Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Going to keep a list of frustrations that I run into while using my computer. Started making the list 15 minutes ago and already have 9 items...

(*Do not* scattershot advice to 'fix' this stuff at me unless you're willing to see it through to the end, up to and including filing bugs with projects and/or submitting patches. If these things were trivial to fix, I would have done so already, and I am not planning to spend the rest of my day telling people "yes I have already tried that".)

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The list so far:

Things stealing focus. So many things stealing focus. Plasma's “focus stealing prevention” has several levels ranging from Low to Extreme but does not explain what these mean.

When trying to open a .exe from qBittorrent, expecting it to be opened with Bottles, I instead get an error from “KIO Client” saying “For security reasons, launching executables is not allowed in this context.” So I have to "open folder" and run it from there and then it's suddenly fine apparently 🤷

When doing a drag-and-drop, there's like a 50/50 chance that something bugs out, and at least one application now forever believes that I am in a dragging state (long after I've dropped the thing) until I restart it; often it's something involving a browser engine.

When trying to drag-reorder running applications in my auto-hide Plasma panel, it starts bugging out, rapidly showing and hiding the panel constantly, and if I release the item at the wrong moment, some other application seems to receive it and shits the bed.

Ark frequently fails to correctly open or extract several archive types (particularly RAR and 7z), especially when password-protected, even though these types are nominally supported. Extraction progress is almost always broken, seemingly regardless of archive type.

“Extract here” in Dolphin fails even more often than Ark does.

If you're accessing a network filesystem through Dolphin, and that connection breaks for any reason, good luck; you'll need it, and your entire Plasma session might end up crashing.

Or if the connection is slow, and something tries to access it, all sorts of stuff around the system starts lagging, also outside of KDE things.

Some installers, when run under WINE in Bottles at least, are impossible to focus from their taskbar icon; they will always stay in the background, and instead you need to minimize everything that's in front of it to be able to see and interact with it.

How are there already 16 DLCs for Cities Skylines 2?!

#AskFedi: I'm looking for games with similarly satisfying building and management mechanics to Project Hospital and Airport CEO. :boost_requested:

Please only reply if you've actually played either of these games; this is not a genre question, it's about the *feel* of the games!

Anyone is welcome to boost, though - and it's much appreciated, these are obscure games and so it'll probably be difficult to find folks who have played them!

What really irritates me about how a lot of people discuss the topic of destructive protest (eg. riots) is that they always try to argue with its proponents, but rarely ever try to argue with the people (including bystanders/centrists/etc.) responsible for making it the only remaining option.

You want to discuss when destructive protest is and isn't appropriate, fine, that's an important discussion to have. But if you're only ever criticizing those doing or promoting it, and not putting in the work to solve the problem otherwise, then what you're *really* doing is being a shield for the status quo.

So, as expected, copyright laws have failed to prevent "AI" companies from abusing authors' work at scale: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/24/a-federal-judge-sides-with-anthropic-in-lawsuit-over-training-ai-on-books-without-authors-permission/

Things sure are rapidly moving towards the point where "literally burning down the HQ and datacenters of every AI company" is the only remaining option, huh?

Guess that's what happens when you have two decades of austerity neoliberals

Lovely. Just learned that we may get planned blackouts this winter due to the electrical network being over capacity.

I did a little experiment today and figured out a new painting technique: using a (very wide) putty knife to paint a desktop!

The goal was to get a smooth, even layer of paint down, with no visible strokes; on top of a desktop that was already in quite poor shape, with some bits bulging out slightly.

Will have to see how it dries, of course, but so far the results are looking very promising!

#woodworking (well, barely, it's an old IKEA desktop so it's more cardboard than wood probably)