My PC repair teacher hated Gates. The first story he told us about him was about how he essentially obtained DOS for a literal pittance, turned a massive profit on it, and never credited the original creators.

I might’ve skewed the story over the years of trying to keep it in my memory, but if I did it just goes to show how much I hate Bill Gates.

NixOS is well worth a try. If you know lua and json, its not too hard to pick up nixlang. I know neither and it only took me a few weeks to learn it. But once you get the hang of it, you can make a Linux reproducible on other systems. I made everything modular. GPU drivers for my old laptop? Imported nix module. Neovim? Imported nix module.

Yeah, I’ve done that. I’ve also deleted SCSI on my first Windows PC, lol. I still haven’t learned my lesson and mess with things I can’t handle. I was notorious for destroying my mother’s computers growing up. Then I learned to fix the things I broke.

As of right now, I use Audacious. Its my absolute favorite music client and all completely modular. You head to the plugins section and add what you want. It doesn’t even close to system tray without a plugin, so super customizable. If you can’t tell, I love modular things, lol.

For a quick music shuffle list with a really sleek design, Amberol is a really close second. Especially if you use GNOME, since its designed by default in the GNOME style. I use KDE, so I stick with Audacious, but I did enjoy my time with MPD on XFCE using a plugin designed for that DE. If I went back to Hyprland, I’d probably use MPD.

Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of firewire, but back in the day it was actually pretty nice. 1.5A @ 30v was pretty nuts back then. I had a PC filled with pirated music I got from LAN parties in high school. No idea where that music went… probably destroyed in a Windows reinstall.

lol! I took a Linux class a long time ago and learned on Damn Small Linux. I came back to it years later with Pop!_OS then moved to Arch where I stayed for 2 years. Went to NixOS for a while.

But I never gave Fedora the time it deserved, so as an afterthought I tried it after I messed up my Arch system (yeeted my .local folder by accident). Went with Nobara for the ease of setup for gaming. I didn’t think I’d stay here, but its just too good.

Haven’t gotten around to it just yet, but I did tag all the music with the proper metadata. I can’t rip anything off my iPod 1st and 2nd gens from my collection yet, but they’re stuffed full of music. I just need the proper firewire, but they seem to be more expensive than the units…

I need to order the music by genre folders now. Today I just got the EddieVPN client for Nobara working. I didn’t realize it was as easy as going to the Eddie site and getting the RPM; I’ve been too spoiled with the Arch AUR having everything I need in one place.

I’m almost there, though. I’ll have the music up soon.

I’m going to try and do this… but I have like 14 iPod classics worth of music to genre… Time to break out the old MusicBrainz Picard, I guess, just to make sure all the metadata is right. I have some wild stuff, too, like German Beatles songs and weird classical piano I’ve never heard of.

I was a little leery of how Soulseek works, so I backed out last second. I’ve never been trustful of the whole folder sharing thing, even on LAN. I’m going to go for it, though. The world should hear the weird stuff and the good songs I’ve ripped off old iPods.

Local library worker here. Can confirm we don’t track connections, we only tally how many use our wifi if we can figure it out. Basically the tally just includes whoever brings out their phone in the library.

Just be aware that the state can supply your library with free internet, and I’m not sure how that’s set up. I personally don’t like connecting to random open wifi, official or no.

I’m a hybrid user. I love to use the keyboard, but sometimes I just want to go in a GUI and click click done. It depends on what I need at the time. I love TUIs the most.

Need to move a handful of files over somewhere? Forget dragging a reticle and dropping them all five subdirectories away, I’m going to boot up Midnight Commander, Zoxide over to where I need to go, select and move.

A mass amount of files? Gonna mv those puppies.

Need to move that one piddly file to the next folder down? I’m going to open Dolphin, do a quick move, and call it a day.

However, for anything programming or note-taking, Vim is love. Qutebrowser or Vimium extensions so I can Vim-ify my browser. Vim everything. We don’t need to bring a mouse into that equation.

And I rest my case, lol. I don’t even know the difference between init and initramfs. It’s definitely a hole in my knowledge and I should know it going down the line, but I need the right time.

I’m here and there on what I want to learn at any moment. It’s not like I can’t learn, but it’s all about what interests me at the time. I learn things in a scattered manner, which admittedly is a horrible way to learn but its just how my brain works.

I’m a very mid-level Linux user. I use systemd because I’m just not familiar with how init systems actually work. I love that the choice is there, but I think systemd has it’s place with users like me that get confused.

That being said, I did run Dracut on EndeavourOS because it was recommended for that distro. I never dived into it to see what the exact difference was, though I do remember running into some things I needed to do that Dracut did differently. There may come a day when I dive into inits, but for now I’m just happy if my system starts.

You’re not wrong, though. If you want all your packages to work correctly, you gotta stay up to date. I know some of my packages will break if I go more than a week.

Yesterday I read about RATs becoming more frequent in the AUR in some packages. They predict that they’re going to become more frequent soon. I’m wondering if it might be time to switch my main machine to NixOS now. I may check out Bazzite and Nobara first, though.

However, I guess Arch is doing something to protect against these? It’s going to be part of BumpBuddy.

Yeah, that checks out. I think there’s other ways of doing it, I just never manages to get it working. I’ll have to check again, but I thought KDE had something in the system settings that let you swap versions. I could be just misremembering the kernel swap settings though.

There’s also some nvidia command hoodoo I tried and everything went well except at the end where I wound up with no graphical output at all, lol. I did a lot of messing around on fresh installs until the cord swap finally worked.

Yeah, it does make sense that you can compare them in that sense, but as far as actual system setup goes, I don’t think they’re comparable. Don’t get me wrong, I love NixOS. When I was learning nixlang and setting up everything to be modular and reproducible, I was having a blast.

However, I also had a blast learning Arch and figuring out how my system works the way it does. I’ll be honest, though, NixOS helped me learn how Home was separate from Root. That alone really helped me learn how the general Linux system file hierarchy worked.

But there are also things I would have never learned about Linux if I never messed with Arch, such as essential system symlinks, how they work, and how to use chroot in the live environment to fix broken ones (thanks to a botched Arch update, lol).

If you like it, learn it-use it. All this comparing and inter-distro warring seems pointless. There’s not a distro I’ve used that I haven’t had things I really liked and really hated.

I had some weird artifacting issues in an older version of Nvidia proprietary. While viewing certain windows or colors, my screen would flicker, or else I would get weird diagonal lines across my whole screen.

I went nuts trying to figure it out. In the end since I started on Pop!_OS, I just easily rolled back to a previous version of the proprietary drivers and called it good. Well, later I wanted to try EndeavourOS. I was too noob to figure how to roll back the drivers there.

So a friend asked me, “Are you using display port or HDMI? Try the other one.” I highly doubted that would fix anything, but for the sake of trying everything, I switched to HDMI. And well… fuck me if it didn’t work. I’ve just been running HDMI ever since.

I’m more in the group of Nix != Arch. They’re just different. I love them both, tbh.

I would like to add that I have never recommended them to beginners. I usually like to recommend Pop!_OS.

I really have been wanting to try Bazzite lately, too.

You should try it.iusearchbtw

Note taking has it’s place, but I agree. Once you go from note taking into crippling habitual hivemind its lost the main point. The time I spent on making my notes look amazing and growing my thought library rather than working on executing my actual ideas was getting insane.

I’ve seen some of the Obsidian maxi’s graphs in tutorial videos. There are people that have spent literal weeks of their precious time on these massive dot-to-line hoards. It really becomes literal e-hoarding. Like counseling levels of bad habit. Then they hold these humongous, continent-sized graphs up like a trophy. Mine’s bigger than yours. Whip it out and prove it.

Now I only jot ideas I want to remember later if I’m in the middle of something, write down dreams I may forget (or nightmares, as it helps me calm down and analyze them logically), and keep to my diet and shopping lists.

I really don’t need more than that. Any reminders or schedules go in my android FOSS calendar (Etar).

We may put up our hats for a while, but we never pull in the sails.

Translation: I’m more than happy to pay for a fair service, but I’m not stupid enough to believe it will last.

I’m not sure how fast the pacman repo updates, but I’m using that plus Syncthing-Fork from F-Droid. I don’t think they’ve dropped 2.0 in there, yet.

Looks like the Arch Syncthing package upstream URL is the official Syncthing and is running 2.0.1. I can now confirm that 1.x from Syncthing-Fork works fine with Syncthing 2.0. I just set it up this morning, oddly enough.

I’ve never really used Ubuntu, but I’m going to agree with others here. If its what you use, it would be better in the sense that it would be much easier for you to give her phone assistance when she needs it, rather than giving her something you’re not used to and possibly having to go over and troubleshoot for her.

If she wants something more in the line with Windows, you could try Kubuntu, but I think the rigging behind KDE is pretty complicated for a casual user. You may want to help her set up the way she wants her desktop to look at first if you go this route. The only other Windows-like desktop is Cinnamon, but Cinnamon-Wayland is still in alpha and once they officially drop it that could make more work for you later.

Admittedly, I have 0 experience with the Unity DE, so that’d be your call if you think you can familiarize it for her.

Manjaro has been pretty quiet for a long time. There’s gotta be a point where we forgive and forget. I like Manjaro and used it as my entry point to Arch. It sets a lot more up for you out of the box and has manjaro-specific package bundles that just work on install.

According to Manjarno, its been just under three years since their last mistake, and that was just forgetting to renew the SSL cert for their archived forums. Probably about time we let it back into the Arch family.