this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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That's the state of computing in 2023: a browser disguised as a native app running 15 layers of Javascript is used as a friggin terminal. And nobody bats an eyelids, as if the utter insanity of it made any sense.
And the installer is 117M compressed. That's MEGABYTES... For a terminal!
The mind boggles...
I've been using Alacritty for the last 4 years, it's kinda the opposite of this nonsense. It's written in Rust, it's super light weight, highly optimised, and uses hardware acceleration to render the terminal. It's top of the chart for every terminal performance benchmark conceived.
However, that lightness and fastness comes at a cost. There are some basic features they just won't add because they're outside the scope of the project. Eg, tabs ("just use a tiling wm and do your own tabs in the wm") or a scrollbar ("just use a shell with a scrolling screen buffer like Tmux"), or different coloured backgrounds for each opened window ("why would anyone ever want to do that?").
My holy grail terminal would be something like Alacritty, written in Rust, blisteringly fast and light weight, but with tabs, scrollbar, bookmarks, etc.
I find myself falling back to using Konsole a lot these days, it's got all the features I want, is fast enough, and already installed on every system I use Plasma on.
I never understand the whole thing around "fast" terminals. How can a terminal be "slow"? Surely the terminal you're using has no effect on the programs you're calling, so what's being measured here?
The very few times your programs end up spamming a ton to stdout I guess