Hacker News: donio

New comment by donio in "Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig"

donio — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 07:55:58 +0000

I gave it a quick go and very few things work at the moment. None of the programs you listed do.

From the README:

  At the moment it can render simple applications that do GLX, EGL or Vulkan graphics (fully hardware accelerated) nested in an existing X server.

And that sounds about right. As far as I can tell it doesn't yet have a lot of the core X11 stuff that "normal" clients expect. For example xterm doesn't start because requests like X_AllocColor, X_OpenFont, X_PutImage (a few picked at random from the error output) are not implemented yet.

glxgears on the other hand does work :)

New comment by donio in "I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon"

donio — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 21:21:14 +0000

It's the opposite for me for one reason: hashtag follows!

There are very few people I want to follow for everything they have to say. I am interested in subjects, topics. Mastodon's hashtag follow feature gives me this. It's not perfect, you need to be on a relatively large instance to take full advantage of it (since it only picks up toots that make it to the instance) but it's still much, much better than no hashtag follow at all.

New comment by donio in "Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client"

donio — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 03:34:49 +0000

The extensive IRCv3 support for one thing. chathistory support in particular is a big one for me since we rely on it on my personal server.

If you scroll down to the Features section on the linked page that gives a good overview.

New comment by donio in "Self-hosting email like it's 1984"

donio — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:47:40 +0000

Not even that, Postfix didn't exist in 1994. This is a 2025 mail server setup and about as vanilla as it gets.

New comment by donio in "Dial-up Internet to be discontinued"

donio — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 02:29:19 +0000

Easy to see for yourself using the throttling option in the developer tools of popular browsers.

New comment by donio in "Ergonomic keyboarding with the Svalboard: a half-year retrospective"

donio — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 01:02:42 +0000

Datahand user, for me switching back and forth between the DH and a regular keyboard (a Thinkpad for the most part) is not a problem at all. It doesn't even feel particularly annoying, I think it's because it almost feels like a different input device category. Kind of like playing the same game on the Steamdeck with controller input and then later on the desktop with keyboard and mouse. I might prefer one but I am fine with the other too.

BTW, I've played about 15K matches of my favorite MOBA on the Datahand, works surprisingly well for that, I imagine the Svalboard would too.

New comment by donio in "Ergonomic keyboarding with the Svalboard: a half-year retrospective"

donio — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 22:11:24 +0000

I am a longtime (25+ years) Datahand user. I have converted my units to a USB capable controller long ago and I have some extra ones as spares/parts but it might be difficult to get another 25 years out of them.

Haven't tried the Svalboard yet but it's the only obvious way forward that I know of so happy to see any new information about it. I'd be especially interested in the opinion of other Datahand users regarding the Svalboard, specifically the hardware, the switches and overall feel.

New comment by donio in "New Aarch64 Back End"

donio — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 04:35:39 +0000

> Is that building Go with Go? Or actual bootstrapping?

Normally it's just Go with Go. Besides the Go compiler you need bash if you want to use the normal bootstrap script but not much else. You can build your way up from C by building an old enough version of Go that was still C based but that's not usually done these days.

> Executed in 11.67 secs

Nice!

New comment by donio in "New Aarch64 Back End"

donio — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 02:33:37 +0000

The Go toolchain is a nice illustration of this approach working in practice. It fully bootstraps in 90 seconds on my aging laptop and since it's fully self-hosted it doesn't even need a C compiler unless you want cgo support.

LLVM takes 2 hours to build on the same host and zig (with the LLVM backend) is another 20 minutes. It will be awesome if that can be brought down to 2 minutes or less.

New comment by donio in "Make Ubuntu packages 90% faster by rebuilding them"

donio — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 02:31:36 +0000

> Gentoo linux is essentially made specifically for people like this, to be able to optimize one’s own linux rig for one’s specific usecase.

That's true but worth noting that "optimize" here doesn't necessarily refer to performance.

I've been using Gentoo for 20 years and performance was never the reason. Gentoo is great if you know how you want things to work. Gentoo helps you get there.

New comment by donio in "Launching RDAP; sunsetting WHOIS"

donio — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 21:12:17 +0000

  curl -s https://rdap.verisign.com/com/v1/domain/example.com|jq -r '.events[] | select(.eventAction == "expiration") | .eventDate'

And https://data.iana.org/rdap/dns.json to find the endpoints for TLDs.

New comment by donio in "Mox – modern, secure, all-in-one email server"

donio — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 18:53:36 +0000

Haven't used Mox yet but Chasquid is great if you want something that's focused on being a streamlined modern MTA rather than "all-in-one". So kind of the opposite of the Mox approach.

I like Chasquid for its straightforward codebase and the hook system that you can use to customize it further.

New comment by donio in "Show HN: Bayleaf – Building a low-profile wireless split keyboard"

donio — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 20:01:34 +0000

Do the two sides communicate with each other or do they act as independent devices?

New comment by donio in "Recurring checklists using Org Mode in Emacs"

donio — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 08:05:48 +0000

There is also M-x org-reset-checkbox-state-subtree

Another list/checkbox related package I use is org-autolist, it saves a lot of typing when adding many list items or checkboxes at once. There is currently an issue that keeps it working quite right with current Org versions and a PR with a fix.

https://github.com/calvinwyoung/org-autolist

https://github.com/calvinwyoung/org-autolist/pull/26

New comment by donio in "Chrome does not have any way to stop video auto play?"

donio — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 08:28:37 +0000

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Media/block-autoplay has some more additional information in particular about the media.autoplay.blocking_policy pref which allows restoring the older behavior of the play intent not being sticky.

New comment by donio in "The Deck: An open-source cross-platform multiplayer card game engine in Flutter"

donio — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 21:52:46 +0000

https://virtualtabletop.io/ is another option for this, web based. It's sort of like a 2D Tabletop Simulator.

Source: https://github.com/ArnoldSmith86/virtualtabletop

New comment by donio in "VSCode’s SSH agent is bananas"

donio — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 21:40:05 +0000

I've never seen any distributions enable ForwardX11Trusted by default. Do you have any examples? It seems very unlikely to me that a distribution would do this for a relatively niche use case.

New comment by donio in "VSCode’s SSH agent is bananas"

donio — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 21:34:03 +0000

They can only do those things if the X11 security extension restrictions are disabled with ForwardX11Trusted=yes or by using -Y rather than -X. This has been the case for the past 20 years.

New comment by donio in "Hard numbers in the Wayland vs. X11 input latency discussion"

donio — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 16:27:46 +0000

The extension situation is already much worse in Wayland than in X11. In my X11 server there are about 25 extensions and only a handful are required for modern desktop functionality. Wayland already has well over a hundred extensions (protocols) and dozens of them have to be implemented by each compositor just to get basic stuff working.

https://wayland.app/protocols/

New comment by donio in "All Lisp indentation schemes are ugly"

donio — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 22:06:55 +0000

You are right, I made the classic mistake of doing the percentage backwards. Once properly formatted I am counting 16 lines and it goes up to 25 so it's a 56% increase.