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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Gnome is more stable in my experience. The base Gnome without any extensions is rock solid and just works without a hitch. Problem is that it’s bland as hell and not very practical. Most of the popular extensions to make the DE are also pretty solid and reliable, as gnome’s extension API doesn’t really allow them to break anything in any spectacular way. Plasma allows better and more powerful extensions, but they also tend to have a bigger effect on the DE’s stability.

    That said, I fucking hate how Gnome devs handle the extension API. Every update to Gnome disables all the extensions even if there’s no breaking changes that would cause them to stop working. You gotta either manually edit their manifest files to trick Gnome into thinking they’ve been updated to the latest DE version, or you gotta wait for the devs to update. Every now and then they do release a breaking change that does break things too, and things get annoying. I used to maintain a relatively popular-ish, very simple Gnome extension. But eventually I got sick and abandoned because nobody’s got time to deal with Gnome’s extension API. I had to rewrite some basic shit for no good reason one too many times.






  • Because calibre also allows me to convert other formats into epub.

    Some files are unreadable garbage because of bad OCR or bad formatting or whatever. I use calibre to preview files in its built-in viewer, to see how they would be rendered on my actual reader. Helps a ton.

    Some files have messed up metadata. Calibre helps with fixing that. I have encountered files that would appear as documents on my Kindle rather than books, for example. Easy fix with calibre.

    Even if it is not messed up per se, I still sometimes use calibre to sometimes edit metadata to tidy them up. So that the author information between different books of the same series is the same, for example. “Banks, Iain M.” for all the Culture books, rather than a wild mess of various different variations of the same name. I have also added missing pieces of information to help group books in my library etc.

    It’s a super useful tool. I just wish it didn’t spam so many system notifications though.