The mentioned performance governor runs the CPU permanently at maximum frequency, which is obviously bad on battery powered devices and on devices with lacking thermal headroom. I think it might cause problems in virtualized environments as well but I’m not sure about that.

It understands \n if I recall correctly. You can also write regular bash, use templating tools, etc. Just use the nativeBuildInputs parameter if you need a binary that isn’t provided by stdenv.

Another alternative approach would be to add a duplicate desktop file, but to write it declaratively using Home Manager:

# in home.nix
home.file.".local/share/applications/firefox.desktop".source =
  pkgs.runCommand "firefox-desktop" { } ''
    cp "${pkgs.firefox}/share/applications/firefox.desktop" "$out"
    substituteInPlace "$out" \
      --replace-fail "Terminal=false" "Terminal=true"
  '';

# - or -
home.file.".local/share/applications/firefox.desktop".text = ''
  [Desktop Entry]
  Name=Firefox
  Icon=firefox
  Exec=firefox --name firefox %U
'';

It would be possible to DIY this with user activation scripts, but I don’t really see a value in doing that over the symlinkJoin.

Since the desktop files come directly from a package you’ll need to change the package you’re installing. This works best if you use the postPatch phase of symlinkJoin:

pkgs.symlinkJoin {
  inherit (pkgs.firefox) pname version;
  paths = [ pkgs.firefox ];
  postPatch = ''
    # String replacement example - will run the app in a terminal
    substituteInPlace "$out/share/applications/firefox.desktop" \
      --replace-fail "Terminal=false" "Terminal=true"
  '';
}

The reason for using symlinkJoin here is that it creates a package with the same outputs as the original Firefox, but with this bash script having run. You can use this like any other package:

let
  firefox' = <...>
in
{
  environment.systemPackages = [ firefox' ];
  # - or -
  programs.firefox.package = firefox';
}

Note that symlinkJoin has special handling for postPatch, but ignores all other stdenv phases, so you need to do everything in one bash script. You can use all the parameters for runCommand though, such as buildInputs and nativeBuildInputs - e.g. for compiling sass in a wrapper derivation.

In some cases it’s useful to also inherit meta or passthru because it’s used in some nixpkgs/nixos sanity checks, but it’s usually not required.

Another approach would be to use overrideAttrs, which will also work but will cause Nix to rebuild the package from scratch. This might be fine or even desired in some cases, but you probably don’t want to do that in this case.

Many people who don’t know what they’re talking about in this thread. No, used memory does not include cached memory. You can confirm this trivially by running free -m and adding up the numbers (used + cached + free = total). Used memory can not be reclaimed until the process holding it frees it or dies. Not all cached memory can be reclaimed either, which is why the kernel reports an estimate of available memory. That’s the number that really matters, because aside from some edges cases that’s the number that determines whether you’re out of memory or not.

Anyway the fact that you can’t run Linux with 16GB is weird and indicates that some software you are using has a RAM leak (a Firefox extension perhaps?). Firefox will use memory if it’s there but it’s designed to cope with low memory as well, it just unloads tabs quicker so you have to reload often. There are also extensions that make tab unloading more aggressive, maybe that would help - especially if there’s memory pressure from other processes too.

Pano perhaps? It doesn’t show up at the cursor but you can search in it, the keyboard works the way you would expect and it auto inserts on selection.

To be fair showing the overview on startup makes perfect sense on vanilla gnome, it’s only dumb if you install one of the two specific extensions that partly replace it.

How was it an obvious data breach? The attack was done via Codebergs notification system. It’s no different from the notification you got from me writing this comment.

In this case it’s more of a switch away from the last cool new thing. Totem (like Music) was built around a media library navigated from within the app. By default Totem doesn’t even support opening videos from the file manager, which is something you would probably expect of a video player. It also crashed for me when I tried using it as intended so I’m not surprised to see it replaced by an app that really is just a video player.

That said many apps get replaced not for feature reasons but just by being GTK3, and they tend to get replaced by their own forks to GTK4 (such as the upcoming replacement of Evince). Why their devs choose to upgrade toolkits this way I cannot say.

Insightful article. I have to confess I never realized the accessibility situation was this bad.

I also want to highlight this excerpt from the comments:

Making things accessible isn’t hard technically. But it requires coordination and people to care about it enough to work on it at the expense of other features. If [I] developed an application on a team and said I had ‘one security guy that works on that stuff as long as it doesn’t interfere with the rest of our work’ I’d be dragged over the coals and have my project forked by the public.

But with accessibility? There’s really no sense of priority or urgency despite it being broken for years and not putting much effort in to fixing it.

It’s prettier than a TTY and you can pick whether you want a Wayland or an X11 session without having to know the correct startup commands. You can pick between different desktops too. And a Display Manager can offer on-screen keyboard and touchscreen support while a TTY can’t (at least GDM does, I’m not sure about SDDM off the top of my head).

Aside from that whatever command you are using in the TTY to launch Plasma might or might not be the same commands SDDM uses, which might or might not lead to issues in setting up the environment. If your environment is fine and you don’t care about having to use a physical keyboard then of course you can remove it. It’s not exactly load bearing.

Try launching Steam from the terminal so you have a chance at seeing an actual error message, at least for the crashing games.

It might be the kernel as the other comment says since the 9070 is pretty new. If it works without issues on something like Fedora or OpenSUSE TW then that was probably the issue.

Running poweroff is one of the correct ways on anything Systemd (details). If that doesn’t work then something is broken.

If you haven’t done so already try looking into the journal. sudo journalctl -b -1 -e will take you to the end of the log for the last boot.

I am very sorry to remind everyone about the existence of Visual Basic, but it has:

• VbCrLf
• VbNewLine
• ControlChars.CrLf
• ControlChars.NewLine
• Environment.NewLine
• Chr(13) & Chr(10)

And I know what you’re asking: Yes, of course all of them have subtly different behavior, and some of them only work in VB.NET and not in classic VB or VBA.

The only thing you can rely on is that “\r\n” doesn’t work.

GUIs do have advantages in things like discoverability. Honestly the 1983s Apple Lisa nailed this with the idea of having clickable menus annotated with keyboard shortcuts, so users could do the same thing faster next time. For some reason we stopped doing this (especially in web apps), but that’s a reason to make better GUIs, not to RETVRN to the feature set of a VT100.

I don’t know why we have to go on nonsensical diatribes about “UNIX wizards” though when we’re fundamentally talking about a handful of minor UI improvements to things that already exist.

It depends a lot on which specific GPU you have and whether it’s a laptop.

New-ish GPU in a desktop with the monitor plugged directly into the GPU? Easy to get working, literally a checkbox on most distros.

1000 series GPU or older in a laptop and you need reasonable battery life and/or some “advanced” features like DP Alt-Mode? Good luck.

Edit: Also, no Wayland until very recently. Possibly never, depending on the age of the GPU.

It’s wild how on the orange website I can read entirely sensible discussions about tricky Bash semantics or whatever, while people in a parallel thread are seriously arguing the Trump admin’s repressions are dwarfed by… whatever “repressions” they think happened during Covid. And I don’t even click on the threads about disabilities (especially autism) anymore because it’s so predictably sad.

Yeah some people seem to have this expectation that there should just magically be a button to unbreak the PC. They talk about their personal pain points when using Linux as if there’s a conspiracy of devs to hide the unbreak buttons for the sake of elitism, but that… just isn’t a thing? If it was that easy to fix an issue, you probably wouldn’t need to fix it because the system would already come unbroken by default. I sympathize with everyone’s Bluetooth configuration woes but mostly it’s a pain in the ass because Bluetooth, in general, is a pain in the ass, not because of elitist devs (who I should mention are doing this in their free time for no pay. There’s almost no money in desktop Linux, unlike in servers).

kwriteconfig6 is barely documented because you’re not really supposed to use it. All of the settings that users are expected to change are in the nice settings app that Plasma ships with. Using kwriteconfig (or equivalently a dconf editor on GNOME) is like editing the registry on Windows; you are implicitly opting into more power, out of most guardrails and into potential breakage. The UX being a bit questionable (though honestly it’s really not as bad as you’re saying, it does exactly what it sounds like it will do?) is to a degree intentional, because you’re not supposed to be using this unless you know what you are doing.

To be fair that’s not the entire story, since you need to actually resolve the conflicts first, which is slightly scary since your worktree will be broken while you do it and your Linter will be shouting at you.

You may also want a dedicated merge tool that warns you before accidentally commiting a conflict and creating a broken commit.

Oh and non trivial resolutions may or may not create an evil merge which may or may not be desirable depending on which subset of git automation features you use.

Using git status often is definitely good advice though.