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.

I had only used kde once before like 7 years ago and I wasn’t a huge fan. I wanted to try it again and I honestly really like it over gnome. I usually go tiling but felt lazy with a new laptop. The trackpad gestures are really solid.

nmcli is quite nice actually. My only real issue with NM is keeping track of what it’s doing behind the scenes.

So I want and have ip forwarding, and I only want to make a firewall whitelist between two of the interfaces.

I’ve uninstalled iptables, nftables isn’t running, NM has the firewall backend disabled, and ip forwarding is on.

This should result in traffic moving between the interfaces, yet traffic is moving between two of the interfaces, and blocked between two of the interfaces. It just doesn’t make sense.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I’m using NM for managing the AP and managed connections, not so much the bare connecting to wifi things.

The only real alternative to NM in this situation is a handful of delicate config files for iwconfig and dnsmasq.

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 was using it on a new work machine, it was fine.

The main issue is all the good tiling wms are X11 based and I don’t really want to use a wayland version of i3. I want some dynamic tiling goodies.

postin’ from my 4th gen X1 Carbon running arch converted from antergos.

So what the ram is soldered, its 4lbs and still gets 7+ hours of battery life after 8 years of use.

I’ve done a few wiki posts and issues. I’m not a bad programmer but my ADHD makes the scaffolding around OSS contribution a lot harder than the actual programming aspect. So I’ve been sorta nervous to jump in.

I’m a fan of cmus. simple and easy.

Sorry cant hear you, too busy computing with the safety switched off and the action set to full auto.

I do think that the highway emphasis is important, as you’re typically traveling faster and you don’t want to take your eyes off the road more than you have to. Having the bright yellow highway for things like complex offramps has been helpful to me in the past. I’ll just have to see how it goes.

looking again, the greater contrast for smaller roads is nice.

Why would you change the roads to grey from yellow? What? What is the primary thing your eye is seeking when using a GPS app?

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 /

ps -aux | grep yourmom

real fwds from FOSS grandma hours, huh.

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.