Changed my #OpenBSD writing-dedicated box from running #cwm to #i3wm -- I like cwm, but it's still a bit too mousey for my taste.

I also changed all of my fonts (both xterm and i3/i3status) to be bitmapped (the "fixed" font), so everything is looking REALLY crisp.

Maybe I'm getting quite crochety, but at this point, I think I'd much rather have a lower res screen with crisp bitmapped fonts than a crazy high-res screen and vector fonts.

The only thing I'm missing is #emoji. My i3status looks like
cpu 31% | load 0.80 | mem 9% | dsk 13.4% | net Gallifrey 82% | chrg 89% 0.00W | Sun 2024.05.26 06:42 AM

instead of
cpu 05% | 📈 load 0.29 |  28.5% |  disk 59.7% |  Gallifrey 67% |  Sun 2024.05.26 06:42 AM

@rl_dane still don't really get the premise of having a bar, it doesn't really do anything helpful.

@sotolf

lol... brofam, #DWM is calling you. Embrace your total eclipse of the scrogneuneurd!! 🤣

@rl_dane I tried DWM, used it for a month or so, really didn't connect well with it, also it does come with a bar by default :p BSPWM if anything is quite a lot simpler than DWM, and I don't need to recompile just because I wanted to change a shortcut... :p

@sotolf

haha, I'm sure there are good patches for a config file. I haven't used it in a good while, but I had my own build of st (suckless' terminal) with some good patches, like for a scrollback buffer and dynamic font sizing.

I recently ran a script I wrote to display the title of a window, and found it didn't work in KDE because it was using swaymsg. So basically, Wayland doesn't have a standard way (so far) of getting window properties that work among all #Wayland compositors.

Man, stuff like that is really frustrating some times. I agree that XOrg is kind of a dead end, code-maintenance-wise, but it's like the designers of Wayland just wanted to come up with something that would work ok with Gnome and KDE and smeg the rest of the universe.

Oh no... I'm complaining about Wayland to Sotolf... I am feeding a monster. XD

@rl_dane I have tried dealing with suckless software and patches, and the more patches you bring into st the more wacked out it becomes, it starts having weird issues, some of the patches don't gel well with each other, and hand merging them are not that much fun.

Xorg is great, it still works, and you can pry it out of my could dead hands, I don't see the value of wayland, sure it does things differently, but in my experience, even after well over a decade of work on it, it still doesn't really work well, it makes things harder for no good reason just "security" well if someone gets so into my box that they can execute code on it I'm screwed no matter what I have on there, I just don't really get it.

Maybe some day it will catch up, but today, no today is not that day :p

@sotolf

> @rl_dane I have tried dealing with suckless software and patches, and the more patches you bring into st the more wacked out it becomes, it starts having weird issues, some of the patches don't gel well with each other, and hand merging them are not that much fun.

@thelinuxcast recently compared Gnome (needing extensions to be usable) to suckless' tools (needing patches to be usable), and now I see how that can go both ways (positive and negative). One time 5 years ago when I was trying to get along with Gnome, I had two conflicting extensions that filled up /var (which was /, derp) within minutes with log messages. sigh. As an old friend would say rather dismissively in these situations, "NEXT VICTIM!"

> Xorg is great, it still works, and you can pry it out of my cold dead hands, I don't see the value of wayland, sure it does things differently, but in my experience, even after well over a decade of work on it, it still doesn't really work well, it makes things harder for no good reason just "security" well if someone gets so into my box that they can execute code on it I'm screwed no matter what I have on there, I just don't really get it.
>
> Maybe some day it will catch up, but today, no today is not that day :p

I have recently re-tooled EVERYTHING to #Wayland: #i3wm -> #sway, and #KDE #Plasma 5.27 to Wayland(-mode), even though it's a touch buggy, and there are things I rely on like Xbanish that just have no replacement in Plasma+Sway. My only XOrg box now is my #OpenBSD box (now running i3, formerly #cwm).

Other than the issue of screen tearing when watching videos, and some purely theoretical performance improvements, I'm no better for being 99% Wayland now. Sway is great, and does absolutely everything I need (even though it's very slow to reload compared to i3wm for some reason), but that's only because the Sway community has done a lot of hard work to re-implement everything that the i3 community needed/wanted (or provide hacks/scripts to do the same). KDE+Wayland is not nearly as nice an experience.

So... uhh.. Wayland is THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE, but just as we have been suspecting for the past decade, the future kinda sucks. :P

@rl_dane @thelinuxcast

Well, there is a reason I neither use GNOME, nor DWM, or ST :p

I have recently re-tooled EVERYTHING to #Wayland: #i3wm -> #sway, and #KDE #Plasma 5.27 to Wayland(-mode), even though it's a touch buggy, and there are things I rely on like Xbanish that just have no replacement in Plasma+Sway. My only XOrg box now is my #OpenBSD box (now running i3, formerly #cwm).

Exactly, there is the reason why I stay on Xorg, there is no real compelling reason to switch.

Other than the issue of screen tearing when watching videos, and some purely theoretical performance improvements,

Yeah, I've heard a lot of people talking about that, haven't really seen it in practice, might be that my brain just learned to compensate from watching too many ultracompressed, full of artifacts videos when I grew up :p

So... uhh.. Wayland is THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE, but just as we have been suspecting for the past decade, the future kinda sucks. 😛

Well I guess I'll leave the future up to the youngsters :p They can enjoy it as they want to, I'll stay here using my old tools for the time being at least :p

@sotolf @thelinuxcast

>> Other than the issue of screen tearing when watching videos, and some purely theoretical performance improvements,
>
> Yeah, I've heard a lot of people talking about that, haven't really seen it in practice, might be that my brain just learned to compensate from watching too many ultracompressed, full of artifacts videos when I grew up :p

I have seen it a good bit on youtube, but there's supposed to be a double-buffering option for Intel graphics cards in XOrg that fixes it. I haven't tried that yet, as editing the XOrg config reminds me of editing XF86Config in the 90s, and I suddenly break out in hives

>> So... uhh.. Wayland is THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE, but just as we have been suspecting for the past decade, the future kinda sucks. 😛
>
> Well I guess I'll leave the future up to the youngsters :p They can enjoy it as they want to, I'll stay here using my old tools for the time being at least :p

I get that, but I also think it's a bit sad that a lot of the old guard (whose opinions I value) will just shut out the #Wayland world instead of wading in and saying stuff like, "What do you MEAN there's no cross-Wayland way of implementing this, and it has to be implemented differently in Gnome, KDE, and wlroots? Do you SERIOUSLY think your only job is schlepping pixels? Tourists."

@rl_dane @thelinuxcast I grew up on HARRY_POTTER_philosopher_stone_TS_part01.xvid so my mind just don't care about video quality at all :p

@sotolf @thelinuxcast

Haha, makes me remember watching Star Trek at awful 240p on Youtube circa 2009. ;)

@thelinuxcast @rl_dane @sotolf 160x120px Dragon Ball .rm

@mirabilos @thelinuxcast @rl_dane ooh that's a great one :D those started to get changed out in my time :)

@sotolf @mirabilos @thelinuxcast Oooof, I do NOT miss #RealMedia

@rl_dane @mirabilos @thelinuxcast neither do I miss the postit size resolution :p the huge smearing pixels and so on :p but I can watch 280p videos and be content, which many now do not enjoy :p

@sotolf @mirabilos

I remember watching 144p youtube videos on the one blackberry I had for a few months in 2010 ;)

@rl_dane @sotolf I have no idea what “number + p” is supposed to be, though

@mirabilos @rl_dane I don't really either but it's the one low resolution that I can normally use and be okay with I thing the p stands for progressive, but I also wonder where the second bart of the resolution went.

@sotolf @mirabilos

Comes from old broadcast tv days where things were measured in lines (because there were no discrete horizontal pixels, just changes in the signal)

Of course, go back far enough (mechanical tv, a.k.a. the "#Televisor") and the lines are vertical... and slightly curved. ;))

@rl_dane @mirabilos CRTs, I had a many inch CRT and it was so huge and a really heavy devil :p

@sotolf @mirabilos

My back still remembers my 20" CRT at work. XD

@rl_dane @mirabilos mine was I think ~35 so you can think how fun that was, made the house shake when you degaussed it :p

@sotolf @mirabilos

DANG... that's a lotta glass!!

@rl_dane @mirabilos yeah and the curve on the screen was pretty brutal too :)

@sotolf @rl_dane @mirabilos This just made me realize that the really big monitors of today also "require" curvature to be useful. It's just that the curvature is now the other way around: concave instead of convex. 🤔

@mogwai @sotolf @mirabilos

You're right, it's gone from the radius of the electron beam being the limiting factor (or rather the focusing power of it) to the radius of the eye (not promoting eye strain by requiring constant re-focusing).

Man, maybe monitors are getting too big? lol

@mogwai @rl_dane @sotolf I did reject the 22″ widescreen I got at first at work in favour of a 19″ 4:3 1280x960 within the first week, as I did not otherwise see what happened on the side (and even the 19″ was on the border of practicality, but with desk distance and large fonts (due to low dpi) it wfm.

@mirabilos @mogwai @sotolf

My dream project (if I ever get my programming skills up to snuff) would be to write my own GUI with a fixed resolution of about 1024x768 (monochrome), just for the old-school Unix workstation feel.

I just think other than working with high-fidellity visual media, we don't need the kind of crazy resolution we're getting spoiled with.

@mogwai @sotolf @rl_dane it’s nice for font antialiasing (if done in greyscale), too, but yes (and bitmap fonts are sharper anyway)

@mirabilos @mogwai @sotolf

I recently discovered on my #OpenBSD X200 that the Terminus TTF font renders beautifully well at any size with no antialiasing.

I don't know how they accomplish this black magic, but I'm here for that.

cc: @amin

@rl_dane @mirabilos @mogwai @sotolf @amin I wish spleen rendered well on non bitmap terminals

@rl_dane @amin @mirabilos @mogwai @sotolf even with no anti aliasing it still has a terrible blur. i have no idea how to get rid of it

@sotolf @amin @mogwai @kirby @rl_dane sounds like your nōn-bitmap terminal does some upscaling itself then

@mirabilos @sotolf @amin @mogwai @rl_dane

@mirabilos @amin @mogwai @rl_dane @sotolf i think in alacritty when i disabled anti-aliasing it looked a bit *too* thick and broken and it was basically impossible to use spleen, it never seems to work right in any of my terminals

@rl_dane @sotolf @mogwai @kirby @amin never heard of that font but I can have a look at it if you link me the homepage (it’s probably impossible to search for this generic a name)

@mirabilos @rl_dane @sotolf @mogwai @amin https://github.com/fcambus/spleen

It's in use in openbsd by default if you've seen the tty in it