Linux

Sober is exclusively available on Flathub, whom published these figures in their Year In Review: https://flathub.org/en/year-in-review/2025

Edit: I'm now enlightened and use mpv, I really like the ModernZ OSC (on-screen controls), and uses config files.

IINA is only on macOS. I looked up linux alternatives but none of them seem to have similar looking UIs, at least out of the box. I want the player UI to float on top of the video + with a blurred background, it as shown in the image; or at least the ability to theme it like so.

It's very clear that the ricing community wants to set any given colorscheme in many apps automatically, most tools do so either with wallpapers (which is inherently opinionated), or the base16 spec. The original base16 repo hasn't been updated in over 2 years, and 16 colors simply isn't enough to make rich granular themes, especially when code has many different syntax elements. We need a successor that allows for more colors on both TUIs and GUIs, more than 16 colors (like 24 or even 32), mapped more granularly.

My story:

I've spent lots of time looking at how to have good colorschemes in apps that change dynamically, to make my desktop pretty and with variety. Many tools can apply colorschemes to apps using image / wallpaper colors like Matugen and Pywal. These tools are very well made, but I realized I actually prefer rainbow colorschemes like Catppuccin. Either way I got attached Matugen, fortunately it can be used without wallpapers and supports custom keywords, there are also base16 colorscheme managers like flavours and tinty.

But Cattppuccin's base16 theme didn't look right compared to its Neovim plugin. The plugin is very well integrated and colors a lot things for you that base16 plugins may not, I would have to set certain UI colors myself if I wanted them to match. Some of the major colors (variables, keywords, brackets, etc.) were shuffled around, so out of the box Catppuccin's base16 theme doesn't even match Cattppuccin's original vision / color harmony. All of this probably applies to other colorschemes as well. So if I want to switch between different schemes while staying true to each one, I would need to set up plugins for each app rather than automatically.

0:00 sg2d - https://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/

0:48 rescatux - https://www.supergrubdisk.org/category/download/rescatuxdownloads/rescatux-stable/

1:06 cmd gems - https://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse

1:30 tldp - https://tldp.org/index.html

2:05 wikis - https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page

https://wiki.debian.org/

2:38 cmdline weather - curl wttr.in

3:22 sh bible -

https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-sh-bible

https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible

4:10 shellcheck - https://www.shellcheck.net/

4:44 uefi vs bios - https://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/booting.html

5:47 performance guides - https://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html

6:16 tldr, manual pages - https://github.com/tealdeer-rs/tealdeer

7:44 cmdline cheatsheets - curl cheat.sh

8:31 fhs - https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html

8:58 otw games - https://overthewire.org/

9:38 awesome lists - https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome

10:40 how to learn.

I want to sort of recreate macOS 15's dynamic wallpaper, and downloaded this set of 8 wallpapers which are most / all the colors it cycles through. On Hyprland, I want to cycle through them throughout the day, but also slowly transition from one wallpaper to another for an hour or longer, crossfading / blending them.

I did some searching, and neither timewall or adi1090x/dynamic-wallpaper can do it. I looked at making my own script to blend images once every 60 secs, but I'm not sure how to quickly crossfade images. This command takes ~15 secs, I feel this should possible much faster with or without imagemagick: magick composite -blend 50 wallpaper1.png wallpaper2.png output.png.

Comments

https://github.com/iDescriptor/iDescriptor

Currently it supports AppImage, but Flatpak version will possibly be available in future: https://github.com/iDescriptor/iDescriptor/issues/1

Compared to other atomic distributions on the market, the ability to live-update without needing to reboot is an important usability requirement for us, such that the user experience remains friendly to downstream users.

I'll start: while looking at app theming I came across WallRizz, renamed from WallWiz. I haven't tried it, and looking at it documentation it seems well made, but I cringe at the name and the AI-generated penguin logo. It shares the art style of all the other AI slop, its basically italian brainrot but 2D. WallWiz sounds way better, rizz sounds like it was specially designed for gen alpha (little kids). If there are apps of even similar quality, why would I use this one?

I want a display manager that shows the desktop as the background, instead of a background image or video. I'm thinking of auto-logging in on boot, and adding another startup command to Hyprland to lock the desktop and show the display manger. My searches didn't yield anything. The closest I could find is hyprlock which blurs the desktop, but that's just a lock screen & not a proper display manager.

I'm wondering if there are possibly any tools out there to do this: Declare a color scheme and set them to all apps CLIs and TUIs, either immediately on upon restart of each app individually. I'm on NixOS and looked at Stylix, once properly set up it automatically sets color schemes to apps. To change the color scheme I'd have to rebuild my nix configuration which is slow.

When I first began researching Linux, for my needs, I found the number of different Distros to be overwhelming. So I made this flow chart, with the intent to help new users find a starting point for choosing a distribution.

I'm open to critique, as to making this chart as helpful as possible.

EDIT: Chart updated based on suggestions in the comments.

This has turned out to be more tedious than I thought. I did the usual looking up tools to use, and found they use ddci, like ddcutil and ddccontrol, but they're very slow. Before setting them up, KDE's brightness slider did software brightness, now it does hardware brightness but now takes a whole moment with each brightness, I can't smoothly slide it back and forth like I can on laptops. I have a Dell G3233Q connected via USB For USB ports and DisplayPort.

Linux undoubtedly requires lots of troubleshooting and searching. Lately I’ve been spending hours (and still aren’t done with) setting up a Windows VM with good graphics support on NixOS. I’ve opened >300 tabs as counted with a browser addon, having looked up stuff like "best way to install Windows VM on linux with , “best VM software for linux”, and more specific things like how to setup WinApps, but I’ve been told that it has very poor graphics performance, since it doesn’t include anything to make it better, so now I’m torturing myself trying to get Looking Glass to work. I opened an feature request today to make better support for NixOS but it was closed stating that documentation is for deb-based distros and “a niche distro such as NixOS”, RIP.

Awesome to see Omarchy getting more visibility! Fireship’s vid spreading the Linux desktop to 500k+ viewers is huge!

I don't use this distro myself, but I still cheer for anything that helps motivate Windows users to make the switch.

I have decided that, simply put, I am very, very tired of my computer acting against me and gaining new problems every day as if they were achievements in a video game, so I’m going to take advantage of my Linux experience with the Steam Deck and Raspberry Pi OS to finally start moving away from Windows!

I spent much of today trying to get WinApps running on NixOS. The VM performance is meh after following all the setup steps in the documentation, and I can't get the RDP part working. I'm not asking for help, which would probably take lots of back and forth commenting. but if I should even try to continue. The steps don't even mention Nix, only how to install dependencies via package managers.

I tried finding videos of Photoshop in WinApps but didn't find any, to see what performance actually looks like. Would it even be decent, or should I just suck it up and do GPU passthrough? Ideally I'd like Photoshop a window part of my linux desktop instead of switching back and forth between OSes. Making something work has been a PITA so far.