after switching to linux i wanted to try the steam app bongo cat. looked like a fun little gimmick. turned out the thing leans on windows-only features like transparent windows, and only registers input while the window itself is in focus. on pop!_os it was effectively dead.
/ what i did
spontaneous as i am, i decided to just build a comparable app for my pop!_os setup, partly to get more familiar with my system, partly as an excuse to try something new (rust). the scope is deliberately tiny: the tool just counts how often you’ve hit a key or clicked a mouse button since you started the recording. that’s it. and since making it just for me felt like a waste, i’m currently packaging it as a flatpak so other linux users can pick it up too.
/ iii. technical deep-diveoptional · expand
/ learnings & what i’d change
rust forces you to actually think about ownership before you can hand a single keystroke to the ui, which sounds annoying until you realise it’s why the applet doesn’t leak memory after eight hours of bongo. the second lesson was capturing global input on wayland: the “just listen to the keyboard” reflex from windows doesn’t exist here, and working with the platform instead of around it ended up being a much cleaner solution than i expected.
