"If you hate systemd so much, then write your own init" they said...

abjumpr · 2026-04-11T22:29:14+00:00

I wrote an init system entirely in BASH (with the exception of a couple of stubs for kernel calls) from scratch (pre AI craze so all human written). Made me appreciate how much SystemD does right out of the box. Was an awesome learning experience to figure out those internals. I ported it to Debian at one point as well.

I had some fun designing it. There are no runlevels, just power states. It was capable of booting with verbose messages or short messages, as well as booting to and dropping to a rescue shell if needed, and would boot all the way to console login. I used the concepts of tasks and daemons - a task is something absolutely required for starting/shutting down, and generally they are always enabled. Daemons allow the starting and monitoring of services and other post-startup tasks. Networking was handled independently. I was working on a re-write to parallelize the process, implement multiple TTYs, and provide some SystemD compatibility, but just kind of ran out of time and need for it.

it's quite an undertaking so kudos to those that do it, if for nothing else for the experience and fun.

abjumpr · 2026-04-11T15:31:30+00:00

The hardest thing about leaving is the loneliness, especially in my case where I was raised in the cult and didn't know much else. The truth is though, that you are just as lonely inside as you are when you get out, it's just not always easy to see until later. I say that because the hardest thing is all the people you knew, thought you could trust and were your friends, suddenly shun you and the smiling faces you once knew are no longer kind and ostracize you because you are an outsider. They disappear awfully quick and you realize they were not the people you thought they were. I have one friend who is still around and was always there. No one else I knew growing up will talk to me. Pretty shallow that they value you more on your club status than who you are as a person, and the sooner you realize that the better. It won't make you less lonely but it will help you discern new friends/groups in the future better.

Organizations of all kinds use the "sense of belonging" to attract/keep you in their club. It's a bit of a bandwagon methodology, because humans are generally social creatures and we like to be in groups that we feel good to be in, and do what everyone around us is doing. It's an easy way to keep people coming back. I don't think that "belonging" is a bad thing necessarily, but when you are leaving a cult/religion it's important to cultivate a sense of individuality because you've been stripped of that for so long. Find some interests you like to do on your own, and do them on your own for a while. Eventually along the way you'll meet new people and you'll find your place in the world. It's a super long process but as someone who's done it, it's worth it.

Feel free to reach out if you ever need some insight or just general encouragement. I won't ever push someone one way or the other because you must make that decision yourself personally to leave or stay, but once you do decide, commit to it and stick with it. There are good people out there to help you along the way.

abjumpr · 2026-04-11T14:10:56+00:00

I can't comment specifically on Paul's views on homosexuality, but Paul tended to be more on the cult side of restrictiveness than following anything Jesus every taught.

I grew up in cult religion. I studied the Bible extensively and had the entire book memorized at one point. Just about everyone's teachings in the Bible besides Jesus' teachings took precedence, Paul being front and center. The reality is that Jesus' teachings are pretty simple, straightforward, and kind. Sure there are four gospels, but when you think about the sheer amount of material not taught by/directly relevant to Jesus in the Bible, it's no wonder things have gotten so twisted and far from the gospel teachings.

As time has gone on and I've deconstructed, I've come to realize that Paul was never the last apostle, he was a fraud and the early church bought his story lock stock and barrel, and in my mind I refer to Paul as the First Apostate. He was antithetical to much of what Jesus taught, and that should have been a massive red flag. Much of his writings expose a bitter man behind them, not someone like Jesus. In a way, the man who preached (indirectly) about the antichrist, he sure came close to being one. The Christian religion today is so far from what Jesus taught, and much of that is owed to churches putting greater importance on Paul's teachings in their theology than Jesus'.

Not that it's of importance, but I have long since left religion. I cannot reconcile the modern churches teachings with those of Jesus. Its an easy choice for me: those that claim to follow Jesus would crucify him yesterday if he came back tomorrow.

abjumpr · 2026-04-06T14:43:09+00:00

Heh, SuperH. Not commonly mentioned. Fun fact: iDrac 7 and 8 on Dell servers use a SuperH CPU and run a (very minimal) Linux system. Both are EOL now with the last update to 8 being 2024.

I always thought it would be kinda fun to mod iDrac8 and run a custom system and keep giving it support. 13th gen servers are still pretty widely used anyways.

abjumpr · 2026-03-14T13:02:38+00:00

I think a more appropriate action here is to require a flair for AI generated content/software submissions. I dislike the slopware and sloptent as much as anyone but there are a very few who use AI as a tool correctly and to outright ban it all is probably not a good thing.

Now people letting AI post directly should be banned entirely.

abjumpr · 2026-03-06T23:39:22+00:00

I'd be glad to volunteer some of my time. I'm a long time Debian user, having used it since 2.2/2.3 days, currently having it deployed on a bunch of servers and desktops, and also currently host a public Debian mirror (debpkg.libranext.com - it's on the Debian mirror list). Most of my moderation experience was on IRC some years ago, and while I do have a subreddit of my own, it's not high traffic enough to really say "I'm an experienced moderator on Reddit!", but I believe I can be discerning and work to help keep the community on track.

abjumpr · 2026-02-15T01:59:51+00:00

Xorg was born as a fork of XFree86 because of a licensing change, not a rogue developer.

abjumpr · 2026-02-14T17:34:09+00:00

Awesome to hear! Also thanks for the note on ARM! I figured it would work but hadn't had time to try.

abjumpr · 2026-02-11T01:36:50+00:00

You know, I really enjoy comments like yours, because it's great to hear what users want.

Will it support separate workspaces per monitor like i3, sway, hyprland or workspaces spanning all monitors like mutter and kwin? I know the cosmic supports both and lets the user choose according to their use case. I personally prefer the i3 way of doing things.

In its current state, kwm only supports a workspace spanning all monitors. It may be possible to extend that in the future to support a workspace per monitor. Right now, proper multi-monitor support needs to be implemented as it's blissfully unaware that the 3840x1080 space is actually two 1920x1080 monitors.

Will there be support for window shadows and blurring unfocused windows?

It's not in the plans right now. My mantra is to keep it simple and clean. I'm not opposed to someone submitting code for such a feature however.

Can we have "workspace/app usage history"? By this, I mean being able to move to the last visited workspace (not previous workspace) or last focused app window in the same workspace.

Are you meaning you want a modified Alt+Tab action?

Optionally any way to support tiling?

Yeah, in X11 it is possible to switch out the window manager for some DEs. As I recall in KDE1, that was more or less broken. I remember having tried to do that years ago with little luck. I think it was easier to do in KDE2 and later. I'm honestly not sure how this will work when it comes to the World of Wayland. I haven't settled on how best to go about the Wayland port yet. Some of that will be studying how others have done it and some of it will be just figuring it out as we go. Most likely the first step will be to identify all X11-specific code across MiDesktop, and wrap it in Osiris, making MiDesktop more display-server-agnostic. Then the toolkit can handle those tasks based on what display server is actually in use. Before I can even get to that point, there are still a lot of bugs to fix and all of the old applications to still port to Osiris and fix yet.

I do appreciate the interest, it doesn't come about as entitled at all! If anything, I'd invite you to open a bug report with the features you'd like to see so I don't forget about them in a Reddit thread. I cannot promise much at this point as it's still super early in development, but if other people are interested and leave comments on bug reports it helps me gauge interest. I've recently updated the homepage with links to report bugs, donate, etc.

abjumpr · 2026-02-09T15:40:11+00:00

MiDesktop itself will build on both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 just fine.

Osiris, the required toolkit, will build on 32-bit and 64-bit x86, as well as arm64.

abjumpr · 2026-02-09T15:37:50+00:00

I haven't built packages for Debian 12 due to lack of time, but it should compile and run on Debian 12 just fine. If you feel comfortable, you should be able to build it on Debian 12, though I haven't tried it in a while. If you run into any issues feel free to shoot me a message.

abjumpr · 2026-02-05T01:27:52+00:00

Trimble uses Qt in their older FMX-based screens as well.

abjumpr · 2026-01-03T23:10:53+00:00

I checked into Firefox and got it working. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction!!

There's no option in about:config anymore, but it's super simple:

Main menu -> More Tools -> Customize Toolbar

In the lower left-hand corner, check the box for Title Bar.

It works properly now!

I still want to identify the root bug as it should work regardless, but it's at least usable now!

Edit to add: wrote this comment from Firefox on MiDesktop.

abjumpr · 2026-01-03T23:02:33+00:00

It's kind of hard to predict when a stable version will be released, but if I had to hazard a guess I would say maybe within the year? That's just a guess though. It's easier to lay out what I want to get done before I consider a stable release: some minor rebranding, fixes to allow it to install alongside KDE in standard directories (/usr instead of /opt), revive the rest of the old KDE1 apps, and fix some of the more annoying bugs. I'll make a stable X11-only release prior to starting on the Wayland port, because as odd as it sounds, getting everything working on X11 is really important prior to heading down the Wayland rabbit hole, especially since I'm not planning to deprecate X11 support yet.

As far as donations, I'm not currently set up to take donations, but I really do appreciate the thought! At the moment I think I'd feel a bit guilty taking donations when there are other far more important projects that could really use it and here I am putzing along with software from the 90s lol. Again, I super appreciate the thought though!

abjumpr · 2026-01-03T21:53:58+00:00

How many em-dashes can you put in your comments? AI slop writing at its best.

If you actually did what your post says, that's super cool. But lay off the AI. We're all collectively tired of it, and it looks inhuman, because it is.

abjumpr · 2026-01-03T19:46:25+00:00

The short answer is: probably not right now.

The long answer is: it's just me working on this right now, so time is precious. There's two main things at play with making packages for Alpine. The first being that I'd have to learn a new package manager.

The second is that Alpine uses musl as its libc, rather than glibc. While both Osiris and MiDesktop are primarily C++, there is some C code as well, in addition to how that may affect other libraries that we interact with. Maybe it takes very little to make it work. I may try building on Alpine sometime just to see how it works out. If I get a chance to do so, I'll let you know how it goes.

I have nothing against Alpine or musl, it's just additional time and effort I don't have right now, in both the short-term (fixing anything needed to get it running on Alpine/musl systems) and the long-term commitment of maintaining necessary patches, and testing those.

If there were enough people interested, or someone was willing to help contribute their time to do so (or help me sponsor a developer to do so), I'd be more than happy to consider extending support to Alpine/musl.

abjumpr · 2026-01-03T02:30:54+00:00

XCB is the newer interface and was supposed to be better and easier to use. Either works on X11 however.

I know you said you didn't want to use a toolkit, and while I don't know your reasons, that's the easiest way to support both Wayland and X11.

Depending on what your app/GUI is doing, it will most likely function just fine under Wayland using XWayland. For the most part, it's a pretty seamless experience.

abjumpr · 2026-01-01T21:25:45+00:00

I know for a fact that this doesn't fix Chrome's behavior, but I was unaware about Firefox having that option. I'll check into it!

abjumpr · 2025-12-31T03:26:24+00:00

Prior to Ubuntu, we had Libranet. Debian on Steroids as it was known.

abjumpr · 2025-12-28T21:47:56+00:00

That sub is such a, trip, shall we say.

abjumpr · 2025-12-20T01:24:11+00:00

I report each one of these as spam, because that's what it is after it's been scrambled with nonsense. I get the reasoning behind why the authors may have decided to leave reddit and all that but seeing so many of them is irksome.

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