well taking inspiration from https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/tumbler/available_plugins with the webp thumbnailer i decided to check and turns out that yes, this once again imagemagick comes to the rescue as it can properly understand the xcf format.

just one small caveat, xcf files are multi-layer and while imagemagick can understand multi-frame, multi-page and multi-layer just fine however a simple convert image.xcf image.png will produce

image-0.png
image-1.png
...
image-n.png

for every layer of the xcf file, so a dirty solution if your xcf files got low layer counts is to use /usr/bin/convert "$1[0]" -thumbnail "$2" "$3" to hardcode layer 0, otherwise you got to extract every single layer and compose them in the correct position.

for image viewing i use nsxiv, may be biased in that i sometimes contribute to the repo and have helped cobble some scripts to extend the functionality tho

for a fetch program i use neofetch which i've been tempted to take maintenance of for a while but have not (i mean i've been maintaining a fork of pywal since 2021)

for screenshotting i like flameshot since it already packs everything i need to do the light editing of screenshots, but is not like i could not use maim with imagemagick like i was doing before.

for clipboard manager i have found nothing better than copyq, it just works, supports images and has vi-like bindings by default

for window management i personally like awesome tho i'm not the biggest fan of lua tho i did re-write my neovim config in lua a while ago...

for file management i use both thunar and vifm, most stuff i do in vifm but having thunar as the default is my preference for when the browser opens a file dir

i use webmail but lately i've been thinking of installing thunderbird, used neomutt for a while but it wasn't doing it for me tho, even using luke smith's muttwizard script to set up neomutt it didn't feel "complete" enough so i went back to using webmail

i did start a thread about shed at https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=5160 but besides Head_on_a_Stick it got no traction it seems, got a little more traction on the artix forum with a moderator, a seasoned user and an artix developer providing feedback to improve the design of shed: https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/ … 410.0.html

currently i want to implement some needed features for v0.3.0 but got stuck into refactor purgatory where all my lazy coding and design decisions come to bite me and prevent the addition of more features until the code is more modular and uses less global variables...

shed is something i've been cobbling together for my own use since maybe june or july of 2022 but only pushed the first commit of a usable version to github back in august of 2022, wasn't until the development cycle of v0.2.0 that i decided to adapt the design and code of shed from just being something i wanted for myself towards the roadmap of eventually becoming a full fledged session process for posix that can manage the session's processes in more than just starting every component but actually managing them from a daemon, ensure nothing dangles and lingers across logouts and logins by also taking care of doing logout (well, this means i eventually need to make shed play well with elogind's terminate-session and kill-session), and with enough hope set up a standar that shames the session processes for different desktop environments being utterly unable to implement the minimum of proper management over their session components and autostart programs when something written in shell script just can.

once shed is on the state of "can just work as session process for x11 and wayland" (likely not rn for v0.3.0 but probably for v0.4.0) then i intend to work on submitting a package to debian so that it just becomes part of the pool of packages inherited by every debian derivate, then make the pitch to devuan so that shed is the tool to reccomend not just to provide a session process for stand alone window managers but user services with sysvinit.

extremely cheap

i wrote my own solution to manage user level services in pure posix shell script very much inspired by my understanding of sysvinit, it works well enough for me but is still 2, well 3 major feature sets (if you want XDG_AUTOSTART to just work seamlessly) away from being a proper session-manager/session-process that is also completely agnostic to the environment (x11, wayland, tty, ssh, whatever) other than requiring a posix shell interpreter and core utils (all which can so far be provided by busybox), but the project has gained basically no traction, so far i've only got some comments and feedback from like 5 or 6 people so my work on the project has been sporadic, i mainly work on the project when I need a new feature or have foolishly done work before applying to a coding job, mind you without results... if anyone's interested (likely not) the link is here: https://github.com/eylles/shed

maybe the wording of "workflows" is worse than "pico-distributions" and the term chomwitt was searching for is "flavours" a-la ubuntu or "respins" a la manjaro.

to give an example some such respin could be an openbox + thunar + tint2 + jgmenu to provide an alternative to the xfce, gnome and kde desktops, call the metapackage something like "bunsen desktop" as those 4 component are what bunsenlabs linux builds their desktop with, another metapackage could be an equivalent of the "ubuntu studio", something like a "devuan studio" package that pulls other 4 metapackages for "audio" "graphics" "photography" and "video"

to such an assortment of metapackages we could then come and define multiple community maintained metapackages to provide various desktop experiences and workflows.

tho there would require some standarization to have all this metapackages depend on standar xdg-destktop features so that there won't be a package that "implodes and doesn't work" unless someone goes out of the way to do something super custom, at which point installing these "workflows" and "pico-distro" metapackages would be counterproductive.

you are on a forum for a niche linux distro, why niche? 'cuz a lotta users don't care what happens in between the press of the power button and the login screen showing up on their display.

as for the users on the forum my bet is a good lot of us are on the "20 to 30 and has never had an actual date" demographic.

you could give this thing i made a shot, it was originally made with the x11 achitecture in mind but it is written in pure posix shell and should be flexible enough to work with wayland, tho i still got to add some more stuff to differentiate the managed daemons in groups other than the current session service group

https://github.com/eylles/shed

yeh i've been having problems with blueman on excalibur for a while so i've been doing everything through the bluetoothctl cli

you can get mirror urls from https://www.devuan.org/get-devuan

if you don't feel like editing apt sources manually you can use https://github.com/eylles/devuan-script … mirrors.sh which is not really automatic but it allows you to simply put the bare urls inside a config file and let the script do the rest.

well, terrible idea but if you are a vim/nvim user there's always vimwiki.

but if you want something more stand alone there's joplin https://joplinapp.org/

for editing config files there are also ways that don't involve running a text editor as root, but running it as a normal user and then using tee with sudo and an askpass program to create an authentication prompt so that the current buffer of the text editor (for example vim) is sent to tee and then tee which has root priviledges just writes the text onto the file.

other option is to make use of sudoedit

oh man i know that, got a couple rolls of sheet metal, some 1/8th spools of wire, some lenghts of industrial 4 conductor wire i gotta turn to extension cords one day and a good hold of pvc pipe that i keep telling myself i'll turn into a phone holder for an old tripod and the rest into a recurve bow... and that is just the stuff i've more or less thought about what to do with, then i got a good chunk of half written software i gotta sit down and polish