Vanilla KDE on desktop, Niri WM+Noctalia shell on laptop. Firstly, because for some reason I cannot get any touchpad gestures to work on KDE, and secondly because the niri paradigm of horizontal tiling is just perfect for a laptop. I tried to use Gnome for a while before landing on Niri, but the lack of configurability and the reliance on extensions for basic functionality drove me nuts.

Oh my god, Krohnkite was so unbelievably buggy for me, it kept fully crashing KDE. I tried to get it to work for like a week, but eventually I just had to give up.

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My first experience with *nix was a professor leading me into a server room though two biometric locks and setting up the config files for a compute cluster faster than I would have been able to open the files.

He was using Vim, and though it took me a while to learn, the sheer speed with which he was able to get us out of that unbelievably noisy server room sold me for life.

Well, I use vim for text edits and nvim+extensions for an IDE. As close to a vim purist as is reasonable. But frankly, it’s the first one you learn to use well.

Yeah, this is the good argument against rust-coreutils. Caring what programming language your binaries are made with? That’s pretty out there.

In the announcement they say the resolution (2880x1920) was chosen to be used at 2x scaling for that reason.

I dont fully get that? Its not a multiple of 1920x1080, so thats unclear to me.

I was a longtime KDE user, but the lack of reasonable trackpad gestures drove me up the wall on my laptop, so I’ve been using niri+noctalia for the last couple months. It just feels so right, it’s lovely. Still some edge cases, but overall just so good.

Proton is still wine with extra sauce. It’s just that occasionally the sauce tastes bad :)

Ahhh got it. I thought it was a “I know this is inadvisable, but dammit I’m going to do it anyways” type of post :)

You can’t run steam with no compositor whatsoever, but you can use the steam deck’s solution of using their gamescope micro compositor for everything. You should be able to install gamescope and just run gamescope -e {other CLI options} steam (assuming you’re using the native Arch package and not the flatpak).

My experience using gamescope for steam has been very mixed, but I’ve seen a tutorial somewhere on doing exactly this.

Gamescope isn’t necessarily the best option for every game, and having a normal compositor (which, for now, must support XWayland) is just a much more flexible solution.

This may also be possible with something more general like xwayland-satellite, but frankly steam and all its games still run on the X11 protocol, so if you really don’t need a GUI you might be able to install a vanilla X11 instance and hook to that directly. I can’t speak to either of those options directly.

But is this worth it, in a practical sense? No. You have a reasonably powerful system, and the only performance you’d be saving is a few percent of a single core on the CPU, which in your config is absolutely not worth it.

The GNOME platform application is used by flatpaks. Basically, a flatpak can be built against/designed to be used with a specific visual toolkit. To do that, it needs to download specific parts of that toolkit, which is what you’re seeing.

Just FYI, pipx does use a virtual environment behind the scenes. The idea with pipx or uvx is to install a python script as a standalone script.