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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Did you read my comment in it’s entirety?

    For programs, that is not a problem.
    This is a problem for data.

    Why? Because you very rarely need to read the program’s “content”, and when you do, you’ll instead go look at the source code anyways. But for binary data files there is no source code that is the equivalent of the contents in readable form.

    If you want to read it as a human in your text editor, good luck with making sense of it. If you want to read it with your program it’ll have to pull in a tree of dependencies out of questionable necessity, and any of that dependencies could have a severe bug or a security vulnerability that affects your program and it’s users. And the only reason you needed to import that lib is to be able to parse this binary format. It’s not even a common one like an archive format, but a totally custom made format of systemd.
    And then there’s another problem. You may be able to make sense of the binary data with your bare hands and a text editor, but you better not edit it that way, because you may mess up the delicate offsets, or you may wanted to replace a value (e.g. a string, out some kind of list) with a longer one but you can’t because of the former problem.

    Binary is ok for programs, and you know what, it’s also fine for data in transit (network) and of course archives.
    But for data, whether it’s a log file or configuration, or some other that would be totally fine in text format, it’s just annoying, limiting, and overcomplicated.



  • Nothing is hidden, it’s all there

    Yeah, of course, it’s all there in binary. For programs of course that’s not a problem, but for data that you may need to look at any time, it is. It’s harder to interpret both for humans (significantly) and both for any program that want to make use of it (unless they use the specific library that came up with the format, and by that also pulling in all its libs transitively)

    Binary data is not much less obfuscated than the system files of windows. It’s all there, you can read it




  • imagine KDE would actually run well as it doesn’t need all the bells it offers and is actually a well written performant DE.

    RAM usages on a 8GB system, 4 hours after boot.

    • plasmashell: 312 MB
    • kwin_wayland: 165 MB
    • akonadi_* summed: ~2 GB
    • kded5: 130 MB
    • kalendarac: 119 MB
    • xdg-desktop-portal-kde: 107 MB
    • kwallet5: 103 MB (unused)
    • kaccess: 103 MB
    • kiod5: 103 MB
    • polkit-kde-auth: 101 MB
    • X, Xwayland combined: 202 MB
    • org_kde_powerdevil: 48,5 MB
    • kactivitymanagerd: 40 MB
    • startplasma-wayland: 39 MB

    There’s also various other things too. Now obviously, looking at the total used counter, these cannot be just summed up, there must be some overlap through shared libraries and such, because if I close my web browser and all I have open is Konsole, total memory usage drops to 2,35GB. 3rd party programs, like opensnitch and syncthing, only contribute 400 MB (opensnitch is surprisingly fat, but it’s UI is not efficient with the CPU either), so the system itself needs around 1,9 GB, but that’s a lot when all you have is 2 GB RAM.
    Then, my system uses an additional 2 GB for cache purposes. Such an old system will probably have an older, much slower storage (unless upgraded, fortunately that’s often easy), and won’t have nearly any capacity to keep a filesystem cache.

    I’m only using a single widget on the desktop to periodically run a command and display it’s results. Other than that, the taskbar panel has the default widgets.


  • I think you can disable most of the toolbars in the main screen if it helps.
    You can do that in the “Docks” menu in the topmost bar, unticking any you don’t need.
    I think you can freely hide these, maybe more: stats, audio mixer, scene transitions, sources (after you have set up your capture source), scenes.

    Then if it’s still a lot, you can untick these in the View menu besides Docks: scene/source list buttons, source toolbar, status bar.

    At that point you only have the controls dock, the preview, and the thin top bar.
    Don’t forget to reenable the sources dock and the audio mixer if you want to change those settings, though.