Linux on Tom Webster

NotionRSSGenerator

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

My blog finally has RSS again (check the front page)! This was a major missing component of moving my site to Notion. I’ve decided to release the code under the Public Domain, but I have to issue a warning before you dig into it: ITS ROUGH! The code was rapidly thrown together and based on two earlier projects: PodcastMaker and NotionCalendarExporter. The resulting code has been thrown together in a blender to make RSS feeds quickly. There are functions that are too long, too complex, and plain-ol’ inefficient.

Don’t get me wrong, it works, but it ain’t pretty. Hopefully you can get some good out of it, just know its a mess.

Where to get it

NotionRSSGenerator

Instructions are on the Readme on that page.

ZedBuilder

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

As Microsoft started to get less and less trustworthy, I moved from VSCode to VSCodium, an open-source build of the VSCode source without Microsoft’s add-ons. This mostly-worked for me, but the remote development extensions were still Microsoft-proprietary (I work in DevContainers a lot). I can work around that. What I can’t work around is Microsoft sneakily(?) adding in more and more slop into the only product of theirs I actually care about.

Microsoft caught a bunch of hate for their buggy “feature” that automatically added CoPilot as a co-author to any commit you make in VSCode. It was supposed to add this if you use CoPilot, and it was supposed to respect the “AI Killswitch” in VSCode. Because of the buggy implementation, it did not.

I’m tired of needing to constantly play defense with the software I use. I moved back to Linux for a reason. I’m tired of the cruft. I’m tired of the forced “features”. I’m tired of tech companies removing my agency as a user.

Moving to VSCodium was not enough. I needed to remove the last piece of Microsoft software from my life. So I moved to Zed.

Zed seems great so far. Built by a lot of the same people who built the Atom editor, open-source (GPL!) code, and written in Rust. But Zed isn’t perfect, its still pretty early-on in the project’s public life. Debian packages aren’t directly available from the project, but they are available from a community-repo (even VSCodium has this problem). I really don’t like adding random repos to my system, so avoiding that is important.

Flatpak packages are available, but making a Flatpak package work well with my existing system utilities is (understandably) frustrating. Flatpak is a sandbox, tightly integrating it with system utilities breaks the main point of Flatpak.

I also wanted to change some Zed defaults. It also suffers from AI-infestation. The project leads have posted their reasoning, and it is logically sound, I understand where they’re coming from, they see AI as a tool for humans, not a wholesale replacement. In the current landscape of AI-boosterism, the Zed developers’ take is a reasonable one.

That said, I still don’t want anything to do with the plagarism-machine. I actually enjoy tech, I enjoy writing code, and I enjoy getting more skilled at it under my own power. I love the process of creation, not just the end-result. AI steals much of that joy from me.

So I decided to build a Zed-builder that runs in a container (to avoid polluting your system with build tools), applies some patches to the default settings (to disable AI and telemetry, among others), and gives you an archive that you can install on your system.

Where to get it

ZedBuilder

Instructions are on the Readme on that page.

How it works

Its not too complicated. Its a Dockerfile that includes all of the utilities needed to build Zed. I’ve also used git diff to make some default settings patches that are applied before compilation. More information is in the Readme on that page.

Debian: Waterfox Flatpak and KDE Plasma Browser Integration

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0600

If you’re moving to Waterfox because of the Mozilla CEO’s recent threat that “[Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser…” and you use KDE Plasma, you may be surprised to see that the native browser integration doesn’t work. Don’t fret though, the problem is actually because Waterfox is looking for files that haven’t been copied to the right place. Let’s fix that.

The Workaround

The error message you may have seen.

The most convenient way to install Waterfox and keep it updated automatically is through Flathub. The files we need will be created once the Firefox Flatpak is installed. Go ahead and install the Firefox Flatpak as well. You’ll also need Flatseal to add a permission to Waterfox.

Open your application launcher and search for “Background Services”. In the search bar, type “browser”. You should see two services:

The two background services we need.

Pause and unpause the Plasma Browser Integration Flatpak Integration service. This step may be unnecessary, but will speed things up if you’re between polling cycles (this is mostly an assumption).

Now, let’s copy some files:

# Copy the integration host to Waterfox's flatpak data directory
cp ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/plasma-browser-integration-host ~/.var/app/net.waterfox.waterfox/plasma-browser-integration-host
# Make a director for the next file
mkdir ~/.var/app/net.waterfox.waterfox/.waterfox/native-messaging-hosts
# Use sed to replace the Firefox flatpak app id with Waterfox's flatpak app id,
# then output that file to where Waterfox will look for native-messaging-hosts.
# Ref: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Native_messaging
sed 's/org\.mozilla\.firefox/net\.waterfox\.waterfox/' ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/native-messaging-hosts/org.kde.plasma.browser_integration.json > ~/.var/app/net.waterfox.waterfox/.waterfox/native-messaging-hosts/org.kde.plasma.browser_integration.json

Now, open Flatseal and select Waterfox to edit its settings. We need to go to Session Bus → Talks and add a new item: org.kde.plasma.browser.integration .

When you’re done, Waterfox should look like this in Flatseal.

Now, when you manage the Plasma Integration add-on and go to Preferences, you’ll see options! Furthermore, you can control your browser’s media with your media keys and system tray icons.

The Plasma Integration add-on works in Waterfox Flatpak!

The Real Fix

This is a cool workaround, but the real issue lies in https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-browser-integration. The application watches for many different browsers, but not Waterfox… for now… hopefully… I have a merge request out to KDE with the fix for Waterfox, both Flatpak and native versions:

feat: add waterfox support (!180) · Merge requests · Plasma / Plasma Browser Integration · GitLab

~~If this is accepted~~, THIS WAS MERGED - it will eventually trickle down to various Linux distributions, fixing this problem without needing the tinkering shown here.

Personal Rant

This move by Anthony Enzor-DeMeo is extremely disappointing and disheartening. Honestly, this dank meme is the best way to sum up how I feel about the situation:

Ref: https://mastodon.social/@TheZeldaZone/114082180124431864

In return Alex Kontos of Waterfox replied with this:

No AI* Here - A Response to Mozilla’s Next Chapter - Waterfox Blog

So I installed Waterfox, imported my data, and tried it out. Its just Firefox with all the bullshit removed. Exactly how it was advertised. Exactly what I wanted. No Pocket, no sponsored stories on the new-tab page, no VPN ads in my menus, no telemetry. Sensible defaults that just work. It even has Tree-Style Tabs right out of the box. Its been a few days, but so far, I’m happy with this being my daily driver.

Sunrise

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Sunrise is a monitor-restart service written for Sunshine Linux Hosts!

If you use Sunrise game streaming from a Linux host, there’s a good chance your monitors won’t wake up when you make a remote connection. The only real workaround was to never sleep your monitors, which seems wasteful and annoying. I wrote Sunrise to solve this problem for myself and put it on the internet, just in case it was helpful for other people.

I wrote more about this bug and the solution in this section of this blog post: Sunshine Streaming

Where to get it

https://codeberg.org/SamuraiLink3/sunrise

Instructions are on the Readme on that page.

How it works

Sunrise checks Sunshine’s log file for a specific error message related to not finding the monitor, then it issues a command to wake the monitor. Pretty tiny, pretty easy to use.