I have been toying with the idea of forking Servo to make a scriptable keyboard-driven browser, like Nyxt but with something else instead of Lisp.

Probably too huge of a project for one hooman though.

My first encounter with Linux was in 2007, I installed Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on my dad’s computer out of curiosity - I was intrigued by a notion of free OS you can deeply customize.

I have spent countless hours fiddling with the system, mostly ricing (Compiz Fusion totally blew my mind) and checking out FOSS games.

Decades later I switched to Linux full-time. After 12 years of daily driving OS X and working as a developer, I wanted a customizable and lean OS that is easy to maintain and control. Chose Arch, then Nix, havent looked back ever since.

I don’t know of any solution that would allow to scan entire pages, but here is a local tool to get LaTeX math from images via OCR https://github.com/lukas-blecher/LaTeX-OCR

Despite whatever your lead/manager says, there is always an option to nuke it from low orbit and start over.

As a programmer, I concur. I sit on my arse all day pushing keys , anybody can do that.

Please elaborate, I’ve been interested in this for awhile - what do you use/recommend for someone who’s new?

A genuinely cool and somewhat lean alternative to Electron!

It’s not that native UIs are lagging behind, there is a whole set of reasons.

TL;DR: browsers, as opposed to desktop apps, are stardartized - because they were originally designed to display and deliver text documents. We were never supposed to build complex application UIs on a web stack.

First, there is no standard way of making native UI on a desktop. Every OS uses it’s own solution, while Linux offers several different ones. Browsers rely on a set of open standards developed specifically for the web, and even there not everything works exactly the same.

Second, browsers are designed to draw a very specific kind of UI through a very specific rendering mode - they run an immutable hierarchy of elements through layouting and painting engines. It works great for documents, but it becomes extremely unweildy for most other things, which is why we have an entire zoo of different UI implementations (crutches, most of them) for browsers.

On the desktop we often make a choice of what UI technology would fit best our purpose. For a game engine I would use an immediate-mode UI solution like ImGUI, for the ease of prototyping, integration and fast iterations.

For consumer software I might choose between something like QT or GTK for robust functionality, reliable performance, acessibility and community support. Mobile platforms come with their own native UI solutions.

For data-intensive UIs and heavy editors (e.g. CAD, video and music production, games) I might need to designan entirely new rendering pipeline to comply with users requirements for ergonomics, speed, latency etc.

It is also easy to notice that as a team or employer, it is often much easier to hire someone for web stack, than for native development. Simply put, more people can effectively code in JS, so we get more JS and tech like Electron enables that.

If you are interested in a single solution that will get you nice results in general, no matter the platform - you might see some success with projects like Flutter or OrbTK.

UI rendering in general is a deep and very rewarding rabbit hole. If you are in the mood, this article by Raph Levien gives a good overview of existing architectures: https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/gui/2022/05/07/ui-architecture.html

I am in the process of learning about/choosing shells for my new setup. Can you please elaborate on gpl-vs-mit style - what do you mean? Is it just about licences?

Oh I remember having this one on repeat for months back in highschool. The entire album is great, but I want to single out tracks Damaged and Promised Land as my favorites - the atmosphere and the emotion is just so GOD DAMN THICC

Brace for a hot take.

Most of these points are completely void, not because Linux is the bestest ever, but because the domination of proprietary systems has conditioned most users to comply to a lesser image of “personal computing”.

Things evolve too quickly? Sorry, we have to stay on top on security updates, new standards, hardware support, new features and ways of working - the world is changing, and our tools follow. It’s not a problem, but a natural consequence of progress. The fact that so many people view this as a source of pain in their personal computing is a problem.

Things break? Well too bad, it’s tech - it’s supposed to break. And we a are supposed to be able to fix it. If most users think that fixing tech is “black magic” - that is a VERY big problem.

Way too many choices? No - you just don’t know what you need. It’s silly to expect a Windows or an OSX user to make an informed choice when it comes to software, because they had these choices picked out for them all their life by the proprietor. An abundance of options is never a problem - our inability to orient ourselves among them is.

TLDR: proprietary computing has normalized a lot of brain-dead practices and expectations, so we crave silly and shiny while turning away from smart and pragmatic. We need better computer literacy, better education and better default computing for everyone.

This is very believable, almost to a point when I would love to read something more than a meme

It looks like a disguised Umbrella logo. Creepy, I like it!

I’ve been running arch on XPS 15 a couple years ago with no problems. There was a problem with sound on laptop launch, but a couple of months in the kernel update fixed all the issues. Arch wiki has a lot of info on hardware compatibility, as well as steps you should take to enable something that doesn’t work out of the box

“I deployed an edge compute environment on this thing, so it can run out SSR backend-for-frontend, but we now have a left-pad issue in our supply chain”

The Linux Foundation hosts brilliant courses on OS virtualization in Linux - after that there is a pretty clear path at a cloud administrator career.

It is nice to see Tauri getting adoption. Out of all electron alternatives I’ve seen, Tauri is the most exciting one.