I finally decided to give Wayland a chance by running the Sway window manager on my newly installed Debian 11 (bullseye) laptop. As expected, I had to finetune things a bit. Most of my old i3 configuration migrated quite easily, but there were certain elements that were closely tied to the Xorg environment and didn't apply anymore. One of them was the keyboard configuration, which I have set to the US international keyboard, so I can easily type Spanish characters when needed. To my surprise, it was sort of tricky to configure that under Wayland. It required quite a bit of searching and testing back and forth. As a matter of fact, in the end, I got it working, but I couldn't find the solution anywhere. I had to put it together by grabbing snippets of information from places like here and here One way or another, adding the following to my sway config file did the trick:

input * {
      xkb_layout us
      xkb_model pc105
      xkb_variant altgr-intl
      xkb_options compose:menu,level3:ralt_switch
  }

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Another issue I ran into after upgrading my laptop to Debian 11 stable (bullseye) recently. For whatever reason, redshift fails to start and shows the following error:

$ redshift -c ~/.config/redshift/redshift.conf
fopen: Permission denied
Unable to load config file.

Yet, checking and double-checking the file permissions doesn't appear to make a difference. The answer can be found in Debian bug #988068. It's not truly an issue with redshift, but rather with apparmor. In my case, all I had to do was edit the file /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.redshift to point it to the correct configuration file:

owner @{HOME}/.config/redshift/redshift.conf r,

After that, simply restart the apparmor service by running sudo systemctl restart apparmor. {link to this entry}

I recently upgraded my laptop to Debian 11 stable (bullseye), and noticed that an old alias I had to connect to a remote system via SSH using a proxy with netcat failed. The error message indicated that netcat did not have a -x option. It didn't take much searching to find the ultimate cause of the problem. The answer is here. Just install the netcat-openbsd package, since the traditional package does not include support for that option (among others). {link to this entry}

Here is a topic that I write about every now and then. Someone shared with me yesterday that Microsoft has decided to stop developing the Atom editor by the end of the year. Since the code itself is open source, the user community can legally fork the project and maintain it from now on. However, there is still a certain degree of disruption, I think, that could have been avoided by using a straightforward open and community-based tool. Then, today, I read that Telegram is considering to start a new paid service. Also in this case, to be fair, the service they are talking about so far sounds just fine. As a matter of fact, they promise that people who use the app for free won't be losing any features at all. Yet, as with the case involving the Artom editor, the fact remains that by using a commercial app one is always exposed to the company that maintains the tool making a decision based solely on their own business interests that will cause some disruption. That is just the nature of things. Companies have to keep an eye on their bottom line. It just makes sense. There is nothing wrong about doing that, of course. It's just the way it is. But that is also the reason why, whenever possible, I very much prefer to choose free software. {link to this entry}