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.

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.

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.

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.

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 updated for system packages. Automatic container updates with docker. 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.

The main disadvantage is that it’s less automated, and also you don’t get automatic updates without any other package management system in place. If you’re using something like e.g. source packages from the AUR then that solves both those problems and there’s no downsides (beyond extra computational power/time you spend waiting) so long as the package maintainer does their job correctly.

Can it mess with my system in any way?

Not… really? I guess if you’re downloading random tarballs off the internet and running make install without checking the integrity or trustworthiness of what you’re downloading then you could get a virus. But if you’re certain the source you’re getting is legitimate, then I suppose the only way building from source could “mess up your system” is if you mess up your system libraries or something whilst trying to install dependencies.

Do you have a Ryzen CPU by any chance? I had an issue like this for ages and it turns out it was a faulty Ryzen power state that was disabled by default on Windows, but not on Linux. If this happens to be your issue, there are ways you can disable the power state in software: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Ryzen#Soft_lock_freezing

There was one question where it wouldn’t let me do this. I think the media streaming question I had to click “Other”.

Never used a dashboard… I just manage my services on the cli with plain docker commands.

What really? I thought the screenshot looked like electron/web app slop but I was like, maybe they’ve just gone for a “modern” gtk/qt theme. It’s actually just a Firefox PWA?

Watchtower for automated updates. For containers that don’t have a latest tag to track, editing the version number manually and then docker compose pull && docker compose up -d is simple enough.

I use catgirl

Yes, if you use the “task list” block. You can also have checkbox bullet points but I don’t use them, not really sure what the use-case for those are when you can just use the task list.

I self-host Notesnook and found it easy to set up. Been using it as my main note-taking app for years now and I’m really happy with it.