Diesel heaters have been used on ICE heavy trucks for decades for cold starting. Webasto made their name in North America selling such heaters. They are used on all sorts of heavy vehicles and agricultural machines where there's no electricity to run a block heater. Webasto isn't the only game in town either.

Actually it turns out it's not only been deemed practical, but Webasto is selling a product that does exactly this, made exclusively for EV vehicles such as vans: https://www.webasto.com/en-int...

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. When you combine cabin heating with warming the entire battery system, you can get full EV range and fast charging at the coldest temperatures for the cost of a tiny amount of diesel per day. Seems like a great idea for the small amount of time each year it's necessary.

Wow. Where to start. Huge diesel tanks? You do realize bus depos already have diesel tanks fill stations? Further we're not talking large tanks. 5 gallons that you can fill with a jerry can for goodness sake. Does Webasto mean anything to you? If not then you really don't know what I'm talking about. Also the web is full of cheap diesel air heaters (no I'm not talking about construction heaters) that work well and are quite efficient. In fact I've seen some redneck videos, probably intending to be anti-EV where they pipe the air duct from one into the interior of an EV. Which in honesty isn't the stupidest idea.

Somehow I think add-on heaters like this, which are already widely used on heavy vehicles with a fluid cooling system (just like they use in battery packs) are a lot cheaper than heated charging buildings.

Do a bit of research before you post so you'll know what you're talking about. Stop assuming that what you know is the way things must be. If EVs are to be successful in colder climates, we will need hybrid heating systems like this.

One other thing was that Elektrotrucker found that regenerative braking was a bit sketchy in icy conditions. But that's not all that different from drivers having to be careful with jake brakes in icy conditions too.

No it's just that the temperatures in Norway's major cities, being coastal, are more moderate than a lot of the coldest climates in North America.

Elektrotrucker just documented a long-haul electric semi trip through Scandinavian countries. In Sweden he had relatively warm temps, only -5 or so. By the time he ended up in Finland it was -35. He had a major problem keeping the cabin warm at those temps. Battery thermal management systems consumed a lot of power too. His efficiency dropped from about 1 kwh/km in warmer places (Germany) to 1.6 kwh/km, which is actually not bad considering. He was able to charge along the way and he wasn't parking this rig indoors every 6 hours to charge it.

As I said in another post, having small diesel heater (air or fluid exchange like all the youtubers are hawking these days) to heat the cabin and also the batteries would be a great way to get full utility out of EVs in harsh climates. I'm really surprised bus companies and electric semi truck makers aren't considering this. Possibly the way the laws are written they'd not qualify as an emissions free vehicle. If so, short-sighted.

Don't laugh. Diesel heaters are a good solution to keep the batteries and cabin warm. I'm sure some say that's crazy and defeats the purpose of using an EV in the first place, and is an unacceptable compromise, but I strongly disagree. I'm really surprised EVs in cold climates don't embrace this. Sure burning diesel makes EV people uncomfortable, but it's a lot less diesel than an ICE bus would burn, and it lets the EV system work at its most efficient state all winter long. Such a hybrid system makes a lot of sense and is still an overall net positive.

Also Qt's biggest downside is it's a C++ toolkit and to use it from other languages requires wrapper layers that instantiate and hold the C++ objects while exposing essentially a C-level interface to those objects. This means in Python, every time you instantiate a Qt object you really are dealing with two objects: the python one and the C++ one. I've run into bugs where the C++ object's lifespan got out of sync with the python object and led to crashes. Also the C++ nature of Qt means often your code is like transliterated C++ than native idiomatic Python for example.

GTK+ was always built out in C, which lent itself better to wrapping in other languages (including C++!). GTK+ was always my preferred toolkit because of this. However with GTK+ 4, their design philosophy is starting to diverge from mine with things like hamburger menus and client-side integrated titelbars. GTK+ is really focused on what Gnome wants first and foremost. It used to be the Gimp Toolkit, but now it's the Gnome Toolkit.

Yes and that's how it's done on Wayland. I don't see any reason why kwin on X11 couldn't do something similar except that you'd have to get all the various programs that want to see the screen to cooperate.

With Wayland, the only way to get an image of the screen is through the compositor through a somewhat well-defined interface (works across several different compositors), so that's what Zoom, OBS, screenshot programs all have to use. But on X11 all the apps just grab screen shots directly from the X server currently. At this stage a standard for X11 just isn't going to happen. Besides that, what would you do if you didn't have a compositor running? Would require fallback code. I just don't see anyone getting real excited about that. Whereas on Wayland these features can be added by the compositor for free as it were, and the screen sharing apps don't have to know anything about it or do anything special.

No, not really. X11 simply has no architecture for that sort of separation, and no way to screen share anything other than what is in the frame buffer.

Oh I see. It's not an option in Dolphin, it's in Plasma settings under Workspace->General behavior.

Very true. Although I hope KDE continues to work equally well on X11 and Wayland. And on other Unix OSes. Perhaps even on Windows. There was a time when I ran KDE on Windows, mostly for kicks. Alternate shells for Windows have disappeared and been banished by MS, sadly.

Regarding Wayland, it is worth noting that one of the features in the summary---not showing certain windows when screen sharing---is a wayland-only feature. X11 simply does not have a way to easily do it.

KDE was really the first real DE for Linux, long before Gnome was a thing. Had it not been for the Qt license issue back then, GTK and Gnome would never have been created. Imagine a world without Gnome and where the GIMP was made from Qt. Some would like it and others probably shiver.

Back in 1998 I was struggling to learn Red Hat 5.1 with fvwm2, coming from an MS/DOS and Windows 95 background. KDE 1.0 came out and I downloaded a bunch of RPMs at the uni lab on a zip disk. I installed it and that changed Linux for me in an instant. I hated the single click thing, but other than that it really made Linux accessible to me. So I owe KDE a lot. After about 20 years in the Gnome 1/2/Mate Desktop world, I've come back to KDE Plasma 6 and quite like it. It does exactly what I want and can be tweaked and configured to suit my needs.

I've read there is a config option to make "move" the default like it is on other OS's, but I can't find it. Using shift and ctrl does work like other OS's and avoids the popup menu. But yeah it's awkward, so I'm glad I just use Caja and avoid dolphin altogether.

It still did as of 6.5.5. But the nice thing about KDE is you can use whatever parts of it you want. I'm currently using Caja as the file manager inside of KDE. No particular reason, but it works fine and I think it looks a lot better than Dolphin.

Axis of Awesome is guilty of copyright infringement on a massive scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...