I think Inkscape 1.4 doesn’t bring any fancy features, but rather makes what already works better. The inconspicous releases are just as important.

While I use river as daily driver and am very happy with it, I feel people who like Hyprland will find river to be rather limited and barren in terms of looks and availability of plugins.

Does it support any DE other than Gnome? For the rest, looks cool!

Sadly, not officially (atm). I think you need to use a custom image and I don’t know how well those work.

See https://old.reddit.com/r/vanillaos/comments/1d69jn0/want_to_run_vanilla_os_but_no_gnome_de/

Governance leaves a lot to be desired.

Genuine question from somebody who’s out of the loop and doesn’t use NixOS: How does this affect your day to day using the distro?

I’ve heard good things about VanillaOS. Not used it myself though.

With their package manager apx, you can use software from pretty much any distro in VanillaOS (copied from link above):

Apx is a tool that allows you to generate work environments based on any Linux distribution and seamlessly integrates them with the system in a convenient way …

Pretty sure that is possible with Nix and home-manager.

I don’t have anything useful to say but that sounds fixing dystopian.

Oh thank you for that link. I knew I’ve heard him take about his plans in some talk he gave, but didn’t know he write them down.

I am on the same page as you. River works for me well enough, but the vision is what keeps me excited.

What exactly was the problem with not being able to configure CSD/SSD? I’ve not run into any issues but that has probably more to do with the applications I run.

I’m sorry to hear that you’re having a hard time getting the software running. I understand that this can be very frustrating.

As others have said, making yourself the owner of everything can cause numerous issues in the long run and there’s a reason why most distributions DON’T make you root.

Why are you using Linux in the first place? I think sonarr and jackett both run on Windows as well.

Don’t let the frustration get the best of you. If you really want to run those tools yourself, then dive into it (and all the technical issues that are part of it), but if you only want to have access to the functionality, you might want to look into a service that takes care of all the technical burden.

Good luck

You’re welcome. I’ve been using it as my daily driver for over a year now and it works for that, but don’t expect any bells and whistles.

I think the biggest difference is dynamic (river) vs manual tiling (sway). Other than that, I feel sway is much more mature and there’s a proper community surrounding it that had written scripts and tools that work with sway. Many of which you are probably gonna use with river as well (swaylock, swaybg, swayidle).

One thing that’s pretty cool about river (at least in theory) is that the tiling algorithm is not part of the compositor itself. Instead, you can run any river tiling program and have that part be completely custom if you wish. Also configuration is done via commands instead of a config language (you usually run a bash script at start).

From what I remember, the vision of Isaac Freund (main developer) is, that river will become more of a tiling compositor base, that others can then use to create their own distributions. I heard that in some talk he gave. You should be able to find that on YouTube.

However, there’s still a long way to go.

In it’s current state, river reminds me of spectrwm. Very simple, with some cool, but ultimately non-essential, ideas that you probably won’t find anywhere else.

Ah, I think that isn’t possible. You would have to split the track and then use the smart clips feature. Or you use a different tool like someone else mentioned.

This should be possible since version 3.1: https://support.audacityteam.org/additional-resources/changelog/older-versions/audacity-3.1

I see you already have a solution but someone else might find this interesting: keyd is a pretty powerful keyboard remapping utility that works everywhere (X11, Wayland and VTs). Think QMK but done on the OS.

While you make many valid points, I think it’s not reasonable to assume that OP could have avoided all the struggles they had, if they just had informed himself prior to installing. Especially since many of them problems described were probably caused by an unfortunate combination of software/driver issues, a specific hardware setup and certain user expectations.

I doubt that watching tech YouTubers or similar would have helped much.

Another river user here. I like river, but I wouldn’t recommend it (for someone who’s never used a tiler). It feels a bit bare bones and there’s not that much development going on (still active, but not frequent updates).

Both Sway and Hyprland are probably good picks. You can always switch to a different one, if your first choice doesn’t satisfy you.

The ease of buying a quality laptop without having to worry about if it will run well with my OS.

I’ve been using MacOS for about 8 years at work and I never really taken to it. It’s fine and I can do my work but I won’t use it if I hadn’t to (unless the only alternative was Windows). But one thing I really like about Macs is that you can buy one and you won’t have any headaches with battery life, software compatibility etc. You get decent hardware (let’s ignore the whole 8GB on an M3 = 16GB on other machine debacle) and know that it will work decently well with 3rd party software/hardware and if something breaks you can just bring into an Apple store.

While there are dedicated Linux sellers (System76, Tuxedo Computeres, Starlabs), I’m hesitant to spend 2k on a computer just to find out that the build quality is subpar, the battery life sucks or that customer support will just ignore my requests (read some bad experiences on the Starlabs subreddit).

Official Release Page for those who don’t want to read the Phoronix article: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/releases/1.0.0

It’s great to see that Pipewire has reached this milestone. Personally I’ve been using it since 0.3.35 for very basic audio needs and it’s been a very smooth transition. After installation I never had to tinker with it anymore. "It just works"^TM

Ah, that’s good to know. Thanks for the info!

Vanilla OS is moving to Debian with version 2. I don’tthink they have a KDE version, though.