I’m going to swerve going Linux phone at the moment, turns out that Ubuntu Touch doesn’t have a fully featured, stable email app yet. I would have thought there’d have been a bit of a choice by now.
I got another phone with the intention of installing UT on it before learning of that bombshell, just going to install LineageOS with microG again on it. But I need to wait 168 hours for the bootloader to unlock because of Xiaomi rules. Ho di hum.
Pipewire worked fine with XFCE, and it was nice having EasyEffects. Anyone tried Pipewire with Gnome? Before I possibly hose something.
I already have a pipewire library installed as a dependency of other packages, but I don’t know anything about it:
~> pacman -Qi pipewire
Name : pipewire
Version : 1:0.3.58-1
Description : Low-latency audio/video router and processor
Architecture : x86_64
URL : https://pipewire.org
Licenses : MIT LGPL
Groups : None
Provides : libpipewire-0.3.so=0-64
Depends On : alsa-card-profiles libdbus-1.so=3-64 libglib-2.0.so=0-64
libncursesw.so=6-64 libsndfile.so=1-64 libudev.so=1-64
libusb-1.0.so=0-64 libasound.so=2-64 libsystemd.so=0-64
libbluetooth.so=3-64 libsbc.so=1-64 libldacBT_enc.so=2-64
libfreeaptx.so=0-64 libfdk-aac.so=2-64 libopus.so=0-64
liblilv-0.so=0-64 libwebrtc_audio_processing.so=1-64
Optional Deps : pipewire-docs: Documentation
pipewire-session-manager: Session manager [installed]
pipewire-alsa: ALSA configuration
pipewire-jack: JACK support
pipewire-pulse: PulseAudio replacement
gst-plugin-pipewire: GStreamer plugin [installed]
pipewire-zeroconf: Zeroconf support
pipewire-v4l2: V4L2 interceptor
pipewire-x11-bell: X11 bell
realtime-privileges: realtime privileges with rt module
rtkit: realtime privileges with rtkit module [installed]
Required By : fluidsynth gst-plugin-pipewire mutter obs-studio
pipewire-media-session telegram-desktop xdg-desktop-portal
Optional For : chromium electron electron17 electron19 qt5-webengine
qt6-webengine sdl2
Conflicts With : None
Replaces : None
Installed Size : 8.25 MiB
Packager : Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig) <heftig@archlinux.org>
Build Date : Thu 15 Sep 2022 17:16:02 BST
Install Date : Fri 07 Oct 2022 01:38:38 BST
Install Reason : Installed as a dependency for another package
Install Script : Yes
Validated By : Signature
I guess it is installed by default in Manjaro Gnome, but Pulseaudio is enabled by default instead of Pipewire. Interesting. I didn’t even think to look if it was installed yet. It wasn’t installed by default in Manjaro XFCE, but it works well there after uninstalling Pulseaudio. I’ll have to remove Pulseaudio tomorrow and see how it goes.
Pipewire seems to be working fine in Manjaro Gnome. Just in case anyone needs it, this is what is required: Install ‘manjaro-pipewire’ and any optional dependencies you might like. Uninstall ‘pulseaudio-alsa’. Restart. This was the same as on Manjaro XFCE. Gnome tends to be an ass about some things, so I wasn’t sure if there would be a difference.
Actually, maybe everything isn’t well. When watching video cpu temp shoots up fast. It seems to be a lie though. Playing a video immediately shoots up the temp without time for that to happen.
Don’t do it on Manjaro Gnome. The process of reverting from Pipewire to Pulseaudio is badly buggered up.
I have a bit of OS install fatigue at the moment. Lineage OS 19 isn’t as stable on this new phone as 17 was on the last, which was rock solid and zero issue. This time around I’m having to reboot every other day because of slowdowns and every now and then there’s an unresponsive GUI.
Got replacement laptop with proper 90Wh battery and am going to chill on Win 11 before getting Manjaro set up on the 2nd SSD slot.
Yea, this stuff can definitely wear on you. Good luck with the phone.
I think I might have switched to Gnome from XFCE yesterday. After a handful of settings changes, it’s nicer than XFCE for sure.
Gnome is nice, check out some of the extensions too. I like the “Hide Top Bar” one which is just about perfect, but there’s a buglet where it makes the text input box on the big search screen after pressing meta/iwndows key a bit small.
I have the layout set as a traditional desktop with smaller application icons on the taskbar, window animations off, single workspace, no hot corner.
This is first time I have used zsh shell, so I’ll see how that goes. But icons in a terminal seem very unnecessary.
I eyeballed a couple of extensions for Gnome, but I guess I’ll have to wait for them to update for Gnome 43.
Powerline fonts/icons are great for custom prompts. There’s oh-my-posh for Powershell and oh-my-zsh available that have different themes that add information in the form of icons that beats text for instant info.
Damnit. Zsh is pretty nice. My favorite feature so far is just being able to directly cd to a directory without typing ‘cd’. I always thought that would be a nice shell feature.
Not a fan of Gnome Terminal or Gedit so far. I usually get on with whichever distro default terminal and gui text editor are installed, but these are really no-go in being so restrictive in features.
Tilix and Geany seem pretty good. Giving those a go. Tilix has tiling built-in. Geany has plugins for auto-save and a file browser in the sidebar.
I moved on to Terminator for the terminal and just use Neovim like any normal person would. 
What are you doing for copy/paste from/to neovim? I always hated all the kludgery for that with vim.
Maybe it is different in other desktop environments, but I always thought it is annoying that Gnome-based desktops don’t have a convenient way to create application shortcut links. Have to create a desktop file and move it to the relevant directory.
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Waterfox
GenericName=Web Browser
Icon=/home/user1/Downloads/waterfox-G5.0.1/waterfox/browser/chrome/icons/default/default48.png
Exec=/home/user1/Downloads/waterfox-G5.0.1/waterfox/waterfox/usr/share/applications/waterfox.desktopSomething that is more annoying here though is that you can’t easily grab the path to a file from linux gui file browsers. So I end up on a terminal doing:
Find the executable and icon files
Browse to the the executable file
find $PWD to get a copy’able path
Paste the path into the desktop file
Browse to the icon file
find $PWD to get a copy’able path
Paste the path into the desktop file
sudo cp waterfox.desktop /usr/share/applications/waterfox.desktop (for example)
Right-click the application icon in the application menu and pin to dash
It seems so kludgy to have to do that for a modern desktop operating system.
Copy to works with Ctrl+Shift+V, copy from for multiple lines (to avoid the line numbers) needs yanking to the clipboard buffer.