My first few days with Niri

Harvey

⚠️ PSA

For people building quickshell themselves, it was just added to the unstable repository so it will be available for regular users after next sync. Thanks go to bialy_wilk (Unsure of their forum handle) for stepping up to do the work.

Be sure to switch over to the repo package after sync so you no longer need to worry about manual updates and rebuilds for stack changes.

stocc

Harvey Thanks @Harvey for the notification and thanks @WhiteWolf for the packaging effort. It's much appreciated.
I've downloaded the package and replaced my locally built version. All working great so far!

WhiteWolf

bialy_wilk = @WhiteWolf np. I'm using Hyprland so gonna test it in unstable more today/tomorrow but if anyone wanna join please go ahead. Version 0.2.1 was added. https://quickshell.org/changelog/

Sebastian

I also have installed the quickshell eopkg from unstable for testing purposes.

Something is strange, and I haven't figured it out yet.
I noticed that with the eopkg, which is v0.2.1, power management doesn't work properly anymore. System does not blank screen or trigger lock screen automatically anymore with dankmaterialshell.
dankmaterialshell emits this error on startup:
WARN qml: IdleService: IdleMonitor not available - power management disabled. This requires a newer version of Quickshell.

requires newer Quickshell version
which is weird, because 0.2.1 is latest and it worked fine with 0.2.0

Then I thought maybe I need to update dankmaterialshell as well. But that brought more problems like dark/light mode not working properly.
Had trouble to reverse everything back to the state that I had. Also build quickshell version 0.2.1 myself, with the same issues. So probably not a packaging problem.

Quickshell and dankmaterielshell also seem under heavy development with many changes.
For now I am back on 0.2.0 with also an older dms version.

Gotta be careful with matugen and dynamic theming on newer dms versions. Cause this also changes ~/.config/gtk-3.0/4.0 which also affects GNOME. Had even trouble with dark/light mode toggle under GNOME.

stocc

Sebastian Anyway, to get notification for Solus updates (if notifications work in general), you need to run
solus-update-checker on startup.

I think solus-update-checker has been removed with the new epoch as it used python 2. I'm not sure what has replaced it though.

Original-Syn

stocc Would likely be through Gnome Software or Discover via packagekit.

stocc

Original-Syn Thanks. I presume Discover will cause a notification to pop-up on my Niri/Quickshell deployment. Time will tell! It doesn't really matter as the regular update cadence means I know when to update in any case.

Sebastian

@stocc Since you are on a laptop: have you searched for/found a way to deactivate touchpad while typing?
Sometimes I am typing and unconciously touch the touchpad with a finger or palm, and then my sentence continues not where it should but somewhere else. That's just annoying 🙈

stocc

Sebastian I haven’t had the issue yet, but apparently there is an option 'dwt' in the touchpad section of the Niri config that should do this:
touchpad { // dwt : disable-when-typing. dwt }

Sebastian

Awesome. I have uncommented it in the config file now and will observe behaviour.

Sebastian

Regarding notifications for updates I will ask again in Support channel soon as a follow-up to the question you had asked there. Tracey had said that in place for the deprecated solus-update-checker, discover/GNOME-Software would notify for updates. Can't say regarding discover, but for GNOME Software this seems only to be true in GNOME itself, not in niri. In GNOME, GNOME Software seems to be started in the background, at least I can kill it without having it opened, which is not the case for niri. Haven't figured out yet if it can be started in background in niri and how this whole packagekit thing works. And actually, I don't want it to be started in background as I dislike it.
Also I don't know whether Tracey's statement means that people who don't wanna use neither discover nor GNOME-Software and prefer cli can't have update notifications.

I figured out so far that pkcon refresh force refreshes the packagekit cache or whatever and that then pkcon get-updates --plain shows whether updates are available. So theoretically possible to build a script with those commands that then triggers notification.
But I do not know if it's save to run pkcon refresh force and if this is usually run by discover/GNOME Software themselves or some packagekit service and how often this is refreshed usually. I didn't find a setting for check for updates intervall in GNOME Software. Also, GNOME Software notification behaviour is weird.
Pretty sure Joey or sheepman are familiar with that whole packegkit stuff and can give advice what would be the best course of action here for notifications.

Edit: you are on Budgie and hence probably using discover? Is it showing notifications for you for updates without having it run manually prior?
Edit: I mean when in niri

stocc

Sebastian Yes, I have Discover, but still no notifications in the notification area. If I manually start Discover it shows there are updates within the GUI, but that isn't propagated to the notification area.

stocc

Sebastian I figured out so far that pkcon refresh force refreshes the packagekit cache or whatever and that then pkcon get-updates --plain shows whether updates are available. So theoretically possible to build a script with those commands that then triggers notification.

I've written myself a little bash script for this (but without the force parameter on the refresh), which I'll spawn at startup of Niri, and see whether it works...

Sebastian

I have also written a bash script but with pkcon refresh force and pkcon get-updates --plain and have it spawn-at-startup spawn-at-startup "sh" "-c" "sleep 60; ~/scripts/solus-pkcon-check-for-updates.sh". Have implemented a loop with while true do and have it check for updates every 30 minutes.
Works fine so far.

stocc

I just realised that I wasn't getting notifications for low battery. It turns out that you need a plugin in DMS to enable this. However, the plugin itself requires the Plugin Manager to be available, which mine wasn't. I then realised that the version of DMS CLI I was running was v0.0.12, or something, which is way out of date. I found that to update this I needed to clone the https://github.com/AvengeMedia/danklinux.git repo.
git clone https://github.com/AvengeMedia/danklinux.git cd dankLinux dms kill make sudo make install dms restart

Having done this, DMS CLI was updated to 0.2.4, which supports the plugins, and I have now installed the Dank Battery Alerts plugin:

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