🔗 “9 Best Free and Open Source Terminal-Based Internet Radio Apps”
If you listen to online radio and prefer a client for the terminal, check this article on LinuxLinks.
Linux
💻 Goodbye, Neofetch, and thanks for all the fish
Neofetch is no more. The git repository for the venerable tool to show off the users' window manager configurations on /r/unixporn was archived and will no longer be maintained. Granted, it hadn't received a commit for around 3 years, so this is not unexpected.
🎮 Grand Utopia
Image from the Grand Utopia website. All rights reserved to the project
I uninstalled Euro Truck Simulator 2 (ETS2) a few weeks ago. I needed the space to install another game and try it out. That game was cool but not as good as ETS2, so I replaced it with the truck driving simulator. However, after watching a streamer use it, I added the Grand Utopia mod.
Grand Utopia is a map mod of a fictional island, partially inspired by the game's French map. The best thing about it is it uses a 1:1 scale, unlike the official game maps, which means a trip takes around the same time as it would in real life for its distance. The scenery is also well made but uses more graphic elements, so expect it to utilize more resources.
I've been playing with this mod for over a week and enjoy it very much. The new places to unlock, the beautiful sceneries, and the 1:1 scale add to a pleasant gaming experience. I cannot recommend it enough.
If you want to try Grand Utopia, there's one thing you need to do: create a new profile. It won't work with your current profiles and will even crash the game if you try to force it on an existing one.
💻 Toggle screen blanking and screensaver on X11 from the terminal
I've been having an issue on i3wm that's been bugging me: the screen blanking doesn't get disabled with software like caffeine or stimulator. Both used to work but suddenly stopped, and I have no idea why.
Fortunately, there's xset to manage the screen blanking and screensaver from the terminal.
I wrote a function for my shell (zsh) to make it more interactive and easier to use. On a window manager, I can attribute keybindings to specific options to toggle the screen blanking and the screensaver or query their statuses, then get a notification about the change or the query.
💻 Plasma 6 minimal session
Image from the KDE website. All rights reserved to the project
Plasma 6.0.0 was released recently and two minor releases, 6.0.1 and 6.0.2 are already out, too. If you're on Arch Linux and you want to try this desktop environment but prefer to have a minimal set of packages, I have a metapackage you can use as is or to build your own. You can get it at Codeberg or Github.
🎮 Euro Truck Simulator 2 on Linux
ETS2 screenshot showing Santiago Bernabéu Stadium
One of the games I've been playing is Euro Truck Simulator 2. I played the Windows version under Proton for over a year, maybe over two years, and the performance was good, considering I don't have a dedicated GPU on my laptop. However, after the 1.45 or 1.46 version update, the game performance decreased severely and crashed frequently.
I posted about this on Mastodon, and someone mentioned that the Linux version had good performance. I'd had issues with the Linux version a few years ago but decided to try and see how it performed. Surprisingly, the performance was better than when the Windows port worked well with Proton for me.