:: Re: [DNG] So what desktop do you us…
Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Martin Steigerwald
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] So what desktop do you use?
Hi William.

Is it difficult to answer you, cause in your replies threading is only
visible in the HTML version of the mail. I'd prefer proper threading in
plain text part and no HTML part at all.

Can't Googlemail do better? I avoid Googlemail and other large cloud
provider mail for privacy reasons. I given up on avoiding Googlemail and
go on mails to mailing lists, fully being aware that a lot of people use
it. Mails to mailing lists are public anyway.

Trying to fix up threading for this time again, cause I am interested in
the topic and enjoying reading your insightful replies. But it takes quite
a bit more time to answer that way even with the assistance of KMail
inserting additional quote layers for me as I mark text areas. For
answering I opened your mail as HTML in a separate window and tried to
replicate quoting in plain text version in the composer window.

I truly hope KDEPIM developers either fix up Akonadi for good one time or
base KMail on a better working framework. Cause KMail otherwise is one of
the best mail programs I have seen so far. It is painful to see how much
it still suffers from reliability issues in Akonadi, even though Akonadi
nowadays is more reliable than it was in a long time.

William Peckham via Dng - 21.09.24, 23:51:27 CEST:
> > > RSS reader, Social Media, Gemini protocol rendering, KDE Connect
> > > integration, etc. It is highly customized with lots of custom
> > > keybindings, making it unsuitable for coding or testing code.
> >
> > Ah, interesting. That would indeed be something that could not be
> > covered by using activities. Cause the key bindings would still be
> > global.
>
> Exactly. But since I can log in with different accounts and desktops AT
> THE SAME TIME it is just a CTRL-ALT-F3 (or whatever) to slide over from
> my Plasma desktop to my OpenBox desktop. (Manjaro thing perhaps)


Ah, yes, I forgot that. I used that a long time as I still used work
laptop for private stuff. I used two different user accounts for that.
Nowadays I have two laptops. Back then it was a 15 inch ThinkPad T520
brick. And carrying two of those around… quite heavy. These times I have
two ThinkPad T14 AMD. A Gen 2 and a Gen 5. I also have the old Gen 1 for
private use. Currently it is just a backup should there be something odd
with the Gen 5. But these are smaller and lighter and thus I can carry two
of them around if need be.

> > I see. I never got around to really testing something like Openbox.
> > Maybe coming from the Amiga I expect certain GUI stuff to work out of
> > the box and feared that I would need to much time to configure more
> > minimal approaches to do what I like.
>
> I came a LONG way to get here, all the way from CP/M and VSPC.  GUI
> desktops are just apps to me, so I play with them until I find the one I
> like for my current purpose.    Plasma has become my main, because it
> allows me to config everything as I like for daily use.  For coding I
> want something that just gets out of my way.  Fluxbox was that for the
> LONGEST time, but I am finding other simple desktops at least as good. 
> ( I miss WINDOWMAKER though.)


Would be interesting to have a way to have two completely separate Plasma
sessions within one user account. But this got more difficult than before.
Back in KDE 3 times it stored almost everything in ~/.kde. And if you'd
manage to have another instance putting everything in ~/.kde-programming
for example then probably you could configure a Plasma desktop for simple
stuff :). But nowadays its all spread over in ~/.config, ~/.local, mixed
with all the other stuff from other independent apps or apps from other
desktop environments you choose to use while using Plasma as desktop.

So yeah, using something like openbox in that case seems to be the easier
approach. Especially as you do not need all the stuff Plasma provides.

> > Yeah, while Plasma and KWin is not slow… I bet such a minimal setup
> > would still be faster. On newer laptops opening a Konsole window is
> > instant, at least when the app has been used before and still is
> > cached. But I still remember a slight delay for opening even just a
> > Konsole window while on AmigaOS it felt like the shell window was
> > there before I even clicked the icon.
>
> I use YAKUAKE for most terminal work. And screen at the other end if
> that work is remote so I can disconnect and then reconnect later.
> I have browsers (Chromium, Firefox, Floorp, Tor Browser, Ladybird,
> Brave, Falkon, Dillo) , Kristall for Gemini, Liferea for RSS, some
> Fediverse clients, and all of the usual KDE tools.


Quite a lot of browsers. I try to limit them. Using Firefox for most of my
needs. But with different profiles. Mainly cause there are so crappy
websites accessing information from a gazillion of other domains that for
my main most restricted profile it becomes difficult to make the necessary
exceptions. So I have a profile that allows more by default. And a minimal
profile for some of my own server services like Nextcloud WebRTC talk. I
know this is not doing anything odd, so I can skip the protections from
the other profiles.

What do you use Gemini for?

> > I used to do a lot of shell work (BASH, KSH) [[Did you know you can
> > write client/server pairs in shell on modern Linux kernels? It seems
> > weird, but it works!]]. I used C, COBOL, Pascal, PERL 4/5, Assembler,
> > BASIC, FORTRAN, JES-2, JCL, HTML/CSS, SASS/SASS-GRAPH, and several
> > database specific languages. SQL is more general and works more
> > places, but is NOT performant!
> >
> > These days just a bit of BASH, V-LANG, FreePascal, and whatever I run
> > into that seems interesting.


I thought V¹ to be quite interesting. Unfortunately last I checked it was
not packaged for Debian. Crystal is also quite interesting, but needs the
LLVM as backend. I love their approach to performance³.

V reminds me of Amiga E. I programmed quite a bit in Amiga E. It has a
blazing fast compiler which also does the linking and everything else.
While I did some work in C as well, I prefer programming languages that do
not force me to put ";" separators manually all the time.

Actually I am preferring languages which do not impose to many chores on
me. That is part of the reason why I prefer Ruby over Python. Python code
blocks looks asymmetrical because of the missing closing statement.

I do format code carefully, but I prefer doing it how I choose.

Refusing imposed policy is part of the reason I ended up with Devuan :)

[1] I bet you mean: https://vlang.io/

[2] Is V still fast? https://fast.vlang.io/

[3] https://crystal-lang.org/

> > "Klytus, I'm bored. What plaything can you offer me today?" - Ming


What movie is this from?

I am rewatching older movies and TV series currently. It is interesting to
see how many of the partly hidden messages I know understand. They are
telling you a lot more through movies than I thought.

Best,
--
Martin