paperbenni

This is my blog. Mainly a place to keep intersting thoughts for myself to read through. If other people find this interesting that doesn’t hurt either. Please expect quick and dirty posts, I am not going to be a spending much time making any of this coherent, more of a thinking out loud thing.

The Future of instantWM

The state of Wayland I started instantWM in (I believe around) 2019. Wayland adoption was low. It had major open issues. Screen recording. Screen sharing. No support from Nvidia. No distros using it by default. No software ecosystem with utilities coming even close to what Xorg had. Some of these are still issues. Flameshot does not work by default on Wayland. It still complains after applying a few fixes. Espanso is really hacky on wayland. Some features straight up do not work. ...

August 12, 2025

Niri

Niri I have recently come across niri. I do not know how I managed to miss that this is a thing for this long. In my limited experience this is even better than Hyprland. Overview hjkl The overview mode is amazing. It would be even amazinger if you could use hjkl vim navigation in addition to the arrow keys. This should be fairly simple XWayland XWayland is a bit rough on niri. instantmenu spawns on the wrong workspace and sometimes behind normal tiled windows. Sometimes it also opens in a window even though it is supposed to render above other windows, not inside one. I do not know if this is a problem with xwayland-satellite or niri, but sadly it makes X11-based menus nearly unusable. ...

June 11, 2025

Immich

My thoughts on Immich Immich is amazing. It looks like Google Photos, it feels like Google Photos, and it’s even faster. Google Photos tends to move infrequently accessed photos to really slow storage, so going through your timeline can be very slow. The desktop version of Immich is also worlds above whatever Google cannot manage to achieve. Video playback works without tons of buffering and dealing with what seems to be an outdated and probably unmaintained fork of the YouTube player. (August 2025 update: they fixed the video player, yay!) ...

February 10, 2025

Linux Gaming Rant

Disclaimer This is a script for a video I started writing a few years ago. I didn’t want to see it rot in a notes app I no longer use, so here it is. I may have formulated it differently nowadays, but the point still stands. Rant I have long been using Linux as my primary operating system for gaming. Back when I couldn’t get wine applications to access the internet I never ever would have thought that the majority of AAA games would ever run on Linux. I love the platform and am amazed at how far it has come. However, there are things that don’t work on Linux. And oftentimes the fault lies not with Linux developers. However, this does not change the fact that some things still don’t work, and problems don’t get better if nobody talks about them. Lately I have increasingly come upon people on Linux communities who seem to function along the following lines: ...

December 30, 2024

Automated Dotfile Management

Introduction instantOS relies on a lot of tools which use plaintext configuration in the home directory and have pretty much all their features disabled by default. This means that in order to ship a somewhat functional system out of the box, user settings need to be managed in some automated way, unless the user modifies them manually. In that case, automated changes in these files can be very destructive, as it could lead to unexpected behaviors or loss of user customizations. ...

December 13, 2024

Software wishlist

Software wishlist For a while now I’ve been keeping a list of features or changes I really wish the software I use had. I consider most of these to be obviously good ideas. I don’t feel particularly creative having come up with them and I’m not sure why these haven’t been implemented yet in most cases. Software Firefox Why is there no shortcut to enter the settings on Linux? There is Command + Comma on macOS, but not on Linux. ...

December 12, 2024

Hello World

Hello world This is my first post. Setting this site up was way more work than I anticipated. Jekyll seems a bit old-school; its website hasn’t changed ever since I first came across it. GitHub Pages is older than GitHub Actions, but Pages was sort of absorbed into Actions. In order to keep compatibility with older repos, they added some ghost jobs to the site (?) Also my custom domain just got erased from the settings, or they added the settings page after I added the custom domain in some other way. That was ages ago, I don’t really remember. ...

December 12, 2024