Wayland King Kitty is a wayland compatible, cross-platform, feature rich terminal emulator. A new kid on the block, the project started in 2017. I have used it since I switched to wayland, and it’s left me thoroughly impressed. After using it for 7 months, I don’t think I can go back to other terminal emulators. Features Kitty has a broad range of features that make it a joy to use. Some of these include, but aren’t limited to:

V4L2 Saves The Day! V4L2 is video capture API for screen capturing in real time. It’s primarily used by webcams. We can exploit this API to create a dummy video device that receives the realtime video feed of the desktop screen and share the “webcam” with whatever WebRTC screenshare platform is being used. You’ll need the V4L2 loopback kernel module for this. After installing, we run the following to instantiate the dummy video device:

What is it? The initramfs, or initial ram file system, is a file system image that is loaded in memory that contains the necessary tools to mount the file systems on the operating system before init process is called. Ideally, this image contains only the drivers necessary to bootstrap the kernel. Despite this, it is most often the case that your initramfs is bloated with unnecessary options for things you don’t need; when compiling a custom kernel, the initramfs will become huge without module stripping and most Linux distributions choose a generic image to support more hardware out of the box.

Using VNC to Workaround Pipewire Woes For some time now, various screen capturing functionalities have worked very smoothly on Wayland. Take screenshots for example: grim works very nicely and when used in conjunction with slurp, it can select any region the user wants. Likewise with screenrecording, courtesy of obs-studio with the wlrobs plugin (there are other plugins for other desktops like GNOME). One sore area thus far in my experience has been getting WebRTC screensharing working.

What is it? Bash is the Bourne Again SHell. It was made in 1989 as a replacement for System 7 UNIX’s Bourne shell and is part of the GNU project. Since then, it has become ubiquitous in the Linux world as the default shell in nearly every Linux distribution. For most Linux users, it’s worth while becoming acquainted with it. It’s power is in automating system management tasks and various other things.

HiDPI Scaling In Wayland, HiDPI displays work very well and are trivial to configure. GNOME and KDE have historically handled HiDPI without issue and under sway, you can set a scale factor like this: output output-name scale 1.25 This is adequate for 1440p. If you’re using a compositor such as hikari that lacks settings for scaling, then QT and GTK can be upscaled with environment variables and terminal text can be scaled as well.

The Case for the Wayland Desktop Wayland is a display server protocol that serves as a replacement for the now 36 year old X windowing system that originally was used for drawing windows on UNIX operating systems. Its various implementations have evolved throughout the years with the current implementation being that of Xorg server. X’s age and sclerotic development has made the case stronger than ever for Wayland. It is far newer (initial release was 12 years ago) and it fixes a lot of the long standing architectural issues that plague X.

So You Like Android Games The Android marketplace for games has become very broad over the course of the 12 years of existence of the OS. As mobile phone and tablet hardware has gotten better, higher quality games have been released to the Play store. Some notable titles being the Asphalt series, Nintendo offerings like Mario Run, Minecraft: Pocket Edition, Among Us, Fortnite, and countless thousands of indie games. This has been the impetus for many to find ways to enjoy these games without some of the drawbacks of gaming on mobile hardware.

Comprehensive Security and Privacy Strategy for 2020 With the plight of the COVID-19 pandemic forcing people to digitize nearly all aspects of their lives, now is the perfect time for a general purpose guide to staying as safe as possible online. This guide has good pointers for just about anyone, but dissidents and journalists in particular should take particular note of this guide and fully implement the suggestions made below. I go highly in depth with application choice and best practices for privacy and security for desktop platforms as well as general services including those that bridge the online/offline divide.

LibreOffice (and MS Office) are Bloat Most people I know go day to day using one of two productivity suites; the dreaded Microsoft office suite (which costs an arm and a leg) or the open source LibreOffice suite. For many, these seem to be the only reasonable choices. I too used to use LibreOffice for making documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. LibreOffice also has a vector graphics application and a database front end that I never made use of.