Hello lads, been a while :p

Recent interests

KDE Linux - The endgame distro?

Since the last blog post I created, and perhaps even before (I forgor), I have been using KDE Linux as my main OS. It’s a hip and cool immutable operating system developed by KDE themselves. I’m somewhat involved in the project as well, but not a regular contributor.

The project makes use of most of what systemd has to offer, systemd-sysupdate, mkosi, and includes the latest and greatest of KDE plasma, all the time.

Under the hood, KDE Linux uses an arch base, but that’s not necessarily required, as it can change distro bases at any time and still work just fine. It does this by having an immutable erofs mounted on /usr, and updates are simply a new image that gets put in place of the old one.

I’ve really enjoyed using immutable operating systems, despite the headache it can be for development. (See my cursed flatpak development episode). I like that my system is robust to most issues caused by my carelessness.

Flatpak

It would make sense that if I’m interested in immutable operating systems, that I’ve been interested in Flatpak, and that I have been. I’ve discussed for countless hours on Matrix chats on how Flatpak and xdg-desktop-portal can be made better, and the new use cases it could cover. I even dove into helping push forward the ability to expose the host’s root filesystem into a flatpak for file managers!. (As a bonus, this also made me a first time contributor to systemd)

COSMIC

Despite using KDE Linux, I’m still very interested in COSMIC. I’ve been the one releasing all the Fedora COSMIC packages every time they need updating. Soon, I will probably get back into COSMIC development. The first thing I particularly care about is validating .desktop files with CI before things get released, because people keep pushing changes that fail the desktop-file-validate command, and screwing up Fedora’s CI :(.

Other things I want to get through are my Touchpad gesture configuration and accompanying cosmic-comp PR. This will allow us to make workspace switching touchpad gestures, and make it configurable in the future (because I like having my workspace switching gestures be 3 fingered instead of 4)!

Code Editors!

I seem to mostly talk about editors in these blog posts. Last time, I had switched back to vscode prior to that, I had started using the Helix editor. My trend in editors can be summarized as follows:

  • Prior to August 2021 - I’m just using whatever is required in school, mostly Eclipse
  • August 2021 - Wow, this VSCode editor is the best thing since buttered bread!
  • October 2024 - Started trying out Helix editor
  • April 2025 - Helix is now my main editor of choice
  • August 2025 - VSCode again?
  • November 2025 - Still frustrated with the proprietary-ness of VSCode, back to Helix.

I don’t think Helix is the end-all-be-all solution of editors that could stand up to VSCode, mainly due to the fact that it’s a terminal based code editor. My twin brother had a great quip regarding that, saying that I am “choosing to have less features” in my editor and bragging about it.

It’s not like I don’t want certain quality of life features in VSCode that I’ve come to enjoy. In particular, I enjoy the integrated terminal, and the fact that I can use my mouse to go just about anywhere, and do things you can’t do in Helix. So, what are my current wishlist items for Helix?

  • The ability to copy the file path of the current buffer - My PR
  • An integrated terminal in Helix (NOT a terminal multiplexer, I need the Windows support for work) - My WIP PR
  • Arrow keybinds sometimes don’t exist in certain menus, where hjkl keybinds exist - My PR for goto
  • Ability to arbitrarily place multicursors (no regex please). A great idea for that can be found here

As you can tell, I’ve been trying to contribute to Helix wherever I feel I can and in whatever interests me. I do worry about the ability for my PRs to be merged, as the Helix maintainers have been known to ignore certain PRs and accept others arbitrarily. I understand that it’s dead simple to contribute to Helix, but a little bit more maintainership would be nice from the members of Helix. I get it though, everyone has ideas for Helix, and will implement them despite whether that’s the vision of the core developers. I do think every idea on the above list EXCEPT the integrated terminal have an almost guaranteed chance of being accepted. We will see if that’s in a normal amount of time though.

Have I reconsidered any alternatives?

I have looked back into Lapce which is a rust-based editor I reviewed in my old blog post about switching to helix. Unfortunately it’s still not very mature, but I have seen some recent activity from a few new contributors! I even put in my own simple PR for consideration. That project, and the associated GUI framework Floem seem to have a more broad acceptance critera for PRs, probably because they are less polished at the moment.

I will never consider Zed and I have a possibly irrational dislike for them, due to their CLA, their EULA for using the editor, and the overall corporate gloom that is pervasive in the project.

Just read this excerpt from the EULA and tell me this isn’t just as bad as VSCode:

2. TERMS APPLICABLE TO THE EDITOR
2.1. License Grant
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Zed hereby grants to You, and You hereby accept from Zed, a term-limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-assignable and non-sublicensable license to make use of the Editor for Your internal use only, and subject to the use limitations in Section 2.2.

2.2. License Limitations
You agree that You shall not: (a) exceed the scope of the licenses granted in Section 2.1; (b) make copies of the Editor; (c) distribute, sublicense, assign, delegate, rent, lease, sell, time-share or otherwise transfer the benefits of, use under, or rights to, the license granted in Section 2.1; (d) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to learn the source code, structure or algorithms underlying the Editor, except to the extent required to be permitted under applicable law; (e) modify, translate or create derivative works of the Editor; or (f) remove any copyright, trademark, patent or other proprietary notice that appears on the Editor or copies thereof.

2.3. Open Source Software
Zed makes certain versions of the Editor and related software available at the Zed GitHub Repository: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed (the "Repo"). Your use of such software is subject to the open source software licenses declared in the Repo.

I get it, they probably have a proprietary offering on top of their open source editor, but it baffles me how people contribute to these projects with the CLA as an overhead. Mind you, this is only just as bad as Microsoft, not worse. Both Zed and Microsoft effectively own the source code (through a CLA), the extension marketplace (Again through a terms of use that give on, and the rights to change their code license (despite Zed having a GPL-3 license).

VSCode might be the evil I know best, and that makes it easy to end up using it for things. I have to use Visual Studio at work occasionally, so I’m used to that workflow.

That’s all for now

Bye :)