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Cake day: May 12th, 2022

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  • 4ffy@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux and DOOM (1993)
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    1 month ago

    The reason that Doom is so portable goes beyond Linux and is an artefact of its development. id developed Doom on NeXTSTEP (i.e. Unix) machines and obviously targeted DOS. This is pretty unique among DOS games at the time and required id to write as much code as possible in a platform agnostic way. This means that the main engine does not care about where it is running and the usual DOS hacks are contained to DOS-specific files. In order to port Doom to a new platform, ideally one only needs to rewrite the system-specific implementation files for video, sound, filesystem access, etc., and this mostly holds true today. (These files are prefixed with i_ in the Doom source).

    The Linux port is just one of many versions developed at the time. I don’t believe that it was commercially released; it was more of a portability test. The reason that the Linux version was chosen for the source release over the DOS version was because it didn’t rely on the proprietary DMX sound library that the DOS port used.


  • Emacs’s regular clipboard is the “kill ring” which also allows you to retrieve any previously cut/copied text. It also has “registers” where you can store and retrieve snippets of text, which can be considered clipboards when used for this purpose. Registers can be referenced by any character you can type on your keyboard, including control characters like ^D.

    This totals… a lot of clipboards.



  • 4ffy@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlDid we kill Linux's killer feature?
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    10 months ago

    I think that this is above all else the reason that I use Arch. Arch Linux makes creating packages trivial, basically just wrapping build instructions into a shell script template. Arch handles the rest. The build systems for deb or rpm packages don’t come close, and good luck rolling your own flatpak.

    This allows me to use pacman for everything outside of my home directory. Pacman is practically the central feature of my computer, and it’s wonderful. I’m sure those Nix people can relate, though I guess my method is a bit less robust.



  • 4ffy@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlNon-Tiling Window Manager Users?
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    1 year ago

    I am a proud Openbox user. In the stacking realm, there is nothing quite like Openbox’s customizeability and the great tooling that surrounds it. In particular, opensnap gives me window snapping to the edge of the screen with the mouse, which is sorely missing from most light window managers. Openbox also has really powerful hotkeys (any arbitrary sequence of actions) alongside Emacs-style key chords, which makes it difficult to port my setup to any other environment.

    One day, I hope to migrate to labwc, which seems to be carrying Openbox’s banner into the Wayland era. Unfortunately, labwc doesn’t (and probably never will) support key chords and I have not been able to find a suitable replacement for tint2, which I use as my taskbar. Someday…

    Here is an old screenshot of mine. Nothing has changed since then.


  • bspwm is probably my favorite general-purpose tiling window manager. I have not personally tried this out yet, but River is superficially similar, with the main configuration done through a combination of shell scripting and riverctl commands. I’m not sure how the tiling behaves in comparison though.


  • This is something that I am sure will be solved eventually, but one of the major weaknesses of Wayland is the lack of lightweight standalone compositors.

    For example, if I want a lightweight stacking window manager on X, I can choose between Openbox, Fluxbox, FVWM, IceWM, Pekwm, JWM, Window Maker, hell even twm if I were a masochist. I have tried out all of these at one point or another and they all have something to offer users. But using Wayland, there’s, uhh, labwc, and that’s it? Maybe I could try using kwin standalone?

    The situation for tiling window managers is similar, with Sway being the only one that feels mature.

    I plan on migrating from Openbox to labwc at some point in the future, once it’s ready. labwc itself is really good, but some of the other programs I need to recreate my setup aren’t there yet. Someday…