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

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: February 12th, 2025

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  • And I rest my case, lol. I don’t even know the difference between init and initramfs. It’s definitely a hole in my knowledge and I should know it going down the line, but I need the right time.

    I’m here and there on what I want to learn at any moment. It’s not like I can’t learn, but it’s all about what interests me at the time. I learn things in a scattered manner, which admittedly is a horrible way to learn but its just how my brain works.


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    1 month ago

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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




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

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

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

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





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

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

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


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

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





  • I walked this path at first, too. For me, it was more like my stubborn battle with Microsoft than not wanting to learn Linux (I had already learned Debian some time ago).

    I’ve flip flopped back and forth, but after the recent bs with screenshot and OS-side ads (for a PAID software, mind you) I haven’t even given Windows a second glance anymore.

    If you’ve got the knowledge to truly debloat Windows, you have the knowledge to set up Linux.



  • Yup, you’d be surprised what you can accomplish with 10gb of VRAM and a 12b model. Hell, my profile pic (which isn’t very good, tbf) was made on that 10gb VRAM card using localhosted stable diffusion. I hate big corp AI, but I absolutely love open market and open source local models. Gonna be a shame when they start to police them.

    To OP: The problem is that they’re looking for keywords. With the amount of people under surveillance these days, they don’t give a rat’s ass if you went to your favorite coffee roasting site, they want to find the stuff they don’t want you to do.

    Piracy? You’re on a list. Any cleaning chemical that can be related to the construction of explosives? You’re on a list. These lists will then tack on more keywords that pertain to that list. For example, the explosives list will then search for matching components bought within a close span of time that would indicate you’re making them. Even searching for ways to enforce your privacy just makes them more interested.

    So then you put out a bunch of fake data. This data happens to say you viewed a page pertaining that matching component. Whelp, that list just got hotter and now there are even more eyes on you and they’re being slightly more attentive this time. Its a bad idea. The only way you’re getting out of surveillance, at least online, is to never go online.

    In reality, they probably won’t even do anything about the above. What they really want is money. Money for your info; money to sell more things to you. They want the average home to be filled with advertisements tailored from your information. Because those adverts make those companies money, which they then use to buy more information to monetize your existence. Its the largest pyramid scheme known to humanity, and we’re the unpaid grunts.

    The moment the world became connected through telephones, cable TV, and then internet this scheme was already in motion way beforehand. Let’s be honest, smartphones were the motherload. A TV, phone, and computer you always keep on you? They were salivating that day.


  • Fonts are a big one and can be a very descriptive fingerprint.

    There are applications out there that muddle your installed fonts by making it look like you have a ton of fonts you don’t actually have.

    But yes, they can see what fonts you have and can tell your OS and other computers you may have used if you’ve downloaded the same third party fonts for all of them.

    If one of those computers was known to be yours at one time, then even if you lock away your identity later on another PC your fonts can give you away.


  • Well… sometimes people just don’t understand each other, too. It was nice talking to you. I didn’t ask any questions because you made yourself quite clear in other comments. You seem to be the type that makes timid people feel unseen, and I don’t vibe with that.

    By trying to make sense of everything, I don’t mean the small fishbowl you seem to be seeing here. I mean humanity. Maybe I’m just insane.

    Well, good luck to you. Pick out and reply to everything you don’t like in life (as you did here) and trample past everything else. That just sounds like stress to me, and I have enough of that without seeing daggers where there are none.