#PSA: Do less.

There's a time to strive and perform, and a time to breathe and exist.

You don't have to self-host.
You don't have to run Linux (although I highly recommend not running Windows, and to a slightly lesser degree, not running MacOS).
You don't have to code.
You don't have to know all the things your friends know and consider to be "basic."

You can just be the very best you you can be.
Start with one little thing at a time. Focus on just one new good habit per week, or per month.

Life is short, but life is also really long. There's no reason to spend it angry or frustrated with yourself.

@rl_dane

Have any advice for those of us who hypothetically self-host so much they can't tell if the internet or their server is down, have run Linux-only for years, code frequently, and know nothing "basic" but everything "weird"? Asking for a friend.

@amin @rl_dane monitoring via gatus, uptime kuma or nagios on a separate server sending you alerts via ntfy

Of course...all self hostable.

Gatus and kuma will let you know if any of your services are down.
Of course you then run into the problem of "what monitors the monitor", so stick a minimal gatus/kuma on your main fleet that just does uptime checks on you monitoring service

Eaaaasy! 😆

@amin @rl_dane seems maybe I missed the context of the thread...
Apologies! 😆

I cannot help with making friends... 😂

@paul @amin

I mean, does it say something about our crazy community that we didn't even miss a beat and just assumed that giving concrete technological recommendations was needed? XD

@rl_dane @amin not so sure about concrete... I tried to imply the solution is absolutely ludicrous, but necessarily ludicrous, because self-hosting is fun except when it isn't

Edit: but even then it still sort of is

@paul @amin

And when it isn't, BOY HOWDY it isn't.

"Self hosting NextCloud is super easy! Just install this snap/Docker and make these few configuration changes..."
> "Ok, cool, it's working!"
> "Wait, now it won't start. What do I do?"
"Ellifiknow, you know how to troubleshoot a SQL database?"
> "Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh"

@rl_dane @paul

No no no no I remember installing NextCloud via snap. It also installed all of gnome-desktop on my tiny VPS completely taking up all CPU cycles to the point I couldn't uninstall anything. I had to slowly run top (which responded super slowly) and kill all the processes.

@amin @paul

Oh man, I remember Gnome bringing my computer to its knees circa 2019.

It was gnome-tracker. Killed EVERY box I ever ran Gnome on back in the day. Horrid.

And my little find script runs in (checks...) four seconds at the most once per hour, and the searches are faster than even krunner, using only grep.

How do they make this stuff so stinking BAD?!?

@rl_dane @paul

GNOME 40 was actually pretty nifty. That was the moment I first fell in love with Linux.

@amin @paul

38 was the last one I used, I think. I was kinda done with it when they announced the integer versioning scheme. I've always hated that.

@rl_dane @amin gnome after version 3 is stupid. Gnome 2 forever! Although, back then I was still primarily using xfce4.
@paul @rl_dane @amin Yeah, I stopped using Gnome when they moved from 2 to 3 it went from a totally usable desktop interface to a kindergarden tablet interface.

@sotolf @paul @amin

Highly opinionated software/projects are only ok when you opinion doesn't absolutely suck, and especially when that opinion isn't forced on the entire community as the default.

Nobody is yelling at "Hot Dog Linux" (that's actually a thing, named after the garish Windows 3.x theme) for being ugly, because it's not the default anywhere.

Somebody gets the great idea to make something crappy like Gnome 3 or systemd the default everywhere, and then the apologists have the gall to say crap like "You're not being FoRcEd to use it!" as if it's a trivial choice to move away from the defaults, especially when they're system components.

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul

People in this thread are forgetting that I actually liked the DE you're all saying no one likes and it was the reason I first fell in love with Linux.

@amin @sotolf @paul

I don't have a problem with the DE itself. That's a matter of taste, preference, and workflow.

Its everything else about it that wigs me out. Culture, structure, governance.

Somehow these types of conversations always go sideways due to semantics. Sometimes due to subterfuge, but mostly just honest miscommunication.

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul

I haven't looked too much into that side but I've liked what I've seen.

@amin @sotolf @paul

I may be way off base, but everything I've seen from that community has been corporate-level insufferable smugness.

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul

Hm. That's not what I've seen browsing GNOME Planet or reading the HIG, but it's possible.

@amin @sotolf @paul

I mean, the HIG is fine, I guess, but that's just a document.

And I guess the latter is their forum or whatever, and yeah, I'm sure you'll find some helpful people on there being helpful.

But what about the way they've silenced people and ejected people from their org with zero transparency. (Don't ask me for deets, the last thing I want to do is go look up a lunduke article X'D )

What about their dismissive and condescending attitude towards their own users, saying "for the love of God, don't change this, it breaks my workflow!"

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul

And I guess the latter is their forum or whatever, and yeah, I'm sure you'll find some helpful people on there being helpful.

No, no, haha, "GNOME Planet" is essentially a combined feed of the blogs of GNOME designers/programmers. Similar terminology is used by a lot of other projects for similar combined feeds. (For example, Planet Debian: https://planet.debian.org/ )

Planet Debian

@amin @rl_dane @paul Of course they are treating the people they agree with well, others that don't follow their dogma and their patterns, not as much..

@sotolf @rl_dane @paul

It's just unfiltered articles from RSS feeds of anyone marked as an official developer (and I think possibly from devs of some apps in the ecosystem). 🤷

@amin @sotolf @paul

I've spoken to at least one official dev on here, and while the conversation was mostly cordial, his attitude was a bit much.

Ask @tripplehelix, he probably remembers the convo.

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix

I don't actually have any beef in either direction (I am beefless—vegetarian, even); I don't use GNOME anymore or plan to use it in the forseeable future.

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix

I'm more likely to code my own WM than go back to GNOME.

@amin @rl_dane @paul @tripplehelix Hopefully you're still on X, because making "just" a window manager on Wayland is not possible.

@sotolf @rl_dane @paul @tripplehelix

I can't get X to work right with my HiDPI screen. If things are scaled right, they're at half the resolution/DPI my screen supports.

@amin @rl_dane @paul @tripplehelix So that means I should not have a hidpi screen, I don't see high resolution anyway :p

@sotolf @rl_dane @paul @tripplehelix

All of my screens have been HiDPI, so "don't use a HiDPI screen" isn't useful advice in my case.

I've used normal-resolution screens and they're fine; the image being half the resolution the screen supports looks a lot worse than a screen natively being lower-resolution.

@amin @rl_dane @paul @tripplehelix Ah yeah, I was not implying you shouldn't use one, just that I shouldn't :)

@amin @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix

Do you mean you can't get full resolution when running XOrg natively, or just running XOrg programs on top of Sway?

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix

I can’t get either of those to work.

@amin @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix

Ok, I've never seen XOrg not handle full resolution when running natively.
That's quite odd.

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix

I either get full resolution but everything is tiny or full size but half resolution. I haven’t figured out how to scale the UI up without decreasing DPI.

Wayland figures it all out automagically.

@amin @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix

To be fair, the only time I've had to mess with HIDPI and X11, it was KDE, which kinda figures it all out for you.

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix

Which definitely implies there is a way to get it working, but I had significant trouble finding it in my own research. It's not a well-enough documented problem, I guess.

@amin @rl_dane @sotolf @paul

Us X11 peeps are all on monitors from 2005, so I guess it just doesn't matter to us ;)

@amin @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix

I saw a couple different suggestions, one involving xrandr, another involving .Xdefaults. I'd send you links, but it doesn't sound like you're interested in trying it right now. ;)

@rl_dane @amin @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix I did it in pure X11, where my new $work laptop has 200 dpi.

  • doubled (18×36px) font (adjusted ~/.Xresources accordingly so I get sensible sizes in xterm by default)
  • manually upscaled every single .xpm in the IceWM theme I use
  • installed the big-cursor Debian package
  • wrote exec /usr/bin/X -retro -nolisten tcp -dpi 192 "$@" into ~/.xserverrc (even though the actual density is more like 196×202 dpi, having it be exactly 96*2 is a massive benefit)
  • put QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2 GDK_SCALE=2; export QT_SCALE_FACTOR GDK_SCALE near the top of my usual ~/.xinitrc

I think that’s all, IIRC I didn’t even need to set an Xft thing.

Things like xmessage(1) are ridiculously small, but everything else “just works”, even sizing in GIMP and the likes.

@amin @rl_dane @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix see below if you want to try again, we can also debug that

@sotolf @amin @rl_dane @paul @tripplehelix you do in photos or in antialiased truetype fonts.

At the moment, you cannot avoid displays with significantly more than 100 dpi, so might as well go for the 200 dpi ones as it’s a simple integer upscale then.