I’d just like to interject for a moment…
I would say willingness to learn and to compromise. And by compromise i’m mainly talking about trying to find alternatives to software that might not exist on linux, and see if those work for you. And if you end up finding a piece of software you need that really has no good alternative to what you need, you can always either go the virtual machine route, or the dualboot route, but i personally think that should be considered a last resort.
Yeah, i’m realizing more and more how convenient those variables are. I recently started using gtklock for example, a screenlocker that also has separate modules for extra functionality, which are also in nixpkgs, but the problem is that you have to explicitly specify the path to those modules in the config. So i wrote the config inside of home manager, and pointed to the modules path with the pkgs.foo variables. Worked like a charm.
I use NixOS, it appealed to me because i got to a point where i liked minimal distros like arch and void and i could build them up exactly the way i like them to be, however i didn’t like how i would have to go through that whole process again if i wanted to do a reinstall. With NixOS i can still craft my OS the way i like it, with the benefit of it being saved as a config, and easy to restore. I did make my own post-install script for void but NixOS is a more solid solution compared to my own janky script. I’m hoping to finally settle down on this distro. I guess the upside to the huge learning curve with nix is that it’s a good motivator to not abandon it because it would feel like my efforts to learn it would go to waste lol.
Yeah it’s at the point where i’m wondering if i still even need xorg. I’m still keeping it around just in case for now, but i could very easily purge it from my system anytime since i’m using nixos and all my xorg related settings are in a specific file. The main pet peeve i have with wayland is gaming related, and should hopefully improve when wine and proton go native wayland. I have a dual monitor setup and games always choose the wrong monitor by default, which means i can only use the resolution and refreshrate of the secondary monitor. I have a keybind to set the primary xwayland monitor with xrandr, which solves the problem, but it is a bit hacky. I also need to toggle vrr on and off with a keybind because it causes flickering on my monitor. It’s a bit annoying but atleast it works, on xorg you can’t even use vrr with multi monitor to begin with.
I wonder what distrotube is going to use from now on since he’s an arcolinux user. He recently made a video about turning dtos into an installscript bundled with a base arch iso, maybe he’ll use that?
Honestly wasn’t expecting them to use Hall Effect in the first place (have any consoles actually had those in recent years?) But let’s be real, this is also the least of the switch 2’s problems. Everything around this console is way too damn expensive. The only thing that’s priced reasonably (imo atleast) is the actual console itself.
Seems like a strange choice. If anything i would’ve expected them to just use a firefox fork or something.
I haven’t tried swaylock unfortunately, gtklock is the first wayland screenlocker i tried. Before that i think i was using i3lock-color on xorg, which also worked fine as far as i can remember, but the problem with xorg screenlocking is that it isn’t actually very safe. Also, i’m not sure what distro you are using, but if it is a systemd distro there is probably a better way to trigger the screenlocker. I’m not sure if that script works in that case because it might be elogind specific. elogind is used on distros like artix and void because they don’t use systemd. Elogind is basically just the logind part ripped out of systemd.
I recently finally configured my lockscreen again after switching to wayland. I’m using gtklock and so far it has been working really well. I’m using void linux with elogind installed, laptop suspends when closing the lid ootb. In order to trigger the lockscreen on suspend, i’m using a script placed in /etc/elogind/system-sleep, as described on the artix wiki
I like it mainly because of the image protocol and supporting both x11 and wayland. I still have alacritty installed as well because i like how damn fast it is. If alacritty had proper image support i’d probably only be using alacritty, but they are both great terminal emulators.
I’ve been sticking with music players that can output directly through alsa. I settled on strawberry cause it can do that and also has other features that i care about baked in ootb. Deadbeef can also output directly through alsa and i liked it for the most part, but what i didn’t like was that things like mpris support wasn’t baked in, so i would have to mess with plugins. I don’t know if there are any other players that can output directly through alsa, those are the only two that i could find so far.
I’m not a programmer so i don’t have much skin in the game, but from how it’s described it seems like a good idea to me and rust seems like a solid language to me. I do understand the concern from devs who don’t know rust and don’t want to learn it, but i guess that also depends on how much they would actually have to interact with it.
I really love bash scripting. I use it to symlink my dotfiles from my git repo, to configure my void system the way i like it, dmenu scripts, and i also use it on my laptop to send me notifications when my battery is almost empty, when i plug/unplug the charger, when it’s fully charged, and to hibernate when it’s lower than 5%. For some reason apps like upower don’t seem to work on my laptop so bash offered a solution.
This is kinda unrelated to the post but do icc profiles now generally work on wayland? I thought last time i read about it it didn’t work yet but maybe i’m mistaken.
I won’t bother going into technical details about x11 and wayland since other people already explained it much better than i ever could, but basically wayland is supposed to be replacing x11, because the codebase is so old now that it has become very hard to maintain and implement new features without breaking things. A window manager pretty much only handles the placement of windows on the screen, and you have to use seperate applications for setting a wallpaper, getting notifications, application launcher, etc. Whereas a desktop environment is a fully fledged out of the box experience. I personally really like window managers because i like the workflow of tiling window managers in particular, which places the windows in a predefined layout for you. Something that might be a bit confusing is that window managers on wayland are called compositors, which is because in wayland the window manager also has to do it’s own compositing. In x11 you could use something like picom, which is a seperate compositor program that you could use to add graphical effects to any window manager, but on wayland this doesn’t exist and the window manager has to implement its own compositing.
If you’re not afraid to dive straight into minimalism/command line, void linux could be a good choice, especially if the laptop is 32bit because void still has 32bit repos.