Linux users:

What was your distro journey?

Mine is composed of the following time-based list of the primary distros I've used, along with a smattering of flash-in-the-pan tests, including but not limited to Suse, OpenSuse, OEL, CentOS, Sorceror, Vector, Mint, and ElementaryOS.

1998-1999: Redhat 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3
1999-2002: Debian
2002-2005: Gentoo
2005-2007: Debian(I still use it for cloud VPSes)
2007-2019: Ubuntu
2019: Manjaro
2019-Present: Arch

As if you needed another reason to stop using chrome:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/...

Got two interviews today. Wish me luck. I'm nervous, but I think the candidates are probably more nervous.

In ancient times, a friend and I made a new website for a golf course, in exchange for free golf whenever we wanted it. We were traveling to Texas for work(we were Linux sysadmins for a defense contractor at the time) and found out that mechanical/logistic issues at the airport in Houston would delay our departure by two hours, but this wasn't until after the plane was fully boarded and had begun to taxi. So we sat on the tarmac at Kansas City Airport for two hours with nothing to do but release that website. We finished some perl hooks to site resources, and pushed the site live. This was on a laptop tethered to a phone with a CDMA data connection, before even EVDO was released.

Even so, it went great! I sshed into the server(running netBSD), swung over the necessary tags, and the site was up.

My workflow today is largely the same, just with git and a more elaborate .vimrc.

It appears that Blizzard is joining the AAA fray in its latest successful attempt to enrage its customers. Looks like the acquisition by Activision did exactly what everyone thought it would do.

The "just use the right tool for the job" argument I've seen many times in defense of Windows is getting tiresome. When the tool's handle is on fire, you use a different tool. It's madness to keep burning yourself.

Vim is a dream come true. That is all.

Have the image repost spams slowed down since they stopped giving away free stickers? Er, have they stopped giving away free stickers? Seems like that would help to cut down on the junk.

Manjaro has some quirks that annoy me(no MST timezone, spotty support for my WD NVME), so I decided that since I'm not interested in any pre-configured graphical desktop of any kind, I should just dive into Arch, since it increasingly felt like that's what I was doing anyway but with Manjaro to dull the blow. So I did, and I am over the moon for doing so. Lots of gnashed teeth, but DDG indexes an answer to every question I've had, and it always makes sense when I find it. I've enjoyed having to dive into systemd in a much more low-level way than ever before-- to actually LEARN what it's doing, how, and why.

But one by one, I have been faced with some issue that I need to resolve, and one by one, I've knocked them off. The result now is the best work and gaming desktop I have ever used.

Arch is not for geniuses or wizards. Just patient people who are willing to read. The payoff is staggering, and many times over worth the effort.

It's insane that to get a phone with decent specs without getting one that's even bigger than what I have(a 5.5" asus that feels like a behemoth) I had to get a phone that was released almost two years ago. I figure sony will release a new compact some time soon, but the price was right on the XZ2, and it feels wonderful to use a phone with one hand again.

A guy on another team who is regarded by non-programmers as a genius wrote a python script that goes out to thousands of our appliances, collects information, compiles it, and presents it in a kinda sorta readable, but completely non-transferable format. It takes about 25 minutes to run, and he runs it himself every morning. He comes in early to run it before his team's standup.

I wanted to use that data for apps I wrote, but his impossible format made that impractical, so I took apart his code, rewrote it in perl, replaced all the outrageous hard-coded root passwords with public keys, and added concurrency features. My script dumps the data into a memory-resident backend, and my filterable, sortable, taggable web "frontend"(very generous nomenclature) presents the data in html, csv, and json. Compared to the genius's 25 minute script that he runs himself in the morning, mine runs in about 45 seconds, and runs automatically in cron every two hours.

Optimized!

First and foremost: do more to show my wife that I love and appreciate her. Not dev but damned important.

Write my own web version of the taskwarrior client.

Run a 5K in June with my wife.

I don't know about you, but a double-digit percentage of my swearing aloud while using a computer takes place when a site uses its javascript bullshit to grab my keypresses, so that when I hit the slash key to search the text of the page(something I do A LOT), it instead moves my focus to their own search field, where I will be halfway through typing before I see that the hijacking has taken place. Today I wondered if this was annoying to anyone else, and found that yes, yes it is. Maybe it annoys you too, so here.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/...

In the past couple weeks I've switched from openbox to bspwm, and I am in love. The tiling is whatever, but I love the granular control bspwm offers for monitors, desktops, and nodes(windows). I love running extremely customizable apps like sxhkd, polybar, and picom to make it my own. Anybody else around here using bspwm?

Fuck. Look at all these pieces.

Please realize that whether I say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, I don't really mean either.

Does anyone have a mnemonic for x and y and which is which, on a graph? I feel like I have to look it up or guess every time. Some day a building is going to collapse because of one of my guesses.

41 minutes into our morning standup call. Barf.

This makes me laugh a lot. I changed my online ledger app to use a unicode character in the URL, which I should probably just use a rewrite rule to accomplish, but for now just to see if it works I tried it out. After confirming that it does, I commited it.

Twenty years.

For twenty years I've used vim almost exclusively, and only now have I learned about buffers and registers. It feels like wasted years, but also it feels like a gift.

What is the fascination people-- especially old people --have with desktop icons?

What Google services are you still using? Earlier this year I made a conscious decision to avoid Google services if I can. I successfully got off gmail and gcal. Because I have yet to find viable alternatives, I am still using:

YouTube
Voice
Gboard
Android
Maps
Music
Home
Fonts (on occasion)

Greetings from vacation! Gaming in Hawaii be like:

I dug up my old ledger web app that I wrote when I was in my late twenties, as I realized with a tight budget toward the end of this year, I need to get a good view of future balances. The data was encrypted in gpg text files, but the site itself was unencrypted, with simple httpasswd auth. I dove into the code this week, and fixed a lot of crap that was all terrible practice, but all I knew when I wrote it in the mid-2000s. I grabbed a letsencrypt cert, and implemented cookies and session handling. I moved from the code opening and parsing a large gpg file to storing and retrieving all the data in a Redis backend, for a massive performance gain. Finally, I switched the UI from white to dark. It looks and works great, and most importantly, I have that future view that I needed.

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.

Homebrew eats shit. It is easily the slowest and least effective package manager I have ever used on the command line. It feels like software that was great in 2006, but hasn't changed since then.

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.

It's ironic that posts asking for upvotes are a frequent source of upvotes for the people who reply, saying, "don't ask for upvotes."

The person who invented battery powered faucets that turn off automatically needs to be strung up by his toes.

When I was 23 or so, I worked nights in a tier-1 control room. Each workstation had a win98 desktop, and two HPUX workstations running CDE. I read all of the lord of the rings in text files on the HPUX machines, and since it was in an xterm window, my supervisor thought I was just tailing logs.