Eyedust

Yeah, the usb live environment. Sorry, I just have a certain older way I say things. When PCs used to have CD drives, we used to say we’d “spin up” something like a game or software. If I was gonna play something like Tonic Trouble, which was a CD game, I would “spin up” Tonic Trouble to play it.

Yeah, this is true. And it’s not surprising that Lutris looks funky. You could get everything on your desktop looking nice and then you boot up Lutris to see a bunch of problems.

You gotta be prepared to dive into apps that opt for those fallback colors and get into their configs sometimes. I’ve been into .rasi, .toml, .xml, and many more file extensions. Then I grab a color picker app and reverse search the app’s colors inside the config to change them to what I want.

I don’t know much about FreeCAD, but I know that the GIMP 3 UI can now be changed around with CSS. Sometimes its just your only option without changing your whole theme. Don’t forget to save your dotfiles in a repository or just back them up on external if you dive into your configs. It will save you a ton of double work if you hop distros or the themes get overwritten in an update.

The year of the Linux Desktop is closer than we think. Too bad the art of just owning a PC is sort of dying, thanks to GPUs costing just as much as the rest of the parts put together.

I’ve been trying to get my stepmom to switch over to Mint on her old Dell AIO. I already spun up the live on it to see if it was compatible and it ran flawlessly. She’s just afraid to make the jump and I respect that.

Its good to see the younger generations just growing up with Linux readily available and easier than ever to install.

I’m going to try to mention things I haven’t seen already written, though I may repeat some of the more important ones to me.

(In no particular order)

Terminal:

• Kitty (Main Terminal)
• Fish (Terminal Prompt)
• Neovim (Code/Text editing)
• Zoxide (a directory changer; once you go to a directory, you can type z and a partial name to go back to it)
• Atuin (a command history lister, can get a key and bring over commands from other systems)
• Midnight Commander (CLI file manager)
• Btop (CLI system monitor)
• Palette (I do a lot of theming in different configs as well as HTML/CSS, so its nice to have something to quick convert hex to RGB).

GUI:

• Timeshift (backup/restore)
• Eddie (for AirVPN)
• novelWriter (my FAVORITE writing tool for my books)
• Floorp (Firefox fork browser)
• Conky Manager 2 (desktop monitoring widgets)
• Rofi (keyboard launcher)
• firewalld (tried this out recently, good firewall)
• Flameshot (ALWAYS; its my favorite screenshot tool)
• MPV (I still get VLC, but opt for MPV most of the time for videos/streaming)
• Speedcrunch (A+ calculator)
• Steam
• Lutris
• Protonup-QT (to inject GE Proton into Steam/Lutris)
• Stremio (a great little streaming tool)

I would like to add that I do use Arch, but I’m fairly sure 99% of these packages, if not all of them, are available for most other distros.

For CLI lovers: Check out Terminal Trove

Edit: I did see that someone mentioned no explanations on the apps, so I tried to put a little blurb on each.

As an Arch user who spun up NixOS for a few months; it’s worth it. It will take weeks to perfectly set up and it could take months to properly learn nixlang, but what you get is a solid, unbreakable, reproducible distro. Move over your dotfiles, home-manager, and nixconfigs and you essentially have the same setup on any other PC (though you may have to alter the video driver config).

I had my nixfiles all modular. My nouveau video drivers for the ancient laptop I was using? Imported from a separate config. That way I could leave anything hardware related behind and draw up new hardware configs for the system I was moving to when the time came. Don’t like your DE? Comment it out and write in whatever else you want to try.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love and use Arch on my main machine. Its just that my dive down the NixOS rabbit hole was really fun and I haven’t even tried flakes.

When I took my Linux class in 2007, he gave us a mountain of distros we could choose from. Ubuntu got picked first and Fedora second. This was mostly due to already having easy installs and a gui to boot with. It was also due to him having shown us these distros beforehand.

I was third pick. I knew what I wanted right away. My teacher, an extremely smart man with photographic memory, seemed fairly bored with the proceedings. That was until I chose Damn Small Linux as the third overall choice. The grin on his face as he knew he found a student that would be fun to teach and wanted to learn.

I was fairly sure he expected me to pick openSUSE. It was the third distro he’d shown us installations for and had us play around with. And boy, am I glad I chose Damn Small. I learned so much more than the other teens that were in there just to get an easy credit. He was an easygoing teacher. He didn’t fail people really, he let them hang around and play WC3: FT DOTA on LAN if they wanted and still passed them. But boy would he teach you if he knew you really wanted to learn it.

After that, we had to group in pairs in PC Repair class (same teacher) to take old student’s orders to help fix their computers. I was allowed to work alone and he just let me do what I wanted. I stuck to the code, repaired computers, and never snooped through anyone’s files. He knew I already could find my way around the Windows Registry (something Microsoft is thinking hard on how to stop you from doing now). He’d also do IT for the school during classes. Whenever he was away, I was allowed to be secondary IT if he was busy. It was easy stuff, mostly printer drivers and wifi troubleshooting.

It was really thanks to Damn Small Linux. My first project was to get Windows Solitaire running on it. He set it for us to research as homework. When he came over to me that same day, I had already looked up the info and was playing it on the GNOME 2 DE (MATE is still one of my favorite desktops). I just said, “WINE?” and he put a finger to his lips and grinned.

Thank you for letting an old man waffle on. Those were good times.

It’s not too bad once you get used to it. It’s still a lot of “throw this color here, check results, looks shit, change color, rinse and repeat.” QT theming is pretty similar.

I had just taken days to perfectly set up my homemade theme last distro, matching QT and GTK, only to find out I didn’t like the distro. I gave after that and just slapped Gruvbox Dark on everything.

When in doubt and the work to theme gets too much: Gruvbox, Dracula, Tomorrow/Tomorrow Night, or Solarized will cover just about everything.

This is basically true. EOS is the closest to vanilla Arch that just runs a gui live with Calamares.

The only difference is the bundled dependencies and packages. EOS sets a lot of those for you out of the gate. That’s what I meant about cross referencing. Sometimes I had to look and see what dependency/library EOS used and then pull it up in the wiki.

In base Arch you make some of those choices yourself, so you can just start at the top of the wiki page instead browsing to where EOS left things.

It’s not a negative thing. I’m just learning from the ground up on the wiki instead of jumping into the middle of things. For example, I had to go through and pick which bluetooth and sound packages I wanted and EOS has them sorted out for you. Small things like that.

EndeavourOS is great. It’s as bare as you can get without opting for straight Arch. I bit the bullet on vanilla Arch a couple weeks ago, though, and am amazed at how easy it is to set up now.

Bonus: I can follow the Arch Wiki word for word without having to cross check things.

But I loved my time with EOS. I would probably still be using it if I hadn’t decided to fuck around with topgrade while having no idea what I was doing. The lesson of the day was just update normally… its built in for a reason.

Vanilla Arch is much easier to install than it used to be. Connect to wifi via terminal commands or connect ethernet, enter archinstall and go down the list.

I’ve only ever had the waking from sleep problem, but it’s consistent in other DE’s for me. I have a desktop so I just turn that and hibernate off.

I had a known problem with krunner not opening after first run unless you killed the process, but I got rofi and customized it to the teeth instead. Found out that I love rofi. I probably won’t go back to krunner even it gets fixed now.

To be honest, at the time I didn’t even look at it. That old saying, “people fear the unknown”. I’ve wised up since then, though, and now I really want to try Nobara.

If I did decide to go for it, I’d probably opt for vanilla Fedora first to get a feel for it. The main reason that I haven’t tried it yet is because there’s one package I really want.

Wait, it was just added three weeks ago! Fedora has novelWriter now!

I use my distro because my Arch friend in true Arch user fashion needed to remind me every day that I was using a Debian based distro. He’d rave about pacman being far superior to apt-get. Every time I couldn’t find some software I was looking for, he’d point it out on the AUR.

I had just swapped to Pop_OS!, so I grabbed Manjaro just to get him to stop. I fully expected to be back on Pop at some point, but I’d give it some time. After about a month I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of swapping again. That didn’t last long as the distro hop urge set in. So I tried EndeavourOS, because I kept hearing bad things about Manjaro.

Then I went back to Windows for a while because a game I was looking forward to playing wasn’t Linux supported yet. The game wound up being shit and Microsoft dropped news of their shady snapshot crap and putting ads in the start bar. By this time my Arch knowledge outweighed my Debian knowledge. Fedora and openSUSE were still intimidating, so back to Endeavour I went.

I broke my build and decided to try another distro, CachyOS. It was nice, clean, and fast, but the miscommunication with foss devs was high because Cachy mirrors update a fair deal slower than the Arch/AUR mirrors do, so I’d be making bug reports of a bug that was fixed two days prior. I thought about using Reflector, but didnt know where to even begin to implement it into Cachy. So now I sit on vanilla Arch and he’s using vanilla Debian. What a world…

Thankfully I haven’t run into any problems with Nvidia drivers. My main rig is running a RTX 3080 with proprietary drivers and my side-project NixOS laptop uses a GTX 970m with nouveau drivers no problem.

It gets me curious about the possibility of specific GPU manufacturers having more of a problem than some. There has to be some discrepancy, because I do see that some users have issues right out the gate, with some being seasoned Linux vets. Whereas I’m mediocre at best and its all been plug and play for me.

I do like the idea of added security, as much as the permission popups annoy the hell out of me. The more Linux becomes popular, the more we’ll need extra security down the road. I hope we can simply whitelist packages at some point, though. Then things become less of a Wayland security issue and more of a user choice thing. If a user chooses a bad package to whitelist, then that’s on them at that point.

I don’t know the details, so it more than likely isn’t as easy as that, however.

Same. I booted up NixOS with Gnome around 5 months ago and it took a second for me to realize it was defaulting to Wayland. I was running it on an ancient Asus gaming laptop with nouveau drivers and the experience was overall smooth. Had it multi screened with my TV, too.

I agree here. Taking the time to learn how to use a distro with atomic updates is a nice skill to have anyway. I spent a couple months learning Nixlang on NixOS and it was damn near unbreakable.

But I’d like to add: Did he not have an external drive for his irreplaceable data? Any Linux user worth their salt knows that anything could happen at any time and frequent external backups is the number one way to avoid disaster in any distro. Pair that with a repository keeping your dotfiles updated and its smooth sailing. If you lose your data at that point the world has deemed you unworthy of having it.

I know I praise Timeshift on some of my other comments, but it should be common sense that backing up your system on your system is not the greatest backup plan. Its only the first line of defense.

I’ve never had a problem with multi monitor (knock on wood). I had to get around screen recording in the past, but I thought that was ironed out. I’ll check that out today.

The only hiccups I’ve run into so far is that the KDE color picker (the dedicated widget and the screenshot tool) is off by one shade. I grab #222222 and it gets #212121. I got around that by using Flameshot. And that’s more on KDE’s end afaik.

The other hiccup is constant alerts asking for input permissions when I use something like an autohotkey or autoclicker.

I’m not saying its perfect yet. I’m saying they’ve busted ass getting it to where it is in such a short amount of time. Its incredibly usable to me for how young Wayland is.

Definitely not for the light-hearted, but if OP is willing to take a month or so to learn Nixlang it actually gets quite easy and you can do pretty much everything with it. No need for Timeshift either. You’d have to really work at breaking it and once its set up that’s it.

Not to mention if you upgrade your system/SSD you only need a few key nix files and some dotfiles to basically clone your whole setup, especially if you use home-manager

As an average desktop user, I’ve run into very little pushback on Wayland. Its made huge leaps in a short amount of time.

This. If you’re going to fuck around with your root, be prepared to find out. Most other problems is a quick search, “oh I don’t have x dependency”, and done.

Nowadays you just need to learn how to use Timeshift and make a save point before messing with stuff. System unstable after tinkering? Time to roll back. Linux is easier and more stable than ever before.

Just stay home, literally in your system, and you’ll be fine 99% of the time.

I want this to be good, but I agree with all these points, right down to the possibility that we may never even see this thing released.