How is the state of tilig WMs? Last time I ried Wayland, mixing and matching WMs and status bars was really flakey, with font scaling and rendering issues. There are certain things I will no longer compromise on in a WM, and if I wanted to be forced to use a specific desktop to get a working graphical environment (functioning scaling, for instance), I’d use a Mac.
Herbstluftwm hasn’t been ported - is there a similar configuration file-less tiling WM? On X, I could also settle for bspwm; both WMs are completely configurable on the command line. How about bars? I’m using polybar right now, but there are a dozen to choose from under X, any of which I can use with whichever WM (and have it function properly).
Again, mere months ago, trying to get font scaling to work properly with the same scaling in all applications was messed up. Under X, if I set a font and size in any program (that supports font selection), I get the same apparent font size - because programs get fonts from X and the same code does all font rendering which makes everything consistent. How is that on Wayland, now, because that was a major deal-breaker last a couple of months ago.
I used sway for a long time(months to a year?) and it was very stable. I’m currently messing with plasmas tiling option ATM and it works okay… Not as fluid but well enough that I haven’t switched back.
Hyprland is one of the ones I tried, and it may be closest to what I’m looking for. I’ve heard the community is extremely toxic, though. Software projects having “conmunities” is a relatively recent thing, for me, so it’s not a big deal, but what’s been your experience?
Me too, mostly, but popping into a forum to ask questions is a thing. I stopped using bspwm largely because the one responsive person in the Matrix channel was a first-class self-righteous turd; that alone wouldn’t have been so bae, but none of the admins called them on it, and, well, herbstluftwm turned out to be better software anyway. The hlwm community has avoided being toxic mainly by not existing, AFAICT.
Using wayfire (disabling the fancy resources eating plugins) + waybar + plus a bunch wlr utilities (some from sway).
I’m using integrated intel gpus. There’s a laptop with both the integrated intel gpu and a nvidia discrete one, but I had to configure the bios to only use the inegrated one, both the binary nvidia drivers, and the open source nvidia drivers fail to set fbdev=1 (the external hdmi monitor is the one associated to the nvidia gpu, and it gets a blank screen), which is required for enabling KMS, which is required for wayland, so no luck. Nouveau actually works, but it’s not stable enough, after some time of use the monitor turn off and there’s no way to turn it back on, and it feels slow or lagging compared to the intel gpu, although it should be the opposite. So I gave up on nvidia on that laptop, and any other box only has the integrated intel gpu anyways. I’ve read of successful stories with nvidia, both with the binary and the open drivers, but I think it’s not a generic thing that all nvidia gpus will work well on wayland with nvidia drivers. The noveau drivers are the only ones working for some gpus, but not stable enough. So I stick with the recommendation to stay away from nvidia if using wayland…
I guess although WM still applies, on the wayland jargon they’re called compositors, and the wayland compositors are not as light as the Xorg WMs, since there’s no Xorg server, and part of the responsibility of the server goes to the compositors on wayland…
There’s labwc, which is the compositor I would have chosen, but the developer decided to stick with xml configuration equivalent to the the openbox one, and also with the openbox themes/styles, which I never liked. On Xorg I used fluxbox + tint2 + …, and I tried openbox, but totally disliked it compared to fluxbox… But other than config and theming, I like its idea of being a light compositor.
Actually by disabling the plugins I am on wayfire, it’s pretty much labwc but with new decent config (I really like its config BTW), and using the gui toolkit theming, so no specific wayfire theming at all, which is nice, as opposed to the labwc own theming… Still, labwc is also an option for some.
Wayfire and labwc are not tiling compositors as most of all others, :)
I can’t remember what I did to break it, but back when I was in high school I was tinkering right before class and rendered my laptop unbootable. I booted into an Arch Linux USB, chrooted into my install, found the config file I messed with, then reverted it. I booted back into my system and started the bell ringer assignment as quickly as I could. I had one minute left when the teacher walks by, looks at it, and says that I did a really good job. She never knew my laptop was unbootable just 2 minutes earlier.
I was testing a custom initramfs that would load a full root into a ramdisk, and when I was going to shut down I tried to run rm -rf --no-preserve-root / to see what would happen, since I was on a ramdisk anyway. The computer would not boot after that because it nuked the UEFI options.
Finally doing what they should have done ages ago. If you leave packaging and backporting work to distro maintainers, you’ll get whatever they have the time for, whether they’re volunteers or employees. If the results are not okay for you - package it yourself.
I’m relatively new to Mint, but I thought that sudo apt update just checked for updates and sudo apt upgrade -y was for actually installing the updates. I don’t see why that would break it though.
Thanks for putting this out for public benefit! I haven’t messed around with MacOS much but the things you’ve mentioned are nice to know.
I believe that’s a shell/bash standard variable, but I need to learn where it came from and how it works
You may know this already, but I’ve found the man (as in manual) utility to be one of the most useful things in GNU/Linux user space. I don’t have much insight into ‘${file##*/}’ off the cuff, but I can tell you there’s manual entries for file, sh, and bash that may help you track it down.
<span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># simply type man [some-command]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">man file
</span><span style="color:#323232;">man sh
</span><span style="color:#323232;">man bash
</span><span style="color:#323232;">man man </span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># very useful for getting started!
</span>
Manpages are local to your system so they’re extremely fast to pull up and searchable!
Here’s some online info on man if you’re interested:
Yes, thank you! The man pages have been a huge help as I’m working through things. Sometimes I don’t know enough to understand what the man pages are telling me, and then I usually end up on stack exchange looking at a command example that someone has helpfully broken down.
It’s definitely a skill that I haven’t mastered either! That being said I think it’s one of the pillars of being a bonafide “super user” and I’d like to set there one day :)
Maybe I’ll take inspiration from this post and write something up about what I learn in the future about manpages.
I had rEFInd and GRUB installed entirely by accident, and a botched update for Arch hosed my entire EFI setup making it impossible to boot Linux or Windows w/o a LiveCD. Thankfully it self repaired once I nuked rEFInd. I ended up going back to Ubuntu, but I hate snaps. I still would recommend Arch for most Linux users who want the power windows.
Actually, I have a story that I’d consider an achievement even though it was extremely stupid and by all accounts should’ve bricked the system but didnt.
So I was on windows and wanted to install linux as a dual-boot on the main drive. The problem was that my mobo didnt like this particular and the only flash drive I’ve had, dropping it out mid-boot, before I got any usable terminal, so a usual install method wasn’t an option. So I had this crazy idea to start a vmware vm in windows and pass the linux iso and the boot drive directly to it and try to install it live over the running system. Unfortunately, vmware guys thought of this and there’s a check that disallows passing the boot drive to vms. So i created a bunch of .vmdks for another drive and fiddled with them in notepad until I somehow managed to trick vmware and at some point it started booting the same windows copy that I was sitting on. I quickly powered it off, added the linux iso and proceeded to install like I usually would. It did involve some partition shuffling, but, somehow, it went smoothly, linux installed, grub caught on, and even windows somehow survived, even though it was physically moved around on the disk. It serms that vmware later patched this out, because later in an attempt to re-create the trick of running the same copy of windows twice, but after updates to both windows and vmware, I was met with the same old error that boot drive is not allowed when trying to add that same virtual drive I had laying around.
I had a similar debacle, when I managed to corrupt a btrfs file system to point it wouldn’t mount again…
I was preparing it to have as my main system on bare hardware. I had accidentally mounted the same block device simultaneously in the host and guest: kablamo silent corruption and all 5 hours of progress lost.^*^ :(
I had a similar setup once. Dualboot, plus the VM with the same physical disk, to access windows, while running linux.
All it took was a small distraction… I’ve missed the grub timeout, and accidentally booted the same ubuntu partition in a VM that was running on the real HW. To shreds…
Allrighty, now we officially need a program (I’m hesitant to call it malware since technically it’s for the user’s good XD) that covertly replaces a running copy of windows with linux… Besides, I think it was possible before to install stuff like Ubuntu directly from windows?
I had an old laptop that I removed the screen from and it still booted. Perhaps if your screen has broken in a way that the GPU detects as a hardware failure, it might prevent booting? Maybe removing the screen entirely might solve the issue? Or at least disconnecting the internal cable from the screen to the motherboard…
Well done! Your curiosity will be rewarded. I would recommend learning some basic bash to start services, read the logs. Basic cli can really help with debugging when you encounter some new challenges (journalctl command for example).
Another thing I can recommend: When I started with Linux I bought a raspberry and used it without a gui to experiment so my shenanigans were less risky on my main pc. This was 3 years ago and now I’m working at a tech company managing 200 servers because the curiosity and empowered feeling never went away.
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