For a while now I thought I was going nuts and having some sort of Mandela Effect until I searched for this feature and found out it's indeed something that was part of Firefox and then got removed again.

I think this was gone when they introduced the + button for opening a new tab being aligned to the last tab in the row and visible at all times… >_>
Maybe the feature is still there just the tab space reduced to nothingness to have the + right after the last tab.
Actually, I can middle-click on the empty space of a tab bar so the space is still there after all and recognises input.
I would now just like to have double-click as an alternative means, because it just so happens you sometimes use a mouse that has unreliable middle-click, and I don't really like opening 2-5 new tabs with a broken mouse wheel / MMB.

And if I want to maximise I can just double-click anywhere else on the browser UI space, so anyone got ideas how to restore it or already did it themselves?
Imo it was an incredibly useful function if you wanted to open a new tab without having to reach for the keyboard or going all the way to the last tab in your row to reach for the +: just double-click on the empty space and done.

Hello Gentoo community!

I'm not new to Linux (so far used Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Debian, Slax and had a short look at Tiny dcore, and meddling with Termux(:X11) if that counts), yet never compiled a system from source. A few applications only here and there based on needs.
However, the idea and thought of Gentoo's concept intrigues me.

Installing Gentoo on some device is kind of a bucket list entry of mine, but going in blindly sounds about as stupid as it likely is.

This is why I wanted to ask the community if there's anything in particular that you absolutely, definitely should mind as someone new to it (other than ye good ol' RTFM, lol).

For instance:

• Any common hiccups and traps one can fall into that I should know about?
• Or something in particular one should know about the device you're installing on, for instance (made up statement) "laptops are harder to install on than PCs"?
• General tips to things you wished you knew earlier are highly welcome too.
• I'm also quite interested in how long it took you to achieve your first useable installation, rough estimate of hours / days, how often it failed, etc.. This would be good to know so I can plan ahead how much time I need to put aside for this and when to do it so I don't get interrupted for too long.
• What would you do differently if you were to get into it now and what would you recommend / discourage from doing (in general)?
• And if you ever installed Gentoo on older hardware, for instance 32bit, what were your experiences doing so (other than it being absurdly slow)?

Note that my default assumption about myself and my skills is:
"I'm an idiot, I will fail this the first or first handful of times – and that's fine, I'm here to learn." so I'm definitely not having any delusional ideas of acing this on the first time around.

Thanks in advance for any insights! : )

My goal is to be able to have battery saving settings on for basically everything, but have Termux and Termux:X11 be exceptions to this rule and excluded from it.

I have developer options enabled and I did enable "Disable child process restrictions". Anything else in there worth a look which affects this?

The reason I want to prevent this from happening is because Termux resetting means Termux:X11 closes as the process gets killed if the device is on standby for too long.
This is annoying behaviour.
Android sure has annoying amounts of control over and handholding with stuff (just let me do my thing, Google… geez…).
I tried wakelock on Termux, but with battery saving mode on it still did it.
Pretty sure actually that wakelock wasn't really respected.

I went into Apps → All apps → opened Termux's App info → App battery usage → Allow background usage is set to on.
The same was done for Termux:API and Termux:X11.

Any other tips or ideas?

Under settings I already searched for App Blocker, but there is not much I can do, it's just the App Blocker app settings. I cannot whitelist anything or the likes.
In Apps → Special app access I cannot alter Usage access as it is restricted.

Using Unihertz Titan 2, in case that matters.
This device is not rooted. For now I have no intents to do so (for reasons).

I heard some people wrote themselves a .sh which basically does a "heartbeat" using commands like echo to keep the system busy and allow it to be running? If yes, what's the specific setup, where can I find examples and where do I set it as a background script?
Or did I misunderstand this?

Coming from a Linux distro to Android sure poses a lot of headaches to me…

I'm using Firefox 152.0.3 (at the time of writing) from the mozillateam PPA on Xubuntu 24.04 LTS. It uses pipewire-pulse, so should be PulseAudio.

What seems to be my issue was documented here in this 8 year old bugreport.

What I tried:

• With media.volume_scale and media.default_volume → set it to double digits in about:config. I thought 2 for both would suffice but it did not work reliably. I'm in double digits now, but I'm afraid once Mozilla fixes this I'll go deaf or my speakers will really really hate it.
• In .config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d in my home directory, I made a custom.conf file with contents stream.properties = { channelmix.normalize = false }
• In PulseAudio's daemon.conf I set flat-volumes = no and /usr/share/pipewire/ in pipewire-pulse.conf I added:

​

pulse.rules =
[
  {
    matches =
    [
        { client.name = "Firefox" }
        { application.process.binary = "firefox" }
        { application.name = "Firefox" }
    ]
    actions =
    {
        update-props = { #node.latency = 512/48000 }
        quirks = [ block-sink-volume ]
    }
  }
]

It doesn't sound like much effort put into it, but I searched all over and found near nothing on this. I'm honestly lost as to what else to do with this weird issue.

Even with double-digits for the two settings I caught how it ended up having some streams start quieter today. It remembered the volumes now after setting ones, but well… that just showed me the issue is still there and requiring attention.
Note that it does not change it midstream, only upon stream start, and now after setting a volume, it keeps it even when the stream restarts.

I'm not sure if it's Pipewire, PulseAudio, or whatever doing it, or allowing it (if so, I would love to turn this off – permanently, for all applications), or if it's a Firefox quirk, exclusively.

How to reproduce:
I found Aphex Twin's Vordhosbn (and the Windowlicker audio upload, though no idea I should or could link it here due to thumbnail) to be two cases where volumes changed against my expectations.
Without the edits mentioned, skipping with arrow keys through the video position, clicking through it, or hitting a number key to jump to a fixed position did reset the audio stream and consequently also its volume.
Pausing the video kept the stream active and as a result the volume remained in place.

Any help appreciated.
Would be great to hear if anyone solved this on their end. It's mildly infuriating.
I only found solutions involving Windows where it seemed to have been an audio driver setting allowing it to do so.

Upgraded to 24.04, now I require to type my password to use indicator-cpufreq (or indicator-cpufreq-selector, which I suspect does the actual changing).
Wasn't the case before, baffled why since other applications doing the same don't need one.

I'm a noob with the sudoers file, so forgive any mistakes and point them out to me.
Tried adding the indicator plugin to it in the hopes of bypassing the password requirement.

I did:
sudo visudo

added at the bottom:

myusername ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/bin/indicator-cpufreq
myusername ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/bin/indicator-cpufreq-selector

This did not work.

I also tried it as a oneliner with
myusername ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/bin/indicator-cpufreq,/bin/indicator-cpufreq-selector

Just to be sure, I also did add the /usr/bin/ equivalents of the above.
Same outcome as before.

I ran sudo indicator-cpufreq – this works, if isolated.
But the panel plugin entry, which is spawned via the new Status Tray Plugin, rejects this.
I found out it's now fully part of xfce4-panel – unfortunately – so I can't just add a binary of the plugin to sudoers… adding the xfce4-panel itself did not solve it and isn't exactly a solution I would have desired for many reasons anyway.

What am I doing wrong, what could I do (other than giving up and moving on, again)?
I'm slowly tempted to add the indicator to my login scripts and hide it in the tray to avoid a double entry… but that would be yet another hacky workaround. : /

Is there any GUI manager for desktop theme presets? I looked around but found none.

It's a lot of hassle to make a complex theme setup, and then switch things one by one…

Point of reference for what I'm looking for:

Think of how panel preset works. And now think of how Windows 7 theme presets used to be, in xfce's case they would need to store the following information:

• Appearance and xfwm4 theming
• Wallpaper and its settings
• Cursor theming
• Icon choice
• System font
• xfce4-panel preset (those which already exist)
• Notification theming
• gtk.css (if in use)
• Used system sounds
• Optionally: LightDM theme (and maybe grub theme?)

Now, I'm well aware that at least in the case of gtk.css, a restart of services is needed.
So reapplying on the fly is probably not as simple as I would like it to be.

The reason I'm asking here is because while I love how modular and self-contained things are, I have a few theme ideas I want to use on my device but I really don't feel like having to keep track of everything I changed and jump all over the place just to set it up, only to then undo/redo it and having to restart services one by one or logout and log back in just to see my visual changes applied. This is very chaotic to do.
I would appreciate more variety in my daily use, however.

Did I miss something essential to this, is there already an application for managing that or is this something anyone has yet to do?

^(Yep, it's me again.)
I'm now looking for a CLI tool or at least some means to control screen saturation with to add it to a script of mine to desaturate my screen colours when I hit my keybind to flip the red mode late at night, so that the colours which get red-shifted are not mixed in with the red.
Granted, I'm not sure if the outcome won't be just black and white all over (the way sct works makes me hopeful though), but it's worth a shot.
Except I found nothing yet, searched the package list like mad, and Xubuntu and xfce itself has nothing alike to this integrated to my awareness (please correct me if I'm wrong).
Of course it would be perfect if running the desaturation command wtihout any value would simply restore defaults, just how sct does it, as it would simplify things.
Think of Android's bedtime mode: It does exactly what I want (except without any shift in colour).

___

Longer context:
I did make myself a small .sh using sct, the little nifty application to control colour temperature with, with the goal to crank up the red levels late at night simply by pressing a keybind.
By "crank up", I acutally mean it: It's nearly red-monochrome.
This is because other night modes were "too soft" for me.
I love how stupid simple sct is to use, but now the downside of this is that there's still colours in there. Consequently, some elements vanish in near black or blend in because of the colour mix generated by the red-shift… or they lack sufficient contrast. Most common the case on anything (dark) blue-leaning. My thought was that some desaturation prior to applying sct could maybe fix this. I could be mistaken though.

Install sct, and try sct 1000 to see what I mean with the red near-monochrome filter and its impact on blue elements.
You can type sct without any value to get to back to defaults by the way.

Before you judge:
Yes, it actually really helped me improve my sleep to cut down on blue to such an aggressive level and I would love to continue doing so, except I would want to avoid having to squint at elements contaning deep blue colours or seeing them as a dark green.

___

Any suggestions and help would be appreciated.
I'd like to avoid GUI-only solutions for the simple reason of using a keybind-script and wanting to add it in there, just to stress it. : )

Thanks in advance!

Hey there.
Any other ThinkPad E570 owners who happen to use Xubuntu and are TrackPoint fanatics like me, "suffering" from phantom input sabotage by their trackpad?

Since 2020 I have Linux in dual boot on this and since then I observed it. This didn't and still does not happen on Windows 10 to me.

This works as follows:
Resting hand on trackpad while using TrackPoint fires gesture events (think "two finger zoom") even though the trackpad is off. Kind of "phantom events" so to say.
This freezes and prevents input from my TrackPoint's mouse buttons and can result in input stuck in drags (until another button press is done) or resulting in non-responding clicks.
It does not affect the cursor's movement and does not fire actual events like zoom.

Mostly learnt to cope with it, so it's no drama if nobody knows. My workarounds so far were:

1: Not resting my hand on the trackpad. 2: Taping it in a way it doesn't register touches.
As you can tell, those are subpar solutions, akin to duct-taping things (…literally). ^^'

I don't remember seeing a way to turn the trackpad itself off in UEFI.
Likewise I tried all I could to sabotage the trackpad:
Shrinking its area into 1 pixel in a corner, turning it off, messing with driver configs, reinstalling, removing and replacing input drivers…
I "did all" I could think of and nothing has helped. The issue seems to be exotic or there's just not many E570 users (who also happen to use my distro). I had this issue consistently through all Xubuntu versions I used so far.

Who here found a solution to this and can help me?

And yes, I may have to crosspost this on the distribution's sub later but thought I'd ask the fellow hardware enthusiasts first.

Thanks in advance!

Hey, fellow Matrix users!
Before you say it: I know this might be a tricky one. ^ ^ '

But if you had to describe in a simple (visual) way to a person who is not tech-savvy how end-to-end encryption and verification works in Matrix clients and what room keys are (for and why and when they are needed), how would you describe it?

I feel this perceived complexity is what doesn't convince some people I know to make the move even though they expressed interest. It's intimidating to them, but I didn't find a great way to explain the whole system to them – yet. I recognise Matrix as a wonderful idea, but an idea on paper doesn't get very far if nobody reads it, if you know what I mean.
The explanations and FAQ on the Matrix (and Element) page didn't seem to help clear it up either and only confused people more.

I'm primarily looking for something "haptic", think along the lines of "It's like having a key to your letterbox!", but no matter how I approach it, I can't find a visual scenario I could use where all of the three mentioned things mesh well with another and are "relatable" for a lack of better words.

Now in case you wonder why:
I've been toying with the thought of visualising the whole concept of e2e encryption, verification and room keys, making something like a short comic sketch to help people visualise and grasp it, so they know what they need to do when logging in to a new client or device simply by following along or looking up the comic again, just something to draw parallels to each of these things, but am having serious trouble there. I want them to understand it and not just follow a bulletpoint list.

Help would be greatly appreciated! : )

PS: So far, I also struggled to make it clear to people that the recovery key is very very very important to preserve your account in case things go wrong… and so one friend already lost access to his first account and another may lose his chat history if his device breaks.
Wish I could have prevented that…