I dunno. I've been making free software for 3 decades and I still think it's fun. While I do get slop PRs sometimes, it's not frequent. And when I want to land a patch in someone else's project, I haven't really been having difficulty doing so.
The main change for me has been... if I want to send someone a patch, it's more important now to talk to them about it first. But I was doing that anyway. Join the chatroom, let people know I found an issue and am working on fixing it, maybe get their advice on how they think it should be solved (to make sure it fits with their project and goals), and then send code. And stick around to help with testing and stuff. It's not much different than how things were before everything moved to GitHub.
Talk to people. Be a part of the community. That's what made free software work in the past, and it's what makes free software work now. As the article said, it was never just the code.
It's wild that anyone still uses Adobe software these days. Adobe is one of the most famous companies for enshittification, and the open-source alternatives are generally very good.
Personally, I switched to open-source alternatives way back in the late 1900s, and they've only continued to improve ever since. Adobe has been lagging behind for over a quarter of a century, in the ways which matter to me, and they keep getting farther behind as they turn to worse and worse methods of extorting money from people.
YMMV, of course.
I can get behind almost anything which reduces lock-in for Adobe's remaining customers, but from what I see in other comments, this probably ain't it. It seems very vibey and buggy. But maybe after more work is put in, it could be good. It looks like it wasn't supposed to go public yet, and they're aware that it's not ready yet.
It’s actually quite simple, give me any open source alternative and I can give you ten major features it lacks that Photoshop has.
If you just use Photoshop as a pixel editing tool, sure, but it does a lot more than that.
I’ve tried getting rid of creative suite for years, but when it comes down to it no competitor has actually come close.
Sure, anyone can list ten features Photoshop has that GIMP, for example, lacks. But it's just as easy to list ten features GIMP has that Photoshop lacks. They're not trying to be the same program.
I see the same argument all the time about Windows vs Linux. Linux lacks this, Linux lacks that, etc... but somehow, people fail to notice that Windows lacks a whole lot of important things that Linux has. Because a Windows user won't be aware of what they're missing. But for me, coming from a Linux background, Windows is missing so much I would view it as unusable.
Changing from one to the other is painful, because of the differences. It's not a drop-in replacement you can keep using exactly the same way. But that doesn't make either one better or worse. They're different, and that's a good thing. But different requires learning, and learning is hard.
Anyway, you're correct that $FreeProgram isn't a drop-in replacement for $ProprietaryProgram. But that's not a valid argument on the relative value of the two programs.
The interesting parts are what is lacking though, not just any feature. A life without smart objects is terrible in photo editing as an example, at least once you’ve seen the upsides.
That and Camera Raw actually being an incredibly capable raw conversion engine.
But I’m not trying to convince anyone here, just saying it makes sense people are paying for Adobe software.
FWIW I do hear these complaints from people who live in Adobe apps but they are very pragmatic about how they approach it. For example, Lightroom is not without its faults but photographers will switch to Capture One and delay leaving the suite so they don't have to relearn everything at once.
Some of those photographers then use their new baseline familiarity with Capture One to test out Affinity for further edits.
But you're just never going to have the time to burn your bridges with the platform in one go. I don't think that is very different from the way developers work; in practice nobody with any serious obligations can simply switch language and toolchain in one go.
So there is attrition, but there is never going to be a threshold over which people cross and get a widespread revolt. I'm not even sure that happened with the switch to Creative Cloud, because they padded that transition by making it easier on photographers and with the other single app plan (that I think no longer exists?)
My own feeling is that there are serious cracks in the way Photoshop works. For example the "smart objects" bodge when they could do what Affinity Photo does with live filter layers, not to mention (when comparing with Affinity) Photoshop's weaker layer blend controls, lack of cross-model curves, lack of a frequency separation tool, culture of over-reliance on plugins.
But Photoshop has things Affinity does not, yet — a mature DAM/Bridge integration, some of the more advanced warp tools, etc., and tiny details like better perlin noise generation.
So it's like the situation with Word, isn't it — 95% of people use only a tiny fraction of what Word can do, but they don't all use the same tiny fraction.
People have their reasons to switch or not switch; even among hobbyist photographers who complain about the cost of everything else, the price of the photography plan does not seem to be one of them (thanks in part to Adobe's strategic reliance on Amazon Prime Day/Deal Days bundles)
I used to be much more aggressively anti-Adobe than I am now. I am never going to use Creative Cloud again myself, mind you, because I do not need anything it uniquely does anymore.
It's a bit like saying you never hear complaints from piano players, only dentists. But dentists also play piano, just like everyone else. Dentists just know more about teeth than the average pianist.
I only know two or three developers who have a strong concept of what Photoshop does or can do, and all of those only use a fraction of what it does (a couple of layer blend modes, healing brush, soft proofing, maybe image slicing).
There are people who live inside photoshop the way developers live inside VSC or Zed or emacs.
Network effects like presets and plugin ecosystem, tutorials and books, team knowledge (you can ask a colleague how to do things).
Switching costs like lightroom catalogues, learning new programs, if it works why fixit.
And the price is not that high if your company pays for it. Open stuff would have to be much better and Adobe much more buggy before most people consider switching.
i personally like affinity better than the FOSS photoshop alternatives, mostly for UX reasons. what i still haven’t found a good replacement for is Lightroom. i use darktable but the way the interface is laid out is antithetical to getting into an efficient flow state. and i say this despite the fact that i consider the output strictly superior to Lightroom (or in fact anything i’ve ever used).
Oh, best of luck with this, it looks like a great idea. I will test it at some point (gig photos, some studio and outdoor portraiture), can test a bunch of different raw formats.
These things have very different personalities somehow.
Over the years I have tried Capture One — it's fine, I dunno, I just didn't settle with it, even though I shoot a lot of portraits which is its comfort zone. (I actually started out with it, free thing from SanDisk)
I really like DxO Photolab but I know this app enrages lots of people; I particularly like the tone curve handling, FilmPack integration, etc.
Lately I have been learning ART, the RawTherapee fork, and I have to say that despite its very idiosyncratic interface, I like this quite a lot.
I would like my extensions to support every browser possible, but if a browser only runs on Mac, I won't be able to test my stuff in it. I've had users asking me for Orion support for ages, and I keep telling them I'll add it once I can run it... but now it looks like that's not going to happen.
Dropping the ports doesn't necessarily make the Mac version better. It makes the entire browser unsupportable by developers who want to make their sites/programs/extensions work in Orion but can't run it.
So my support list now is...
- Supported: Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Floorp, Chromium, Brave, Vivaldi, Librewolf, Waterfox, Ungoogled Chromium, Thorium, Mullvad, Tor, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, ...
- Impractical to support: Orion
- Impossible to support: Zen Browser
Dang, looking at this later, I realize I forgot again that HN doesn't support common list formatting. If I put one "- item" per line, it joins them all into a single paragraph. And now it's too late to edit. It should work if I put a blank line between each item though.
This probably won't be the last time I trip over that. I use lists a lot, and almost every other platform allows them to be one per line without anything between.
The full answer for this is a long, wild ride which would fill entire chapters... but the short answer is: Zen's author broke the extension API so badly it's literally impossible to do a lot of what my extension needs to do... and the author is aggressively opposed to fixing it or even admitting that he broke it.
More generally, Zen Browser is the buggiest browser I've ever encountered... by a wide margin. Some of the issues are jaw-dropping. It's notorious for losing user data. And looking at its history, it has mostly just kept getting worse over time. Extensions which used to work don't any more, because he keeps breaking more and more stuff.
I tried to support it. But instead, I got a quick education on why nothing supports Zen Browser. They can't... because of the guy behind it. Sometimes due to his incompetence, sometimes because he actively intervenes when people try to support it.
So... my experience with Zen Browser rapidly went from "hey this seems neat" to "wouldn't touch this with a ten meter pole".
I used to think task bars were pretty neat, back in the 1990s. But once I started keeping more than a dozen windows open, it became a waste of space. And now that I typically have 200+ windows open, the concept of a taskbar is ... like trying to get a fish to ride a bicycle, or like having a rock in my shoe. It gets in my way and provides no benefit to me.
But that's okay. I don't have to use one. Different people have different needs and preferences, and their choice to use a taskbar-free workflow doesn't interfere with their ability to get serious work done.
Same... ish. 2D grid of desktops. Can add/remove them with a hotkey, but I normally have a 3x5 grid. Hyper+Arrows to navigate them. Hyper-s to stick/unstick a window, which also works for moving a window to a different desktop. Hyper-g to group/ungroup windows into a single shared frame with tabs. Hyper+Alt+Arrows to move a window, Hyper+Shift+Arrows to resize, Hyper+PgUp/PgDn to raise/lower, Hyper+Tab to change tabs in the current frame, etc. Lots of other keys, mostly Hyper+something.
Each desktop has a project or something, a related group of windows which I leave open until I'm done with it. Some desktops have remained more or less the same since the 1900s since they've been relevant and useful for that long.
Over time, my desktop hasn't gotten fancier... it has gotten simpler. Bells and whistles are inversely proportional to useful life span. Similarly, over time I've relied less and less on big, full-featured, specialized applications and databases... and more on plain text files, a text editor, short scripts, clean filesystem organization, and a whole lotta terminals.
> Don't make me explicitly keep track of things, just hold onto it all for me!
>
> There's some universe where my desktop is basically a Notion-like thing, and I can just throw things into semi-persistent workspaces (that I close out when I'm done). Desktop Environments that make this work nicely will be quite cool IMO
>
> (A simple and dumb version of this is the BeOS "group various windows together, even though they aren't from the same application" stuff. Very cool stuff IMO
What you're describing sounds like it has been possible for a long time.
I've been doing it on my Linux desktop for decades. I throw things into workspaces which just ... stay open until I'm done with it. The same windows with the same layout and the same history and state, everything right where I left it. They stick around as long as they need to, which can be weeks, months, even years. I even have some desktops which have stuck around since the 1900s, though they do gradually change and evolve over time.
... and any windows from any program can be grouped together. Grouped into a desktop, or even grouped into a single window frame with tabs.
And nearly everything is automatically logged, so I have detailed history going back well into the past.
This stuff isn't in the big mainstream UIs, but it is at least possible with a bit of work to set it all up.
- Basically never logging out. Everything just stays running.
- Lots of desktops, usually one per project or task or ... whatever grouping makes sense.
- No minimizing windows. No taskbar, tray, dock, etc. Things just stay open, and I change desktops when I want to change to a different project or task or whatever.
- Logging at multiple levels. Like, there's a script which checks the complete session state every 15 seconds, and logs it if it has changed. It's exported as a tree or outline of each desktop, each tab group, and each window... with the title and size+position. Archived daily. That way, if the computer crashes or something, I have a recent snapshot I can restore.
- Also, detailed logging of what I'm doing. Like, every 100ms or so, a daemon checks the title of the focused window. If it has changed, it logs the new title and the timestamp, and how many input events happened since the last log entry. If the time of day changes to a new minute, it logs the number of input events since the last log entry. These logs can then be used for all sorts of useful things. Like analyzing my erratic sleep schedule and predicting when I'll be awake so I can schedule appointments. Or automatic time tracking for billing clients.
- I make sure to put useful info into my window titles, in each program. This makes the logs way more useful.
- Also, whatever other logging is relevant... like zsh history, autojump for getting to oft-used directories easily, a todo list / calendar text file with one heading per day and a list of stuff relevant to that day, a new directory each day for miscellaneous files which are worth saving but don't fit elsewhere, a lot of screenshots, an entire web archiving system to save copies of pages I view, etc.
On a side note... a lot of this stuff is explicitly forbidden in Wayland. It doesn't allow these features to exist, because most of this stuff is viewed as a security risk. So if you're using Wayland, entire categories of useful features are off limits. Their reason is basically "what if a hacker collected data about you? what if a hacker wanted to remotely control your computer?" ... but they ignored the case of "what if the user wants to collect data about themself? what if the user wants to remotely control their own computer?".
I was at Canonical during the Ubuntu Phone thing, and it was wild to watch that play out. It started out with a bunch of good ideas... but somehow, every last one of those good ideas got overturned and reversed.
Like, "let's put the buttons at the bottom so the user can reach it with their thumb while holding the phone" got turned into "let's put every important button at the top left where it's literally the hardest place on the whole screen for an average user to reach during typical use".
Or, more importantly, it started out as something like... "Debian/Ubuntu has a rich repository of high-quality full-featured battle-tested popular programs curated by community experts, designed by and for users to empower themselves, so lets give users a way to run all those beloved programs on mobile devices". And then it became "let's get rid of the package repository and forbid users from running anything from it, and build a brand new system which is incompatible with everything, and instead has a commercial app store where corps can sell proprietary software and Canonical gets a big cut of each sale, and the OS has only a small set of proof-of-concept placeholder programs, and is designed to restrict the user so corporate partners can have more profit and control".
And then when it didn't work out, the company kinda doubled down on some of the worst parts of it and went all-in on Snappy.
Instead of bringing phones up to the level of a desktop, as promised... the company tried to bring desktops down to the level of a phone. And that trend has been increasingly popular in the corporate Linux world lately... "Androidifying" desktop Linux.
From an insider's perspective, the Ubuntu Touch thing looked pretty promising... and then management pushed everything sideways. The regular developers kept trying to fix it and make it good, but then upper management would step in and forbid it. The VP of "Future Engineering" in particular. Lots of stuff was forbidden because it "goes against the vision". So things didn't work, and couldn't be fixed.
The worst was one day at a big sprint... the VP of Business gave an all-hands powerpoint presentation right after the workday ended, with a catered dinner afterward. He looked and spoke like a caricature of an Italian mobster, and spent 45 minutes gleefully explaining exactly how we were going to screw the user to make more profit, by taking control away from the user and giving that control to phone corporations. Like, selling corps the ability to place ads directly onto the user's home screen. He was so excited he was practically vibrating.
Afterward, I just went straight to my hotel room and cried.
Eventually, the phone project was cancelled because it had failed pretty spectacularly, for exactly the reasons everyone said it would... and upper management laid off nearly the entire Ubuntu Engineering business unit, about a third or a quarter of the company. The people in charge had decided the problem wasn't a bad design... it was just all those uppity devs who wouldn't follow orders. They kept the managers who were responsible for making it fail, and got rid of all the devs who tried to warn management that the "vision" was broken.
At least sabdfl seemed somewhat aware of the situation... aware of how bad it was. A day or two beforehand, he started the day by giving everyone a pep talk. The talk was pretty somber, talking about how we were supposed to have a mature product to launch by now, but instead we were cancelling the launch and hoping for an optimistic scenario where some tech magazines would at least say it "showed potential". The best case scenario he could muster for the team's motivation was ... we might get a couple reviews stating that it could eventually be good someday, with enough work.
I've been using approximately the same desktop setup for ages, and yet, it often still feels like I'm living in the future because mainstream desktops still haven't really adopted some of the best features, and in some ways are moving backward. This is kind of a disorganized laundry list, but ...
For one, the ability to change how the desktop itself works while it's running, without restarting it... modifying the code on the fly. And if I manage to crash the window manager or some other desktop component, easily just restart it without having to log out or restart all the other programs.
And being able to pretty easily run and manage hundreds of windows. Log in, open one desktop for each project, and just leave it running until the project is done. Maybe reboot for upgrades once every year or two, but otherwise no disruptions.
NO DISRUPTIONS. I don't even have the underlying plumbing installed for notifications and stuff like that. They can try to interrupt me, but they'll find those API calls aren't plugged in to anything.
Freely mixing and matching tiled and floating windows, each of which can be its own tab group with multiple arbitrary windows sharing the same frame. Super handy having free-form placement and grouping of absolutely anything.
No minimized windows. No task bar. No icon tray. No desktop full of icons underneath the windows. The entire screen is one big canvas, to be used however you like. If you need more space, just hit a key to open another desktop.
Manage nearly everything with a keyboard. Mouse usable but not required.
Sloppy focus, of course. (i.e. focus follows mouse, but stays focused if mouse "falls out" of a window into empty space) Not click-to-focus. And definitely no raise-on-click or raise-on-focus.
Mouse keys built into the keyboard, for clicking, scrolling, and moving. Mouse warp too, to teleport the cursor, like having two mouse cursors and a key to swap between them.
A full set of launcher hotkeys which are easily configured and managed by making short shell scripts. Like, F1 to F12 run scripts from ~/bin named like "f1" to "f12", and "shift-f1" and "ctrl-f1" and "shift-alt-f1" and "hyper-shift-ctrl-f1", etc... if a script exists, the key is mapped. Ideally just symlink the named key to a program or script with a more descriptive name, like "shift-f3 -> open-todays-journal-in-vim.sh" or something like that. Easy to see exactly what each key does, with a "ls -l" or similar. (can send a normal f1-f12 event by holding Fn and hitting a number key or the two keys next to the numbers, but I barely ever have a reason to)
Network transparency for everything, of course. It's wild that newer desktops have chosen to remove such a useful feature.
Work at my desk with a notebook to either side, all using a single keyboard+mouse... just slide the cursor off one screen and onto the next. Pick up a notebook and move to the living room. Use its keyboard+mouse to control the notebook plus the television, in much the same way... slide the cursor off one screen and onto the next. Pack up and go to a coffee shop. Control the remote home computers from the local notebook, using their running desktop session. Or run programs natively on several remote computers, with the windows all opened together on one desktop on the notebook.
Automate inputs easily, whenever desired. Record and play macros which work in any program.
Configurations revision-controlled and synced across all my devices, privately, without any data leaking to a corporate cloud.
Organize data into a rich set of nested topic directories or project directories, instead of organizing things by file type into places like "~/Pictures", "~/Documents", etc.
But also, a directory for each day, to hold all the other misc stuff which doesn't fit elsewhere. And a key to easily access it.
Shell scripts can easily know what program I'm using in the GUI, and what directory the focused program is working in, so scripts can take context-sensitive actions.
Automatic private logging of what I do, with easy time tracking and arbitrary queries, using simple plain text log files which are small, easy to grep, and easy to build custom tooling around.
Human-readable plain text everywhere. Plain text files are versatile, powerful, portable, compact, timeless, accessible, and future-proofed.
No churn. No need to retool every few years. Long-lived tools which are mature and robust. Maybe not the flashiest or most fashionable tools, but "bells and whistles" and "useful life" are typically at odds with each other.
A rich vocabulary of small, simple tools which each do one thing well... makes for a powerful, expressive world of deep functionality thanks to the power of language. It empowers the user to do anything they can express. But a small set of huge tools, while initially a bit easier, tends to quickly become limiting and stifling.
I think a lot of the "right answers" for interface design have been figured out for a long time. That is not to say new interfaces are bad... but anything which throws out the old battle-tested solutions in favor of something radically different is going to take a long time to reach anywhere near the same level of usefulness.
It's a lot of stuff accumulated over a long period of time, sort of pieced together... but here are some of the details:
The overall setup is X11 with a Sawfish window manager. X11 provides a lot of cool features like network transparency and automation and generally being wildly flexible. Sawfish is like the Emacs of window managers, written in a flavor of Lisp, and you can literally rewrite its code while it's running. So whenever I want something to work differently... I just find that part of the code, change it, and activate it.
If I manage to crash it, that's fine... Sawfish isn't the outer process for my session. For that, I have my .Xsession just do a simple loop. It keeps running until I touch a file called ~/.xlogout, and can restart the window manager or other tools if necessary.
I pretty much never log out or reboot unless it's time to do a dist-upgrade... which means once every couple years on average. Everything just stays running.
The main limit is that Xorg is usually compiled to use an 8-bit ID for each client, so it can only have 255 clients connected at once, which usually means a limit of 255 windows open at a time. But you can push this a bit using programs which do multiple windows in a single client connection, like "urxvtcd" in rxvt-unicode can have hundreds of terminals sharing just one client slot. I've occasionally had 500+ windows open on a single computer (though this is kind of a bad habit, and I try to keep it under 200).
I configured Sawfish to do soft tiling, and also to do tabbed windowing, and made all of it work via keyboard, including things like moving and resizing windows. Sawfish is also where I implemented the "every flavor of F1-F12" hotkeys thing, and implemented mouse warp, and it already had a lot of things built in like sloppy focus and the ability to add and remove desktops with a keypress.
I added another thing to it to save the contents of every desktop, every window, size and position and title and tab grouping, etc... every 15 seconds or so if it has changed since last time. This gets archived daily. So if the whole system crashes, or if I need to actually log out, or if something bugs out, I can restore things mostly how they were.
A lot of the stuff I don't have, like a task bar, or a desktop notifications system, is simple enough to do by just not installing one or not running any of the relevant programs or services.
As for traditional-ish desktop stuff, there's not much. I set the wallpaper using a small program I made decades ago, which basically just picks a file at random from a big nested directory structure of images I've accumulated over the years. I use a 2D grid style desktop pager in the corner of the screen to see which desktop I'm on, with Hyper+Arrows keys to navigate the grid, but I barely ever look at the widget and it sticks to the bottom stacking layer so other programs are free to draw over it. Similar story for a Conky instance configured in a thin vertical strip with all sorts of realtime system stats and any other info I care to put there. It's a quick, easy way to see what's going on, but I often cover it up and use that space for other things. It's basically just system stats rendered onto the wallpaper.
I mostly use keyboards with open-source firmware like QMK, with a pretty extensive personal keymap tailored to my needs and tastes. I also added some stuff to QMK, like a better MouseKeys motion mode called "inertia" mode, to make mouseless use easier. But on notebooks and legacy keyboards, I can at least use Kanata to get most of the same features.
Macros recording/playback is built into the keyboard, or X11 in general is pretty easy to automate with small programs or shell scripts or even one-liners. Like, with xdotool.
For remote controlling other systems, x2x is great. Ancient program which "just works". Or running remote programs on the local screen, ssh + normal X11 stuff. Or for a full remote desktop, there's VNC (there's a tigervnc xorg extension, and the tigervnc viewer is good too... I patched it to make it handle larger desktops better, and the patches are upstreamed).
(continued in next comment, my post was too long to fit in one comment)
I have my dotfiles and other stuff checked into Subversion, with different programs in different modules so I can build each host's config out of a set of modules, and not have to have everything checked out on every host. There's an article about the setup on my site. Git didn't exist at the time, but you could probably do something similar with git submodules. I run a revision control server of sorts in a lxc guest on one of my computers, to make it easy to sync things. Or depending on the nature of what I'm syncing, sometimes "unison" works better, or sometimes "syncthing", or sometimes git + github, or sometimes just rsync.
I have a little python program constantly monitor the title of the focused window, and look for anything which looks like a filesystem path. This gets saved to a ramdisk, like ~/ram/last-dir and ~/ram/focused-window-title, so other programs can use this info for context-sensitive things. Hotkeys which react in different ways in different programs, or always know what directory to work in, or whatever.
I also basically keylog myself, with another little python program I wrote. It monitors the title of the focused window, logs the timestamp when each window was focused, and logs the quantity of input events... but not the actual individual content of keystrokes. So I can tell which window was used when and how active I was, but not exactly what I was typing.
To make these title-based things work better, I make sure to put useful info into my window titles. Zsh is configured to put the command line (so far) into the title, along with the current host and path, or put the finished command line into the title while a program is running. I added a browser extension to put the current URL into the window title. I configured Vim to put useful info into the title. Etc. So the logs are very detailed. This info comes in handy quite often, and is also used for other things like generating a heat map graph of my erratic sleep schedule, and predicting when I'll be awake so I can schedule appointments more easily. Can also easily tell exactly how much time I spent working on pretty much anything, for invoicing clients or working toward productivity goals or whatever.
I've put together several things which work in a daily log directory... like ~/daily/YYYY/MM/DD/ . There's a key to open a shell in today's directory, or open a minimalist filemanager there. I made a screenshot program which saves things there... like, press a key, click or drag to select what I want to save onscreen, then it shows a preview I can edit if I want, and asks for a title, with recent titles available for easy recall or searching or tab completion so I can save a series of images without having to retype the title... and then it saves to a timestamped file in today's dir. Shift+Screenshot to do the whole screen, Ctrl+Screenshot to turn off all controls and just save automatically using the most recent title, Meta+Screenshot if I want to add metadata (like open "hacker-news.2026-09-24_11:59:23.png.md" in Vim to save extra notes). Or any combination of modifiers to combine effects.
And, of course, a nice terminal and shell. I've found rxvt-unicode is lightweight and can run hundreds of terminals with near zero resource use. And zsh is very powerful and customizable. But YMMV, use whatever you like. Build up your own vocabulary of tools over time, and the shell becomes incredibly powerful.
I've had the same $HOME, basically, since I first installed Linux in the 1900s. It occasionally gets moved from one hard drive to another, and now is scattered across an entire network of many hosts, with pretty much everything replicated and synced and backed up... but it's still the same data, collected and curated and organized and optimized over decades. When one's computing environment is stable and built for user empowerment instead of corporate growth... one can really settle in and get everything "just right".
I've also had mostly the same browser session for like 15 years. Even when switching between browsers. The session is much like my $HOME filesystem, just an organized hierarchy of arbitrary stuff, whatever I found useful or notable or worth keeping. At first, I did this using Tabs Outliner in Chrome, but it has degraded over the years and has a lot of the best features paywalled, and it doesn't work on Firefox, and it didn't adapt well to Manifest V3, and it's buggy and unreliable and awkward now... so I made my own replacement. I suck at naming things though, so I just called it "TK's Tree Style Tab Outliner". Still working on the feature to auto-sync between browsers, but at least it can export and import manually and do automatic backups, to make sure data won't be lost.
... which reminds me. It's also very helpful to run Chrome (or Firefox, or whatever) in a memory jail cgroup so it won't grow until it squeezes every other program into swap space. A cgroup like this also makes it easy to pause and unpause the entire browser session so it won't do anything while you're not actively using it. Slow down the memory leaking, reduce CPU use to zero to make the rest of the system run faster and cooler and make the battery last longer, and completely stop data leaking out to corporations while the browser is idle. Yet another thing I made a little script for.
And a ton of other things which didn't even come to mind, because I'm so accustomed to it that I don't even think about it any more.
Most of this is niche and weird and probably has very few users, and took a lot of time to discover and integrate... but a lot of the stuff people want in a desktop is already possible and has been for a long time, if you're willing to look around and try things until you find what works for you. Just try to use systems which are designed to be powerful and flexible, and you'll never hit the ceiling. It may be harder initially, compared to something mainstream, but you'll be able to go a lot farther with it.
Thanks so much for this detailed write-up! It's always enlightening to learn about different setups, especially when they have been painstakingly crafted over multiple decades.
