Tree Style Tab is a Firefox extension which shows you tabs in a tree like fashion. Hopefully obvious, but I don’t know what you thought of first.
I personally like the extension because you can expand and collapse tree views. And because you can collapse tree views, you can show more “tabs” by collapsing some trees (which is also automatic when you switch to another tree).
This is personally useful for me because I can get distracted in tangents quite easily, and knowing where the heck this came from is also quite nice to know about.
Sometimes, I can get distracted into doing multiple topics at once too. While I could use multiple windows, I don’t really like it when there’s more than 2 windows to cycle through. With trees, I can vaguely separate topics without getting lost in the sea of tabs just next to each other (the tabs which are already in Firefox).
Also with the collapsing trees, I can technically see more tabs than the Firefox’s tabs, since Firefox’s tabs has a minimum size and can’t hide tabs (although Tree Style Tab could hide tabs, upon configuration, apparently).
I personally install the extension and do the following:
Go into the extensions management page > Tree Style Tabs > preferences, and set the theme to “High Contrast”.
All other themes include a light themed background which is why I don’t prefer anything else (and the “High Contrast” theme doesn’t do that).
Move the extension to the right side, and set “Style of contents for the sidebar position” to “left side”.
I’m not sure of the exact setup I had to do on Linux, it may have involved removing the background too, but I’m not sure.
This extension does take up viewport space, and will make reading awkward without the extension taking up space if you keep the extension always open.
I don’t have much to say about this. Oops. End of blog post.
Note about Google Chrome: An extension like this is not available on Google Chrome. At least, not this exact one.
You can look at the list of similar projects.
Hi! I am writing from Gentoo Linux, which I’ve been accidentally using for the last several days. Oops
For some context, my computer is an M1 MacBook Pro, which is a computer that runs macOS. There’s a project called Asahi Linux which aims to get Linux running on Apple Silicon Macs.
By default, that curl | sh
script installs Fedora Asahi Remix.
There is a list of other Linux distributions you can install on Apple
Silicon Macs, and Arch Linux ARM has been dropped and
isn’t available because it was badly maintained.1
I have personally chosen to use Gentoo Linux, kind of because I don’t know what to do choose.
Last time I considered Linux, I wrote this:
feature support needs:
(not documented?) night lightimplemented (2023-06-10)- external displays (HDMI, 4k60hz)
And also this:
complications:
- my email workflow is that if i’m done with it, i archive it. archiving the email is local, and the emails are then no longer accessible on the mail server.
- if i want to move my thunderbird setup, i would have to copy all the data over to linux. if i do that, there will be an inconsistent state, so it’s best to have one active copy of my thunderbird data around.
- my data is stored on drives formatted with (encrypted) APFS. linux support for (encrypted) APFS is… probably non-existent.
- i don’t have all the storage space in the world, so moving data from (encrypted) APFS to ext4 (or btrfs?) could be a lot of work alone.
- different shortcuts, breaking workflow
- i need to figure out the tools i have on macOS, then translate that over to linux. which is also work, work which might be a lot also.
So, what’s the current state of things?
Well… Not much has changed actually. Except for the tools on macOS part. And the Night Light part
It’s implemented!
That’s about it.
Or so I tricked you into thinking to.
Well, actually, this is just a tangent about macOS’s Night Shift, but I think macOS’s Night Shift might be implemented in a way where colors can just look… slightly off. Like record the screen in OBS or something and play it back. The colors will look… slightly stronger in some cases.
That’s not really the case with KDE Plasma’s Night Light implementation, so I guess it’s just a macOS Night Shift thing.
Doesn’t seem like I can use my USB-C hub to connect to an external monitor yet. So this is holding me back from fully committing to Linux
For the tools, I actually mostly installed command line programs, or macOS
specific apps for specific tweaks via Homebrew, or Free or Open Source
Software which are available on both macOS and Linux. So I just grabbed my
list of explicitly installed casks and formulas and also
grabbed a list of installed applications in /Applications/
(by doing an
ls
) just in case I installed something else not using Homebrew.
After grabbing the list of installed apps on macOS, I just searched the name
of the package from Homebrew in Gentoo Linux (using eix
), and then dealt
with all the missing results manually. Of course, this is work that… I
did. Oops
After doing all the work of finding the package name on Gentoo Linux, it seems I’m missing around 40 things, compared to the number of things I do have installed, but I don’t know the number of that.
There is one important tool that I don’t have, and it’s todoman
(for managing TODO items). I settled for KOrganizer for now since it has
CalDAV support. From what I can tell, there is an attempt to include
todoman
in the Gentoo Linux repositories, but it
hasn’t been completed yet.
I tried Merkuro Calendar (is it named Kalendar? I’m not sure), but for some
reason it asked for my CalDAV password every time I booted my computer. I’m
not sure, I’m using KeePassXC as my secret service and I do have the
keychain
USE flag enabled. Maybe the program is still trying to use KDE’s
wallet thingy but failing. It was annoying enough for me to find another
calendar app, and I found KOrganizer. (Post-writing note: KOrganizer also
asks for the password every time the system boots. Probably because it uses
the same backend as Merkuro)
I am still not keen on migrating my entire setup to Linux yet. However, I still have to read email, so I setup Thunderbird anyways. I haven’t copied my entire data over yet, and I disabled archiving of messages to prevent data loss by forgetting to save my locally saved and remotely deleted message.
Tangent: One annoying thing is Dark Reader giving a flash of white content when switching to another email. This is a problem in v115 of Thunderbird, happens on macOS, and I still haven’t figured out how to fix that. That’s also partially why I stuck to an older version of Thunderbird on macOS, which is kinda more difficult on Linux when you’re using the package manager and it doesn’t have the old version around.
I still use APFS on my external drives, which I don’t know if it’s readable on Linux yet. Actually it’s encrypted and I kinda don’t care about it too much. I still have macOS if I need it.
If I was gonna have access to my data on Linux, I would reformat the drive and also somehow at the same time migrate data to the new filesystem. I’m not sure how I’ll exactly achieve that though. (creating some empty space which macOS and Linux somehow both has read/write abilities, and shrinking the APFS filesystem file creating new filesystems in place of that sometimes, then all of those extra filesystems merged into a single big one somehow… I don’t know, I won’t bother right now)
I probably still won’t switch to Linux until the external monitor support is added (and my “docking” setup works).
And if support is added and everything works, I might just switch to Linux entirely pretty much.
I have no idea if my workflow will work in Linux and whether I still depend on macOS for some stuff. Hopefully not, though.
This is the end of the blog post. The following contents is just additional and you do not need to continue reading, as I am about to proceed into “Review about Linux” and departing from “Would I use Linux?”
I did mention I accidentally started using Gentoo Linux more. So I am going to comment on a few things.
Using Prism Launcher, I was able to launch Minecraft and play Minecraft. That’s about it.
Well there’s also mods and unscientific performance benchmarks. At rendering only 2 chunks, I was able to get maybe 400 FPS at an absolute max, which is pretty fast.
I did attempt to do an unscientific benchmark on macOS, but discovered that macOS technically renders stuff at a different resolution than Linux, so I just didn’t even bother trying again. It might actually be the same though.
Another thing I do with my Minecraft setup is I enabled “Use system installation of OpenAL” (not a thing in the official Minecraft Launcher probably). OpenAL stands for “Open Audio Library”, and I use the system installation in an attempt to lower latency (and use Pipewire). It feels like it was lowered a small bit, however, there’s probably other latency issues just lurking around which is more than just audio.
Switching to KDE Plasma can be difficult when you’re used to macOS. After
you’ve basically switched to KDE Plasma, then it’s hard to switch back to
macOS. Fun.
I almost constantly use KDE Plasma shortcuts instead of macOS shortcuts in macOS when I’ve been using KDE Plasma for a while now. You can probably tell how annoying this gets.
The minimized windows being available in the window switcher is very annoying, since I have practically all my windows maximized.
It’s possible to arrange virtual desktops in a 2D layout, and I think that’s pretty cool! Although you’re limited to 20 desktops per activity, so if you need more than that, you’re gonna have to dive into actives (which is kind of annoying to use when trying to move windows between them).
I have sometimes experienced freezes and crashes. The exact reproduction steps are not concrete, and there seems to be a similar issue at https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/196.
The crashing of the system has absolutely caused data loss in my Minecraft world. Heck, it might’ve even caused duping. Oops
I was going to try setting up kernel crash dumps to collect logs and memory dumps, but I’ve been kinda stuck with vague instructions that don’t even apply to my system (where’s the systemd commands???)
Another random issue is sometimes the laptop just gets warm. Like noticeably warm. Annoyingly and noticeably warm.
There doesn’t seem to be a “low power” mode thing yet, and I might have to
make my own script based on using cpupower
to do things.
iTerm is a macOS terminal app. It also has the feature of fixing the goddamn poor contrast that some programs have. That’s something I depend on, and it doesn’t seem like that exists anywhere on Linux for some reason.
The contrast fix in iTerm is a workaround, not a fix. However, I depend on that workaround sometimes, and uh, I don’t have it, I guess. Which sucks, but whatever.
Speakers! They work. Except… in some ways, they sound less spatial. I don’t know if it’s just a slightly different speaker setup (or DSP, I think that’s what they call it to make the speakers sound “better”).
When I pause music (playing from mpv), it stops. Great! Except when I start using the sound again, a tiny bit of the music gets played. That might be with leftover samples or something, I don’t know, it’s something I noticed.
Also sometimes a few hundred milliseconds of the start of the music gets dropped. I’m not sure if that’s just sample rate stuff and changing it (I have music in different sample rates).
Fonts. There are some fonts which just come by default on your device, except there’s more than just the default fonts in existence, and I personally have some preferences for fonts.
I have 2 fonts that I prefer:
That’s it. And ideally, that would be the only font I would ever see or use on my computers.
However, because computers are made by people and sometimes people don’t consider everything (especially disabilities, and names too), on macOS, you cannot change the font used by the system globally. The best you can get is maybe application specific settings if any (and with TinkerTool, but that doesn’t do much).
Speaking of application specific settings: My web browser of choice, Firefox1, has its own font settings. Hell, web pages can choose their own fonts! So I went to the font settings (in Firefox settings), changed the Serif and Sans-serif fonts to “Inclusive Sans”, changed the Monospace font to “JetBrains Mono”, and made sure to uncheck the checkbox labeled “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above”.
Another application with application specific settings for fonts: nheko, a Matrix client. In the settings (available after logging in), you can change the font family to whatever. I changed it to Inclusive Sans. I just left the emoji font family the default since that’s other stuff that I don’t have fonts for.
OK now I’m gonna talk about Linux cause that’s what I’m actually using right now. I’m using the KDE Plasma desktop environment, and in the System Settings app, there’s settings to change all the fonts. So I just changed everything to Inclusive Sans and changed the monospace font to JetBrains Mono and called it a day.
Both my web browser and nheko still have application specific settings that I have to change manually, but I’ve already went over that and it’s the same thing.
After changing the font in the system settings on my Linux system, it’s basically all Inclusive Sans or JetBrains Mono. So no matter where I look, it’s the font I chose.
So, to compare macOS and KDE Plasma (Linux) in being able to globally change fonts: KDE Plasma wins. On macOS, it’s still their default in lots of places.
There may or may not have been some places in KDE Plasma where the font didn’t change, but it’s kind of notice when the default is similar to your preference.