Hacker News: paulbgd

New comment by paulbgd in "The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility"

paulbgd — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:43:49 +0000

The article mentions several TUI programs that rendering in an accessible way for screen readers.

New comment by paulbgd in "Workers report watching Ray-Ban Meta-shot footage of people using the bathroom"

paulbgd — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:31:53 +0000

I honestly prefer the ars article here just because there's no onscroll fancy animation, just an actual textual description of what's being reported.

New comment by paulbgd in "How to Review an AUR Package"

paulbgd — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 15:59:32 +0000

As someone who is a maintainer of a few packages, it’s actually really hard to find references for this stuff! The wiki is pretty bare when you start looking for specifics, and like you say there’s tons of crap pkgbuilds when you try to look at what others do.

New comment by paulbgd in "iPhone 16 Best-Selling Smartphone in 2025; Apple Takes 7 Spots in Top Models"

paulbgd — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:40:42 +0000

It helps that the major cell carriers have convinced people to pay multiple times more than the budget carriers, to offer free phone upgrades every few years or when switching carriers. Makes me wonder how much cheaper phone plans could be

New comment by paulbgd in "Minnesota is under siege. This cannot stand"

paulbgd — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:41:47 +0000

The article doesn’t talk about whether immigration enforcement is good, instead focusing on the side effects of the current federal deployment in Minnesota.

New comment by paulbgd in "I'm returning my Framework 16"

paulbgd — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 22:18:06 +0000

kinda similar experience with my thinkpad t14s gen 2 amd (what a name.) I like framework's philosophy, but there's so many refurbished business laptops out there (many unused) that I like upgrading every few years to a 3-4 yr old laptop.

Getting a laptop that's linux certified has been better than I thought, things like sleep and power management "Just Work" whereas on other laptops I'd spend more time configuring TLP or even just hibernating every time because I couldn't get a good sleep experience. Hope this inspires the other manufacturers to work on getting this working out of the box.

New comment by paulbgd in "Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable"

paulbgd — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 22:19:36 +0000

Super cool, I'm definitely going to have to grab a pi and set this up. Now if we could also solve the ps5/switch/etc not turning off the TV, my setup would be perfect!

New comment by paulbgd in "Samsung may end SATA SSD production soon"

paulbgd — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 17:09:23 +0000

pcie expansion cards? SATA isn’t free and takes away from having potentially more PCIE lanes, so the only real difference here is the connector

New comment by paulbgd in "Gnome is better macOS than macOS"

paulbgd — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:51:14 +0000

Reading it closely, that's a bit of an oversimplification. The article focuses pretty heavily on functionality over style, where doing the equivalent thing in macos is either silly or near impossible to achieve

New comment by paulbgd in "Gnome is better macOS than macOS"

paulbgd — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:42:55 +0000

I like plasma as well, my main complaints with it rn are

- configuring stuff like the task bar has always been buggy, the drag/drop frustratingly won't drop stuff in the right place, I've even had to completely log out to fix being locked in the editing mode earlier this year

- settings app goes deep and it makes it harder to find simple stuff. one example for my friends is when they wanted to turn on gsync/freesync, the toggle for it on gnome is right inside of refresh rate like you'd expect

- I hate to say this because I know it's gnome/gtk's fault, but apps on gnome look much more consistent for me than apps on plasma. gtk apps don't look good, qt apps don't look good, and plasma apps do look pretty good but they're in the minority. It has been a year since I've tried ricing KDE though, so I'd accept if this has gotten better

I don't totally agree with the extensions thing, the only one I use is quake terminal so that I can have ghostty pop up (since gnome doesn't support the protocol needed for that to work natively) and I consider myself a pretty technical user. Even on plasma I like a lot of the gnome apps like nautilus for being opinionated/polished. it's been a struggle to get a good feeling environment on plasma without a lot of tinkering (which to its credit, is doable!) whereas gnome feels pretty good ootb

New comment by paulbgd in "Gnome is better macOS than macOS"

paulbgd — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 16:34:22 +0000

Totally agree. Lots of friends who game have been asking for advice on linux now that they don’t want to update to windows 10. I’ll show them both gnome and plasma, and they’ll usually try kde then switch to gnome because it’s so darn easy to use.

It’s opinionated, the settings app is easy to navigate (with the downside being, tweaks/gsettings is needed), and simple stuff like shutting down/switching audio input/wifi/printers is all stuff they were able to figure out without my help. I do wish gnome would figure out some of the compatibility stuff with Wayland (quick windows on ghostty seem not to work because they won’t implement a specific protocol?) but out of every desktop rn, gnome really is one of the easiest to pick up

New comment by paulbgd in "Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark"

paulbgd — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 03:45:22 +0000

Totally agree, but it seems like competitive games have solved it. CS2 (VAC), The Finals (EAC), and Overwatch 2 (Warden) all run flawlessly on Linux.

New comment by paulbgd in "Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark"

paulbgd — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 22:54:39 +0000

On Wayland+gnome/plasma I’ve had great luck with games, Firefox is almost there with some bugginess, and video playing apps that use mpv like plex work great. It’s definitely not perfect and you may dive into configuring per app flags to make them utilize hdr, but the easy stuff generally works

New comment by paulbgd in "Oavif: Faster target quality image compression"

paulbgd — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 22:05:09 +0000

Super cool! I wonder if the same technique could be useful for video encoding too.

New comment by paulbgd in "Samsung now owns Denon, Bowers and Wilkins, Marantz, Polk, and more audio brands"

paulbgd — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 16:07:34 +0000

There’s always Sony too, who still put out pretty good receivers.

New comment by paulbgd in "When Fascism Comes Wrapped in the Flag and Carrying a Cross"

paulbgd — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 04:05:42 +0000

I'm going to guess they voted 2016 and 2020, prior to January 6th & Project 2025

New comment by paulbgd in "OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google"

paulbgd — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 06:08:48 +0000

Check out sweep. Completely unaffiliated, their only offering is the jetbrains plugin so it gets a lot more focus than windsurf. Only downside is that Claude code is still a better agent, but at least its tab complete is some of the best

New comment by paulbgd in "Nvidia won, we all lost"

paulbgd — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 01:18:20 +0000

I’ve used fsr 4 and dlss 4, I’d say fsr 4 is a bit ahead of dlss 3 but behind dlss 4. No more vaseline smear

New comment by paulbgd in "High-quality OLED displays now enabling integrated thin and multichannel audio"

paulbgd — Thu, 29 May 2025 15:29:17 +0000

Not this but similar, Sony’s acoustic surface audio for their displays uses actuators behind the screen to vibrate it. it’s not crazy bass but I’d say it’s on par with regular built in tv/laptop speakers

New comment by paulbgd in "Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC"

paulbgd — Wed, 07 May 2025 15:53:01 +0000

The CTO is the president of the VideoLAN non-profit, so it seems accurate. Supposedly from their about page they’re the primary maintainers of vlc.