i think it depends on the image you get - for archlinux you can simply cat (or dd) the file onto a usb stick and it works perfectly fine, bootable. but i think i have seen an image at some point where it didn’t work, but i don’t recall what it was.

cat works perfectly fine too 👌

well you can never be 100% certain your laptop won’t spontaneously die either.

for any new arch user, i do recommend keeping an archiso live USB around in case something really does happen - since every arch user should know the basics of how it works, it should be easy enough to recover as well.

knowing that, i really only check the news out of curiosity, since i’m not a grub user i haven’t had arch be unbootable since i started using it years ago. even if it did i’m confident enough it’d be a quick fix.

hard disagree on this… while for people who don’t know it it might look like programming, it’s really not much different than editing config files (which people who don’t know it will assume is programming too).

Sure, the language used by bash can be used to write massive programs. But in 99% cases using the CLI is like using a gui with a button and a text field - type some text into the field and then click the button, letting whatever software you’re running take the content of the text field and do something with it.

way closer, in fact, to executing a discord bot command, than to actual programming as in software development (what i’d argue people think of when talking about programming)

funnily enough, i see it as one of the advantages of arch, and a reason i’ll keep putting up with the constant updating for the forseeable future - nvidia support has gotten way better recently, and since arch has very recent packages i haven’t had nvidia issues in quite a while now.

Once it all lands in debian i’ll consider giving debian another shot on desktop… but that’ll take a while.

while you do have a point, i’m still having issues with taskwarrior printing it’s update notifications, even after opening an issue and the maintainers patching it.

The thing is, i use arch on 3 different devices, and i don’t need to see every news entry 3 times, so yes in my case having it as default in pacman would indeed be bloat.

That said, there is PLENTY of places where I think arch could have saner defaults. but the beauty of arch is that it is made to be configured exactly the way you like it, so you really can’t fault arch as much in this case, compared to other distros that try to take all decisionmaking away from the user.

I think it’s like with bears, where parks have the issue of designing a trashcan that is easy for humans to open but hard for bears to open - there’s a significant overlap between the dumbest humans and the smartest bears. I’d argue it’s the same with crows.

i like cmus, but it is commandline-only.

gammastep works just fine for me on sway, and it appears the maintainer is still replying to issues on that repo. i wouldn’t worry too much just yet.

that said, it seems to not work for hyprland, so for anyone using that, look for something else

In my view, by far the biggest reason to switch is that Telegram doesn’t end-to-end encrypt chats by default.

Yes you can start encrypted chats specifically, but i’ll bet 99% of chats on telegram aren’t encrypted - meaning whoever has access to the telegram servers can read all the messages.

Signal claims to end-to-end encrypt all chats by default, and if you want to be 100% sure you can in theory read the source code and compile the app yourself. this means signal cannot read any of your messages, even if police asks them to or servers get seized. That’s a massive advantage in privacy.

who’s doing the gunning? we dont have that many combat robots yet, and i still have hope that communication is open enough and most people aren’t too brainwashed to realize firing on your own countrypeople is bad.

but we better do sonething before these change.

light. used to struggle hard to wake up even with several loud alarms, but a bright light turning on before my alarm made it so much easier. especially nice is a smart bulb that brightens slowly.

I know stuff is missing from it and it doesn’t have reviews, but when i’m on my own i just check organic maps first, if i find something that looks decent i just try it.

when traveling with others i often have to turn to tripadvisor or google maps to make sure to find something they like, not everyone is as happy to just try as me.

if it’s free, you’re the product.

signal seems really good right now, with open source clients, but they already show that they’d like to keep the ecosystem locked down by not allowing 3rd party clients. at some point they will need a way to pay for their datacenters, and even if they claim the foundation or whatever is doing well, i can see the pestering for donations getting much worse in the future.

that said, threema is far from optimal too, im still waiting for matrix servers to become solid options. last time i wanted to set up synapse, the only captcha they supported was fucking Google captcha :|

i think flatpak has done a lot to make this easier, but at the same time… i’ll admit i’m not a fan of it (mostly due to random issues).

the way i see it, more distros need something like arch linux’ AUR. if an application is reasonably easy to build, it really does not take much to get it into the AUR, from where there’s also a path towards inclusion in the official repos.

i don’t know too much about other distros, but arch really makes it amazingly easy to package software and publish everything needed for others to use it. i feel like linux needs more of this, not less - there’s a great writeup that puts why linux maintainers are important way better than i ever could:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230525163337/https://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/

i’d suggest starting by finding out what package in your distro actually decides where audio goes - mostly it is pulseaudio (older) or pipewire (newer).

depending on the details of how your distro and the dongle work, it could either be a simple “pactl set-default-sink <headset-name>”, or a more complicated set of udev rules or pipewire/wireplumber scripts.

note that distros using pipewire still often support a lot of pactl commands, so it may be worth looking at the simple option even when not using pulseaudio.

my phone won’t even do “force stop” anymore… fairphone 5 running whatever os fairphone ships, and all force stop does is put the app in the background or whatever, if it has an issue the issue will still be there when opening it again.

personally, i’d have pretty big benefits for my homelab if i could use my own ipv6 range for everything. having only a singe public IP is just very limiting.

sadly, my ISP does give out ipv6 for home networks, but i cannot connect to any of them from my mobile phone with the same carrier. so that’s fun. they talked about rolling out ipv6 on mobile networks years ago, but i guess it’ll take a few more…

i’m thinking long term - sure, right now google knowing everything about me isn’t dangerous. but if a massive political slide to the right happens in countries that host services, suddenly all the saved data from many years ago can be used against me. and don’t fall for the “end to end encrypted” bullshit either - all these services can flip a switch and have your encryption keys instantly. (or, if its an open source app that ACTUALLY keeps keys on the device only, which is extremely rare, it’s one update away from happening, and you better read the whole diff every update and compile the app yourself.)

that’s why i choose to self host everything. yes there’s a risk of being hacked, or installing something malicious because i don’t read every diff on every update. but i feel more confortable with it being my own responsibility, and my services are also all on seperate virtual machines to hopefully isolate any breaches.

I’m using Trilium notes. it’s simple enough and does what i need. Used to use Obsidian but wanted something open source, and with Trilium you can self-host the sync server for free (even comes with a handy web-ui).

Note that it is much simpler than obsidian, but for me it’s plenty. It was easy to import my obsidian vault into it, and it allows exporting as .md files which work fine back in obsidian too.

Recently the dev said he’s putting it into maintenance mode, so no new features will come to Trilium. There’s a community around Trilium Next that wants to keep expanding it, but personally i hope Trilium stays as it is and is maintained for a long time.