Shinji_Ikari [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2020

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  • I’m gonna comment and say that’s the point.

    You start out with bare minimum and install what you need. As you go you generally have an idea of what is and isn’t on your system. It’s not as annoying as Gentoo with all source compiling, not as anal as nix.

    If something breaks, you go to ArchLinux.org and 95% of the time it’s mentioned on the front page so you follow the instructions and move on. It’s a very transparent distro, little drama to follow unlike Ubuntu/canonical or fedora/redhat.

    It used to be harder to install and which gave some street cred, but they simplified it a bit which is nice.

    The Stans give an unbalanced look at arch. I use arch because I want the latest packages, I don’t want to segment my packages between my repos and tarballs when there’s a game stopping missing feature on a package pinned to a 2yo version. I don’t want to learn a whole scripting language to carefully craft my OS like nix either. I want a current OS that’s easy to fix and easy to install packages so I can go back to what I was doing.







  • A lot of software wont be distributed with a PPA to add.

    Additionally, debs are useful for offline installations, with apt you’re able to recursively download a package and all of it’s dependencies as deb files, then transfer those over to the offline machine and install in bulk.

    That being said I’ve never had great luck with the software center, it’s always felt broken. I’ll typically just dpkg -I <pkg>.


  • Polonium

    Hm I’m not sure if that’d really give me what I’m looking for. I know its certainly possible to configure KDE and Polonium to get me 90% there but I think I’d rather just have a normal floating setup I can switch to if need be. I’d need to remap a significant amount of keyboard shortcuts that would stop making sense in the context of a full floating DE.

    I really just want a very fast app launcher like dmenu, dynamic tiling, and monitor independent workspaces. I have a particular setup using certain alpha keys for my workspace.

    I never really enjoyed the experience of tacking things onto an existing DE and having to mess with UI configuration. I’ve been really loving XMonad for a few setups and my ideal wm would be something that’s extremely low power and low fluff. Even if I only eek out 10% more battery life, breaking the 10hr mark is more valuable to me than most bells and whistles.

    I’m just really lazy. I could load up my xmonad setup in 20 minutes but I wanted to see the state of wayland and that requires learning a new wm’s configuration quirks.


  • I’ve been using gnome as a “base” DE for years, what that means is I install it, then install my tiling wm and use all the gnome utilities.

    I recently had to set up a few new machines and decided to try KDE on a couple and I’m really enjoying it. I haven’t even gotten around to installing a tiling wm because I want to learn a wayland option and that’ll take some time. I haven’t ran into pain points listed here but one thing I like is when I want to do X, there’s usually already something ready to do X for me. Years of gnome and I felt like the devs were always fighting me. I haven’t really used a full gnome setup in a few years though, but I know the “mommy knows best” attitude is still prevalent with the devs.










  • I had an old arch install about 7 years ago that stopped booting, so I booted into ubuntu, mounted the ssd, used a chroot to fix it, forgot to unmount the ssd, proceeded to rm the mount dir as it was “temporary”. It took me mere seconds to realize what I did and by then it was a lost cause. I was able to use a file recovery tool to grab my precious memes, but thankfully there wasn’t much else valuable on the drive.

    Worlds most roundabout rm -rf /




  • Yes, vim is a command line program.

    If you look up “Cli file manager”, there’s a bunch that you can check out and try.

    Tree, grep, and find are usually my three go-tos. Tree to get a general view of a ton of nested files/folders, then if I know a name I’ll use find . -name "filename", if I know a bit of contents, i’ll use `grep -re “content string” to find files containing that.

    I recommend reading the man pages because you can often chain together these in fairly powerful ways.