Paul Cobbaut's blog: 2025

2025-08-28

Thunderbird

I had an 'apt hold' on Thunderbird for several years. The new versions had too much whitespace everywhere, and given that I had like 80 subfolders in my mailbox made it unusable for me. All 80 could not fit on my 4K screen, even with the tiniest font settings, because 90 percent was whitespace.

Previous versions of Thunderbird had a much more compact look.

This picture (from over two years ago) compares two versions of Thunderbird, the newer one on the right.

I find whitespace a waste of space.

Yet, sticking with an ancient version is probably not the best idea, so since Trixie I decided to 'suffer thru it' and install the newest Thunderbird.

With the new Thunderbird comes another annoyance... the old version always offered me the choice between opening a picture in gimp or ristretto. The new version has this:

Who designs these things? When it is a good idea to choose between two identical options?

Later today I may find time to file a proper bug report.

2025-08-27

Debian Trixie

So my PC, installed with Buster, upgraded to Bullseye, upgraded to Bookworm, is now upgraded to Trixie. The previous upgrades were smooth, Trixie has some annoyances.

last, lastb, lastlog are unavailable?

I liked these utils! They were removed because they are not Year 2038 compliant. I do feel honored for being mentioned on the Debian mailing list about this issue:

"Yes, the people who are likely to care are admins with cobwebby
homebrew cronjobs that regularly generate painstakingly formatted
security reports and send them to the fax machine, or whatever."

So yes, only a minor annoyance. There are new tools, but I still live in 1984. :)

each paused mpv uses 2-3 percent CPU???

Starting mpv four times, and pausing the four videos, gives me this:

PID USER    PR NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
244578 pol     20   0 6614584 378620 239952 S   2.7   0.6   0:03.07 mpv
244641 pol     20   0 6628548 404728 250220 S   2.3   0.6   0:02.99 mpv
244706 pol     20   0 6690264 525200 307212 S   2.3   0.8   0:02.49 mpv
244768 pol     20   0 6723580 513508 342240 S   2.3   0.8   0:02.48 mpv

This is not good! I often have several of these open, up to ten. Can't do that anymore :(

PC is hotter all the time???

k10temp-c3 and nvme-100 are notably hotter all the time. Even after closing all programs, except a terminal (and the XFCE4 desktop), these temps do not go below 34 and 38. Before the upgrade k10temp-c3 often dropped to 26. (Yes the PC is clean of dust.)

right-click context menu requires scroll?

I have a 4K screen and yet some richt-click-context-menus require scrolling? Why? The display can stack at least five of these on top of each other and still have room to spare. Who decided this was a good idea?

xfce4-panel refuses to start (including panel-settings)

When the upgrade to Trixie is finished, you do a reboot. And most annoyingly my xfce4-panel did not show. It flickers four times in less than a second and then disappears forever. Same for the panel settings. I tried removing all of the xfce directories in my home folder, but that does not help.

I ended up creating a new user account, at least that works. I made a bug report, but have little hope for this: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1110743

I vaguely remember adding some 'hacks' to the panel in 2020, for example it always showed the number of seconds since my birth. Bullseye and Bookworm had no problem with it...

No worries, Debian is still the best!