Shinji_Ikari [he/him]

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 really didn’t want to go the medicine route years back. Like OP Im a guy who always kept it long. I decided to give the basic regimen a try and went with a keeps like service because dermatologists are by far the worst doctors I’ve had to work with.

And although it thinned, the thinning totally stalled, to a point where it’s a little noticable but on a good day isn’t at all.

I haven’t cut my hair in years and despite it being annoying to take care of sometimes, I get to look in the mirror and see the version of myself that I like to see which makes the little bit of medication worth it imo.

I always hated the “just shave it and own it, bro” attitude because damn my hair is part of my identity, I love having it. I’ll put some effort into keeping it.

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>.

That’s a big thing for tech jobs, especially with the relatively low security. If you’re not working you’re not learning, and if you’re not learning you’re behind the curve and seen as “less valuable”.

Especially with how specific job postings are, if you don’t have the right combination of experience, you’re worthless. So if you’re bored maintaining some ancient irrelevant stack, you’re worse off.

I think I first installed linux some time around 2009. I’m only just now starting to contribute to libraries, unrelated to linux. Its such a cool feeling growing along side the open source movement.

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.

I started using it about 8-9 years ago at this point, back when the options were FB messenger or whatsapp. Both were trash and limited in comparison.

I only use signal for work but I find the app clunky and unintuitive. Telegram, being a somewhat privacy nightmare, but not connected to a big data broker company, also gives me the ability to search through a decade of messages to find an old joke, a picture shared, etc.

Telegram is simple enough that I can tell my aging gen x parents and apathetic zoomer siblings to install it and there’s nearly zero friction to them logging in and receiving messages. It solved the problem of being added to a new fucked up imessage groupchat every other week as an android user.

It’s not great if security is your main goal for organizing, but it has a better user experience than most chat apps. Especially if cross platform chatting is important to you.

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.

Ah yes, the despicable crime of selling bootlegs can only be punished by permanent service to a billion dollar company. Makes sense.

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 thought blocking nsfw posts on mobile was bad enough until I tried viewing a totally SFW subreddit that was small enough to not be “verified”. Straight up didn’t let me view a subreddit that wasn’t essentially approved without logging in or using the app.

I had to literally give up on a windows install that worked itself into an update hole, run the update, cant log in, undo the update, it tries to update at night. Endless cycle, no possible fix.

I don’t want to berate you, but just know with enough practice, you’ll be able to fix that linux install. Windows wont let you fix it.

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.

Idk how it works in china, is the wire coming from the wall a thin sorta stiff wire? or is it a thicker wire(5-10mm across) that is bendy?

If the latter, you can just plug that ethernet cable into your own router.

If its a fiber cable then I dont know if you can have your own ONT.

Is your service fiber? Is your router a combined ONT and router? If its not and you have an ONT serving ethernet to the router, you can just plug your own router in.

You said it’s through china mobile so is it a cell modem/router?

Yeah I actually just prefer the command line, I’ve never had to force myself to use it. I even tried using VSC for a bit recently but i couldn’t get myself to like it. I just use nvim with some plugins in a tmux session now and its productive as hell.

Of course I don’t browse the web with the command line. For merging branches, I always merge main into the working branch first, check conflict files, and go through the file finding the diffs and resolving them. I’ve used merge tools before that were sorta nice but I had my own issues with them.

Maybe it’s the type of programming I do. I don’t do any web stuff, so file count is down. For larger code bases I keep a non editor terminal up and will grep -re for word/phrase searching, find to look for specific files, etc. I’ll occasionally use an IDE, typically eclipse based because embedded, but I don’t find myself missing the features they add.