Monthly Archives: August 2021

Excellent Experience with Debian Bullseye

Debian, Desktop Linux

I’ve appreciated the bullseye upgrade, like most Debian upgrades. I’m not quite sure how, since I was already running a backports kernel, but somehow the entire system is snappier. Maybe newer X or something? I’m really pleased with it. Hardware integration is even nicer now, particularly the automatic driverless support for scanners in addition to the existing support for printers.

All in all, a very nice upgrade, and pretty painless.

I experienced a few odd situations.

For one, I had been using Gnome Flashback. Since xmonad-log-applet didn’t compile there (due to bitrot in the log applet, not flashback), and I had been finding Gnome Flashback to be a rather dusty and forgotten corner of Gnome for a long time, I decided to try Mate.

Mate just seemed utterly unable to handle a situation with a laptop and an external monitor very well. I want to use only the external monitor with the laptop lid is closed, and it just couldn’t remember how to do the right thing – external monitor on, laptop monitor off, laptop not put into suspend. gdm3 also didn’t seem to be able to put the external monitor to sleep, either, causing a few nights of wasted power.

So off I went to XFCE, which I had been using for years on my workstation anyhow. Lots more settings available in XFCE, plus things Just Worked there. Odd that XFCE, the thin and light DE, is now the one that has the most relevant settings. It seems the Gnome “let’s remove a bunch of features” approach has extended to MATE as well.

When I switched to XFCE, I also removed gdm3 from my system, leaving lightdm as the only DM on it. That matched what my desktop machine was using, and also what task-xfce-desktop called for. But strangely, the XFCE settings for lightdm were completely different between the laptop and the desktop. It turns out that with lightdm, you can have the lightdm-gtk-greeter and the accompanying lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings, or slick-greeter and the accompanying lightdm-settings. One machine had one greeter and settings, and the other had the other. Why, I don’t know. But lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings had the necessary options for putting monitors to sleep on the login screen, so I went with it.

This does highlight a bit of a weakness in Debian upgrades. There is SO MUCH choice in Debian, which I highly value. At some point, almost certainly without my conscious choice, one machine got one greeter and another got the other. Despite both having task-xfce-desktop installed, they got different desktop experiences. There isn’t a great way to say “OK, I know I had a bunch of things installed before, but NOW I want the default bullseye experience”.

But overall, it is an absolutely fantastic distribution. It is great to see this nonprofit community distribution continue to have such quality on such an immense scale. And hard to believe I’ve been a Debian developer for 25 years. That seems almost impossible!

Distributed, Asynchronous Git Syncing with NNCP

Software,

I have a problem.

I have a directory that I use with org-mode and org-roam. I want it to be synced across multiple machines. I also want to keep the history with git. And, I want to use end-to-end encryption (no storing a plain git repo on a remote server), have a serverless setup, not require any two machines to be up simultaneously, and be resilient in the face of races and conflicts.

Whew.

I’ve tried a number of setups – git-remote-gcrypt on a remote server (fragile), some complicated scripts around a separate repo in syncthing (requires one machine to be “in charge”), etc. They all were subpar.

Then NNCP introdoced asynchronous multicast and I was intrigued.

So, I wrote gitsync-nncp, which uses NNCP to distribute git bundles to all the participating machines. The comprehensive documentation for gitsync-nncp goes into a lot more detail about how it works and what problems it solves. It’s working quite well for me!