AnIndefiniteArticle

Let them eat brioche!

It’s a spew into the universe. It might even be bad advice. I’m processing the possibility of Trump winning and Biden somehow being our choice on the other side trying to hold off the big “you’re fired” to American democracy. Three people have read it enough to upvote it, and maybe it helps them process it, too.

If he’s getting results cleaning up Trump’s mess, it’s because of his team. Showcase his team and all the work they’ve done. It’s his choice of cabinet members and Supreme Court nominations that we are voting for.

That and the military is all the president really does. Our system of military alliances are a mess. Joe inherited that and young people are demonstrating that they want to see that changed.

The moderate play is to showcase the people who a vote for Trump would fire. John Oliver’s piece on Schedule F hits on that well. This is an important core feature of why we want Joe.

He also needs to do something to adapt our foreign policy (which is the President’s core power) to the people’s desire to change our role on the world stage to a less violent one.

He needs both to win big for the dems. It doesn’t matter if he’s feeble and old if the election isn’t about him. It isn’t. This election is about the fundamental nature of what our country is. America has to confront its darkness and fix itself. Neutral isn’t an option when we’ve been going in reverse. Where are we going? Set a destination for what America should strive to be, and ask people to vote for that.

The circus format makes people want the big strong man barking out at the debates. We need the man intensely feeling the moment he’s in with looks of pain as he tries to process his predecessor’s ranting. We need to show the people and system of civil rights/service/reparations that a vote for Uncle Joe represents.

Trump 2 is the American Revolution finally ending with its version of a Napoleon moment. Hey: we held out a bit longer than the French!

Biden 2 is four more years of life support. Educate us on the people and their roles, Joe. Open up for democracy and new ideas to build a new America. We need to know what’s there in order to collectively imagine what could be. We need to know who else we are voting for when we vote for Joe. He needs to set the stage for people to feel like they are voting to build and protect an America that they want to live in.

Ultimately, we need some constitutional amendments to fix our broken government. Evolve past an enlightenment-era collapse pattern and into something that can last. Maybe run on a slate of amendments that a vote for Joe would endorse. Undo Citizens United, cement Roe, net neutrality, rank choice voting, etc. Make a list and have everyone agree that that is what we are voting for. If he wins with that pitch, he has a good argument for either congress or the states to ratify the amendments, or to call a convention if they don’t follow through. Let Trump write a list of amendments, too, and put it up to a vote. Joe’s Constitution vs Trump’s Constitution. Joe’s American vs Trump’s America. Actually, ending up with two constitutions up to a vote like that sounds like the start of civil war II: which states ratify which constitution to get behind which president. Maybe that’s just where we are headed, unless we can be convinced to use a civil way of negotiating for a new system. A civil way would be more responsive to nuance and less prone to bake-in of ideas due to backlash.

We need that next revolution, but first we need to set up a system of civil resolution to make sure that it doesn’t destroy us.

Thanks for the leads and the good conversation. I have found that being an idiot in public and then deescalating is one of the fastest ways to gather information.

Thanks for pointing out that in this case the DM is using X regardless of whatever graphical environment gets loaded when the user logs in. This really is a moot point/discussion. I’m still glad I raised it to get perspectives like yours.

You’re right that I should play around with wlroots a bit more. It’s been a while, personally. Mostly because it’s been a while since I’ve had time to just play around with my system. My life is at a point that it looks like I’ll have that free time soon, for better or for worse.

I’ll note that I do like alternative init systems for diversity and competition and because systemd was very hungry and rigid. An init system is also a bit more fundamental to system stability than a display server, so I think it’s reasonable to be critical of systemd and Wayland for contradictory reasons. Systemd has also come a very long way in the past decade plus. I have also seen it learn from the other ideas implemented in its competition, mirroring your argument. Diversity and unification are not at odds with each other, but are different parts of the same cycle of improvement.

Good to know that this has been implemented in your favorite DE! Considering how Wayland often implements things, it’s probably implemented on the DE-level, leading to a fractured configuration ecosystem. Being implemented in Wayland is different from being implemented in some of the DEs that use Wayland.

edit: if I’m wrong about that, and it is implemented in Wayland itself, please continue to correct me!

It’s not just about it being a config file, it’s also about having access to a powerful tool like xrandr within that config file.

That’s kind of my point. Something like randr is more fundamental than the DE, and its configuration shouldn’t be fractured by being DE-dependent. I personally don’t like DEs at all, and like the ability to control a more minimal system.

I’ve never needed any of those things.

I do need to change monitor configurations.

I once had an old TV that I used as a monitor that had 1027p worth of pixels instead of 1080p. Auto detection tools said it was 1080p. With xrandr I was able to modify the output to 1027p so I didn’t lose the edges of the display to the TV’s broken forced overscan design. Could you do that with Wayland?

I am serious, and I’ll tell you exactly what will change my mind. I need real tools instead of “upgrades” that have less functionality and are less usable. If Wayland (or whatever comes next) can deliver on functionality, I’ll sing its praises. For now I’m on X.

Give me real tools or get off my lawn rewilded patch of native plants and bugs!

This is why X11 is better. I’d rather have settings like this in a text file that I can copy over to my next machine than have to navigate a UI that will change on a different DE or the next upgrade.

Backwards compatibility, portability, and text-based interfaces are a virtue.

X config files aren’t “hacky scripts”, they are fundamentally more powerful, customizable, usable, and future-proof. Xrandr is a powerful and capable interface with applications across the system.

When Wayland adopts these kinds of powerful interfaces with decades of refinement I’ll switch to it. I don’t want to keep track of whether my DE uses wlroots or gnome or plasma and their independent/redundant/feature-lacking randr alternatives. Randrs should be more fundamental to the display operation than the DE. Wayland is fundamentally hacky and broken.

Edit: thank you all for the discussion. I’d like to clarify a point. I don’t just want a text file with configuration settings that implement features that I need to beg/bother the devs for. They are likely to have better things to do and it might not be a priority for them. I want access to powerful tools via the configuration files that I can make do pretty much anything if I read the documentation. Xrandr is such a tool. I don’t want setting for a feature that has to be baked into the DE which I have to beg to have implemented and which will be implemented differently across different DEs. I want flexible, dynamic, modular tools.

You got a source on scientists voting for a rename?

The CLI has many advantages over a gui. For one, actions are reific, repeatable, and scriptable. This saves time as you can reuse previous commands and edit them appropriately for the current situation. This makes it easy to look back and verify what you have done. The command line is also a much more stable interface. GUIs change all the time and it’s hard to remember where things might be located. The structure of the gnu operating system accessed via the command line facilitates the discovery of installed commands/programs and documentation. You can record these actions once and repeat them on many machines. You can script common activities (eg bulk file renaming) that make file and data management easier.