Pumpkin Escobar

What do you folks on hyprland/sway use for your shell / toolbars / launcher? I tried nwg and it was… OK but pretty clunky. No shade for the developers of the project, all the settings pages and system config stuff is a TON to put together…

I don’t need something as full-featured as KDE or Gnome Settings. I’d prefer a well-polished minimalist launcher and task manager / toolbar over something that does everything

Apple computers ARE really well put together, maybe no other maker exactly as good. But I’d say the Microsoft Surface line is a similar quality. Razer too though they’re pretty expensive.

Asus zephyrus laptops are pretty great build quality, close to Apple but without the same kind of pricing and markup gouging we get from Apple

Im not an apple hater, they make some great stuff. My point above was just that they don’t have competition in the “I need a Mac” space so their hardware isn’t competitively priced. And their build quality is great, but not every laptop needs to be built like a tank with top of the line components.

It’s good, a lot of good work going on, what they already have is impressive and the development seems pretty active and progressing well.

But if you’re buying a laptop to run Linux and don’t plan to use macOS, I really think there are a lot of better options out there (depending on what’s important to you). You’re going to pay the Apple premium price for a computer, and though apple computers are good hardware, they’re expensive and largely overpriced for small upgrades. Whatever price you find for a refurbished M2, take that money and go find a laptop known to be well supported on Linux, it’ll just be a better experience and you’ll probably get more for your money.

I haven’t run Asahi in 6+ months but thunderbolt/usb4 wasn’t working when I last used it so I couldn’t use my usb dock. Video was OK but I think Audio was sketchy (don’t remember specifics). It’s stuff that will get fixed at some point but right now it feels like a handful of minor annoyances or inconveniences

Even in 1-2 years when Asahi gets some updates and is in a better spot (I really do expect it to be) I still don’t think I’d lean towards a macbook with Asahi over something else if Linux is the only OS you’re going to run. Of course, if you’re looking to dabble with some iOS development or something else you need a mac for, but don’t want to live in MacOS, then Asahi’s a great option to get you back to Linux.

Ah, good to know. I haven’t really used that save configuration and reuse process, I just do the install directly at the end of configuring everything. But I can see the draw for using that, a shame it doesn’t seem to work that well.

• archinstall is one of the better/best distro installs around - it just does what it says it will and is pretty intuitive
• LUKS encryption is easy to set up in archinstall - strongly recommend encrypting your root partition if you have anything remotely sensitive on your system
• If you do use encryption but don’t like typing the unlock password every reboot, you can use tpm to unlock - yes, this is less secure than requiring the unlock password every time you reboot, but LUKS + TPM unlock is still MUCH better than an unencrypted drive just sitting there
• sbctl is a good tool for secure boot - If you want to get more secure, locking down bios with an admin password, turning on secure boot, sbctl works really well and is pretty easy to use. I would suggest reading up to understand what it’s doing before just installing/configuring/using it
• yay is a solid AUR helper / pacman wrapper

archinstall’s default btrfs layout has I think 4-5 separate subvolumes (I’m not running btrfs anymore so can’t check) but at the very least I remember it has:

• /
• /var
• /home

being separate subvolumes and mountpoints, you can just use a previous snapshot from 1 without rolling back others

Related to the snapshotting stuff, timeshift-autosnap is pretty helpful, hooks into pacman and takes a snapshot before installing/updating packages.

Personally I found btrfs and the snapshots helpful when starting to use arch, but now that I know how not to blow things up, it has been stable enough for me I just felt ext4 was easier.

Posting pictures of riced-out tiling window manager desktops is the hot new game they’re looking for.

Ollama and openwebui for a nice web interface.

I’ve been tempted to ditch my current password manager and move to bitwarden. I think this is the final push I needed.

Similar to previous reply about MATE with font size changes, I do that with plasma. I hadn’t seen plasma big screen you linked, I’ll definitely try that one out. I’ve wondered about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_Mobile? Like these sort of niche projects don’t always get a lot of attention, if the bigscreen project doesn’t work out, I’d bet the plasma mobile project is fairly active and given the way it scales for displays might work really well on a tv

Speaking of scaling since you mentioned it. I have noticed scaling in general feels a lot better in Wayland. If you’d only tried it in X11 before, might want to see if Wayland works better for you.

Lan-mouse looks great but keep in mind that there’s no network encryption right now. There is a GitHub ticket open and the developer seems eager to add encryption. It’s just worth understanding that all your keystrokes are going across the network unencrypted.

More than distro hopping maybe try out a zen kernel or compiling kernel yourself and changing kernel config and scheduler, or a newer version of the stock kernel?

I’m not super current on what’s in each kernel but I’d expect latest mainline to handle newer processors better than some of the older stable kernels in some of the more mainstream slower releasing distros.

Ran Asahi for several months, tried it out again recently. It’s good/fine, I just don’t love fedora.

There’s some funkiness with the more complicated install, the AI acceleration doesn’t work, no thunderbolt / docking station.

MacBooks are great hardware but I don’t think they’re the best option for Linux right now. If you’re never going to boot into macOS then I’d look for x13, new Qualcomm, isn’t there a framework arm64 option now or was that a RISC module?

I’m also assuming you’re not looking to do any gaming? Because gaming on ARM is not really a thing right now and doesn’t feel like it will be for a long while.

Really love arch and the AUR. I’ve been tempted to get nix set up for the rare cases when there’s no AUR package or the AUR package is unmaintained. I figure if there’s no package in the AUR or nixpkgs, it’s probably not worth running.

btop reports some gpu, network and disk information that I don’t think shows up in htop, feels a bit more comprehensive maybe? Both are fine, but I too use btop, it’s nice.

Random trivia: I think btop has been rewritten like 3-5 times now? It’s sort of an inside joke to the point that someone suggested another rewrite from C++ to Rust ( https://github.com/aristocratos/btop/issues/5 ). I guess the guy just likes writing system monitoring console apps.

Taking ollama for instance, either the whole model runs in vram and compute is done on the gpu, or it runs in system ram and compute is done on the cpu. Running models on CPU is horribly slow. You won’t want to do it for large models

LM studio and others allow you to run part of the model on GPU and part on CPU, splitting memory requirements but still pretty slow.

Even the smaller 7B parameter models run pretty slow in CPU and the huge models are orders of magnitude slower

So technically more system ram will let you run some larger models but you will quickly figure out you just don’t want to do it.

Respect, but…

I’ve been tempted to try and install plasma mobile on a tablet.