Jack of random trades at random times that randomly catch my interest for a random amount of time.

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: February 12th, 2025

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  • I’m a very mid-level Linux user. I use systemd because I’m just not familiar with how init systems actually work. I love that the choice is there, but I think systemd has it’s place with users like me that get confused.

    That being said, I did run Dracut on EndeavourOS because it was recommended for that distro. I never dived into it to see what the exact difference was, though I do remember running into some things I needed to do that Dracut did differently. There may come a day when I dive into inits, but for now I’m just happy if my system boots to desktop.


  • You’re not wrong, though. If you want all your packages to work correctly, you gotta stay up to date. I know some of my packages will break if I go more than a week.

    Yesterday I read about RATs becoming more frequent in the AUR in some packages. They predict that they’re going to become more frequent soon. I’m wondering if it might be time to switch my main machine to NixOS now. I may check out Bazzite and Nobara first, though.

    However, I guess Arch is doing something to protect against these? It’s going to be part of BumpBuddy.


  • Yeah, that checks out. I think there’s other ways of doing it, I just never manages to get it working. I’ll have to check again, but I thought KDE had something in the system settings that let you swap versions. I could be just misremembering the kernel swap settings though.

    There’s also some nvidia command hoodoo I tried and everything went well except at the end where I wound up with no graphical output at all, lol. I did a lot of messing around on fresh installs until the cord swap finally worked.


  • Yeah, it does make sense that you can compare them in that sense, but as far as actual system setup goes, I don’t think they’re comparable. Don’t get me wrong, I love NixOS. When I was learning nixlang and setting up everything to be modular and reproducible, I was having a blast.

    However, I also had a blast learning Arch and figuring out how my system works the way it does. I’ll be honest, though, NixOS helped me learn how Home was separate from Root. That alone really helped me learn how the general Linux system file hierarchy worked.

    But there are also things I would have never learned about Linux if I never messed with Arch, such as essential system symlinks, how they work, and how to use chroot in the live environment to fix broken ones (thanks to a botched Arch update, lol).

    If you like it, learn it-use it. All this comparing and inter-distro warring seems pointless. There’s not a distro I’ve used that I haven’t had things I really liked and really hated.


  • I had some weird artifacting issues in an older version of Nvidia proprietary. While viewing certain windows or colors, my screen would flicker, or else I would get weird diagonal lines across my whole screen.

    I went nuts trying to figure it out. In the end since I started on Pop!_OS, I just easily rolled back to a previous version of the proprietary drivers and called it good. Well, later I wanted to try EndeavourOS. I was too noob to figure how to roll back the drivers there.

    So a friend asked me, “Are you using display port or HDMI? Try the other one.” I highly doubted that would fix anything, but for the sake of trying everything, I switched to HDMI. And well… fuck me if it didn’t work. I’ve just been running HDMI ever since.




  • Note taking has it’s place, but I agree. Once you go from note taking into crippling habitual hivemind its lost the main point. The time I spent on making my notes look amazing and growing my thought library rather than working on executing my actual ideas was getting insane.

    I’ve seen some of the Obsidian maxi’s graphs in tutorial videos. There are people that have spent literal weeks of their precious time on these massive dot-to-line hoards. It really becomes literal e-hoarding. Like counseling levels of bad habit. Then they hold these humongous, continent-sized graphs up like a trophy. Mine’s bigger than yours. Whip it out and prove it.

    Now I only jot ideas I want to remember later if I’m in the middle of something, write down dreams I may forget (or nightmares, as it helps me calm down and analyze them logically), and keep to my diet and shopping lists.

    I really don’t need more than that. Any reminders or schedules go in my android FOSS calendar (Etar).




  • Yeah, I was diagnosed with severe chronic anxiety, but I also have an ADHD diagnosis from when I was a kid and tested for autism. When I broke my tailbone and they gave me oxycodone, it was bliss. I could just focus and really lock in to things that interested me. It comforted me.

    I could only take 5mg. Any time I tried 10mg I panicked. So, when I ran out, I looked for an alternative that could do the same thing and found Kratom. I don’t recommend it, really. That’s why I’m still working with my doctor. I want to get off it.


  • Hasn’t helped me yet, but that’s because I haven’t found a med that doesn’t give me wild side effects.

    • SSRIs - Nightmares, anorgasmia, RLS, insomnia leading into mania.
    • SNRIs - Sleeping nearly 20 hours a day for a week. Also had a real side effect called something like “excessive disrupting and disturbing yawning” where I would constantly have yawn attacks and could not stop yawning for ten minutes. It actually drove me into a panic attack because it was messing up my breathing.
    • NDRIs - This was a wild one. I was angry and combative. I wanted to destroy everything I touched and I didn’t even care.

    I’m going back tomorrow to tell the doc that the SNRIs didn’t work, so hopefully I can try something else. Right now I have hydroxyzine as needed and it somewhat works, but it also causes nightmares for me as well if I take it too late, which kind of kills the point of taking it on sleepless nights.

    At this point I’ve just been continuing Kratom. But again, I can’t take it at night due to vivid nightmares. Seems like anything that ups my serotonin does it to me.




  • I’ve never really used Ubuntu, but I’m going to agree with others here. If its what you use, it would be better in the sense that it would be much easier for you to give her phone assistance when she needs it, rather than giving her something you’re not used to and possibly having to go over and troubleshoot for her.

    If she wants something more in the line with Windows, you could try Kubuntu, but I think the rigging behind KDE is pretty complicated for a casual user. You may want to help her set up the way she wants her desktop to look at first if you go this route. The only other Windows-like desktop is Cinnamon, but Cinnamon-Wayland is still in alpha and once they officially drop it that could make more work for you later.

    Admittedly, I have 0 experience with the Unity DE, so that’d be your call if you think you can familiarize it for her.



  • Manjaro has been pretty quiet for a long time. There’s gotta be a point where we forgive and forget. I like Manjaro and used it as my entry point to Arch. It sets a lot more up for you out of the box and has manjaro-specific package bundles that just work on install.

    According to Manjarno, its been just under three years since their last mistake, and that was just forgetting to renew the SSL cert for their archived forums. Probably about time we let it back into the Arch family.