Yelling At Clouds

[tekk]

The nostalgic desktops thread got me thinking today (definitely not putting off work or anything, no,) about running a few nostalgic desktops and god Linux sucks so bad now. Because everything should be as user-hostile to build as possible there are a few apps I use via flatpaks. For the life of me I can't get them to run outside of a "real" desktop environment.They can't see dbus for some reason even when the session is launched with dbus-launch (maybe I need to ck-launch-session the dbus-launch? This feels like the ramblings of a madman.)

But hey, XFCE did start as a clone of CDE anyway, right? Maybe I can just put on a theme that doesn't look like shit.

Have y'all looked at theming lately? Back when I started in the late 2000's, early 2010's theming was actually pretty sane. If you ran KDE then you installed the Qt theme you wanted and then you set the GTK theme engine to the one which rendered like Qt If you ran anything else you installed the GTK2 theme you wanted and set the Qt rendering engine to the one which matched GTK. As far as I can tell these engines don't exist anymore, plus you now have 2 simultaneous versions of Qt running and THREE versions of GTK, all of whom have incompatible styles and no support for like "render using the GTK theme." Anyway good luck finding a theme which supports all 5 toolkits, but then with the number Electron apps tons of your apps won't follow your theming anyway, have fun.

Edit:
I forgot that gtk4 is basically unthemable as well. I'm not aware of any non-GNOME app which has adopted it and all of the GNOME apps use "libadwaita" which is intentionally unthemable.

Who else has some old man opinions to get out?

[UndeTerminated]

In terms of yelling at clouds and Linux - if you want to have any sound generated in "out", you need to:
if you run Void Linux, you need to make sure that dbus and elogind/seatd/trunstiled are started, then you need to start pipewire and wireplumber as user in non-deamon mode,
if you run Alpine Linux, you need to make sure that dbus+elogind are started, then you need to start Alpine specific script,
if you run Chimera Linux, you need to make sure that dbus and so on, then you need to start wireplumber as user daemon.
What the hell is wrong with them? Why once it can should be run in deamon mode, other time in non-deamon? Why generating farts from speakers need running dbus and session bus? It is so trivial thing, not a building entire nuclear power plant.

Under BSD you just start OS and sound can came out, it just works(TM).

I do not even want to start that ALSA/PulseAudio/PipeWire/JACK/god-knows-what thing. When I was running Void everything was great when I was able to use sndiod. PipeWire always was throwing cryptic errors and it was not always clear to say if it works or not. This is one of reasons why I avoid Linux.