Tag: PineTab2

“Sway” too long

Spent way too long last night trying to get #Sway set up on my #PineTab2 because:

1. The Arch dependencies for some of the optional components were broken (wmenu requires dmenu, but the package didn’t say so).
2. The Arch documentation for Sway is out of date and sends you to AUR for just about everything.
3. The documents I found didn’t make it clear that key bindings are the only way to launch things unless you explicitly add some other kind of launcher that’s not in the sample config. Or what to expect when changing the menu config. Or what the menus are supposed to look like.
4. Because of the broken dependencies, even when I tried to use the keybinds, they failed silently. For a while I wasn’t even sure it was reading my config file.

And now I’m like…why did I go to all that trouble? All I wanted was to make sure I had all the prerequisites to run a basic Wayland session on something lighter than Plasma. I’m just going to switch back to LXQt.

I miss the days when #Linux seemed to actually run deterministically. When I could see what was breaking easily and fix it easily.

I don’t miss all the extra fiddling and trial and error just to get something functional.

Sure, I like tinkering. When I want to. I don’t like to have to.

Kmail

Ugh… I was hoping KMail had gotten more reliable since I last tried it, but just setting up an IMAP account I had multiple issues:

  • The inbox wasn’t synced. Everything underneath it was, just not the inbox.
  • It didn’t initially recognize all the special folders like Trash and Sent to begin with, either.
  • Even after I managed to get it to sync the inbox folder, it was literally impossible to move or delete anything from that folder! In some places the action was disabled, and in some it was missing!

That last one was first reported 10 years ago, supposedly fixed, and then it came back.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316153

There’s a workaround that involves messing around with the akonadi console, but apparently even that’s only temporary!

I wanted to use the defaults on this system as much as possible before bringing in other stuff, especially since I could theoretically share contacts and calendar accounts across multiple apps without signing in on every single one…but I think I’m going to just install Thunderbird and have done with it.

Gyahhh, now I’m thinking of that old Apple commercial where the actor who played Lord Refa on B5 is trying to set up a Windows program and his kid eventually gets frustrated and says, “I’m going over to so-and-so’s house. They have a Mac.”