Fre:ac seems to run in a wine package.

I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.

If you have a LS-120, it will eject the floppy disc like you were on dome fancy-pants Macintosh!

Sigil of Motif (rare)

• +2 to disguise, if you are attempting to pass for 20 years older than you are
• Stacks with Cape of fvwm

Warhammer of cfdisk (common)

• Cannot be dodged
• Roll 1d10. On critical fail, smash yourself with warhammer for 5d4 damage.

I tried pulling in the theming from there, and while it works miracles, I still want to do the three-headed dragon meme:

• Real Motif apps
• Qt5 apps (where there’s a Motif-like theme baked in)
• GTK apps, which don’t honour the same fonts and the theme is far more divergent from the “real deal”

There are a few other “Solaris 9” and “Perl Tk” lookalike themes that also come close, but they’re all sabotaged by GTK’s lack of bitmap font support (The old bitmap Helvetica is my go-to UI font)

Heads will roll if my LS-120 drive stops working!

Coherent theming, although you’ve hardly had that since Windows 98.

I’ve applied themes to make Xaw, Qt, and GTK software more Motif-like, but the GTK ones seem spotty and the Qt theme doesn’t work for Qt6, and fonts are inconsistent.

Also on modern firebreathers.

I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.

I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.

I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.

I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn’t like don’t need to follow me to the next build.

In a conventional install, that just means “don’t check the checkbox in the installer next time”. In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?

I suppose the closest I’ve gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don’t use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.

I suspect the tooling isn’t quite there yet for desktop use cases.

If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.

The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.

We get, for some reason, a huge number of window replacement contractors coming door-to-door. Because I really want to be high-pressure sold $10k worth of low quality glass from the people who are running big enough marhins to put a full page colour ad in the local newspaper every day to go with their 6 hours a day of local TV spots.

I actually said to one “We’re a Linux household. Not interested in Windows” and slammed the door on them.

I now realize cocking a rifle would have made the effect even better.

I wonder if it might be an unreproducible moment in history.

I suspect the Cambrian explosion of X11 window managers came from two things:

• Propriatery and former-propriatery systems with unique look and feel (see, for example, Open Look/olvwm) There was also a tendency to copy any style you could (WindowMaker copied NeXTStep, IceWM mocked OS/2, and when those cute QNX demo discs came out, within days there were lookalike themes). It feels like the last major outside inspirations, MacOS and Win1,1 are converging on almost intrrchangeable insipidness.

• The 1990s/2000s customization era. Machines were finally powerful enough to do mildly nifty things, but still attainable by hobbyists gluing together pixmaps and this bred stuff like Enlightnment E16 or Afterstep

Do these forces still exist in 2024? It seems like Unix Porn today is a bunch of neokvetch windows without even a titlebar to provide a personal statement.

I think I’d be a lot more excited about Wayland if I felt like I can get a compositor that matches my tastes.

I want to iconify things to the desktop, not relying on a taskbar-alike. Nothing seems to offer that. Hell, the taskbar is often a third party program.

I want to double-click to shade. Labwc just added this, a feature that X11 window managers have been offering since the 90s.

I want an aesthetic that’s got real depth and skeumorphism, rather that flat and featureless. Maybe something offers that, but there are plenty of X11 choices that have beveled buttons out of the box.

The charm of Unix systems used to be flexibility, buy Wayland seems to be an extinction-level event for traditional window management. Nothing fills the gap of FVWM or WindowMaker. But gosh, I can get 92 flavours of tiling compositor and windows that ripple when dragged.

I had a similar positive experience with Gamescope, which tamed a game that freaked out every time I moved the moude onto the other monitor.

Maybe Wayland’s healthy place is as a secondary window system you launch inside your normal X11 session.

There are some canned choices like “50 newest tracks”.