Not quite a scripting language, but I highly recommend you check out cosmo for your usecase. Cosmopolitan, and/or Actually Portable Executable (APE for short) is a project to compile a single binary in such a way that is is extremely portable, and that single binary can be copied across multiple operating systems and it will still just run. It supports, windows, linux, mac, and a few BSD’s.

https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/ — this is where you can download precompiled binaries of certain things using cosmo.

From my testing, the APE version of python works great, and is only 34 megabytes, + 12 kilobytes for the ape elf interpreter.

In addition to python, cosmopolitan also has precompiled binaries of:

• Janet 2.5 MB
• Berry 4.0 MB
• Python 34 MB
• Php 11 MB
• Lua 2.1 MB
• Bash 5.1 MB

And a few more, like tclsh, zsh, dash or emacs (53 MB), which I’m pretty sure can be used as an emacs lisp intepreter.

And it should be noted these may require the ape elf interpeter, which is 12 kilobytes, or the ape assimilate program, which is 476 kilobytes.

EDIT: It also looks like there is an APE version of perl, and the full executable is 24 MB.

EDIT again: I found even more APE/cosmo binaries:

• quickjs (javascript) 2.5 MB
• lisp 20K

You might be able to run the latest KDE or gnome in a distrobox podman or docker container:

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/run_latest_gnome_kde_on_distrobox.md

I dunno what’s most appropriate for email, but I often joke:

Isn’t open source kinda like a cult?

It’s a not a cult I swear! Just switch to free software, and free yourself!

I’ve also heard my friend say something along the lines of:

Free software, free culture, free people

Or maybe it was free world or free trade? I can’t remember.

Although, for slogans like this, I might go with something that has more of an immediate effect, like shilling an adblocker.

• Install uBlock Origin. Blocking ads is one of the easiest ways to increase your security.
• Install uBlock Origin. It blocks more than just ads, but also tracker scripts that follow you around the net and collect your data.

Or the ever so simple:

• Free software means free as in freedom — not as in beer.

Anyway, I partially agree with the other poster, but I think a one sentence quip at the end of an email is unobtrusive enough that it gets a pass. Of course, it depends on your specific workplace and how strict they are, but I would assume most workplaces have a little space for humanity.

I want to like Plasma, really I do, but even when I haven’t chosen it as a DE it overheats my laptop because Baloo File Extractor just won’t fucking quit consuming a CPU core for what seems like hours a day.

I remember having this issue. Basically, it was a bug, where baloo file manager was stuck on a file. After some time (and maybe a reinstall?), and deleting the index, baloo worked fine.

This reminds me of kasmweb, but fully open source.

Zotero is a citation manager, with a firefox extension to save an article (but really, a tab) with one click.

It also has fulltext search. You can search snapshots of everything you save.

“But I can’t save all my tabs at once”

(There are some solutions, but nothIng official)

Save as you go. Computers simply don’t have enough ram for 2000 tabs.

Anyway, it also seems to be able to run javascript plugins, and I saw you have some experience with that.

It also has support for folders, so you can organize it a bit better than tabs work for that.

Yeah, I read that manual but it didn’t answer my question.

The big problem is that the arch wiki describes a setup with nested subvolumes first (in a subvolume below @ or whatever your root subvolume is), but then suggests in a tip to use a subvolume directly below the top level subvolume. The limitations mentioned in that manual don’t seem to apply to either setup, as they would prevent swap from working, which is not the case. I have tested both setups and they work fine — or so it seems. I’m worried there is some hidden gotcha I’m missing.

in addition to that, some of those limitations simply don’t apply to my setup, as I only have a single device.

It’s bad to brush your teeth after eating.

The reason for that is that when acids are in the mouth, they weaken the enamel of the tooth, which is the outer layer of the tooth,” Rolle says. Brushing immediately after consuming something acidic can damage the enamel layer of the tooth.

Source: https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/brushing-immediately-after-meals-you-may-want-wait

Xplore file browser

It’s trivial to replace the independent pieces of xplore, but it has so many features in one app that I just can’t let it go. It’s got dual pane file browsing, disk usage chart, smb, ftp, and many other cloud storage connections. It also handles many types of compression.

It’s become my main offline music player as well, because it has the simple ability to shuffle a folder of music, which is all I really need.

It can also view installed apps, export them to apk, and view and modify appdata (as non root!).

Progression fantasy

When syncthing is configured to go both ways (the default), it also syncs any deletions. You can somewhat get around this by something like one way sync, but it’s not really a proper “backup” software.

Personally, I like to treat data synced by syncthing, even between multiple machines, as one copy of the data when I am following the 3-2-1 backup rule*, because syncthing won’t save me from a buggy program deleting all my files or user error, or anything like that.

*See wikipedia for info about the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Discord is adding ads soon. Currently, they don’t enforce the TOS violation of custom clients, but maybe after they add ads, they will begin to do so. I would be very careful with any of this.

https://www.die.lu/

https://github.com/Katana-Official/SPatch-Update

Might not work, but at least it’s updated.

You could also look into https://www.luckypatchers.com/. There might be patches for what you want to do.

Also switched here. OBS on wayland has some new features, that I’m excited to take advantage of, but I still cannot find a way to share some windows, but not an entire monitor.

OBS has another feature: “virtual monitor”. It does what it sounds like, and creates a virtual monitor, which you can then treat like a real monitor, like extending to, or unifying outputs, etc.

It also has a feature to share the entire workspace, but it doesn’t work like I expect, and instead uses all monitors (not workspaces) as a single input source. I suspect that’s a bug tbh, because this behavior is useless considering you can just add monitors as a source side by side.

Wezterm. I started out on konsole, and was happy with it, but then I started using zellij as my terminal multiplexer. Although zellij allows you to configure what command copies and pastes text, copy/paste on wayland and windows only works by default with wezterm. It gives me consistency across multiple DEs/OSes, with minimal configuration, which is good because I was setting up development environments for many people, with many configurations

In order to receive messages from a mailing list you must subscribe to it

It would have been really nice for this to be documented in the docs for the openstack mailing list, so I could know before I sent an email. I read their 3 different pages on the mailing lists, wrote up a email with all correct formatting and etiquette, and read through the archives to ensure I was sending my question to the correct mailing list, only to receive a “Your message needs to be approved by a moderator.”

Almost a year later, still in quarantine. It doesn’t matter though, I figured my issue out.

Despite all the effort put into documenting mailing lists, and all the effort I put into reading that documentation, there are still de-facto standards people are just expected to know on top of that and it’s bullshit. Software forges (github, forgejo, etc) don’t have this problem, people can just contribute or ask for help using the integrated tooling (issues, PR’s, etc). There is a problem with centralization, but hopefully activitypub federation between software forges fixes that.

The new mars helicoptor, ingenuity, runs linux.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/19/22291324/linux-perseverance-mars-curiosity-ingenuity

Their solution is to hold two copies of memory and double check operations as much as possible, and if any difference is detected they simply reboot. Ingenuity will start to fall out of the sky, but it can go through a full reboot and come back online in a few hundred milliseconds to continue flying.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26181763

Dunno if future one’s will run linux though, since this is just an experiment.

You could write the entire program in awk,

https://github.com/djanderson/aho

It’s cause you’re not actually supposed to use nix-env: https://stop-using-nix-env.privatevoid.net/

You’re actually supposed to be using nix search nixpkgs#packagename to search and nix profile install nixpkgs#packagename to install.

However, to use both of those, you need to have the “experimental” (not really though, most of the community uses them) features of nix-command and nix flakes enabled, which they aren’t by default.

And of course, nowhere on the main documentation did I find any if that, I only found it via the pain of using it wrong, and forum posts.

Nix’s documentation is horrific. I’ve had situations where I only got help via discord…

git clone --depth 1 will clone a git repo without older stuff. Without this, the nixpkgs git repo is like 13-14 GB, but with a depth of 1, it’s only 200 mb.