many times

linux 🐧

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

{
Dear whoever made devrantron available on the AUR: BLESS YOU. MAY UNDERSTANDING CLIENTS AND JUNIORS WHO RESPECT AUTHORITY COME YOUR WAY.
};
( with kde's app-loading cursor animation, the devrant stressball bounces and i think that's absolutely fantastic )

*starts system*
*googles "Manjaro wacom support" *
*opens Archwiki*
*installed everything available in AUR to get Wacom tablet to work on Manjaro Xfce4*

*reboots*

*bricked*

MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!!!!!!

A million years ago I used and loved a WM called waimea. I used it extensively, and even used it on my work machine. It was abandoned by its author for whatever reason, in 2004. I used a derivative wm for a while, called kahakai and loved that too. Since that time, everything has gone from 32bit to 64, and waimea got buried in the past.

Fast forward to this past weekend, when I discovered, on a whim, that there is an AUR for waimea! There was not one for kahakai though-- that appears to have been genuinely abandoned.

So I installed waimea and started working on configuring it, with only a man page and the wayback machine as a reference. As of a couple days into the effort, I'm not quite there yet, but I love the results so far.

//Friends made me do this LOL
Haxk20 guide on using arch as pro.
//TL;DR Fucking read it dammit. I cant explain it in few lines.
Go to AUR.
LLVM-git
mesa-git
lib32-mesa-git
^ are a requirements if you want to have snappy system most of the time.
Do not fucking use AUR helpers. They are shit most of the time and break stuff like LLVM also they are for noobs who cant manage their shit (Really dont use them god dammit)
DO NOT USE PRECOMPILIED VERSIONS OF GIT PACKAGES. NEVER EVER !
Works surely but you can never trust anybody else just yourself (Remember this also for other things. The only person you can truly trust is yourself) Also precompilied shit breaks sometimes.
Run latest commit from mainline. I build every day if i can. If i cant or the mood is not right then once a week is fine.
Update Arch every day. Take care of the system.
I so many times hear Arch is piece of crap and breaks.
No its not. You just cant take care of your god fucking damn system.
If you dont upgrade every day stuff will break and you will be forced to make a force update which is never good (Only if package mantainer says so).
If you cannot take care of the system then arch isnt for you.
And if you still think arch is broken most of the time then see this:
Mesa, llvm, git, linux-next (+ few patches on top of that), xorg, wayland, gnome, firefox-nightly, libdrm and surely many more built from git at least once a week. (kernel and basic stuff built daily mostly) and having testing repos enabled at all times.
The last time i had unbootable GUI was 2 weeks ago and just because i upgraded LLVM without then building mesa. (YES YOU NEED TO DO THAT).
This is beyond bleeding edge as most people say. Yes its crazy but its fucking stable. Whats my point ? that if you say arch is unstable then think of this post and think again before saying. Its stable. You just cant take care of the system.
Restart after kernel update. I cannot say this enough. If you upgrade something low level then either source it. (Most people wont even have clue what that is so then reboot) Or the easiest option. REBOOT.
If you have bug. REPORT IT.
We are in dev community and im suprised most people here wont report bugs.
Are you dumb or what ?
What if your shit had bugs and people wont report them ? They would stay there and frustrate people more and more.
For real. Report bugs you find in kernel or IDK where. Without the report it wont get fixed. And be nice to devs. Dont expect help if you dont provide logs. ALWAYS PROVIDE LOGS.
Also if you run linux then run all AMD system FFS. Nvidia is shit on Linux. The company wont do shit for you. AMD has dedicated devs to opensource drivers. And opensource drivers are on parrity and heck most of the time better then proprietery.
I think thats all.
Sorry but friends made me do it.

So well as you may have known i run GNOME 3.31.4 (Just built from git) and built from my modified PKGBUILDs. Interestingly enough someone saw the idea and created their own modified PKGBUILDs of GNOME and put them on fucking AUR. AMAZING.

While i love Firefox from the bottom of my heart i still cant believe that Chromium does a better job at youtube videos. I mean that in firefox the moving objects in youtube stutter few seconds apart. Chromium movement is butter smooth and both are running 60fps video. This is mind blowing.
And scrolling is butter smooth on chromium too and on firefox it lags sometimes.
Well i guess this is a reason for me to use firefox-canary aur package.
From this last sentence you should know who wrote the rant.

Since everyone is swithcing to Linux I decided to switch to it myself. I chose Arch, as I have some experience with linux. After a couple of hours trying to get my PC to boot from USB (I forgot to turn secure boot of) I began installing. After about 2 hours of switching between install and chroot and the installed system to get Wi-Fi to work (fucking Wi-Fi!!) I was ready to install gui. I decided to go with i3, xfce terminal and zsh + oh-my-zsh. It took me about 5 hours to get the UI looking decent.
In the meantine I learned about AUR and yaourt and how to make a user that can use sudo.
After about 7-8 hours I can say that I actually love it!
What I love:
-yaourt: it can install any software you need. Not in official repo? No problem! It will find it in AUR.
-Pulse Audio: I can controll exactly how loud anything is.
-i3: just i3 in general. It was hard to get used to it at first (coming from windows and xfce), but after 10 minutes I didn't even use mouse.
What I didn't like:
-Getting Wi-Fi to work relyably. I had to switch between install media and live system many times just to install a package that is apparently needed for it, but it's not obvious on the wiki.
-Getting polish characters (like ę,ł,ś) to work took 2 hours and I got to the 4th page in google to find a working solution.
-lack of usefull documentation on what is needed to get a GUI working. There is just a paragraph that to run a DE or WM you need x11 server installed. After installing it and running startx nothing happened. After some googleing I learned that I also needed sddm or lightdm-gtk-greetet installed AND enabled by systemctl enable and NOT systemctl start.
-Systemd-boot. It can automatically detect that I have windows installed, but not the arch linux install I just did? What the fuck? Why?

Overall, if someone asked me if it was warth I would probably say yes. If I end up not liking it I still have my Windows install (for gaming) intact (I hope, I didn't check) I can return to.

Dev nightmares :

- Not finding bug fix on stackoverflow/GitHub .

- Losing code that hasn't been pushed to GitHub.

- Dealing with an unclean and inconsistent database.

- Installing Node Dependencies.

- Resolving CORS and 500s.

- Training a Linear Regression Model with 700 epochs on an entry-level Laptop.

Keep appending to this list.

#devrant #devnightmares

Ok, so many people rant about windows update. It can fuck up things, starts unexpectedly (after 100 warnings and messages letting you choose when but ok) and it takes too long to update.

I use Windows daily so I update regularly and never takes more than 5 mins. 20 when its a major update twice a year. So let's talk about Linux.

Yesterday I wanted to try out .net core on Linux so I booted my antergos vm to do it. TLDR: Didn't do shut because, surprise, Linux updates.

So apparently I downloaded the wrong version of visual studio code. Uninstall and install the right one then. Nope, can't do that. Some dependency must be updated. That dependency is on the highest version on the AUR, I have to get a different one. Ok, no problem. But I can install the other because uninstalling the original breaks more dependencies. Well fuck then.

So I decided I'd do a full system update with pacman, shouldn't take long. 1.6gb worth of update. I have 200mb download so it should be fast right? Well, I had to wait a couple of hours.

So I couldn't do anything on my afternoon because of Linux updates. That's an original rant isn't it?

And before the comments get here, yeah I know it's arch, it's difficult and all that. This isn't about being hard to do. It's just annoying and making me lose time.

Updating to mesa 18.3 (mesa-git aur) just because of No Man`s Sky to fix white screen issue since openGL 4.5 is implemented there and 18.2.3 only has 4.4 Well it has a good point in it. I will be always up to date on mesa and llvm.

alias 'yoink'='yay -Sy'
alias 'yeet'='yay -R'

I just installed voidlinux and daaaamn this shit is good. Its so lightweight and fast :3
And I don't even need the AUR to install i3-gaps. Its in the fucking main repo.

Now I'll just shut the fuck up and continue experimenting

would be helpfull

IDK if im crazy or i kind of got used to it that i run all bleeding edge.

Classmates call me crazy but i think its OK to run latest shit always. I mean new features and fixes and all that crap. Sure stuff breaks but well what an Arch linux user would i be if i didnt have a Arch Linux USB in my pocket always right ? (Yes i do have Arch linux always with me). Just boot into that and revert to latest working version. Its isnt that hard really. And i mean stuff breaks only sometimes and thats really not often tbh.

So yeah. Compiling grub-git as i write this rant just because my amd-ucode file isnt detected by grub in arch repos.

Yes arch packages are sometimes fucked up really well but on the other hand it isnt hard to use AUR to download them.

And please dont for fuck sake use AUR helpers. Just download the fucking zip. Unzip. and makepkg -si it really isnt hard and its just better this way.
Yes more work for you but the system doesnt break that often.

!rant
I need a new OS.
I have one year of Kubuntu, one year of Fedora KDE and there years of Arch Linux (Openbox, KDE, i3wm).

Now I'm undecided between debian and Arch Linux as a stable System.

What do you guys recommend me?

I hate picking huge software from AUR and need to compile it, but i hate having always a, yes stable package, but under versioned...
(and, exist a Debian minimal without everything Archstyle?)

GNOME-dev packages for Arch are 1/4 done.
Suprisingly they work quite well actually.
Settings getting new sound menu finally and it looks pretty sweet. Isnt merged yet but hey i wanted to try it out when i had the chance.
I will get it done in few hours most likely. At least the basic gnome package group.

No fucking way im doing gnome-extra.
I would make it into an repo but well i dont have a spare server i could use sadly. And i dont have money to mantain a server sadly.
It will be AUR most likely.

I just found that that when you have ultra bleeding edge system that actually AUR packages break due to this. HAHA. Im fine with this just edit the makepkg to have the bleeding edge then normal versions of it.

Arch I want to love you. But you're so freaking unstable and I just want to code in peace without you freaking out every week about config files being screwed up. Why can't we have the stability of more mainstream distros AND the Pacman package manager + AUR? Some of us have to code for a living you know.

I'm really tempted to just go back to Debian to set it and forget it. PPA's be damned.

Is it just me or is the Audio driver for Antergos WAAAY better than the one on Windows? Big diffrence for me at least.

Also, huge thanks to whoever made devRantron available on AUR.

Argh! (I feel like I start a fair amount of my rants with a shout of fustration)

Tl;Dr How long do we need to wait for a new version of xorg!?

I've recently discovered that Nvidia driver 435.17 (for Linux of course) supports PRIME GPU offloading, which -for the unfamiliar- is where you're able render only specific things on a laptops discreet GPU (vs. all or nothing). This makes it significantly easier (and power efficient) to use the GPU in practice.

There used to be something called bumblebee (which was actually more power efficient), but it became so slow that one could actually get better performance out of Intel's integrated GPU than that of the Nvidia GPU.

This feature is also already included in the nouveau graphics driver, but (at least to my understanding) it doesn't have very good (or none) support for Turing GPUs, so here I am.

Now, being very excited for this feature, I wanted to use it. I have Arch, so I installed the nvidia-beta drivers, and compiled xorg-server from master, because there are certain commits that are necessary to make use of this feature.

But after following the Nvidia instructions, it doesn't work. Oops I realize, xrog probably didn't pick up the Nvidia card, let's restart xorg. and boom! Xorg doesn't boot, because obviously the modesetting driver isn't meant for the Nvidia card it's meant for the Intel one, but xorg is to stupid for that...

So here I am back to using optimus-manager and the ordinary versions of Nvidia and xorg because of some crap...

If you have some (good idea) of what to do to make it work, I'm welcome to hear it.

!rant

After my HDD failed last week. I replaced it with an SSD, upgraded my RAM. I wanted to install Arch but I am a noob in linux so I stuck with Manjaro.

I am just loving XFCE and AUR. 😍

I fucking hate that ISPs just decide to block certain websites!

Sky for example blocks a bunch of things related to Tor. You can't go to the website, and can't even install stuff like tor browser from AUR, because it has tor in the download url. The connections simply time out.

Yes, I can use a VPN to install Tor, I'll probably have to do that. But fuck!!! Many VPN providers' websites are also blocked.

This seems to be common practive. In my previous flat we had Virgin. They blocked the website of all VPN providers they could find, and even kept me from establishing a connection to some of those providers. In that case I could donwload Tor (surprisingly) and then tried a bunch of clients until one of them worked.

It's fucking pretentious, and I don't think I'll find anything about blocking perfectly legal resources in any of their T&Cs.

Pull Request Message -

Day 1: "Updates to the UI and the load performance of the page."

Day 127: "shdheiahwjak"

If you are using arch and are making packages from the aur all I can say is use makepkg -s because then it will install all the dependencies for you.
Yay

Super curious: Ive broken my arch frequently. And then fix it and go on with my day. Or an update causes some weird package confliction because I used pip instead of pacman for one library or whatever.

But I keep hearing from different sources that "arch being super unstable is a myth. It never happens!" Okay surely not all the time, my system is usually pretty good but:

Do you people never `pacman -Syyu` ?
How have you not broken everything?! Or do you just pretend like the AUR (the best thing ever and also the source of most of my problems) doesn't exist? What black magic are you doing to appease the arch gods?

Why the actual fuck is MariaDB disguised as MySQL in the AUR?!? Is there just no way to install MySQL from the AUR anymore?

So, since I messed with Elementary OS so much that it yearns for the sweet release of death and Windows 10 stopped connecting to the Internet, I now want to format them both and install Arch and Windows 8.1, respectively.

However, if my Arch installation fails (again), what distro should I install?

I am leaning towards Arch-based (I ADORE the AUR) and Debian-based distros, and have used, in this order: Linux MInt, Debian with Gnome 3 (I despise this DE), Antergos(can't get Manjaro to boot off of a USB drive) and Elementary OS (which was a thorough disappointment).

lesson learned...
never run yaourt -Syu --aur without checking the upgrade list.

reboot-> system doesn't boot -> F**k
reboot (runlevel 3)
discover that nvidia-beta and nvidia-utils mismatch version.
fix it editing pkgbuild of nvidia-beta to install lastest version.
reboot->everything works.

Results: succesfully wasted 25minutes.

I think I want to hop distro's.
Been using Manjaro xfce for like 6 months now. It's been really good(especially the AUR and software repos) but every now and then I found myself tinkering with weird probelms, especially when it comes to Nvidia drivers.

I need an easy to use, fire-and forget(auto hardware detection) distro with the newest software possible(I develop in Android and Node, and the most recent versions of IDE's and software are important.

I also don't want too much bloatware. I don't mind that much about customizability, as long as the default UI isn't ugly and hard to use.

Which diatro and DE you guys can recommend according to my preferences?

!rant
Ooooh. devRantron looks really fancy. Thanks for the AUR package :)

Really liking the themes "coming soon" - We must convert them all over to the dark side! Muhahahahah!
Erm I mean... *whistles*

Linux perf events would be an order of magnitude more useful IF THERE WERE ANY REAL DOCUMENTATION.

Not to denigrate the heroic effort behind the creation of the perf_even_open man page, where is the event documentation? What do they MEAN?

What, even, is the difference between PERF_COUNT_SW_CPU_CLOCK and PERF_COUNT_SW_TASK_CLOCK? No one seems to be able to give a definitive answer.

And while I'm at it, why is PAPI stuck in an AUR on Arch?!

I am currently using Gnome on Debian,
for about 3 years and i am thinking to switch my distribution, please suggest me one

my priorities are stability and productivity.

Originally i was thinking to switch to Arch Linux because of the AUR, but the installation ...

Why is there so much hate towards Manjaro Linux and so much love towards Antergos ? I mean, it's still Arch, right ?

It's just that Manjaro has its own repos but you can still use AUR.

I am feeling really stupid right now.
How to run devrantron via the console (using manjaro with i3wm, installed via the aur).
I feel like i tried everything but i am sure i am overlooking something obvious.

Devrantron leads to a deb in the AUR? makepkg isn't handling it, and it litterally just tosses me an error saying "file format not recognized"

How would you recognize a person still hungover the amazing beauty that Google+ was?

Simple, they don't use the phrase "I like this."
They use +1

I just started maintaining a few AUR packages, and I got to say it's rather fun and rewarding, just to know that your responsible for making sure that something is up to date, and that no one using the package is getting anything bad.

Just managed to install devRantron from the aur. @thanik apperantly the PKGBUILD was out of date.

netcoredbg
If you're creating an AUR pakage
Why the fuck are you not referencing every dependency?
And it isn't even some obscure library or anything. It's fucking CMake.

I Looked at You 🤩
You Looked at Me 👾
Aur 101 Errors Found 😵

Ever happened?

Pacaur vs Yaourt ?

Arch users: Does anyone use the cower tool? I did a fresh install on my laptop and can't find it on aur's pages anymore. I read into it being 'replaced' by something called auracle? Not sure if anybody is up to speed on that, but at the very least cower's package pages have been removed from aur.

A tool like cower only saves me a little trouble of writing a bash script to update all my aur packages at once, but it was one less thing to do without using an AUR helper (which I've been consistently suggested to stay away from). How do you streamline this process on your machines?