Been using KDE exclusively on Wayland for over 2 years. What am I missing?

Hot take: the more Gnome shoots itself in the foot, the better for Linux.

I’m grateful to Microsoft for Windows 11 providing me a bunch of free machines to stick in my basement and put Linux on.

You’re describing the boot keyboard, not the full USB HID protocol. It is true that there are some keyboards that only support NKRO, but the USB HID protocol has supported NKRO forever. https://www.devever.net/~hl/usbnkro

As a child one of my tasks (and probably my favourite - it was assigned more out of the fact that I was so eager to do it than anything else) was to make tea for my family. When we moved to the US, after eventually finding an electric kettle (which that was a mission in itself at the time), I noticed how much longer it took to boil the water. My dad started explaining the differences in the electrical systems to me.

One particular incident I can think of that really sparked my obsession with “how can I boil the most water possible in the least time possible?” occurred at a party. There were probably 30 people over and I was making tea and coffee for everyone. I was already maximising throughput by using a coffee maker on one circuit, a kettle on another circuit, and heating water in a pot on the stove. Yet it still took ages for me to provide everyone with their tea and coffee (longer than it would have taken with just a 2 litre 3 kW kettle without any of the other bits, because much of what I was doing was waiting for more water to boil). It didn’t help that the gas stove was seemingly better at heating up the rest of the house than at heating the water.

So it became one of those things where I apparently decided this was a problem with the world and I’m going to find the One Best Answer™. Right now the thing I think is probably the best available option is still not available in the US. Probably my ideal would be something that can boil a litre of water in under a minute and has at least a 5 litre tank so you can have an initial, near-instant burst of boiling water for your daily usage. Which would essentially be that same Quooker I linked, but with 10 kW of heating power rather than just 2.

(And before anyone asks… yes, I did once start enough kettles, induction cookers, etc. simultaneously that the lights dimmed and my UPS started beeping. No, there wasn’t a purpose to that other than for fun. Can you really blame me though? I had just got an electrician to install a 14-50R, a 6-20R and two new 5-20R circuits in my kitchen and I wanted to check whether I really could draw 25 kW of power in my kitchen!)

I guess “faster than what?” is what we need to clarify here, so I’ll give you a few numbers.

The fastest I’ve got a gas stove to boil a litre of water was around 6 minutes using a “Turbo boil” burner. The highest power US spec kettles you typically get are ~1500W, which take around 4m30s to boil the water, pretty similar to what you’ll get with a plug-in induction stove.

With a NEMA 6-20R, you can buy a plug adapter and a cheap British kettle (~3000W), which will boil a litre of water in just over 2 minutes. But those typically have 13 A fuses in the plugs. A NEMA 6-20R would realistically allow a 4500 W kettle which would finish off a litre of water in under 90 seconds.

Boiling water.

I am collecting data on various appliances and their water boiling abilities. I measure the temperature before and see when the temperature plateaus due to the state change. I time it. When possible I measure the energy use.

The more time I invest in it the more I think every North American kitchen should have at least one NEMA 6-20R.

Me replacing GNU coreutils with the rust ones.

That doesn’t get you a good text editor. That just gets you emacs with two bad next editors.

My experience with Apple has been more like

I credit Apple in many ways for their choice to design their business in a way that their profit motive often aligns with their users’ interests.

Their app store model for iOS is one of the strongest examples of them not doing that though.

But how am I going to use capabilities to have my equivalent of sl having setuid to nobody?

They’re downloaded somewhere under /var/snap and by default a snap only has access to a limited set of directories - one under /var/snap for system-wide data (generally used by snaps that run services like cups or MySQL) and one under ~/snap for each user. When you snap remove an app, it bundles that up into a file that’s kept for a while in case you reinstall, but it won’t if you use --purge.

Obviously many apps request access to other places (such as non-hidden directories in your homedir) so they can read or write stuff, but that’s down to the app to then behave correctly (same as with any other packaging system).

Let me know when I can get cups as a flatpak.

(Oh and snaps predate flatpaks.)

Yeah the API is open and there used to be an open store, but lack of interest ended up with the project shutting down. As it turns out people don’t like alternative stores nearly as much as they like the idea of alternative stores.

sl and KDE plasma

Yeah, Steam is pretty much a monopoly. But I haven’t seen what I’d call monopolistic practices from them. It’s just that everyone else appears to fall flat on their faces when trying to make a competing product.

I’m less mad at Steam and Google because there are clear, simple ways to avoid their cuts.

I have no basis to say whether they’re providing a service worth the 30% charge. I’m also less mad at Steam than at Google because they’re being less shady about trying to push people into their store too.

Good way to check that all the parts are working before putting whatever you want on it.

My ex: what charging cables do you have? They last forever, mine break after a year!
Also my ex: so I got a bunch of the same charging cables you have and they all broke after a year