Is conky still a thing? I used it for that when I used an exclusively passive cooled PC a few years ago. You were able to easily create bar graphs in a config file and even include output of commands.
Dear God, anyone who doesn’t already use LaTeX should not be told to use LaTeX. It’s really a great departure from traditional word processors and I firmly believe that people really need to discover it on their own, or else they will just be confused and think it’s an arcane, dated, and useless piece of software.
I think you can use Arch for university, but I have a few suggestions:
Don’t update packages unless you have time to fix issues. Rare, but it happens, although usually minor.
Never mess with greeters, kernel modifications, bootloaders, or anything else before login. Fixing issues may require a live USB and take some time. Avoid the temptation! (Ask how I know…)
Use Flatpak where you can for increased stability by way of fewer packages to update.
Of course, you could also use a non-rolling release distro. Nothing wrong with that.
Excuse me if this is a bit of a dumb question, as I have never particularly worried about packaging methods and simply installed what I needed from the official Arch packages or AUR, but how does Flatpak lead to fewer updates? I know it sandboxes things, that’s why I’ve been interested in it for applications I don’t quite trust like Discord, but I never got around to actually switching applications of that sort over and trying the format out.
Speaking of Discord, hooking that out of the “normal packages”, aka everything I update via yay, would be beneficial anyways, since it’s the only thing that forces me to update my system by saying how I’m oh so lucky about a new update coming out and I don’t wanna mess with partial system updates. That’s kinda besides the point though, I just wanted to complain.
Good question. Flatpak doesn’t lead to fewer updates overall, but it does lead to fewer system packages installed via pacman or yay, which can run into dependency conflicts unlike Flatpak.
Flatpak provides a common runtime upon which different applications can be installed via containers, much like apps on a phone. You can then adjust the permissions for each app such as which directories it can access. It’s kind of like installing Firefox (e.g. Flatpak) and then a Firefox extension such as uBlock Origin (e.g. LibreOffice). It doesn’t matter if you’re on Ubuntu, Fedora, or Arch, from the extension’s perspective it’s the same old Firefox and doesn’t touch anything else on your computer. This means uninstalling is clean and it has no dependencies on other packages installed.
The disadvantage with Flatpak is they can be slower (sometimes not even noticeable) and take up more space, although the runtime can be re-used between Flatpak applications. Personally, I like Flatpak for large GUI applications like LibreOffice, which has 170+ dependencies if installed via pacman.
Huh, neat. On my current EOS Desktop PC it’s a bit too late to uninstall everything and reinstall it as a Flatpak, but I’ll keep that in mind for new Linux installs. Thank you :3
The easiest step into this world is KDE. It has a store for users to share global themes, color themes, even sddm animations.
You can use kwin rules to send certain apps to certain desktops, start shaded, all sorts of fun stuff.
And then you can throw a tiling manager on top of that. If you want to use the control panel, you can install bismuth. If you’re comfortable editing text files, awesome or i3 (but I have yet to go that far).
If you really want to go for it, hyperland looks incredible, but it is a lot of up front work.
I use Arch for all my computers, including my "critical" systems. I only do full upgrades when I know I have the time to troubleshoot something broken, but rarely need to do so.
More than this, I actually use Arch as the OS for thousands of computers for my work that end up in customer hands, who expect stability. I'm not sure at what point it stops being Arch, though - I pin the package repositories to internal mirrors with fixed package distributions from specific dates to control the software that goes to them, so it's not really rolling release anymore I guess - I control the releases and when updates go out.
Arch is what you make of it. My Arch project desktop pc is constantly shifting and breaking and needing attention as I continually improve it and play with things. My Arch laptop that runs my life and work and is the most important computer I own is a paragon of stability and perfect functioning.
Nope 😂 though, despite their decision obviously having nothing to do with me, I did find it to be somewhat flattering and a bit reassuring that the fine Valve engineers seemed to make similar decisions to me.
This Lemmy community is a pretty good resource for inspiration, and sometimes you can snag animation or icon sources from the descriptions or comments. It’s not super in depth on the how to end of it though.
Perhaps it’s important to point towards resources where new users can check compatibility; like e.g. linux-hardware.org. Or even better ones that I’m unaware of.
My kids only know Linux and have never seen Windows in their life before. They know their way around KDE just fine and get the stuff done they need. For gaming, it is steam with proton but mostly they game on consoles.
I find it to be quite inaccurate depending on who you are. As a beginner, it’s fine, but for me, for example, the distro I’m looking for is Arch-meets-NixOS. All the packages I need, with the packages being easy to install, avoiding compiling wherever possible, NOT immutable, and having a Stable release, with a 6-month release cycle.
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