Sway and client side decorations

You may have recently seen an article from GNOME on the subject of client side decorations (CSD) titled Introducing the CSD Initiative. It states some invalid assumptions which I want to clarify, and I want to tell you Sway’s stance on the subject. I also speak for the rest of the projects involved in wlroots on this matter, including Way Cooler, waymonad, and bspwc.

The subject of which party is responsible for window decorations on Wayland (the client or the server) has been a subject of much debate. I want to clarify that though GNOME may imply that a consensus has been reached, this is not the case. CSD have real problems that...

Fee breakdown for various donation platforms

Understanding fees are a really confusing part of supporting creators of things you like. I provide a few ways for people to support my work, and my supporters can struggle to understand the differences between them. It comes down to fees, of which there are several kinds (note: I just made these terms up):

Learn about your package manager

Tools like virtualenv, rbenv, and to a lesser extent npm and pip, are occasionally useful in development but encourage bad practices in production. Many people forget that their distro already has a package manager! And there’s more– you, the user, can write packages for it!

Your distro’s package repositories probably already have a lot of your dependencies, and can conveniently update your software alongside the rest of your system. On the whole you can expect your distro packages to be much better citizens on your system than a language-specific package manager will be. Additionally, pretty much all distros provide a means for you to host your own package repositories,...

fork is not my favorite syscall

This article has been on my to-write list for a while now. In my opinion, fork is one of the most questionable design choices of Unix. I don’t understand the circumstances that led to its creation, and I grieve over the legacy rationale that keeps it alive to this day.

Let’s set the scene. It’s 1971 and you’re a fly on the wall in Bell Labs, watching the first edition of Unix being designed for the PDP-11/20. This machine has a 16-bit address space with no more than 248 kilobytes of memory. They’re discussing how they’re going to support programs that spawn new programs, and someone has a...

wlroots whitepaper available

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Firefox is on a slippery slope

For a long time, it was just setting the default search provider to Google in exchange for a beefy stipend. Later, paid links in your new tab page were added. Then, a proprietary service, Pocket, was bundled into the browser - not as an addon, but a hardcoded feature. In the past few days, we’ve discovered an advertisement in the form of browser extension was sideloaded into user browsers. Whoever is leading these decisions at Mozilla needs to be stopped.

Here’s a breakdown of what happened a few days ago. Mozilla and NBC Universal did a “collaboration” (read: promotion) for the TV show Mr. Robot. It involved sideloading...

A history of emergent intelligence

As you all know, the simulation of universe 2813/9301 is now coming to a close. This simulation is notable for being the first simulated universe suitable for hosting intelligent life, but yesterday the simulation reached a state where we believe no additional intelligences will emerge. It seems the final state of this set of physical laws is a dark and empty universe of slowly evaporating black holes. Though, given the historical significance of this simulation, it’s unlikely we we’ll be turning it off any time soon!

On taking good care of your phone

I just finished replacing the micro-USB daughterboard on my Samsung Galaxy S5, which involved taking the phone most of the way apart, doing the replacement, and putting it back together. This inspired me to write about my approach to maintaining my cell phone. I’ve had this phone for a while and I have no plans to upgrade - I backed the upcoming Purism phone, but I expect to spend months/years on the software before I’ll be using that as my daily driver.

I don’t want to be buying a new phone every year. That’s a lot of money! Though the technophile in me finds the latest and greatest...

Portability matters

There are many kinds of “portability” in software. Portability refers to the relative ease of “porting” a piece of software to another system. That platform might be another operating system, another CPU architecture, another web browser, another filesystem… and so on. More portable software uses the limited subset of interfaces that are common between systems, and less portable software leverages interfaces specific to a particular system.

Some people think that portability isn’t very important, or don’t understand the degree to which it’s important. Some people might call their software portable if it works on Windows and macOS - they’re wrong. They might call their software portable if it works...

Nvidia sucks and I'm sick of it

There’s something I need to make clear about Nvidia. Sway 1.0, which is the release after next, is not going to support the Nvidia proprietary driver, EGLStreams, or any other proprietary graphics APIs. The only supported driver for Nvidia cards will be the open source nouveau driver. I will explain why.

Today, Sway is able to run on the Nvidia proprietary driver. This is not and has never been an officially supported feature - we’ve added a few things to try and make it easier but my stance has always been that Nvidia users are on their own for support. In fact, Nvidia support was added to...