I'd gladly pay a reasonable price for professional packages/support for programs like Emacs/Melpa, Debian, and Xfce. As a user, I empathize with the complaints by developers that are constantly overworked. Even if this doesn't generate enough money to pay for everything, it might be enough to hire someone to handle the issues and communities, something that clearly drains their efforts, especially because programmers tend to prefer technical challenges rather than dealing with people.

I understand that many projects accept donations, but I think providing an actual reward (even if its something minimal, like an updated package instead of having to build it from source) might be a good way to get resources and avoid developer burndown.

I'm curious as to what the Tildes Linux/BSD community (and I suppose other answers like Windows or MacOS would be acceptable, though they may feel a bit more dry) use for their desktop. I imagine that Ubuntu and Gnome will dominate the answers as you would expect, but maybe you'll surprise me. Personally, I'm on Arch Linux with i3-gaps. I use Arch because I enjoy the DIY aspect of Linux as well as the aur and slim nature of Arch. I'd also be lying if I didn't say I use it partially just because I like the "pacman" pun.

As for i3-gaps, I think that WMs are generally more customizable and good for 'ricing', plus they go with my workflow and are convenient in that they load faster and the likes, though I have to admit I have only ever used i3 (I've been considering trying out bspwm). So, what do you guys use? You can also of course share more information such as your shell or DM if you wanted, though I highly doubt anyone cares what display manager you us or anything.

There seems to be a trend lately of people switching over to BSD operating systems. Having read some blog posts on the matter and now given the recent system-d controversy, I'm genuinely curious to give FreeBSD or OpenBSD a go as my main OS.

For those who have switched over to BSD, what are some problems you've encountered and/or what are some things you miss?

I have been looking for some software where I can brain dump all the things I need to remember on a constant basis so I can easily find it again in the future. A personal wiki basically. I am wondering what any of you tilderians are using?

The things I am looking for:

Absolute requirements:

• Open Source: I want to be in control of the data myself, and I want to be able to hack on it myself as the need arises.
• Self Hostable: Goes hand-in-hand with with open sourceness, I want the data to live on the server in my apartment, under my own control.
• An API of some sort so I can programmatically add/read/modify data.

Nice to haves:

• Revision history of some sort.
• Common/simple data format for easy backup and longevity.
• Web interface, with mobile compatibility.
• Lightweight as possible, so I can run it on a low powered server.

Does anything know anything like that?

Options I have heard of:

• TiddlyWiki
• DokuWiki
• MediaWiki
• ZIM
• Emacs with Org Mode

Here is a previous discussion on the topic @ Lobste.rs

I got into FOSS recently and have been researching replacements for common proprietary software. Along with reddit (r/privacytoolsio) I have used alternativeto.net & privacytools.io. I would love to make a list on Tildes for anyone that is also interested in this stuff.

Telegram -> Signal: signal.org
Discord -> Riot: riot.im (surprised this isn't as popular)
Google -> FindX: findx.com (there are many others but this is my favorite)
.................searX: searx.me
Reddit -> Tildes: tildes.net (obviously)
Chrome -> Firefox: mozilla.org (there are many others but this is my favorite)
LastPass -> Bitwarden: bitwarden.com (my personal favorite but there are others)
Photoshop -> GIMP: gimp.org
FireAlpaca -> Krita: krita.org
Microsoft Office -> LibreOffice: libreoffice.org
Windows Media Player -> VLC: videolan.org (Best FOSS ever)
uTorrent -> qBittorrent: qbittorrent.org
...................Deluge: deluge-torrent.org
Adobe Illustrator -> Inkscape: inkscape.org
Adobe Premiere Pro -> Blender: blender.org (mainly 3d stuff but can be used as animation)
Windows -> Linux: ubuntu.com (ubuntu is just one distro, there are so many)
Adobe Audition -> Audacity: audacityteam.org
..............................Ardour: ardour.org
Github -> Gitlab: gitlab.com
Trello -> Taiga: taiga.io
Fraps -> OBS: obsproject.com
Gmail -> ProtonMail: protonmail.com
Youtube Client -> NewPipe: newpipe.schabi.org
Outlook -> Thunderbird: thunderbird.net
Adblock+ -> uBlock Origin: (you can get it in your browser's addon store)
Unity -> Godot Engine: godotengine.org
USD -> Bitcoin: bitcoin.org (I would suggest an altcoin like Stellar though)
... anything else? any programs you don't know a FOSS alternative to that I can find?

A few weeks ago I posted a project I was working on to read news from the command line. I incorporated the suggestions given in that thread (license, requirements.txt, etc), incorporated suggestions I've received elsewhere, and added a few features.

Here's the updated link: News Desk

Any feedback would be much appreciated!

Edit: And a specific point for feedback. I store the user's API key in ~/.nd_config/key which I think is a step up from requiring the user to set their key as an environment variable (which is how I had it originally). Still though, is there some way I can not store the key in plaintext and still have it in a format that is readable by the computer and can be used to verify API access?

So I tried to install sway on my desktop today. This required a lot of fiddling, as I had to pull in bleeding-edge dependencies for the Wayland libraries, and had to build the compositor framework wlroots. Finally however, I had everything compiled and ready to go and....

Proprietary Nvidia drivers are not supported. Use Nouveau.

I had completely forgotten that sway requires open-source Nvidia drivers. So - has anyone had experience using Nouveau? How usable is it from day-to-day? How noticeable is the performance hit when switching from proprietary drivers?

I've only been seriously programming for about a year now (and mostly in R), but I've been digging into Python for the past few months. Mostly I use pandas/numpy/scipy/scikit-learn, etc. for data analysis and some ML stuff, but in an effort to expand my skills I've also been playing around trying to build a few projects.

It's not much, but I built this: News Desk

Feedback is welcome. One bug that I'm aware of is that when you refresh the program, the url_list isn't cleared and the URLs from the refreshed articles are just appended to the list. So even though only 20 articles will show, you can select, for example, article 35.