many times

linux 🐧

What I was supposed to do today:

Finish up some homework and code for a bit

What I actually did today:

1. Boot up my laptop to get started on homework

2. Open Spotify and try to connect my headphones

3. Reinstall Bluetooth and pulseaudio to connect to headphones

4. Connected! But the sound quality is shit

5. Spend an hour or so learning about codec sinks and how Bluetooth is the definition of an overengineered clusterfuck

6. Install some package from the aur to get AAC codec support

7. Now we have high fidelity audio, but the headphones still connect to the crappy SBC sink, so I spend another 45 minutes writing a shell script to automatically switch to the AAC sink when a Bluetooth headset connects

8. It’s finally working! But now I have no motivation to do my actual work. Fml

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.

would be helpfull

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

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

Sleepy brain me sometimes makes truly confounding choices.

I elected to build openjfx from source overnight rather than installing the bin package.

It got to 35% in 8 hours.

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.

If Java versions can coexist on a system
If all java versions have their own packages on the AUR
If you can change envvars in a launch script and be sure that all processes of the application will persist your settings
Then why THE FUCK do package maintainers keep announcing to change the default java version to install their package, rather than explicitly doing that by themselves? Fuck off, do you really think yours is the only package that needs a specific Java version? Do you think each and every user will write their own init script, or edit the PKGBUILD to include the new version as an envvar in the desktop file? This is why Arch has a bad name, and they're fucking right. If you don't have the time to put a single motherfucking diff in the motherfucking pkgbuild to specify the java version in the desktop file, then don't fucking maintain the package. I know there are too few maintainers, but pretending to maintain a package while doing fuckall is much worse than leaving it unmaintained on the AUR so the first person who has time can pick it up.

!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?)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

!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. 😍

Pull Request Message -

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

Day 127: "shdheiahwjak"

Discords update "policy" is really annoying.

I daily-drive Manjaro and discord refuses to allow you to log in with an older client version when they release an update.

Manjaro's stable takes about two weeks to catch up so when this happens I'm stuck looking for an alternative way to update.

Usually I go for the AUR or (if available) unstable branch package but today the AUR wasn't up-to-date yet when I encountered this problem.

This is a minor inconvenience and was fixed about an hour later when the AUR was updated with the newer discord-electron-bin but I just don't get discords game here?

Why not allow the previous client version to connect and alert users of an available update like any other sane chat application does?

You could go for a time period like two weeks or a month and AFTER that start forcing users to update. I don't get why they force it the instant they release the update.

Just wanted to share this annoyance here, maybe someone encounters this possibility when designing update cycles for their application. I urge you not to instantly lock-out older versions. It's annoying, useless and restrictive. Or if you do so, opensource it so repositories can immediately build from source and sync and don't need to wait for a maintainer to update the bin in the repo.

I'm the maintainer of the Godot Engine package in AUR, some users have commented on the package that they would like to see it in the community repo of Arch Linux, but I have no idea how that is done.

Any pointers?

Got a problem with an AUR package. Decided to ask the AUR maintainer. Registered on the AUR page. Can't login, receiving HTTP400 bad referrer header.

Decided to report that issue. To do so, I need to register on the Arch Linux Website. Did that. To finish registration, I need to verify my account. However, the verification button just does nothing.

Removed AUR package.

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

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?

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*

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.

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

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"

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 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.

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

Ever happened?

Why is Arch User Repository considered as a strong point for Arch and Arch-based distros? is it more reliable than the way Ubuntu manages packages? is it ok to trust some guy that made a version of a program you need to run? why most of the programs that have a linux version are only available for Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora (made by their own developers)?

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?

Pamac.
I like it. It's simple and better than that "discover" software center thing.
But omg do I hate pamac. Not even talking about what it caused to the AUR. I'm talking about automatic full system updates.
It's so annoying. I'm working on something, have like 20 open windows where I'm doing something. I just need that ONE app to continue. So I install it using pamac, boom. 2GB of updates and I can't even skip it. Alright, I wait.
When it finally finished I tried continuing with what I was doing, but nah. Some nvidia driver update broke my stuff and I have to reboot my system.
That's very annoying. Remember, I still have all my work open, including one app which takes a stupid amount of setup when starting. I really don't wanna have to reboot at that point. But I have to.
So I open the "windows button menu" (don't know the name, but you know what I mean) and click restart. It gives me an error. Probably updated some critical thing relating to the reboot menu which broke it.

(I know I can just use the terminal to reboot, but before I do I had to make this post.)

This isn't a one time thing. This has happened to me twice before. What really makes me mad is that I can't turn full updates off. There would be a really simple fix to all of this:
When installing an app, check for updates and just ask the user if they want to update everything, or just install this app now (and update the dependencies for it).

I understand that I have to update my system, but just let me finish my work first, okay? Just update when I'm done. It would also be nice to have an extra button for "Update and shutdown" without going the Windows route and forcing updates.
While I'm on the topic of windows, I used Windows 8 once on a laptop belonging to a family member. I was in the proccess of doing something when it just blacked out, stopped all apps and started installing updates. Not even a warning. That's just one of the reasons I'll never even consider switching to Windows.

(Using Arch with KDE btw.)

Fuck Arch Linux
Love the AUR, but the fact that every -Syu I've done led to system wide failure is unforgivable
I'm coming home Fedora, also screw you Debian and your broken packages