Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey

June 15th, 2023

The 2023 Stack Overflow developer survey results are in, and here’s my (likely controversial) take:

Rust developers are the most self-centered, with Go developers close seconds.

Here are screenshots of the very nice “Worked with vs. want to work with” graphics for programming languages, with Rust and Go highlighted:

Read the rest of this entry »

Why I Switched Firefox from Snap to Flatpak

March 23rd, 2023

This – this is the reason:

Snap update notification

Unlike other software packages (which includes, I believe, Flatpak) Snap packages will not update if the application is already running. Instead you get this annoying popup “Oh boy, you have 13 days to close your app otherwise nasty things will happen!” Which wouldn’t be such a bad idea in and by itself, except that if you close the application – it doesn’t update. Even the notification doesn’t go away.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the Fediverse

March 15th, 2023

Did you know that this blog is also on the Fediverse? Follow me @oded@geek.co.il.

Script day: check the currently set Plasma desktop wallpaper

March 13th, 2023

I like to have some kind of slideshow as a desktop background wallpaper, and there are various ways of doing that – using your local picture library or multiple variations of remote image sources (everyone love NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day), and you can find a lot of discussions online about how best to go about automating setting the desktop’s background wallpaper image – in KDE Plasma it is particularly not that easy as you have to contend with multiple “activities”, with each has multiple screens, with each has multiple “desktop containments” – fortunately Plasma no longer supports different wallpapers for different virtual desktops – otherwise it would really have been a massive mess.

But sometimes I don’t want to change the wallpaper – just to figure out which one I’m looking it (maybe I want to delete it?). There isn’t any discussion about that on the internet, so I wrote this script and here it is for posterity (and also in this Github Gist):

Read the rest of this entry »

Israel and Russia, an interesting geopolitical analysis:

March 2nd, 2023

This YouTube channel is mostly about military hardware, but this video I think covers a wide range of geopolitical issues quite well.

Is This An Elon Musk’s Upgrade?

February 22nd, 2023

Trying to register for the Twitter API (for personal use and mucking around), and this is how the “accepts our terms of service” page looks:

Mind you, the “I accept” and “Submit” buttons still work very well, you just have no idea what you’re signing up for… 🤦

Chrome Applications and the cursed CSD

February 19th, 2023

I’ve ranted before about Client-Side Decorations (CSD), here and elsewhere, and here’s another one – mostly as a reminder to myself about how to disable CSD on Google Chrome web application windows.

The gist is – CSDs are horrible – they make your desktop look like a mishmash of different operating systems on the same screen, where it is often not clear how to interact with the application windows. The worst case is of course the MS-Windows XP RTL reflected UI, where you had some windows with normal operation buttons (close, maximize, etc) on the right side of the title bar and some windows were in “RTL” mode, so their buttons were on the left side 🤯.

Read the rest of this entry »

Imported Rant – Why I Hate MacOS

February 9th, 2023

I’m starting a new thing on this (otherwise quite dead) blog, mostly as a service to myself: “Imported Rants”. Its going to be basically copies (sometimes maybe better edited) of rants I posted as comments in other places (mostly YouTube), that have grown long enough to almost be an article in and of themselves.

Today, in response to Brodie Robertson’s question – Should Linux Users Hate Apple As Much As Microsoft? here’s the rant from my comments:

Read the rest of this entry »

Things Samsung consider essential

November 26th, 2022

Apparently, Tiktok is an essential application that everyone needs to have and cannot be removed – so said Samsung.

Why Wayland is a Bad Idea™

October 23rd, 2022

Most people who have been involved in Linux development/administration/advocacy already know that Linux operating systems are in the middle of a big shift (or actually, almost at the end of it) in the graphics stack used in Linux desktops – from the old and gnarly X11 protocol to the new hotness: Wayland compositing. And it sucks.

Read the rest of this entry »