Linux

i officially left windows yesterday! :)

Definitely my Framework 13 AMD. This machine is truly perfect

Switching over to a tiling windows manager has been really enjoyable. It feels like a futuristic paradigm shift

Just flat out getting Debian to install. This was my first OS swap on a Dell Latitude. Holy whirlwind that bios is locked down with half a dozen secure boot “features”.

My problem ended up being in storage configuration. After I set it from raid to achi Debian install was able to detect the drive. Why my laptop with a single m.2 slot was configured for raid, I’ll never know.

Not the latest, but one of the biggest improvements was the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard. Now I have programmed the keyboard to have VIM navigation at the keyboard level. The latest was switching to neovim and setting it up properly.

This nice little one liner bash script, assigned to a shortcut Meta +Shift + O. It opens the flameshot GUI, let's you select an area of text in your screen and click Ok. It OCRs the screenshot and puts it into the clipboard. It checks for whether you're using Wayland or X11 to use the appropriate clipboard tool. Beyond the more typical text in an image scenario, it's a convenient way to copy non-selectable text in error popups. Not my original idea, copied the concept from a suggestion in a GitHub comment thread and adapted it.

exec &> /dev/null [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" = "wayland" ] && (flameshot gui --raw | tesseract stdin stdout | wl-copy) || (flameshot gui --raw | tesseract stdin stdout | xclip -in -selection clipboard)

A script full of functions that I perform often, like:

• Probe every 5min for internet connection. Play Black Sabbath when there is. (My internet goes down often.)
• Create individual tarballs/zips/rars for each subdir.
• Extract all tarballs/zips/rars from a dir. (It detects the format on its own)
• Extract all files of a DwarFS file into a dir.
• Re-encode all vids from a dir.
• Delete all thumbnail pictures from my user.
• Find and remove all desktop.ini and thumbs.db files in a dir, recursively.

My .bashrc then sources that script, so to use those functions I simply open a terminal. And if I ever need to delete my .bashrc and recreate it anew, they're safely stored in my scripts directory.

Deciding on the folder where to keep backups to cloudsync so i can reinstall everything from scratch.

Edited my kernal parameters to prevent my CPU from going into a low power state that had been causing crashes for years apparently.

Edit: if you use 1st gen ryzen and have been putting up with intermittent crashes thinking it was your shitty old used GPU like me, try disabling c-state 6.

Fish, and a searchable command history.

unlocking luks over ssh

Lowering swappiness to get more usage out of my RAM.

Switched to an immutable system after I finally managed to wrap my head around the concept.
I've tried it before but left frustrated cause my normal workflow doesn't apply anymore.
But if you're looking for an OS that basically disappears in the background, it's great. I even removed the terminal cause I have no use for it on my laptop.

I just bought another (cheap quad core 256GB SSD) thinkcentre as a tinker platform.

So I'm going to add that to my Linux uh setup (of machines).

Reinstalled Arch. I had used Arch way back in 2006, but fell out of Linux because I primarily game. Now that proton has improved so much, I dropped my windows install completely. I have tumbleweed on my desktop but decided to try a real Arch install on my laptop. I appreciate how easy tumbleweed was to create an encrypted lvm with snapper rollback, but wanted to understand it a little more instead of having a GUI do it all for me.

Last night I successfully installed Arch with an "luks on lvm" setup, and was able to successfully boot! I didn't quite get snapper working 100% either rEFInd, but I think I'm close.

I definitely appreciate how easy Linux is to install now, but it's good to know I can do it the hard way if I need to, and learn some things along the way.

Learned how to use zoxide. Makes my terminal so much friendlier

I got VFIO/IOMMU + single GPU pass-through working on Fedora 40 with my RX 6800 xt into a win10 VM.

More of a see if I could sort of thing, I don't imagine I will actually need it much, but it may help if any of my friends are curious about switching over.

I reinstalled from scratch. Went from Xubuntu to minimal Ubuntu with KDE de. And then tried wayland again. One the one hand, gaming performance went up by a lot which was basically my main issue.

On the other side it is buggy af. The file manager fails mostly at moving files. There are random graphical glitches. Had the whole DE crash/lock up a couple times And the tabbing/tasbar handling is (still) not what I want. I also have still not found out why zfs automount does not trigger.

But at least I have something useable again!

I tried Wayland again on a new CachyOS install and I've only had a couple minor issues so far, so I'm sticking with it this time.

Cleaning up the junk.

I went through a lot, and put my dotfiles in my dotfiles repo.

Repartitioning one of the extra disks that was still on NTFS to ext4 and updating the fstab entry accordingly.
So, nothing big.

I bought a sager laptop, matching the models that system76 uses. Loaded pop os and away I go.

So far, very stable. I am forced to use Nvidia performance mode if I want an external monitor which is slightly annoying, but I can reboot into normal mode when on battery.

Its the poor battery usage that irks me. The battery life gets me 90 min of use, so not great.

I got steam for some gaming, guitarix and ardour for music, libre office, IDE and git tools all good to go.

Worth it

I thought it was when I switched over to pipewire, but no. I've got severe audio crackling problems now and I want to go back to pulse for all it's faults.

I use dex and picom now. Every few months I learn something new about running i3wm with no DE.