Now polybar will show on all monitors by default, and we don't have to
update the script every time those monitors change, useful when changing
between computers that use HDMI and computers that use display port, for
example.
Now we no longer have to worry about kitty having an inconsistent color
scheme when changing the color scheme of the rest of the environment,
which means that we can fully use kitty's window management and change
themes with pywal at the same time.
Since I usually have a browser and terminal emulator open most of the
time, I have placed them back as desktop 1 and 2 by default. I'm used to
the file browser being in 3, and 4 serves as media, which is important
for language immersion in particular.
The other 6 icons are numbers for individuals that know how to read
other languages.
This enables us to automatically change kitty colors when changing pywal
color schemes, which means that kitty window management, such as its tab
feature, will honor the new colors of pywal automatically, without
having to restart kitty.
Now that pipewire is more mainstream, we don't have to worry about using
alsa or pulseaudio here which, from what I remember, took more effort
to set up.
There was actually an issue where waybar was using larger padding than
usual, which was fixed by setting the gsettings in our sway config. I
liked the padding changes introduced by the other theme, however, so
this change makes it permanent.
This was cool when we had KDE-specific applications, but since I'm
prioritizing ranger and nautilus now, dolphin isn't needed. Since I'm
focusing heavily on terminal and web-based applications, there is less
need to customize KDE applications specifically.
Two other advantages to this is that I no longer have to manually update
the colors in kdeglobals, and most if not all of the environment can be
programmatically set up with minimal effort.
Now sway behaves similarly to unclutter on bspwm/xorg, and we don't have
to worry about moving the cursor out of the way since it automatically
disappears.
Since ueberzug only works in X, and since ranger previews currently
conflict with tmux due to a new python version on arch linux, ueberzug
has no real advantage besides making image previews work in alacritty,
which I ultimately decided against due to how it handles fcitx input on
Xorg.
One of the conveniences of GNOME is auto-mounting. Although manually
mounting is a good learning exercise, we can improve productivity by
auto-mounting by default.
Looking back at this, meta packages should be one of the most convenient
ways to keep track of packages. It gets the job done and should be more
than sufficient for our use case.
In particular, installing all packages guarantees that we won't "miss
something" and have to install it manually, which is more useful than
having a lower package number count.
The main disadvantage is dealing with constant updates to large packages
in a restrictive internet environment, although it's possible to
mitigate this by separating the smaller packages from the larger ones.
This is mainly to get rid of the warning when using "git status" where
git doesn't exist when the current partition isn't the same as the root
partition.
This makes it so that mpv won't take up the entire screen when executed,
assuming it's dealing with a video resolution equal to or greater than
the current display.