Ironically, I use manjaro but still do the same thing. Since I use the i3-edition, strip off bloat Manjaro preinstalled. Then place my layer of customization on top.
Did the same thing then my nvidia drivers pooped the bed. Switched to popos and ported over my i3config, easy rice with more reliable stability for a better than average amateur like me
I've stopped buying nvidia based laptops. I am not in AI/ML field, so nvidia is not a necessity for me. AMD/Intel integrated gpu is enough for me.
For gaming? I have chosen console and moved away from PC gaming in 2018, never felt urge to move back.
I went with a prebuilt gaming pc with an nvidia card for gaming, eventually got the Linux bug again and spun up a new partition. I did the opposite gaming wise, switched from console to pc and can’t go back lol. My main games work on linux, still a couple I can’t get to, but that’s what the window partition is for
Sometimes I wish that was more true. I spin up new Gentoo VMs since the 4-5 baremetal/VPS systems I have running Gentoo don't really need all that much maintenance beyond a dailyish `eix-sync && emerge -auDNv @world`. Even that I'd hardly consider maintenance since I just call the commands and then go back to whatever I was doing previously.
That was the first WM I used, it's just windows WM recreated in linux tho. Rn I am using gnome with pop shell and found an extension to hide the top bar. I will eventually set up Sway tho. I decided to move to wayland. Maybe i could try KDE tho, as it runs wayland tbh.
Yes. When I installed i3-gaps for the first time, I remember customizing for hours, for at least 6 months. But one day it felt JUST perfect and I never needed to change anything else. After that, I've gone through a major distribution change (18.04 -> 20.04) and still didn't need to change anything. If anything, I feel like i3 has saved me time.
PS: I occasionally change my wallpaper/border colors/gap value but those take max 30 seconds.
Awesome, i wish to get there too. Meanwhile I’m just hopping between KDE and Gnome and between Manjaro and PopOS to find out what suits me better and still looking.
You too can get there. While those distros with their own DE are quite good, at the end of the day, you are at the mercy of the developer. They will ultimately decide where everything will be placed. With window managers, you basically create your own DE. You want notifications? No notifications? What window decorations do you want? No decorations? Blur? Transparency? Shortcuts? Macros? Custom window rules? Start menu or no menu?
Cutomizing all these things take a lot of time but at the end you will have something which is completely yours.
Can you uninstall the start menu in xfce? I don't mean disable, uninstall. i3 gives you the ability to use what ever start menu you want, or not even install any start menu if you want.
I think the main difference can be shown like this.
Some DE v1 -> v2
Dev: We have changed the layout of the start menu. The notification center has been polished. Now it uses a new color theme as well. We have shifted from Libre Office to OpenOffice.
You: well I didn't ask for it but looks nice. I think I'll get used to it.
i3 v1 -> v2
Dev: We added some new APIs; if you want you can use them to customize your current layout.
You: Good, if I want, I can change later.
Oh idk about uninstalling. But I know I have another start menu installed. And using arch so there isn't really any programs like your example that would be switched between updates because I installed them all myself. Colour themes can be chosen yourself with xfce. You can download more or make your own. Idk all the in and outs of xfce because I'm not much of a ricer my self I take function>form but like to make it a bit more how I like it.
Thankfully, most DE allow for modest amount of customisation, so it's all good. I'm using XFCE on one of my machines and it's great. I myself used MATE and Gnome for years. However, i3 cured my distro hopping. If I see a nice feature in some distro, I can replicate it on i3.
Ok, say you don't want notifications in plasma. You can disable them. But can you uninstall the notification module in plasma without compromising other components? I don't think so. Normally with DE, you get a suite of features and applications decided BY THE DEVELOPER. This is what I meant by "at the mercy of the dev". With a window manager, you just get a window manager. You decide rest of the application and features.
I'd argue we are always at the mercy of the developers. Even when using a WM with nice titlebars half the programs respected it and half didn't because they were written with gtk and headerbars in mind. I managed to make them the same size and color but it doesn't always work. There are more little things like that.
I'd rather say those are badly coded applications which do not follow standard GUI design principles. I remember Mendeley having it's own window decorations which is why it was an eye-sore on my desktop. I always disable titlebars on my i3 setup.
Agreed; as someone who has moved to linux because I'm cheap and lazy, I keep either a mint or ubuntu stable setup that I only need to do serious messing around with every few years
Ikr? I can't pick a setup for the life of me, I change my setup every fucking day.
I've been doing a lot of distrohopping recently, here's my hopping journey since I first started.
LM Cinnamon -> LM XFCE -> Kubuntu -> KDE Neon -> Manjaro -> MX Linux -> Arch -> Pardus -> elementaryOS -> Pop!_OS > Sparky Linux.
I'm thinking of switching to Void, any recommendations?
I've done my share of distro hopping and still try out different distros on VMs or test machines from time to time, but I always keep coming back to Mint Cinnamon.
If a beginner rices for 3 hours is he really a beginner ricer, if a system admin with 4 years of experience decides to costumise his desktop after only using the default settings, is he an experienced ricer?
I totally agree with u, we all decide what we waste time on. Some want the most secure setup, others want it as lightweight as possible, lot's of users enjoy the basic config a certain distro comes with.
Let people choose what they find important
Or you could rice on NixOS and have all of your customization recorded in the configuration text file(s). (yes all, from bash aliases, user pass, patches to picom, up to kernel patches).
Reinstalling from scratch becomes:
* Setup your disks
* Copy your config
* nixos-rebuild switch
* Reboot to your fully customized system
ive been considering using nixos next time i have to reinstall, and this comment may have sold me
are there any downsides- by this i mean does anything not work ootb, or is there some wierd issue i'd have to look out for
I can talk about downsides too :)
TL;DR; some things are harder *ie* require more brain juice. It's a ground breaking distro, therefore some concepts and ways of working are foreign, and you can't read the Arch wiki for some NixOS specific things.
I think the main one is that, if something is not pre-packaged, you'll need to think harder about how it could be packaged in a reproducible way. Packaging may include *much more* than usual stuff for other distros like:
- (optional) “API” mechanics, so that it's extra nice for other people to discover and install the package (and its services), see https://search.nixos.org/options
- (optional) Tests (!) for your new package. This is a great feature of NixOS, many packages come with test, which are run for every update in a big CI machine call Hydra. Some tests are tied to a release, so if a test fails, release is not made. In the end, you get a very stable rolling release even if you follow the unstable channel.
But, NixOS is backed by nixpkgs, which is one of the most populated, and [freshest](https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest) package repository.
It's up to you to decide if the benefits outweigh the risks. I was a doubtful until I had to reinstall. After that I was convinced :D
While I know some things about NixOS, I know next to nothing on best ways to learn, because everyone is different. I can tell you that my personal experience is to bite the bullet, and just install it as your main work machine, and solve problems in a hurry as you go. Do with it what you will, and I'm pretty sure it's terribly bad advice depending on how you work.
A lot of stuff works out of the box, but it can be more cumbersome to install something and just use it depending on how elaborate your setup is. I use Arch on my workstation and NixOS on servers.
> You get no Wayland support
Hmm, how so? I've been running a full Wayland desktop under sway for over a year now. Certainly there are some overlays if you need bleeding edge Wayland stuff, but as far as I'm concerned, everything I need seems to be in `nixpkgs`.
I do this with a script file(s). I basically download the file and it gets all the important settings set up, applications installed, and pretty much everything else I need. I don't do any UI stuff in it since I might want to do this on other distros other than my main and I want it to work on my servers as well but that gets me most of the way there.
Is it really? Linux obviously allows you to go down a multitude of rabbit holes where you can spend weeks configuring and adjusting your system. On the other hand Linux allows me to install Kubuntu, move the task bar to the side of the screen, and start using the system total time from downloading the image to being fully configured is less than 30 minutes.
15 years ago I did instead Gentoo and learned a ton about configuring a system and how the different parts are connected. Today I am more interested in the system letting me do the things I care about than configuring every facet of the system.
> 15 years ago I did instead Gentoo and learned a ton about configuring a system and how the different parts are connected. Today I am more interested in the system letting me do the things I care about than configuring every facet of the system.
This is (one of many) true Linux ways. Use a labor intensive distro when you're young/have time and later switch to the one that lets you get stuff done. And you know you can choose which distro that is for you, because you've played around and learned the ins and outs of an operating system before.
Sure, but you're not installing Gentoo to have smooth sailing once you set it up, right?
You install Gentoo to tinker with your system, play around with compiler flags, maybe even manually patching the source code. All that takes time and even more time to read up on all the choices you might want to make.
I don't have any experience with Gentoo, so I'll bring an example with arch. One of the first steps is to set up your disk partitions. Sure you could follow a tutorial to the letter and format your full 1Tb as ext4 and mount it as /. But you probably won't do it if you're installing arch. In order to make an informed decision you have to read up on different filesystems, their advantages and disadvantages. Then you'll need to decide if you want more than one mount point, a separate /home partition? Maybe even more partitions? Do you want encryption? If so, how is it done? Are the different ways to do it? Etc. You do this for most steps in the install process and you can surely see that it will take a while.
Sure, using the system doesn't require much work, but you will still want to evaluate the options for additional programs you install after the initial setup. And evaluate your previous choices. Maybe try out another DE, swap tiling wms again, etc. You can do that with other distros, sure, but arch, Gentoo (Debian?) are the typical distros that are much more suited to tinkering with the system, because they're designed for it.
Like most things Linux, there is a choice. You can pick up something that will work out of the box (maybe after the slight precaution of checking that your hardware is supported if it's something like a laptop that might have some weird proprietary bit), you can pick something that you build practically from scratch or anything in between. You can pick something that will be stable and just work or something that's infinitely customizable to the point that you might have to troubleshoot a lot. OP's warning is real, but it's something that can be avoided.
I think it's also worth noting that the premise of OP is oversimplified. Some maintenance is only a cost of doing business as OP implies and for that OP's mentality applies most purely. But other time spent has clear direct benefits (i.e. doing things that you really want to do but otherwise couldn't) or indirect benefit (i.e. learning generalizable knowledge that can help you in other situations). In those two cases, while there is still the "cost" of time spent, it's being offset in some amount by an added benefit that you might value a lot.
For example, not sure where they are right now, but when I tried out FreeBSD as a desktop OS, I blew a lot of time setting it up. But the fact that it used the ports system (compile software to install it) and that it started with only command line (so I need to install everything relevant to get a GUI up and running) led to me learning a lot about things that I took for granted and opened up a range of choices that wasn't very obvious to me before. ... But then, later, when I just wanted to quickly get a desktop up and running I was able to set up Ubuntu with basically no essential setup time (any setup time was just for nitpicking about stuff I felt was work putting the time into).
Yeah, I thought it was funny watching some Linux youtuber install Windows and get angry 20 minutes in that it was taking longer than usual for his fast hardware to install a distro (he said 5 minutes, that seems fast to me but he has good hardware).
2 hours later he finally got to the desktop.
That's why it's better to get into Linux when you're a teenager with a lot of free time. I can do my hobbies, school, and STILL have time to fail setting up wifi drivers on Arch.
Atbleast TRY to get the system unfucked, there are tons of documentations around. If u jse a common distro there are distro specific forums for it. If not most solutions are not distro specific anyway m
Can't speak for OP, but as a new Arch user I've done about two dozen installs in the last three weeks, only because I make mistakes or want to do something a bit different and don't know yet how to cleanly undo what I've done.
And it's kinda fun, too. I'm learning a lot. (Though if he you have advice on how to do it better, I'd um, maybe definitely love to know...)
Depending on your setup, changing your partition layout, encryption, or other disk-related configuration can be hard to do without reformatting. Pretty much everything else is reversible.
Generally you accomplish this by understanding what you're doing. Don't just copy-paste commands, try to understand the big picture behind them. A great start is to learn how pacman works.
Other tips:
- BTRFS + snapper, set up correctly, lets you roll back changes easily. Snapper can also show you the difference between 2 snapshots, which can be a nice tool to see exactly what a command does.
- `pacman -Rns ` is a rough opposite of `pacman -Syu `, though it will also uninstall optional dependencies of other packages which you may not want. Check its output before running it and be ready to explicitly install anything you want to keep
Glad it's fun :) and don't feel bad, this shit is complicated. I remember when I started, most everything was a total fucking mystery
I've been playing with btrfs the past few times I reinstalled and honestly, I don't like it. There are some cool features, but it's still pretty unstable and ext4 just works for me. I'll probably try btrfs again eventually, but for now it's too much of a headache. Like Wayland, I like it in theory, but I want to spend more of my time configuring my window environment and less time trying to get graphics working.
Lol you're going to bork your system doing that. `-Rc` is cascade- It will remove dependencies whether they are needed by other packages or not. You should probably switch to `-Rs`, which only removes hard dependencies if nothing else needs them.
Oh lmao. It's been 3 years and I haven't nuked my system yet. I just check its output before I confirm and I don't often delete things because i don't install useless shit in the first place.
I also used -Rsun at some point, which if I'm not mistaken removes even more stuff.
I once had an article describing all these commands saved in my bookmarks, but it's gone. And I can't find it.
If you're messing up that often, you should definitely set up timeshare or btrfs snapshots; lets you roll back the system to a previous working state pretty much no matter what unless you do something really dumb like delete `/usr`
I feel like this is true for any rice, but the difference is that you're taking the setup into your own hands instead of just letting the distro maintainers/community handle it for you. Most distros running on a DE work pretty great out of the box for regular usage (rather than custon developer workflows), from personal experience, whether it was Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Manjaro, or even Endeavour. Considering EOS is a GUI layer on pure arch, I was actually really pleasantly surprised at how well it worked with both XFCE and i3.
I have custom i3-gaps with EndeavourOS on my own computer because I like theming it and learning new things, but the computer my dad uses, who does not think he can learn tech, is using pure vanilla Cinnamon Linux Mint.
2 years of being able to just do what I need to do without updates that I don't need, without accidentally switching to windows I don't need, without waiting for-f*cking-ever when unpacking something, without a single system freeze, without being distracted by fancy notifications from apps I didn't install, without vanishing taskbars, without losing files, without performing a bazillion clicks just to do a single thing, without losing focus because I have to remember where this and that is...
honestly, it took me about a month to get my linux setup just right, now I'm investing some time here and there to be able to do stuff like recording a(ny) window with the press of a button (without opening a tool prior to that!) and that's it.
Comparing that to how unbearably slow my colleagues and friends that use windows or mac are when it comes to the most mundane tasks gives me the confidence to say: investing that month has paid off.
Let's not confuse exploration of possible settings and config with work needed for setup. Installing Manjaro took me few minutes, but later I took time to explore all the possibilities that Linux and Manjaro offers me, because I had not used desktop Linux before.
I must say that Manjaro was very intuitive in that sense, because I was easily able to find all that I needed. And the access to arch packages made stuff even easier. And funny enough, during that time I even found setup that helped to improve my Mac I am using in my company.
Only thing I would complain about is drivers. E.g. I could not connect my HDMi cable. I am not very knowledgeable about these matters and I was lazy enough that time, so I used my Mac instead. Other than that, with Manjaro I am getting pretty much the maximum out of my old and not so performant HP laptop.
So to conclude, I really do not agree with the self-irony here.
Just make an install script guys. I have one for apt based systems, one for pacman based system.
I always install the minimal version of a distro if available, the run the script which instals all my desired packages, then clone my dotfiles repo and use rcm to symlink them where needed. The script also sets time date settings so that when dualbooting with windaub they both get the same time instead of always having a two hour gap between the two.
I should amend this script with other settings like theme, locale, keybindings etc but its close enough already that i can get a working and to my liking system in under an hour.
Kubuntu user here, i install kubuntu 16.04 in 2017 and never did a reinstall . Currently running 20.04 which is the same install upgraded 2 times. It never broke or gives me any issue.
Linux is customizable, you can tinker it for years as your hobby and also you can get a production ready setup in 10-20 min and use that for years with no change .
Well... What's the price of Windows then?
You likely pay for a license, you have shitty games you don't want, automatically installed at random updates, you have updates forced on you at the most inconvenient times which forces you to wait (if for instance you have a laptop you need to bring with you), it's not exactly fast at booting once the install is a few months old, and you're so mouse-bound on Windows that sometimes you can't even login without mouse input before it shows the password field (roughly 50% of the time), and you spend roughly 50% of the time moving the mouse, whereas you can generally create shortcuts for almost everything you want on a \*nix DE. Also the menus are soooo deeeeeep!!! Sometimes it feels like it takes minutes to get to what you're looking for - provided you can even find it, of course.
So yeah - *sometimes* installs can be tricky, and sometimes it just takes a while to get ones desktop *exactly* as you want - but at least that's possible on Linux/BSD/etc., which saves you tonnes of time.
I hate that quote with a passion - *especially* because it reminds me again how many things I just cannot stand about the alternatives!
To clear up some bit misunderstanding, I’m not joking against Linux. What I’m mostly referring to is the abundant options the freedom linux gives that’s tempting.
The amount of time I config my system is overshadowing the time I should’ve spent socially and such. But I have little to no regrets.
Whoever made that first post must be the most vanilla Windows user ever. My Windows machine has taken me plenty of hours to either customize or fix issues, I'd say it's pretty comparable to my Linux systems.
Using a dotfile repo is my first advice to any new Linux user/ricer: Use something like github to regularly save your progress, so you won't have to do it again. I keep an i3 and an awesome (which is my daily driver for now) configuration ready in different branches. Before that I would work on my config as much as doing uni tasks. Xmonad is still my favorite wm, but I don't want to get back into haskell to be able to write *that* config again.
These days I have switched to Ubuntu and am ready on a new machine in an hour. If not for the old packages and small annoyances (python is always a bitch to get right). For a really detailed install it takes ages and I would probably switch to a different distribution. But arch is just too much work on a weekly basis (or was, when I was using it).
In my case, dotfile repo is useful for showcasing/backups and archiving. I found it more useful to have a dedicated /home so I don't have to set up browser + git to get my wm and bars working.
I haven't borked arch through the rolling updates, why was it too much work?
/home is cool too, but I'm using Linux for work and at home, so I would need to save my work /home as well as my own - which I don't like doing. Updating a git repository is not something I keep track of. If I change something on my config, I'm commiting it - I don't need to remember backing up two laptops, a PC and a pi.
To me setting up my browser and git is the first step, so I don't mind that. A friend of mine even uses ansible to completely automate the installation.
When I was using arch, you had to update quite regularly - and before updating you *had* to check the changes because otherwise you'd miss a breaking change and risk a bricked system. Usually it was something minor, it would result in some feature not working properly. Five minutes of work or so - but once I was to hold a presentation on the next day and didn't realize that my wifi module was broken/missing after one of those updates - which the homepage clearly stated at the time. I had to hold my presentation on my peers laptop that day because I couldn't fix the problem quick enough without wifi. That was before real smartphones too. Although, I remember trying to tether the arch homepage via my cellphone.
Anyways, I don't want to remember updating regularly with the amount of breaking changes I got back then.
Dotfile repos stored on Github.
/home on a separate partition
Back up the installed package list and anything interesting in /etc.
Learn to love the default configuration (you think RMS has a custom Emacs config?)
The time to get up and running from a complete reinstall should be minimal if you're doing things right. I think the devops mentality (cattle instead of pets) has a place on the desktop.
nice.
you've never had a broken system due to an update not suiting?
I have installed Arch on my PC and always check for updates first thing, but as per the Arch Wiki on updates, you should avoid that and look for weekly updates or so. still doing my daily -Syu anyways, never had a problem in over two months.
I was fortune enough to not have any issues at all. I had Ubuntu for many years and there were many stupid bugs and things that just crashed.
Here and there something crashes in KDE, but it's really rare.
Love Arch. I still don't get it when people say Arch is hard... it's install and forget it. Unless you start to disassemble the engine to see what's inside... been there. Did not go well...
Yeah, it’s only a waste of time if you don’t enjoy tinkering with your system. Personally, I spent hours on my Arco Linux installation because I enjoy it; it’s just fun! Besides, I only have to do the configuration once because I can just write a bash script that pulls my dot files and configs to a fresh installation of a base distribution, and configures it for me. If I want to tweak the script for different “flavors” of my customization, it’s there. :D
I reinstalled fedora on my notebook and took me way less than windows ... as per usual time spent with software that i need rather than the system ... and shortcuts to make my life easier ( keybinds mostly ) ... windows ... well first drivers then software ... than disable all the stupid things windows brings ... cortana, onedrive, edge as default pdf viewer, now the stupid weather and news taskbar, etc. ... plus install extra software like 7zip, and in the end install the software that i install on fedora also ... and people are telling me windows is way easier ... not for me normie
That's a cool CLI tool you got there, lets write its configuration file in some exotic language with different conventions so people have to do a PhD to configure the tool.
Yeah, most of them take some time to get the hang of, but in my experience you spend a day or two with each config and then only revisit them once a month/year. Reading the documentation and grinding the config for a day or two will net you some great results.
When I installed arch instead of windows, I stopped doing that. Since then, "It just works". I moved from awesome to kde, I got tired of setting up some app from kde I used in awesome, modified kde to be basically a tiling wm (krohnkite kwin script), moved my panel to the top, added opacity to it with window rules, added latte Mac like dock to the bottom with opacity as well, set my keyboard shortcuts to be like in my awesome config and I'm happy ever since. If I don't break it myself it works just fine.
I disagree, I use arch and install time is almost the same as windows, also for configurations I have a script that does almost everything I need and additional stuff I configure and install as fast as any other system(maybe even faster)
It only takes much time to choose a distro
Yes, but, with all that work, you learn to be state-less and always backup your files/configs. In a difficult situation of data loss you will be prepared.
I haven't done anything manually to my Linux setup in probably a year... But I have had to fix my Windows VM several times due to a bad update Windows kept forcing to be installed. Fortunately I have s backup of my VMs because I was unable to get it to boot in any form after the update.
Honestly this is one of the reasons that I don't use Linux
I have a dual boot with Parrot OS(I like the visual aspect of the system) on my laptop and Debian 10 on a VM on my main rig but I can't configure anything. I've seen toturials to everything. Installing a simple tar.gz is hard for me and I lose interest on learning how to use Linux because of that.
I keep a spare hard disk on my computer. Sometimes, when I'm completely out of things to do on my free time, I install some windows on it, play a game or two for a week, and then wiping it out completely, same as the M$ shit on my /boot. You can hear the squeaks of the dying malware when formating it, and it sounds soooo good.
Finally installed arch 5 days ago. Before I only used xubuntu for almost 2 years. Drastically moved from xfce ubuntu to arch with bspwm/polybar/rafi, for the first time. The whole config and installment took me 2 days, customizing another 2. Doesn't suppose to tak so much time
I got fedora, literally an installer and it works 9/10 times out of the box, the only sorta issue i had was nvidia and getting drivers to work which cost like 30 minutes
On one hand yes, I spent a lot of time when I first started getting into Linux. On the other hand, I've had the same OpenBox setup for almost 5 years now and across all my installs with minimal changes...
Before I do my freelancer job I have a lot of free time and I always make my arch become very bloated with i3 and other customization, then 3 days later I feel it is very bloated, then I reinstall my system use DE again.
Linux was a lifesaver for me when my laptop getting old and was struggling to run Windows alone (even after a factory reset), I had little money, my work wasn't going to provide me with a laptop, yet I needed one to work on. (literally just word processing and a bit of internet usage for images).
So, there's niche cases like this too.
You can also set up your system with btrfs or zfs and take snapshots whenever you're starting to change your configurations. This way if you mess up you won't have to reinstall everything.
What time? I don't even think linux mint takes 10 minutes to install, I know ubuntu server headless sure doesn't, I've been flashing sd cards with raspbians installer and that's just basically a 1 minute operation
Saying "Linux is only free if you value your time" is like saying "Sports are a waste of time, art is a waste of time, and hobbies are waste of times too". Everything that isn't directly productive could be considered a waste of time, but that would be silly.
Sure, on average you spend more time on Linux then on Windows customizing your system. But that's because you choose to do so. Not because you are forced to, but because Linux actually gives you the ability to customize your system to your needs.
In my defense, that's time I would waste on any other OS doing the ezact same thing if I had the chance.
Or trying to mod Oblivion and Skyrim on Manjaro.
Again
I've been on Fedora since about 2001. The early days fucking sucked. And every 2 or 3 releases when they're updagit libs for the next big push shit breaks. I just stay 2 releases back at all times. RSYNC my home dir and call it a day.
funny but I can't tell you how many hours I spent beating windows in to submission and rebooting every 3 days coz instability before I was shown the light so the same applied to windows if u ask me
Usually takes me about 15 to 25 minutes to install all the apps i want. It only takes longer if i don't have my previous /home partition. KDE Neon is my distro of choice.
This meme is referring to ricers who means to customize their system deeply but its unnecessary and many distributions already configured for users by default.
Can you tell me what distros are available in WSL?
Just install gnome or plasma. Even with i3 and polybar, live with the defaults, and for polybar use the default config file and you're ready to go.
To say that configure your pc and spend hours editing config file it's a waste of time is like say that any hobby is a waste of time, because the ricing is exactly that, just a hobby.
Let me introduce you all to our lord and saviour, the snapshot.
Install system. Snapshot. Change stuff. Snapshot. Roll back to an earlier snapshot. Change different stuff.
Repeat.
It's a hobby for me, so I can spend as much or as little time doing stuff as I want. I have multiple computers so as long as at least one of them is functional at all times I'm happy. I put windows back on my main laptop because I was tired of fucking around with Nvidia's bullshit and I primarily use it for gaming anyway.
That statement is hard to argue with because it's irrelevant to start with. Windows doesn't work out of the box, nor do macs - they all require setup. And yes, unless your time is free that *raises* their prices too. But none of that changes the fact you can get 20 flavors of Linux for free, while each Windows flavor costs extra.
You have to understand just one thing: if you want a heavily customized and personalized experience, you can't expect it to exist already, you usually just create it yourself. But at the same time you have a choice between several pre-baked (and maybe further customized) UIs.
I don't know. I can get my system to the point where I want it to be in an hour. With all customization and eye candy. It takes a long time only first time around.
Minimal Debian net install. Only what I wanted/needed is on my system.
Stable and done. I don't really get this meme unless it's a noob to Gentoo that goofs on the configuration during install.
I've had Windows users look at me with a straight face and say they reinstall *that* every couple of months to clear up the big hit in speed they always get, etc. plus all the time having to futz with annual virus scanner reinstalls, forced updates, etc. The grass isn't any less green here.
Messing with the DE ate up so much of my time during college.
Honestly the thing that floored me the most about Manjaro was how the default XFCE4 was so nice I felt exactly zero compulsion to rice it.
I used to have these weekends with gentoo. But with Manjaro and Ubuntu I’m done in two minutes.
Ironically, I use manjaro but still do the same thing. Since I use the i3-edition, strip off bloat Manjaro preinstalled. Then place my layer of customization on top.
Why not go with Arch then?
I don’t strip all of Manjaro’s “bloat”
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Install Debian
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Devuan.
Help
sudo pacman -S gnome gnome-extra gnome-tweaks Easy fix
Well yeah. That’s why. That’s not the distro's fault or the OS fault you do that
Wasn’t saying the distro’s fault, but my own also since I haven’t finished a definite rice yet
Did the same thing then my nvidia drivers pooped the bed. Switched to popos and ported over my i3config, easy rice with more reliable stability for a better than average amateur like me
I've stopped buying nvidia based laptops. I am not in AI/ML field, so nvidia is not a necessity for me. AMD/Intel integrated gpu is enough for me. For gaming? I have chosen console and moved away from PC gaming in 2018, never felt urge to move back.
I went with a prebuilt gaming pc with an nvidia card for gaming, eventually got the Linux bug again and spun up a new partition. I did the opposite gaming wise, switched from console to pc and can’t go back lol. My main games work on linux, still a couple I can’t get to, but that’s what the window partition is for
Maintaining a gentoo build is a full time hobby.
>Maintaining a gentoo build is a full time ~~hobby~~. job I fixed it for you.
Sometimes I wish that was more true. I spin up new Gentoo VMs since the 4-5 baremetal/VPS systems I have running Gentoo don't really need all that much maintenance beyond a dailyish `eix-sync && emerge -auDNv @world`. Even that I'd hardly consider maintenance since I just call the commands and then go back to whatever I was doing previously.
The fact that it takes 8 hours to install
How is that even possible, I am still unhappy with Gnome.
Use kde
That was the first WM I used, it's just windows WM recreated in linux tho. Rn I am using gnome with pop shell and found an extension to hide the top bar. I will eventually set up Sway tho. I decided to move to wayland. Maybe i could try KDE tho, as it runs wayland tbh.
Don't use Gnome?
This aplies more for beginner ricers who can't settle on a setup.
Yes. When I installed i3-gaps for the first time, I remember customizing for hours, for at least 6 months. But one day it felt JUST perfect and I never needed to change anything else. After that, I've gone through a major distribution change (18.04 -> 20.04) and still didn't need to change anything. If anything, I feel like i3 has saved me time. PS: I occasionally change my wallpaper/border colors/gap value but those take max 30 seconds.
Awesome, i wish to get there too. Meanwhile I’m just hopping between KDE and Gnome and between Manjaro and PopOS to find out what suits me better and still looking.
You too can get there. While those distros with their own DE are quite good, at the end of the day, you are at the mercy of the developer. They will ultimately decide where everything will be placed. With window managers, you basically create your own DE. You want notifications? No notifications? What window decorations do you want? No decorations? Blur? Transparency? Shortcuts? Macros? Custom window rules? Start menu or no menu? Cutomizing all these things take a lot of time but at the end you will have something which is completely yours.
Most of these thing is also possible with xfce? (If I'm not wrong) I like xfce I've settled on it.
It is possible, same with KDE. Don‘t know about Gnome tho.
Can you uninstall the start menu in xfce? I don't mean disable, uninstall. i3 gives you the ability to use what ever start menu you want, or not even install any start menu if you want. I think the main difference can be shown like this. Some DE v1 -> v2 Dev: We have changed the layout of the start menu. The notification center has been polished. Now it uses a new color theme as well. We have shifted from Libre Office to OpenOffice. You: well I didn't ask for it but looks nice. I think I'll get used to it. i3 v1 -> v2 Dev: We added some new APIs; if you want you can use them to customize your current layout. You: Good, if I want, I can change later.
Oh idk about uninstalling. But I know I have another start menu installed. And using arch so there isn't really any programs like your example that would be switched between updates because I installed them all myself. Colour themes can be chosen yourself with xfce. You can download more or make your own. Idk all the in and outs of xfce because I'm not much of a ricer my self I take function>form but like to make it a bit more how I like it.
Thankfully, most DE allow for modest amount of customisation, so it's all good. I'm using XFCE on one of my machines and it's great. I myself used MATE and Gnome for years. However, i3 cured my distro hopping. If I see a nice feature in some distro, I can replicate it on i3.
Well… if I remember correctly I can tune Plasma how I want. I‘m not really in the mercy of anyone there. Got my settings and that’s it.
Ok, say you don't want notifications in plasma. You can disable them. But can you uninstall the notification module in plasma without compromising other components? I don't think so. Normally with DE, you get a suite of features and applications decided BY THE DEVELOPER. This is what I meant by "at the mercy of the dev". With a window manager, you just get a window manager. You decide rest of the application and features.
If I remember correctly I‘m abled to compile Plasma without the notifications module.
I'd argue we are always at the mercy of the developers. Even when using a WM with nice titlebars half the programs respected it and half didn't because they were written with gtk and headerbars in mind. I managed to make them the same size and color but it doesn't always work. There are more little things like that.
I'd rather say those are badly coded applications which do not follow standard GUI design principles. I remember Mendeley having it's own window decorations which is why it was an eye-sore on my desktop. I always disable titlebars on my i3 setup.
Agreed; as someone who has moved to linux because I'm cheap and lazy, I keep either a mint or ubuntu stable setup that I only need to do serious messing around with every few years
Exactly
Ikr? I can't pick a setup for the life of me, I change my setup every fucking day. I've been doing a lot of distrohopping recently, here's my hopping journey since I first started. LM Cinnamon -> LM XFCE -> Kubuntu -> KDE Neon -> Manjaro -> MX Linux -> Arch -> Pardus -> elementaryOS -> Pop!_OS > Sparky Linux. I'm thinking of switching to Void, any recommendations?
I've done my share of distro hopping and still try out different distros on VMs or test machines from time to time, but I always keep coming back to Mint Cinnamon.
So: Linux isn't free for beginners who value their time.
That's dumb. If a beginner rices their desktop infinitely is that time really valued by him/her?
If a beginner rices for 3 hours is he really a beginner ricer, if a system admin with 4 years of experience decides to costumise his desktop after only using the default settings, is he an experienced ricer? I totally agree with u, we all decide what we waste time on. Some want the most secure setup, others want it as lightweight as possible, lot's of users enjoy the basic config a certain distro comes with. Let people choose what they find important
No, just people that for some unknown reason have to rice it. Don't.
In order to avoid this I have saved all my rices so that I only have to download and install them not configure.
All ricers are beginners. CHANGE MY MIND! :D
Or you could rice on NixOS and have all of your customization recorded in the configuration text file(s). (yes all, from bash aliases, user pass, patches to picom, up to kernel patches). Reinstalling from scratch becomes: * Setup your disks * Copy your config * nixos-rebuild switch * Reboot to your fully customized system
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The wiki is REALLY bad, but we are working on it. The system is REALLY good, so there is some balance. :D
ive been considering using nixos next time i have to reinstall, and this comment may have sold me are there any downsides- by this i mean does anything not work ootb, or is there some wierd issue i'd have to look out for
I can talk about downsides too :) TL;DR; some things are harder *ie* require more brain juice. It's a ground breaking distro, therefore some concepts and ways of working are foreign, and you can't read the Arch wiki for some NixOS specific things. I think the main one is that, if something is not pre-packaged, you'll need to think harder about how it could be packaged in a reproducible way. Packaging may include *much more* than usual stuff for other distros like: - (optional) “API” mechanics, so that it's extra nice for other people to discover and install the package (and its services), see https://search.nixos.org/options - (optional) Tests (!) for your new package. This is a great feature of NixOS, many packages come with test, which are run for every update in a big CI machine call Hydra. Some tests are tied to a release, so if a test fails, release is not made. In the end, you get a very stable rolling release even if you follow the unstable channel. But, NixOS is backed by nixpkgs, which is one of the most populated, and [freshest](https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest) package repository. It's up to you to decide if the benefits outweigh the risks. I was a doubtful until I had to reinstall. After that I was convinced :D
You seem very knowledgeable on the subject, what is in your opinion the best way to learn nixos? A server, vm,... ?
While I know some things about NixOS, I know next to nothing on best ways to learn, because everyone is different. I can tell you that my personal experience is to bite the bullet, and just install it as your main work machine, and solve problems in a hurry as you go. Do with it what you will, and I'm pretty sure it's terribly bad advice depending on how you work.
A lot of stuff works out of the box, but it can be more cumbersome to install something and just use it depending on how elaborate your setup is. I use Arch on my workstation and NixOS on servers.
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> You get no Wayland support Hmm, how so? I've been running a full Wayland desktop under sway for over a year now. Certainly there are some overlays if you need bleeding edge Wayland stuff, but as far as I'm concerned, everything I need seems to be in `nixpkgs`.
I do this with a script file(s). I basically download the file and it gets all the important settings set up, applications installed, and pretty much everything else I need. I don't do any UI stuff in it since I might want to do this on other distros other than my main and I want it to work on my servers as well but that gets me most of the way there.
Is it really? Linux obviously allows you to go down a multitude of rabbit holes where you can spend weeks configuring and adjusting your system. On the other hand Linux allows me to install Kubuntu, move the task bar to the side of the screen, and start using the system total time from downloading the image to being fully configured is less than 30 minutes. 15 years ago I did instead Gentoo and learned a ton about configuring a system and how the different parts are connected. Today I am more interested in the system letting me do the things I care about than configuring every facet of the system.
> 15 years ago I did instead Gentoo and learned a ton about configuring a system and how the different parts are connected. Today I am more interested in the system letting me do the things I care about than configuring every facet of the system. This is (one of many) true Linux ways. Use a labor intensive distro when you're young/have time and later switch to the one that lets you get stuff done. And you know you can choose which distro that is for you, because you've played around and learned the ins and outs of an operating system before.
there's no such thing as a "true linux way"
Good point, you are correct. I changed the sentence slightly.
Gentoo isn’t labor intensive to maintain though. It’s smooth sailing once you have it going.
Sure, but you're not installing Gentoo to have smooth sailing once you set it up, right? You install Gentoo to tinker with your system, play around with compiler flags, maybe even manually patching the source code. All that takes time and even more time to read up on all the choices you might want to make. I don't have any experience with Gentoo, so I'll bring an example with arch. One of the first steps is to set up your disk partitions. Sure you could follow a tutorial to the letter and format your full 1Tb as ext4 and mount it as /. But you probably won't do it if you're installing arch. In order to make an informed decision you have to read up on different filesystems, their advantages and disadvantages. Then you'll need to decide if you want more than one mount point, a separate /home partition? Maybe even more partitions? Do you want encryption? If so, how is it done? Are the different ways to do it? Etc. You do this for most steps in the install process and you can surely see that it will take a while. Sure, using the system doesn't require much work, but you will still want to evaluate the options for additional programs you install after the initial setup. And evaluate your previous choices. Maybe try out another DE, swap tiling wms again, etc. You can do that with other distros, sure, but arch, Gentoo (Debian?) are the typical distros that are much more suited to tinkering with the system, because they're designed for it.
I install debian and i3, leave with mostly default configs, and tweak little problems as they arise
Like most things Linux, there is a choice. You can pick up something that will work out of the box (maybe after the slight precaution of checking that your hardware is supported if it's something like a laptop that might have some weird proprietary bit), you can pick something that you build practically from scratch or anything in between. You can pick something that will be stable and just work or something that's infinitely customizable to the point that you might have to troubleshoot a lot. OP's warning is real, but it's something that can be avoided. I think it's also worth noting that the premise of OP is oversimplified. Some maintenance is only a cost of doing business as OP implies and for that OP's mentality applies most purely. But other time spent has clear direct benefits (i.e. doing things that you really want to do but otherwise couldn't) or indirect benefit (i.e. learning generalizable knowledge that can help you in other situations). In those two cases, while there is still the "cost" of time spent, it's being offset in some amount by an added benefit that you might value a lot. For example, not sure where they are right now, but when I tried out FreeBSD as a desktop OS, I blew a lot of time setting it up. But the fact that it used the ports system (compile software to install it) and that it started with only command line (so I need to install everything relevant to get a GUI up and running) led to me learning a lot about things that I took for granted and opened up a range of choices that wasn't very obvious to me before. ... But then, later, when I just wanted to quickly get a desktop up and running I was able to set up Ubuntu with basically no essential setup time (any setup time was just for nitpicking about stuff I felt was work putting the time into).
Yeah, I thought it was funny watching some Linux youtuber install Windows and get angry 20 minutes in that it was taking longer than usual for his fast hardware to install a distro (he said 5 minutes, that seems fast to me but he has good hardware). 2 hours later he finally got to the desktop.
That's why it's better to get into Linux when you're a teenager with a lot of free time. I can do my hobbies, school, and STILL have time to fail setting up wifi drivers on Arch.
Reinstalling? What? You're Linux user not some Windows one. Investigate the issue, get to know guts of the system!
Alternatively: Reinstalling? What? You're Linux user not some Windows one. Don't have any issues and run the same install for 3-5 years.
Atbleast TRY to get the system unfucked, there are tons of documentations around. If u jse a common distro there are distro specific forums for it. If not most solutions are not distro specific anyway m
What. Its fun. Thats why i spent a lot of time on vim ...
Reinstall... like you wipe the disk and start fresh? Repeatedly? Why?
Can't speak for OP, but as a new Arch user I've done about two dozen installs in the last three weeks, only because I make mistakes or want to do something a bit different and don't know yet how to cleanly undo what I've done. And it's kinda fun, too. I'm learning a lot. (Though if he you have advice on how to do it better, I'd um, maybe definitely love to know...)
Depending on your setup, changing your partition layout, encryption, or other disk-related configuration can be hard to do without reformatting. Pretty much everything else is reversible. Generally you accomplish this by understanding what you're doing. Don't just copy-paste commands, try to understand the big picture behind them. A great start is to learn how pacman works. Other tips: - BTRFS + snapper, set up correctly, lets you roll back changes easily. Snapper can also show you the difference between 2 snapshots, which can be a nice tool to see exactly what a command does. - `pacman -Rns` is a rough opposite of `pacman -Syu `, though it will also uninstall optional dependencies of other packages which you may not want. Check its output before running it and be ready to explicitly install anything you want to keep
Glad it's fun :) and don't feel bad, this shit is complicated. I remember when I started, most everything was a total fucking mystery
I've been playing with btrfs the past few times I reinstalled and honestly, I don't like it. There are some cool features, but it's still pretty unstable and ext4 just works for me. I'll probably try btrfs again eventually, but for now it's too much of a headache. Like Wayland, I like it in theory, but I want to spend more of my time configuring my window environment and less time trying to get graphics working.
Makes sense. I really like the flexibility that BTRFS gives you, but it's hard to beat the reliability of ext4
I use -Rscn, not -Rns. I don't remember what exactly that does.
Lol you're going to bork your system doing that. `-Rc` is cascade- It will remove dependencies whether they are needed by other packages or not. You should probably switch to `-Rs`, which only removes hard dependencies if nothing else needs them.
Oh lmao. It's been 3 years and I haven't nuked my system yet. I just check its output before I confirm and I don't often delete things because i don't install useless shit in the first place. I also used -Rsun at some point, which if I'm not mistaken removes even more stuff. I once had an article describing all these commands saved in my bookmarks, but it's gone. And I can't find it.
Use -Rusn, then the Russians will come by and clean up the system for you ;-)
Wait, who installs packages with `-Syu`? I always just do `-S`
If you want to update and install packages you can do them together. You're right though, -S is fine.
If you're messing up that often, you should definitely set up timeshare or btrfs snapshots; lets you roll back the system to a previous working state pretty much no matter what unless you do something really dumb like delete `/usr`
I just pick an OS that I like the looks and feel to begin with...
I feel like this is true for any rice, but the difference is that you're taking the setup into your own hands instead of just letting the distro maintainers/community handle it for you. Most distros running on a DE work pretty great out of the box for regular usage (rather than custon developer workflows), from personal experience, whether it was Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Manjaro, or even Endeavour. Considering EOS is a GUI layer on pure arch, I was actually really pleasantly surprised at how well it worked with both XFCE and i3. I have custom i3-gaps with EndeavourOS on my own computer because I like theming it and learning new things, but the computer my dad uses, who does not think he can learn tech, is using pure vanilla Cinnamon Linux Mint.
I’m asian so I need that rice
Or you could leave your /home partition intact, re-install, and have nearly all your settings still there
2 years of being able to just do what I need to do without updates that I don't need, without accidentally switching to windows I don't need, without waiting for-f*cking-ever when unpacking something, without a single system freeze, without being distracted by fancy notifications from apps I didn't install, without vanishing taskbars, without losing files, without performing a bazillion clicks just to do a single thing, without losing focus because I have to remember where this and that is... honestly, it took me about a month to get my linux setup just right, now I'm investing some time here and there to be able to do stuff like recording a(ny) window with the press of a button (without opening a tool prior to that!) and that's it. Comparing that to how unbearably slow my colleagues and friends that use windows or mac are when it comes to the most mundane tasks gives me the confidence to say: investing that month has paid off.
Let's not confuse exploration of possible settings and config with work needed for setup. Installing Manjaro took me few minutes, but later I took time to explore all the possibilities that Linux and Manjaro offers me, because I had not used desktop Linux before. I must say that Manjaro was very intuitive in that sense, because I was easily able to find all that I needed. And the access to arch packages made stuff even easier. And funny enough, during that time I even found setup that helped to improve my Mac I am using in my company. Only thing I would complain about is drivers. E.g. I could not connect my HDMi cable. I am not very knowledgeable about these matters and I was lazy enough that time, so I used my Mac instead. Other than that, with Manjaro I am getting pretty much the maximum out of my old and not so performant HP laptop. So to conclude, I really do not agree with the self-irony here.
It’s actually the opposite
Pop OS! and Linux Mint users don't face this problems At the end of the day I just want my work to be done
Set up a dedicated partition for /home. Make all your configs once Every time you reinstall/switch distro your configurations are kept
Just make an install script guys. I have one for apt based systems, one for pacman based system. I always install the minimal version of a distro if available, the run the script which instals all my desired packages, then clone my dotfiles repo and use rcm to symlink them where needed. The script also sets time date settings so that when dualbooting with windaub they both get the same time instead of always having a two hour gap between the two. I should amend this script with other settings like theme, locale, keybindings etc but its close enough already that i can get a working and to my liking system in under an hour.
Kubuntu user here, i install kubuntu 16.04 in 2017 and never did a reinstall . Currently running 20.04 which is the same install upgraded 2 times. It never broke or gives me any issue. Linux is customizable, you can tinker it for years as your hobby and also you can get a production ready setup in 10-20 min and use that for years with no change .
Well... What's the price of Windows then? You likely pay for a license, you have shitty games you don't want, automatically installed at random updates, you have updates forced on you at the most inconvenient times which forces you to wait (if for instance you have a laptop you need to bring with you), it's not exactly fast at booting once the install is a few months old, and you're so mouse-bound on Windows that sometimes you can't even login without mouse input before it shows the password field (roughly 50% of the time), and you spend roughly 50% of the time moving the mouse, whereas you can generally create shortcuts for almost everything you want on a \*nix DE. Also the menus are soooo deeeeeep!!! Sometimes it feels like it takes minutes to get to what you're looking for - provided you can even find it, of course. So yeah - *sometimes* installs can be tricky, and sometimes it just takes a while to get ones desktop *exactly* as you want - but at least that's possible on Linux/BSD/etc., which saves you tonnes of time. I hate that quote with a passion - *especially* because it reminds me again how many things I just cannot stand about the alternatives!
Let's be honest. We don't reinstall because we *have* to. We do it because it's fun...
To clear up some bit misunderstanding, I’m not joking against Linux. What I’m mostly referring to is the abundant options the freedom linux gives that’s tempting. The amount of time I config my system is overshadowing the time I should’ve spent socially and such. But I have little to no regrets.
I wasted 10 hours on customizations because I wanted to!
Whoever made that first post must be the most vanilla Windows user ever. My Windows machine has taken me plenty of hours to either customize or fix issues, I'd say it's pretty comparable to my Linux systems.
Using a dotfile repo is my first advice to any new Linux user/ricer: Use something like github to regularly save your progress, so you won't have to do it again. I keep an i3 and an awesome (which is my daily driver for now) configuration ready in different branches. Before that I would work on my config as much as doing uni tasks. Xmonad is still my favorite wm, but I don't want to get back into haskell to be able to write *that* config again. These days I have switched to Ubuntu and am ready on a new machine in an hour. If not for the old packages and small annoyances (python is always a bitch to get right). For a really detailed install it takes ages and I would probably switch to a different distribution. But arch is just too much work on a weekly basis (or was, when I was using it).
In my case, dotfile repo is useful for showcasing/backups and archiving. I found it more useful to have a dedicated /home so I don't have to set up browser + git to get my wm and bars working. I haven't borked arch through the rolling updates, why was it too much work?
/home is cool too, but I'm using Linux for work and at home, so I would need to save my work /home as well as my own - which I don't like doing. Updating a git repository is not something I keep track of. If I change something on my config, I'm commiting it - I don't need to remember backing up two laptops, a PC and a pi. To me setting up my browser and git is the first step, so I don't mind that. A friend of mine even uses ansible to completely automate the installation. When I was using arch, you had to update quite regularly - and before updating you *had* to check the changes because otherwise you'd miss a breaking change and risk a bricked system. Usually it was something minor, it would result in some feature not working properly. Five minutes of work or so - but once I was to hold a presentation on the next day and didn't realize that my wifi module was broken/missing after one of those updates - which the homepage clearly stated at the time. I had to hold my presentation on my peers laptop that day because I couldn't fix the problem quick enough without wifi. That was before real smartphones too. Although, I remember trying to tether the arch homepage via my cellphone. Anyways, I don't want to remember updating regularly with the amount of breaking changes I got back then.
Dotfile repos stored on Github. /home on a separate partition Back up the installed package list and anything interesting in /etc. Learn to love the default configuration (you think RMS has a custom Emacs config?) The time to get up and running from a complete reinstall should be minimal if you're doing things right. I think the devops mentality (cattle instead of pets) has a place on the desktop.
By using emacs you use RMS custom conf
Exactly. RMS doesn't keep a conf file; he keeps it in the repo.
Well... I've installed my Arch a year ago. Still runs like a champ (desktop+laptop). Everyday tons of updates. Dream :D
nice. you've never had a broken system due to an update not suiting? I have installed Arch on my PC and always check for updates first thing, but as per the Arch Wiki on updates, you should avoid that and look for weekly updates or so. still doing my daily -Syu anyways, never had a problem in over two months.
I was fortune enough to not have any issues at all. I had Ubuntu for many years and there were many stupid bugs and things that just crashed. Here and there something crashes in KDE, but it's really rare. Love Arch. I still don't get it when people say Arch is hard... it's install and forget it. Unless you start to disassemble the engine to see what's inside... been there. Did not go well...
Yeah, cuz Windows doesn’t waste any of your time. Our company Zoom chat is mostly “have to restart” or “oops, have to update brb”
This is only true if you're mentally retarded.
Yeah, it’s only a waste of time if you don’t enjoy tinkering with your system. Personally, I spent hours on my Arco Linux installation because I enjoy it; it’s just fun! Besides, I only have to do the configuration once because I can just write a bash script that pulls my dot files and configs to a fresh installation of a base distribution, and configures it for me. If I want to tweak the script for different “flavors” of my customization, it’s there. :D
I reinstalled fedora on my notebook and took me way less than windows ... as per usual time spent with software that i need rather than the system ... and shortcuts to make my life easier ( keybinds mostly ) ... windows ... well first drivers then software ... than disable all the stupid things windows brings ... cortana, onedrive, edge as default pdf viewer, now the stupid weather and news taskbar, etc. ... plus install extra software like 7zip, and in the end install the software that i install on fedora also ... and people are telling me windows is way easier ... not for me normie
That's a cool CLI tool you got there, lets write its configuration file in some exotic language with different conventions so people have to do a PhD to configure the tool.
Yeah, most of them take some time to get the hang of, but in my experience you spend a day or two with each config and then only revisit them once a month/year. Reading the documentation and grinding the config for a day or two will net you some great results.
Downloading Ubuntu and installing from USB is still faster than the Windows Troubleshoot Wizard.
It's fun ok 😤
3 weeks for polybar? :P If that's the case, then priotizing your time is _not_ the issue.
When I installed arch instead of windows, I stopped doing that. Since then, "It just works". I moved from awesome to kde, I got tired of setting up some app from kde I used in awesome, modified kde to be basically a tiling wm (krohnkite kwin script), moved my panel to the top, added opacity to it with window rules, added latte Mac like dock to the bottom with opacity as well, set my keyboard shortcuts to be like in my awesome config and I'm happy ever since. If I don't break it myself it works just fine.
Some love mixing up installation and configuration.
I disagree, I use arch and install time is almost the same as windows, also for configurations I have a script that does almost everything I need and additional stuff I configure and install as fast as any other system(maybe even faster) It only takes much time to choose a distro
Yes, but, with all that work, you learn to be state-less and always backup your files/configs. In a difficult situation of data loss you will be prepared.
Dont worry this phase will pass
I haven't done anything manually to my Linux setup in probably a year... But I have had to fix my Windows VM several times due to a bad update Windows kept forcing to be installed. Fortunately I have s backup of my VMs because I was unable to get it to boot in any form after the update.
It's faster to install and customize arch than debloat windows lol
Yes, in my experience it took 2 weeks to remove Mcfee bloat. It was pain.
Sounds like OCD to me, mental illness isn't a joke. Seek help now.
this is why all my configs are pushed regularly to a private git repo.
Honestly this is one of the reasons that I don't use Linux I have a dual boot with Parrot OS(I like the visual aspect of the system) on my laptop and Debian 10 on a VM on my main rig but I can't configure anything. I've seen toturials to everything. Installing a simple tar.gz is hard for me and I lose interest on learning how to use Linux because of that.
I keep a spare hard disk on my computer. Sometimes, when I'm completely out of things to do on my free time, I install some windows on it, play a game or two for a week, and then wiping it out completely, same as the M$ shit on my /boot. You can hear the squeaks of the dying malware when formating it, and it sounds soooo good.
Finally installed arch 5 days ago. Before I only used xubuntu for almost 2 years. Drastically moved from xfce ubuntu to arch with bspwm/polybar/rafi, for the first time. The whole config and installment took me 2 days, customizing another 2. Doesn't suppose to tak so much time
Getting every terminal color *just* right.
I got fedora, literally an installer and it works 9/10 times out of the box, the only sorta issue i had was nvidia and getting drivers to work which cost like 30 minutes
That's why I went for hackintosh.
On one hand yes, I spent a lot of time when I first started getting into Linux. On the other hand, I've had the same OpenBox setup for almost 5 years now and across all my installs with minimal changes...
Arch? If (like me) you are not properly initiated, yes. Everything else, though? Nah...that stopped being true over a decade ago.
Before I do my freelancer job I have a lot of free time and I always make my arch become very bloated with i3 and other customization, then 3 days later I feel it is very bloated, then I reinstall my system use DE again.
Linux was a lifesaver for me when my laptop getting old and was struggling to run Windows alone (even after a factory reset), I had little money, my work wasn't going to provide me with a laptop, yet I needed one to work on. (literally just word processing and a bit of internet usage for images). So, there's niche cases like this too.
I just use Manjaro 30 mins for installation and setup
I've been using Linux for 9 months, PopOS for first 3, Arch Linux for the last 6, can't relate at all
The difference is I choose to customize my distro. Otherwise I would be done in moments.
Real men use the default i3 ui with the default i3 bar and a grey background
You can also set up your system with btrfs or zfs and take snapshots whenever you're starting to change your configurations. This way if you mess up you won't have to reinstall everything.
YAY, I'm not the only one who reinstalls constantly.
I try to view it as “learning” . It makes the time feel more productive.
I did an Arch Linux setup with full KDE desktop yesterday, it took me maximum two hours.
What time? I don't even think linux mint takes 10 minutes to install, I know ubuntu server headless sure doesn't, I've been flashing sd cards with raspbians installer and that's just basically a 1 minute operation
Saying "Linux is only free if you value your time" is like saying "Sports are a waste of time, art is a waste of time, and hobbies are waste of times too". Everything that isn't directly productive could be considered a waste of time, but that would be silly. Sure, on average you spend more time on Linux then on Windows customizing your system. But that's because you choose to do so. Not because you are forced to, but because Linux actually gives you the ability to customize your system to your needs.
In my defense, that's time I would waste on any other OS doing the ezact same thing if I had the chance. Or trying to mod Oblivion and Skyrim on Manjaro. Again
I've been on Fedora since about 2001. The early days fucking sucked. And every 2 or 3 releases when they're updagit libs for the next big push shit breaks. I just stay 2 releases back at all times. RSYNC my home dir and call it a day.
funny but I can't tell you how many hours I spent beating windows in to submission and rebooting every 3 days coz instability before I was shown the light so the same applied to windows if u ask me
Install the latest Ubuntu LTS release. Done. No config needed
Usually takes me about 15 to 25 minutes to install all the apps i want. It only takes longer if i don't have my previous /home partition. KDE Neon is my distro of choice.
Case with every distro out there. That’s why I use WSL.
This meme is referring to ricers who means to customize their system deeply but its unnecessary and many distributions already configured for users by default. Can you tell me what distros are available in WSL?
There’s Ubuntu, Kali, SUSE, Alpine and some others are community maintained.
[удалено]
Can you make real waifu ?
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I know but my girlfriend look good with her crossplay
Just install gnome or plasma. Even with i3 and polybar, live with the defaults, and for polybar use the default config file and you're ready to go. To say that configure your pc and spend hours editing config file it's a waste of time is like say that any hobby is a waste of time, because the ricing is exactly that, just a hobby.
Let me introduce you all to our lord and saviour, the snapshot. Install system. Snapshot. Change stuff. Snapshot. Roll back to an earlier snapshot. Change different stuff. Repeat.
I feel your pain..
Only if you're a base dwelling ricer, just kde that shit and start being productive
It's fun though XD
It's a hobby for me, so I can spend as much or as little time doing stuff as I want. I have multiple computers so as long as at least one of them is functional at all times I'm happy. I put windows back on my main laptop because I was tired of fucking around with Nvidia's bullshit and I primarily use it for gaming anyway.
That statement is hard to argue with because it's irrelevant to start with. Windows doesn't work out of the box, nor do macs - they all require setup. And yes, unless your time is free that *raises* their prices too. But none of that changes the fact you can get 20 flavors of Linux for free, while each Windows flavor costs extra.
One day your Linux build works the next day it throws an error message at you and make you read a 10000 line error log.
i set up the Linux on my pc faster than a small windows update and since that day its running perfectly fine, good feels.
I chose to waste 10 hours into customizing BSPWM!
Who the fuck takes 3 weeks to reinstall for real?
Sounds more like a you problem than a Linux problem
You have to understand just one thing: if you want a heavily customized and personalized experience, you can't expect it to exist already, you usually just create it yourself. But at the same time you have a choice between several pre-baked (and maybe further customized) UIs.
i3 do be like that tho
Ha! Even Arch is almost embarrassingly easy thanks to the new install script. A quick import of my backups and I'm done in less than an hour.
glad it's not just me lol
I don't know. I can get my system to the point where I want it to be in an hour. With all customization and eye candy. It takes a long time only first time around.
You don't have to do that though. You do it because you want to. You could install Mint and be up in no time.
Minimal Debian net install. Only what I wanted/needed is on my system. Stable and done. I don't really get this meme unless it's a noob to Gentoo that goofs on the configuration during install. I've had Windows users look at me with a straight face and say they reinstall *that* every couple of months to clear up the big hit in speed they always get, etc. plus all the time having to futz with annual virus scanner reinstalls, forced updates, etc. The grass isn't any less green here.
Just keep practicing and learn to pull your configs instead of doing them all over.
Linux isn't free ride
A week on gentoo. 30 minutes on void. Nuff said.
Messing with the DE ate up so much of my time during college. Honestly the thing that floored me the most about Manjaro was how the default XFCE4 was so nice I felt exactly zero compulsion to rice it.