Phanatik

Looks great, I’ll give it a bash

One of the simplest ways to safeguard against breakage is to have your /home on a separate partition. I realised I wouldn’t need to backup and reformat it from the beginning, I just need to wipe the root drive and reinstall again.

It’s made even easier by writing an installation script. Simply put, you can pipe a list of packages into packstrap and use a little convenience package for pulling a partition scheme out of a file.

I like to tinker and I’m aware that things will break so I have these tools that let me rebuild the system again in as short a time as possible.

Wayland isn’t trying to be X12 and since X11 has been around, there haven’t been plans for there to be an X12 either. You want to discourage people from using Wayland but don’t encourage people to contribute to X11. You’re so hellbent on taking Wayland down, rather than further convincing people that X11 is superior and it’s easier to improve.

Have you any idea how many billions Facebook has been fined for this removed.

I’m interested to see a Fediverse implementation of a YouTube alternative. Being able to link a Microblog on Kbin to a Mastodon post and a Community post on a YT alt would be HUGE.

Arch with Wayland and Pipewire. Running SwayWM and have never been happier with my setup.

Genuinely one of the best pieces of software that these heroes are giving away.

I use ranger and it’s multi-purpose. I use it as a file manager, file editor (via vim) and also a disk mounter (through an add-on). I can run shell commands if I wanted to.

What I really like is that I can use the :mkdir command to make one directory with spaces in its name or :shell mkdir to make multiple directories in one go and escaping spaces if necessary.

I like that it shows you how much space is free based on which partition you’re on. Another useful feature is being able to preview images.

Now, not all of what I mentioned is unique to ranger but it’s fast and navigating is easy. If I’m copying files between two folders, I can put a flag down and use ’ to jump between them.

Ranger is very customisable so if you want to control how different file extensions are handled then there is a config file that’ll allow you to do that.

I suppose I could’ve signposted better that I was speaking in the context of Arch Linux but could be applied to any Linux distro. I wasn’t speaking in a general sense just within the parameters of using a PC.

That’s quite a hyperbolic conclusion you’ve come to. It’s not that deep and I’m not advocating everyone live their lives by this philosophy.

Remember that Arch Linux is a flavour of Linux and this particular flavour has a particular philosophy. If you want something prebuilt like Windows, there’s Ubuntu, PopOS, Linux Mint, and a myriad of others. You don’t have to go to the level of configuration that Arch does but being Linux, the option is open to you if you wish to dig into your system to see the cogs in motion.

I might need to read it again to be sure but I don’t think that’s what they were saying. I believe they’re talking about something which has been Arch Linux’s philosophy from the beginning which is “know your system”. The process by which you do that is first understanding that Arch is modular and highly configurable. You then choose every component from your Window Manager to your File Manager. The demystification is from you taking the initiative to learn about your options before deciding “I like this one” and then installing it and then configuring it suit your preferences. You don’t have to be programmer to do this, you can follow the ArchWiki or watch SomeOrdinaryGamers install Arch from scratch to a usable system in 45 mins.

The reason the “know your system” philosophy is important is that you, the user, are in control. You are simultaneously the end-user and the sysadmin. You know what you’re installing so if something breaks, there’s this handy terminal to tell you what happened. If that’s not helpful, rollback your changes and try again. Computer too slow? Throw open htop and watch your processes. Trying to kill a stubborn process? F4 to search for it. F9 to bring up the command menu. 9 to select SIGKILL and pres enter.

You’ll probably say “that’s a lot of steps to kill a process” but with routine use, it becomes muscle memory. The more the use it, the more efficient you become at using it.