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I am back. I finally got released from prison after Google put me there and forced me to write a blog post..
Today I want to talk about getting into GNU/Linux and free software, how I got into it and how you can get into it yourself. But because my "started using GNU/Linux" story is so short, I'm gonna also talk about how I got into certain software like dwm and Gentoo, since normies tend to call this stuff difficult.
My first encounter with the GNU/Linux operating system was in 2011 when I found out about this new "fancy" operating system called Ubuntu GNU/Linux. People like myself reading this blog post right now might say "DOnT yOU hATe UbUnTU?!?!?" but back then, it was very different from what it is now.
Back then, it was a fairly nice system...
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Time for something a little different than usual. Today I'm going to talk about my next project that I am working on as we speak. It usually starts with 'boo this program sucks, let's write something that does what I need it to do better than the current options and this time, it's no exception.
As you know, I've been working rather heavily on my dwm build; speedwm. I've been trying to iron out bugs with it and generally make it the window manager (or computer setup in general) of my dreams. After I reached 800 commits just a few days on the new speedwm repository alone, not to mention the many more on the old repositories, which adds up to over a thousand commits, I realized that I am trying to improve something that doesn't really desperately need improvement.
Now that I'm fairly happy with it, I am going to start a new project...
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2023 is basically here and that means 2022 is over. Happy new year to everyone who follows my blog. March is going to mark 1 year since the first blog post, but there's still a good while until we reach that milestone.
Anyhow, I was planning on making a long blog post about 2022 and how.. mixed it was but because I had too much fun, I did not have time to finish it. I didn't really like what I had written anyway so for this year, a small blog post like this one will have to do...
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So.. because I keep getting questions about Project 081, even though I don't really work on it much anymore, I thought I'd make this blog post as an update on it as well as why it's taking so damn long. Also if this blog post comes across as negative, I'm sorry, it's 5 AM and I'm tired. Suck it up.
I will be honest here, I hate working on Project 081, and this is not because I think the project is bad, or even because its ABSOLUTELY PROPRIETARY (hopefully one day we get the source code for Tiger). It's because it's a massive pain to test it or even to create a basic image...
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Now, unless you're some big channel that uploads every day or something like that, you've no doubt experienced the absolute pain that is YouTube refusing to promote your videos.
Even if you're someone like me who doesn't really care that much about getting views or something and just casually uses the platform once a month or something to post stuff occasionally, you've no doubt noticed that if you upload videos in a short timeframe, no matter what it's about, it's almost guaranteed to get more views than anything you just post and forget about.
This is just a theory but I suspect Google and YouTube wants you to constantly push out new videos every day, even if it's total crap not worth 30 seconds of your time. As you know, I tend to only upload videos once a month or less, and that's for multiple reasons.
Firstly, I don't have time to push out content daily about the new cool dwm patch or whatever. Not only is it not very useful for the viewer and basically acts as filler, but it's a waste of time for me as well. Secondly, YOU don't have time to watch this filler garbage content that only exists to make YouTube push your content to people's feed.
I think a good example of this is if you look at my Forwarder Factory channel, which is now completely dead because I have zero plans to upload anythng to it, but anyways all of the old videos were successful and got plenty of views, despite the content of the videos being mostly crap.
I then of course stopped uploading to it for reasons I don't need to specify and 4 months later I broke the silence a nd posted something to it. Got 487 views which is absolutely nothing in comparison to what the earlier videos got...
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So, I am considering installing BSD on my computer, specifically FreeBSD. Or maybe we should call it FreeBaSeD, whatever.
Now as you guys know I of course use Gentoo GNU/Linux as my desktop operating system. It's definitely my favorite distribution because it doesn't seem to have all the flaws other distros like Arch have. I haven't had many issues with Gentoo, I mean Portage is quite slow because it's written in Python but for the most part it has been really reliable and I am typing this post from Gentoo. However most other distros don't seem to be very reliable, not to mention some "recent" events are really encouraging me to switch over to a different operating system.
As you all know though, I use free (as in freedom)/libre software and because of this, there's no way I'd use something like Microsoft Windows or Apple macOS©️™️ again but there are many free operating systems, and of course FreeBSD is one of them...
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This is just a brief blog post regarding some new somewhat important news for this website! speedie.site has received a wiki, which anyone may edit. No, this is not some bloated wiki solution, it's done using purely PHP and CSS, and articles are written in Markdown! This is great, because speedwm documentation is already written in Markdown and has been for a while. Not only that, but speedwm has it's own separate wiki, because a lot of information is speedwm related.
Now, I want to get speedwm 1.9 out soon, especially since it has been two full months since the last release and over 100 commits since then, but I want to move some documentation over to the speedwm specific wiki first, as I think the man page is growing very, very big...
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I don't think it needs to be said but I've been doing some changes to this website recently. If you saw yesterday's blog post, I talked about some changes I had made, such as introducing a speedwm and general wiki to the site. I made some changes to the wiki shortly after publishing that blog post, and today I made even more changes so I think it justifies another blog post. Either way, this blog post is practically just an extension to the last one.
Now, why did I make these changes, and why the title which (seemingly) has nothing to do with the point of this blog post anyway? Well, you see I decided to try to set up a Git server by myself for a few reasons and that's exactly what I really want to talk about, I just think I should put the wiki changes in this post as well...
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speedwm 1.9 was released so I thought I’d write this short blog post. Yes, there is a real blog post in the works as well, in fact it’s basically complete, but I think writing this is necessary.
Either way, speedwm 1.9 is out now, and I want to talk about some of the changes I’ve made to it, since there are some big changes that will definitely be noticed if you just update from 1.8 to 1.9. First of all, if you just updated, you might notice that most of the keybindings have been removed. Many of the chained keybindings have been removed, because I simply wasn’t ever using them. But that’s not what you noticed, is it?
I removed most of the keybindings that call spawn() (the function that runs a program) because if I leave them in, people need to have all that software installed to make the keybindings functional...
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Warning: This blog post, unlike most of my others features strong language, because I hate libvirt. Please leave if you're sensitive to this.
I really, really REALLY hate libvirt. In fact it may be the worst program I have ever used, in fact it even manages to somehow outclass a lot of nonfree software, it is that bad. It's so bad I'm going to say fuck for the first time on this blog. And yes, I will take advantage of that...
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Good afternoon good sirs! So I think most of you that follow my blog are free software and privacy supporters. Even if you support the 'open source' movement more than the highly based free software movement, I think we can both agree on the fact that ethical software is not ethical and might actually be less ethical than nonfree software. I want to talk about this because while it is nothing new, I got reminded of it and thought it was an excellent topic for today.
If you're out of the loop, or maybe haven't fallen for the free software ideology as much as the rest of us, what is "ethical" software and why should it be abolished? Ethical software is a software movement similar to the free software and open source movements, which strive for freedom in technology...
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Today I want to just quickly talk about some important (and some lesser important) stuff regarding my software projects. First of all, let's talk about spmenu. In addition to the color support I added a month or two ago, spmenu now has image support. I initially couldn't think of many uses for this, however it's actually really useful. Let's say I want to list out all my wallpapers and set one as my wallpaper...
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Yesterday I decided to get some work done and ported most of my Gentoo packages for my software, such as speedwm and spmenu but much more to Arch. Of course, first I had to learn how to actually do this, but as it turns out, it’s actually even easier than on Gentoo. I was able to create all of these packages, including testing in less than an hour.
I had to make a few minor changes to spDE for it to work on Arch, such as changing the owner of the home folder to the user rather than the user’s group but for the most part it works perfectly. No, the package will not be on the AUR as I do not want the user to have to deal with compiling the stuff locally. I also don’t want to deal with the AUR moderators potentially deleting packages.
With that said, if you want to install spDE on your Arch box, add my arch repository (instructions in README) and pacman -Syyu...
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So, because this blog post marks blog post number 50, and because the first blog post is 1 year old today, I thought to celebrate I'd do a rewrite of my first blog post, which still holds true, actually more so than when I intially wrote it. Granted, the original blog post is terrible, it was fueled out of frustration and nothing more so let's give the topic the chance it deserves.
As well all know, GNU/Linux is an operating system and it has always been the outcast, it has always been less popular than other operating systems like Windows and macOS. Out of the outcast operating systems like BSD, Haiku and more however, it's pretty popular and it's growing in popularity. While this may seem like a good thing at first, when you actually dig deeper into what that means for GNU/Linux, you'll find many problems and I want to talk about those today.
So let's go back into the early days. Linus Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, which was used in combination with the GNU project...
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I'm going to keep this one short and to the point. As some of you may know, my domain is going to expire. It is going to expire on the 31st of March 2023, which is not far from today and that's what I'm going to talk about.
For those of you that don't know, my website uses a "free" TLD (top level domain). This seemed like a good option last year, but as I want to continue this stuff, it presents a problem. Freenom is the company that provides the .gq TLD, along with a few more domains such as .tk...
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Alright so I have a brief announcement or something today and that is, I have officially stopped using Gentoo. Yes that's right, the Gentoo elitist is now an Arch cuck. But why, why would you commit such a crime you might say? Well, Gentoo has actually been giving me more and more problems for months now, and it doesn't seem to get any better.
I've had so many dumb issues with Gentoo recently, such as Xft fonts being broken, packages failing to emerge, --depclean removing my entire system, and the final straw, gnome-keyring issues that just do not occur on other GNU/Linux distributions. In case you're not aware, I have been using Arch on my laptop for months now, and while Arch has some annoying issues such as GPG keys constantly breaking pacman when updating, I find that it works much better now.
To make matters worse for Gentoo, syncing the repositories takes a very long time, and it's valuable time that I do not want to spend just because a program is slow and written in Python...
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As you guys may know if you have been a speedie.site reader for a while, I was a Gentoo user, and recently I switched to using Arch full time. However, I am yet again switching operating system because I just found out Windows is the best operating system ever made.
Now, most of you probably use some open source Linux distribution on your computer. But Linux is open source, and that's bad. That means Russian hackers can steal your porn collection because of course they can see all the source code and backdoor it. When you're using Microsoft Windows on the other hand, the only one who can access your data is Microsoft, who will send that data to the NSA...
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I will keep this one short so you can actually read through it. Yesterday (13/04/2023) I purchased a domain, because as we all know I do not trust Freenom to keep my site up. This domain is a lot more reliable, however it does mean you will have to swap out '.gq' for '.site'. I have redirected some parts of my site. I have redirected the main speedie.gq domain, and I have also redirected rss.xml so that RSS readers won't complain...
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Now that most of my issues regarding this site are resolved, I want to start writing about something. I have a lot of topics I want to talk about, however for many of these topics there's just not much content to them, so I apologize for the length of some of these.
Anyways what better topic to start with than this one. My blog isn't perfect, I post a lot of garbage here quite often, but what pisses me off is when people will write blog posts, have an RSS feed and then ruin it with one thing. They will put about 1/10 of the blog post in the description tag, and then they will have the blog post in full on their website.
This is extremely annoying, because it means I have to open up my bloated web browser just to view your blog post which could normally be read using my RSS reader, which is designed for reading blog posts. What if I want to read your blog post on the command line?...
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Today I want to talk about Wayland, and why I don't use it. In case you're a normie and don't know what Wayland is, Wayland is this new display protocol created by the people over at Freedesktop. They want it to be better than the display protocol most GNU/Linux users are already using called X11. While I'm not against the idea of a new display protocol, in my opinion Wayland is a failure, and it fails at doing everything X11 did right, and that's what I want to talk about here. Note that most of this will be from a developer's perspective; if you're using GNOME, KDE or maybe even one of the many wlroots based compositors, your experience on Wayland is probably going to be pretty good.
First, let's talk terminology...
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Today I want to talk about my favorite web browser which I have been using for several months now and that is Chromium, specifically Ungoogled Chromium. Ungoogled Chromium is the best browser because it's fast, it respects your privacy, but also doesn't provide any extra bloat or anything, it's just a fast, privacy respecting web browser that does everything you need and nothing more. In a lot of ways it's the best web browser for minimalists, but also for normies because it requires no learning coming from Chrome or whatever.
If you are on Arch, you can get it from the AUR, and I also have a package available in my arch repository, so if you're using speedie-aur you can just pacman -S ungoogled-chromium. When you start it for the first time, if you're coming from regular Chromium or maybe the horrible spyware that is Google Chrome, you're going to notice that it looks a bit more minimal. That's because most of the Google junk has been removed, so what you have is what you actually need out of a web browser...
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It is no secret that I strongly believe in copyleft licenses like the GNU General Public License (often shortened to GNU GPL or GPL) and the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Copyleft licenses as the name implies are the opposite of copyright licenses. With copyleft licenses, the user has the freedom to modify, study and distribute the software and source code. But unfortunately in recent years copyleft licenses have fallen out of favor thanks to tech companies like Microsoft heavily pushing too permissive licenses to developers. These licenses (which I will call 'cuck licenses' from now on) rob developers of their work...
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