I dunno. I've been making free software for 3 decades and I still think it's fun. While I do get slop PRs sometimes, it's not frequent. And when I want to land a patch in someone else's project, I haven't really been…
Developers are also creative professionals. It's a bit like saying you never hear complaints from piano players, only dentists. But dentists also play piano, just like everyone else. Dentists just know more about teeth…
It's wild that anyone still uses Adobe software these days. Adobe is one of the most famous companies for enshittification, and the open-source alternatives are generally very good. Personally, I switched to open-source…
The full answer for this is a long, wild ride which would fill entire chapters... but the short answer is: Zen's author broke the extension API so badly it's literally impossible to do a lot of what my extension needs…
It could run extensions a lot better if it ran on other platforms, so the extension developers could actually test it and support it properly. I'd love to support Orion, but I can't because I don't have a practical way…
I would like my extensions to support every browser possible, but if a browser only runs on Mac, I won't be able to test my stuff in it. I've had users asking me for Orion support for ages, and I keep telling them I'll…
I've got an overview of a lot of it in another thread here... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49827552 Some of the main parts are: - Basically never logging out. Everything just stays running. - Lots of desktops,…
I used to think task bars were pretty neat, back in the 1990s. But once I started keeping more than a dozen windows open, it became a waste of space. And now that I typically have 200+ windows open, the concept of a…
Same... ish. 2D grid of desktops. Can add/remove them with a hotkey, but I normally have a 3x5 grid. Hyper+Arrows to navigate them. Hyper-s to stick/unstick a window, which also works for moving a window to a different…
(part 2/2) I have my dotfiles and other stuff checked into Subversion, with different programs in different modules so I can build each host's config out of a set of modules, and not have to have everything checked out…
It's a lot of stuff accumulated over a long period of time, sort of pieced together... but here are some of the details: The overall setup is X11 with a Sawfish window manager. X11 provides a lot of cool features like…
> Don't make me explicitly keep track of things, just hold onto it all for me! > > There's some universe where my desktop is basically a Notion-like thing, and I can just throw things into semi-persistent workspaces…
I was at Canonical during the Ubuntu Phone thing, and it was wild to watch that play out. It started out with a bunch of good ideas... but somehow, every last one of those good ideas got overturned and reversed. Like,…
I've been using approximately the same desktop setup for ages, and yet, it often still feels like I'm living in the future because mainstream desktops still haven't really adopted some of the best features, and in some…
> zero evidence That's a bold claim. It doesn't tell me there is zero evidence... hardly anything has zero evidence. It just tells me you either reject the evidence or haven't looked. It's not hard to check. For the…
Becoming active on Twitter in 2006: sunglasses Becoming active on Twitter in 2016: popcorn Becoming active on Xitter in 2026: red ballcap It makes a statement. Is it a statement you want to make?
Whether the topic is Wayland or cheese or the finer points of knitting, one does not make an anonymous throwaway account to post statements one wants to stand behind and be associated with. Using an anon burner account…
> This brings so many advantages, such as true tear-free graphics and lower input latency. Curiously, people always seem to list the same advantages, and it's a very short list. Fewer (but still non-zero) torn frames…
One guy creating an anonymous throwaway account, to make questionable posts without risking action against his real account. BTW, what's the policy on that sort of thing here?
Metux (Enrico Weigelt) was banned from the Xorg project because his patches kept breaking things, often in ways which demonstrated he didn't even do the bare minimum before pushing commits. Like, adding code which…
Exactly. It's hard to be enthusiastic about something which breaks a lot of stuff I rely on daily, when the benefit is that it fixes problems I've never had. My theory about the motivation behind the extra security is…
Dang, who is this Zak guy? Seems like a huge nerd. (spoiler: he's the admin of /r/flashlight, an expert on lighting, a widely respected reviewer, maintainer of the community's quarterly "arbitrary list of popular…
It's funny to see someone using a LLM as a compiler, making it convert higher-level operations into assembly, instead of just using a compiler.
I dunno. I've been making free software for 3 decades and I still think it's fun. While I do get slop PRs sometimes, it's not frequent. And when I want to land a patch in someone else's project, I haven't really been…
Developers are also creative professionals. It's a bit like saying you never hear complaints from piano players, only dentists. But dentists also play piano, just like everyone else. Dentists just know more about teeth…
It's wild that anyone still uses Adobe software these days. Adobe is one of the most famous companies for enshittification, and the open-source alternatives are generally very good. Personally, I switched to open-source…
The full answer for this is a long, wild ride which would fill entire chapters... but the short answer is: Zen's author broke the extension API so badly it's literally impossible to do a lot of what my extension needs…
It could run extensions a lot better if it ran on other platforms, so the extension developers could actually test it and support it properly. I'd love to support Orion, but I can't because I don't have a practical way…
I would like my extensions to support every browser possible, but if a browser only runs on Mac, I won't be able to test my stuff in it. I've had users asking me for Orion support for ages, and I keep telling them I'll…
I've got an overview of a lot of it in another thread here... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49827552 Some of the main parts are: - Basically never logging out. Everything just stays running. - Lots of desktops,…
I used to think task bars were pretty neat, back in the 1990s. But once I started keeping more than a dozen windows open, it became a waste of space. And now that I typically have 200+ windows open, the concept of a…
Same... ish. 2D grid of desktops. Can add/remove them with a hotkey, but I normally have a 3x5 grid. Hyper+Arrows to navigate them. Hyper-s to stick/unstick a window, which also works for moving a window to a different…
(part 2/2) I have my dotfiles and other stuff checked into Subversion, with different programs in different modules so I can build each host's config out of a set of modules, and not have to have everything checked out…
It's a lot of stuff accumulated over a long period of time, sort of pieced together... but here are some of the details: The overall setup is X11 with a Sawfish window manager. X11 provides a lot of cool features like…
> Don't make me explicitly keep track of things, just hold onto it all for me! > > There's some universe where my desktop is basically a Notion-like thing, and I can just throw things into semi-persistent workspaces…
I was at Canonical during the Ubuntu Phone thing, and it was wild to watch that play out. It started out with a bunch of good ideas... but somehow, every last one of those good ideas got overturned and reversed. Like,…
I've been using approximately the same desktop setup for ages, and yet, it often still feels like I'm living in the future because mainstream desktops still haven't really adopted some of the best features, and in some…
> zero evidence That's a bold claim. It doesn't tell me there is zero evidence... hardly anything has zero evidence. It just tells me you either reject the evidence or haven't looked. It's not hard to check. For the…
Becoming active on Twitter in 2006: sunglasses Becoming active on Twitter in 2016: popcorn Becoming active on Xitter in 2026: red ballcap It makes a statement. Is it a statement you want to make?
Whether the topic is Wayland or cheese or the finer points of knitting, one does not make an anonymous throwaway account to post statements one wants to stand behind and be associated with. Using an anon burner account…
> This brings so many advantages, such as true tear-free graphics and lower input latency. Curiously, people always seem to list the same advantages, and it's a very short list. Fewer (but still non-zero) torn frames…
One guy creating an anonymous throwaway account, to make questionable posts without risking action against his real account. BTW, what's the policy on that sort of thing here?
Metux (Enrico Weigelt) was banned from the Xorg project because his patches kept breaking things, often in ways which demonstrated he didn't even do the bare minimum before pushing commits. Like, adding code which…
Exactly. It's hard to be enthusiastic about something which breaks a lot of stuff I rely on daily, when the benefit is that it fixes problems I've never had. My theory about the motivation behind the extra security is…
Dang, who is this Zak guy? Seems like a huge nerd. (spoiler: he's the admin of /r/flashlight, an expert on lighting, a widely respected reviewer, maintainer of the community's quarterly "arbitrary list of popular…
It's funny to see someone using a LLM as a compiler, making it convert higher-level operations into assembly, instead of just using a compiler.