, it's a terminal, you should not get in the way! ("tabbed terminals"? Dude, windows are free!)

    I haven't even touched my xterm settings - I use whatever defaults are shipped by my distro of choice.

    Yes, I know xterm has a menu. No, I've never used it intentionally.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-05-30, 19:27
    Dinosaur

    Post: #718 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 3 days
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    As per this comment on the related Ubuntu bugreport, adding iommu=soft seems to silence the endless stream of swiotlb bullshittery on systems using Broadcom 4401 NICs, like my Inspiron 6400.

    No other side effects have been noticed so far. Unfortunately, outside the Ubuntu bugreport all reports related to this stupid bug have been stalled (or even closed), as nobody seems to care about old computers anymore, and this comes out from the OS that supports pretty much every Network Interface Chipset known to mankind...

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-09-13, 02:00 (revision 2)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #771 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 3 days
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    In one of those very, VERY rare times when I have unrestricted/unmetered access to the Internet (not thanks to CANTV!), I managed to install nearly a year of pending updates across my active Debian fleet. I did a full "apt-get -t buster-backports dist-upgrade" to nicely bridge the gap between ol' stale Stable and the party zone at Testing. Among other things, this meant all my machines got the latest kernel on Debian, which unsurprisingly is the already-EOL 5.7 branch.

    No incidents to report... except for THIS.
    Those came from my oldest active Buster setup, the IBM TV box with its patched-up ATi RV630 (HD2600 in marketingspeak). Apparently the new kernel hates my card, but only in X11 - KMS framebuffer console is spotless. The wallpaper is fine, but everything else renders with that kind of corruption! Even weirder: if you look at the last screenshot, videos and 3D workloads are corruption-free - it's only things like window borders, widgets, icons and everything with which you interact with your PC! (I'm quite surprised the corruption could be captured on an ordinary screenshot - no blurrycams needed!) Needless to say, this is no bueno - this is MALO, MUCHO MUY MALO!

    Things used to work fine with kernel 5.3, and indeed if I reboot to that kernel, display works flawlessly. I tried installing every linux-image release on Backports, and every since kernel starting with 5.4 exhibits the very same symptoms: consoles and 3D/videos are fine, desktop is corrupted, so it's clearly not a Mesa or Xorg bug. However, there is another workaround which I found the only one to bring some sanity back: disable KMS. With no modesetting (radeon.modeset=0), X11 is once again corruption-free, but as you already know, this kills hi-rez consoles, bootsplashes, and in general modern kernels and GPU drivers don't really like it that much (I even got the DRM bits yelling at me at the kernel log that "UMS is not compiled-in on this module" or something down these lines!). Of course this could imply that the next Debian release (Bullseye) would be a dud for this specific configuration, which would be a shame as it feels quite speedy with a half-decent GPU and plenty of RAM!

    Unfortunately, while I've got some good material for a bugreport, why even bother filing a report!? To keep it languishing aside the other couple reports I've filed on kernel bugs that hit me with ZERO ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AT ALL, not even basic triaging?! Yeah, now that upstream is seriously thinking about killing AGP support I guess the only answer I would get nowadays is a "sucks to be you", not even "have this virtual money and go buy a virtual video card that won't even fit on your dinosaur" :/

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-09-13, 08:14
    Post: #148 of 203
    Since: 11-24-18

    Last post: 9 days
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    Posted by tomman

    No incidents to report... except for THIS.


    Oh, wow... Time to get a few used RX 550 cards?
    Posted on 20-09-15, 21:49

    Post: #88 of 105
    Since: 11-13-19

    Last post: 1223 days
    Last view: 1223 days
    Posted by wertigon
    Posted by tomman

    No incidents to report... except for THIS.


    Oh, wow... Time to get a few used RX 550 cards?

    They make RX 550 cards in AGP form factor?
    Posted on 20-09-15, 23:42 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #779 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 3 days
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    Posted by kode54
    Posted by wertigon
    Posted by tomman

    No incidents to report... except for THIS.


    Oh, wow... Time to get a few used RX 550 cards?

    They make RX 550 cards in AGP form factor?


    Most likely this also hits the native PCIe versions of those R600 cards, and who knows what else (as ATi/AMD maintainers are focused on recent hardware nowadays). Disabling KMS fixes desktop, but kills framebuffer consoles (and I'm unsure if UVD/VDPAU/VA-API still works without KMS)

    Another feature killed by recent updates: being able to use dumbphones with ModemManager: my ol' trusty (and now headless) RAZR V9x no longer gets recognized by ModemManager - not that it ever worked with it: MM always died trying to use my 3G connection (it sent some AT command related to APNs, the phone returned some empty response, MM went ballistic and segfaulted - the same phone works just fine with pon/poff and nearly every other modem dialer), SMS support was spotty (with ModemManager-GUI I wasn't even able to READ messages until a 2018 update or so, and even then it would WIPE the phone storage every time I pulled the messages out of the phone, unlike most Windows tools and Wammu). Ah well, I guess only dinosaurs use dumbphones, even if you're forced to interact with them through a PC because noone repairs broken flex cables on flip phones anymore. At least I learned how to use USSD codes via AT commands (AT+CUSD=1,"*144#") since that's the only way you can check your prepaid balance on Movistar phones over here, and even THAT was broken on ModemManager too!

    The Broadcom NIC on my Dell still causes the kernel to complain, but iommu=soft still keeps things under control - that's yet another bug noone cares about fixing anytime soon (on that related Ubuntu bugreport, people hasn't had the same luck as me with this workaround, but it's fine - who uses wired NICs nowadays?).

    I had finally to bite another bullet and install VirtualBox from official upstream .DEBs since the packages on Sid are too new for Buster, and the old Sid version I had installed now has an incompatible kernel module which breaks your setup on anything past 5.4 - great, more bloody red Orrible® branding on my desktop. Guess next time I have unmetered access I'll play a bit with KVM/QEMU and friends, as VirtualBox is slowly earning a place into my shitlist :/

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-09-19, 16:33 (revision 2)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #780 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 3 days
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    While my date of "ditching VirtualBox and other Orrible® products for good" is still far, FAR away, I still get to deal with VBox on computers that are not mine (that, and sadly VBox is the only user-friendly, cross-platform, free/open source VM product out there - VMWare is mostly dead thanks to Dell, Hy-Perv is a Windows-only mess, Parallels is the best Mac users can get... and even they have to pay for it, and KVM/QEMU have a long road to march towards dumbproof despite being already production quality).

    This time, yet another P2V situation: $NEW_CUSTOMER has their current $PRODUCT running on a long EOL'd Ubuntu 10.04 LTS HDD that came from a unknown computer, then ended at a not-so-shabby ThinkServer TS140 (a complete waste given that we're still dealing with no UEFI support, a 2.6.32 kernel, and a non-server Ubuntu setup pressed into production by $SOME_MORONS). The product in question is another ancient, unsupported LAMP-based payroll system they're still using yet they're about to migrate to the solution sold by $FORMER_BOSS, and I've been contracted to P2V this crap so they can actually use both applications during the transition without having to reboot several times a day.

    Long short story: P2V'ing ancient Ubuntu is a piece of cake these days if you still choose to stick to VirtualBox.

    - Install Orrible® upstream .DEBs, as we're on Buster which means no official Debian packages, ever. You also want to RDP into this thing (because LOLubuntu and its unlocked desktops by default!), so make sure to install the "Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack" as you will need that one for MS-compatible RDP (VNC support is only present on FOSS/community/distro builds, not on upstream binaries), USB2/3, PXE for some emulated NICs, etc.

    - On another PC running VBox, prepare the source HDD image: clone the original HDD to another disk (we MUST NOT TOUCH the original production disk until we're already on the production VM!, plus backups), clear enough space on the clone to shrink the partition (those guys loved plaintext .SQL dumps for everything, so I was able to compress ~35GiB of "backups" to ~890MB in .tar.xz, bringing down the target HDD image from 250GB to 50GB with plenty of space to spare).

    - Attach the clone HDD to VBox (create a physical VMDK, don't forget to change permissions to 666 on /dev/sdYourCloneDisk, umount any partitions here prior to continuing!), create a new Ubuntu 64-bit VM (gib enough RAM, add a new blank VDI disk large enough for the target, we want bridged networking, VBox 6.1 now defaults to VMWare SVGA video which makes our life easier should we want to not install guest extensions), connect our physical VMDK to it, boot to test.

    - Does the VM boot OK? Test ACPI shutdown, etc. Boot the VM again, but this time use your favorite Clonezilla ISO to start it, clone the physical HDD to our final, blank VDI. Move/enlarge partitions as needed (if you wish/have OCD and can't stand unpartitioned space). Shut down the VM, detach the physical VMDK, test boot again from the VDI. We're now ready for the final and most glorious step...

    - ...which is exporting the VM to the actual production server! To save some time, we will export the OVA appliance directly over NFS (so don't forget to have a speedy CPU, gigabit LAN if possible, and nfs-kernel-server installed on both hosts!). This is the most time-consuming part of the process, albeit user interaction is minimal (in my case, the final OVA shrinked the VM further down to ~2.7GiB, hooray for cheapass LAMP bloat!). Get intimate with VBoxManage, as we're now on headless CLI-land!

    - Import the VM (VBoxManage import yourappliance.ova; test with --dry-run first!), fix network settings (VBoxManage modifyvm yourVM --nic1 bridged --bridgeadapter1 eth0), enable RDP (VBoxManage modifyvm --vrde on, set authentication if desired), now start the VM (VBoxManage startvm yourVM --type headless), check network connectivity, RDP into the VM and fix network settings (IP address, etc.), test shutdown (VBoxManage controlvm yourVM acpipowerbutton, then wait until the VBox host process exits). Test everything twice! You're done... almost!

    - To seal the deal, we now need the VM to come up on every server boot, and to shutdown cleanly at every server shutdown. This is where things have always been a bit of a sore thumb on VBox, particularly with Debian. If you haven't already noticed, VBox ships with a vbox-autostart initscript, the setup procedure is not straightforward and the whole mechanism is as fragile as a house of cards (VMs may fail to start or shutdown cleanly, getting permissions right is tricky, system updates may break everything, and it never worked properly at Debian, whose VBox packages never shipped the vbox-autostart script at all!). Luckily, if you're not a Troo UNIX® Way graybeard a Poetteringware hateboner allergic to systemd, getting VBox autostart with it working is surprisingly easy AND reliable - all you need is a custom unit file, run a couple commands, and you're set for success. No permissions fuckery needed! Try it. Try bringing up and stopping VM. Try rebooting your server and watch. Now We Are Playing with (Virtual) Power! Call it done, crack open a cola/beer can, go home and enjoy your lenghty decontamination shower. You've earned it.

    - If everything went according to plan, before leaving, ask the local slaves to access both the old and new applications. They should notice no difference at all, they aren't even aware that their old crusty crapp is now running on fake hardware :P

    - The old production Suckgate HDD? (because it had to be a Suckgate 7200.12 HDD with >60K hours on the clock and broken, unsafe firmware, that's why!) Backup that one for a final time, hand over that backup to the resident IT drone, tell customer you've reinstalled it but left it unplugged, make it magically vanish.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-09-19, 23:17
    Custom title here

    Post: #930 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    I was waiting for the part where you get a free hard disk the old drive mysteriously vanishes into the ether.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 20-09-20, 01:49 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #782 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 3 days
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    I'll take COVID over a free F3-arch Suckgate, thanks. Still, suck manages to follow suck, so...

    (Incidentally, said final backup was stored on a slightly newer Suckgate Laptop Thin with several relocations and only 14K hours. Not that the server drive is actually better, as it is one of those WD Bleughs that I love to refurbish over and over and over... welcome to the Soviet Venezuelan Public Administration, where you get no pay, just broken drives and no backup facilities beyond "make a second copy on the same drive, hoping for someone to take a backup home twice a year". And no extra RAM because POLITICS! But as long as slaves get paid their monthly dollar and politicians at the top still figure out how to get shady business/communism done survive, who cares about a missing backup?)

    ---

    Decided to experiment a bit with the Radeon R600 2D issue on my IBM box, because boredom.

    - Everything works fine with kernels up to 5.3 (you have to turn off DPM to get UVD working, but that's a separate issue for R600). Console delivers my pretty bootsplash as soon as KMS kicks in, desktop renders like usual, videos play without issues, glxgears gets glorious HW rendering.

    - Starting with kernel 5.4, X11 2D is fucked. Wallpapers are OK, but every single UI widget (icons, buttons, window frames, etc.) render with graphics corruption (that somehow can be screenshoted!). But 3D/video overlays are OK! (tvtime, VLC et al are crystal clear)

    - Tried fiddling with Radeon X.org driver settings:
    * Switching from GLAMOR to EXA accel only worsens the 2D corruption, to the point that I can see a heavily corrupted bootsplash right at X startup for a split second!
    * Staying with GLAMOR but enabling ShadowPrimary actually fixes 2D... but as the manual page clearly explains, it severely nerfs 3D/video performance (i.e.: tvtime turns my TV card input into a pathetic slideshow)
    Option "ShadowPrimary" "boolean"
    This option enables a so-called "shadow primary" buffer for fast CPU access to pixel
    data, and separate scanout buffers for each display controller (CRTC). This may improve
    performance for some 2D workloads, potentially at the expense of other (e.g. 3D, video)
    workloads. Note in particular that enabling this option currently disables page flip‐
    ping. The default is off.


    - Turning off KMS (radeon.modeset=0) is the nuclear option. So nuclear it actually nukes video acceleration completely, to the point Mesa falls back to llvmpipe, and tvtime refuses to run due to no video overlay available! This is because the Radeon kernel module bails out since UMS is no longer available:
    [    4.582932] [drm:radeon_init [radeon]] *ERROR* No UMS support in radeon module!

    Oh, and my hi-rez console also goes back to 1981 and stays at 80x25. But on the flip side (ha!), X11 2D works fine... because my CPU is now doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Suck!
    One more thing: disabling KMS also brings in some IRQ woes:
    [   17.209905] irq 16: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)
    [ 17.209974] CPU: 0 PID: 0 Comm: swapper/0 Tainted: G OE 5.7.0-0.bpo.2-686-pae #1 Debian 5.7.10-1~bpo10+1
    [ 17.210036] Hardware name: IBM 8188KS5/IBM, BIOS 2AKT51SPS 07/06/2005
    [ 17.210091] Call Trace:
    [ 17.210143] <IRQ>
    [ 17.210205] dump_stack+0x60/0x7e
    [ 17.210265] __report_bad_irq+0x38/0x9e
    [ 17.210320] note_interrupt.cold.10+0x9/0x59
    [ 17.210380] handle_irq_event_percpu+0x69/0x70
    [ 17.210442] handle_irq_event+0x2f/0x48
    [ 17.210503] handle_fasteoi_irq+0x7c/0x120
    [ 17.210555] ? handle_untracked_irq+0xb0/0xb0
    [ 17.210608] handle_irq+0x4c/0x80
    [ 17.210656] </IRQ>
    [ 17.210707] do_IRQ+0x46/0xd0
    [ 17.210758] common_interrupt+0x106/0x10c
    [ 17.210809] EIP: native_safe_halt+0x11/0x20
    [ 17.210863] Code: 00 64 a1 9c 1f b5 d6 f0 80 48 02 20 8b 00 a8 08 75 c6 eb 84 cc cc cc cc cc
    55 89 e5 e9 07 00 00 00 0f 00 2d 4e 99 76 d6 fb f4 <5d> c3 8d b4 26 00 00 00 00 8d b6 00 00 00
    00 55 89 e5 e9 07 00 00
    [ 17.210944] EAX: d675dac0 EBX: 00000000 ECX: 00000001 EDX: 0000ad32
    [ 17.210995] ESI: 00000000 EDI: 00000000 EBP: d69b1f14 ESP: d69b1f14
    [ 17.211047] DS: 007b ES: 007b FS: 00d8 GS: 00e0 SS: 0068 EFLAGS: 00200292
    [ 17.211103] ? __cpuidle_text_start+0x8/0x8
    [ 17.211157] ? dcb_app_lookup.isra.7+0x18/0x70
    [ 17.211208] ? native_safe_halt+0x11/0x20
    [ 17.211267] default_idle+0x1f/0x150
    [ 17.211329] arch_cpu_idle+0x12/0x20
    [ 17.211389] default_idle_call+0x2d/0x30
    [ 17.211454] do_idle+0x1d7/0x250
    [ 17.211512] cpu_startup_entry+0x25/0x30
    [ 17.211575] rest_init+0x88/0x8a
    [ 17.211631] arch_call_rest_init+0xd/0x19
    [ 17.211687] start_kernel+0x4da/0x4f9
    [ 17.211742] i386_start_kernel+0x48/0x4a
    [ 17.211802] startup_32_smp+0x164/0x168
    [ 17.211860] handlers:
    [ 17.211946] [<e8b6baaa>] usb_hcd_irq [usbcore]
    [ 17.212014] [<e8b6baaa>] usb_hcd_irq [usbcore]
    [ 17.212068] Disabling IRQ #16

    I've never seen THIS happening to date, until now.

    - Other possible options I'm not going to try:
    * Upgrade my GPU, maybe to a R700-based HD4x50. Yeah, right...
    * Switch to noVideo. Dude, the very reason I bought this HD2600 was because I actually wanted a GPU that could do something beyond rendering a desktop and SD video! No, that GeForce 6200 is not leaving storage.


    It's a shame that Debian 11 is going to ship with broken video drivers, because otherwise those IBM boxes really shine with it, as long as you stuff them with plenty of RAM and refrain from ever running a web browser on these. For video playback and retrogaming (old games, 8/16-bit emulation), these old Northwoods are not bad picks if you're well aware of its limits.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-11-07, 01:17 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #812 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 3 days
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    Kernel 5.8 just landed on Buster through the magic of backports:

    - It fixes the 2D fuckery on R600, so I'm back to having a non-broken desktop, yay~ Still need to test UVD and stuff UVD works as long as you give up DPM, and it seems next Debian stable would no longer ship with broken video on your Radeon AGP retroboxes.

    - It also breaks the nVidia blob because everybody at both fronts are a bunch of anti-user assholes, of course. The fix? Install the DKMS package from Testing - despite the obvious warning, it works fine, and it incorporates the much-needed 5.8 build fixes.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-11-07, 02:58
    Custom title here

    Post: #952 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Posted by tomman
    Kernel 5.8 just landed on Buster through the magic of backports:

    - It fixes the 2D fuckery on R600, so I'm back to having a non-broken desktop, yay~ Still need to test UVD and stuff UVD works as long as you give up DPM, and it seems next Debian stable would no longer ship with broken video on your Radeon AGP retroboxes.

    - It also breaks the nVidia blob because everybody at both fronts are a bunch of anti-user assholes, of course. The fix? Install the DKMS package from Testing - despite the obvious warning, it works fine, and it incorporates the much-needed 5.8 build fixes.
    Yay!

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 20-11-07, 09:23
    Full mod

    Post: #422 of 443
    Since: 10-30-18

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    Time for a little Debian gripe of my own.

    On one hand, I love tiling window managers because they automatically arrange everything for me to see without having to carefully resize windows all the time.

    On the other hand, I love modern desktop environments like GNOME they make the computer get out of my way and let me focus on watching videos or hacking source-code instead of trying to set my audio volume or remember how to mount a USB drive.

    Unfortunately, those two tastes don't go great together; modern desktop environments are uniformly floating-window based, while the people who like and promote tiling window managers are grateful just to have pixel-addressible displays, never mind anything like polish.

    However, a while ago I discovered a thing called GNOME Flashback that runs most of the GNOME 3 background services under the traditional X11 environment. By default it uses the GNOME 2 window-manager Metacity, but it's pretty easy to swap it out for a tiling window manager, giving me the best of both worlds. I don't expect this comfortable niche to be available forever, but while it lasts, I'm going to hold onto it.

    A couple of weeks ago, I figured it had come to an end. I logged on as normal, but instead of my custom GNOME+i3 setup I got standard GNOME 3, and I couldn't see any particularly relevant errors in the logs or any suggestion of where to begin looking, so I figured all good things must come to an end, and decided to look around for alternatives.

    - Material Shell is a GNOME 3 shell extension that turns it into a tiling window manager. Even though it uses the dwm/awesome tiling model, it just makes so much *sense* visually and is so straightforward I'd probably switch to this full time... except, it's horribly, horribly buggy. Whenever I run it, my logs are filled with errors from gnome-shell, and the last time I tried it in GNOME-on-Wayland mode, it segfaulted GNOME Shell in like 30 seconds. The last time I tried it in GNOME-on-Xorg it worked beautifully, but after going to bed and returning the next morning, I could move the mouse cursor but not click on anything. Maybe I'll come back in six months or so and try it again.

    - XFCE is another X11 desktop that is fairly good about letting you replace the window manager. I like it, I got it working with i3, and it definitely brings back memories of the early days of GNOME 2, but I worry that it's not going to keep up with the messy progress of the Linux desktop. If I switch to something else, I'd like to pick something that will stay out of my way for a long time.

    - Sway is a step in the other direction, it's a tiling Wayland compositor I'd have to add desktop-style polish to. Unfortunately, this turned out to be teeth-grindingly difficult. Over the years, Debian at least has set up a robust system for adding things to X11 sessions, and by default these days when you log in, you get an SSH agent and a GPG agent and PulseAudio and all your environment variables are read from your `~/.profile` and it's pretty easy to set everything up the way you want it. Wayland (or at least, Sway launched from GDM3) doesn't have anything like that - it just launches the Sway binary, and that's it. Sway can launch programs at login, but can't set environment variables, and you certainly don't get an SSH agent or PulseAudio or anything useful by default. Screw that.

    Today I got sick of all these half-assed solutions, and decided to try one more time to repair my GNOME+i3 setup. I cleaned away my old hacks, tried to set up new hacks, and it still didn't work, it didn't even seem to *look* at my `~/.xsession`. Out of desperation I went to look at the Debian package tracker, and sure enough somebody had filed a bug, and wonderfully it was already fixed in the next version. I installed the upcoming version from Unstable, and presto! Now I'm back in comfy ol' GNOME+i3 land. Huzzah!

    The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.
    Posted on 20-11-07, 13:42
    Post: #152 of 203
    Since: 11-24-18

    Last post: 9 days
    Last view: 5 days
    Posted by Screwtape
    Time for a little Debian gripe of my own.

    On one hand, I love tiling window managers because they automatically arrange everything for me to see without having to carefully resize windows all the time.

    On the other hand, I love modern desktop environments like GNOME they make the computer get out of my way and let me focus on watching videos or hacking source-code instead of trying to set my audio volume or remember how to mount a USB drive.

    Unfortunately, those two tastes don't go great together; modern desktop environments are uniformly floating-window based, while the people who like and promote tiling window managers are grateful just to have pixel-addressible displays, never mind anything like polish.


    I have the same problem actually. I love the way i3 works, but Gnome 3 just has too much polish to let it slide. Best of both worlds would be a decent Gnome 3 tiling extension that lets me set things up the way I want, and easily create a 30-70 split or set a fixed 80 column width to a terminal or similar "hacks".

    The other important thing for me would be a Gnome 3 extension that lets me set up my workspaces; A simple one that lets me simply assign workspaces to screens in order of preference would be awesome (imagine working with laptop docked to two extra screens, then remove laptop which collapses all screens to laptop screen, then plug it back in and it all gets reassigned on the fly).

    Another thing that would be *really* nice would be to assign a multi-screen workspace, say you are a graphics artist and your work spans four massive screens, then you can switch to a two-workspace screen and two small workspaces while configuring an animation and viewing the result, then back to massive four screen workspace...
    Posted on 20-11-08, 01:09
    Dinosaur

    Post: #814 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 3 days
    Last view: 11 hours
    After reading this article, and reviewing a bit what the hell is this Wayland thing (apparently it's a weird trainwreck of the Troo UNIX® Way™ and the "it's ooooold, better not learn from the past!" mindset), my opinion on Wayland went from a mere "meh" to a firm "I'm staying on X11 for the foreseeable future".

    Now I know why GDM stutters on my I6400, yet the MATE session is fairly smooth (even with software composition enabled on this ancient R500 GPU): GDM runs on gnome-session, which actually boots into Wayland! (according to htop). So... all these years I have been using a little bit of Wayland without even knowing. Too bad the Wayland architecture is a complete mess (now every DE has to bring everything but the kitchensink, unlike the X11 bloaty way of "we provide some reasonable base services like a clipboard"). And since modern, user-facing large open source software projects are ruled by monkeys in steroids... I'm not dropping DANGER MINES UNSAFE X11 for quite some time to come - It Just Works For Me On My Machine™.

    I'm too old for experimenting with half-baked software these days, y'know.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-11-08, 01:27

    Post: #101 of 105
    Since: 11-13-19

    Last post: 1223 days
    Last view: 1223 days
    You must be much older than my soon-to-be-turning-39, or you're saner than I, as I find myself regularly desktop and even sometimes distro hopping still. I end up going back to Arch. With a shitload of AUR packages. And I'm running the Git versions, albeit without any patches, of wlroots and Wayfire. Oh, and nightly builds of Mesa git, which even proves to break my computer at random, because the build bot that churns out the updates doesn't run any tests, it just grabs, builds, releases! Your computer may start to work again in 24 hours, when Mesa notices the regression and has dutifully fixed it already.

    I also boot Windows at least daily, to play a game with Epic's wonderful kernel driver client side anti-cheat solution baked into it, because the game's developers couldn't figure out a way to implement a 60 player game without performing all the physics on the client side and trusting the client to tell the server where the player is and what the player is doing. (I saw this apparent in a level, where I got disconnected due to my recent string of shitty OpenWrt dhcp server killing my connection the instant the DHCP lease expires, with the whole level continuing to animate and move around me, and continue to accept me moving around relative to it, while all the other players just continued to lock in place and animate whatever state they were in when their last tic was received from the server, which meant that 50 other players were just kind of floating along the drums of the level and walking in place, but never falling through the gaps in the map, as the map continued to animate all on its own.)

    Yes, you can try that, too. Wayfire is a floating window compositor, complete with Compiz like effects that are actually lighter than actual Compiz, and it does support some tiling plugins so you can get a tiled workspace if you so desire. Searching for Wayfire is also great, because Google insists that I ACKCHUALLY intended to search for Wayfair, because extreme popularity means niche search phrases *must* be typographical errors.
    Posted on 20-11-08, 11:13 (revision 1)
    Post: #154 of 203
    Since: 11-24-18

    Last post: 9 days
    Last view: 5 days
    Posted by kode54
    You must be much older than my soon-to-be-turning-39, or you're saner than I, as I find myself regularly desktop and even sometimes distro hopping still. I end up going back to Arch. With a shitload of AUR packages.


    Nah, not older, actually two years younger than you - but I have been using Linux since 2002-ish. :) For now I have resigned myself to running Gnome 3 on Ubuntu - it's not perfect, but for the current single-screen setup I run, it's good enough. If and when I invest in multiple screens again, I'll look into a more efficient setup. Ubuntu stock just works good enough for me, and nearly everything I need to do can be done with either PPAs or the good old ./configure+make+make install dance (these days, ninja and cmake is getting more prevalent, but still works decently).

    The problem with all rolling releases is that you *must* run the latest and greatest. Even when you don't want to. Even when you have already found the perfect setup. That's why I stay away from rolling even though I like and support the concept as such.
    Posted on 20-11-08, 11:55
    Full mod

    Post: #423 of 443
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 863 days
    Last view: 59 days
    A while ago I wrote up instructions on setting up i3 and GNOME, but they bitrotted pretty heavily over the years as GNOME migrated from their own session-management code to re-using systemd. I've now updated it to match my current configuration:

    https://zork.net/~st/jottings/gnome-i3.html

    I also (finally!) figured out how to disable the client-side decorations in gnome-terminal, so my terminals are space-efficient black rectangles once more.

    The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.
    Posted on 20-11-08, 21:35

    Post: #305 of 449
    Since: 10-29-18

    Last post: 8 days
    Last view: 2 hours
    Posted by kode54
    I also boot Windows at least daily, to play a game with Epic's wonderful kernel driver client side anti-cheat solution baked into it, because the game's developers couldn't figure out a way to implement a 60 player game without performing all the physics on the client side and trusting the client to tell the server where the player is and what the player is doing


    Client-side physics is like leaving your front door unlocked - anyone who's checking will see that there's no protection.

    My current setup: Super Famicom ("2/1/3" SNS-CPU-1CHIP-02) → SCART → OSSC → StarTech USB3HDCAP → AmaRecTV 3.10
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