I’m gonna comment and say that’s the point.

You start out with bare minimum and install what you need. As you go you generally have an idea of what is and isn’t on your system. It’s not as annoying as Gentoo with all source compiling, not as anal as nix.

If something breaks, you go to ArchLinux.org and 95% of the time it’s mentioned on the front page so you follow the instructions and move on. It’s a very transparent distro, little drama to follow unlike Ubuntu/canonical or fedora/redhat.

It used to be harder to install and which gave some street cred, but they simplified it a bit which is nice.

The Stans give an unbalanced look at arch. I use arch because I want the latest packages, I don’t want to segment my packages between my repos and tarballs when there’s a game stopping missing feature on a package pinned to a 2yo version. I don’t want to learn a whole scripting language to carefully craft my OS like nix either. I want a current OS that’s easy to fix and easy to install packages so I can go back to what I was doing.

I had only used kde once before like 7 years ago and I wasn’t a huge fan. I wanted to try it again and I honestly really like it over gnome. I usually go tiling but felt lazy with a new laptop. The trackpad gestures are really solid.

nmcli is quite nice actually. My only real issue with NM is keeping track of what it’s doing behind the scenes.

So I want and have ip forwarding, and I only want to make a firewall whitelist between two of the interfaces.

I’ve uninstalled iptables, nftables isn’t running, NM has the firewall backend disabled, and ip forwarding is on.

This should result in traffic moving between the interfaces, yet traffic is moving between two of the interfaces, and blocked between two of the interfaces. It just doesn’t make sense.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I’m using NM for managing the AP and managed connections, not so much the bare connecting to wifi things.

The only real alternative to NM in this situation is a handful of delicate config files for iwconfig and dnsmasq.

I was using it on a new work machine, it was fine.

The main issue is all the good tiling wms are X11 based and I don’t really want to use a wayland version of i3. I want some dynamic tiling goodies.

postin’ from my 4th gen X1 Carbon running arch converted from antergos.

So what the ram is soldered, its 4lbs and still gets 7+ hours of battery life after 8 years of use.

I’ve done a few wiki posts and issues. I’m not a bad programmer but my ADHD makes the scaffolding around OSS contribution a lot harder than the actual programming aspect. So I’ve been sorta nervous to jump in.

I’m a fan of cmus. simple and easy.

Sorry cant hear you, too busy computing with the safety switched off and the action set to full auto.

I had an old arch install about 7 years ago that stopped booting, so I booted into ubuntu, mounted the ssd, used a chroot to fix it, forgot to unmount the ssd, proceeded to rm the mount dir as it was “temporary”. It took me mere seconds to realize what I did and by then it was a lost cause. I was able to use a file recovery tool to grab my precious memes, but thankfully there wasn’t much else valuable on the drive.

Worlds most roundabout rm -rf /

ps -aux | grep yourmom

real fwds from FOSS grandma hours, huh.

Yes, vim is a command line program.

If you look up “Cli file manager”, there’s a bunch that you can check out and try.

Tree, grep, and find are usually my three go-tos. Tree to get a general view of a ton of nested files/folders, then if I know a name I’ll use find . -name "filename", if I know a bit of contents, i’ll use `grep -re “content string” to find files containing that.

I recommend reading the man pages because you can often chain together these in fairly powerful ways.

Computers are more or less the sum of their parts.

For the longest time, and even now I think, the “Linux laptop” companies mostly sold re-branded quasi-generic laptops from Chinese manufacturers and focused on the software aspect to ensure compatibility. This meant that a lot of aspects were cheapened out on. The chassis, trackpad, keyboard, display, fit and finish in general were second class. Sure it was a machine that ran Linux, but most computers do that pretty well.

Laptop shopping is already fraught with pain and hazards. How do you know you’re getting something that wont break down? Add the “vote with your wallet” premium price on these boutique Linux laptops, and they don’t seem that appealing.

Thinkpads on the other hand have a huge community of nerds documenting compatibility. They have enterprise customers dumping pallets of used machines into the used market every year, and have far better parts accessibility than the quasi-generic machine.

Then there’s the trackpoint, you never need to leave the home row. You’re not victim to subpar trackpads(Every non-mac trackpad is subpar, sorry, I don’t make the rules, they suck absolutely.)

I’ve had my X1 Carbon 4th gen since new in 2016. Even if I can’t upgrade it, 7 years on its still nearly perfect. I got an Dell XPS 15 from work ~5 years ago and I’ve gone through two batteries, finishes are wearing off, the hinge is wonky, and IT HAS NO TRACK POINT.

Anytime I need to install something in windows, it just feels, uncivilized? Like every step of the way is disrespectful to the user. Windows is political, it has business priorities that effect how it’s used. Linux feels like a rock, like yeah you can get mad at it when you drop it on your foot but the rock isn’t interacting back the same way that windows is constantly changing and questioning your judgement.

Cries in perfectly managed window layouts and reasonable defaults.

What card do you run? I went from a 970 to a 3080ti and both drivers just automagically worked. The 970 used to have dkms issues but it randomly stopped at some point.

oh my god another xmonad user. You can get almost close with some paid tiling window managers in mac but you can’t recreate the managed layouts of xmonad.

What kind of things do you install? Typically the "page long guide"s are showing every basic step to hold the users hand. If you’re installing something in ubuntu, you update your repos, then install the package.

Every time I install something in windows, the endless unique install wizards, weird spyware packaging, restart requirements, etc make me want to rage quit. Not to mention the sketchy sites most Windows freeware comes from, or the windows store that will continually re-install candy crush and minecraft.

With Linux, even the CLI you learn a handful of basic concepts and live your life. To me complaining about typing “apt get install” is akin to complaining you need to learn to read to know when the bus is arriving.

I’ll admit there are three extra steps with say, installing chrome. But if you say out loud what you’re doing, ie “I need to add the repository so my computer knows where to get chrome” “Now that it knows where chrome is, I’ll run apt get update to refresh the packages” “Now that it knows where it is, and its refreshed, let me install it with apt get install chrome”.

or if you download a deb package, the ubuntu apt store will automatically open it with a double click then you click “install”.

No offense to you, but there seems to be an attitude that when trying something new, you should not be expected to learn the slightest thing about it. Sure your mom or grandpa might not be able to install it, but if you’re at the point where you’ve acknowledged the page long guide, you’re certainly smart enough to try something and give it an honest try.