I’ve been using Linux for 25 years. I started with SuSe, switched to RedHat after a couple months, and after a few more months switched to Gentoo… for 10 years, then did Arch for the remainder.

Frankly, I think that distro hopping is a bad idea because it means you don’t get enough time really understanding how to fix things. As a long time Arch user, it would never occur to me to throw out 10+years of tooling and scripts, muscle memory and shorthand to fix a driver issue. I would read the wiki top to bottom and then go spelunking through other sources until I find the solution (then update the wiki) before I’d switch to something foreign with its own set of problems and unknowns.

My advice is to find a distro that makes sense to you, and that has a deployment pattern you like and commit to it for a few years. Don’t switch unless you find something that fulfills those two requirements even better, and even then do so cautiously. Your experience and understanding is hard-won.

Ooh! I have something for this.

Depending on how complicated you’re willing to allow it to be to run locally, you could just run a webserver right on the desktop. Bind it to localhost:8000 so there’s no risk of someone exploiting it via the network, anf then your startup script is just:

1. Start webserver
2. Open browser to http://localhost:800/

It’s not smooth, or professional-looking, but it’s easy ;-)

If you want something a little more slick, I would probably lean more toward “Path 2” as you call it. The webserver isn’t really necessary after all, since you’re not even using a network.

One option that you might not have considered however could be to rewrite the whole thing in JavaScript and port it to a static web page. Hosting costs on something like that approaches £0, but you have to write JavaScript :-(

Also Ctrl+D to exit any shell and Ctrl+R for reverse searching your history!

Just be careful with files with spaces in the name. There’s an incantation with xargs that I always have to look up when I want to use it safely.

Not in and of itself, but I find that I have a handful of common tricks that I can put into aliases. Also, there’s ffmpeg.app!

I’ve used Starship before, and while it’s quite powerful for formatting what goes into your prompt, I don’t believe there’s any feature in there that will fix the prompt to the top of the screen. The best I could find in the docs was a feature to place some text to the right.

Yes, that’s it exactly.

Hear me out: I want the prompt at the top of the screen.

It’s terribly inconvenient to have the place you’re typping your command into at the bottom. On laptops, your fingers are in the way, and on desktops, you’re always craning your neck looking at the bottom-left.

Imagine instead if your terminal looked like this:

| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| $ curl https://...
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| $ echo "hello"
| hello
| $ ls
| output.png
| goes.txt
| here.webm
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |

After a command is entered in the upper pane, it’s appended to the lower pane along with the output just like a normal terminal. Maybe even something like translating Shift+Enter to mean “clear the output pane and run”.

Could Wine help out here?

My guess is it’s the license change. From Wikipedia:

In 2018, some modules for Redis adopted the SSPL. In 2024, the main Redis code switched to dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available License v2 and the Server Side Public License v1.

Valkey appears to be a Redis fork that was triggered by the license change, but since Valkey still uses the original BSD license, I’m not sure I’d favour it over Redis since the latter switched licences specifically to prevent abuse of the BSD license by parties like Amazon.

What is the deal with getting gpu acceleration into a terminal emulator of all things? Of all the innovations that we could use, faster drawing of text doesn’t feel like it should be a priority.

This is an excellent idea. Fortunately you’re not the first to have it ;-)

You should look into alias.

I use mine with either my Jabra 75t Bluetooth earbuds, or my big Bose over-ear ones using an aftermarket Bluetooth adapter. Both are great.

• Aegis Authenticator
• F-Droid
• FOSSify
• Joplin
• Thunderbird
• Libre Memory
• Libre Torrent
• New Pipe
• Syncthing
• TorrentsCSV
• Tusky
• UntrackMe
• GNOME
• Lemmy

Torrent stuff in HD or 4K and play those files instead of trying to stream from a company that won’t offer better than 720p :-)

Nope, pipx definitely can’t do that, but the idea that running your yourscript.py --help will automatically trigger the downloading of dependencies and installing them somewhere isn’t really appealing. I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s got uv configured to install the virtualenv in the local .venv folder rather than buried into my home dir, so this would come with the added surprise that every time I invoke the script, I’d get a new set of dependencies installed wherever I happen to be.

I mean, it’s neat that you can do this, but as a user I wouldn’t appreciate the surprise behaviour. pipx isn’t perfect, but at least it lets you manage things like updates.

This looks like a reimplementation of pipx.

I used KDE for about 10 years, but switched to GNOME when 3 came out and haven’t looked back. It’s a little unusual if you’re coming from Windows, but I’ve found that once I let go of old paradigms like a start bar and icons and embraced multiple workspaces, that GNOME is pretty damned amazing.

BG3 is a pretty impressive game really. It’s clear that they poured a lot of effort and talent into it. It just feels… pointlessly complicated to me. There’s like, 200 different spells to cast, each with their own effectiveness based on a dice roll, a multitude of different configurations for character development which all feel both too similar and like I’m closing the door on something I might really like. The story is… okay, but really not that interesting to me, and the pacing in combination with the very open world and constant fiddling with gear with a multitude of only slightly different attributes… it’s just too much. The game feels more like a job than something I’d do for fun.