Based on https://docs.atuin.sh/configuration/config/#search_mode, “fuzzy search” is used as standard.

I don’t have any use-case for a tiling window manager, for example, but I have zero intention of shitting all over various TWM projects whenever they’re brought up.

I feel the same way. I think tiling is useless (for me). Except in the terminal emulator. Strangely enough, I use it there.

I understand that Gnome kinda goes against the traditional desktop paradigm

Which is not a bad thing at first. Just because something has been done for years doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better.

The Helix editor, for example, uses the selection → action model. With vim, it is exactly the opposite. That’s why I prefer Helix. And yes, this is my own subjective opinion.

You can find idiots in every group. Usually, however, these are always just the loud minority. I bet the majority of users simply use what they want and stay completely out of any discussions.

For my part, I have always used KDE / Plasma and I will continue to do so. Gnome just doesn’t appeal to me. Is Gnome therefore bad? No. I just prefer something else. Just like I use a different editor instead of vim, for example.

A dual boot system is not a big problem as long as you boot in EFI mode and use GPT partitions. I have been running a dual boot system (Windows 10 and Arch Linux) for years without any problems.

You should allocate around 500 MB for the EFI partition. This allows you to install Windows and a Linux distribution and still have reserves if you want to install additional Linux kernels, for example.

If you want to change partitions, first make a data backup on another data medium. Because something can always go wrong. Even if it’s just a power failure.

While Arch does it too, they prefer to keep the packages as vanilla as possible - often requiring effort of the user’s side to make it work with the rest of the system

To be honest, I have hardly ever had this experience. In my opinion, the distribution works so well precisely because Arch releases everything vanilla wherever possible. And in cases where the vanilla version doesn’t work, the Arch team patches it.

So the thing with Debian and any Debian based distro like Ubuntu or Linux Mint is there is no big centralized software repo like the AUR.

The platform for this would be available (https://mpr.makedeb.org).

Yes there is the apt repository but if you want something that’s not in there, get ready to read the documentation or follow random guides.

Not everything is available in the AUR either. It may therefore be necessary to create a own PKGBUILD file. And since anyone can publish something in the AUR, you should check the PKGBUILD file before installing or updating it. Both also require reading guides (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PKGBUILD and so on).

On Arch, all I have to do is Paru -S Reaper,

This would give me the error message that the command was not found. Why do some people assume that everyone uses the same AUR helper as they do? I use aurutils, for example. This AUR helper offers more options but is more cumbersome to use in some cases.

Apart from that, the name of the package is reaper and not Reaper. So even if I would use paru, it would not work.

Now that Arch is so easy to install with the Archscript,

Easier? Yes. But archinstall had and still has some bugs. And archinstall, understandably, does not cover everything so that a manual installation is more flexible.

yeah yeah there’s flathub and stuff but that’s more of a last resort, optimally, you want to get it the correct way.

Appimages or flatpaks are often the correct way to go, as many projects only publish such packages.

If I had to guess, I would say that the updates to Plasma 6 will be offered at the end of the week or in the course of next week. But I’m not an Arch developer, so that’s really a guess.

However, one should first read through https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/official_repositories#Testing_repositories and consider whether it is really worth the risk.

For my part, I will simply wait until Plasma 6 arrives in the official package sources.

and I’m glad that they took extra time to release rather than quickly shoving it out, a la Plasma 4 and early Plasma 5.

As far as I can remember, this was also the fault of some distributions that wanted to release Plasma 5 quickly, even though the developers of Plasma pointed out existing bugs.

TIL SDDM hasn’t gotten to 1.0 yet.

Many projects also deliberately avoid publishing a version 1.0. For example, the static website generator Hugo continued with 0.100.0 after version 0.99.1. The current version is 0.123.3.

This is mostly due to the fact that some users have the wrong expectations. For example, that version 1.0 is as good as error-free and fully developed.

How long has it been the de facto default greeter for KDE Plasma?

Since Plasma 5 if I’m not mistaken. Before that, KDM was the standard.

In my opinion, just because someone is behaving incorrectly is no reason to behave in the same way. One can also disagree with someone without using terms like moron or whiny bitch.

How does pacman work compared to apt-get ?

Roughly speaking, pacman is faster, but offers fewer functions. And the parameters take some time getting used to. For example, you can update the system with pacman -Syu.

and how to find in which package an command lies.

You can either use the command pacman -F or the tool pkgfile.

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pacman
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pkgfile

I am struggling a bit with Zsh, like I ended up starting bash to configure an environment variable, any ressources on-it.

Without a more detailed description of the problem, it is difficult to help you. As I have been using ZSH for many years (also under Arch), I can only say that you have done something wrong. But if you don’t want to work much with the shell anyway, Bash is perfectly adequate.

But do yourself a favour and stay away from Manjaro. The team responsible for this distribution has already made so many avoidable mistakes and strange decisions that I don’t trust this distribution. And I’m not alone in this opinion. If you want a distribution based on Arch, there are better alternatives. Like EndeavourOS, for example.

Nowadays, servers that are not connected to a monitor, keyboard or mouse are often referred to as headless. Regardless of whether they have a graphical user interface (which can be used with tools such as Guacamole, for example).

I’m not trying to say that this is correct, but simply to point out that the term “headless” is now often interpreted differently.

It’s more than just a simple tool with which you can tweak audio. Some features are listed at https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/. The tool is mainly intended for the development of games (also under Linux).

And yes, it’s basically just about the fact that Steam Audio is now completely open source.

I’m only referring to Arch now because I have no idea about NixOS.

Arch and NixOS Those two are in the “pain” category. I would never recommend them to anyone starting with Linux, for example because they’re fed up with Windows

In my opinion, you are making the mistake of equating all Windows users. But not every Windows user is the same.

An acquaintance of mine, who works full-time as a Windows administrator, was able to install and configure Arch manually on his first attempt, for example. But yes, other Windows users would despair.

But that’s exactly why you shouldn’t make blanket recommendations, but rather recommendations based on the wishes and knowledge of the person who wants to use Linux.

high demanding

Basically, you should be able to read and willing use a search engine. That’s all you really need.

hard to set up and use

If you use archinstall, which has long been an official part of the Arch iso file, you can install Arch within a short time. But I don’t think manual installation is very difficult either. Because if you follow the official instructions, you can simply execute many of the commands mentioned therein without having to change them beforehand.

And what do you mean by hard to use?

I’ve been using Arch for over 10 years, almost like any other distribution. Apart from only 3 things, 2 of which can be automated.

• Before an update, I check whether something has been published at https://archlinux.org/news/ that affects my installations. If so, that has to be taken into account. The check itself can be automated with https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/informant, for example.
• The cache of pacman must be cleaned regularly. This can also be automated with a hook (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman#Cleaning_the_package_cache).
• From time to time, I synchronise my configuration files with the pacnew files. There are tools for this (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave#Managing_.pac*_files)

requiring the user to be skilled and to know what he’s doing

Not necessarily. The most important thing is that the user is willing to read, that he is willing to use a search engine and that he is willing to learn something new. And that is often the problem these days.

And shall I tell you something? Even after several decades with Linux, I often have no idea what I’m doing. But I’m still trying to acquire new knowledge.

don’t hold the users’ hand

I agree with you here. Arch is, among other things, intended for users who want to solve their problems themselves. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t get help. However, it is expected that you first try to solve your problems yourself. And if that doesn’t work, you should ask smart questions. However, this guide does not only help with Arch. Basically, it is (even if it is now partly outdated) still one of the most important pieces of knowledge you can have.

and don’t tolerate user error well.

I have been using Linux for over 20 years and have therefore already used several distributions. Basically none of them tolerate errors. If I make a mistake when configuring Alacritty under Ubuntu, for example, basically the same thing happens as under Arch.

Edit: Please don’t take this post the wrong way. My point is not to claim that Arch is like Ubuntu, for example. But these myths that have formed around Arch (e.g. that you can only learn Linux properly with Arch (which is complete nonsense)) are a bit annoying.

https://vifm.info

In this case, however, it cannot be said that I am using it as intended. The AUR helper I use, aurutils, uses Vifm to display the respective PKBUILD file during an update, for example.

I’m particularly amused by the pro-NVIDIA “it just works” comments. Compared to what exactly?

Compared to nothing. I have used Nvidia graphics cards under Linux for many years. The last one was a GTX 1070. In order for the cards to work, I had to install the driver once with the command pacman -S nvidia-dkms. So the effort was very small.

By the way, I am currently using a 6800 XT from AMD. I therefore don’t want to defend Nvidia graphics cards across the board.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Nvidia, many people do not judge objectively. Torvalds’ “fuck you”, for example, referred to what he saw as Nvidia’s lack of cooperation with the kernel developers. And i think he was right. But it was never about how good or bad the graphics cards were usable under Linux. Which, unfortunately, many Linux users claim. Be it out of lack of knowledge or on purpose.

Since then, some things have changed and Nvidia has contributed code to several projects like Plasma or Mesa to improve the situation regarding Wayland.

How can you be sure it doesn’t affect popular images? The probability may be lower, but I don’t think you can rule it out.

At https://blog.frehi.be/2023/04/23/the-security-risks-of-flathub/ someone has published an article about Flathub in which he addresses a few problems.

Therefore, the answer is that Flathub is not always safe to use. However, I do not know of any package source that is always safe to use. Is Flathub more insecure than other package sources? I can’t answer that because I don’t use solutions like Flatpak, AppImage etc. myself.

• Virus scanners only detect a fraction of the harmful programmes.
• Virus scanners can often be tricked.
• Virus scanners often have security vulnerabilities themselves, which are usually quite serious, since such programmes embed themselves quite deeply in the operating system.
• Virus scanners cause many users to become careless because they rely too much on such tools.

Therefore, from my point of view, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. Therefore, I do not have such a tool permanently installed, neither under Linux nor under Windows. However, every 6 months I scan my Windows installation with a USB-bootable virus scanner. No actually harmful programme has been found for years.

In my opinion, the following things are much more important than any security software.

• Install updates as soon as possible. Under Windows, you can use tools like Chocolatey for this.
• Only install software from trustworthy sources.
• Only install software that you really need.
• Only use root or administrator rights if you have to. For everything else, the rights of the user account are sufficient.
• Create backups regularly.
• Think before you act.

Especially the last point is a problem for many users. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve witnessed someone receiving an alleged invoice from mobile provider A by email and opening it, even though they had a contract with provider B.