and linear window managers: niri.

Yes, I tried PostmarketOS with Phosh on my old Lenovo Ideapad. It just works without tinkering.

I am using gentoo-sources-6.12 . Idk, how mainline that is. It is pretty upstream with some Gentoo patches, I guess.

To increase the responsiveness of the system I changed the default setting of the scheduler to prioritize user input over system background processes (I don’t remember the exact config name in the kernel). Other than that, I compiled it very close to Gentoo handbook recommendations: selecting only what I need and carefully choose between compiling drivers and features as a module or builtin.

I have gone from borgbackup to rdiff-backup to reduce complexity and dependencies. rdiff-backup’s incremental strategy needs more space than deduplication from borgbackup, but you don’t need fuse and borg itself to restore your latest backup.

With rdiff-backup you can just use cp -a to restore all your files. Only if you need a file you deleted ages ago, you need it.

I relied on borgbackup for a long time, never had an incident. But then I wanted to try the new replication borg2 feature and almost lost my original borg1 repo. With rdiff-backup you can just rsync the repo to another drive and have two copies of your offline offsite redundant backup. Encryption is a non-issue, you can run it on top of every other filesystem and LUKS or over SSH.

Granted, I just switched to rdiff-backup, but I am loving the simplicity of it already.

Unfortunately I don’t have the same setup: I use the xboxdrv kernel module to use the PS5 controller for Steam games without native PS5 controller support. I deactivated Steam input for this game (Elite Dangerous, btw.).

I connect (USB) the controller before starting Steam. After connection I immediatly unload the hid_playstation module and start xboxdrv as root (I needed to create a custom mapping for it). Only after that I start Steam and can use the PS5 controller flawlessly in-game.

You might ask, why I am using a PS5 controller instead of an xbox controller. It’s all about ergonomics. The PS5 controller is simply better for me.

Finally I found the time to write down, how I use Ghostscript:

gs \
    -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
    -o /output/gs_file.pdf \
    -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress \
    -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK \
    -sDefaultCMYKProfile=/path/to/ISOcoated_v2_eci.icc \
    -sColorConversionStrategy=CMYK \
    source/file.pdf \
    -f

I don’t now which of ProcessColorModel or ColorConversionStrategy is the important one. I kept both and did not bother to try to omit one of them. -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress makes sure that embedded bitmaps are in 300dpi and I think -f prevents Ghostscript staying in interactive mode after all pages have been finished.

I am also interested in any experiences, especially regarding the computers you can attach to these small displays. I often see RPi as an option, but I heared about RocketChip, too. What are the best platforms to drive these displays?

We learned the hard way that on a RPi4 you want a very good SD card if you are running nextcloud on it.

Why is it stagnant?

For my my father I only have to make sure it looks not so different after each major upgrade. I have to be careful when there are new things, but apart from that he can do everything for himself except these major upgrades and backups.

So, he is happy with Fedora and Gnome classic.

ghostcript can add a color profile, too. I use the regular ISO coated v2 (without the 300%). This is just a step to not do all things in Scribus by hand and make sure colors are not out of gamut.

I don’t now the command line from the top of my head. Just ping me again, so when I am on my computer I can send the complete ghostscript cli line that currently works for me.

The final profile is set up by Scribus, where I have set it to the ISO coated with 300%. Ideally I would like to have less steps in the chain, so that a change in the Inkscape-source involves less manually steps. One can dream of it. (:

I basically use it only for mail, although I have set up my calender there, too. The evolution-data-server makes it possible to access the calender entries using gnome-calender which has a modern gui.

You can still accept email invites in evolution and see them in gnome-calendar. It works very well with my radical server.

And second bonus, it integrates your dates with gnome-shell. Just disable notifications in evolution to don’t get them twice. (:

Evolution.

I have used Thunderbird a lot, but finally decided to go back to Evolution 2 years ago.

I am actually producing PDF/X-4 print-ready stuff with Inkscape, ghostscript and Scribus. I even have TrimBoxes and proper CMYK.

But it involves many manual steps, especially overprinting for the K color channel does not work and I need to adjust every polygon and vectorized text manually.

I whish it would be possible all in one tool. I can afford the time, because it is only a hobby. If it would be professional the extra steps involved make it not good enough.

Yeah, Debian for services/servers (Raspberry Pi in my case) and Gentoo on the desktop.

But for the not tech-savy family members I’ve choosen Fedora for them. They need more GUI.

Nowadays busy with making my useflags compatible with bin-packages to reduce time to update.

I am curious, though how adoption of this new feature is.

Subjectively, I think, KDE/Plasma would make me unproductive compared to Gnome, maybe not as much as being on Win11 for sure. Both are cluttered and distracting from my point of view.

I am looking forward to niri, because I realized that GTK is the real king that makes Gnome so awesome to use. Niri would make window management even better. (:

A word on new Linux users: I have seen most prefering Gnome, older people tend to prefer the Gnome classic, because they are used to the idea to see which programs are currently running (taskbar). And this makes it easier for me to help them, because it still behaves like a modern desktop.

The KDE/Plasma/XFCE/Cinamon users around me are all long time Linux users. They made a dicision for themselves and know how to use it.

Clearly, Gnome is the most modern looking of the three.

Nothing is graceful about Windows. [=

Gentoo for my workstation because I need flexibility, security and stability there and Debian stable for my Raspberries running all the services I need 24/7 access to.

I don’t like all the spin-offs of the major distros. And no, Ubuntu is not a major distro it is based on Debian and they are known for some really bad decisions in past and present, eg: snap instead of flatpak.