There’s an argument to be made that system software like filesystems and kernels shouldn’t get too smart about validating or transforming strings, because once you start caring about a strings meaning, you can no longer treat it as just a byte sequence and instead need to worry about all the complexities of Unicode code points. “Is this character printable” seems like a simple question but it really isn’t.

Now if I were to develop a filesystem from scratch, would I go for the 80% solution of just banning the ASCII newline specifically? Honestly yes, I don’t see a downside. But regardless of how much effort is put into it, there will always be edge cases – either filenames that break stuff, or filenames that aren’t allowed even though they should be.

The usual problems with parsing ls don’t happen here because Nu’s ls builtin returns properly typed data. You can work with it in pretty much the same way you would work with it in Python, except that Nu has a composition operator that doesn’t suck ass (|), so you don’t have to write as much imperative boilerplate.

I have a number of reservations regarding Nu (the stability of the scripting language, unintuitive syntax rules, a disappointing standard library) but this particular argument just doesn’t apply.

Pano perhaps? It doesn’t show up at the cursor but you can search in it, the keyboard works the way you would expect and it auto inserts on selection.

How was it an obvious data breach? The attack was done via Codebergs notification system. It’s no different from the notification you got from me writing this comment.

In this case it’s more of a switch away from the last cool new thing. Totem (like Music) was built around a media library navigated from within the app. By default Totem doesn’t even support opening videos from the file manager, which is something you would probably expect of a video player. It also crashed for me when I tried using it as intended so I’m not surprised to see it replaced by an app that really is just a video player.

That said many apps get replaced not for feature reasons but just by being GTK3, and they tend to get replaced by their own forks to GTK4 (such as the upcoming replacement of Evince). Why their devs choose to upgrade toolkits this way I cannot say.

Insightful article. I have to confess I never realized the accessibility situation was this bad.

I also want to highlight this excerpt from the comments:

Making things accessible isn’t hard technically. But it requires coordination and people to care about it enough to work on it at the expense of other features. If [I] developed an application on a team and said I had ‘one security guy that works on that stuff as long as it doesn’t interfere with the rest of our work’ I’d be dragged over the coals and have my project forked by the public.

But with accessibility? There’s really no sense of priority or urgency despite it being broken for years and not putting much effort in to fixing it.

It’s prettier than a TTY and you can pick whether you want a Wayland or an X11 session without having to know the correct startup commands. You can pick between different desktops too. And a Display Manager can offer on-screen keyboard and touchscreen support while a TTY can’t (at least GDM does, I’m not sure about SDDM off the top of my head).

Aside from that whatever command you are using in the TTY to launch Plasma might or might not be the same commands SDDM uses, which might or might not lead to issues in setting up the environment. If your environment is fine and you don’t care about having to use a physical keyboard then of course you can remove it. It’s not exactly load bearing.

I’m running KDE Plasma with the revived Krohnkite for auto tiling. Plasma 6.2 seems to have fixed most of the bugs from 6.0 and 6.1, at least the ones I’ve noticed.

I was using Sway/SwayFX for a few months but was missing some KDE Gear apps like Dolphin and Okular which I couldn’t get to display correctly. KDE is afaik the only desktop with a working Qt theming engine right now, so I can’t really see myself switching (unless maybe if they break Krohnkite again).