Not OP, but I’ve been using Niri as my daily driver for almost two years (since v0.1.2). The stability and polish have really impressed me. In addition to the scrolling workflow it has some especially nice features for screen sharing & capturing, like key binds to quickly switch which window you are sharing, and customizable rules to block certain windows when showing your whole desktop.

I do use a 40" ultrawide. Looking for options for getting the most out of an ultrawide was how I got into scrolling window managers.

I only occasionally use my 13" laptop display. I still like scrolling because I like spatial navigation. Even if windows end up mostly or entirely off the screen I still think about my windows in terms of whether they’re left, right, up, or down from where I’m currently looking.

I don’t like traditional tiling as much because I find squishing every window to be fully in view to be awkward; and with e.g. i3-style wms if I want to stash a window out of view, like in a tab that’s a separate metaphor I have to keep track of, with another axis where windows might be. Scrolling consistently uses on spatial metaphor, placing all windows on one 2D plane with one coordinate system.

Home Manager is a Nix tool for managing configuration for a single user, usually on a Linux or MacOS system, or possibly WSL. You configure installed programs, program configuration (such as dot files), and a number of other things, and you get a reproducible environment that’s easy to apply to multiple machines, or to roll back configuration, etc. I find it helpful for having a clear record of how everything is set up. It’s the sort of thing that people sometimes use GNU Stow or Ansible for, but it’s much more powerful.

A Home Manager configuration is very similar to a NixOS configuration, except that NixOS configures the entire system instead of just configuring user level stuff. (The lines do blur in Nix because unlike traditional package managers where packages are installed at the system level, using Nix packages can be installed at the system, user, project, or shell session level.) Home Manager is often paired with NixOS. Or on Macs Home Manager is often paired with nix-darwin. As I mentioned, the Home Manager portion of my config is portable to OSes other than NixOS. In my case I’m sharing it in another Linux distro, but you can also use Home Manager to share configurations between Linux, MacOS, and WSL.

When I’m pairing with someone who uses VSCode it’s usually painful how slow they are about finding and opening files. And so much screen space is taken up by stuff that is not code. It’s extra frustrating because even VSCode has built-in solutions for all of this, but lots of people don’t seem to understand how to use it efficiently.

• NixOS + Home Manager
• Niri
• Kitty
• Neovim, via Neovide

For work it’s Fedora + Home Manager because the remote admin software doesn’t support NixOS. Thankfully I’ve been able to define my dev environment almost fully in a Home Manager config that I can use at work and at home.

I use lots of Neovim plugins. Beyond the basic LSP and completion plugins, some of my indispensables are:

• Leap for in-buffer navigation & remote text copying
• Oil for file management
• Fugitive + Git Signs + gv.vim + diffview.nvim for git integration
• nvim-surround to add/change/remove delimiters
• vim-auto-save
• kitty-scrollback

I was reading recently about how Tailscale makes peer-to-peer connections work, which I thought was quite interesting. If we stop using NAT there is still an issue of getting traffic through stateful firewalls. That can be hard without a server because, for example, in some cases you need to coordinate two nodes sending each other messages on the same port nearly simultaneously to get all the intervening firewalls to interpret that as an “outbound” session from both sides to allow traffic through. https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

I like rofi for this use case, but it uses fuzzy search instead of labels. You might have to type more than one letter, depending on what windows you have open. OTOH if you know any part of the window title you can start typing immediately without having to scan a list for a label first.

Labels work well for jumping to something you can already see, because the label appears where you are already looking, so you see it immediately. I’m guessing the process of finding the label for a window that is not visible would be clunkier - you’d have to find the label in a possibly long window list.

Very cool! A while ago I found that instead of using fractional scaling, things were smoother for me if I set Gome’s text scaling factor in accessibility settings. I think most GTK UI scales based off that value? It’s pretty helpful for me, even though I’m not actually using Gnome anymore. But if fractional scaling support has gotten better, maybe I’ll switch my approach.

I’m very glad I switched. One of the little improvements: IIRC last time I checked PaperWM didn’t have bindings to set a window to a specified width. It only had a cycle width option. With Niri I have shortcuts to set a window to ¼, ⅓, ½, ⅔, or ¾ of the screen width.

There are lots of other improvements. One of my favorites is the dynamic screen cast target.

Good question! I think this is distinct from split tunneling, but does a similar thing. But I’m not an expert - I don’t know how precise or broad the definitions are, so I’m not positive the concepts don’t overlap.

From some brief reading it looks like split tunneling is set up by configuring routing to determine which traffic goes through the VPN based on destination IP addresses. OTOH what I’m calling confinement determines VPN use based on which process sends traffic. So with confinement all traffic from select processes, regardless of destination, goes through the VPN.

I think there are differences in how inbound traffic works too. With confinement inbound traffic can only reach confined processes.

This is the BS I came to this thread for!

And as I just recently learned, network namespaces support! Those can be handy if you need a backup job to route through a VPN tunnel, or some such thing.

I can’t think of a good story from personal experience, so I’ll share a wild objection from some guy on the internet from, I think 2007. The story pops into my head from time to time. This guy insisted that it would be impossible to create an entire OS that can run from start to finish without the resources of a major software company. He argued that therefore Linux must actually be a pirated, reskinned version of Windows. https://danielandrade.net/posts/linux-windows-misconceptions-tech-story/

I checked the Wayback machine to try to find more messages from that thread because I think he kept posting and doubling down. But pulling up ancient ZDNet forum posts is slow enough that I gave up.

As a gamer myself I don’t think it’s appropriate to try to deprive someone of a hobby that they genuinely enjoy. As a long-time Linux user I stick to games that work well on Linux, like Overwatch. But unfortunately games aren’t interchangeable - if League is your thing, Dota might not be an acceptable substitute.

Better to argue for dual booting than to try to cut off a friend’s personal relationship with their game.

Ahhh, for some reason I had it in my head that rebooting cleared the syslog

To see logs from only the previous boot run,

journalctl -b -1

Oh, kanata looks great! Good to know!

My family uses Discord heavily, and I’ve set up a number of different distros and window managers at different times, all using Wayland, and I have not seen this issue. I think that includes running in browsers using Xwayland, and using native Wayland - but I’m not 100% sure because I’ve been running browsers in native Wayland mode for a long time, while my family members usually use the Discord Electron app.

There might be some more specific issue on your system, like a pipewire misconfiguration? Do you use pipewire?

In the earlier days of Wayland I was not able to reproduce the custom keyboard mappings that I set up with xkb. Xkb worked, but only in windows running under Xwayland. I know the common xkb presets, like changing caps lock to a control key, are reproduced in Wayland implementations. I had really custom mappings that required more general remapping capability.

I fixed my setup by building a keyboard with a microcontroller that I can program with ZMK. It’s a better setup, although it did take more time, effort, and money. The bottom line is I’m enthusiastic about Wayland, even though I had to find another way to reproduce one of my favorite features.

I got my kids started on Scratch - I recommend it! Syntax is communicated with puzzle block shapes. Statements have a tab on the bottom, and a matching slot on top; number and string values are pill-shaped; boolean expressions are diamond-shaped. If the pieces fit together, it’s a valid program.

As a NixOS user, any drama that might be going on doesn’t affect my use of the software

I use a chat interface as a research tool when there’s something I don’t know how to do, like write a relationship with custom conditions using sqlalchemy, or I want to clarify my understanding on something. first I do a Kagi search. If I don’t find what I’m looking for on Stack Overflow or library docs in a few minutes then I turn to the AI.

I don’t use autocompletion - I stick with LSP completions.

I do consider environmental damage. There are a few things I do to try to reduce damage:

1. Search first
2. Search my chat history for a question I’ve already asked instead of asking it again.
3. Start a new chat thread for each question that doesn’t follow a question I’ve already asked.

On the third point, my understanding is that when you write a message in an LLM chat all previous messages in the thread are processed by the LLM again so it has context to respond to the new message. (It’s possible some providers are caching that context instead of replaying chat history, but I’m not counting on that.) My thinking is that by starting new threads I’m saving resources that would have been used replaying a long chat history.

I use Claude 4.5.

I ask general questions about how to do things. It’s most helpful with languages and libraries I don’t have a lot of experience with. I usually either check docs to verify what the LLM tells me, or verify by testing. Sometimes I ask for narrowly scoped code reviews, like “does this refactored function behave equivalently to the original” or “how could I rewrite this snippet to do this other thing” (with the relevant functions and types pasted into the chat).

My company also uses Code Rabbit AI for code reviews. It doesn’t replace human reviewers, and my employer doesn’t expect it to. But it is quite helpful, especially with languages and libraries that I don’t have a lot of experience with. But it probably consumes a lot more tokens than my chat thread research does.