Anteckningar

Was going to await Debian 13 for one of my laptops, but I got tired of waiting and reached for OpenSUSE TW instead. It was a solid choice.

Debian is a solid choice for a laptop/workstation, but the last 6 months before the next stable - like now - is an impatient wait. Plasma 6 and LabWC will be awesome then, but I want to use them now.

CSS Subgrids. I do not yet have words to describe how powerful it is.

Neither can I express how angry I am about the fact CSS subgrid are so incredibly late into the game. This should have been introduced decades ago.

Designers and art directors have known and embraced the power of grids since, like forever.

I can’t believe Chrome still forces me to duplicate styles for Slider inputs and Progress elements.

It was filed as a bug in 2015 and closed as a wontfix.
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40564916

An example. This is not allowed:

::-moz-progress-bar, 
::-webkit-progress-value { 
  color: var(--progress-value-color); 
}

Instead, one has to do this:

::-moz-progress-bar { 
  color: var(--progress-value-color); 
}

::-webkit-progress-value { 
  color: var(--progress-value-color); 
}

This is shit.

Hopefully, the new select styles initiative won’t get stuck in this limbo. 20 years writing CSS, and weird stuff like this is still to be excepted.

No wonder people take the easy way out and rely on over-engineered form controls in React/Vue/Svelte, where 99% of all solutions are not as a11y as a Progress element would be.

Sad.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed turned out to be as boring as I hoped it to be. I have had some bad NVidia updates and have experienced the slowness of Zypper, but I was able to solve without googling anything. The former was even solved using Yast in a recovery shell.

My KDE Plasma desktop stays out of my way and “just works”. This really is how Desktop Linux should feel like.

Making pancakes. The old Skeppshult still delivers, even with a vegan recipe.

Jumping on the Zen browser wagon. Did not expect it to be a fork of Firefox, I had expected Chrome.

I really like the promise of being able to toggle all chrome and still keep the excellent Firefox developer tools. Zen might be my new browser choice for web development.

So a new ongoing redesign is up for preview. https://25.madr.se

Wow. The Zen browser website crashes in Safari. So no thanks?

I am excited for Debian 13. It will make me not use Arch, Btw. Can’t wait to move on from being a target for an overdue and not at all funny meme.

Even to this pro-Hyprland day, I would recommend Sway and Waybar as a first WM. The combo is awesome to see if tiling window managers are something for you, or for making your first rice.

I have used i3 and Sway for several years, and up until recently I never had used the Scratchpad feature. Now I would miss it in other WMs.

The Sway Scratchpad is a bit like git stashes, only it is cyclic rather than a stack. I use it for my tmux session, my password manager and my audio settings: stuff I’m not necessarily would like to have on a keybind or a dedicated workspace.

Recently, Scratchpads in Sway has been a pleasant new companion. Being able to toggle Slack, a terminal for git commits and Keepass have been a productivity boost.

Spent a night fixing Nvidia related issues. Always a joy. Next GPU will be from AMD.

FINE. I am installing OpenSUSE on my gaming PC.

I have run out of arguments not to.

OpenSUSE installed. The installation process was ok. They forced me to install x11 to use KDE Plasma 6. I refused, and went back to rusty ol’ startplasma-wayland instead of SDDM.

Gotta say, OpenSUSE delivers. Might be my daily driver on my desktop computer for a long while. I had read the default Plasma is excellent, and I agree.

Even REAPER and all LV2 plugins were easy, thanks to OBS.

It is a joy to browse some color palettes and make up a website design as spontaneous outburst of inspiration comes.

Never forget to play and have fun. Your own website can, perhaps should, be a statement.

First PWA built with vanilla Svelte and Vite is live, my second overall:
https://srf25.madr.se

It is a digital countdown app to help me keep lifting weights, do cardio and being on a diet until Sweden Rock Festival 2025.

I have successfully migrated all my personal source code from Github to a selfhosted alternative.

I have thought about it for a while, and when a friend tipped me about https://forgejo.org/ I felt it was time.

In the future, when I have the time, I would like to build a Linux distribution from scratch. Only for the sake of learning.

The preferred method seems to be: 1) https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/, 2) https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/

Gotta say, KDE Plasma have started to feel like coming home. Every time I try to make a /r/unixporn rice, I always burn out and return to KDE Plasma.

Doing a minimalistic DAW desktop was fun, though. It is powerful to have a setup were everything is blazing fast and use less than 600MB on boot.

Another try to learn finnish in Duolingo. Hitto sinä, or should I say Kiitos, Käärijä and Erika Wikman. After all, I am 14% finn according to my DNA.

Reading about CSS subgrid, long overdue. What a time to be a CSS author.

Doing deadlift. No straps, no belt. Just chalk.

Reinstalled DAW, based on Linux. Near MacOS level in case of latency.

With labwc and yambar, my reinstalled DAW idles on 550MM RAM. Reaper may have the rest.

Life and times when switching between JavaScript and Python, ep 001

Python: range(5)

JavaScript: Array.from({ length: 5 }, (_, index) => index)

Thinking about making another offline-first PWA. Last time was 2019.

React and Redux seems to be boring choices nowadays, which is good.