Portable Computing continued
So it's a couple of months later and I'm still loving my Surface Linux setup.
I have ditched Wayland for X, using dwm as the window manager. Wayland was fine-- but various programs ran under Xwayland, which used too much power. The current setup seems to be quite frugal with its power usage.
I've just been gradually fixing things as they annoy me. I've spent a bunch of time configuring dwm.
I ported my status bar script from sway -- but initially my unicode icons for charging weren't displaying. This was confusing-- the icons were displayed fine when I entered them into vim. I finally realized that they were, in fact, displaying -- but at a teensy tiny font size. So it turns out that my chosen font didn't actually include those unicode code points, so a fallback font was automatically used -- but there was no setting for its font size. dwm allows a list of fonts and sizes in its configuration, so it was a quick fix once I worked out what was going on.
Today I think I've fixed the intermittent audio issues I was having. I'm using JACK, since it's required by SuperCollider, and mpd is fine with it -- but sometimes when I tried to watch a video in Firefox, the video either wouldn't play (because it couldn't connect to the pulse audio), or it would play, but with no sound. Following Alien Bob's DAW post I've got pulse audio redirecting to JACK-- and pavucontrol showed me that when the video was playing, but without sound, it was because that channel was muted.
There may still be issues if I restart JACK (as happens when I plug in an USB audio interface), but at least now I should be able to fix it without rebooting.
I've mostly been using it to further explore SuperCollider, which is a fantastic tool.
